Michael Bennet

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 318, which was submitted earlier today.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I further ask that the resolution be agreed to, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate, and any statements be printed in the Record.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 319, which was submitted earlier today.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it adjourn under the previous order.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Banking Committee be discharged from further consideration of H.R. 2447 and the Senate proceed to its consideration.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I am going to replace the Presiding Officer in the chair in a few moments, but before that, I wished to come to the floor and talk about our economy and some work this Congress needs to be engaged in if we are going to get things moving on the right track again. Today, the stock market plunged 400 points because of concerns that are going on in Europe, especially with Italy. It is a debt crisis that has been on the front page of every newspaper around the globe for weeks and in some cases months. I am reminded of the discussion we had over the summer that consumed the Congress for an entire summer, about the lifting of the debt ceiling. Article after article after article said that if the Congress couldn't figure out how to work this out in a bipartisan way and make a material difference in the trajectory of our deficit and our debt that, for the first time, our credit rating would be downgraded. For the first time in the history of the United States of America, the full faith and credit of the United States would be called into question. That was on the front page of every newspaper for weeks. In the end, we stumbled across that finish line, and in the end our debt was downgraded. I would argue we are about to face the same thing again and have the chance again to do the right thing--to act in a bipartisan way, to create a thoughtful approach to our debt and our deficit that allows us to continue to invest in our economy. Families in Colorado, much as the families in Rhode Island, are struggling in an economy that is the worst since the Great Depression. We are coming out of it now, but there are significant structural issues in that economy. I have shown this chart before. There are four simple lines. The blue one is the productivity index, which shows our economy has actually gotten substantially more productive since the early 1990s, substantially more productive during this recession for a variety of reasons. One reason is that our companies have had to learn to compete with the rest of the world in a way they have not before, so they became more efficient. The benefits technology has brought has driven up this curve. Unfortunately for our workers but understandably for our businesses, they have had to figure out how to get through this recession with fewer people so they can get through to the other side. The second curve is our gross domestic product, the size of our domestic economy, and it is not where it was before the recession, but it is headed back there. The other two lines are the unemployment level, which this chart says is 14 million people, but I think the number is closer to 25 million, when we consider who has stopped looking for work and when we consider who is underemployed in this economy. Then this line is a tragedy for our families, which is falling median family income. This chart--it is a little hard to read--is a pretty good depiction of what is happening. This red line represents the bottom 90 percent of income earners in this country. Think about that. We are talking about the bottom 90 percent. That is everyone, except for 10 percent. It shows the share of the income in the United States that they are earning. It starts out here in the 1920s and goes to today, where the bottom 90 percent are earning roughly 47 percent of the income. The last time that was true, by the way, was 1928, the year before the Great Depression and the market crash. The top .1 percent earns 10 percent of the economy--.1, not 1 percent--.1. The last time that was true was 1928. All through the productive times in the 20th century, the 1950s and the 1960s and the 1970s, there wasn't that kind of imbalance in our economy. This group earned roughly--90 percent earned roughly 70 percent of the economy and everybody else earned a fair share of the economy, and the economy grew and we were able to build for the future. Those are structural issues in the economy we can help with, we can work together to fix, but what we have to do right now is avert predictable crises that are within our control so we don't make matters worse. Sometimes when I travel, people don't know why we need to worry about what is going on in Europe. This afternoon I wanted to bring a chart that shows the soaring debt of all these European economies and the United States. We are the blue line here. This is Greece up here. Everybody is in tough shape. Everybody has made promises they can't keep. Everybody has levered up in a way that isn't sustainable. But what is also true is that we are all interrelated. If something bad happens in Europe, something very bad is going to happen here, just as when the capital markets fell apart at the beginning of the last recession. This chart shows how dependent our economy is on exports to Europe. Between one-fifth and one-sixth of the total value of our exports goes to Europe. If the European banks fail, if the governments can't pay back their debt and the economy comes to a screeching halt in Europe, they are not going to buy our exports. Those are American jobs we need to worry about. Those are American jobs we need to defend and protect and we need to understand this relationship. Look at the exposure of our U.S. banks to Europe. This red part is the euro area. It is 29 percent of the total international exposure of our banks, with 23 percent to the U.K. More than half of the foreign exposure of our banks is European debt. We were unable to come to a rational conclusion on the debt ceiling. So the Congress punted this decision to a supercommittee and asked them to please help us make the decision. My own hope is that the supercommittee takes a page out of the bipartisan proposals that were reached--the one that was led by Bowles and Simpson, the one by Rivlin and Domenici. I think the details are less important, frankly, than the size, but that takes $4 trillion out over the next 10 years, a balance of cuts to revenue of roughly 3 to 1, that sends a message to the world that the United States is serious about dealing with its fiscal matters. If we don't do that in advance of this European crisis that is on the front page of every newspaper in the country, I can assure my colleagues that the choices we have in front of us will be even tougher than they would have otherwise been. Sometimes I get the feeling that people around here actually don't think the American people are watching this screaming match, are watching the disagreements, are watching the political games, but they are. They know exactly what is going on here, and they understand the seriousness of these issues because they are living through that economy I spoke of earlier. That is what they are worrying about. They are making less today than they were 10 years ago. They are making the same amount they were making 20 years ago. They can't afford to send their kid to college. They can't afford their health care, and they would like us to help straighten that out, but at a minimum they would like us to prevent matters from getting worse. They would like to see us work together. Some people here think Congress has always been unpopular, that it is just as an institution an unpopular place. Not so. Look at this. Here is Congress's approval rating today: 9 percent. That is a pretty catastrophic fall-off in the last 10 years, and I would argue it has an awful lot to do with our inability to address problems the way people in their local communities are doing. There is not a mayor in Colorado who would threaten the credit rating of their community for politics-- not one. Not a Republican mayor, not a Democratic mayor, not a tea party mayor, not one would imagine doing it for a second because people in our communities would know that all that would do would be to drive up our interest rates, make us spend more money on interest and less on infrastructure, more on interest and less on education, more on interest and less on the health and welfare of our citizens. We know that at the local level, but somehow here we get to color outside the lines. We are now at 9 percent, which is almost at the margin of error for zero. We did some research to find out what else is at 9 percent. We could not find virtually anything in public polls taken all across this country. My goodness, the Internal Revenue Service has a 40-percent approval rating compared the our 9 percent. BP had a 16-percent approval rating at the height of the oilspill, and we are at 9 percent. There is an actress who is at 15 percent. More people support the United States becoming communist--I do not, for the record--at 11 percent than approve of the job we are doing. I guess we can take some comfort that Fidel Castro is at 5 percent. Look, we are suffering--and when I say ``we,'' I mean families across this country--through the worst recession since the Great Depression. We can see on the front page of every single newspaper what the stakes are here if we do not act in a comprehensive way on our debt and our deficit. We know that both parties have different approaches to the challenges we face. But at the end of the day, these challenges are the challenges of the American people, not the challenges of a bunch of politicians in Washington who are worrying about the next election. My hope is the supercommittee shows leadership here, that it gives the opportunity for every Member of this body to express their leadership here, and that all of us are able to go home to red parts of our State and blue parts of our State and say to the people: We saw the problem coming, and we led the world. We materially addressed the problem we faced. We acted in a bipartisan way. We came up with a plan that said: Do you know what. We are all in this together for the benefit of our kids and our grandkids, for the people who are suffering through this economy. There is $2.3 trillion of cash sitting on companies' balance sheets in the United States of America tonight that is not being invested because no one knows what interest rate environment they are going to be in because they do not know what Washington is going to do. We shattered confidence in this economy this summer. We should not do it again. This is a popular number, this 9 percent, these days, you may have noticed, on the Presidential campaign trail. It is not a popular number for the American people: 9-percent approval. Let's do something right here, and let's drive these numbers back up, and let's restore confidence in the American people. With that, Mr. President, I thank you for your patience and yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I want to take just a few minutes to talk about Veterans Day and important work already going on in Colorado to support our returning servicemembers and their families. This Friday, Veterans Day holds special significance. America's part in the war in Iraq is coming to a close this year, and we have started drawing down combat troops in Afghanistan. In Colorado, that is going to mean about 400 Fort Carson soldiers will come home from Iraq in December alone. Many of the bravest 1 percent of Americans who shoulder 100 percent of the responsibility of keeping our country safe will be coming home all across the country. As these servicemembers return to their families and many transition to civilian life, we need to make sure we are ready to make good on the promises we have made. I asked leaders from the Colorado veterans community to make recommendations for how to make Colorado the best State for veterans and military families to live and work. After months of thoughtful conversation, they produced a comprehensive report called ``Better Serving Those Who Have Served'' that offers solutions on how to address the challenges facing America's veterans. A key part of this report is a new proposal to create a National Veterans Foundation, modeled after work being done in Colorado Springs that enabled public and private agencies to better collaborate to support veterans and military families. This week, I will introduce a bill to bring that Colorado- based innovation to the rest of the country. The bill would create a congressionally chartered National Veterans Foundation to support communities attempting to work on a blueprint model like Colorado Springs. The foundation would help fill gaps in services to veterans by helping communities align and leverage their resources. I have also joined Senator Tester and the Presiding Officer and cosponsored the VOW to Hire Heroes Act. The VOW to Hire Heroes Act does much to help veterans find good-paying jobs, including providing significant tax incentives to businesses that hire veterans. The Senate will likely be voting on this important legislation tomorrow, and I urge colleagues to support its passage. Before I sit down, I wanted to mention that 2 weeks, maybe 3 weeks ago, I was down in Colorado Springs visiting Fort Carson, and I went to see an elementary school on the post. As a former school superintendent, I have spent a lot of time over the years in schools and tend to want to be there when the children are there so that you can actually get a sense of whether there is any learning going on. This meeting was different because it was a meeting after school, after the children had gone home. Ninety percent of them live on the post. Their entire lives have been defined by these two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their entire lives have been defined by the deployment of one parent--in some cases two parents--who have served two or three or four tours of duty on behalf of this country in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thousands of our troops are going to be coming home over the next year. I think we need to be asking ourselves whether we really are ready to honor the commitments and promises we have made. As others have said tonight, when we are coming out of what is the worst economic calamity we have faced since the Great Depression, we need to make sure we are doing absolutely everything we can for these veterans but also for the people who are the moms and dads, the children at elementary schools just like the one I visited, all across the country. The children in this school, according to the teachers with whom I met, have faced extraordinary challenges at home as a result of all this. It is another example of the work we should be doing together here in a bipartisan way as we ask people to serve their country in these foreign wars. I continue to hope at some point there is going to be a breakthrough here and we are going to get past the partisan cartoon we have confronted for the entire time I have been in the Senate and get back to the work of the American people and get back to the work that will support the children in that elementary school at Fort Carson. I want to say on this floor and for this record how grateful I am to their teachers for teaching but also for giving their Senator an insight into the lives of the young people they are serving. Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, November 10, 2011; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, and the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day; that following any leader remarks, the Senate be in a period of morning business until 10 a.m., with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each, with the time equally divided and controlled between the two leaders or their designees; and that following morning business, the Senate proceed to the consideration of the motion to proceed to S.J. Res. 27, under the previous order.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, today I wish to recognize the sesquicentennial of the 17 original counties created by the Colorado Territorial Legislature in 1861. These counties celebrate this significant milestone today, November 1, 2011. Congress established Colorado Territory on February 28, 1861, and the territory's first legislative assembly convened on September 9, 1861. The 17 original counties--Arapahoe, Boulder, Clear Creek, Costilla, Douglas, El Paso, Fremont, Gilpin, Guadalupe, shortly thereafter renamed Conejos, Huerfano, Jefferson, Lake, Larimer, Park, Pueblo, Summit, and Weld counties were established by the territorial legislature within the present boundaries of the State of Colorado. From the snow-covered mountains of Summit County to the farm lands of the San Luis Valley, these original counties established the foundation from which the most beautiful State in our country grew and developed. Colorado became the 38th State of the Union on August 1, 1876, under President Ulysses S. Grant, and became known as the Centennial State. Over the past 150 years, counties had their boundaries revised, new counties were created, and some were abolished, and today, the State of Colorado has 64 counties, each one with its own unique history, geography, and cultural heritage. I take this time today to congratulate Colorado on the 150th anniversary of our State's first 17 counties and to recognize all of Colorado's 64 counties for their vital contributions to our great State. As we welcome this milestone in the history of Colorado, we can no doubt look forward to another promising and prosperous 150 years.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. I would like to say to the Senator from North Carolina, before he leaves the floor, that I am well aware of his longstanding commitment to education issues and to the kids in this country. I have no doubt of that, and I hope he didn't take anything I said to suggest that. I actually think the two of us probably share a lot of agreement on what we ought to be doing. My issue is simply--and as I said about the Senator from Kentucky, he has every right to do this--that, as my colleague and other members of the committee, I want to engage in a debate on the bill. I want to consider the amendments of my colleagues and to offer my own. I am painfully aware, having been in a school system, that Congress was supposed to reauthorize this bill in 2007. It is now 4 years later, and because of our own fecklessness, our own inability to get anything done, every single year teachers and parents and principals keep having to put up with what is the crudest accountability system I could imagine. The only thing cruder than the accountability system was the response of big school districts, such as the one I used to work in, to that accountability as people tried to comply with well-intentioned but incredibly poorly thought-through laws and regulations from Washington, DC. I don't want these schools to have to endure 1 more year of this meaningless accountability, where we are comparing this year's fourth graders to last year's fourth graders and telling ourselves that actually makes a difference. There is a lot of good work being done in our States right now around standards--elevating them--so we quit fooling ourselves about whether we are meeting international norms when it comes to our kids. There is a lot of great work being done in Colorado and other States that have come along creating a growth model that we--not we but moms and dads and teachers and principals--can actually track how this group of fifth graders did compared to how they did as fourth graders and how they did as third graders and then compare them to similarly situated kids across the country. That makes all the sense in the world compared to what we currently have. I sat out there in absolute despair wondering why this town was so mean to our teachers and to our kids. Isn't it a bare minimum that the Congress could reauthorize the legislation when they were supposed to-- in 2007? Yet now we find ourselves here. I thought the Senator from North Carolina was very eloquent this morning and today on the floor as well and I appreciated the points he made. My objection is a narrow one, which is the idea that the right way to approach reauthorizing No Child Left Behind, the right way to approach trying to fix this situation is to create a bunch of procedural barriers that don't allow us to have a substantive discussion about it. I agree completely with what the Senator from North Carolina said 1 minute ago. There is a reason we have not a 15-percent approval rating but a 12-percent approval rating. There is a reason. I think we should come together in a bipartisan way and reauthorize this bill, get rid of AYP, and do some of the important things in this legislation. Then I hope the Senator would look at one of my amendments, because one of my amendments has his pharmacist in mind, if only we could get to a discussion of the merits of this bill. I see the Senator from Kentucky has left the floor, but I would just say that my only objective in coming down here today was simply to implore him to withdraw that objection. Knowing it is his right to object, I can't think of why he would do it if he wanted to change the trajectory of the work from the Federal level. I thank the Senator from North Carolina and the Senator from Minnesota and I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I have never done this in the 2\1/2\ years I have been in the Senate. I have not been here a long time, and I have spent a lot of time complaining about the way this place works. But I had to come to the floor to implore the Senator from Kentucky to reconsider his objection. I do it not because I have a perspective on this as a Senator; I do it because I had the honor of serving as the superintendent of the public schools in Denver for 4 years of my life and have dedicated years of my life but, more importantly, seen the dedication of the people who are working in our schools. The Senator speaks of the tragedy of this process. I will tell you what a tragedy is. A tragedy is that only 9 of 100 children living in poverty in this country, in 2011, can expect to get a college degree-- that is a tragedy; the fact that when I became superintendent in the Denver public schools, on the 10th grade math test, there were 33 African-American students proficient on that test and 61 Latinos proficient on that test--the test that, if we are honest with ourselves, which we are not, measures a junior high school standard of mathematical proficiency in Europe. That is a tragedy. It is a tragedy that there are people working in our schools right now, at 11:15 a.m. in Colorado, doing the best they can to serve our kids, and we think a 2-hour meeting is too long. That is a tragedy. I would not have drafted the bill exactly the way it has been drafted. The chairman knows that. He and I even have disagreements about some of the things in this bill. But finally, after 2\1/2\ years, there is a bipartisan piece of legislation in front of the committee that is having the benefit of the work of the Senators who are there, and we are told that meeting for 2 hours is too long. The Senator has every right to make his objection under the Senate rules, which the Presiding Officer has observed may need some updating. But I think if you ask yourself, why is it that we have a 12-percent approval rating, which is going down, it is because of this kind of thing. I actually look forward to hearing the amendments of the Senator from Kentucky. I wanted to know what they were. As the chairman mentioned, there are 146 amendments that have been filed. I have some I have filed--only three or four. The Senator from Kentucky has 74 of the 140 amendments. In the 2 hours we met today, we considered three amendments or voted on three. We were debating a Republican amendment, and I was very interested in what Senator Isakson had to say when our meeting came to an end. If we are going to do this in 2-hour increments, my math--I am proficient in math, thank goodness--is that it would take 60 days to do this in 2-hour increments. Do you know why people are fed up with this place? It is because they do not think the debate we are having is about them. They think the debate we are having is about us. And do you know what. They are right about that. The teachers all across my State, all across the district I worked in, want us to lift this burden from them--in my view, the biggest Federal overreach ever in domestic policy. That is what the bill does, not for ideological reasons but to help respond to the voices of our teachers, respond to the voices of our superintendents, respond to the voices of our parents who are sick and tired of the almost comical but to them painful measures of annual, yearly progress--the idea that we are going to label all our schools ``failing'' by 2014 because we have a completely made-up accountability standard in Washington, DC. This bill does away with that. It does not do it in exactly the way I would want to do it, left to my own devices, but it does it in a way that can get bipartisan support in the Senate. I mean this broadly. I am not saying it in this case. When people see the political games that are being played, when they see people who are unwilling to work together, and they are killing themselves to deliver for our kids, I am not sure there is anything more backhanded we could do. So I would beg the Senator from Kentucky to let us have the hearing, the committee meeting. Let us consider his amendments. I and all the rest--today's conversation was one of the first--I regret saying this-- one of the first substantive conversations I have had in a committee hearing since I have been here. I thank the chairman and I thank the ranking member for creating a context where that can happen. Let's have the conversation. I would be happy to meet 24 hours a day to talk about this subject with the Senator from Kentucky--24 hours a day, every day. Because if we care about the widening gap between rich and poor in this country, we cannot sustain anything remotely approaching our----

Mr. BENNET. I will in 1 second--anything remotely approaching our claim to be a land of opportunity when 9 out of 100 children born in poverty can graduate with a college degree, when 91 out of 100 children who are unfortunate enough to be born poor are constrained to the margin of our democracy, the margin of our economy. I will stop here. But to be clear about it, there are 100 seats in the Senate. When I walk into this room, I think about what if the 100 people who were here were children living in poverty in the United States. Here is how many would have a college degree. That chair. That chair. That chair. These four chairs and this one. That is it. The rest of this Chamber would be occupied by people who did not have the benefit of a college degree.

Mr. BENNET. Yes.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I am here today to talk a little bit about the state of our economy. I have spent the summer and early fall traveling around the beautiful State of Colorado, having townhall meetings and listening to people who mostly start the conversations by saying: What is wrong with you people in Washington? Why can't you work together to actually get anything done there? They are short of slogans these days, and they are desperate for us to turn this economy around. They know what the consequences have been of living in a country that for the first time in its history has had median family income falling, at a time when their cost of health insurance has been skyrocketing, their cost of higher education is going through the roof. I thought the Wall Street Journal captured this in a way that I have been unable to. In a very vivid way, on the front page a couple weeks ago, there was an article that was entitled: ``As Middle Class Shrinks, P&G''--that is Procter & Gamble--``Aims High and Low.'' That article is about one of the most iconic middle-class brands imaginable, Procter & Gamble. Ninety-eight percent of the households in this country have a product in their house that is produced by Procter & Gamble: Crest toothpaste, Head & Shoulders shampoo, Tide water detergent, Pampers diapers, Bounty paper towels. The list goes on: Duracell batteries, Mr. Clean, Pepto- Bismol, Pringles potato chips--stuff that did not even exist before there was a middle class in this country to buy it. That is the great brand of Procter & Gamble, and it is still a great brand. But this article is about how they are changing their business model to reflect the current economic realities and economic realities they believe are actually going to persist for some time. I will quote from the article, Madam President, which I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record.

Mr. BENNET. I quote: P&G's profits boomed with the increasing affluence of middle-class households in the post-World War II economy. The story I was just telling. The article starts out by saying: For generations, Procter & Gamble Co.'s growth strategy was focused on developing household staples for the vast American middle class. Now, P&G executives say many of its former middle-market shoppers are trading down to lower-priced goods--widening the pools of have and have-not consumers at the expense of the middle. . . . P&G isn't the only company adjusting its business. A wide swath of American companies is convinced that the consumer market is bifurcating into high and low ends and eroding in the middle. They have begun to alter the way they research, develop and market their products. In other words, they have begun to alter their business plan with the assumption that the middle class is evaporating in this country and that their growth markets are the very richest among us, on the one hand, and the very poorest among us, on the other hand. Let me close on this part by reading near the end of this story: To monitor the evolving American consumer market, P&G executives study the Gini index, a widely accepted measure of income equality that ranges from zero . . . to one. . . . In 2009, the most recent calculation available, [there was] a 20% rise in income disparity over the past 40 years. . . . Here is the next quote: ``We now have a Gini index similar to the Philippines and Mexico--you'd never have imagined that,'' says Phyllis Jackson, P&G's vice president of consumer market knowledge for North America. ``I don't think we've typically thought about America as a country with big income gaps to this extent.'' I do not think that is the way we have thought about America either because that is not what America has been for generation after generation, decade after decade, going back to the founding of this country. Why do I come to the floor to talk about this? It is because the debate in this place is becoming more and more unmoored from the facts, and people need to be reminded, I think, here--not in Colorado--but here about what the problem is we are actually trying to solve. Here, as shown on this chart, is our current economic challenge. The top line is our productivity index, going back to 1992, that blue line. You will notice it fell slightly during the recession, and then it took off again like a rocket. Why? Because firms all over the country were having to figure out how to do what they were doing, produce what they were producing, with fewer people in order to survive in this recession. The combination of competing in a global economic environment, which was not even present remotely in the way it is today in the 1980s, required us to be more productive. The technological revolution this country has spawned and led has allowed us to become more productive. You can see from this green line--which is gross domestic product-- our economy actually has started to come back. We are about two-thirds of the way back to where we were before this recession started. But what my families are feeling in Colorado and what the Presiding Officer's families are probably feeling in Missouri is in these other two lines. This line represents median family income which, as I said earlier, continues to drop, for the first time in our country's history, in the last 20 years. What that means is people are earning $4,000 and $5,000 less in real income at the end of the decade than they were at the beginning of the decade. Although I guess I should point out here, as well, that during the time median family income was falling, average family income went up, reflecting the widening gap between rich and poor in this country and reflecting a diminishing middle class. This line is unemployment. It does not take a genius to figure out that when the green line crosses again and our GDP is where it was before we even had this recession--and it will--we do not have an answer for people who have been dislocated as a consequence of our economy becoming more efficient and more productive. These jobs are going to be created not by legacy firms from the last century but by businesses that are going to be started tomorrow and the week after that and the week after that. Rather than having a partisan debate here in Washington, we should be having a bipartisan discussion about how to change our Tax Code and change our regulatory code to make it easier--not harder--for small businesses to be created and to compete and to make sure we are creating jobs here in the United States that are actually lifting median family income rather than driving it downward. This is what has happened to manufacturing in the United States since 2001. I invite anybody to look on our Web site if they want to look at these charts themselves or use them in their own meetings. But this top line is our manufacturing output. You can see that has been rising. This other line, going back from 2001 to today, is manufacturing employment. Output rising; employment falling. People in my State know we did not get here yesterday. This has been happening to them for the last decade or so. They want us to be responsive to that. This is the median family income chart: In 1999, median family income was roughly $53,000. In 2010, it was $49,000--a $4,000 drop in real dollars since 1999; a 7.1-percent decrease. People are coming to me and saying: Michael--they may not know it is a 7.1-percent decrease, but they know they are earning less. They know that 10 years ago when they set out to save for college for their 8-year-old, they were expecting to be earning more at the end of the decade. Now their kids are going to school, and they are saying: I can't afford it. Tuition has skyrocketed. I can't send my kid to the best school they got into. What a waste. I would ask you, Madam President, whether any of us think we can afford another decade like that at the beginning of this new century. If we consume a fifth of the 21st century driving American middle-class income down, we are going to have a very tough time recognizing ourselves. This next chart is something that is not noted by many, but I used to be a school superintendent, so I have an interest in our education. This chart shows unemployment during this recession based on educational attainment. The worst it ever got for folks with a college degree in this country was 4.5 percent during this recession. For people who had less than a high school diploma, it was 15 percent. For people with a high school degree, it was around 12 percent. Here is what else we have done over the last 10 years. This chart shows our poverty rate in this country. This is why we have to move past the politics and into a substantive conversation about where we want to take this country as Republicans and Democrats together. These lines are people who are Republicans and Democrats and Independents, who are seeing their income driven down, who are seeing their wealth destroyed, and expect us to at least be able to have a civil conversation about it on the floor of the Senate. Did you know that poverty has increased by 46 percent since the year 2000 in the United States of America? There are 46 million people in our country of 300-and-some million that live in poverty today. Thirty- five percent of them are kids. Two percent of the children in the United States today are living in poverty. One-fifth of the children in our country are living in poverty. As I mentioned earlier, this has not affected everybody the same in our economy. This is the average income growth for the top 1 percent of income earners in the United States. This is the top 5 percent. This is the top 10 percent. And it seems almost insane to describe it this way, but the bottom 90 percent, 9 out of 10 income earners--9 out of 10 income earners--this is what has happened to their income since 1967 in real dollars, inflation-adjusted dollars. It has been absolutely stuck and flat at the bottom of this curve, all of which leads me to show the most disturbing slide of all, which I know is hard to read. But let me tell you what it says--and you can find it on the Web site. It says we have not seen this level of income inequality in the United States of America since 1928. That is the last time that the so- called bottom 90 percent of earners--9 out of 10 earners--earned roughly 45 percent of the income in the country. Here in 1928, and here in 2011. I do not think our democracy can sustain itself with another decade or two of numbers such as this. We have to do better. The bottom 90 percent of earners, as I mentioned a minute ago, are Republicans and they are Democrats, they are Independent voters, and they expect their government to work together. We cannot create their jobs, but we can create the conditions under which we can create high- paying jobs in the United States that are lifting family incomes rather than driving them down. That is what we should be debating in Washington. Like you, Madam President, I have a deep concern about the fiscal condition of the country. We have $1.5 trillion of deficit, and we have $15 trillion of debt, and we do not have the apparent will to address that problem. We can address that problem. We should be adopting the kind of policies that were recommended by the bipartisan commission, Bowles-Simpson, that together combines to take $4 trillion out of our deficit situation over the next 10 years. They did it by asking everybody to have a share in the sacrifice. We should be debating that on the floor of the Senate. We should be supporting the work that the Gang of 6 has tried to do, not just because it will help us with our fiscal situation, which is critical, but because it will help us with our jobs situation. There is $2.3 trillion of cash, by some estimates, sitting on the balance sheets of America's corporations that is not being invested now because people are deeply worried that they cannot predict what interest rate environment we are going to be in because we cannot get our fiscal house in order and because the government is financing its debt on short-term paper, which easily could rise. Every rise in our interest rate will add $1.3 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years. These are the facts. I have a list of what we could be doing today. I will not dwell on it. We could be reforming and simplifying our Tax Code. We could be adopting a long-term research and development strategy. We could be investing, as Republicans and Democrats have done for decades if not centuries, in our infrastructure. We could bring our public education system into the 21st century, which would matter a lot not just to our middle-class kids but to kids living in poverty as well. Did you know that today, if you are a child born in poverty--whether you are rural or urban, it does not matter--your chances of getting a college degree are 9 in 100--9 in 100--which means that the day you are born, if you are among those 100 kids, out of the shoots 91 of you are consigned to the margins of the democracy, the margins of our economy. If we do not change the way we educate our kids, and even if we do not care from their point of view what the implications of that are-- and I deeply do care about that as the father of three little girls. I think everybody should have an opportunity to graduate from high school, go on to college and succeed. Even if you did not care from that perspective, look at what happens if you do not have an education in the 21st-century economy. Look at the unemployment rates people are having to suffer through if they do not have a high school degree or a college degree compared to if they do have a degree. That is not going to change. The last time we were creating jobs in this country we created roughly 5.3 million for people with a college degree, 3.5 million for people with something north of a high school diploma. No new jobs for people with a high school degree, and we lost jobs for high school dropouts. So if you care about the strength and success of the American economy, if you care about maintaining the mantle of the land of opportunity, if you care about the idea that the job of one generation is to put another generation into a position to succeed and contribute in the economy and the democracy, you need to care about what we are doing with our education system. We could be talking about that. We could be doing regulatory review to make sure we have a process to get rid of old regulations that do not make sense and put in ones that do. I know in Colorado we have a huge interest in ending our reliance on foreign oil. Everywhere I go people talk about that. Everywhere I go people wonder whether it would not be better to have an energy policy that created energy independence for this country instead of having one--or a lack of one may be a better way of saying it--that forces us to shift billions of dollars a week to the Persian Gulf for the privilege of buying their oil because we do not have a policy. We could be thinking about advanced manufacturing. We could be eliminating the technology gap. We could be modernizing the FDA. There is no shortage of things we can do if we come together to do it. I see my colleague from Oregon is here, so I will wrap up in 1 minute. But in order to be able to get to any of that, in order to get to any of that, we have to knock off the political games and actually start working together around this place. Two days ago there was an article in the Washington Post--I think it was--that said that the United States Congress has a 14-percent approval rating, and the joke around here is, well, who in the world are those 14 percent who think we are doing a good job? But it is not a joke. This is serious. There is a reason our approval rating is in the basement. It is because instead of working on the things that actually would drive productivity in this country, would drive job creation in this country, would most importantly drive median family income up instead of down, we are fighting with each other. I want to go back to Colorado and have an answer for the people in my townhalls who could care less--could care less--whether I am a Democrat or I am a Republican and just want me to do my job. The ones who are doing their jobs want me to do my job. The ones who do not have jobs want me to do my job. They want all of us to do our jobs. I know there are people of goodwill on both sides of the aisle that if given the chance will work together to do this. The last thing I will say is this, and then I will stop. The rest of the world is not waiting for us to get our act together. The rest of the world is not waiting for us to decide whether we are going to have another debate that leads to us blowing up the credit rating of the United States. They are not waiting for us to decide whether we want to sacrifice for the first time the full faith and credit of the United States of America. They are not waiting for us to decide whether we are going to invest in 21st-century manufacturing. My colleague from Ohio just showed up. He talked about that. They are not waiting for us to decide whether we are going to let them own the 21st-century energy economy. They are going right ahead, and so our failure to act has consequences. I believe it is time for us to come together--even though we are in a political season, even though we have a Presidential campaign--and do our work on behalf of the American people and the people of my State of Colorado. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, today I honor the life and memory of a prominent tribal leader and dedicated public servant in my home State of Colorado. The Honorable Ernest House Sr. served more than 30 years in tribal leadership, including four terms as tribal chairman of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe in southwest Colorado. He was first elected to the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Council in 1979 and elected chairman in 1982. Throughout his long tenure as a tribal council member and chairman, he actively and effectively worked for the betterment of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. Mr. House Sr. was an unassuming, yet forceful leader on many issues important to the people of his tribe, including natural resources development, law enforcement and support for tribal business enterprises. His leadership on water issues helped to complete the critical Dolores and Animas-La Plata water projects in southwest Colorado that benefited not only his tribe, but also the entire region. He was a strong advocate for keeping the Ute Mountain Tribal Park in pristine and undeveloped condition. As the grandson of Chief Jack House, the last traditional chief of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ernest House Sr. was raised from a young age to be a leader of his tribe. And he proved himself equal to the task. In his years of leadership, he was widely respected for his ability to bring people together and get results for his tribe and the greater Four Corners community. Ernest House Sr. worked his entire life to move his tribe forward while still maintaining its traditional tribal identity and heritage. He urged young Native people to be proud of their tribal heritage. Mr. House Sr. also served his country in the Army National Guard, the Signal Corps, and the Special Forces. I ask you to join me in honoring the life and legacy of Mr. Ernest House Sr., a visionary leader who was dedicated to serving his tribe, his community, Indian country, the State of Colorado, and our country. My thoughts and prayers are with his family and the entire Ute Mountain Ute Tribe at this time of loss.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. I wanted to read a few excerpts from it because I think it is instructive about what we are doing. P&G's profits boomed with the increasing affluence of middle-class households in the post-World War II economy. As masses of housewives set up their new suburban homes, P&G marketers pledged that Tide detergent delivered cleaner clothes, Mr. Clean made floors shinier and Crest toothpaste fought off more cavities. In the decades since, new features like fragrances or ingredient and packaging enhancements kept P&G's growth robust. What is happening now? For generations Proctor & Gamble's growth strategy was focused on developing household staples for the vast American middle class. Now, P&G executives say many of its former middle-market shoppers are trading down to lower priced goods--widening the pools of have and have-not consumers at the expense of the middle. That has forced P&G, which estimates it has at least one product--and you heard the list, so this won't be surprising in 98 percent of American households--to fundamentally change the way it develops and sells its goods. For the first time in 38 years, for example, the company launched a new dish soap in the United States at a bargain price. P&G's rollout of Gain Dish Soap says a lot about the health of the middle class. The world's largest maker of consumer products is now betting that the squeeze on middle America will be long lasting. If you needed any example of what our families are struggling with in Colorado every single day, here is a business plan that is modeled on a perpetually shrinking middle class by a company whose whole business model in their history was based on a rising middle class. I will skip the next one in the interest of time. I will go right to the end. I want to show some numbers. This was the conclusion of the article: To monitor the evolving American consumer market, P&G executives study the Gini index, a widely accepted measure of income inequality that ranges from zero, when everyone earns the same amount, to one when all income goes to only one person. In 2009, the most recent calculation available, the Gini coefficient totaled 0.468, a 20 percent rise in income disparity over the past 40 years, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. ``We now have a Gini index similar to the Philippines and Mexico--you'd never have imagined that,'' says Phyllis Jackson, P&G's Vice President of consumer market knowledge for North America. ``I don't think we typically thought about America as a country with big income gaps to this extent.'' I don't think we typically thought about America that way either. It is not who we purport to be or who we are going to be. In order to put us on a path that will actually produce a rising middle class again, instead of a division among the very wealthy at the top and the poorest of the citizens at the bottom, we are going to have to come together on some pretty serious choices. I know there have been some who argue that this is all a problem that is caused by too many regulations, and I am the first to say we should only have the regulations that we need. Some say the threat of any revenue--even at a time when we are collecting less revenue as a percent of our economy than we have over the last 30 years--some are saying any revenue is choking off this recovery. Let me show you something very surprising. This is high-tech Senate stuff. Here are some lines on a chart. I know people probably cannot see the detail at home. They can get it on the Web site. This blue line, from 1992 to 2010, which is about 20 years, represents what is called the productivity index. It shows that we have become far more productive as an economy over the last 20 years. It is not surprising that we have, and we have because we have had a technological revolution that has made us more productive. See at the very end where the recession is, look what happened to the productivity index during our recession--because with every single month that went by we were losing jobs; American business was doing what they had to do, which was figure out how to get through the recession and get to the other end; how to ring out every efficiency they could, how to make themselves as productive as they could. They did and they have. We are much more productive today than we were here. The green line is our gross domestic product, our Nation's economy per capita, the amount of money per person that our economy is generating. Here is an amazing fact. This is where we were before the recession. This is where we are today. Our economy is the same size today as it was before we went into the recession. We are producing about the same economic output as a nation that we were producing before we went into this downturn. I was shocked when I learned this number. But look at this. Here is our employment level. Here is our employment level today. We have 14 million people unemployed, but we are producing about the same as we were before we went into this horrible recession. That is a structural unemployment problem. That is not a problem that will be solved by slogans, and it is not going to be a problem that is solved by companies that have become much more efficient at what they do. It is going to be solved by companies that will be started tomorrow and the day after tomorrow--small businesses, venture-backed firms, people who are inventing the technology of the 21st century, the products and services of the 21st century, not the products and services of the 20th century. That is the only way we are going to put these people back to work. We could be investing in infrastructure too; that would help. This line is median family income, which is what I started this conversation with. This is a terrible story. It is not just a sad story, it is a terrible story. That is that line for median family income. It was over $53,000 in 1999. It is $49,000 today. It is almost $4,000 less in real dollars in a decade. I could have brought in another slide which shows that this trend has actually been going on a little longer than that. Think about that. It means half of the families in 1999 were earning less than $53,000, and half were earning more than $53,000. Today half are earning less than $49,000 and half are earning more than that. These are folks who have done absolutely everything that anybody ever asked them to do. But I don't care whether you are a family or a business, it makes it very hard for you to make ends meet if that is the slope that you are on. I argue that we cannot consume one more decade of this new century, with economic policies that are leading us here, and expect to have a vibrant middle class. I want to be in an economy where Procter & Gamble has to change their business model to catch up with a rising middle class, not be in a position that they are in today where they believe they have to bet on a falling middle class.

Mr. BENNET. Sure.

Mr. BENNET. I thank the Senator from New York. He is right about that. What he will see on another slide--not tonight--is that we were already on this decline. This is not news to people living in our States. It is not news to people trying to figure out how to make ends meet week by week. This is not news to them. It is not news to the people who came to my townhalls and said they cannot afford to send their kids to the best schools. They sent their first kid to the fancy school, but they cannot send their second kid there. They are upset that we are not getting done what we ought to be getting done. What we see on this other chart is that this decline was happening already because the economy wasn't lifting all boats, and it was widening in equality terribly. I have things tonight that talk about that. Then the recession accelerated that decline. They lost 2.3 percent of median family income in the recession, which is more than any of the previous recessions, going back to the Great Depression. So that is how tough this is. The Senator is right. If we keep doing what we have done for the decade that led us into this recession, if we go back to those policies and readopt those policies, and that is where we end up, we will continue to see this slide.

Mr. BENNET. I thank the Senator from New York. This gives a sense of the widening inequality that has happened. This is average income, which is different from median income. The amazing thing is, while middle-class income has been falling, and it fell throughout this 10 years, average income actually went up because a few people at the very top of the economy did incredibly well over this period of time. They have done incredibly well. This is the very top 1 percent of our earners who went from here to up here. The top 1 percent saw that, and here is everybody else. This red line is 90 percent of the people in America. Their average income was flat from 1967 to 2006. That is 90 percent of the people who live in the United States. It is hard to see how people can get ahead under circumstances like that. It is no wonder that we have these alarming numbers this week from the Census Bureau which show there are 46.2 million Americans now living in poverty. That is a 46-percent increase since 2000. I had to look to make sure I was reading that right. Since 2000, when 31 million people were in poverty, it has gone up to 46 million people in poverty today, and 22 percent of the children in the United States of America tonight are living in poverty. Over one-fifth of the children living in the United States tonight are living in poverty. And, by the way, as a former superintendent of the Denver public schools, I can tell you we are not doing ourselves any favors when the chances of a child living in poverty in this country graduating from college are roughly 9 in 100, which is what their chances are today. Ninety-one out of one hundred poor kids in the country can't expect to get a college degree; can't expect to be anywhere but on the margin of our democracy or our economy. I wonder what effect that will have on our median family income going forward. This is the last slide, because I know the hour is late, and it is one that was in the Washington Post. I am not going to bother to describe the details, but you can find it on the Web site and it is worth looking at. It is worth looking at. This red line--and it is the only thing I will talk about from this slide--shows what the bottom 90 percent--and it seems ridiculous to talk about the bottom 90 percent--what the 90 percent of earners in this country earned as a percentage of the income that everybody earned in the United States from before the 1920s to today, essentially. For the vast majority of time or some majority of time in the period from World War II--the end of World War II--until the present, the bottom 90 percent of earners earned roughly 70 percent of the income in the United States--a majority of the income, 70 percent of the income--for a long time. Now they are earning roughly 50 percent. The bottom 90 percent is earning roughly 50 percent of the income. That means, by the way, the other 10 percent are earning roughly 50 percent of the income. That is how it is distributed. It is a unique moment in the country's history, actually, uniquely unbalanced. In fact, we have to go back to 1928--the year before the market crashed, the year before Black Friday, the year before our financial markets collapsed and put us into the Great Depression--to find income disparity that looks like the income disparity we face today. In my view, the 20th century represented a period in this country's history of limitless opportunity, limitless economic growth, limitless educational attainment. Our democracy succeeded in generating an economy that gave everybody a fighting chance. Maybe a definition of whether we are giving people a fighting chance is whether middle-class income is rising or falling. Now we are in a period where it is falling and we find ourselves in the position of producing the same domestic product we were producing before this recession with 14 million more people unemployed. The economists tell us we have recovered, that we are in a recovery. The technical definition is that we are in a recovery because the technical definition is based on whether GDP is growing. That is a very cruel definition of recovery for the 14 million people who are unemployed. It is a very cruel definition of recovery for a middle class that is getting wiped out because median family income is falling. Look, the people who live in Colorado, notwithstanding all of this, are optimistic. They are optimistic about their communities and they are optimistic about their families. It gets tougher and tougher, but they rise to the occasion. And you know what. That is what they are asking us to do. They are asking us to knock off the political games that seem to be only about Washington and seem to have nothing to do with the challenges they face. Today was a good day here. I was pleased. It has been a long time. I was pleased to join my senior Senator and about 30 other Democrats and Republicans at an event to say it is time for us to think big about solving this country's fiscal challenges and that we are anxious to work together to do it. We are anxious to create a comprehensive plan to deal with it. We should be taking exactly the same approach on jobs. Getting our fiscal house in order is incredibly important to encourage and inspire confidence in our markets and confidence in our businesses and confidence in our local economies. But our work won't stop there. We need to reinvent our Tax Code so it is driving innovation and driving a rising middle class. We need to reimagine our regulatory code so it is doing the same. We need to educate the children in this country so they can take on the jobs of the 21st century, because the jobs of the 20th century are not coming back. We will be waiting in vain for those jobs to come back. The people in my meetings back in Colorado are demanding--that is the right way to say it, they are demanding--we work together. Our State is a third Republican, a third Independent, and a third Democrat, but they are Coloradans before any of that, and they are Americans maybe even before that, and it is time for us to meet their standard. Tonight we had votes on the reauthorization of FEMA--our emergency agency--to respond to the incredible tragedies that have happened around the country. It got 62 votes and we were able to pass it. We had a vote on the transportation extension, the FAA reauthorization, and I think the vote was 92 to 6, with Democrats and Republicans moving this country forward. That is what we have to do in order to get this economy going again. The people in Colorado today are saying: We want more of that and less of the bickering, more problem solving and less finger pointing. My hope is that on an occasion such as today, when we actually have made some progress, no matter how limited, it may give us the chance to move forward together. Mr. President, I appreciate the Chair's endurance and allowing me to speak on the floor tonight.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to executive session to consider the following nomination: Calendar No. 358; that the nomination be confirmed; the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate; that no further motions be in order to the nomination; that any related statements be printed in the Record; that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action and the Senate then resume legislative session.

Mr. BENNET

Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I understand there is a bill at the desk, and I ask for its first reading.