[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 5]
[House]
[Page 6377]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    RESTORING JOB GROWTH IN AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Louisiana (Mr. Boustany) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BOUSTANY. Madam Speaker, the United States is on an unsustainable 
path right now, an unsustainable course with massive debt, trillion 
dollar deficits going into the out-years, unemployment approaching 10 
percent, and this administration, since January of 2009, has enacted 
$670 billion in gross tax increases with more tax increases planned by 
this administration and the Democratic leadership of Congress. It's no 
wonder we have high unemployment and uncertainty all throughout this 
country with regard to the business climate.
  So what can we do? How can we correct this course? How can we restore 
American competitiveness for the 21st century? Well, I think there are 
three things we can do. First, let's cut wasteful, massive government 
spending. Let's give the American public confidence that we can get our 
fiscal house in order. Let's send a signal to the bond markets and to 
our foreign allies and competitors that we can act responsibly. Let's 
lay out a path for entitlement reform, which is causing severe strain 
on the Federal budget and leading to this deficit spending. Just laying 
out a corrective path will send a positive signal.
  Secondly, we can lower the corporate tax rate to make U.S. companies 
more competitive globally with regard to our trading competitors. Let's 
unleash American innovation. Let's get the American companies out there 
creating jobs again by lowering the tax rate for our corporations. 
Right now we have the second highest corporate tax rate in the world 
among industrialized countries. This makes us less competitive. This 
also means that companies that want to come to the United States and 
invest to create jobs here also have a high tax burden. So, therefore, 
if we want to create jobs, let's make this country competitive for 
investment coming in and for our companies going out to do investment. 
That's how we will restore job growth in this country.
  Also, one of the things we need to do with regard to tax policy is to 
make sure that we don't doubly tax our companies who are trying to 
compete against foreign competitors abroad because our companies 
competing all over the globe also create American jobs. If we doubly 
tax ours on top of having the second highest corporate tax rate in the 
world, well, it's no wonder we're not seeing the kind of job growth 
that is necessary. We're not going to see U.S. companies and the U.S. 
be competitive in this global market.
  And finally, the third thing: let's promote exports. Exports create 
jobs, good high-paying jobs. Now, the President has announced that his 
goal, his stated goal during the State of the Union, was to double 
exports by the U.S. over the next 5 years. Well, let's look at a little 
bit of history here for a moment. It took us 10 years previously to 
double exports. It required the completion of a round of negotiations 
at the WTO. It took implementation of NAFTA and 10 free trade 
agreements to be implemented to double exports. This administration has 
offered none of that so far.
  We have, currently, three free trade agreements pending that have 
been negotiated in good faith, and yet this administration and this 
Democratic Congress has failed to implement these free trade 
agreements. These are a win for the United States because those 
countries are already bringing goods into our country; we just have 
barriers in exporting to theirs. Why not lift those barriers? 
Implementing these free trade agreements will create good high-paying 
U.S. jobs.
  These three countries--Colombia, Panama, and South Korea--are markets 
that are ready for U.S. goods and services. So all we have to do is 
implement these agreements which have been negotiated in good faith. By 
failure to do this, what we're doing is sending a signal to our 
competitors and to other countries that the United States does not 
negotiate in good faith. That's a poor signal to send if we want to be 
competitive in this global market.
  Meanwhile, those three countries I just mentioned, Colombia, Panama--
let's just take Colombia, for instance. The European Union and Canada 
are both in the stages of implementing free trade agreements with 
Colombia. And what's happened? We've seen U.S. exports of agriculture 
products plummet just over the past year. At the same time, the 
European Union and Canada have also increased their exports to fill 
that gap. We are losing out. We are losing out on being able to export 
to Colombia simply because we won't keep our good faith negotiation and 
implement this agreement.
  The President has announced a national export initiative, but yet 
there have been no substantive steps to move this forward. Why not 
implement a small business initiative to help our small businesses 
export to Colombia? That's an immediate way to create jobs.

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