McConnell: Americans aren't amused by worsening economy

From the office of the Senate minority leader:

U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell made the following remarks on the Senate floor Wednesday regarding our nation’s worsening economy and rising unemployment numbers:

Over the past few weeks, Americans have gotten what seems like a daily dose of bad news about the state of the economy. Whether it's more joblessness, threats from ratings agencies, the price of gasoline, goods and housing, or a slowdown in manufacturing, people are finding very little reason for optimism.

And they're getting little comfort from an administration that seems more interested in deflecting the bad news than facing up to it. Amid the onslaught of bad news last week, President Obama’s message was that we’d hit some bumps in the road and that people need to be patient in the face of what called economic "headwinds." He even joked about the wildly mistaken predictions he and others at the White House made a couple years back about the job-creating potential of the Stimulus.

Well, I don't think the 14 million Americans who are looking for jobs right now and can’t find them find any of this very funny. I don't think that the 23 percent of Americans who now owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth are laughing about their predicament. I don’t think recent college graduates out there who are burdened with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt and who can't find a job are amused that the Stimulus bill turned out to be a failure.

In fact, I think Americans are deeply troubled by the fact that an administration which claims to be concerned about creating jobs has spent the better part of the past two and a half years pushing policies that seem like they were designed to destroy them. Indeed, I think there’s a growing consensus out there that far from improving the economy, the President has made it worse.

The facts speak for themselves.

The day the President took the oath of office, 12 million Americans were out of work. Today, nearly 14 million Americans are out of work. That's a 17% increase in the unemployment rate under President Obama. So unemployment's worse.

Gas prices have nearly doubled. When the President came into office the average price of a gallon of gas in this country was $1.85. Today, it’s $3.69. So gas prices have gotten worse.

The national debt has reached crisis levels. In just the last two years, the debt has gone from $10.6 trillion to $14.3 trillion — a 35% increase from when the President was sworn into office — and his own budget projects that it will only continue to grow.

So the debt is far worse.

Health insurance premiums have gone up. For more than a year, the President devoted what seemed like every waking moment to a health care proposal that he said would lower health insurance premiums by as much as $2,500.

“Instead, health premiums for working families continue to rise. And the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says they’ll continue to grow, by as much as $2,100 per year. So health insurance costs have gotten worse.

Home values continue to plummet too. In my own state of Kentucky, home prices have fallen about seven percent in the last year, while new home construction is down almost 15 percent. I've got constituents with excellent credit telling me they can’t get a mortgage because of new lending rules that have made it hard even for people who’ve worked for years to build a stellar credit rating to a get a loan. Nationally, home values have gone down 12 percent since Inauguration Day. So home values have gotten worse too — driving down the equity people have built up over years.

When it comes to policy, the President is fond of dividing the world into two camps. In his view, those who disagree with him are on the wrong side of history. Those who agree are on the right side. Well, at this point, I think most Americans would agree that if this is the right side of history, they're not interested. They'd rather have their jobs back. At this point, I think it's safe to say that the patience of the American people has run out. Administration officials made a lot of promises of a brighter future. They’ve have had their chance to deliver.

Americans don't have infinite patience. They don't want to be told to just wait a little longer when all the evidence shows that their circumstances and their prospects are only getting worse.

They want a change in direction.

You know, one of the liberal think tanks in town recently issued a press release that I think embodies the disconnect between Democrats in Washington and the experience of most people outside Washington. In the face of all the bad economic news we've been getting, this particular think tank announced that it had 10 charts which purported to show that, contrary to the claims of some, the U.S. is actually a low-tax country.

Never mind the fact that we have the second highest corporate tax rate in the world. Never mind the fact that nearly 14 million Americans are out of work. Never mind the fact that the time it takes out-of-work Americans to find a new job is now longer than it was during the Great Depression — and that since the housing crisis began, average home values have fallen more dramatically than they did during the Great Depression.

Never mind all that. These guys have 10 charts they want to show you that prove government should take more money out of the hands of the taxpayers so they can spend it themselves.

I think this is all you need to know about the Democrat approach to the economy. It never seems to change. Take almost any major economic indicator you want: Americans are worse off than they were in 2009. It's time Democrats wake up to this fact. It’s time they do something to solve these problems and help the people right in front them.

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