[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 12962-12965]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                   A DISCUSSION ABOUT JOBS--Continued

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Ms. Fudge). The Chair recognizes the 
gentleman from California.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Please continue.
  Ms. LORETTA SANCHEZ of California. As I was saying, there are four 
basic things that you can do to increase the productivity of your 
people, to increase innovation, if you will, of our Nation. The first 
is to educate your people. We have been putting money into that, 
including the GI Bill that we passed over a year ago. Health. If your 
workers aren't healthy, they can't go to work. So the health care 
reform. Incredibly important. Transportation. How do you move people 
and goods? That was part of the Recovery Act, when we said, let's build 
high speed rail; when we said, let's put in systems of water and 
sanitation that work for our people. And, number four, communication, 
investing in innovation and communication for people; in broadband that 
we've been putting across our Nation.
  So that is the way we increase the productivity of our people. I have 
to say that on this side, on the Democratic side, even though people 
have been saying that we have been deficit spending, I say to them, 
anytime that you can invest in the American people, the American people 
will pay you back four or five or tenfold on that investment.

                              {time}  1720

  So I am again proud to stand here with you and talk about the 
accomplishments of this Congress.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Let's turn to Ohio, and we will continue on with the 
story of jobs and what it means in our local districts.
  Mr. WILSON of Ohio. In addition to supporting those that are out of 
work with unemployment benefits, we need to support small business so 
that they can create more job opportunities for our workforce.
  Why aren't small businesses hiring? On NPR this morning, one small 
business owner said it as clearly as anyone can say: Small businesses 
are not hiring because they don't have to. We need to create an 
economic environment that makes it necessary for small business to 
hire.
  As we all know, 60 to 80 percent of the new jobs come from small 
businesses. Most Americans get their first jobs at a small business. I 
know I did. And the small businesses on Main Street are the ones that 
will lead our economic comeback, not the big businesses on Wall Street.
  So what can we do here in Congress to help small business? Access to 
credit is one of small business's biggest challenges. For small firms 
to play their job-creation role, they need the right tools to work 
with, and without the access to capital, small businesses have a tough 
time staying afloat. According to the SBA, without access to affordable 
credit, small enterprises are twice as likely to fail compared to 
businesses that can find credit. They must be able to access capital to 
be able to get their new venture off the ground or expand their 
operations.
  Given how tight credit markets are, that is a challenge that every 
business in every community is encountering. That is why Congress has 
taken steps to address these problems.
  Legislation that Congress passed in February strengthened the SBA 
lending programs and made them even more usable for small business. 
This important new law does a number of things to help small business. 
It provides interest-free loans of $35,000, giving that shot in the 
arm, the immediate cash to cover existing business obligations.
  It makes it easier for small business owners to get small business 
SBA loans, and that is cutting away much of the redtape. So many people 
have stayed away from SBA because of the redtape that has been cut back 
significantly or eliminated in many cases.
  This will reduce the cost of loans. It helps small firms raise equity 
and capital. In total, the new law will generate $21 billion in new 
lending and investment for small business.
  These programs, when paired with existing programs at the Small 
Business Administration, will help business to continue and America's 
small business weather the storm and lead us back to prosperity.
  In addition, I support the Small Business Lending Funding Act. The 
bill

[[Page 12963]]

would boost funding to small business by investing capital in community 
and smaller banks. The more that participating banks increase their 
total loans to small business, the more favorable the terms become.
  Finally, I also support the Small Business Jobs Tax Relief Act. It is 
a companion measure to the Small Business Lending Fund that will help 
small business grow and create new jobs through, number one, 100 
percent exclusive of small business capital gains, small business 
penalty relief and increased deductions for startup expenditures.
  Again, I would like to thank Congressman Garamendi of California for 
convening this session, and I am happy to be with you and share with 
you some of the problems and issues and solutions we have in Ohio.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. I thank you so very, very much for raising the 
critical role of small business in creating jobs. It is where many of 
the jobs are created, as you so correctly stated.
  You also referred to two bills that passed this House, H.R. 5297, 
which was the small business lending program, and it did all of the 
things you said. There is actually $30 billion in that that would be 
available to community banks to deliver loans to small businesses, $30 
billion made available to them.
  There is also a requirement that they would have 10 years to pay back 
those funds. So it would go on the books of the bank as a loan, but it 
would be a long-term loan so that they would have the capital. I am 
told by the small businesses in our area that they were able to get $1 
million of capital, which this provided up to $30 billion to small 
banks. If they could get $1 million of capital, they could then make 
$10 million of loans. So there is that kind of leverage involved here.
  That bill passed this House with 98 percent of the Republicans voting 
no. Now, I don't know how many times I have sat here on the floor and 
listened to our colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle talk 
about their support for small businesses. But here where they had a 
concrete chance to help community banks and small businesses, 98 
percent of them voted no.
  You mentioned the small business tax incentive program, $3.5 billion 
of tax incentives for small businesses to specifically help small 
businesses weather the storm. It also granted tax relief from penalties 
that they may have had from mistakes that were made in the past. Again, 
a bill specifically designed to help small businesses.
  Ninety-seven percent of our Republican colleagues voted no on that. 
So don't come to the floor and say you are for small businesses when 
you had a chance to vote for legislation that would specifically help 
small businesses.
  There is another one that just came to me. We actually passed it and 
it is a good bill, it is important for many reasons. But I got a phone 
call last Saturday from a friend who was--``was'' is the right word--
was a home builder in California. He built many homes, high quality 
homes, was deeply involved in making those homes as green as possible, 
large energy conservation in solar and the like.
  He said, John, you have got to make sure that the HOME STAR programs 
that provide an incentive for homeowners to upgrade their home so that 
they can install triple pane windows, insulation, the cash for caulker 
things. They are really important, because it gives the homeowner a 
chance to reduce their annual energy bill, whether it is heating in the 
winter or air conditioning in the summer.
  He said, beside that, it is my new business. It is my new business. I 
am not building homes for a while because of the market in the area in 
which he was working, but he said I am going to existing homes and 
giving them the chance to make their homes energy efficient. I can make 
some money, they will make some money.
  There are other programs that are out there that provide additional 
assistance such as tax credits, and I want to come to that in a few 
moments.
  So when that bill was on the floor, what happened? Where do you 
stand? Do you stand with homeowners and small businesses such as I just 
described, or are you standing for Wall Street?
  Well, let's find out. Ninety-three percent of the Republicans on this 
floor voted against the HOME STAR energy program. I don't get it. I 
don't get it. We are saving energy, helping us consume less energy, 
giving people an opportunity to work and homeowners an opportunity to 
reduce their energy bill.
  I don't know what that means in Ohio, but I do know what it means in 
California. It is a chance for a small contractor to change his 
business model and to move in a direction that is good for him, good 
for the homeowner, and good for America.
  Mr. WILSON of Ohio. I believe that we have seen examples of this back 
in my district in Ohio also. We have seen a roofing company that we 
just visited last week, and they have come up with a new type of roof 
that is a green roof that actually has vegetation growing on it. It not 
only keeps the inside of the building cooler, but it is much more 
pleasant to look at.
  Another option they had was a white roof instead of a second, and I 
was amazed. With that white roof, Congressman, you could hold your hand 
out like this and just feel the heat reflecting back off that roof 
versus going into the building. These are the type of energy 
efficiencies that we are going to have to look at as we move forward in 
our country to become the leader again.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. These are the kinds of jobs that really don't require 
a Ph.D. People can take these jobs that were working on the line in a 
manufacturing industry or working in the housing industry. They may 
already have some skills that are available to them. But there is an 
enormous, enormous potential here. And the other pieces of legislation 
provide for a tax credit to the homeowner to put in these systems. So 
we need to really move along on these kinds of things.
  I am going to just run through another series of bills here that are 
very important to us, I believe. Again, this is the Jobs For Main 
Street Act that creates jobs for firefighters, for teachers, and to 
rebuild highways and the like, extending health care benefits for those 
who had lost their insurance because of the downturn, something as 
sensible as keeping teachers employed, something as sensible as making 
sure that firefighters are still there.
  Yes, it is the Federal Government helping local governments. It is 
true. And it is a deficit issue. But what if we don't have teachers? 
What if there are teachers being laid off and the classroom size goes 
from 20 to 30? What about the next generation's ability to compete 
internationally, their educational opportunities are stifled? That is 
not a what-if. That is my daughter's classroom. She is a teacher, first 
grade. She has gone from 20 to 30.
  The economy is down. The State of California is in financial trouble. 
The Federal Government has the ability to help here, to keep people 
employed, teachers in this case, others in schools, and, more 
importantly, make the most fundamental investment, which is the 
investment in the education of our children.
  You may be seeing something like that in Ohio. I know it is a major 
problem all across this Nation.
  Mr. WILSON of Ohio. We are seeing that in Ohio, and we are working on 
our education. We are trying more than ever to get the reading programs 
going as best we can.
  What we found out, Congressman, is that when a child can read and 
comprehend, the science and math scores go up and the discipline 
problems go down. So the education and the development and work that we 
have going on in the State of Ohio is something that our governor has 
been very firm about, and is not giving up the fight for a better 
education for our children.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Well, these things are critically important.
  One more bill that I want to take up before I turn to what we can do 
next is a bill that dealt with the fundamental reason that the American 
economy crashed in 2007-8, and that was the meltdown of Wall Street.

[[Page 12964]]



                              {time}  1730

  The extraordinary greed, the games that were being played, the gamble 
that was being made with our money by Wall Street led to the collapse. 
Obviously, the housing industry, the subprime mortgage market, the 
collateralized debt obligations, the derivatives, all of those games 
were being played on Wall Street. For more than a year--almost 2 years 
now--this House, the Democrats, have fought to rein in Wall Street; to 
force Wall Street to operate with rigorous rules that hold them 
accountable and responsible. We finally succeeded late last year to 
pass a Wall Street Reform Act. It went over to the Senate. It took 
almost 9 months for the Senate to gestate a bill. Conference committee 
took place. The conferees met. The bill came to this floor. And we 
added a few provisions to the--the bill came to the floor and it passed 
with provisions that were added during the conference committee. A good 
bill. It does rein in Wall Street, does set clear rules. It makes it 
impossible for a bank to fail and for taxpayers to bail out a bank--a 
big bank. There are things in it that went beyond that. Providing 
opportunities for small banks. Some of the additional benefit to small 
banks. They were given a break so that the heavy-duty regulations that 
were imposed on the major banks were not imposed on the small banks.
  Where do you stand? Do you stand to rein in Wall Street and finally 
bring to heel the bankers that brought this Nation's economy to its 
knees and doggone near tanked the economy, putting us into a Depression 
equal to 1930? Do you stand with that kind of regulation or do you 
stand with the Wall Street bankers that said say, Oh, trust us. We'll 
never do it again.
  The Democrats in this House carried the burden of reining in Wall 
Street, setting in place the regulations, setting in place the rules of 
the road going forward, hopefully preventing, and I think will prevent, 
the kind of meltdown that we had. Our colleagues on the Republican side 
to a person voted ``no'' when it came time to discipline Wall Street. 
They voted ``no'' when it came time to discipline Wall Street. You know 
where you stand when you vote here in this House. In this case, do you 
stand with the regulation of Wall Street or let them continue doing 
what they did? It's clear where we stood as Democrats.
  Now, Representative Wilson, would you like to add to that?
  Mr. WILSON of Ohio. Yes, I would. Thank you. I believe that the other 
thing that needs to be said here, too, is Democrats stood strong for 
financial reform by making sure that we never get in the position where 
the taxpayers have to bail out a bank again. There's no such thing as 
too big to fail anymore. There are further amounts I would like to have 
seen done. But in order to get it through, we had to lighten up some--
--
  Mr. GARAMENDI. A compromise.
  Mr. WILSON of Ohio. Yes, some compromise. But that being said, I 
truly believe that now we have taken the risk away from the taxpayers 
having to pay for really the reckless gambling and things that went on 
with the derivatives and how they accounted for them and how they were 
able to be manipulated. And really oversight is now on Wall Street--and 
it needed to be there all along. I truly believe we would have not had 
the meltdown we had had it been there in the first place. It is there 
now, and it will continue to help us in the future.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. I was back in the district over the Fourth of July 
week and somebody said, Well, it's kind of like an NFL football game. I 
said, What do you mean by that? He said, Well, you used to play 
football at the University of California Berkley and you could have 
been in the NFL but you decided to go in the Peace Corps. I said, Yeah, 
it was a good decision. But what's the point here? He said, Well, you 
know, this Wall Street bunch, before your reform, it was like an NFL 
football game without any rules, and the referees were sent into the 
locker room. And you can kind of imagine what the outcome would be. 
Wild chaos and a lot of mayhem. He said, That's exactly what happened 
on Wall Street. The regulators during the Bush period stepped out of 
the room. The rules were not there to prevent the kind of excesses--if 
there were rules, there was nobody to make them obey it. And we wound 
up with the problem we had.
  Let's move to the future here. So what are we going to do next? In 
the financial reform, Wall Street reform, there was a provision, and in 
another bill that we passed earlier there was a provision that is 
extraordinarily important to the American worker. In existing law today 
and for the last couple of decades there's been a tax break for 
corporations who offshore jobs--a tax break that literally gives a tax 
reduction when an American corporation sends jobs offshore.
  You say, Excuse me, did I hear what you said, Congressman? You did 
hear what I said. What I said is, in the law today there is a tax break 
for sending jobs offshore. We have twice passed on this floor 
legislation that would end that tax break and annually restore to the 
American Treasury $14.5 billion that now sits in the popular 
corporations that have offshored American jobs. Must stop. It's got to 
be over. The Republicans voted with the corporations to keep that tax 
break in place. I'm not there. And I suspect you're not there, Mr. 
Wilson, either.
  So we need to make sure that that bill that's sitting over there in 
the Senate where the power of one senator can simply stop everything, 
that it is busted loose and comes back so that corporations--American 
corporations--no longer get a tax break when they send American jobs 
overseas. Issue one. Let's get with it, Senate.
  Secondly, this one really drives me crazy because this is really 
California. We've got solar in California. We started that in 
California. In 1978, I passed a law as a California State Senator that 
gave a tax break for the solar industry. The first in the Nation. And 
it started the solar industry. It also started the wind turbine 
industry in California. Right now, we're spending about $5 billion a 
year of tax money on buses; we spend billions of dollars supporting the 
solar industry with tax credits, some of which we've talked about; and 
the wind industry. We need, in my view, a law that says if it's our tax 
money, then it will be made in America. It will be used to buy 
American-made buses, trains, light rail. It'll be used to pay for solar 
panels and tax credits on the homes of Americans; panels and equipment 
that are made in America. It is, after all, our tax money. And with the 
windmills or the wind turbines.
  In my district, we have two of the biggest wind farm areas in the 
Nation. We've got the Montezuma Hills in Solano County, which I 
represent, and we have the Altamont Pass area in Alameda, and San 
Joaquin County. Many of the new turbines that are being put up are made 
overseas--and most of them are made in China. And I'm going, Wait a 
minute. We're giving them a tax credit, those companies that own these 
machines? We're giving them a tax credit to buy turbines that are made 
where? China? No way, no how. There ought to be a law. And I believe 
this Democratic Party and this floor is going to put such a law 
together.

                              {time}  1740

  I think we've got about 10 minutes left, and I just noticed a 
colleague from the great Midwest just arrived. Congresswoman Kaptur, 
thank you so very much for joining us. I know you and I have had 
conversations about jobs, and I know that your part of the country used 
to be manufacturing center one. I guess the two of you can debate that. 
But let's talk about these kinds of things. How do we restore American 
manufacturing?
  Ms. KAPTUR. Well, Congressman Garamendi, I just want to say I thank 
you so very much. You are from the State of California, a State that's 
about four times as large as ours, maybe five, with 53 million people. 
We have over 11 million people in Ohio, but we are a State that has had 
to grow our way forward, to build our way forward for so many 
generations. We really aren't federally dependent in the sense that we 
don't have gigantic bases. We do have Wright-Patterson Air Force

[[Page 12965]]

Base in the city of Columbus, our capital. But the rest of Ohio has to 
either mine--and Congressman Wilson comes from a part of our State that 
actually supplies so much of the coal that is shipped to our region and 
others. We either have to grow in regions like mine--I represent a 
major agricultural region that abuts Lake Erie's southern shore--or we 
have to manufacture. We don't really have any choice. So we have to 
create wealth, basically.
  And what's been happening over our country for many decades now is 
that we are amassing trillion-dollar trade deficits every year, which 
means all that spending benefits someplace else. Ten percent of the 
goods that are exported from China go to one company--Wal-Mart. They 
are a bazaar for Chinese goods.
  We look at what you have pictures of up there, vehicles and wind 
turbines. I was just through a part of my district where wind turbines 
are going up now. We'd like to manufacture them as well as deploy them. 
And we are the solar capital of the Midwest--Toledo, Ohio, and northern 
Ohio. We are one of three centers on the continent, actually. People 
don't realize that we've built that off of our glass industry, and it 
is a new age for us. In fact, the largest solar field in Ohio was just 
dedicated in Upper Sandusky recently, and I have bases in my district--
smaller bases, like the F-16 Fighter Wing and the 983rd Engineer 
Battalion and our Camp Perry--that have deployed solar fields.
  So we are trying to move our region into the new energy era, but it's 
tough. It's really tough because we are on such an unlevel global 
playing field. Other countries aren't open to our products. And there 
is no question that unless we reduce that trade deficit and stop 
outsourcing our jobs to China, Mexico, every other place in the world, 
we are not going to be able to create a strong middle class and 
maintain the middle class that we have today.
  So I want to commend you for doing this Special Order tonight. We 
know that our future lies in wealth creation, and it has to come from 
places like Ohio that have to stand on their own two feet and pull 
themselves up by their bootstraps.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. I thank you so very much, Congresswoman Kaptur, for 
joining us.
  The heart and soul of America's manufacturing sector was the Midwest, 
and Ohio at one point was the strongest part of America's manufacturing 
economy. I know it can be restored. And right here in this area with 
the rolling stock of America's transportation system, with the new 
technologies, whether they're wind or turbine, if we use our tax money 
to support these industries rather than to support industries that are 
located in China or other countries, I think we can then provide the 
kind of strength that will return to America once again in the 
manufacturing sector.
  We're nearly out of time, and this has been a great discussion. I 
just want to turn for a few moments to another colleague from 
California. We do think that we are the biggest part of the American 
economy. And a big part of it happens to be where Congresswoman Watson 
lives, which is the entertainment industry.
  Congresswoman Watson, I think we're out of time.

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