[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 56 (Tuesday, April 23, 2013)]
[House]
[Pages H2232-H2235]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1930
               MAKE IT IN AMERICA: MANUFACTURING MATTERS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Williams). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 3, 2013, the gentleman from California (Mr. 
Garamendi) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority 
leader.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, it's good to be back here for another 
week of work. We certainly have work to do. Out across this Nation 
there are a lot of people that are still unemployed, and it's time for 
Congress to take this extremely important task and to get it done.
  We've been talking here on the floor for a long time about how we can 
create jobs in America. The Make It in America agenda that my 
Democratic colleagues and I have put forth over the last 2\1/2\ years 
is an extensive number of bills designed to bring jobs back to the 
United States. And we need them.
  An article that appeared in the newspapers this last day or so talked 
about this. This is Paul Krugman talking about the long-term 
unemployment that we now have here in the United States. He cites that 
for the last 5 years we've been in a crisis. Unemployment remains 
elevated, with almost 12 million Americans out of work. But the real 
striking and huge number is in another category, and that's the long-
term unemployment: 4.6 million Americans have been unemployed for more 
than 6 months, and more than 3 million have been jobless for more than 
a year. The programs that my Democratic colleagues and I have offered 
over the last 2\1/2\ years would have gone directly to that problem.
  He argues that when you have this long-term unemployment, you create 
a problem that these men and women are not likely to ever get back into 
the workforce, citing several statistics that are found around the 
Nation. But we can do something about that, and the Make It in America 
agenda is exactly what we ought to be working on.
  Before I go into the specifics of that agenda, I'd like to cover one 
other issue. This is seen in a report from the International Monetary 
Fund that they just came out with in the last couple of days warning 
the United States to be very careful about continued reductions in our 
budget. They argue that the austerity program that the United States 
has actually been on for the last 2 years--now, remember, immediately 
after President Obama became President the United States took on a 
stimulus program, an enormous stimulus program of a little over $700 
billion. That actually created the start of the rebirth of the American 
economy, but it only lasted for a year, a year and a half.
  Then we undertook, at the behest of my Republican colleagues, an 
austerity program, one that involved seriously reducing the Federal 
budget. Over the decades, beginning in 2011, we will see a nearly $2 
trillion reduction in Federal expenditures in the 10-year period. That 
is what austerity is all about.
  Today, if you were trying to get on an airplane somewhere in the 
United States, you were beginning to see yet one more effect of 
austerity, and that is the air traffic controllers going on furlough, 
so that 1 day out of 10 air traffic controllers will not be working, 
meaning that there will be a shortage. Some say, well, they should have 
moved the money around and they could have done it some other way, but 
that's not the way the austerity program is in the United States, and 
that's not the way the sequestration law is written.
  Sequestration is across-the-board cuts, expenditure item by 
expenditure item, with no--or very little--authority to shift money 
from one lower priority to a higher priority. Therefore, today, the air 
traffic controllers, some were not working. There was a general 
slowdown of air traffic across the United States resulting in some of 
my colleagues not getting to work today to vote on the three bills that 
we had up here on the floor just a few moments ago.
  In any case, the IMF warns: U.S. austerity will slow growth. This was 
a warning that was issued to the United States. It was also issued 
earlier to the United Kingdom, who have been on a very serious 
austerity budget for the last 3 years. The result is that the United 
Kingdom has actually seen a shrinking in their economy, as has most of 
Europe. Austerity did not work in Europe as an effort to deal with the 
downturn of the economy and the Great Recession, and it certainly is 
not working here.
  We need to create jobs in the United States. A rational economic 
strategy would say that when you have a general decline in the economy 
caused by a lack of consumer spending, then it is time for the 
government to step in and to provide support for the economy. We can do 
that in a way that actually is an investment strategy. This is where I 
would like to take this conversation.
  Instead of talking about austerity and cut, cut, cut at the Federal 
level to deal with the deficit--an issue that, indeed, we must deal 
with, but that's a long-term issue that we have to get about--but we 
have a short-term crisis right now with employment and the lack of 
demand here in the United States.
  So, what do we do about it? Well, first of all, we end sequestration; 
give a rational way for the government agencies to address the $85 
billion of cuts that are taking place in the next 6 months--better yet, 
to put that off into the future. Let those cuts occur in the years 4, 
5, 6, 7, out in the future rather than right now, when what we ought to 
be doing is increasing the government expenditure on key investments, 
like keeping the airplanes in the sky, like

[[Page H2233]]

keeping the men and women who are at my Air Force base in Travis, 
continuing to provide the support that the Air Force needs in moving 
men and equipment out of Afghanistan, and shifting those budget cuts 
off to the future. I hope that happens. I have asked my colleagues, and 
certainly the President has asked for this to happen. We'll see if my 
colleagues here are ready to do that.
  So, what do we do in the meantime? It's about investments, those kind 
of Federal Government expenditures that actually will create immediate 
jobs as well as long-term economic growth. There are several, and I'll 
go through them very, very quickly.
  First, education. The most important investment that any economy will 
make, any society will make is the investment in education. And it's 
not just K-12; it's the higher education system, a doctorate education, 
as well as the retraining of those long-term unemployed who need to be 
prepared for the jobs of today and tomorrow, not the jobs of yesterday. 
So that's the education.
  The second piece of it is research. It's the foundation of future 
economic growth. You need to have a robust research program if you 
intend for your economy to stay ahead. Fortunately, America has had 
such an agenda for a long time. However, the sequestration cuts--for 
example, $45 million out of research at the University of California-
Davis in just the next 6 months--that means layoffs, layoffs of 
technicians and others who are involved in those research programs. And 
it means that those research efforts will not come to fruition in the 
near future. They will be delayed, and the benefit of them will not be 
seen for some time.
  Some of this is real jobs right away. For example, some of that 
research has to do with bioherbicides and biopesticides. These are 
naturally occurring organisms that occur somewhere in the environment. 
They are discovered, they are brought back to the laboratory and grown 
and become a bioherbicide or a biopesticide. Research in that area is 
clearly going to be delayed as a result of sequestration. So let's 
delay the sequestration, put it off in the future years so that we can 
grow the economy today.
  The third element of economic growth is in the area of 
infrastructure. You have to have infrastructure. This is about moving 
Americans across our landscape. This is about our ports, our highways, 
our airports, and other critical elements in the transportation 
infrastructure.

                              {time}  1940

  We know that we are woefully behind on meeting the infrastructure 
needs. Probably eight out of 10 bridges in the United States are 
deficient. We know that our highways are filled with potholes and don't 
measure up to the standards that we would want, simply for the 
protection of our automobiles' suspension systems. We know that there 
is far more to infrastructure than just highways and ports and 
airports.
  For example, the Mississippi River is flooding. So what is the status 
of levees in the United States? Well, the status of levees in the 
United States is not good. In my district, I have more than 1,200 miles 
of levees, and many of them are insufficient to protect the people who 
live on the land side of the levees, the farms and the cities.
  One of the most dangerous cities in the United States is Sacramento, 
California. It ranks number two after New Orleans. We need to have that 
levee repaired, yet the Army Corps of Engineers is taking a $250 
million cut in its levee budget and in the projects that it does in 
deepening the ports and maintaining the ports. It makes no sense that 
at a time when we know there is severe flooding, even to this day along 
the Mississippi, that we would take $250 million out of the Army Corps 
of Engineers budget. But that's precisely what is happening with 
sequestration.
  Infrastructure goes beyond that. I'm going to come back to 
infrastructure in a few moments, but I see I'm joined by one of my 
colleagues.
  I'll just rapidly finish with the other two elements in a program for 
building the American economy.
  The final two elements are manufacturing. You have to make things. 
I'll come back and talk about that in a few moments. And the final 
element is you must change. The economy is changing, people have to 
change with the economy, our education system, our infrastructure. All 
of these require that we are willing to change.
  Now, my colleague from the great State of Ohio, please, share with us 
your thoughts on sequestration, jobs and what we can do here in the 
United States to put people back to work.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I thank the gentleman.
  In line with what you were talking about on the infrastructure piece, 
I think it's important that we take a look at what investments need to 
be made in the country. We're living, unfortunately, in a narrative in 
the country where everything that the government invests in is a waste 
of money, according to some people here in the United States Capitol. 
No investment that the government could make could possibly be a good 
one. So we are forced into a discussion of either you're a socialist 
and the bureaucrats should be CEO of the company or nothing.
  What the Democrats are trying to articulate is for us to reestablish 
the formula that led to the great economic expansion here in the United 
States. We had figured it out. We figured it out. In just a few hundred 
years throughout the industrial revolution this new country figured out 
how to make investments, how to protect intellectual property, how to 
protect private property, and how to make investments in certain things 
that were going to yield dividends down the line, that were going to 
help business and workers alike all at the same time.
  And that formula was invest in infrastructure--invest in roads, 
invest in bridges, invest in ports, invest in the airports, invest in 
the research, invest in the space program, invest in military research 
that eventually would spin out into the world. We had the formula. 
Invest in our workforce, public schools, universities, GI bill. A 
pretty simple formula. This is not brain surgery we're talking about 
here, but it worked. And this little country that was fairly small and 
really insignificant at one point became the industrial powerhouse of 
the entire world because of that genius of public-private investments.
  And, of course, the private sector came in and made big investments. 
Of course, they did. That's what they do. But our job here, in some 
instances, is to get out of the way. And we're all in agreement there 
that, of course, the government can get too much in the way, and we've 
got to streamline government. The Tax Code is too complicated. It needs 
to be simplified.
  We can do all that without having to disinvest or eat the seed corn 
that is the future economy of the United States of America. And why I 
love to join my friend here from California is because every time he 
comes to the floor, he's talking about how do we make investments today 
that are going to pay us dividends down the line.
  And when you talk about infrastructure, you're talking about making 
investments that are going to put, for the most part, building-trades 
workers to work, who make a decent salary, a good salary, good 
benefits, good health care. And then they go out. You have a road built 
or a bridge built, and the painters and the ironworkers and all these 
projects, sheet metal workers, they all come and they build and they 
all got some money in their pocket. Then they go down the street and 
they go to Home Depot and they spend some money there. They buy a house 
or add a room or put a pool in or they invest. They send their kids to 
college, and the whole thing keeps going. That's what we're talking 
about here.

  Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Ryan, your lesson on American history is right on. 
We often hear some of our colleagues talk about the Founding Fathers--
the Founding Fathers wouldn't do it this way, they wouldn't do it that 
way, or they would.
  It's very interesting that George Washington on becoming President, 
the first President, went to Alexander Hamilton, his Treasury 
Secretary, and asked Mr. Hamilton to develop a strategy to grow the 
American economy. Alexander Hamilton came back with a report 3 or 4 
months later, laid out about a dozen different elements, and in that 
report that Alexander Hamilton brought to President Washington was the 
genius of what you just described. He said, the Federal Government

[[Page H2234]]

should provide for infrastructure investment. He didn't call it 
infrastructure. The Federal Government should build canals, ports, and 
roads. He also said, the Federal Government should buy American-made 
products to encourage manufacturing in America. So this is not new.
  Your recitation of American history down through the line actually 
began with our very first President, laying out the partnership, the 
public-private partnership, the Federal Government playing a key role 
in those investments that create economic growth.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Right. And if you look, comparatively speaking, now 
to what China is doing, what India is doing--granted they're developing 
countries--but they're spending 7 or 8 percent of their GDP on 
infrastructure projects. Here in the United States we're spending maybe 
2.
  I know we are not a developing country; but we do have major 
investments to make in our cities, in our rural areas, whether you're 
talking about combined sewer systems, whether you're talking about 
waterlines, whether you're talking about dealing with the septic 
systems in rural areas, whether you're talking about bridges. I think 
in Trumbull County, where I live, I think we have 60-some bridges that 
are deemed not adequate.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Unsafe.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Unsafe. In one county in Ohio, and there's 88 
counties.
  And we have high unemployment, much higher than any of us would want. 
And, yes, we have problems; but the Federal Government is getting money 
at 1 percent. And I know my friends--and I'm on the Budget Committee 
and we talk a lot about deficits and everything else--I know a lot of 
people would say we can't borrow our way out of this. And what I'm 
saying--my argument that I'm making--and I don't want to attribute 
anybody else to this--is that we've got major billion-dollar, hundreds 
of billion dollars--probably the Society of Engineers says a couple 
trillion dollars' worth of infrastructure needs over the next decade or 
so--why wouldn't we invest in these projects? And they say, well, 
you've got to borrow the money. We're going to borrow the money at 1 
percent, maybe a little higher, depending on the day of the week.

                              {time}  1950

  That project that we can do today is going to be a certain price. 
It's going to be $100, say. What's that project going to be like in 5 
or 10 years? It's going to be that much more expensive. Labor is going 
to be more expensive. Energy costs are going to be more expensive. The 
raw materials are going to be more expensive. Cement is going to be 
more expensive. Steel and brick are going to be more expensive. Go 
right down the line. Everything is going to be more expensive. And part 
of the problem with the Treasury is we don't have enough people 
working, paying taxes into the Treasury.
  So, to me, you get a twofer, and it's not like the project doesn't 
need to get done. This is not ``make work.'' This is something that 
needs to get done.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Let me give you an example.
  The American Public Works Association--these are people with the 
sanitation systems, the water systems and the like--estimate that 25 
percent of all of the fresh-treated water in our municipal water 
systems is lost to leakage, and they estimate, together with the EPA, 
that we need to spend over $300 billion immediately to deal with 
sanitation systems in the United States that are inadequate and $335 
billion in drinking water so that we have clean, available drinking 
water.
  One more point here: for every billion dollars we spend, you put 
28,000 people to work immediately. Those are the engineers, the 
draftsmen, the architects, the men and women who are operating the 
equipment, who are back-filling the ditches, laying the pipe. And if we 
use another strategy that we've developed on the Democratic side called 
Make It in America--if you use our taxpayer money to buy American-made 
equipment--then in your district, the steel mills begin once again to 
produce American-made steel, and all of the pipe and other equipment 
that's needed can be produced in America, using our money.
  I love your example of the 1 percent. There have been Democratic 
proposals--and in fact, the President talked about it here in his state 
of the Union--about creating an infrastructure bank. If you take that 
10-year or 15-year money that the government can borrow at a percent 
to, maybe, a percent and a half and put it in an infrastructure bank 
and then loan it to those cities and municipalities and counties and 
others that need to build these systems--well, let's say we borrowed a 
percent and a half and that you loaned it out at 1.6 percent--that's 
enough to pay that back. We circulate that money in our economy, we use 
that money to buy American-made products, and we get this economy 
moving.
  It's there for us. We can do this if only we'd put our minds to it. 
Set aside for a moment the deficit issue. I said for a moment, not 
forever. We know we have to deal with the deficit, but you cannot solve 
that deficit unless you have Americans working, and we can put 
Americans back to work.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And, I believe, unleash a new economy. I mean, we 
are strangling the economy right now because we're not making those 
kinds of investments.
  Again, when you look at our competitors--because I'm from northeast 
Ohio. We play a lot of football, and there's a scoreboard. America is 
not going to win every game, but we'd better be in a position in which, 
in the global economic competition, we are competitive, and we know 
what makes us competitive.
  I'm not saying it's all about making money. A lot of this stuff that 
we're talking about is quality of life. We won't get into health care 
and preventative maintenance or anything like that, but we have human 
beings in Virginia and in major towns who are stuck in traffic for 2 
hours in a commute in and out of a city. We're not investing in the 
high-speed rail, which would be another job creator and good for the 
environment and a new industry, and it would help develop and spread 
new technologies.
  So we are not leading right now. We have status quo. I hate to say 
this, but we have a lot of people who want it to be that way. They want 
the Congress to be dysfunctional because they don't necessarily like 
government. You don't have to be enamored with government, but you do 
have to recognize that there is a role to be played here.
  If you play sports and if you read the newspaper and watch the 
football team, you think it's the quarterback, it's the wide receiver, 
it's the running backs--it's the skill position people--who get all the 
press, but none of that works. Let's say that those people are the 
private sector, that they're the CEOs that we worship. Well, within 
that team there are linemen, and there are blockers and tacklers and 
linebackers, people who are in the guts of the game, on the front 
lines, making it happen so that this other stuff can happen.
  The infrastructure is the blocking and tackling. It doesn't make the 
headlines, but it does what needs to be done in order for all of the 
other stuff to work.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. You reminded me of my college football career at the 
University of California, Berkeley, where I was an offensive guard and 
a defensive tackle, blocking and tackling.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. So this resonates with you, yes.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Oh, it resonated with me just fine--along with a lot 
of bumps and bruises and cuts and the like.
  But this is the public-private partnership. This is the role of our 
government to make these critical investments in education, in 
research. In fact, one of the Make It in America agenda items is the 
extension of the research tax credit--a permanent or at least a long 
extension of it.
  Representative Carney has introduced House Resolution 905, which 
would extend that. We have been extending it 1 year at a time, but that 
doesn't give the businesses the opportunity to plan on a long extension 
or on a long period of time for research. For example, I was at 
Genentech in my district. They have a major biopharmaceutical program 
there--the biggest biopharmaceutical plant in the world. They conduct a 
lot of research, but the start-stop of the research and the development 
tax credit makes it difficult for them to plan long into the future.

[[Page H2235]]

So this piece of legislation, part of the Make It in America agenda, 
does that extension and gives this certainty to businesses.
  We also have the infrastructure bank being reintroduced by our 
colleagues here on the Democratic side. This is one of about two-dozen 
bills that the Democrats have introduced for the purposes of moving the 
economy by bringing the manufacturing back home. We also have the 
Patriot Corporations of America Act, by Representative Schakowsky from 
Chicago, that rewards companies when they bring the jobs back home. 
Previously and even today, American corporations can take a tax break 
for shipping jobs offshore. They don't get a tax break when they bring 
those jobs back home. We want to reverse that.
  There is a series of bills. I call the attention of Congress to these 
bills, the Make It in America agenda, so that we can once again Make It 
in America, not only make things in America, but Americans can make 
it--infrastructure, a critical element of this.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. When you look at manufacturing, which the R&D 
component leads to partnerships with, you have two problems. One is 
it's year to year, so you can't plan your long term, as you said. But 
at the same time, the budgets for the National Science Foundation and 
the National Institutes of Health have been inconsistent as well. Those 
are things that we need to ramp up. Those aren't huge money items, but 
those yield a lot of value.
  So extend the R&D tax credit; beef up the National Science 
Foundation; beef up the National Institutes of Health; beef up the 
research in the Department of Energy. Public-private partnerships. Lay 
that groundwork for the private sector. Help the private sector.
  We had a group of CEOs in last week who were in the semiconductor 
industry. They talked about the same thing, and they talked about the 
public-private partnerships and how that's needed for us to maintain 
our competitiveness here. These are good-paying jobs in upstate New 
York and other places, and these are the kinds of investments that we 
need to make. Again, we've got to get out of this mentality that every 
single thing that the government does is bad. There are some things, 
and it's the public-private partnerships that are going to ultimately 
lead the way for us.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Alexander Hamilton and George Washington had it 
correct: the American Government working with the private sector can 
make the difference.
  When we talk about infrastructure, we have an opportunity this year, 
Congress and the President, to make a huge impact on American jobs. We 
are going to rewrite, in this session, the Surface Transportation Act 
for America.

                              {time}  2000

  Mr. Rahall and I have authored a bill that we hope becomes part of 
that Surface Transportation Act, that simply says: as we spend the 
taxpayers' money--this is money that is collected from the gasoline and 
the diesel excise tax--that that money be spent on American-made steel, 
concrete, bridges, buses, trains, whatever.
  It can work.
  One quick example. In the stimulus bill, there was an opportunity for 
Amtrak to buy new locomotives, about half a billion dollars to be spent 
on these new locomotives. In that section of the law, one sentence was 
added that said, These must be 100 percent American-made. Nobody was 
making locomotives in America before that, but Siemens, a German 
corporation, one of the biggest manufacturers in the world, said, Oh, 
half a billion dollars? We can make locomotives. In America? Sure.
  In Sacramento, California, they opened a manufacturing plant. There 
are probably somewhere between 200 and 300 people working there today 
manufacturing 100 percent American-made locomotives. And on May 13, 3 
years after they began this process, the first 100 percent American-
made locomotive in probably more than a century rolls onto the tracks 
of America.
  We can do this.
  Mr. Rahall's bill, H.R. 949, will provide that opportunity, American-
made, using American taxpayer money. I also have another bill that does 
the same for solar and wind projects.
  We can do these things; we just need to put our mind to it and get 
past this business of austerity. We cannot solve this problem of 
American jobs with an austerity budget. We've seen it fail in Europe, 
and we see it failing here in the United States as the long-term 
unemployment continues to harm 4.5 million Americans that have been out 
of work for more than 6 months and another 3 million that have been out 
of work for more than a year. We need an investment strategy, a Make It 
in America strategy, an investment strategy in those things that create 
long-term economic growth.
  Mr. Ryan, I thank you very much for joining us this evening. If you'd 
like to wrap, and then I'll wrap, and then we'll call it a night.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I'd just add, lastly, that to me it's about 
exciting the country and getting the country excited about what the 
future of America is all about. Tax cuts for the top 1 percent of the 
people and austerity for the rest is not a vision for an exciting 
America that young people want to come into.
  The private sector is going to be a huge part of this, but there are 
things that we need to start doing here. Whatever the percentage is 
that the government's role is in investments, I don't know what that 
number is, but we're not doing it, and there's no aspirational vision 
to excite young people to say, Man, we're going to the Moon, or we're 
going to go energy independent, or we're going to have high-speed rail 
that's going to connect the entire country.
  I think the President has desperately tried to provide that vision, 
only to be pulled down to the depths by some of the folks here who I 
think have a completely different agenda, and that agenda doesn't align 
with the America that was built over the past century or so.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Ryan, I thank you so very much for joining us this 
evening.
  We're still the strongest, best country in the world. There's no 
other place like America. And if we begin acting like we can and are a 
strong, robust, building, growing, dynamic country instead of being 
weak and pulling ourselves back and saying, Oh, we can't do it; we 
can't do it--no, we can do it. We can build. We can invest.
  Every time we invest a dollar in infrastructure, we put Americans 
back to work and we give them an opportunity to take care of their 
family, to stay in their home, to provide for their children's 
education. When we do that, we create the foundation for future 
economic growth, whether it's education or research or building the 
infrastructure and making it in America. As we do these things, this 
agenda is the American agenda, the one that created this country.
  As you so well said when you opened here: It's the American history. 
It's there before us. We can do it. We must do it. We owe it to the 
American people.
  Mr. Ryan, thank you.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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