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Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Marco Rubio today issued the following video statement on the two-year anniversary of President Obama signing the stimulus into law. To watch the video on YouTube, please click HERE. For television stations seeking a broadcast quality statement, the video is available for download HERE.

“It was two years ago today that President Obama signed into law the stimulus package. A law that he said would help stimulate and grow the economy. Well two years later, it is still as big a failure as it was the day it was signed. In fact, the only thing it stimulated was the national debt. This year alone, the federal government will spend over a trillion and a half more dollars than it takes in. The stimulus is a big part of that.

“The stimulus didn’t fail because of bad intentions. The stimulus failed because government doesn’t create private sector jobs. U.S. senators don’t create jobs. Regulatory agencies don’t create jobs. Jobs are created by everyday people from all walks of life that start a new business or expand an existing business. The job of government is to make it easier for them to do that – not harder. And growing our debt, it makes it harder on them to do that. It makes it harder on them to do that because it dries up the availability of money that people can invest in the private sector. It makes it harder because, ultimately, it makes people afraid the future is going to include higher taxes, and higher taxes are not a stimulus generator.

“The reality is, the stimulus package set us backwards, not forwards. And I hope that we never repeat that mistake again.

“The most important thing we can do here in Washington, D.C., to help grow our economy is to be helpful to the people that grow the economy – the everyday people from all walks of life who have a dream and pursue it by starting a business and employing others. We need to make it easier for them to do that by getting control of runaway, excessive, and quite frankly, sometimes ridiculous regulations. We need to get a hold of this debt crisis that faces our country and that threatens our future. And we need to give people a simple, sane, fair and affordable tax code. These are the things I campaigned on. These are the things that I’ll work for as a United States Senator. I look forward to working with all of you and make all of this a reality. Thank you all. May God bless all of you, and may God bless our country, the United States of America.”