[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.
____________________