bipartisan hire act which helps cut taxes for those that do add employees. we have expanded, we ve given states more money to insure that things like teachers and firefighters weren t laid off. we ve expanded and continued unemployment insurance, and the small business bill has passed the house. so i, you know, look, we will continue to look at and take steps that are, as i talked about on monday, that are targeted in nature to help continue the recovery and to help create an environment where the private sector is adding jobs. i think we are all aware of the steps that have been taken. what dr. romer seems to be saying here is that a lot more spending is to come to make this economic recovery again, i d point you to what the president said on monday. i don t, i don t think that is, i don t think that is i think, again, i d point you to what the president said as ideas that are being looked at.
otherwise we wouldn t be in the mess or at least somewhere near where we are now so i think the president is right. let s give the tax breaks to the middle class. those are the people, the small business owners, that need it the most. not the very wealthy that haven t been paying their taxes the way they should have in an appropriate percentage the way lower income aren t you afraid some of these small business owners who are sole proprietors if they re going to be taxed more they won t be able to hire additional workers? there are a lot of incentives available. we passed the hire act that allows for businesses to hire someone, a $5,000 tax credit if you employ someone out of work for more than two months. that will help draw down the unemployment figure. people aren t taking enough advantage of it and part of it is because we have tight capital and credit. our financial institutions have to do a better job of making sure that they let, loosen up on the credit. i ll read to you
isn t this a golden opportunity for the democrats to take the high road and say we ve got plain, and paint them as obstructionists? how aggressive do the democrats have to be during this recess? we will be very aggressive. we do have a plan. we ve been creating jobs with the recovery act and building roads and bridges and giving tax doubts businesses that hire people now, some over 5 million people as a result of the hire act. we know there s a lot more to do. huge hole has been dug. the question is do we want to keep going lowering the unemployment rate or turn backwards. i would just leave with you this, ed. right now, to add insultd to injury the republicans are filibustering a small business tax cut bill. they re unbelievable. that would give loans in small businesses. we re going to talk a lot about that in august. what about your state, michigan, high unemployment. i mean, this is tough. it s extremely tough. our people have been hit harder, longer, deeper, than anybody
you are here because it s so important to be here and the people are getting free health care services. thank you for doing that. this is important. we have people who have been, as you know, out of work the longest who have now exhausted all of their unemployment insurance benefits. i m introducing legislation with a number of democratic colleagues. we would love to have republicans, senator schumer is my main cosponsor. it will do two things, extend unemployment benefits for 20 weeks for those who exhausted benefits and secondly, increase the incentives for employers to hire them. we would extend for one year a very successful tax cuts we passed called the hire act that will give tax cuts to businesses right now that we have some 4 million or more, 5 million that will be hired through these tax cuts this year. we want to extend it and actually increase the tax cut if you hire somebody who has been out of work the longest.
hire act that gives incentives to the private sector to hire unemployed workers. that s a very difficult political argument. it s difficult to say, hey, things would have been much worse had we not acted. the main point, david, we ve got the best news we had in a long time, out of that 162,000 new jobs, 123,000 of those jobs are in the private sector. that is both encouraging and substantive. i m optimistic but also realistic it s going to take us a long time to dig our way out of those unemployment numbers and decrease those unemployment numbers. as we move from red to black, we re talking steps to create new jobs. we re going to keep our nose to the grind stone and focus on what america needs and that is jobs. fair to say the numbers might be confusing in the months ahead, maybe misleading, given the number of workers that will