Tom Harkin

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Absolutely, I will yield.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, for more than 50 years, the Federal Government has provided students with grants and loans to help pay for college. That is a public-private partnership between the government and the students, between our taxpayers and students. It is an investment premised on the idea that a higher education will improve life for the borrower and also will strengthen our society by giving more Americans the knowledge and skills to get better jobs and to be able to give back to their communities. I know firsthand how higher education can transform one's life. I went to college on student loans and to law school on the GI bill. That is why I have spent my career in Congress fighting to ensure that all students who wish to learn, who wish to get a college degree, also have the opportunity to do so. I have worked on the Appropriations Committee to expand funding for Pell grants and student support programs. And now, as the HELP Committee chairman, I have worked to expand Pell grants to make sure our student loan programs are well run. For the past 2 years, Congress has provided significant resources to help students access and finance a college education. In 2008, we increased the amount of Stafford loans that undergraduates can borrow by $2,000 a year. The Recovery Act of 2009 provided another $17 billion to the Pell grant program. The recent reconciliation law added another $36 billion to Pell grants over the next 10 years. So the Congress has made hard choices to secure these increases for financial aid programs. The money is an investment in our Nation's students and also in our country's future. For that investment to pay off, we must ensure that students are being well educated and that schools are using Federal dollars responsibly. To ensure our investment is paying off, earlier this year I initiated an oversight investigation into for-profit education companies. Education companies that make a profit for shareholders and investors are growing at an astonishing pace. Enrollments, profits, and share of the Federal financial aid budget going to those schools are skyrocketing. In 2008, these for-profit schools accounted for 10 percent of the students enrolled in higher education, but those students received 23 percent of Federal student loans and grants and they accounted for 44 percent of the defaults. Again, for-profit schools, 10 percent of the students, got 23 percent of the Federal loans and grants and accounted for 44 percent of the defaults. Confronted with numbers such as these, I became increasingly concerned a significant share of our Federal investment in higher education is being misused and that some companies are using the Federal aid program as a cash machine to drive up profits as their main purpose. Across the country, some higher education companies are using a high-pressure sales force, persuading consumers in search of the American dream to go deep into debt to purchase a product of often dubious value. Default rates are sky high, taxpayer money is being squandered, top executives walking away with fortunes. You might think I am talking about the subprime mortgage industry, which came crashing down 2 years ago, because that does describe it. But what I have just described is also the situation created by many for-profit colleges. Just as in the subprime mortgage crisis, countless thousands of ordinary Americans are being harmed by the reckless pursuit of profits by a few. This summer, I heard testimony from Ms. Yasmine Issa, a single mother of twin girls. Two years ago, she went back to school to earn her degree in medical sonography. She went on line, typed in sonography, and found an advertisement for the Sanford-Brown Institute, part of a chain of for-profit colleges owned by Career Education Corporation, a publicly traded company. The folks at Sanford Brown sold Ms. Issa on the value of their program. They told her how it would help provide for her daughters, so she enrolled and paid out $29,000 for an 18-month program. The recruiters at Sanford-Brown did not tell her that she could have gone to the local community college and received the same degree for $7,000. They also didn't bother to tell her that her degree at Sanford- Brown wouldn't even allow her to sit for the sonography exam. Nor did they tell her that without passing the exam, she would not be able to work as a sonographer. So after $29,000 invested, 18 months of hard work, Ms. Issa couldn't even sit for the exam. Ms. Issa is not alone, but she and students like her are the reason I decided we in Congress need to take a closer look at this for-profit college situation. After three hearings, I believe it is an important time to report back to the Senate on what we have found to date. So today I am going to take the time to walk through the findings of each of these three hearings, talk about the problems facing these students and taxpayers, and conclude by talking about where the HELP Committee investigation is going in the coming years. The first hearing in June asked what are for-profit colleges? We focused on this issue following dozens of troubling reports about students being ripped off by for-profit colleges. The New York Times, Bloomberg News, ``Frontline,'' even Good Housekeeping had reported extensively about the growth of federally funded, for-profit higher education corporations. Our first task was to get a sense of what these for-profit colleges were, how big they were, and how well they were serving our students. Given that these companies receive almost all of their revenue from Federal dollars, one would think all of this information would be easily available to the public and not require a congressional investigation to unearth. But, unfortunately, that was not the case. First, what are for-profit colleges? For-profit colleges or proprietary institutions, as they are known in the law, are institutions of higher education that provide a program of training to prepare students for gainful employment in a recognized occupation. Essentially, in 1965, we recognized that career or vocational schools, as they were then known--most of them were privately owned--played a valuable role in our education system and that the people who attended the schools should be able to get financial aid to attend them. At the same time, we required these schools to demonstrate that students were being prepared for gainful employment in a recognized occupation-- something we do not require of 2- and 4-year programs at public and nonprofit schools. Today, we find ourselves in a world where proprietary schools offer everything from basic school training to liberal arts graduate degrees, and some for-profit schools enroll not a few hundred students but in some cases a few hundred thousand students. If these schools were providing high-quality education for most of their students, those numbers would be a cause for celebration. Instead, they are a case for concern, and these concerns are longstanding. Twenty years ago, former Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia held a series of hearings looking at the for-profit sector, and because of the problems he found, he initiated a series of legislative fixes to ensure that for-profit schools were a good investment for students and taxpayers. As with many laws, 20 years has taken its toll, and those reforms have been almost completely rolled back. We find ourselves today facing some of the same problems, with few tools in place to provide genuine oversight of our taxpayers' investment. What has not changed is that, unlike public or nonprofit schools, proprietary schools are legally bound to operate in the interest of their owners. As the companies have gotten larger, they have been transformed from mom-and-pop operations into high-growth, high- investment, big businesses. Fifteen for-profit education companies that operate 69 schools with an enrollment of 1.5 million are actually publicly traded on the New York stock exchange or on NASDAQ. Another 33 for-profit education companies operating 65 more for-profit schools are at least partially owned by private equity investors or hedge funds. The result is that the vast majority of for-profit schools have prioritized growth over education in order to satisfy the demands of their investors. In fact, growth and return on investment for shareholders is their legal obligation. So it should not surprise us that educating students is taking a backseat to just getting more bodies in the door. For-profit colleges traded in the stock market are a relatively recent phenomenon that has created a drastically transformed landscape for us here in Congress, the legislators. As I said, in 1992--the last time Congress took a serious look at this sector under Senator Nunn-- there were no publicly traded, for-profit higher education institutions--none, zero. In 2010, 15 publicly traded institutions enrolling a million and a half students are in existence. That is just publicly traded. There are many more that are equity owned, owned by equity investors or hedge funds, which also did not exist 20 years ago. To satisfy shareholders, publicly traded schools must constantly focus on growth, measuring up to Wall Street's laser-like attention to quarterly enrollment statistics. Publicly traded schools must also generate higher revenues while keeping down costs, including teaching costs. These schools do this by raising tuition and increasing the number of enrolled students, which in turn increases the amount of Federal student aid dollars flowing to the schools. But it does not necessarily do anything about the quality of the education received. A focus on growth at the expense of student outcomes is not just the province of the publicly traded companies. As I said, increasingly, hedge funds and private equity firms invest in for-profit colleges and manage the business end of the operation. For example, how many people know that Goldman Sachs--yes, the same Goldman Sachs--is the owner of more than one-third of the publicly traded EDMC--that is a for-profit college--which is the operator of something called the Art Institute and Brown Mackie? These are colleges; these are for-profit schools. A vice president and a managing director of Goldman Sachs sit on the EDMC board. These firms are interested in short-term profit and have little interest in the long-term educational outcomes of the students attending the schools. It certainly is not clear to the students that the school is owned by a bunch of Wall Street investors. I had this chart printed. These are not all of them, but these are for-profit schools owned by private equity and hedge funds that we were able to come up with. How many students at Rasmussen College or Morrison University or the Institute for Business and Technology or Beckfield College or Chancellor University or Ashworth College or Florida Coastal School of Law--how many students signing up for this know they are owned by private investors or hedge funds that operate these schools? They sound as if they are just legitimate colleges. An estimated 1.3 out of 1.8 million students attending for-profit schools in 2008 were attending schools primarily owned by Wall Street investors. Let me repeat that. Out of 1.8 million students going to for-profit colleges in 2008, 1.3 million students were attending colleges primarily owned by Wall Street investors. Again, this landscape was not around 20 years ago. In fact, most of it was not around 10 years ago. Here is what the hedge fund owners of Westwood College state on their Web site: They always keep their eye on the ball of what is best for the business over the long term. Not the students, not the education of students, but they keep their eye on the ball of what is best for the business, the hedge fund. That is funny, I thought the ball we should be keeping our eye on is how good a job we are doing educating students with taxpayer money. Westwood is under investigation by the attorney general in Colorado. It has had its operation shut down in Texas, and it was told not to operate online in Wisconsin. No accrediting agency seems willing to acknowledge that it accredits this school, yet Westwood College turned a profit of $46.7 million in 2009. It is owned by a hedge fund. While we call these schools for-profits to distinguish them from public community colleges and 4-year colleges and the nonprofit universities, it is really a misnomer since they are largely federally funded through student loans, grants, and military benefits. As a group our committee looked at, these publicly traded companies receive at least 85.6 percent of their revenue from Federal dollars of one sort or another. That is for profit? Under current law, these companies cannot get more than 90 percent of their revenue from student loans and grants. We call it the 90-10 rule. To me, that seems like a lot, but for these companies, it is not enough. According to an internal lobbying document from the Career College Association released by the New America Foundation, one of the top priorities for the for-profit college trade association is to roll back that rule and increase the amount of Federal dollars these companies can get from the government. Ninety percent is not enough. They have clearly done a good job since at least six of the companies-- Kaplan, EPCI, TUI, ACC, Remington, and Vatterott--get more than 90 percent of their revenues from the Federal Government. You might say: Wait a second, Senator Harkin, I thought you said they were limited to 90 percent by law. True. Here is how they get around it. The University of Phoenix, for example, in its SEC filing acknowledged it received 89 percent of its revenues from Federal financial aid programs. Document requests that we got indicate they receive an additional 1.5 percent of revenues from other Federal sources, including military benefits. That means even the largest for-profit school--Phoenix--is receiving more than 90 percent of its revenues from Federal taxpayer dollars. Again, how do they do that? If you get military money, that is not counted in the 90 percent; that is counted in the 10 percent that is private. Let's get that again. If they enroll a military person who gets GI bill benefits and they put it into these schools, that is not counted as part of the 90 percent. That is what their nice lobbying got done for them. Some of them get more than 90 percent of their money from the Federal Government. So, again, just looking at Phoenix, the University of Phoenix took in more than $1 billion in Pell grants last year and more than $3 billion in Federal student loans--$4 billion in revenue from American taxpayers for just one company in 1 year. More than 93 percent of the students in these schools take out Federal student loans. The loans go to these schools. By relying so heavily on Federal subsidies, these for-profit colleges have privatized the process of collecting Federal subsidies, but they have left the students holding the bag for the cost of a subpar education at a very high price. Of course, the term ``for-profit'' is not completely misplaced because, regardless of how poorly students perform, as long as these companies can demonstrate enrollment growth, they remain profitable. In 2009, the same 30 schools that received 86 percent of revenues from Federal dollars generated $3.5 billion in profits for the hedge funds, the equity investors, or stockholders, shareholders. Last year, together, all the schools had a profit margin of 19 percent. How many businesses in the State of West Virginia have a profit margin of 19 percent, I ask, or Iowa? But that is the average. Some schools have profit margins of 33 percent. The highest we found was a 37-percent profit margin last year. Where did the money come from? Taxpayers. The taxpayers of America. It is not a bad deal if you can get it. Then look at what happened with the executive salaries. That 85 to 90 percent-plus of their revenues coming in from the taxpayers really paid for some high executive salaries. BusinessWeek recently reported that the CEO of Strayer, one of these schools, was paid $41.6 million last year--that is the president of a school--26 times the highest salary paid to a nonprofit or private university president, probably more than at the University of West Virginia or Iowa or Iowa State. Combined, the executives at the 15 publicly traded schools received $2 billion from the sale of stock over the last 7 years. Let me repeat that. Over the last 7 years, these executives who run these schools started dumping stock. They started selling all their stock back. Do you know what they got? They got $2 billion in the last 7 years from the sale of their stock. If they loved these schools so much, you would think they would be investing the money in the schools, to help some of these students, maybe tutoring, some kind of support mechanisms for those poor students who come in who do not have an experience of going to school; that they would be doing everything they could to make sure students who came in stayed and did not drop out. No. They sold stock and walked away with $2 billion in the last 7 years. The co-CEO of the company that owns the University of Phoenix was paid $11.3 million last year. That is more than 7 times the $1.6 million paid to the highest paid head of a nonprofit--more than 14 times the compensation paid to the president of Harvard. Boy, they are walking away with money. Well, that was our first hearing. What are these schools? Our second hearing that we had in August, we featured testimony from the Government Accountability Office, the GAO, focused on how for-profit schools go about recruiting students. We had heard companies--these for-profit schools--complain that their rapid growth was nothing more than students voting with their feet. Unfortunately, the GAO and our witnesses, including a former recruiter at Westwood College, I just mentioned, made clear that for- profit college growth is actually the result of an aggressive, well- funded marketing effort by the schools, including lies and deception. Using undercover agents and hidden cameras, GAO presented a troubling picture of student recruitment. Undercover investigators from GAO visited 15 campuses of 12 companies and they found misleading, deceptive, overly aggressive or fraudulent practices at every one of those campuses, every single one. We watched the films. We watched. They had these little hidden cameras and microphones. We watched them in our committee hearing. Startling. Startling. Students were lied to and misled about the costs of the program, about what they could expect to earn, about how many students graduated, whether their credits would transfer, and whether the program was accredited. They were misled about whether their student loans were dischargeable in bankruptcy and even were prevented from having a conversation with a financial aid officer until after they signed on the dotted line. So you sign on the dotted line. Then you get to talk to the financial aid officer. That does not happen at West Virginia University or Iowa State. You can see the financial aid officer and see what you are eligible for before you decide to go there. I wish to digress for a minute about these loans being dischargeable in bankruptcy. That is one thing very few of these students know. Let's face it. A lot of these students come from low-income families--and I will get to that also in a minute--and they have not probably had a good educational experience in secondary school, but they want to better themselves. So they listen to this high-pressure sales tactic. They get these kids online and stuff and they call them on the phone and they say: Do not worry about anything. We will fill out all the paperwork. We will take care of all the paperwork, and based upon what you said, you are eligible for this much Pell grant--you will get the money--and loans and you can get these Federal loans. We will take care of all the paperwork. You do not have to worry about a thing when you sign up. What the students do not know is that the loans they are taking out can never by discharged--never, until they die. We talked a lot about the subprime and how many people were left with houses they bought that they could not pay for. Here is one difference. You can walk away from the house. If you buy a car and you get a loan on a car and you cannot make it, you can walk away from the car. Students cannot walk away from these debts. Once that school gets that money and they drop out, they have that debt hanging around their neck. You know what happens--and I will get to this letter, too--these students then cannot go on to another school. They cannot get another loan. They cannot do anything until they pay that debt. The Federal Government will be after them on that debt. Even when they get Social Security, they will go after the Social Security payments. How many students would borrow $29,000 if they knew that, if they knew that debt will be yours until you pay it off? They do not know that. They drop out of school, they borrow the money, they gave it to the school, and that is it. Not true. Schools do not inform them of this. The committee received recruitment training manuals from several different campuses. They have one thing in common: manipulation. Get this, and this is written up. They encourage their sales staff to identify the emotional weaknesses of prospective students, to exploit the pain, to motivate students to enroll. Again, do not take it from me. A recent Business Week article described a document from Kaplan University that urged the recruiters to focus on ``the fear, uncertainty and doubt of their prospective students.'' These recruitment practices more likely characterize boiler-room sales tactics than trying to get someone a good education. These abusive recruitment practices result in students unprepared for or poorly matched to their academic program, with a high probability of dropping out, leaving school not with a degree but with a mountain of debt. Some for-profit companies spend in excess of 30 percent of total cost just to fund an aggressive sales force, 30 percent of total cost, just in their sales force. Those abusive practices, so widespread that GAO found them at every campus of every company it visited, are the symptoms of a very sick industry. While GAO made some minor revisions and clarifications of the long list of misleading practices it documented--and that the industry has now tried hard to use to discredit the work of the GAO--the essential finding stands; that every single school engaged in misrepresentation, deception or outright fraud. I urge anyone interested to go to our committee Web site, the HELP Committee Web site, and listen to those GAO tapes for themselves. In fact, the 30 companies from which I requested information spent a combined $4.12 billion in marketing in fiscal year 2009, $4.12 billion they spent on marketing. If you say: Well, what is wrong with that? Just think, 86 percent of that came from the taxpayers. Six companies: Apollo, Walden, Grand Canyon, Bridgepoint, Strayer, and ITT actually spent more than 50 percent of their revenues on a combination of marketing and profit. So you add up their marketing and their profit, over 50 percent of their revenues. The second HELP Committee hearing made clear to me the problems of the for-profit sector cannot be chalked up to a few bad actors. The opportunity for great profits, in spite of poor student outcomes, has become the business model in this sector. I became worried this approach, characterized by aggressive recruitment, high cost, high debt, low graduation rates, was creating a vortex, sucking in even the good actors in the industry. Think about this business model. Think about it. If you are one of these for-profit schools, you make the most money by recruiting the poorest students, and here is why. Because if you get the poorest students, they are eligible for the maximum Pell grant. You get the poorest students, they are eligible for the maximum Federal loans. That is profit. That is profit to these companies. So that is the business model. Since they, the companies, are legally bound to try to increase their returns, either to their equity investors or hedge funds or their shareholders, they have to have this growth. So they keep aggressively recruiting more students. The poorer you are, the better they like it because it gives them more money. Then, if you drop out, it is no skin off their teeth. They do not owe you anything. So the poorer students get recruited. They do not get any support or very little, a little help. They drop out--I have a chart to show you that after a bit--and they have all this debt and the schools have all the money. That is the business model. The HELP Committee held its third and most recent hearing in September, with a focus on answering the question: What is happening to all the students whom these schools are pushing so hard to bring in the door--the ones I just talked about. Unfortunately, according to information provided by the 30 schools and analyzed by the HELP Committee, it appears these students are not faring very well. At the 30 companies we analyzed, 54 percent of the students who came in the door in the 2008-2009 school year had left without a degree by the following year. OK. At 30 companies we had analyzed, 54 percent of the students who came in the door that year left the following year without a degree. They vanished--54 percent, one out of every two, they left. That number is striking. We know from the Department of Education that nearly every student at a for-profit college will take out a Federal student loan. Of course, they will get their Pell grants too. That means more than half these students are enrolling, being saddled with debt, and dropping out without a degree. The numbers are even worse when we look specifically at students enrolled in associate's degree programs. This chart will show this. The chart shows the 10 associate's degree programs with the worst outcomes for students, these 10. The column in yellow shows the percentage of students leaving--right here. So here is the institution's total students. Here is the withdrawal rate. This is the withdrawal rate in the first year; in the first year, 84.4 percent of students from Bridgepoint who signed up dropped out in the first year. What do you think happened to their loans? What do you think happened to their Pell grants? Students get those back? Not on your life. Bridgepoint kept them, the money went to their shareholders. In that program, Bridgepoint, 84 percent, nearly all the 7,900 students they have, left before attaining their associate's degree. I am not talking about a master's degree, I am talking about a 2-year degree. Nearly 70 percent at the second school, Lincoln, with the rest in the 60-percent range. So they had 69 percent who did not finish. Just among those 10 schools, 375,000 students enrolled in the 2008- 2009 school year. Nearly 250,000 dropped out without a degree a year later--250,000. These are staggering numbers. Behind these numbers are students who are fed up with the lack of help or support from the school. They can no longer justify the level of debt they are taking on because they realize the dream job the recruiter sold them on is not waiting at the end. I should be clear, these are not the complete dropout rates. More students are actually likely to quit by the time we would actually measure that. These are students who are gone within 1 year, many of whom never even register in the Department of Education's annual enrollment count. Guess where they are counted, though. They are counted by investors looking to value the company and measure its likely profit. So when I say all these students dropped out, that is just 1 year. How many dropped out the second year? We do not know that. Let me focus, for a moment, on Bridgepoint. Bridgepoint operates Ashford University and is based, sort of, in Clinton, IA. A group of private equity investors purchased a small Catholic school in 2004, when it had about 375 students. In 2004, this small Catholic school in Clinton, IA, had 375 students. They transformed it into a for-profit school. It now has 67,000 students, a 17,000-percent increase in student population in 6 years, 17,000 percent. Ashford still operates the small campus in Iowa. About 600 students go there. The other 67,000 take classes online. I, obviously, was very interested to know how the heck they can be doing such a good job for students with that kind of growth. What the data we have collected for our investigation can tell us, for the first time, is they are not doing a very good job for their students. Eighty-four percent of the students seeking an associate's degree and 63 percent of bachelor's degree-seeking students leave Ashford within 1 year, without finishing their programs. But look at the growth--17,000 percent growth. This is not terribly surprising because Bridgepoint offers no tutoring or other student services. If a student starts to have difficulties at Ashford online, they have two options: talk to their part-time teacher online or ask the computer avatar, who is the online student resource center. Should a student succeed in completing a degree at Ashford, they had best not expect a lot of help finding a job. While Bridgepoint employs 1,703 recruiters, they employ just one person to handle career planning. They employ 1,703 recruiters, and one person to handle career planning for the entire student body of 67,000 students. According to a recent study, 60 percent of all community college students need extra help to succeed in school. They need tutoring and classes to make up for what they may not have learned in middle school and high school. For-profit colleges have served a similar population with similar needs. As they often remind us, the for-profit sector serves a group of students that traditionally lack access to higher education. Their students are the ones who are the most vulnerable, the ones who didn't have parents who went to college, who didn't grow up in a fairly wealthy household. And to make it through college, they require a significant support structure that is not available at these for-profit schools. Like Bridgepoint, schools that have large online programs seem to have particularly troubling outcomes. This becomes clear when we look at a large publicly traded school that has both a large online program and a large campus-based program for associate degree-seeking students. I am talking about a 2-year degree. We can see it on this chart. Career Education Corporation--that is another one of these for-profit schools--has a withdrawal rate of 44 percent on their campus-based programs, and a whopping 69.5 percent in their online programs. Campus- based program withdrawal rate 44 percent; online withdrawal rate 69.5 percent. Something is very wrong here. To me, this suggests these online students are not getting the support they need. It is inexpensive for a school to enroll a student online, but to ensure those students are learning and succeeding would require a major investment that for-profit schools, obviously, are not willing to make. What these high dropout numbers illustrate is a phenomenon called ``churn.'' That is an industry term for bringing in students, signing them up for loans and Pell grants, and then leaving them to sink or swim. Then they go out the door, and they bring in more. That is what they call churning through the students because so many students at these for-profit schools come in the door and then leave within 4 months, 5 months, 6 months. Many of these students don't even show up in the data the Department of Education collects. At Bridgepoint, for example, on the first day of classes in the fall of 2009, there were about 48,000 students signed up. Over the next year, recruiters signed up 77,000 additional students. Let's keep these figures in mind. In the fall of 2009, 48,000 students signed up for Bridgepoint. In the next year, they signed up 77,000 additional students. Then at the end of that school year in 2010, there were only 67,000 total students enrolled. That means the school's actual head count for that year was about 125,000 students enrolled at some point. But 58,000 students, nearly half of them, didn't stick around. They were out the door. These are the kinds of things people don't know. This is what our investigation has uncovered by getting the documentation that led us to these figures. The picture is much the same at other for-profit schools. In fact, most schools we analyzed recruit at least the equivalent of their entire starting student population anew each year. That bears repeating. Most of the schools we analyzed recruit at least the equivalent of their entire starting student population anew every year. This chart describes the University of Phoenix. We have all heard of them. If someone has never heard of them, they don't watch TV or read newspapers or ride a bus or anything else to see all their ads. They do a great job of advertising. At the University of Phoenix, in 2008-2009, the school started the year with 443,000 students. They ended the school year with 470,800 students, so almost a 28,000-student increase, 27,800 to be exact. They grew their enrollment by 27,800. In fact, they actually recruited and enrolled 371,700 new students in that year to get 27,800. Again, these numbers can get a little confusing. Let me try that again. The University of Phoenix started the school year in 2008 with 443,000 students. They ended the school year with 470,800, a growth of 27,800 students. How did they get 27,800? They recruited 371,700 students just to get that 27,800. That means almost 350,000 students passed through the University of Phoenix in 2009 without anything to show for it. They came in. A lot of them gave them their Pell grants. They turned over their student loans. Then they vanished. The students got the debt and the University of Phoenix got a nice little profit. Actually, a nice big profit. At another company, EDMC, the marketing and recruiting machine signed up 124,000 new students in the last school year. But they ended up the year with only 19,000 more students than when they started. Recruiters for these schools face the imperative of enrolling large numbers of new students each year to replace those dropping out and eventually reach the point where the number of new students is sufficient to actually cause the enrollment to grow. That is what the shareholders demand. That is what the hedge funds who own them demand. That is what their equity investors demand. The schools may be very successful as companies, making profits for their investors and their owners and, I might say, huge compensation for their executives and their presidents, but it is hard to say they are successful as educational institutions. (Mr. BENNET assumed the chair.)

Mr. HARKIN. I am delighted to yield.

Mr. HARKIN. I am glad the Senator asked that question. I will go over that again. There is a Federal law that says they can only get 90 percent of their revenue from Federal financial aid sources, loans or grants, Pell grants, loans, that type of thing, 90 percent. The University of Phoenix reported last year they got 89 percent of their money from the Federal Government. But here is the kicker. If you are a GI and they recruit you and you are giving them your GI bill benefits and other educational benefits you get through the military, that is not counted in the 90 percent. For some reason that is not taxpayer money. Actually, the University of Phoenix got more than 90 percent of their money from the taxpayers.

Mr. HARKIN. That is correct.

Mr. HARKIN. I say to the Senator, who has been a leader in this effort of looking at the for-profit industry, trying to get the facts so we can make reasonable decisions as legislators about protecting both the taxpayers' dollars and protecting students, on December 8 our committee published this report called ``Benefiting Whom, For-Profit Education Companies and the Growth of Military Education Benefits.'' I suggest that he might want to look at that. The Senator is absolutely right. More and more of this money is going to the for-profit schools. Let me put it this way: Between $640 to $700 million in GI bill benefits went basically to public institutions, public schools--the University of Illinois, Iowa State, University of Colorado, University of Georgia--all that. About $640 to $700 million went to public schools. That supported 209,000 students. About the same amount of money from GI bill benefits went to the for-profit schools and supported 75,000 students.

Mr. HARKIN. Yes. That is about right.

Mr. HARKIN. The Senator is correct.

Mr. HARKIN. That is right.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, 2 weeks ago all 42 Republican Senators signed a letter threatening to filibuster any extension of tax cuts for middle-class Americans or any continuation of unemployment benefits unless and until the Senate agreed to extend tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. As many have pointed out correctly, Republicans have been holding middle-class tax cuts and benefits for the unemployed hostage to an extension of tax cuts for the very rich. Well, it appears the hostage-taking incident is nearly over. The hostages--the unemployed--will be released. The ransom will be paid. Wealthy Americans who make $1 million or more a year will receive an average tax break of more than $100,000. Indeed, in the course of negotiations to rescue the hostages, Republicans demanded and got an even more royal ransom: they demanded and got a giveaway on estate taxes that will benefit only the wealthiest one-quarter of 1 percent of the U.S. population. The heirs of a single estate worth $1 billion would save $100 million thanks to the ransom demanded by the Republicans. Mr. President, no question, champagne corks are popping on Wall Street, and at America's most exclusive country clubs and boardrooms, the superrich and their heirs, I am sure, are planning on throwing lavish Christmas and New Year's parties. Tiffany jewelers will no doubt be looking forward to selling a record number of $29,800 watches. This is a picture of one. Giving those making over $1 million a year more than $100,000 in tax breaks--well, they can buy this wristwatch for $29,800 advertised in the New York Times. This is made in Switzerland. Now, maybe if it was made in America, you could say: At least it was made in America. But it is not made here. This is what the very rich spend their extra $100,000 on, things like this. It doesn't help our economy. But what about the rest of America? What about those who don't shop at Tiffany's? Is this a good deal for the American people overall? Well, I have come to the conclusion that it is not. At a time when our annual deficit is close to $1 trillion, much of it borrowed from China, at a time when the wealthy are already enjoying a huge surge in income even as middle-class incomes are stagnant, it is simply obscene to give another lavish tax cut to the top 2 percent. Let me say what should be painfully obvious about this new bonanza for the rich: They do not need it and we can't afford it. They do not need it and we can't afford it. And it will not help the economy. In fact, in the longer term, I believe it will hurt our economy. These new tax breaks for the rich are terrible public policy. Let me briefly mention just four reasons these tax cuts are harmful. First, these new tax breaks will make income inequality even worse. In recent years, in the grip of the great recession, many millions of ordinary working Americans have lost their jobs, their homes, and their savings, but the wealthy have made out very, very well. Today, income inequality--inequality--in America is at an alltime high. The top 1 percent controls more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. At the same time, the bottom 90 percent holds 73 percent of all personal debt in this country. Eighty percent of all additional income earned between 1980 to 2005 has gone to the top 1 percent. Let me repeat. Eighty percent of all additional income earned from 1980 to 2005 has gone to the top 1 percent. The gap grows wider. In 2009, in the wake of the taxpayer bailout of Wall Street, Goldman Sachs paid its employees an average of nearly $600,000 per person. Executives at Goldman Sachs received bonuses totaling $13 billion. So why in the world would this Congress vote to make this already extreme income inequality even worse? Why in the world would we vote to borrow tens of billions of dollars from China to make the rich even richer? This is foolish, and it is recklessly irresponsible. The second reason why this is a bad agreement, again the distribution of these new tax cuts is radically skewed in favor of the wealthy. As I said earlier, those who earn $1 million and above would, on average, receive an annual tax break of $100,000. By contrast, an average American taxpayer earning $26,000 would receive a tax break of $670. In 2007, the top 25 hedge fund managers in the United States took home an average income of $892 million. Yes, you heard that right. Their individual annual income averaged nearly nine-tenths of $1 billion per person. Under this agreement, each would get an income tax break worth perhaps as much as $50 million. Reason No. 3 why this is a bad agreement: The nearly $900 billion in tax cuts in this agreement would crowd out necessary investments in priorities such as education, infrastructure, homeland security, health care, scientific research. In other words, we are eating our seed corn, borrowing money to pay for short-term tax cuts rather than for long- term investments that develop our human capital and our physical infrastructure for the future. As a contrast, the United States right now invests about 2.4 percent of our GDP, our gross domestic product, in infrastructure. China invests almost four times our rate; 9 percent of their GDP annually goes to infrastructure. China invested $186 billion just in rail in the last 3 years. Within 2 years, they will open 42 new high-speed rail lines with trains reaching speeds of 200 miles an hour. By 2020, China plans to add 26,000 additional miles of tracks for freight and travel as well as 230,000 miles of new or improved roads and 97 new airports. What do we have? We are borrowing money from China in order to pay for short-term exigencies at the same time China is using its wealth to invest in infrastructure so they will be more competitive in the world economy in the future. We are going to try--mark my words--we are going to be coming up with some bills to invest in highways, a new highway bill. We have a new highway bill to come up. We are going to try to invest in new highways and probably invest in other kinds of infrastructure projects. I am sure the Senator from Colorado knows how many sewer and water projects in Colorado are going underfunded right now that need to be done. I have the same in the State of Iowa. We think about high-speed rail. I saw a recent figure that said 60 percent of all the flights that originate out of O'Hare, in Chicago, go 300 miles or less. It is overcrowded. One day of bad weather such as the other day and there are thousands of airplanes backed up all over the country. Three hundred miles? That could be high-speed rail. Right now, to go from Chicago to Detroit by rail takes you almost all day. By high-speed rail you could do it in a couple or 3 hours. Maybe you wouldn't want to take an airplane. We should have high-speed rail from Boston to Miami, from Seattle to San Diego and hubs in the Midwest from Chicago going out to Kansas City, St. Louis and Des Moines and Omaha, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Cincinnati. We are not doing it. We are borrowing money from China to pay for present exigencies, we are going into debt, and then when our bills come up to try to fund programs to build infrastructure, our Republican friends will say we can't afford it. We do not have the money. So it will crowd it out. Why? So we can give some of the richest in our country another $100,000? For people with $1 billion estates getting an extra $100 million so they can go out and buy those $29,000 wrist watches or $2,500 cashmere scarves or whatever it might be? If our debt continues to grow at unsustainable rates, we are going to find ourselves, very soon, in the same position as Greece, Ireland, and Spain today. We will reach a tipping point, where international bond vigilantes place big bets against the United States, shorting our debt. This would radically drive up interest rates in the United States, forcing us to make even more draconian cuts in spending in everything from education to scientific research to health care. This may suit the agenda of the rightwing, which would be delighted to see education programs and health care programs gutted, but it would be a disaster for ordinary working Americans and for our economy as a whole. The fourth reason why this is a bad agreement: The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office ranks tax cuts for the rich as dead last among the various options for boosting the economy and creating jobs. This is hardly surprising. As I said, the wealthy are the least likely to spend their new tax cuts. They can only buy so many $29,800 wrist watches. By contrast, virtually every dime of emergency unemployment benefits is spent on necessities such as food, rent, and transportation. Middle and lower income taxpayers are likely to spend most, if not all, of their modest tax cuts. This stimulates the economy, creates jobs, and has a positive multiplier effect across the economy. It is a cruel irony that under this agreement, benefits for the unemployed are extended for 1 year while tax cuts for the rich are extended for 2 years and are now more likely to be extended far beyond that. If we are going to borrow additional hundreds of billions of dollars from foreign creditors, mainly China, shouldn't we at least insist the money is spent in ways that benefit our economy in the long term? If we are going to borrow the money, let's build our infrastructure so our private sector 5 years, 10 years from now will be more efficient, will be able to compete more effectively in the world economy. I might add, these infrastructure jobs put Americans to work. It is one of the best multiplier effects of our dollars. Why is that? Easy. When you build a new school, the work has to be done locally. You can't ship the work out to India. Think about it. Most of the materials that go into a school--the bricks, the mortar, the rerods, the wallboard, the sheetrock, most of the lighting, the conduits, the piping, switches, floor tiles, windows, doors--most of it is made in America. Most of that is made here. So when you spend $1 on something like that, the work is done locally, it helps the local economy, plus all the materials--not all but most of the materials you buy are made in America. That dollar spins around. You give someone an extra $100,000 and they spend $29,800 on a watch. I don't think that benefits many Americans. Maybe the jewelry store, maybe Tiffany's where you buy it, they are making some. But most of that goes out of the country. If you give extra money to people to buy a new flat-screen TV--yes, there is some benefit here to the retailer that sells it, maybe the shipper that brought it in, but the majority of it goes overseas. That is why I say, if we are going to borrow money, put it into infrastructure. It provides a lot of jobs and provides a great multiplier effect in our economy, and you get something at the end of it that is going to benefit our kids and our grandkids. I repeat, with this agreement, we are eating our seed corn. Instead of borrowing to invest in the future, we are borrowing to pay for consumption today. Within the next 2 years, these hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars will just go poof. They will be gone with nothing to show for it--not one new highway, not one new bridge, not one new school. Our economic competitors are not making these kinds of foolish choices. As Fareed Zakaria pointed out in his column in the Washington Post on Monday, China has doubled its investment in education, rocketing to the very top in the most recent international rankings of educational achievement. As I said, the Chinese are investing hundreds of billions of dollars to build the world's most advanced infrastructure. According to Reuters, the Chinese Government is planning to spend 1.5 trillion over the next 5 years in seven targeted sectors--alternative energy, biotechnology, new generation information technology, high-end equipment manufacturing, advanced materials, alternative fuel cars, and energy-saving technologies. Do you know what this tax thing is going to cost us over the next 5 years? About $1 trillion. What are we going to have to show for it? Nothing. Instead of borrowing these billions, we should use them to rebuild and modernize our crumbling infrastructure. We should use that money to invest in things such as biomedical research, renewable energy, technologies of the future, and education of our young people to perform the high-end jobs that those sectors will create. This would put millions of Americans back to work and would have huge payoffs for future generations. The needs are enormous. A recent report determined that the current need, just for improved school infrastructure, is more than $250 billion nationwide. EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, estimates we need to invest more than $200 billion in wastewater treatment and, as we all know, our interstate highways and many thousands of bridges are desperately in need of repair or replacement. It is simply shameful to continue to neglect these basic infrastructure investments, even as we borrow hundreds of billions of dollars to pay for new tax cuts and consumption. The last thing, my fifth reason for not supporting this tax package, is the 2-percent cut in Social Security taxes for 1 year--2 percent. We go from 6.2 percent down to 4.2 percent. That might sound like a good deal, put some more money in people's pockets. But why are we taking it out of the Social Security trust fund? Mark my words, a year from now-- 1 year from now, assuming this bill passes--and I guess they have the votes for it--1 year from now when we come back and we are going to want to get that back up to 6.2 percent, our Republican friends are going to say that is a tax increase, a tax increase on hard-working Americans. You are going to go from 4.2 percent to 6.2 percent? People will be afraid: Oh, no, we can't raise those taxes. Thus, we will set in motion with this tax package a pressure to begin the dismantling of the Social Security trust fund. We have not done this before. We should not be doing it now. It will come in. It will be 4.2 percent. Next year it goes back to 6.2 percent. We will be accused of raising taxes on hard-working Americans. Therefore, we need to extend it. As we extend it, that means more money will come from general revenues--will have to come from general revenues to put into the Social Security trust fund. OK. Let me repeat this. Right now every working American puts in 6.2 percent of their income into Social Security. That is a trust fund. Now they are going to take it from 6.2 percent down to 4.2 percent, and say: OK. You are going to keep in your pocket 2 percent for 1 year. One year from now we come in: Oh, no, we can't go back to 6.2 percent. That is an increase in taxes on working Americans. Okay. We will extend it. How are we going to make up for that 2- percent cut? We are supposed to make up for it with general revenues. How are we going to make it up with general revenues when we are going to be arguing that the debt is so high, the deficit is so big, we have got to cut spending? So we have got to cut spending, so therefore we cannot put the money from general revenues back into Social Security. What is the answer? Raise the retirement age on Social Security. Cut back on the benefits on Social Security. Maybe cut down on disability benefits--all kinds of things to cut down on Social Security so we do not have to take money from general revenues to put back into the Social Security trust fund. Mark my word, it is coming. It is coming. What is it no one is talking about? First of all, there is no deficit in the Social Security trust fund. The Social Security trust fund can continue to pay out 100 percent of benefits until about 2037--about 2037. Then it can only afford to pay 75 percent of benefits--not zero but 75 percent. What could fix that? One very simple thing. It is called equity. It is called fairness. It is called justice. Right now, if you work and you make $40,000 a year, you pay on every dollar you make at 6.2 percent into Social Security. If you make $400,000 a year, you are only paying in 6.2 percent on 25 cents on the dollar. Why is that? Because Social Security payments are capped at $106,800 a year. That means you pay 6.2 percent up to $106,800. Over that you do not pay any more into Social Security. Think of how many people in this country make $4 million a year. They pay on $106,000, a fraction of what they make. It seems to me that fairness and equity would argue that if a working person who makes $20,000 or $40,000 or $50,000 or $60,000 or $70,000 a year has to pay on every dollar into Social Security, why should not someone who is making $400,000 or $800,000 or $1 million or $4 million? Why should they not pay in? Raise that cap so that everybody pays that 6.2 percent on every dollar they make. You know what. Social Security will have no problems for the next 100 years. Well, actually it is 75 years. For 75 years no problems. Why are we not talking about that? Why are we not talking? Why are we not debating and voting on whether we should raise the cap and then we will not have to take 2 percent out of the Social Security trust fund. Mark my words, it is coming. It is coming. The pressure is going to be built to damage the Social Security benefits. It is going to start about a year from now. I cannot support the bill that is before us. It will exacerbate income inequality. It will give tax cuts we cannot afford and they do not need to the wealthiest people instead of investing that money in infrastructure in the future. It will begin a process of dismantling the Social Security trust fund. These are misplaced priorities, bad values. It is a misguided bill that will drive our Nation deeper into debt with too little to show for it in the long run. I might be for going into debt if you got something to show for it. It is like when my wife and I got married and we bought a house. You go into debt. But I knew that if we worked hard and saved our money, we could pay off on that house and we would have something to show for it. We did not just borrow money so we could go to fancy restaurants and have nice meals or buy a very expensive car or buy nice clothes. No, put it in the house, because you know you are going to have something. The same way with infrastructure. At least if you are going to borrow money, have something to show for it in the end. So, again, it will drive us deeper into debt, too little to show for it in the long run. That is why I am going to have to vote against this package.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, first I ask unanimous consent that Kia Hamadanchy and Awatif Chafie of my staff be granted the privilege of the floor.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I want to start by thanking my friend and colleague Senator Dodd. Throughout his career in the Senate, he has always made it a priority to protect and support America's children and families. I am delighted to reauthorize the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, Family Violence Prevention and Services Act, the Adoption Opportunity Act and the Abandoned Infants Assistance Act as we celebrate the congressional legacy of the distinguished senior Senator from Connecticut. Children and families will benefit from these and improvements in the system designed to prevent and serve victims of child abuse and neglect, as well as family, domestic, and dating violence. I would also like to thank the Senator from Wyoming, Mr. Enzi, and the Senator from Tennessee, Mr. Alexander, for working with us and showing a true commitment to getting this done. The efforts of the Senators and their staff were invaluable. The legislation that was just passed and is being sent to the President is a step forward in improving child safety and strengthening critical services for children and families. At a time when there is little talk of successful bipartisan effort in Congress, this legislation is a reflection of changes we are able to make on behalf of American citizens when we work together, to do better for our Nation's children and families. The need for this reauthorization is real. In my home State of Iowa, after a 2-year drop, the rates of child abuse rose 11 percent in 2009. The CAPTA Reauthorization Act of 2010 will help communities better meet the needs of our children. This reauthorization encourages states to provide high-quality prevention services to reduce abuse and neglect, ensures that investigations of allegations protect children and reduce trauma, and directs vital resources to communities that need them most. Each of these enhancements should ultimately result in improved systems for training and supporting adults charged with identifying, preventing, and responding to reports of abuse, neglect, and maltreatment; stronger coordination among service providers; and a renewed focus on the need to respond to the conditions that lead to abuse, neglect, and maltreatment in order to prevent them from occurring. These are important steps, but we still have a lot of work to do. Rates of child abuse and neglect are still far too high across the country. Each year, an estimated 794,000 children are victims of child abuse or neglect. In its Child Maltreatment 2008 Report on Child Abuse and Neglect, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported that, each year, 141,700 children are seriously injured, 18,000 are severely disabled, and 1,760 children die as a result of abuse or neglect. Children younger than 6 years of age accounted for 76 percent of child fatalities. Babies younger than one year of age accounted for 42 percent of child fatalities. Each of these children is one too many children who have suffered. Similarly, we cannot ignore the 1.5 million women and 900,000 men who are raped or physically assaulted by a partner every year in the United States. Last year over 247,000 victims and their children were turned away because shelters were full or programs lacked resources. The services provided for through this reauthorization are essential. In one day alone in 2009, more than 65,000 victims of domestic violence and their children received life-saving services from local domestic violence programs because of the services provided through FVPSA. By passing this reauthorization we have taken steps toward providing a better system. I want to take a moment to mention those who have worked so hard on my staff. I would like to thank Dan Smith and Pam Smith, who do a great job on all of the undertakings of our committee. I would like to thank Bethany Little, David Johns, and Ashley Eden of my staff. David has been working on this for over 3 years; I especially appreciate his diligence and effort. I would also like to thank Senator Dodd's staff Jim Fenton and Averi Pakulis. Also, as I mentioned, this has been a bipartisan effort, and I would also like to thank Senator Enzi's staff, Beth Buehlmann and Kelly Hastings as well as David Cleary from Senator Alexander's staff. I am also grateful to Chairman Miller and Ranking Member John Kline of the House Committee on Education and Labor and their excellent staff for the impressive work they did moving this bill quickly through the House. I appreciate the assistance of Lynn Rosenthal, the White House Adviser on Violence Against Women, in improving the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act. Vice President Biden has long been, and continues to be, a leader in this area and Lynn assisted him ably in this effort. This is a major undertaking, and to be able to get this kind of joint effort at time like this is a great tribute to all of those who have worked so hard. As always, we could not work without the excellent services of the Senate Office of Legislative Counsel, especially Liz King. This is a critical step forward to ensuring the safety of America's children, youth and adults--let's keep walking forward together.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Madam President, in these closing weeks of the 111th Congress, the Senate will be saying goodbye to a number of retiring colleagues. But, for my part, I will miss them all, but I have to be honest, the most poignant farewell will be to my dear friend, Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut. Chris and I have much in common. We are both proud of our Irish roots. We were both elected to the House of Representatives at the same time, in the famous post-Watergate election of 1974. Chris moved over here to the Senate in 1980, and I followed 4 years later. We both ran for President--with similarly unambiguous results. Over the years, we have collaborated on many legislative initiatives, including, most recently, the historic Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act--the health reform bill. As we all know, Chris Dodd is almost literally a son of the Senate. With good reason, he is enormously proud of his father, Thomas J. Dodd, who was a lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials and served two terms in the Senate, from 1959 to 1971. Chris worked as a Senate page at age 16, and was elected to the Senate at age 36. For three decades, Chris has embodied everything that is good about this body: a passion for public service, a sincere desire to reach out across the aisle, a great talent for forging coalitions and bringing people together, and a willingness to work extraordinarily long hours in order to accomplish big and important things. Over the decades, Senator Dodd has been a leading champion of working Americans, fighting for safer workplaces, the right to organize, stronger public schools, better access to higher education, and, of course, quality health care as a right not a privilege. He was the author of 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, which for the first time entitled every American to have leave from their job to take care of children or elderly relatives. Make no mistake, Senator Dodd is leaving the Senate at the very top of his game. Last year, when Senator Kennedy fell ill, Chris picked up the torch of health care reform. When I became chair of the Health, Education, and Labor Committee, I asked him to continue to take the lead in forging the final bill, which he had led so expertly on before, and which will go down in history as one of America's great progressive accomplishments, on a par with Social Security and Medicare. Even before final passage of health reform, Senator Dodd, as chair of the Banking Committee, was hard at work crafting yet another historic bill: the most sweeping reform of Wall Street and the banking industry since the Great Depression. To be sure, other Senators played important roles in passing health reform and Wall Street reform. But it was Senator Dodd's dogged work and virtuoso skills as a legislator that ultimately won the day. These two landmark laws are a tremendous living legacy to the senior Senator from Connecticut. He has made his mark as one of the great reformers in the history of the U.S. Senate. Chris Dodd has accomplished many things during his three decades in this body. But, in my book, the highest accolade is simply that Chris Dodd is a good, generous and decent person, with a passion for fairness and social justice. For me, it has been a great honor to be his friend and colleague for the last 36 years. Our friendship, of course, will continue. But I will miss the day-to-day association with Chris here on the floor, in committee, and elsewhere here on the Hill. Paul Wellstone used to say that ``the future belongs to those with passion.'' By that definition, our friend Chris Dodd has a wonderful future ahead of him. No question he is full of passion, passion for doing what is right for the people of this country. But no question, the Senate is losing a giant--one of our most accomplished and respected members. We are also losing a happy warrior in the mold of FDR and Hubert Humphrey. As the columnist E.J. Dionne has written, ``The happiness quotient in the Senate will definitely drop when [Senator] Dodd leaves.'' I couldn't agree more. For 36 years in Congress, Chris Dodd has faithfully served the people of Connecticut and the people of the United States. And there is no doubt that he will pursue new avenues of public service in retirement. As I said, I will miss his friendship and counsel here in the Senate. But I wish Chris, his wonderful wife Jackie, and their wonderful young children, Grace and Christina, the very best in the years ahead. ted kaufman Madam President, when our colleague Ted Kaufman, who is leaving, was sworn in as Senator in January 2009 to succeed the newly elected Vice President, Senator Joe Biden, he made it clear that he would not run for election in 2010. He noted that he had not raised money to become a Senator and would not raise money to be elected 2 years later. He would be a free man, beholden to no special interest, determined to do only what is right for the people of Delaware and the United States. Senator Kaufman has made good on that pledge. He may no longer be a Member of the Senate since the swearing in of the new Senator from Delaware, Mr. Coons, but in just 2 years in the Senate, he left his mark--both legislatively and in the esteem of Senators on both sides of the aisle. Of course, it should come as no surprise that Ted Kaufman excelled in this body, and had influence and clout far beyond what is typical for a reshman Senator whose tenure was only going to be 2 years. After all, he came to this body with a distinguished and diverse background in government, business, and the academy. He holds a degree in mechanical engineering from Duke, which led to a job with DuPont chemical company. He went on to earn an M.B.A. from the Wharton School and taught at Duke University's schools of law and business. And, of course, as we all knew Ted before, he served for 20 years on the staff of Senator Joe Biden, most of that time as chief of staff. Like most Senators, I have enormous respect for the role of the Senate's professional staff members. In fact, we often joke that Senators are ``a constitutional impediment to the smooth functioning of staff.'' In Senator Ted Kaufman, we saw the best of both worlds, combining the expertise and competence of a veteran staffer with the leadership and political skills of a first-rate Senator. This made Senator Kaufman a formidable presence in this body for the last 2 years. No question, Senator Kaufman's influence was felt most impressively in the effort to reform Wall Street in the wake of the financial meltdown of 2008. Soon after becoming Senator, he cosponsored, along with Senator Leahy and Senator Grassley, a bill to give Federal prosecutors more effective tools for rooting out financial fraud. President Obama signed that bill into law in May of last year. And when the Senate undertook the sweeping reform of the financial system earlier this year, Senator Kaufman quickly stepped forward as one of the toughest critics of Wall Street, giving speech after speech here on the floor proposing and demanding fundamental changes in America's broken financial system. I listened with particular interest to his explanations and criticisms of high-frequency trading and other opaque trading practices of hedge funds and big Wall Street firms. I was proud to cosponsor the SAFE Banking Act, cosponsored by Senator Kaufman and Senator Brown. This legislation would have dramatically reduced the size and concentration of the largest financial institutions, thereby making our financial system safer. I was disappointed this proposal was not included in the financial bill. But getting 33 votes for this ambitious measure was no small feat, and, no question, Senator Kaufman's tireless efforts helped to rally support in the Senate for reforming our financial institutions. Thanks in no small measure to Senator Kaufman's expertise and relentless advocacy, the worst aspects of Wall Street's casino capitalism have been eliminated, and our financial system is better able to allocate capital to areas of the economy that need it the most. So the junior Senator from Delaware was true to his word. For the last 2 years, he was a Senator's Senator, giving his all, beholden to no interest, serving the people of Delaware and the United States with competence, character, courage, and, I might add, with rock-solid integrity. I have valued Ted Kaufman's friendship and counsel here in the Senate, as I said, going back for nearly 20 years. I look forward to continuing that relationship now that he has departed from this body. So I join with the entire Senate family in wishing Ted and Lynne much happiness and success in the years ahead. George Voinovich With the close of the 111th Congress, the Senate will lose to retirement again one of our most seasoned and respected Members on the other side of the aisle, Senator George Voinovich of Ohio. Senator Voinovich and I have much in common. We are both proud midwesterners. But here is what we really have in common: My mother immigrated to America from what is now Slovenia, the nation of Slovenia, and George's mother was a first-generation American of Slovenia descent. Both of us were--and I think we are the only two Senators ever--awarded the Golden Order of Merit by the Republic of Slovenia, in part for our efforts to assist Slovenia in its campaign to rid the world of landmines and to assist the victims of landmines. We both care very deeply about the success of democracy in Slovenia, a very small nation that has set a powerful example of political stability, economic reform, true democracy, and ethnic inclusiveness in the Balkans. For nearly 4\1/2\ decades, George Voinovich has devoted himself to public service at just about every level of government--quite amazing-- as a member of the Ohio House of Representatives, Cuyahoga County commissioner, Mayor of Cleveland, Lieutenant Governor of Ohio, Governor of Ohio, and, for the last 12 years, U.S. Senator from the State of Ohio. Across those 44 years of service, he has been respected for his independence, his pragmatism, and his insistence on putting ideology and partisanship aside in order to accomplish important things for ordinary working Americans. Another constant in the career of George Voinovich has been his insistence on fiscal discipline and his willingness to advance creative, tough-minded, nonideological approaches to help government live within its means. As mayor of Cleveland, he took a municipality that had recently declared bankruptcy and turned it around to become a three-time All-American City winner. As Governor, he returned the State budget to balance despite a bad economy. And for the last 12 years, he has been one of the Senate's leading champions of fiscal conservatism. By that, I mean true fiscal conservatism, which means a willingness both to cut spending and to raise revenues as necessary in order to bring down deficits and balance the books. On that score, on matters of taxing and spending, Senator Voinovich had the courage to break ranks with his own party on many occasions. Our colleague Senator Voinovich has many accomplishments in this body. I do not have time to mention them all, but I know he is particularly proud of his work as chair and, most recently, ranking member of the Clean Air and Nuclear Safety Subcommittee of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, wherein he played a key role in passing the National Energy Security Act of 2009, which is helping our Nation to lessen its dependance on imported petroleum. He is also deservedly proud of his long leadership in the fight to preserve and protect Lake Erie and the other Great Lakes--a cause that has been a constant throughout his career in public service. Here in the Senate, he has been a cochair of the Great Lakes Task Force, and he introduced a bill that, when signed into law in 2008 by President Bush, ratified the Great Lakes Compact to protect these national treasures through better water management and conservation--a singular accomplishment by Senator Voinovich of Ohio. Senator Voinovich has achieved much during his distinguished career in public service. I could use any number of superlatives to describe his character and work: sterling character, an honest individual, someone who, when he gave you his word, gave you his word. To Senator Voinovich, a handshake was a handshake. It was a commitment, and he would never go back. But in my book, the highest accolade is simply that George Voinovich is a generous, sincere, decent person, dedicated to public service, always determined to do the right thing for the people of Ohio and the entire United States, a man lacking in ideological rigor but still a person dedicated to true conservative causes he has championed all his life. It has been a great honor to be his friend and colleague for these last years. Our friendship, of course, will continue. I wish George and Janet the very best in the years ahead. Judd Gregg I know others are here. If I can indulge them just for a few more minutes, I would like to make one more speech in praise of another colleague who is retiring, again on the other side of the aisle, and who is a good friend and someone for whom I have had not only great friendship but great respect, and I have served with him a lot on our committees--Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire. Senator Gregg can be a very effective and persuasive partisan for the conservative causes he holds dear. He also has a strong New Hampshire independent streak and is willing to buck his party when he thinks it is wrong--for example, when he voted against President Bush's Medicare prescription drug benefit bill because it was unpaid for and would add hundreds of billions of dollars to the debt. Indeed, as ranking member and former chair of the Budget Committee, Senator Gregg has been one of the Senate's leading champions of fiscal discipline. I especially admire Senator Gregg's capacity for reaching across the aisle, building bridges, and getting important work done. On that score, he has represented New Hampshire and the United States at his very best. This quality has made him a standout member of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, which I chair. He forged a very productive working relationship with my predecessor as chair, Senator Ted Kennedy. For example, he played a key role with Senator Kennedy in crafting the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act, and a few years later, I was proud to work with both of those New England Senators again--especially Senator Gregg--to reauthorize and improve the Americans with Disabilities Education Act. In 2008, Senator Gregg was a key leader in crafting and forging bipartisan support for the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. Many have criticized the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP, but facts are facts: TARP prevented a total meltdown of our financial system. And almost the entire $700 billion taxpayer investment has been or soon will be paid back to the U.S. Treasury. In fact, just this week, the Treasury booked a $12 billion profit on its previous $45 billion investment in Citigroup. This year, Senator Gregg has played a key role on the HELP Committee in bringing together Senators from both parties to advance food safety legislation. Frankly, there were many times when sharp policy disagreements threatened the survival of that bill. But at every turn, Senator Gregg played a constructive role in working through the options, crafting bipartisan compromises, and keeping the legislation on track to passage. I have nothing but admiration and gratitude to Senator Gregg for his leadership on the food safety bill, which, as you know, passed the Senate, and because of a little glitch, the House had to return it, and it is coming back to us on the continuing resolution bill. We will put it on our omnibus bill and send it back to the House. I do not think there is any doubt that this will be signed into law by the President this year. That is the first modernization of our Food and Drug Administration inspection systems in 70 years--70 years. Again, I wish to publicly thank Senator Gregg for hanging in there over several years' period of time to make sure we kept it on track from one Congress to another, from one Congress to another, up and down, but we finally got it done. As I just said, I have the utmost admiration and gratitude to Senator Gregg for hanging in there and making sure we got the job done. As many of our colleagues will remember, several years ago, Senator Gregg bought a $20 Powerball lottery ticket and won $850,000. Again, we all want to go up and touch him and see if it will rub off on us a little bit. To this day, Senator Gregg is the only person I have ever known who won a Powerball lottery ticket. Well, as we have often said, that was Judd Gregg's personal good fortune, but it has been our good fortune to have a Senator of his high caliber and character in this body for the last 18 years. During that time, I have placed great store by his friendship and his counsel. Of course, that relationship and friendship will continue, but I am sorry we are going to miss him here in the Senate. I join with the entire Senate family in wishing Judd and Kathleen the very best in the years ahead. I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that Gillian Leibach and Lauren Scott of my staff be granted the privilege of the floor during the duration of today's proceedings.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. How much time do we have?

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I yield myself the remainder of the time. I see no Republicans on the floor now.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, our first responders are genuine heroes. On a routine basis, they walk into burning buildings, confront criminals, and put their lives on the line to protect our families and communities. These dedicated workers are on the front lines every day, and they have invaluable skills and knowledge about how to best protect the public and stay safe on the job. Unfortunately, under current law, many of our first responders have no voice in the decisions that affect their own lives and livelihoods. Their workplace input is disregarded because they are denied the same basic rights that other American workers enjoy. Currently, private sector employees are covered by the National Labor Relations Act and have the right to form a union if they choose, but we leave it up to States to determine whether police and firefighters have the right to form a union. Over half of the States allow collective bargaining, but almost 300,000 police officers and 141,000 fire fighters nationwide are legally forbidden from exercising their basic, fundamental right to collective bargaining. That is an injustice to our police and firefighters and is inconsistent with American values. That is why I support the Public Safety Employee-Employer Cooperation Act, which would extend this basic right to thousands of brave public servants. This bill has the support of a broad bipartisan coalition of Senators. The Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act protects the fundamental rights of our first responders by requiring States to provide them with four basic protections: The right to form and join a union; the right to sit down at the table and talk; the right to sign an enforceable contract if both parties agree; and the right to go to a neutral third party when there are disputes. The benefits of this bill go to both our first responders and the communities they serve. We know that collective bargaining helps improve safety for workers. The firefighter fatality rate in States without collective bargaining is about 52 percent higher than in States that honor these rights. Collective bargaining relations have also helped to address worker fatigue, on-the-job errors, employee fitness, and safety hazards like asbestos. Equally important in these times of State fiscal crisis, there are countless examples across the country of union firefighters and police officers voting to forego scheduled salary increases, defer pension payments, pay increased benefit premiums, or reduce overtime hours in order to help States cut costs and avoid layoffs. While guaranteeing the fundamental right to organize, the act preserves maximum flexibility for States and localities to shape their own laws. The 26 States that already allow collective bargaining will not have to change their laws at all. Other States will have to ensure the four basic protections, but everything else about how to craft their labor laws is left entirely to the States' discretion. It is long past time to ensure that our dedicated public safety officers have the same basic rights that private-sector workers across the country already enjoy. This is a matter of fundamental fairness, and an urgent matter of public safety. I urge all of my colleagues to support this important bipartisan bill. Mr. President, earlier today my colleague from Wyoming was on the Senate floor and made some statements about this bill--my ranking member, Senator Enzi. I just want to respond to a couple of those. My friend from Wyoming said the bill didn't go through the HELP Committee during this Congress, and we weren't given a right to consider the bill in the appropriate venue. Well, Senator Gregg, on the Republican side, has introduced this bill for the last five Congresses. The HELP Committee has marked up this bill and approved it twice, and a majority of the Senate has twice voted to consider the bill. So we have been debating this bill for years. Simply because it didn't go through the committee this time doesn't mean it didn't go through the committee many times before, which it did. Secondly, the bill does not impose an unfunded mandate on our States. That was mentioned. It does not require cities and States to spend money, only to engage in a dialogue. It does not allow strikes, and it does not impose arbitration or require particular terms. These are indeed left up to the States.

Mr. HARKIN. Yes.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, the American people are united in their desire to provide generously for the new generation of veterans, including those who have served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We want these veterans to have every opportunity to reintegrate successfully into civilian life, to find good jobs, and to build solid careers. To that end, the Federal Government has provided opportunities for these veterans to pursue advancement through higher education. That is why we passed the post-9/11 G.I. bill on June 30, 2008, and it is why we expanded existing education programs through the Department of Defense--DOD. The Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, which I chair, has been conducting an in-depth inquiry into the for-profit sector of higher education. Most recently, we have taken a look at the unprecedented surge of dollars from military educational benefits programs to for-profits. I am here today to have printed in the Record a new report that committee staff has prepared titled, ``Benefitting Whom? For-Profit Education Companies and the Growth of Military Educational Benefits.'' This report documents that between 2006 and 2010, combined Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense education benefits received just by 20 for-profit education companies increased from $66.6 million to $521.2 million, an increase of 683 percent. Mr. President, I will have more to say about the report in the upcoming days. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a report and an appendix be printed in the Record.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, earlier today, I was listening to the Senator from Illinois, Mr. Durbin, and he talked about coming over to the Senate floor from a meeting over in the Dirksen Building, which he said is about a block away, but he said it was like going from the real world to a surreal world here in the Senate. As I have listened to some of these Senators on the Republican side speak since then, I think Senator Durbin is right on the mark. What is going on here? Sometimes you have to stop and say: What truly is going on here? We have lost touch with what is happening in America--to ordinary Americans, to the real middle class. What do we have here? We have Republicans who will not do anything until we have a tax break for the richest Americans--continue these tax breaks. I listened to my friend from South Dakota recently who was just on the floor talking about creating jobs and all that kind of stuff. Well, we just had the new unemployment figures come out this morning from the Labor Department--the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which says unemployment rose to 9.8 percent. But that is just the official unemployment figure. Actually, if you do a full accounting of payroll data, if you take into account the 14.8 million workers who are part time, of necessity, because they can't get a full-time job or they are discouraged and have left the workforce because they have been looking and they are out of work and they have gone past their 99 weeks of unemployment compensation, according to Leo Hindery, who is the chairman of the Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation, the real unemployment rate is now 18.7 percent--18.7 percent--and the job gap is not just 7.3 million, it is actually 21.9 million in real terms--21.9 million people in this country--who are either unemployed, underemployed, left the workplace because they are discouraged, their unemployment benefits have run out or they basically have shifted around and they are not any longer in the workforce. You take all that into account and you have 21.9 million people out there out of work. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the study from the Smart Globalization Initiative project.

Mr. HARKIN. So we have a high unemployment rate, we keep losing jobs, and Republicans keep saying we have to extend the tax breaks for the wealthy. I hear that in terms of jobs--jobs, jobs, jobs. Well, that is interesting, because in 2007, the top 1 percent of all income earners in America took home 23\1/2\ percent of all the income in America. So let us get that straight. The top 1 percent took home 23\1/2\ percent of all the income. In fact, they took home more money than the bottom 50 percent of income earners total in America. Eighty percent of all the increase in income earned from 1980 to 2005 has gone to the top 1 percent. In the wake of the 2008 Wall Street bailout, executives from Goldman Sachs received bonuses totaling $13 billion--$13 billion for Goldman Sachs. So Republicans keep talking about we have to do more tax breaks for the wealthy. Well, after 10 years of tax cuts for the wealthy, where are the jobs? We have had this for 10 years--what they are trying to extend, the Bush tax cuts, which I never voted for in 2001. So we have had them for almost 10 years. If cutting taxes were so good for creating jobs, I ask my colleagues: Where are the jobs? Where are they? It is that same old trickle-down theory. If only we would give more to the top, it will trickle down on everybody else. Well, as one worker told me the other day--talking about trickle down--who has been out of a job for 2 years: I haven't had a drop. He said: I would settle for a heavy dew. One person told me one time--and I will never forget this about trickle down--he said: If you have been raised on the farm, you understand something very simple. You don't fertilize a crop from the top down. You don't fertilize a tree from the top down. You fertilize it by putting it at the roots. You want to create jobs in America, you don't give it to the wealthiest in America, you start putting things down at the bottom. If we want to get to the jobs issue in America, we have to start talking about what our trade laws are doing and how we are shipping more jobs overseas. Let's talk about our educational system and educating people into job retraining or rebuilding the manufacturing base in America so we can actually manufacture and make things here one more time--and I mean new things, not the old things but new things: rebuilding our infrastructure, our high-speed networks of communications, and make sure we have an infrastructure that is second to none in the world. There are a lot of things we can do to spur economic growth and jobs, but the worst possible one of all is giving tax breaks to the wealthy. I haven't even touched on the moral implications of that or the justice or fairness issue, and I will, but just on pure economic grounds we know tax breaks for the wealthy don't do it. They never have and they never will. Yet Republicans keep wanting to do the same thing over and over and over again. Someone attributed this to Albert Einstein--I don't know if it is true--but whoever it was said: The definition of ``insanity `` is doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting a different result. Republicans keep wanting to give more tax breaks to the wealthy and expecting that somehow, magically, we will have jobs created. Well, we gave all this money to Wall Street and to Goldman Sachs and I don't see any jobs out there anywhere. My friend from South Dakota was talking about the election; that we have to listen to the American people. Well, here is a poll that came out this morning. Senator Schumer showed this earlier. This is a CBS News poll out today which shows that only 26 percent of Americans support millionaire tax breaks. Guess what. N ot even a majority of Republicans support it. Only 46 percent of Republicans support the millionaire tax breaks. So who are my friends on the other side of the aisle listening to? Wall Street. They are listening to those who have made a lot of money and they do not want to pay their fair share of taxes. They are certainly not listening to, I guess, the majority of Republicans who say they don't even want the tax breaks for the wealthy. My friend from South Dakota was talking about the election. We had a big election. Republicans got elected to office in larger numbers. That is absolutely true. We can't deny that. But what ever happened to the election of 2008? It is as if it never happened. Yet 40 million more Americans voted in 2008 than voted in 2010. Do you know for whom they voted? They voted for Barack Obama. They voted for Democrats. They voted for change. They did not vote for more tax breaks for the wealthy. They wanted to change the system. That is what we have been trying to do for the last couple of years, except that we have had intransigence on the part of Republicans in the Senate in the form of one filibuster after another. So 40 million more people voted in the election of 2008 than voted in 2010. Again, what we need to do is change things. We don't need to change things to do more of the same, which is what the Republicans want to do. I hear my friend--again, I cannot help but refer to this. He said that the tax increases never created jobs. That is kind of the way I heard it said. I wrote it down here--can't create jobs by raising taxes; never happens. Frankly, I remember 1993. I was here then, and we had the Clinton bill here from President Clinton. It was sometimes called the Clinton recovery bill. We had all worked on it here. Did it increase taxes? Yes, it did. It increased taxes. Boy, did the Republicans howl. I was here. I remember. And all the economists on the other side were saying: Oh my gosh, if we pass this, it is going to be terrible. I went back and got some of the quotes. My friend from Utah, Senator Hatch, said: Make no mistake, these higher taxes will cost jobs. Senator Burns from Montana said: So we are still going to pile up more debt. Most of all, we are going to cost jobs in this country. Senator Phil Gramm. This is August 5, 1993: I want to predict tonight that if we adopt this bill, the American economy is going to get weaker and not stronger. The deficit 4 years from today will be higher than it is today, and not lower. When all is said and done, people will pay more taxes, the economy will create fewer jobs, the government will spend more money, and the American people will be worse off. That is what he said in 1993. Do you want me to go on? My friend from Iowa, Senator Grassley, said: I really do not think it takes a rocket scientist to know that this bill will cost jobs. August 6, 1993. Here they were all predicting this. I had a couple more I wanted to get in the Record here just to put an emphasis on it. Representative Newt Gingrich--oh, yes--Republican of Georgia. On August 5, 1993, he said: I believe this will lead to a recession next year. This is the Democrat machine's recession, and each of them will be held personally responsible. I like this one. Representative John Kasich from Ohio said: This plan will not work. If it was to work, then I'd have to become a Democrat. If I am not mistaken, former Representative John Kasich was just elected Governor of Ohio. I didn't know he ran on the Democratic ticket. History--read the history of it. You cannot deny it. As we often say around here, everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, but not everyone is entitled to their own facts, and the facts are very clear. After we passed the Clinton bill--with not one Republican vote--the economy started to get better, we started to create jobs, we started to reduce the deficit. In just 7 years--actually 6 years, a little over 6 years--we actually got a surplus in our budget--a surplus and a huge number of jobs were created with the higher taxes. The last time we had a surplus was then. We were on the path of reducing our debt, our national debt. We had more jobs. People were working. Then George Bush came to office in 2001, and the Republicans looked at all this money that was coming in which we were going to use to pay down the national debt so our kids would not have a big debt hanging over their heads--they looked at all that and said: Oh my gosh, let's have a tax cut. And they rammed through a tax cut--they sure did--in 2001. They rammed through a huge tax cut that to a large extent benefitted the wealthiest people in this country. By 2007, the top 1 percent took home 23.5 percent of all the income and were not paying their fair share. But that is what they want to extend. That is what the Republicans want to do. They want to continue the Bush tax cut they put in 2001 for the wealthy. So they took all that money that was coming in that we were going to use to pay down the debt so our kids would have a better future, they gave it all to the wealthy--not all but a fair amount of it--about 80 percent to the wealthiest in our country and a few crumbs and stuff to others. What did it do? It raised the deficit and put us in deeper debt than ever before--all so the wealthy could have a little bit more money. This is what they want to continue. As I said, I think the evidence is clear that what they did in 2001 did not give us jobs, it hurt the economy, and widened the gap in America between the top and the bottom even more. It widened the gap even more in our country. Now they want to continue that same policy, and they say it is going to create jobs. It did not create jobs. We have lost jobs because of this. I spoke here last evening, and after I spoke, the Senator from Texas spoke, and she was talking about who creates jobs in this country. It is the wealthy; they get this money and they create jobs. Entrepreneurs do create jobs. Most of the jobs and businesses created in this country were not created simply by the wealthy; they were created by ingenious people who had a good idea, were willing to work hard, gather some money together, get investors, and build a business. Most of the new jobs in America are not created by the DuPonts or the Rockefellers or the people like that; they are created by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and the people like that who did not start with a lot of money, but they had a good idea and they were entrepreneurial and went to work and started these businesses. So create more jobs, get more money to the wealthy? Here is the headline in USA Today recently. It said ``Luxury spending is back in fashion.'' Then underneath, in small print, it says, ``Jobless still aren't buying essentials.'' So I guess what we need to do is give more tax breaks to the wealthiest so they can go out--I just read about someone the other day going out and buying $2,600 cashmere scarves-- $2,600 for a scarf. I suppose so. I was just with a group of unemployed Americans the other day who came to Washington. Some have been out of work for over 2 years, all of them hoping we can extend the unemployment benefits--which the Republicans will not let us do, by the way, and I am going to get to that in a second. But I held this up. I thought, ``Luxury spending back in fashion.'' I asked those people who are unemployed if they were going to be shopping in Tiffany's this year. Maybe you are going to go down and buy a little jewel-encrusted broach for your wife or maybe, if you are a woman, you will buy one of those diamond-encrusted watches for your husband. Oh, I know, you are going to go buy a Lamborghini made in Italy or a Mercedes made in Germany. I said to these people: Maybe you would like to go down and buy one of those 3D, high- definition flat screen TVs made in Japan. That is where the money is going. The rich are not creating jobs; they are buying $2,600 cashmere scarves, and they are going to Tiffany's and buying jewels and buying wrist watches that cost $25,000, most of which are not made in America, anyway, but are made in some other country. If you really want to give tax breaks to businesses, I am all for it if it is truly oriented towards businesses employing people in America, as long as their products are made in America, as long as they are manufactured here and they do not take the money and ship it off to some other country. If a business wants to start here and employ people here in America, manufacture something here--rebuild the steel industry in our country, rebuild manufacturing--I am all for it. I just do not believe in giving tax breaks to someone who takes that money and say: Guess what, I am going to invest it in a business in Thailand or in Germany or in Brazil. That is what they do. You give all that money to these wealthy people up on Wall Street and stuff, they can invest that money wherever they want, and out it goes, out of the country. Since we have such high deficits and we want to get our deficits down, we want to create jobs, don't give it to the most wealthy in our country; give it to legitimate businesses that either start or expand and employ Americans and start making things here in America or put it into infrastructure spending, rebuilding the infrastructure of America--our highways, bridges, roads, schools, communication systems. That will create jobs. That will create jobs. They say government spending cannot create jobs. I happen to disagree with those who said the stimulus bill did not create jobs. It sure did. It put a lot of people to work all over this country, not in government jobs but in rebuilding America. When you put money out there and you are rebuilding a highway or a bridge in Iowa or in Minnesota, it is done by private contractors, private businesses that employ people and spend the money here, mostly on products made in America. That is why infrastructure spending has such a good multiplier effect. It has a multiplier effect because when you build a new school or a new classroom or whatever, first of all, the work has to be done here, it cannot be shipped off to China. Second, the money is spent here. Third, most of the products that go into our infrastructure are still made in America. When you think about it, when you build a school, rebuild a school, you think about the cement, you think about the bricks, you think about the mortar, you think about all the conduits for the lighting, heating, ventilation, air-conditioning units, windows, doors, and 9 times out of 10, it is made in America. So you get a big multiplier effect from that money, and it does indeed create a lot of jobs. I mentioned just a second go that I was with a group of unemployed who had come to Washington to petition their government for a redress of their grievances, and their grievances are that they are out of work, they are looking for work, and their unemployment benefits have just run out. We have tried several times here on the floor of the Senate asking unanimous consent to extend the unemployment benefits for another year. The Republicans have objected every time. And the letter that was sent out by the Republican leader the other day said that they are going to object to anything passing this floor until they get their tax breaks for the wealthy. So they are holding hostage millions of Americans who have lost their jobs. Some have been out of work, as I said--I met some who have been out of work for over 2 years; some for a year or months. For $300 a week--that is about the average in unemployment benefits, about $300 a week. They say we cannot afford that. My Republican friends say we cannot afford that. But we can afford to give a $100,000 tax break to the wealthiest Americans. Think about that. During this holiday season--I heard my friend from South Dakota say that we should wrap up our business so Senators can go home and spend our holidays with our families, have a nice holiday season. What about those millions of Americans who are out of work and have just had their unemployment benefits cut off? What about them? Are they going to have a nice Christmas? Are they going to have a nice holiday season? The Republicans say no. Give the tax breaks to the wealthy first. Well, as I said, Wall Street executives got billions of dollars in bonuses--billions. They are probably going to have a nice holiday season. They will probably even shop at Tiffany's, Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus. But how about the millions of Americans who are out of work who rely upon unemployment benefits, $300 a week, less than the poverty wage, and we are saying: No. No, we are not going to extend them during this holiday season. The Republicans are holding them hostage. I am sorry. This is unconscionable. Have the Republicans lost all sense of fairness? Have they lost all sense of justice? Have the Republicans lost all sense of what is right and wrong? I mean, they can fight for their tax breaks for the wealthy. Fine, that is what they are fighting for. I understand that. But to say we cannot extend unemployment benefits for people out of work because we have not yet given the tax breaks to the wealthy is a morale outrage. I ask: Where is our outrage at something like this? Where is the President's outrage at this? The President ought to be out there saying: This is morally outrageous, that we are going to deny unemployment benefits to people during this time of the year especially. We can have our battles on the tax cuts. We can have those battles, but we should not hold hostage the people who are out of work today and need unemployment benefits. Some people say: Well, unemployment benefits, it makes people lazy. Well, as I pointed out the other day in a speech on the floor, when eight people look for one job. There is one job for every eight people. So you have musical chairs going round and round. One person gets it, and you have seven people still unemployed. What a lot of people do not even know is that in order to even qualify for unemployment benefits, you have to be actively looking for work. You cannot sit at home. You have to be actively looking for work. A lot of the people I talked to 2 days ago who were here who were employed, you hear their stories. They have tried everything. Some have gone to different States. They have gone to different communities. They have tried everything to find another job. I just read a letter from one the other day, a math teacher, has three college degrees. She has lost her job. She has tried to find work in different States. She has tried everything from McDonald's to everything else and cannot find a job. By the way, the people who are truly hurting the most in this job market right now are people over the age of 50, mostly women. Women over the age of 50 who have worked hard, many of them had good jobs. Again, I spoke to one on Tuesday who had worked all her life, had a very good job. She admitted she was making $70,000 a year, good middle- class income. She lost her job and has been out of work for over a year. She cannot find work. She has tried and beat the pavement and looked all over. But, you know what, she is in that area between 50 and 60. Very tough. Very tough. Yet we will not even extend unemployment benefits for people like her. Well, as I said, I think it is a moral outrage, and I would hope our President would get out there and start saying that. Let the American people know how the jobless are being held hostage by the Republicans in trying to get their tax breaks for the wealthy. So it is been said the Republicans are playing hardball. Well, if they are playing hardball for the rich, we ought to play hardball for the jobless, too, in this country. They want to play hardball, we ought to play hardball. My friend from South Dakota says he would like to get out of here and spend Christmas with his family. Would not we all? But, I think, rather than identifying with those on Wall Street and those who wear suits and ties every day and have a comfortable life such as we do, we ought to be identifying with those middle-class Americans who are out of work. If the Republicans want to play hardball, I think what we ought to say is: Look, we are going to stay here every day, we are going to be here every day, and every day we are going to ask consent to bring up this bill to extend unemployment benefits. If we have to be here on Christmas Eve, so be it. If we have to be here on Christmas Day, we ought to be here on Christmas Day, if necessary, so the American people will get an idea of what is going on in this Senate Chamber, the outrageousness of it. So, yes, we would all like to spend time with family over the holidays. But unless and until we extend the unemployment benefits, at least at a minimum, we should not leave this Chamber and see how long the Republicans want to hold on to that and how much they want to deny people their benefits. If 2 million Americans and 10,000 of my fellow Iowans are going to be suffering because they will not even be able to put food on the table or have a nice holiday season with their families because they are unemployed, the least we can do is identify with them. They are not going to have a very good holiday season unless we do something and take action. So I think we should stay as long as is necessary. Lastly, for too long and for too many times, the Republicans have used an archaic 19th century procedure called the filibuster to thwart the will of the majority of the people in this country, to stop legislation, to stop a whole bunch of things, nominations, things they even, when we finally get them through, get 99 votes out of 100. But they stop them because of a filibuster. Well, that may have been OK in the 19th century. It may have been OK in the early part of the 20th century. But we can no longer live with that. We cannot run a 21st century government in a 21st world with an archaic millstone around our neck called a filibuster. When this body reconvenes in January, we finally have to break the shackles of that. We have to break the shackles of that 19th century rule, proceeding, where one or two Senators can stop everything. Stop it. I quote Vice President Biden who said: No democracy has ever survived that needed a supermajority. No democracy. Ours cannot survive either if we continue with a supermajority needed in the Senate. I hope we stay here. I hope we increase the unemployment benefits. We will continue the debate on the taxes. I will be supporting, tomorrow morning, the vote on continuing the tax benefits for those families making $250,000 and less, to extend the tax breaks for that group. I will not go higher than $250,0000. I will not vote to extend tax breaks for anybody over $250,000. Quite frankly, if you make $250,000, you are in the top 7 percent or so of income earners in America. So is that the middle class? I think that is stretching it. Those making $40,000, $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 to $80,000 a year are clearly in the middle class. That is the broad middle class of America. What are we doing for them? What are we doing for them? So I will vote to go up to $250,000 but not a cent more than that. Quite frankly, I have a hard time even going to $250,000. It ought to be less than that. If you want to give more tax breaks to people, extend the earned-income tax credit and increase the childcare tax credit for working families. If you want to do that, now you are talking about helping middle- class families. Some people say: Well, we have to do something for small businesses. I am all for that. But I wish to make sure it really goes to small businesses that employ Americans, keep the jobs here, manufacture things in America, and do not ship them overseas. You do that, I am all for a small business tax break. You bet. So that is the debate we should have. But the unemployed and those who need unemployment benefits during this holiday season should not be held hostage. I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I listened with great attention to the speech just given by my friend from New York. Senator Schumer is right on target when he is talking about: Whom are we fighting for? What are we in the Senate for? What are we here to do? Whom are we fighting for? I have often said the one thing about the very wealthy in our country, they are pretty good at taking care of themselves. Obviously, they would not be rich if they were not. But what about the people who do not have much? Who is fighting for them? This is what I wish to spend some time talking about; that is, the unemployed in this country. Last week we went home for Thanksgiving. I hope everyone had a good time with their families. Now we are looking at the upcoming holidays with anticipation, as we do every year, to be with our families, go out and buy some presents and exchange presents--kids, grandkids, a festive time. But what about all those people who are out of work and have no money, who right now are being cut off from the only lifeline they have, unemployment insurance benefits--losing them day after day because they ended 2 days ago. By the time Christmas rolls around, somewhere close to 2 million Americans not only will be out of a job but will have no source of income whatsoever, facing another winter season celebrating the holidays with nothing. I had a newspaper headline I showed the other day that said: ``Luxury spending is back in fashion''--about how much money was being spent on jewels and fancy wristwatches and high-end types of things. Then, right under, in small print, it said: However, for millions of Americans they are not shopping anywhere because they are out of work. The two faces of America--is that what we want this country to be, a few who can spend on lavish, jewel-encrusted watches, buying $2,500 cashmere scarves, as I just read about the other day, and everybody else sort of getting in the soup line? We are a better country than that. That is what I wanted to talk about: reauthorizing the emergency unemployment insurance program. But I, first of all, listened to my friend and colleague from Iowa, Senator Grassley, talk about taxes. I did not hear the whole speech, but I heard him say raising taxes never reduces the deficit or reduces the debt. I do not know which he said-- either the debt or the deficit. Well, I hate to disagree with my friend, but in 1993, when we enacted the Clinton economic proposal, it included increasing taxes in 1993. Oh, I remember the Senator from Texas, Mr. Phil Gramm, an economist, got up and said: Oh, this is going to cause a depression. This will be the worst thing that ever happened to this country. We are going to rue the day we ever did this. Well, we passed it. Of course, it did not get one Republican vote, and we did raise some taxes in 1993. What happened, then, for the next 7, 8 years? We had unprecedented growth in this country. Quite frankly, we did balance the budget by 2000. Not only did we balance it, we had a surplus, and we had a surplus going into 2001. That is when George Bush came to the Presidency and said: Oh, we have this big surplus. Alan Greenspan was warning us we had too much of a surplus and it might not be wise to pay down the debt. We were on course to pay down the national debt. Then the Bush administration pushed through some tax cuts, for which they said: Oh, we are just going to do it temporarily, you see, just until 2010. We will keep them until 2010, and then we will have to revisit it or we will go back to what we had before in 2001. They made that deal. I did not vote for it. I did not think we should cut taxes that time. I thought we should pay off the national debt. That would have strengthened our economy more than anything. But, no, the Bush administration, the Republicans who controlled the House and the Senate, said they wanted to cut the taxes. Most of the taxes that were cut, as my friend from New York said, were for the very wealthy. What happened? Did we have a lot of job growth? Not a bit. Not a bit. Not only did we not get job growth, the deficit skyrocketed. So I do not want to hear any exhortations from that side of the aisle about how raising taxes has never reduced the deficit or the debt. We did under Bill Clinton. The proof is there. We had a surplus. But they wanted the tax breaks to give to the wealthy. Lastly, my friend from New York talked about being held hostage. There has been a lot of talk about middle-income Americans getting a tax break. But I ask--and I keep asking--who are middle-income Americans? Who are they? Well, I keep hearing it is those earning $250,000 a year or below. Mr. President, $250,000 a year? My friends, if you are making $250,000 a year, you are in the top 5 percent of the income earners in America. That is right. If you make $250,000 a year, 95 percent of the American people make less than you do. So is that middle class? I do not think so. To me, in the middle class are people who are making $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, $60,000, $70,000, $80,000, $90,000 a year. That is the broad middle class of America. A lot of people in America are living on $40,000 a year. It might be hard for some people to think about that, but that is true. They do not take fancy trips. They do not have fancy cars. They do not go to fancy restaurants. They do not wear suits and ties every day. But they are working, and a lot of them are working at jobs that are important to our society. They may be nurses aides. They may be taking care of our elderly in a nursing home or in assisted living. They may be our childcare workers taking care of our children. They could be working in fast food places. They are making $35,000, $40,000, $50,000 a year, and that is it. That is the middle class of America. What are we doing for them? What are we doing for that middle class? So every time I hear about that $250,000 is the middle class, I am thinking: Wait a second. You are talking about the top 5 percent in America. If you want to talk about the broad middle class, you have to start talking about people making less than $100,000 a year. What are we doing for them? Well, it seems to me, if we are going to have some tax breaks and stuff, we have to think about this group. In that group--in that group--of the broad middle class is the army of the unemployed. That is where the unemployed are. The unemployed are not on Wall Street. They got their bailouts. They are getting million-dollar bonuses this year, and my friends on the Republican side want to extend the tax breaks so not only do they get their million-dollar bonuses, they will not have to pay their fair share of taxes on them either, not to mention, for some of them, the way they are getting their money, they are being charged at the least possible tax rate--not as regular income but as capital gains. But I am not going to get into that right now. So what are the Republicans doing? They are saying we cannot extend the unemployment benefits for the millions of Americans who are unemployed until and unless we have tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans. For those making over $250,000, $500,000, over $1 million-- they do not care; no matter what, no matter who you are, how much money you make--we have to give them tax breaks or we cannot extend unemployment benefits to the unemployed. You want to talk about hostages? The Republicans in this Congress are holding hostage the unemployed workers in America because they want to get the tax breaks for the wealthiest. That is what is happening here. I don't know that many of the American people know about that. Oh, they see us debate this stuff and back and forth about who is going to get these tax breaks, but right now unemployment benefits have run out. We have asked I think three or four times, if I am not mistaken, on the Senate floor for unanimous consent to extend the unemployment benefits, and the Republicans have objected every single time. Why? They wrote a letter. Yesterday, the Republican leader had a letter signed by every single Republican in the Senate that said they will not allow any bill to pass the Senate unless and until we pass a bill giving tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans. It almost begs credulity. You wonder, is this real? Do they really mean that? Well, they signed their names to it. That means we can't extend unemployment benefits until we give in, until we give in to the Republicans and give tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans. What a deal. What a deal-- holding people who are at the end of their ropes--the most vulnerable in our society--holding them hostage for their Wall Street friends. I have heard this said by some on the other side: Well, unemployment benefits make people lazy. If you give them unemployment benefits, they won't look for work. Well, let me talk for a minute about what the labor market looks like right now, and we will see if these people are really lazy. Right now, there are 15 million people who want a job and can't find one but 9 million people forced to work part time because they can't get a full- time job. There are a number of other people who have looked for a job, and they have given up. They have been out of work for 2 years. As the Presiding Officer knows, after 99 weeks, you don't get any unemployment benefits whatsoever, and a lot of people have been out of work for over 99 weeks. They have nothing. That means our unemployment rate is not around 9 percent; it is actually about 17 to 18 percent. And these unemployed workers are looking for work. What people have to understand is that before you can get unemployment benefits, you have to be actively looking for work. It is a requirement in order to get it. But what is happening out there? Workers can't find jobs because there aren't any. There is one job for every five workers. Well, it says here: 14.8 million workers unemployed. That is not really true. It is actually about 26 million. That is 14.8 million unemployed, but when you include those who have given up because they have gone beyond 99 weeks, when you take into account those who work part time because they were working full time but now they can only get a part-time job, it adds up to almost 26 million. Let's just take the Bureau of Labor Statistics as they are: 14.8 million workers, 2.9 million jobs, 1 for about every 5. Actually, it is fewer than that. If you really look at the overall picture, it is really more like 1 in 8 to 1 in 10. So, in other words, for about every 8 to 10 workers, there is 1 job out there someplace. So most workers will lose on this kind of game of musical chairs. When you run around and the music stops, one person gets a job and six or seven people don't have one. So I challenge my Republican friends: How can six or seven or eight people find a job when there is only one available? That is why we have so many people facing long-term unemployment. Over 6 million people have been out of work for more than half a year. I saw a lot of them who were here in Washington yesterday. Four in 10 workers, what we call the long-term unemployed, have been unemployed and looking for a job for at least 6 months. This is higher than during any previous recession. There are extensions going back to 1950. In terms of the share of the total unemployed--you can see the graph here--in terms of who has been unemployed for more than 6 months--and as we can see, as we go from the 1950s to here, look at where this line now goes in 2010: more than we have ever had going clear back to the 1950s. Long-term unemployed, higher than any previous recession. It is the highest in 60 years. They are being held hostage by the Republicans. Long-term unemployment is especially common among older workers over aged 50. These are people who have worked all their lives, they have saved for retirement, they have lost their jobs, and they are having a very difficult time finding new work. A year, year and a half, 2 years--I have met people out of work for well over 2 years. Again, they can't find work because it is not there, through no fault of their own. So, as I said, our economy needs at least 11 million jobs--at least. To say that people who are unemployed are lazy and shouldn't get benefits--if you say that, you are obviously out of touch. You are out of touch with the real world and what is happening out there and the difficult circumstances that face our hard-working American families. I get a lot of letters--and I am sure the occupant of the chair does too from his home State--from people who are just at their wit's end, and they just tear your heart out. A 50-year-old woman from Altoona has been unemployed since November 2009, a year and a month. She wrote me: ``I can't even get a job at McDonald's right now, and believe me, I have tried everywhere.'' Unemployment insurance is helping her get by, but she is worried about running out of benefits, which just happened 2 days ago. I got this letter before 2 days ago. Her unemployment benefits are out. An unemployed schoolteacher from Estherville wrote me. She said: I have not felt so humiliated in 20 years. I have been a productive and hard-working woman since I was 13, but now I feel insignificant. She wrote me that this summer. This month, she wrote me again. She said: I have tried to find employment in other States, all over Iowa, in every form of employment you can imagine: convenience stores, fast food, factories. I am a high school math teacher with three college degrees and I can't find a job. If it weren't for unemployment, I would be on food stamps. But without unemployment insurance, she doesn't know what she is going to do. She just lost hers a couple of days ago too. These are just two examples, but there are millions. In this holiday season, from now until the new year, 2 million people will be cut off if we don't continue these programs. In Iowa, my home State, more than 10,000 people will be cut off from their benefits during this holiday season. And if we don't do anything, we will face 6 million by April left without any source of income, hanging by a thread. Their savings are exhausted. Their unemployment benefits are the thin lifeline keeping them afloat. Congress has never cut back emergency unemployment benefits when the unemployment rate was as high as it is now, and this is no time to start. Here it is again. Going back to 1959, when we had high rates of unemployment, every single time, Congress passed emergency funding to keep unemployment benefits going--that is, until now. Republicans have said, oh, they will extend it, but they want to pay for it. It is about $56 billion to extend it for 1 year. They have to pay for it, and how they want to pay for it is to take money out of the Recovery Act. There is still some unexpended money there that is going out for things such as roads and bridges and infrastructure projects that put people to work. So they want to take money from that, which is giving people some jobs and helping build our infrastructure, to put into unemployment benefits, when, going back to 1959, through Republican and Democratic administrations, we have always said this is an emergency, and that is the way we fund it. Well, the Republicans say, we have a huge deficit. We can't do that anymore. Then why are they so intent on passing a tax cut bill, extending a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans and they don't pay for it? They put it on the deficit--not for $56 billion but for $700 billion. Oh, they are willing to do that. They are willing to do that for the wealthiest but not for people at the end of their rope, the unemployed. So I guess we have entered a new era in this country. We don't help the unemployed: we just help the wealthy. That is all we do. That is why we are here, I guess. Look at that. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. I ask, have my Republican friends lost all sense of fairness? Have my Republican friends on the other side of the aisle lost all sense of justice? Have they lost all sense of what is right and what is wrong? Where is the moral outrage? Where is the moral outrage that we are going to let people stand in the soup lines for Christmas but we are going to give tax breaks to the wealthiest? We are going to give million-dollar bonuses to the people on Wall Street who, by the way, caused a lot of these problems, and we won't even make them pay their fair share of taxes. Where is the outrage? Well, I will tell you. It is out there. The American people are seeing this. They are saying: Wait a minute, Congress wants to pass this big tax break and they won't help the unemployed? They get it. They get it. I can't believe Congress is doing this. I can't believe my friends on the other side of the aisle are so hard-hearted that they would hold hostage--that they would not let us move a bill to extend the unemployment benefits until we pass their bill to extend the tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans. Where is our sense of moral outrage at this? Just one other thing. Unemployment benefits that we give out to people is not money that is thrown down a rathole. Quite frankly, one of the best economic stimuli we have is unemployment benefits, believe it or not. Why is that? Well, because people who get unemployment benefits--and right now, in my State it averages about $300 a week. That is about a national average. It is right about there. It is about $300 a week. That is about $15,000 a year. That is lower than the poverty wage, by the way. If you think unemployment benefits are some big deal, it is lower than the poverty wage. So when they get that money, what do they do? They go out and they buy groceries. They buy some clothes for the kids. They buy the necessities of life. And that money acts as a multiplier to our economy. This is Mark Zandi, Moody's economy.com, about how the GDP increase is generated by $1 of stimulus going to these various things. Food stamps is the best. For every dollar we put into food stamps, we get an increase in GDP of $1.74, again because people spend that money to buy food, most of which is grown, produced, processed, packaged, shipped, and bought in America. Unemployment benefits are right next to food stamps--$1.61 increase in GDP for every dollar we put out, again for the same reason. People using unemployment benefits are not using them to buy a Mercedes. They are not using the benefits to buy a new, high- definition, 3D flat screen TV made in Japan. They are not using the benefits to buy a gold-encrusted, diamond-studded Rolex watch made in Switzerland. They are using these benefits to buy the necessities of life, most of which are made here in America. Extending the Bush tax cuts--for every dollar we put in, we get back 32 cents in GDP growth. That is what the Republicans want. Why, when trying to stimulate the economy, would we put $1 into something that returns us only 32 cents, when we can put $1 in and get back $1.61? How about infrastructure investments. We get back $1.57 for every $1. It is very close to unemployment benefits. Yet Republicans want to take money out of this and put it here. Why don't we take money out of here--the tax cuts--and put it here? That is a better deal for our economy. It creates jobs, and we get an increase in economic activity in our country. As I said earlier, here it is. The average UI benefit is about $15,600 and the poverty level is $21,756 for a family of four. It is a powerful benefit that provides food, clothes, housing, utilities--all of the things needed just to keep life going. That is what these unemployment benefits are spent on. With the holidays coming, our economy needs the money and people need the benefits. Cutting off that revenue would be counterproductive for jobs. It is counterproductive for the people who need these benefits. It makes no sense economically to cut off unemployment benefits. But more importantly, it makes no sense morally. There is such a thing as right and wrong. There is such a thing as fair and unfair and just and unjust. It is not just, it is not fair, and it is not right that, through no fault of their own, we are saying to these people, the unemployed in America, the millions--whether it is 14.9 million or closer to 26 million or anywhere in between--it is just not right to say: Well, maybe we will extend your unemployment benefits after we extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest in our society. That is totally irresponsible. But that is where we find ourselves. I say to the President of the United States: Mr. President, you made a lot of promises when you were campaigning in my State of Iowa, and one of the most important you made was that you were going to hold the line--and you said this time and time again--at $250,000. You would extend the tax breaks to middle-income people below $250,000. You ought to hold to that, Mr. President. You ought to hold to that. We will see if the Republicans want to shut down the government. Do they want to shut the government down? That is what they are saying. We are going to have to have a resolution on the Senate floor--because it will run out--to keep the government going. They are saying they will not pass that unless and until we extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. I dare the Republicans to shut the government down just because they want to give tax breaks to the wealthy. I say if that is what they want to do, let the American people see the extent to which the Republicans will go in order to help their wealthy friends. Mr. President, hold to your guns, hold to your guns on $250,000 and below. Don't give in. Don't give up. The American people are behind you on this one, Mr. President. Tell them you want unemployment benefits extended, you want middle-class tax breaks extended, and we want to fund the government. We don't want to go into default. We want that first. Don't give up, Mr. President. The American people will be behind you, and this Congress will be behind you too. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Erin Bibo, Dillon Kiel, and Susan Dixon of my staff be granted floor privileges for the duration of today's proceedings.