Thanks very much for the opportunity to join you here at the National Press Club. I’d like to talk with you about the pace of our nation’s jobs recovery,... the governing choices and economic policies that Democratic governors are making to accelerate that jobs recovery,... and the very different set of choices being made by many Republican governors.

Over the past 5 years, our focus in Maryland has been on creating jobs and improving the conditions for job creation. With performance measurement, we have been making our government work more effectively. We openly set public goals, and we transparently measure our progress toward achieving those goals.

Building on our strengths and the better decisions of our State’s past, we’ve been able to make progress even in these challenging times. How? By choosing a balanced approach of cuts,... revenues,... and strategic investments in the very foundations of our economic strength like public education,… Progress in creating 20,000 net new jobs so far this year; progress in making our Maryland’s public schools America’s #1 best public school system three years in a row; progress in driving violent crime and homicides to their lowest rates since the 1970s; and progress in protecting our Triple A Bond rating – one of only 8 among the states – certified by all three rating agencies,…

Across our country, Democratic governors – in the toughest of times – are balancing budgets, making tough choices, creating jobs, and moving forward all at the same time. As Governor Beshear said in the closing days of his winning campaign in Kentucky, “true leadership is having the courage to make the right cuts and the good sense to make the right investments.”

DEMOCRATIC VERSUS REPUBLICAN GOVERNORS

Last week in Ohio and last week in Kentucky, voters sent a very powerful message. It is the same message they sent in West Virginia recently. And it’s that they want their elected leaders to knock off the narrow-minded ideology, and put job creation first.

In Kentucky, Steve Beshear completed what I believe was a near-perfect campaign. How did he do it? By focusing on those choices that we can make together to create jobs and expand opportunity. And that was Governor Tomblin’s focus as well,… while his opponent talked about peripheral issues like health care lawsuits.

In Ohio, voters overwhelmingly disapproved Governor Kasich’s over-reaching anti-union ideology by rejecting Senate Bill 5. As you know, this bill would have taken away collective bargaining rights from public employees – including moms and dads who work as firefighters, teachers, and police officers. More people turned out to vote AGAINST SB 5 than turned to vote FOR Governor Kasich to begin with. The voters in effect were saying, “enough already with the anti-union ideology – what does banning unions have to do with creating jobs?”

Voters in all three states told us they want their servant leaders to bring people together to create jobs, solve problems and do the things that work.

And that’s what Democratic governors are doing in every part of our country – making the tough but right choices now to create jobs and expand opportunity.

Recently, Governor Malloy of Connecticut brought together both Democrats and Republicans in a special session around a job creation package. The package includes a balance of investments, infrastructure, tax credits, job training, regulatory reform, and support for small businesses.

In Delaware, Governor Markell has a serious job creation initiative called Building Delaware’s Future Now, which calls for additional investments in the job creation priority of infrastructure.

In North Carolina, Governor Perdue’s “Ready Set Go” initiative, seeks to make every North Carolina student college- or career-ready by the time of graduation from high school – so that the Tar Heel State’s workforce has the skills to fill the new jobs created in this changing new economy.

TWO ECONOMIC MODELS

If there is anything that we should have learned from the Administration of George W. Bush, it is that trickle-down economics does not work.

And yet the struggle between two competing economic models continues: one that has been proven to work in every generation, versus one that brought us record debt and record unemployment.

One that built the largest and strongest middle class in the history of the planet, versus the one that brought us declining middle class incomes for the first time since World War II, and very nearly drove our national economy into a second Great Depression.

These two fundamentally different sets of choices are playing out, not in Congress, but in statehouses across our country. Take Ohio as one extreme example among many where Governor Kasich is making deep cuts in economic priorities like public education even as he cuts taxes for the estates of dead millionaires and billionaires -- hoping, I can only suppose, that they will reach back from the grave to create millions of new jobs and opportunities for the living.

By their own trickle-down theory, this massive concentration of wealth – accomplished primarily by massive tax windfalls for the 1% – was supposed to bring about better times, not economic disaster. If their theory worked, millions of jobs should have been created by now,... jobs falling from the sky.

We created only 1 million jobs during the Bush decade. Compare that to the 23 million jobs created during President Clinton’s years. I report, you decide: which is the more effective economic model for creating jobs and expanding middle class opportunity?

They succeeded in accomplishing their means – the extreme concentration wealth – but it brought about near disastrous economic ends for 99 percent of us. It has been a failure for America. It has been a failure for America’s economic growth. And we are still recovering from the losses of Bush decade and their failed trickle-down economic model.

President Obama and Democratic governors reject their model. It is not fiscally responsible. It is not good for our country.

We believe in a different model, a more effective model, the more traditionally American model. This model puts job creation first and recognizes that to create jobs, a modern economy requires modern investments. That isn’t a Democratic or Republican idea, it’s an American idea; an historic and economic truth that we have proved out time and again as a people.

We have a long way to go before we recover all that we have lost, but we can make our economy stronger; we can make our country better.

Last month our country achieved the 13th month in a row of positive job growth under President Obama’s leadership. Thirteen months in row – that is the longest stretch of consecutive job creation that our nation has achieved since 2005-2006.

Meanwhile, the private sector has achieved 20 consecutive months of job growth.

Last month, under President Obama’s leadership, we achieved the second-lowest month of foreclosures since November 2007. In July we hit a 44-month low,…

Because we are starting to make better choices as a people, our economy is starting to get better. Bank failures are down; corporate profits are up. But better isn’t good enough. We haven’t regained all that we’ve lost in the Bush recession; too many of citizens are hurting, still searching for work. There’s a lot to do.

And the truth of our situation is, we won’t move beyond our current job creation and employment difficulties simply by cutting.

If it feels every month that our economy is taking two or three steps forward and then one step back,... that’s because for every two or three jobs the private sector creates, the public sector eliminates one. The absence of a more balanced approach, the absence of moderation and measure in the public decisions of our national endeavor, is forcing counties, cities and states to actually slow down our jobs recovery with never ending layoffs and job eliminations.

If our public payrolls were bloated, perhaps you could chalk this up to right sizing, but in most places our public payrolls are not bloated. How much less public safety would be good for Baltimore or Newark? How much less education would be good for America?

CONCLUSION

For the last decade we’ve been severely under-capitalizing the idea of America. We have been under-investing in that common platform of job creation and opportunity expansion called the United States.

Others may rightly want to talk about the morality of an economic system that is rigged to concentrate so much of our nation’s wealth in the hands of so few, but I am just as concerned about how these poor choices keep us from investing in our country and the better future and the better job opportunities we want for our children.

Under President Eisenhower in the 1950s, as a nation we invested nearly 12 percent of federal non-defense spending in our infrastructure – which allows America’s business and commerce to thrive. Today, we’re at just three percent.

When it comes to basic research and development, we are today investing 60 percent less than we did when Richard Nixon was president, as a percentage of our GDP.

In just the last ten years we’ve slipped from having one of the highest percentage of college graduates in the world down to 12th.

And it is not what other countries are doing to us – it’s what we are not doing for ourselves.

No one else is going make these national economic investments in education, innovation, and infrastructure for us. 

The American Society of Civil Engineers recommends we invest $846 billion over the next decade to upgrade our roads, bridges, and tunnels. Ending the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, and returning to Clinton-era tax rates for the highest brackets would allow us to make $400 billion of that needed investment. To govern is to choose.

Democratic governors believe that there are, in fact, some challenges so large that we can only hope to tackle them together. Creating jobs, spurring innovation in how we feed, fuel, and heal our people, expanding opportunity in this fast-changing new economy, improving public education and public safety, making college more affordable, rebuilding a 21st century transportation and cyber infrastructure, eradicating child poverty,... these things won’t happen by themselves.

We must do them as we always have before. We must do them together, and do them ourselves.

Thank you very much. I’d be glad to open this up to questions, and search with you for answers.