[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 29 (Wednesday, February 14, 2018)]
[House]
[Pages H1172-H1174]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         ECONOMIC REGENERATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2017, the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Fortenberry) is 
recognized for the remainder of the hour as the designee of the 
majority leader.
  Mr. FORTENBERRY. Mr. Speaker, you may remember this around the 
holidays. It was a television commercial that played quite frequently. 
It may still be on. But it shows a shelter for the poor and homeless 
around Christmastime, and men and women are entering from the cold 
wintry streets, and they are gathering under bright lights and sharing 
good cheer, and they are clearly benefitting from the holiday 
outpouring of charity and compassion and fellowship.
  But then the commercial shifts and the environment changes. It is a 
dreary downtrodden affair at this point. The new year has begun and the 
shelter is left darker and less full than its former ambient light, and 
laughter has dimmed into somber tones. All the while, a man is sitting 
at the piano in this emptying place singing, ``Don't You Forget About 
Me.'' The scene concludes with the adage: ``The season of giving ends, 
but the need remains.''
  Mr. Speaker, as our economy begins to recharge, giving more and more 
hope with more and more Americans gaining jobs, it is important, 
though, to continue to reflect on this still early stage of the new 
year. After some important budget battles here and a major tax reform 
piece of legislation, it is important to reflect on the proper balance 
between responsibility and charity, as well as those who continue to be 
left behind or forgotten.
  Americans are the most generous people in the world, and they also 
deeply value responsibility, and they know that a fulfilled life 
requires rewarding work. Unfortunately, unemployment and 
underemployment continue to hinder a faster economic recovery, causing 
much anxiety for persons and their families.
  According to a new survey from CareerBuilder, nearly eight out of ten 
Americans say they are living paycheck to paycheck, and our improving 
economic indices should not obscure this difficult reality.
  So to better help persons support themselves and one another in the 
full dignity of work, our next phase of economic regeneration must be 
an attempt to find the proper balance between right-sized government, 
responsibility to one another, and reasonable expectations that 
everyone can contribute something according to their means and their 
capacity. Everyone has something to give.
  As this recognition and economic regeneration kindles a new policy 
discussion, several guideposts should be kept in mind, such as ensuring 
enhanced opportunity and the erasure of what I call entrepreneurial 
impediments, along with efforts to address and mend a deep societal 
sense of brokenness.
  When persons are unemployed or underemployed, they can enter a 
downward spiral in their lives. Mr. Speaker, as we well know, 
Washington alone cannot create a humane economy that works for the 
many. Americans living together in community form the cornerstone of a 
vibrant market.
  A fuller answer to unemployment, underemployment, and this widespread 
lack of financial assets, along with the resulting loss of social 
capital, might be found in the idea that government and society should 
join in a movement for national solidarity, seeing work as a common 
endeavor for us all. After all, economics, in its essence, is not just 
a transaction; it is profoundly relational.
  A rightful discussion about the profound meaning of work also 
requires the right words. The overreliance in this body, particularly, 
on depersonalizing economic language, I think, is one reason that 
Washington can seem so disconnected and aloof from real communities and 
real people.
  At the end of the month, if a person can't pay their gas or a grocery 
bill, they are unlikely to care about GDP growth or arguments for the 
efficiency of globalized trade. In a similar way, recent news cycles 
are tracking the skyrocketing stock market valuations with some ups and 
downs of late. And this is all exceeding most expectations, 
particularly from the beginning of the year, but glowing green numbers 
and signals provide little reassurance to millions of Americans who are 
priced out of owning stock.
  Ultimately, Mr. Speaker, a lack of work, as well as a lack of 
assurance in the security of government guardrails and earned benefits, 
can take a life-diminishing toll.
  Mr. Speaker, I have many seniors who write to me and suggest to us in 
pretty clear terms that they aren't entitled to their own money. We 
throw the language around of entitlements, referring to programs where 
people set aside money into government savings programs or were given 
guarantee of healthcare. That is not an entitlement. That is something 
people worked for.
  Many persons with difficult jobs deserving of both dignity and earned 
benefits sometimes are those who are forgotten. I approached my door 
recently, Mr. Speaker, here in D.C. at my office, and there was a large 
crowd of men who had gathered, and they were all in camouflaged T-
shirts waiting outside.

                              {time}  1745

  All of us here experience a number of visitors from our home States. 
Sometimes, in my office, people have to stack up outside in the 
hallway, as we are trying to accommodate people.
  But as I got closer, I noticed that the front of these T-shirts that 
these men had on read, ``United Mine Workers.'' I thought, that is 
unusual to see Nebraskans wearing United Mine Workers T-shirts. But it 
turns out they were actually waiting for my neighbor, who is from the 
State of Kentucky. Nevertheless, I greeted these men, and we began a 
meaningful conversation about work and security and fairness.
  These men had spent their lives in hard jobs. I am sure they toiled, 
very proudly, to make a reasonable living for their families, but they 
all now showed real signs of physical fatigue. They were in Washington 
making a

[[Page H1173]]

plea for their pensions, which are facing dramatic reductions. A 
similar situation does exist in Nebraska for another group of workers.
  These people worked for a guarantee: that they would be provided 
for--when they could work no more. But, given a confluence of factors, 
their pensions face a dramatic shortfall, and, frankly, it is not fair.
  I lived for several years as a younger man in the area where these 
gentlemen had come from, in a town that had lost half of its population 
in 20 years, in what is called the old industrial Rust Belt, where the 
post-World War II economic boom built a thriving, stable community, but 
now where globalized supply-side theory has had its most dramatic 
degenerating economic effect. I said to one of these men, ``You know, I 
know where you come from,'' and one of the men and I hugged.
  Mr. Speaker, our country is in pain. Epic hurricanes and floods; 
escalating urban violence; an opioid epidemic among those self-
medicating their own mental, physical, and financial anguish; combine 
this with a broken healthcare construct, and the lingering after-
effects of a bitterly fought last electoral season have torn America's 
heart.
  In a vibrantly healthy society, though, there should be space for 
what I call marketplace fluidity and creativity and innovation. A 
person who has an idea and the drive should be able to pursue it. The 
benefits accrue, of course, to this person as the inventor, but also 
the buyer of those services, the community, and those who gave the 
effort in the building of this product or service.
  So a healthy economy is two things at once: it is individualistic and 
it is community-oriented at the same time. Innovation and competition 
can be disruptive, but they must be set within a fair set of rules.
  When a system stacks to the wealthiest, or is outsourced by faceless 
corporations in the name of advancing quarterly profits, exploiting the 
poor elsewhere and damaging the environment elsewhere, where there is a 
lax legal foundation and, therefore, an indirect subsidy to the means 
of production, and the externality costs are borne by persons elsewhere 
in the forms of shorter lives and the effects of pollution, it sets in 
motion not only difficulties in other places, but here--a loss of jobs, 
lost community cohesion, and a breakdown of life's stability. Tie this 
to the loss of the formative institutions of family life, faith life, 
and civic life, and we drift. We drift without a national narrative. It 
makes it much more difficult to respond holistically in the midst of 
tragedy to our greater challenges and problems.
  For a moment, I want to speak about a person who participated in one 
of my telephone townhalls. She told me she is an architect, her husband 
is an architect, and they were very interested in starting an 
architectural firm on their own, but they can't. Why can't they? They 
have the education, they have the drive, they want to be innovative and 
disruptive, they want to do creative work with their own two hands and 
take the risk necessary to provide something new and novel in the 
marketplace.
  They have a sick child. So by the time they go onto the individual 
insurance market and try to obtain insurance for themselves, knowing 
that they are going to have to pay the full deductibles and copays, 
that bill--and this was a little while back, I suspect it is higher 
now--the bill was going to be close to $30,000. So before they even 
open their door, they have an upfront cost of $30,000, just for a 
little bit of personal protection.
  So what happens? They stay put. They are tethered to institutions 
that may not be as gratifying to them. Society loses from their 
inability to take that risk and provide that product out in the market, 
because they are tethered, they are handcuffed, to a benefit called 
healthcare that a large institution can provide, but the small 
entrepreneur can't. This makes no sense.
  We have some specific ideas on this, and we are working to grow a 
bipartisan working group to make proper changes potentially in that 
individual insurance market, whereby people can pool together more 
easily, where there is a better type of major medical product out there 
that would be a lot less expensive, and, perhaps, using an idea that 
was embedded in the healthcare debate earlier this year, where the 
government provides a stabilizing reinsurance model so that the market 
can actually work within a certain bandwidth where the sickest person 
pays the same rate, but is protected from excess expense by a more 
direct government subsidy.
  This makes sense. Think about the entrepreneurial potential that then 
would be released, creating opportunity, more jobs, better products. We 
are constraining ourselves for no reason here.
  I hope that this chapter can unfold in the coming weeks, as some 
people of goodwill are trying to work through this, and there is 
significant interest, I feel, on both sides of the aisle. You just have 
to break through it.
  Mr. Speaker, we are also, from my perspective, living in a 
paradoxical age where we are more and more dependent upon big business 
for information flow and consumer goods, and, at the same time, we are 
more and more skeptical of this model.
  I was trained in an era where economic language was cast in terms of 
efficiency and optimization, economies of scale, production capacity, 
inputs, the free flow of capital and labor, and on and on, all the 
vocabulary of economic academic theory. These are analytical and 
mechanical terms necessary for understanding market function, but they 
lack a connection to any deeper purpose.

  Ultimately, a properly functioning market is a connector of 
community, a delivery mechanism for material well-being, and an 
opportunity enhancer for individual initiative and rewarding work. 
These classical economic expressions lack a deeper understanding of the 
ultimate purpose of production.
  I once asked a professor when I was young: Who does a normative 
analysis? Who asked the question, ``What ought to be?'' What 
institution is doing that?
  He said: No one.
  Mr. Speaker, you are a fairly young man. You know this as well. We 
are long past the age when working one's entire career in the same 
large corporation guaranteed security and well-being is finished. The 
current corporate construct is desperately driven and hopelessly 
fragmented by quarterly profit mandates.
  Short-term decisions overrule long-term strategy. While this is 
occasionally brought to heel by scandal and malfeasance, most 
multinationals are no longer tethered to a face or a place, so they 
pitch us on TV and print with caring images, and kindly deem us worthy 
to help with their chosen causes, and then major cities with major 
airports become the hub, and the rest of us have to just buy it.
  Now, lest I sound too critical, large businesses certainly retain a 
necessary space in producing certain types of goods and large-scale 
industrial products, and can provide exciting opportunity. That is all 
true and necessary.
  But I also think we are on the front end of something, Mr. Speaker. 
There is a hunger for the next economic trend to reorient around the 
revitalization of Main Street, including local foods, sustainable 
energy production, smarter services, and smaller scale manufacturing, 
recreating that long lost sense of place in our communities.
  Imagine a new urbanism of an economic ecosystem with friendly 
neighborhoods, nearby centers of smaller scale, microbusinesses, 
contextually appropriate architecture, and a burgeoning supply of 
easily accessible public space. We see this trend developing, and, 
frankly, it is very exciting.
  Now, we had a bill recently in which we took an important vote here 
on tax reform, and I believe this is going to help. I believe that tax 
reform legislation will help rebalance a number of business inequities, 
particularly for small business where most jobs come from.
  It is estimated that the average Nebraska family of four will receive 
more than a $2,000 extra benefit in their pocket from the immediate 
impact of the tax bill and the relief that they will get. And then over 
time, due to increased wages, that will translate into about a $4,000 
benefit.
  I think this is important because Americans need a break, especially 
working men and women trying to get a bit ahead and trying to provide 
for their family well. But for many, it is also harder and harder. As 
we said,

[[Page H1174]]

many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. That is not fully a Tax 
Code problem. It is the harsh reality of social fragmentation, downward 
mobility, the rising cost of living, and skyrocketing income disparity 
driven by inequitable globalization and concentrations of economic 
power. These forces have not fundamentally benefited us fully, and they 
have left millions of people behind.
  I think this tax reform measure is important because it particularly 
rebalances the perverse incentive to offshore.
  In addition to putting more money in the pockets of hardworking 
Americans, it does support the revitalization of Main Street and the 
return of the ``Made in America'' label.
  This legislation also provided a reasoned progress in an attempt to 
make the Tax Code simpler and fairer and to resolve this convoluted set 
of problems that overburdened people, families, and small businesses 
across the Nation. I think this is important because we are living in 
an age where we can't keep pushing the same policies over and over and 
expect them to fit into a 21st century architecture of well-being and 
successful living.
  Moving forward, I believe the source and the strength of the American 
economy will be in this new urbanism of small business in which 
entrepreneurs from village to city add value through small-scale 
manufacturing, innovative new products, or brokering in repair 
services.
  Now, we do anticipate a spike in the initial deficit from the tax 
bill, but we are already seeing a surge of revitalization and 
possibility of economic opportunity. Given this reorientation of the 
tax policy around the family, hopefully, with the entrepreneurial 
momentum, we will generate more jobs, earnings, and reverse this 
downward trend in small business formation. Less tax, more taxpayers, 
more revenue over time, that is the calculation.

                              {time}  1800

  As more opportunity appears, more persons should also be able to 
transition from important support mechanisms and systems into 
meaningful work.
  Now, this tax reform attempts to be sensitive to the needs of all 
Americans as it begins to push for a modernized revenue construct that 
no longer enables the complex, lawyered-up, quarterly-driven 
multinationals to unjustly benefit from low taxes abroad while taking 
advantage of tax loopholes here. It rebalances the perverse incentives 
to offshore. At the same time, it uses the carrot of lower corporate 
rates to bring foreign profits back to America, and we are already 
seeing the effect.
  So, on balance, this was a massive, historic, and necessary overhaul 
of our antiquated, harsh, and complicated tax system so that families 
cannot only get by, but maybe they can start getting ahead. And if we 
can combine this with a small business ecosystem of revived 
entrepreneurial momentum--and a part of that is the next set of 
policies, hopefully, that will be empowering with a new type of 
healthcare product that is stable for persons who do want to enter into 
the formation of their own small business now but are not empowered to 
do so--this will only strengthen this entrepreneurial revitalization.
  There is no way to calculate the held, pent-up benefit of unleashing 
this potential. Again, because we have tethered people to a benefit 
package based upon institutions that are able to afford it, we have 
drained ourselves, made ourselves weary from being able to unleash the 
fullness of the potential to create things with your own hands or your 
own intellect that are good for you, good for your family, and good for 
others. That is what we mean by a new small business ecosystem that has 
revived entrepreneurial momentum.
  Mr. Speaker, in the Middle East, the Jordan River flows into both the 
Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea. There is a difference between the two 
bodies of seas. One of them is devoid of life. Water flows in but 
nothing flows out. It is dead.
  Abundant life requires both giving and receiving, both charity and 
responsibility. An economy that is founded upon these strengths which 
we have discussed tonight, supported by a right-sized government and a 
dedicated, hardworking people, can only keep growing stronger. Then, 
maybe--maybe--we can say, don't you forget about me and that we will 
never forget about you.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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