Livingston, October 27, 2010: Represenative Kevin Brady speaks realistically to local business owners about our economy.
Congressman Kevin Brady Gives Sobering Economic Speech to Local Business Owners, LIVINGSTON, October 28, 2010 - Representative Kevin Brady met with local business leaders on October 27, 2010 from 2 - 3 pm at the Livingston/Polk County Chamber of Commerce. Brady gave a sobering presentation on the state of our economy and how our economy, which normally bounces back quickly from recessions, is recovering 3 times slower than usual. Brady also talked about taxes and healthcare and how Obama care is hurting our nation. He also brought up the drilling moratorium imposed by the Obama Administration and it's effects on the Texas economy. After his speech, Brady fielded questions from local business leaders. The following are parts of the speech from Representative Kevin Brady: We have a week before election day. But there's a lot of concern about what's going to happen after November 2. What's going to happen with our taxes? When is the economy gonna get going? What will be the impact of healthcare law? No country bounces back from bad economic times like the USA. But this is one of the slowest recoveries on record. This recovery is 3 times slower than 1981 and 1982. Since we began the year our economic growth has dropped by two thirds. Consumer confidence is lower than when the stimulus began. At this point in the recovery, businesses should be re-hiring workers that they laid off, hiring new workers, investing in new equipment, and expanding. We're not this time. Consumers, I'm convinced, are concerned about the economy, families are concerned about housing values, but they are also very worried about the debt. They see the dangerous levels of debt that this country is going in and they're wondering who's going to have to pay all that back, so they're staying out of the stores. I listen to a lot of businesses of all sizes, and what they all tell me is the same thing: What they hear coming out of Washington, a call for higher taxes, more regulations, higher healthcare costs, higher energy costs from cap and trade, and this sort of anti-business rhetoric that they hear and their point is “Look, it's hard enough to predict the market, trying to predict the market from Washington is impossible. We're going to stand back”. As long as they're standing pat, our economy isn't going forward. So we've got a real challenge going forward in the economy. I think one of the keys is to take all tax increases off the table. We're already an over taxed nation, we don't need to add more. Secondly, taxing professionals and small businesses by increasing your taxes as the President has proposed, doing it during a recession or anytime is not a smart idea and doing it right now makes no sense because professionals and small businesses are the job creators that can help us pull out of tough economic times. We also need to take cap and trade, all the new energy tax, all the new talk about business tax off the table as well and provide a path back to a balanced budget. We can show the public that there is a way to get back. It's not easy because congress is spending 40 percent more than they are taking in each year. Unless we change our ways, we'll have a national debt of 20 trillion dollars. It's so big that it's almost hard to grasp, but every economic study tells us when a country owes as much as the size of their economy, their growth slows dramatically. We'll go from a growing solid growth of the United States to a very sluggish stagnant growth of Europe. That's what happens when you get too much debt. I also believe this drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico, which continues in practice, is very damaging to our state. Not being able to drill in neither the shallow waters or the deep waters for the past six months is taking its toll on our economy and the longer it goes on, more harm will be done to our businesses, especially small and mid-sized companies.
Brady tries to explain a visual chart that shows the ridiculous bureaucracy of Obamacare.
Brady On Obamacare...
When the government runs out of money to fund all this, and they will, we estimate the IRS will have to hire 16,000 new workers to force people to comply with all the new laws in this bill. The heart of this bill is that everyone in America must have government approved healthcare or pay a tax and most business will have to offer government approved healthcare or pay a tax. For businesses, I know they were promised by the President that if they like their healthcare packages (that they already have) they can keep it. That's not the case. I don't know what your impression is when you see this, but most people agree, it's not the healthcare that they were hoping for, and there's going to be a lot of challenges, especially in a community like Polk County that's investing in healthcare where it's critical that you have quality care here at home so a community can thrive, there's going to be a lot of impacts and unintended consequences from this bill that has effects on us as families and communities themselves.
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