[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 111 (Thursday, September 8, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H7797-H7801]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
IDEAS FOR A BETTER AMERICA
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Kansas (Mr. Tiahrt) is recognized
for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. TIAHRT. Madam Speaker, I will spend some time this afternoon
talking about how we can keep and create jobs in America. For almost
two centuries the American economy has been the envy of the world. With
its dynamic, hardworking, motivated workforce America has truly been
the land of opportunity where innovation has thrived. But that status
is changing.
We are now running a $670 billion annual deficit that is contributing
to our Federal budget deficit, and it has slowed our economy over the
past few years. This development is not a temporary blip on the radar
screen. It is the culmination of a generation of increased regulations,
unsound tax policies, languishing emphasis on math and science,
education, unchecked health care costs, rampant lawsuit abuse,
unfocused research and development funds, and a weak trade policy
enforcement system.
In short, our government has made it difficult and less desirable to
keep businesses in America. Over the past generation we have put up
roadblocks to keeping and creating jobs in America. If these current
trends continue, our economy will continue to lag and will no longer
remain the most dynamic economy in the world.
Meanwhile, countries like China and other nations are preparing for
the future. They are educating their students in math, science and
technology and pumping out record numbers of engineers. They are
reducing tax rates and other economic barriers to entice investments
into their nations. These countries are pursuing aggressive trade
policies to reduce America's economic dominance in world trade.
Some of the examples are Ireland. Ireland has shifted from a Third
World nation of Western Europe to the envy of the European Union
largely due to its tax policies. The Celtic tiger has lowered its
corporate tax rate to 12\1/2\ percent, stimulating the economy and
creating jobs.
India was languishing under a burden of a socialist government; but
now through their concerted effort to reduce regulations, they have
stimulated their economy.
China currently graduates more English-speaking electrical engineers
than America does. Their focus on education, especially math and
science and technology, is allowing China to build their own Silicon
Valley and attract the world's technological business to their doors.
Brazil has achieved what some believe to be a pipe dream. They are
projected to be completely energy self-sufficient in a couple of years.
It took them years to develop renewable energy sources, but now they
are the leaders in ethanol production, and their economy is not
suffering from the current high crude oil prices.
Chile is becoming an economic leader in Latin America by breaking
down the barriers and doing business in their nation. Their emphasis on
signing free trade agreements has been very fruitful. Last year they
signed free trade agreements with the United States and with South
Korea. They are currently in negotiations with China, India, New
Zealand, Singapore, Japan and Australia; and they will continue to
thrive.
For these reasons, these nations and other world economies are poised
to move ahead of the United States in the next decade. In fact, the
2005 Index of Economic Freedom by the Heritage
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Foundation ranks the United States 13th in the world. For the first
time in 3 years we are not in the top 10 in the world in this
measurement. This is due both to other nations' progress and economic
competitiveness, as well as our own barriers to a thriving economy.
Without attention to these matters, the United States is headed towards
a third-rate economy, and 20 years from now we may no longer be the
world's leader.
Congress needs to take these matters seriously. Last year the House
began the competitiveness legislative agenda on the floor. Over a
period of 8 weeks we discussed and voted on issues related to keeping
and creating jobs in America.
Later this month, the Jobs Action Team is again bringing legislation
to the House floor to combat this problem. But we need to take a long-
term vision approach. For this reason, the House Economic
Competitiveness Caucus has been created. The House Economic
Competitiveness Caucus will be launched with offering opportunities to
get Members involved in creating and keeping jobs in America by
removing the barriers that Congress has created.
The House Economic Competitiveness Caucus will focus on ways to
uncover and help the economic competitiveness in the global market as
well. The caucus will provide and deepen the understanding and
underlying problems that inhibit economic growth and will focus on
long-term risks with current policies that make American businesses
uncompetitive.
Our idea is to create and keep jobs in America. Of these jobs, the
idea to keep jobs and create jobs, we have designated the problems into
eight categories. These eight categories are going to be addressed, and
I will go through them to tell you about what we need to do in each
one; but these are the areas that Congress has created barriers to
keeping and creating jobs, and we are going to help remove some of
those barriers.
Health care security is the first issue. Costs related to health care
are growing at a rate faster than inflation. The people who keep and
create jobs here in America tell me that health care costs is their
greatest challenge today. The CEO of Starbucks Coffee announced that
his company spends more on health care than they do on coffee itself.
Their raw materials are less than their health care costs. It is a huge
problem that drives up the price of American products, and that forces
jobs overseas. It is a complex problem whose policies are set through
government policy primarily because of what is demanded in Medicare,
Medicaid, and in lawsuit vulnerability. And this problem must be
addressed in order to lower costs and improve our ability to compete.
The second area that we need to improve here in America is
bureaucratic red tape. The Federal Government has become a creeping ivy
of regulations. The total burden of the environmental economic impact
at the workplace and through tax compliance, this regulatory burden
mounts up and the total cost is $850 billion per year.
{time} 1745
Eight hundred fifty billion dollars a year to comply with regulation
in the United States; that amount of money is greater than the gross
domestic products of either Canada or Mexico. For any product
manufactured in the United States, the cost to comply with regulations
is 12 percent of the cost of that product. In other words, if it costs
$1 to build that product, 12 cents of that dollar goes just to comply
with the paperwork.
What if we applied some common sense to our regulations and
streamlined the application? What if we could reduce them by half? We
would be 6 percent more competitive in the world and that would help us
create jobs.
Lifelong learning is another issue where we need to remove barriers.
Job training and retraining are necessary parts of keeping up in
today's economic environment. Our children must learn the fundamentals
of math and science and they must become familiar with technology and
be exposed to a math and science curriculum in order to be able to
compete in a global economy. We must help all of our colleges and
universities produce graduates who enter science and engineering
careers.
The nation of India graduated 85,000 software engineers last year. As
I told you earlier, China graduated more English-speaking electrical
engineers than the United States. We have to encourage more young women
and young men to pursue technical areas of our economy.
Energy is a tremendous issue today and it is a barrier to keeping and
creating jobs. We have all seen the price of gas at the pumps. It costs
me over $40 to fill up my minivan. Imagine those on fixed incomes,
those who are retired or farmers and truckers or anyone else who uses
transportation to create or keep their jobs? Our gas prices are too
high. Even before Hurricane Katrina, gasoline was on the rise.
We have not built a new refinery in America since 1976. The limited
growth in new production of crude oil has been a tremendous problem. We
once again were defeated in trying to open up the Alaska National
Wildlife Reserve, or ANWR. I have always been puzzled after living in
Kansas, what is so precious about ANWR? Kansas has been producing oil
for 100 years. We cleanly and efficiently drill and discover new
sources of petroleum right in Kansas near metropolitan areas, near
urban settings and in rural settings, and we do it without disturbing
the environment or polluting the environment. Why can we not do that in
the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve?
In the energy bill we were requesting only 1,800 acres to produce oil
in an area of over 2.5 million acres. It just amazed me; the area is
only about 3 square miles, and to produce the production that is all
that would need to be utilized. And it is in an area in the North Slope
of Alaska, which is the size of California.
We have to be able to develop new sources of production. Natural gas
is also in limited supply with futures prices in the month of December
peaking $12 per 1,000 cubic feet. What does that mean? It means higher
electricity costs, but in comparison, that same unit of measure is only
$4 in Europe and less than $1 in Russia.
Why is it so high in America? We have had environmental lawsuits and
EPA regulations against developing new sources of producing electricity
like clean coal production plants. We have had the inability to build a
pipeline from the Canadian natural gas fields to the east coast of
America. We can lower the energy costs by easing regulations and
applying some common sense, by increasing the production of crude, by
increasing the refinery capacity here in America, but we also need to
improve conservation and increase alternative energy sources.
Today, in Kansas, we are building a windmill farm which will generate
electricity and we are going to build four additional wind electricity
generating farms in Kansas, and that is a good alternative source of
energy. But we need to continue finding other alternative sources and
new sources if we are going to be competitive in the future.
Innovation and investment is another area where we need to remove
barriers. Technology is the engine of growth, yet America does not
really have a comprehensive plan to encourage research and development.
In Europe they have a different philosophy for research and
development. Their money goes directly into product development and it
is not available for other companies to expand. We have not seen it
that way in America. We do not do things like they do with AirBus, for
example. AirBus is subsidized by European nations, by their owner
nations, and that research and development goes directly into a product
that competes with products in America that are not subsidized, that
are built by Boeing.
But in America we take our research and development dollars, like the
ones that are spent at the National Institute of Aviation Research at
Wichita State University, where we develop new manufacturing techniques
for composite materials, research on their ability to withstand
stresses, their ability to compare composites, and that research and
development is made available to small businesses to develop new ideas
and put them into practice and create jobs. It is available to Boeing,
Beech. It is available to Cessna and LearJet and any small business. It
is even available to AirBus, even though their research dollars are not
made available to us. We need to be
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more focused and more protective of our research and development
discoveries.
We also need to encourage international investment. Capital dollars,
the dollars needed or dollars that are needed for investment, capital
goes where it is welcome. With good intentions to protect investors in
America, Congress has created regulations that make it difficult to
attract capital into America.
Now, in South Carolina you can find a BMW plant. That is a place
where we have attracted outside investment in America. We need to do
more of that, but it is very difficult when we have these barriers that
have been created.
Trade fairness is another area where we need to protect American
exports, and it should be foremost in any trade agreement and any
policy that Congress reviews and considers. The ultimate goal should be
to put American businesses at the top of the global supply chain which
benefits small businesses and creates jobs.
Now, trade fairness can be applied to any time we have a trade
agreement. So it is important that we continue to have trade agreements
like we just passed this summer called CAFTA, the Central America Free
Trade Agreement. These free trade agreements give us a vehicle to allow
free and fair trade. If you look at the way some policies have happened
through trade, for example, China, they have manipulated their
currency. They have targeted manufacturing areas like hand trucks and
auto lifters.
In Wichita we have a company that makes hand trucks. Hand trucks are
what moves boxes around for one individual to use. Those have been
targeted by China, and they manufacture them and they sell them below
the cost of manufacturing them through subsidies, trying to run
American manufacturers out of business so they can have a corner on the
market. We need to combat that through trade fairness.
The one thing that we have an over-surplus of in America that we need
to export is lawsuits. And the way we can export lawsuits is through
our trade agreements, by taking these countries to task when they
unfairly target our businesses.
Another thing we need to do is tax relief and simplification. Our tax
structure puts American businesses at a tremendous disadvantage in the
world market. We must simplify and eliminate the punitive nature of our
current Tax Code. Incentives such as bonus depreciation will encourage
investment which moves production lines and increases revenues. But we
need to look beyond that. We need to have broader changes as well.
There is a movement now in America to take our tax policy and put it
into something like a value added tax or a national sales tax or a flat
tax. These ideas can help us become more competitive. But the real
objective ought to be to remove the cost of taxes from the bottom line.
Right now through our income tax system, the way it is structured
today, the costs end up on the bottom line. The cost of all the labor,
the cost that gets buried into the products that are passed from one
supplier to a manufacturer to a retailer or a wholesaler, gets buried
into our products and it makes us less competitive in the world market.
So we need to find a way to remove our taxes from the bottom line and
still accumulate the amount of money that we need to run the Federal
Government.
The last item I want to talk about in the steps to competitiveness is
ending lawsuit abuse. We can return integrity to our legal system by
curtailing frivolous lawsuits and returning the courts' attention to
upholding the laws of our land rather than legislating from the bench.
We have seen lawsuit abuse. We have seen activist judges create a
situation where America has difficulty in our costs.
One of the things we are going through now is an asbestos settlement.
The asbestos settlement is going to create a trust fund, and we must be
very, very sure that only those that have been actually impacted by
asbestos receive money from the trust fund and that it does not become
a cash or a slush fund for anybody who gets to slide into the fund. But
it is going to be huge. It is going to be $180 billion. That money
comes out of the profit lines, and it means it is going to drive up the
cost of products in America.
We have lawsuits where 40 percent of the money does not go to the
victims. Sometimes it is 50 percent of the money that does not go to
the victims. We have lawsuits where too many people get involved in the
lawsuit and the cost of going through our system becomes extremely
high. That ends up buried in the cost of our products and makes us less
competitive. The other side of the equation is the activist judges that
have been involved in our court system in the debate.
In Kansas, for example, one of our judges decided that the State was
not spending enough money on education. Well, that is a good debate to
have and those decisions should be made by our legislature. We have
this concept in America of separation of powers. We have an executive
branch, a legislative branch, and we have a judicial branch. There is a
balance in those powers. But what we have been seeing in America is a
crossing of lines, a blurring of lines where the courts have encroached
on the activities of the legislature.
In Kansas they were deciding how much money we were going to be
spending, where it is going to be spent on educational issues. And that
is a travesty and it is costly, and it ends up complicating things in
America. I think that that is difficult when it comes to doing business
in America because we cannot plan for that.
We have a legislative system that has a job that they need to do and
it should not be encroached upon by the court system.
Those eight issues are issues we are working on through the Economic
Competitive Caucus: Health care security, bureaucratic red tape
termination, lifelong learning, energy self-sufficiency and security,
innovation and investment, trade fairness, tax relief and
simplification, and ending lawsuit abuse and litigation management.
If we can get these legislative initiatives through, we will lower
the cost of doing business in America. That will help us create new
jobs. We will be able to keep the jobs that we have, and in doing that,
we will we will be the dynamic economic force in the future that we are
today.
We have a wonderful opportunity that came through a horrible tragedy,
and I want to talk about what things could be done in rebuilding in the
gulf area in the south following the damage that was caused by Katrina.
Katrina was a horrible incident with the loss of life, the loss of
property. The South is never going to be the same. If you look at the
area we are told that 100,000 square miles were affected by Hurricane
Katrina. Now that is larger than the State of Kansas. It is hard to get
our minds around the area and the amount of damage that has been caused
in the South by Katrina.
When you look at the property damage, the houses that are blown away,
you cannot really picture the heartache that is created by the loss of
a loved one or even the loss of pictures, items that you have from
people who preceded you in life, and photos and journals and just
things that are taken from us when we have a tragedy like that. Whether
it is a flood or high wind, it is gone and you will never be able to
replace those items.
I know when we had water damage in my own home and lost items that
were precious to me, I could not put a price tag on it. My wife lost
the Bible that she had that she wrote comforting notes in on the day
she lost her father. Those kinds of things cannot be replaced. But what
we can do in the South is, we can rebuild that area. We can give the
people who live there hope. We can create an economic engine down there
that can be greater with new jobs and new ideas and new possibilities.
Now we can do that, set up an experiment down there in how we can
streamline the process of regulation, provide more energy, rebuild the
area in a safe fashion, and do it so we can get that area back on track
and get those people back on their feet and allow them to start their
lives over.
In the area of regulations, we have such regulations like the Jones
Act that has been temporarily waived to allow for a clean up of the
region.
{time} 1800
Today, the President waived the Davis-Bacon Act to allow for lower
costs in reconstruction. That will allow us to get more people involved
in reconstruction, but I would like us to
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look at the banking regulations. That will help us reopen banks and
access to accounts and mortgage processing.
We should expedite the EPA's siting and permitting process and the
licensing process, especially when it comes in the area of small
refineries. We should reduce the environmental impact statement
requirements and streamline that process. That can hold up construction
for months, if not years; and I believe that OSHA and other agencies
that have a tendency and a propensity to be working in an adversarial
mode or an adversarial relationship with employers should be encouraged
on the site to work with employers through a process, and a good
example of how that can work occurred in Wichita, Kansas.
A couple of years ago, OSHA decided to target three counties in
Kansas. One of them was Cedric County where Wichita is located, and
they targeted homebuilders. They went there and they showed up on job
sites, and they started writing fines and assessing costs against
employers for alleged violations of safety. They just struck a lot of
fear in the whole home construction industry, and the result of that
was that many areas just shut down.
If you think about it, a subcontractor, let us say a framing
contractor, on a job site, if he has a job that it is a $100,000 house,
the framing portion of it, his profit may be only a couple of thousand
dollars. Well, if his fine is $5,000, it is cheaper for him, more
economical for him, to stay at home and not do the job than to be at
the job and have the potential of some kind of fine he did not even
know about. Some of the alleged violations that were sited were a
Styrofoam cup on the stairs, a cord that ran across the job site that
was in the wrong location, a ladder improperly leaning against a wall.
Anyway, the bottom line was that they shut down the homebuilding
industry.
If we were going to get it started, we had to get OSHA together with
the builders. So I was contacted by the Wichita Area Builders
Association. I got in touch with OSHA. We got the two parties together,
and they came up with a plan where they could work together, and it
worked very simply. OSHA would show up and announced would walk around
with the job superintendent or the contractor. They would make a list
of any potential violations. They would discuss that list. OSHA gave it
to the contractor, and then he said, I will be back in 6 weeks; I will
tell you when I am coming and let us go through this list and see how
you are doing.
We found out most of the problems that were created were caused
because of a language barrier. Many of the workers were Hispanic, did
not have good English skills, and they did not understand how you
properly lean a ladder up against a wall. They did not understand you
were not supposed to put your Styrofoam cup on the stairs, that it
could be a trip hazard. Once that was effectively communicated, the
environment became safe. It worked very well. The homebuilders went
back to work. OSHA was satisfied because they created a safe work
environment, and together they achieved a common goal of a safe working
environment and getting the job done.
We could use that example down in Louisiana and Mississippi and
Alabama as we rebuild down there where we have EPA, where we have OSHA,
where we have other government agencies working with the private sector
to get people back in their homes, to get them working and to get them
back on their feet.
In energy, in order to immediately help the refinery capacity in the
gulf region, as well as around the country, Congress needs to ease the
roadblocks increasing the capacity to current refineries. Rather than
the 3 to 5 years that it takes today to build a new refinery, current
refineries could be increased in capacity in as short as 12 months,
maybe as long as 18 months. In the long term, the government needs to
be able to drill in ANWR, as I said earlier, and other locations to
increase the supply of crude; but we need to start by streamlining the
EPA process on permitting and reduce the time period involved.
We need to ease some EPA regulations, especially when it comes to
some of the emissions and the Clean Air Act, and we need to take
advantage of the natural growth and increasing capacity by expanding
current sites as far as refineries are concerned.
But these are important to rebuild the refineries down there and
increase the supply of gasoline, and that will have a general impact.
Right now, we are all paying higher gas prices. By increasing the
supply of gas, we will have lower gas prices. It is simple economics.
We need to carry it out in the South, but look at other areas where we
can streamline, getting a greater supply of fuel.
The infrastructure. In order to rebuild the area of highway, roads,
bridges, train tracks and the ports, they all have to be restarted. The
Department of Transportation and related agencies need to allow for the
expedited planning and building, as well as expedited process for
granting permits and waivers and licenses. The insurance community has
to be involved.
There are many lessons to learn from Hurricane Katrina with relation
to the flood insurance coverage and implementation and access to
mandates for insurance in vulnerable areas and concerns about the
definition of flood insurance versus the protection against high winds
and a myriad of other provisions, but the government needs to make sure
that the insurance claims are processed quickly for rebuilding.
There also needs to be an incentive in place for those to rebuild in
high-risk areas and to purchase the proper insurance. Our government
should consider a buyout of particular areas, especially those that are
vulnerable for other flooding or vulnerable in polluted areas. If
companies and people will not sell, then they are going to have be
required to purchase insurance.
Liability can be a roadblock for the reconstruction. Lawsuit abuse
needs to be prevented. We should probably look at a loser-pay or a
blanket liability protection which needs to be instituted in the
region. Otherwise, the economy could be completely strangled by junk
lawsuits or liabilities that could plague the region for decades to
come.
In health care, we have hundreds of thousands of displaced residents
that need to be able to use their health care insurance wherever they
are, even if they are temporarily relocated. The government needs to
allow for health care portability. When we are in these regions to
rebuild, we need to use programs like the associated health care plans
and other ways for employers to afford and offer health care insurance,
and it all should be implemented quickly.
The policies to allow for the purchase of insurance across State
lines should be explored in order to encourage the growth of health
care facilities and incentives for health care workers, and education
training programs should be implemented.
Education portability is important. With dislocated families spread
across the whole region and the Nation, education vouchers are needed
to help pay for the cost of education for these kids who are
temporarily in other areas and are able to go to school. School loan
waivers, Pell grant extensions, and other higher education policies are
needed to be implemented to allow students to continue their education
during this time.
Job skills training, I think, is very important. Some of these jobs
are not going to be re-created. We are going to have new industries
down in that area. The government should work with the chambers of
commerce and companies to set up public/private partnerships to train
people for jobs that will be available in those areas and for jobs
during the rebidding process.
I think there are a lot of skills that could be utilized and
developed during that time, and tax incentives are probably a good
thing that we need to discuss when it comes to rebuilding as well.
Immediate tax incentives to encourage investment in the area should
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be implemented, including a deduction tax for companies and individuals
who build in the affected region, and accelerated depreciation should
be available for capital and equipment and software investments as
well.
These ideas can be used to quickly help reconstruct the area in New
Orleans and in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. It is a way that we
can get people back on their feet again.
In summary, I just want to go over the things that I think we need to
do in Congress to not only help the South get back on its feet again
but also to help America stay number one into the future, that is, that
we need to address the issues in health care. We need to limit the
growth in regulations of bureaucratic red tape. We need to effectively
focus our education system on the future economy.
We need to develop new energy sources and increase the supply of
energy, as well as the conservation of the energy and alternate energy
sources. We need to look at research and development through innovation
and investment. We have fair trade policies. We have to improve our tax
system so that we can have some tax relief and simplification, and we
need to end lawsuit abuse and have litigation management for America.
With these individual ideas, I think we will be able to grow a
stronger America and retain our number one status well into the future
so that our children and grandchildren will have the same opportunities
that we have had to build a strong country and make our dreams come
true.
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