Progress made on jobs, finance rules, health reform, despite GOP’s tactics

A year ago, our economy faced a collapse bigger than any since the Great Depression. Job losses reached 700,000 per month, plunging home values threatened millions of families’ financial futures — and as President Barack Obama and a new Congress took their oaths of office, our country braced itself for the hard times to come.

Since then, Congress’s agenda has been directed at addressing the grave challenges that confront us. Our accomplishments have shared a common thread: softening the impact of the recession, restoring our economy to growth and our budget to responsibility, and building our prosperity on a sounder footing. That work is by no means through, and some of the hardest tasks are still in front of us. But with the economy growing again for the first time in a year, job losses slowing to a near-halt, and Congress close to passing transformative legislation on several fronts, this year has seen real progress for the American people.

The most immediate response to economic crisis was, of course, the Recovery Act, which cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, funded job-creating projects and provided aid to hard-hit families. The results have included more than 1 million jobs created or saved; mass layoffs averted for teachers, police officers, and firefighters; and, according to the nonpartisan Center of Budget and Policy Priorities, 6 million Americans saved from falling into poverty. In addition to the Recovery Act, Democrats also worked to help small businesses take out loans so they can grow and create jobs, to protect responsible customers from exploitative credit card company practices, and to help responsible homeowners to keep their homes.

Job creation was also a prime motive behind the House’s work on clean energy. Democrats recognize that protecting coming generations from catastrophic climate change is a moral imperative — but we also see tremendous opportunity to establish American leadership in the most important new sector of the world economy. By funding new energy research, encouraging the shift to the most promising new technologies, and fighting global warming with proven market-based solutions, we can create jobs and export opportunities on an economically and environmentally sustainable foundation. The House passed a clean energy bill this summer, and the Senate is making progress on its own version.

Health insurance reform was also an issue given added urgency by the recession, which brought job loss, insecurity and lost health coverage to millions of Americans. The House was moved to act by the stories of families facing inexorably rising premiums, of small businesses struggling with the cost of insurance and falling further behind their overseas competitors, and of Americans facing dropped coverage or even bankruptcy because of insurance companies’ most outrageous profit-seeking practices. No bill Congress has considered in recent memory has the power to reduce more economic anxiety than health insurance reform. As I write this, the Senate is taking its turn to debate a reform bill; and though the struggle to get a bill to President Obama’s desk has taken longer than anyone predicted last January, the struggle to reform American healthcare has been going on, in one form or another, for generations. We have never been so close to enacting such important reforms.

Finally, the House voted just this month to put an end to the reckless Wall Street practices that brought our economy so close to collapse in the first place. Democrats’ regulatory reform bill strengthens oversight of our biggest banks and financial institutions, empowers and protects consumers, and takes taxpayers off the hook for future bailouts. The bill stops misleading and abusive practices that trap consumers in loans that are impossible to pay back, and it stops the reckless gambling that spread risk from companies like AIG to our entire financial system — and while it can’t undo the year of turmoil unleashed by Wall Street’s greed, it can safeguard our economy for the years to come.

We have made progress, but have not yet achieved our goals. As long as Americans continue to suffer from the aftershocks of recession, Congress will continue its efforts to help create jobs and lay a foundation for a new prosperity. It’s encouraging that a majority in the Senate supports the key pieces of the recovery agenda that are still pending; on the other hand, it’s continually frustrating to see an obstructionist Republican minority that, even in the face of historic national problems, is more interested in saying “no” than constructively working to shape legislation. Next year will be a decisive test of whether congressional Republicans are more interested in catering to a narrow, ideological base, or to the needs of the country as a whole. And, as Congress continues to focus on job creation and digging America out of its fiscal hole, the new year will also test Republicans’ commitment to their principles of economic growth and fiscal responsibility.

Nevertheless, I think the American people can look forward to the new year with hope — because, by any measure, this has been one of the most productive years the House has seen; and because a look back to last winter’s fear shows how far we’ve come.

Hoyer is the House majority leader.