Pat Toomey Weekly Republican Address TEXT VIDEO 08/14/10

Hi, I’m Pat Toomey from the great state of Pennsylvania, and I’m pleased to have this opportunity to share a few thoughts with you today.

Like a lot of Americans all around the country, I really believe America is at a crossroads. I’ll always be optimistic about America. We’re too strong a people and too good a country to be held back for long. But I am deeply concerned about the direction we’re heading in right now.

That direction is being driven by extreme policies that are coming from one-party domination of government in Washington. And this extreme ideologically driven agenda is preventing the strong economic recovery and job creation that we should be having.

It’s time we put some real checks and balances back in place this November.

Let’s take a minute to review what’s happened in just the last 18 months. First, there were the ill-advised taxpayer funded bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the....

...car companies. Now, to be fair, the bailouts were begun under the previous administration; but the crew that’s in charge now ramped them up when it was perfectly clear that they were not accomplishing what they were supposed to.

Next, we had the so-called stimulus bill. Nearly a trillion dollars in new Washington spending, including some egregiously wasteful spending, like $2 million to study exotic ants and $30 million for a spring training baseball complex, among hundreds of other ridiculous items. Now we were told that this monster spending bill would create jobs and keep unemployment below 8%. Well, since then we’ve lost nearly 3 million more jobs and the unemployment rate hit 10%, and in some states it’s still well above that. Over 14 1/2 million Americans remain out of work.

But even that was not enough for the one-party extremists in Washington. After that, they went ahead and rammed through a $2-trillion healthcare bill, that even the official budget scorekeepers say will actually increase the cost of health insurance for individuals and families. And that’s not to mention the very serious consequences for healthcare quality of imposing government in between doctors and patients.

Now where do all these bailouts, takeovers and spending sprees leave us?

They leave us with a weak economy without job growth and with a mountain of debt for our kids.

Washington spending as a percentage of our country’s economic output has grown by 25%--practically overnight. That extravagant spending has caused a budget deficit for this year alone of $1 1/2 trillion dollars. That’s a staggering amount of debt. In fact, this Democratic administration is projected to create more debt than all the debt we accumulated in the entire history of our country from George Washington all the way through 2008, combined.

So where do we go from here?

Well, the first thing we need to do is eliminate the threats from further harmful legislation. Some elements of the Democrats’ extreme agenda have not yet been implemented, and if we want to create jobs, we need to keep it that way. For example, Democrats have tried unsuccessfully to impose a massive energy tax on all of us through a cap-and-trade bill and to take away workers’ rights with a Card Check bill. Well, first and foremost, Washington needs to stop causing even more harm.

Second, you know, there’s an old saying: When you’re in a hole, stop digging.

There are hundreds of billions of dollars that have not yet been spent in the bailout and stimulus programs. We should stop spending that now.

There are billions more in completely unnecessary and wasteful Washington spending that should stop immediately.

And finally, we need to offer American families and businesses the kind of tax cuts that will stimulate genuine private sector job growth, instead of the billions of tax increases the Democrats have already imposed and the more that they are threatening. To start, we should make the current tax rates permanent instead of raising them at the end of the year. And we should cut capital gains taxes to encourage business investment. Even prominent Democrats have recently said the last thing we should be doing in a recession is to raise taxes.

Now, I have every confidence that the 21st century can be another great American century. And I know we can have a booming economy. But to get there, we have to remember the source of our national strength. Our strength does not come from bailouts and government spending.

It comes from a free enterprise system and the hard-working honest citizens who make it run—the kind of industrious folks I see every day in Pennsylvania. When government lets these folks grow their businesses and work hard without putting obstacles in their way, that’s when we will achieve the flourishing recovery our country deserves. I’m Pat Toomey, and I thank you for listening.

VIDEO CREDIT: rnc