[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 15]
[House]
[Pages 19789-19792]
[From the U.S. 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 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

[[Page 19790]]

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 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.

[[Page 19791]]

  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 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

[[Page 19792]]

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 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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