Legislative Agenda

Job Creation

The economic meltdown on Wall Street and abuses in the housing market produced the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. People across Illinois have struggled to make ends meet while facing the loss of their jobs, their homes, their health coverage, and their savings. Congress has spent most of the past two years working to help create new jobs and strengthen our economy.

When it looked like there might be no bottom to the recession, we passed the Recovery Act (or "stimulus bill") to help stabilize our economy and spur job creation across all sectors of the economy. The Recovery Act provided a tax cut for 95% of all working Americans, as well as incentives for businesses to help job creation. It funded construction projects to put Americans to work rebuilding our roads, bridges, and waterways. It provided funding to move forward on new energy initiatives that will strengthen our nation over the longer term. It helped our state and local governments avoid drastic layoffs, something that the Congressional Budget Office says is one of the most efficient ways to stimulate the economy, keeping firefighters, police officers, and teachers on the job serving their communities. It also included "Buy American" provisions directing projects funded under the act to use American products wherever possible.

Not only is it crucial for our communities to keep our teachers in the classroom and our firefighters and police on the streets, if thousands of these workers lose their jobs they also lose their ability to purchase the goods that our small businesses want to sell, which leads to further job losses in the private sector. In early August, Congress passed the Education Jobs and Medicaid Assistance Act. The bill will save or create an estimated 300,000 jobs nationwide, including over 150,000 jobs for teachers.

This year, we also passed the HIRE Act and the Small Business Jobs Act. The HIRE Act created a new-hire tax credit to encourage businesses to expand, extended the authorization of the highway program to ensure continued infrastructure spending, and provided tax incentives to help small businesses expand. The new-hire credit provides a tax cut of up to $1,000 for an employer who hires an individual who has been unemployed for 60 days or more and retains the worker for at least a year. The Small Business Jobs Act creates an opportunity for small businesses, which have experienced great difficulty finding credit, to expand employment with help from community banks.

We worked to overcome repeated objections to extending unemployment assistance and COBRA health insurance benefits, and have so far been able to extend these programs through November 2010.

Government cannot solve all of our economic problems, but it should step into the breach to help restore a strong and dynamic private sector and create incentives to put Americans back to work. I am committed to putting this economy back on track and rebuilding our economic vitality in ways that work for all Americans.