[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 1]
[House]
[Pages 1112-1116]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         SOLUTIONS FOR AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Young of Indiana). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) 
is recognized for 30 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege and honor to be 
recognized by you to address you on the floor of the House of 
Representatives. It's also my privilege to be here to listen to the 
presentation of the gentlemen from essentially the east coast and the 
west coast present their version of solutions for the United States of 
America.
  If I can just take that, Mr. Speaker, and roll it backwards from 
bottom to top rather than top to bottom. I hear their concern--and I 
share concerns--about the loss of American manufacturing and the loss 
of American trade and the trade deficit that we do have. I hear the 
advice, which is we should have wise public policies that we should 
advance going forward that would be good for American manufacturing, 
good for American trade, that would bring about the refurbishment and 
the renewal of American manufacturing and bring about a balance in 
trade and perhaps a surplus in exports, which is good for this country 
because we would rather collect IOUs than issue IOUs.

[[Page 1113]]

  I agree with the gentleman on both of those points, and I suspect we 
don't agree on how to get there to those points, Mr. Speaker. But I 
would make this point, that the United States has been a very strong, 
industrial Nation. In fact, at the end of World War II, we were the 
only industrialized nation in the world that had an established, 
globally competitive industry that had not been devastated by the war. 
We had a surplus of exports because here in the United States we could 
produce things, we could make things, we could export them to the rest 
of the world, and we did. We did it with military supplies. We did it 
with all kinds of industrial supplies. The United States of America was 
the industrial powerhouse of the world. Much of the rest of the 
industry had been destroyed, and we had built ours up in that period of 
time in order to supply the global World War II war effort. So the 
United States' industry was the preeminent industry in the world.
  Why was it?
  Because of the reasons I've said, plus we were competitive. We had a 
wage and a salary and a benefit package that was competitive. We had 
American workers that were more productive than any other workers in 
the world. We had a well-educated workforce. We had a work ethic. We 
had a work ethic where we took great pride in being able to go to work. 
If we punched the clock, we produced more per hour that we were out 
there on the floor of that factory than anybody else in the world 
because of a number of reasons: American ingenuity, American 
industriousness, and America's work ethic. We did those things, and we 
set the standard for the world. That carried us beyond World War II, 
through the fifties, through the sixties, through the seventies, into 
the eighties, and actually into the nineties.
  Over a period of time, as the gentleman's charts show, America's 
industry began to lose its competitive advantage with the rest of the 
world, and the rest of the world began to catch up.

                              {time}  1850

  I saw the signs of that. I saw the signs of it in the fifties, when 
we would get close to New Year's--and just think of Japan, Japan 
devastated in World War II. A lot of their production facilities were 
in homes, not in factories. And they had factories too. And they were 
bombed, and they were burned, and they were destroyed, and the tragedy, 
all that is part of history that I don't care to address here tonight, 
Mr. Speaker.
  But in the aftermath they needed to start up something. They needed 
to produce goods and services that had a marketable value, both in 
Japan and abroad, and they did. And the things that showed up here were 
paper goods, little things like when it came time to celebrate New 
Year's, there would be a little Japanese whistle that would blow out 
like the tongue of the dragon and roll back up again. That way we got 
those paper products coming from Japan because that's what they could 
do. They could make them. They could produce them. They could sell 
them. They could make a little money selling those things to Americans. 
And that would be in the fifties.
  In the early sixties, what came along? Well, transistor radios. And 
there would be the Toshiba radio, Japanese-made, portable transistor 
radio that you could carry around with you out on the farm and listen 
to the radio. How about that? What an idea of an invention.
  I didn't mean that that was a Japanese idea. It was a Japanese-
produced idea that could compete with the American production. And so 
they sold radios, made in Japan, into the United States, and a lot of 
young American kids carried those Toshiba radios around, and other 
portable radios, in order to listen to rock music of the time. They 
didn't have talk shows at that time, not that I remember anyway.
  And so slowly the Japanese began to ramp up their industry. They went 
from paper toys to radios, to optical equipment. Some of the best 
optical equipment in the world was produced in Japan. It still is, for 
that matter. And so they made binoculars and cameras, and they created 
a culture of people that love their cameras, and they evaluate those 
cameras made in Japan and how they compete with the rest of the world. 
And if you watch the Japanese tourists, they're here using their 
cameras on a regular basis.
  Now, all the ways they've ramped up to be able to compete with the 
rest of the world, here we sat in the United States thinking that 
somehow or another this wave that we had caught would forever carry us, 
and our industry slowly began to atrophy, slowly began to lose its 
competitiveness.
  And it reminds me of a study that was done by a Russian economist who 
was commissioned by Lenin back in the second decade of the 20th 
century, when Lenin decided that he wanted to find an economist who 
would prove that capitalism would eventually expire, that it was a 
self-defeating economy. So he hired an economist, or ordered him to 
produce a product, and his name was Kondratiev.
  Well, the economist Kondratiev put together the theory that Lenin had 
directed him to produce, which is that capitalism would expire, that it 
was self-defeating, that even though it might have brief bursts of 
success, eventually that it would run out of energy and it would expire 
and diminish and, essentially, that would be the end of the wave of 
capitalism.
  So Kondratiev sat down, and he chartered the free enterprise economy 
going clear back to the 18th century and earlier, and he tracked 
unemployment, gross domestic product, the output of the nations, and 
followed the industries. And when he tracked this cycle of capitalism 
in the effort to prove his charge that had come from Lenin, it was 
this: That yes, capitalism does decline, that the capital investment 
and the unemployment and the GDP of the countries that have free 
enterprise economies does diminish, but it diminishes down to a point 
where it regenerates itself again.
  And when looked at, and this was a study that was back in the dusty 
volumes at MIT University and much forgotten about until there was a 
computer study that was done, and somebody remembered that they had 
read Kondratiev's study that was back in the annals at MIT. Now, they 
went back and dusted it off and compared it to the modern computer 
analysis which now is a generation old, and they concluded that the 
computer analysis of the cycles of capitalism matched that of 
Kondratiev, whose theory was this: that we have a 52-year cycle.
  Now, I don't stand on that it's 52 years or 75 or 25 or any year 
other than that. But the theory that he uses to explain his 52-year 
cycle is instructive to all of us, and that's this: That when you hit 
the bottom economically, when your GDP has bottomed out, when your 
unemployment rate is at the top, and when your capital investment is at 
the bottom, you look around, as a society, a culture, and economy, and 
you think we have to do something. What are we going to do?
  And the psychology of that is that all of us sitting at the bottom of 
the economic cycle, with high unemployment, low GDP and low capital 
investment, we see that if we keep doing the same thing over and again, 
we're going to end up with the same result. And we don't like where we 
are. We don't want to be where we are in 4 or 5 or 10 or 20 years or a 
generation or two, so what will we do that's different?
  And I've lived through this a time or two, especially during the farm 
crisis years of the eighties, when I saw that land values were 
spiraling downwards to perhaps as low as a third of what they were just 
a few years before, market prices going downwards the same way. We rely 
on rain. It couldn't rain. The markets didn't produce the value for the 
crops that could be raised, and the land values went down. Everything 
was spiraling downwards.
  But what was going on was the manifestation of Kondratiev's theory 
springing up, and people who had no immediate hope economically began 
to put together a strategy for the long term so that we would have a 
successful economy. And it matched almost perfectly with Kondratiev's 
theory, the Russian economist's theory, which is that when your 
economic cycle reaches

[[Page 1114]]

thebottom, and everything is sitting down here with the low capital 
investment, high unemployment, low GDP, people are looking for a way to 
solve those problems. So their creativity kicks in and they begin to 
think and talk and dream and pray about what kind of ideas can come to 
fruition to reverse the cycle, the downward cycle that they are in.
  And so they begin to come up with new inventions, and they come up 
with new efficiencies. They come up with new business models. And as 
these ideas are generated, the ideas have to catch the kind of energy 
that can attract capital.
  Now, there's not as much capital in a low economy as there is in a 
high economy, but there's much more demand for it. And so you go out 
with your ideas and you market them, and you attract the capital to 
generate these ideas.
  This is what we did at the beginning of the dot-com bubble. If you 
remember, we learned here the creativity of a bad economic cycle was a 
contributing factor to developing the microchip and the ability to 
store and transfer information more effectively and more efficiently 
than ever before. And thus was born the dot-com bubble, the creation of 
the boom of the dot-com.
  And that was, once investors saw that ability to store and transfer 
information more effectively, more efficiently than ever before, they 
began to invest in it because they believed that transferring that 
information, storing and transferring it, turned into a profit share. 
So they invested their capital, and the profit share began to get 
injected into the dot-com, and the dot-com bubble was born.
  Now, the mistake with the dot-com bubble was just an adjustment in 
investment. But what really happened was there was an overexuberance in 
investment during the dot-com bubble years, and those were the years 
that the middle of the nineties were the beneficiaries of. The 
overexuberance in investments reflected the understanding of the 
investment community, the attraction of capital to these dot-com ideas, 
these creative ideas, to store and transfer information more 
efficiently than ever before.
  The creativeness of that was not regulated by this realization that 
storing and transferring information didn't necessarily translate into 
profit; that it had to create efficiencies in order to be translated 
into profit. So we had an overexuberance in investment. The dot-com 
bubble began to swell. And when, under the Clinton administration, the 
Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, that was the 
lance that pierced the dot-com bubble. The dot-com bubble collapsed.
  But the growth that came was the growth that came from the 
understanding that we had created an ability to be more efficient than 
ever before, and the adjustments were in the aftermath.
  Well, that fits exactly within Kondratiev's theory. We had hit the 
bottom economically. The creative people were looking around for 
something that they could do to change that paradigm. And what they 
came up with was the microchip and the other tools of software that 
allowed us to store and transfer information more efficiently than ever 
before, and being able to do that caused people to invest more, start 
new businesses, to transfer efficiencies around the country, and to 
increase our efficiencies.
  If you think for example, just in the trucking industry, the software 
packages that would allow truck dispatchers to click the mouse rather 
than make a judgment decision and send a truck to Portland that could 
drop a load off there and go to Seattle and circle back through Montana 
and drop off a load and come back to the warehouse in, say, Des Moines, 
for example. Many more efficiencies were created by software packages 
that made the decisions instead of fallible mortals that were using 
judgment calls while they were under stress on the fly.

                              {time}  1900

  All of those things fit back to Kondratiev's theory, his theory that 
during hard economic times you would generate ideas. Some of those 
would be good ideas. The good ideas would attract capital. The capital 
would be invested. The invested capital would bring about new 
technology. The new technology would bring about increased 
efficiencies. Increased efficiencies increase productivity. Increase 
the GDP, the gross domestic product, increase GDP. Of course it was 
good for the wealth of the Nation. And once you reached the apex of 
growth in the GDP, you ended up with a sense of success, a sense of 
complacency where we have arrived, we have invested our capital, we 
have invented our new methods to produce more goods and services more 
efficiently than ever before, and we've translated that into profits. 
Now, let's just keep this ball rolling down the road.
  As you keep the ball rolling down the road--you don't realize it at 
the time, but the complacency of the continued day-to-day success 
brings about that idea of let's just hold on. Let's not create new. 
Let's just ride this out. And societies, economies, cultures ride out 
the successes. When they ride out the successes--if competition doesn't 
catch you first from a foreign country--eventually those successes are 
riding on the capital investment of decades gone by, and the 
efficiencies diminish in proportion to the depreciation of these 
capital investments and also in proportion to the creativity of the 
competing economies. When that happens, you don't know it, but you're 
going downhill.
  I think of a poster that I saw in a friend of mine's house years and 
years ago. It is a picture of a little boy sitting on a tricycle, and 
he has his hands on the handlebars and his feet up off the pedals. He's 
got a big grin on his face, and his hair is blowing back behind his 
head. Underneath the poster picture, it says: If you're coasting, 
you're going downhill.
  Mr. Speaker, there are many economies in the world throughout history 
that have reached the apex of their growth and they have decided they 
like where they are. They get complacent and they begin to coast. If 
they are coasting, they are going downhill. Each economy, each society, 
each culture gets to that point where they start to coast and they go 
downhill. The societies and cultures that see it a different way, that 
understand that you have to constantly be innovating, you have to 
constantly be creating, you have to constantly find a way to be more 
competitive, they are the ones that show up in the Super Bowl of the 
global economy.
  When I listen to my colleagues from the east coast and the west coast 
talk about what's wrong and what we need to fix and we need 
manufacturing jobs and that we've exported these jobs overseas, I would 
say to them, you've been advocates for the policies that are 
protectionism. You tried to protect the union jobs in the United 
States. You've opposed the free trade agreements that we've negotiated 
with foreign countries, including South Korea, Panama, and Colombia. 
And just being the voices of the unions that you represent, you have 
insisted that we have trade protectionism and that the working 
conditions and the jobs and the benefits packages that are negotiated 
in places like Colombia or South Korea be similar to those that are 
negotiated here in the United States.
  Mr. Speaker, we can't change the policy in South Korea; we can't 
change it in Colombia; we can't change it in Panama; and we can't 
change it in places like China or other places in the world. They are 
who they are, and they will compete within the limits of their ability 
to produce. If we have policies that diminish our ability to compete, 
then we are going to have a lower market share, and no amount of 
Congress posturing itself for the people that write campaign checks is 
going to change that competitiveness. We've got to be competitive.
  What would I advocate? What is my solution for this? I could go down 
through the list. They talked about the American Dream and they talked 
about trade agreements, and they talked about manufacturing jobs and 
exporting our jobs overseas and the export of American manufacturing to 
China. They talked about trade protectionism and they want to reignite 
the

[[Page 1115]]

American Dream. So do I. I would like to think that it still burns. It 
burns based upon American liberty, American freedom, American 
opportunity. And what makes this country great would be a wonderful 
discussion to have between Democrats and Republicans here in the United 
States Congress. We seldom have any discussion like that.
  What makes this country great? What are the underpinnings that has 
grown this country into the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world? 
Yes, we have our contemporary troubles. We remain the unchallenged 
greatest Nation in the world economically, culturally, militarily, 
politically. We're the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world.
  Why?
  I challenge my colleagues to embellish the things that I'm about to 
say, but I would say this: We have God-given rights, God-given liberty. 
This is not a manifestation of Steve King and the modern world in 2012 
telling you something right now. This was a deep conviction of the 
American Founders that we have rights that come directly from God. We 
get our rights from God. We don't get them from man. We don't get them 
from government. If government gives us rights, then who are we, if 
government decides to take our rights away, who are we to complain? 
They are the all powerful. They are the omnipotent, the government.
  Our rights come from God, and our Founding Fathers all knew it and 
they signed off on the Declaration of Independence. We're endowed by 
our Creator with certain unalienable rights. These are the rights that 
are the foundation of American vigor. Think about the breadth of what 
this means.
  America has received immigrants from donor nations all over the 
world. I believe every nation in the world. Why do they come here? 
Because they are inspired by the American Dream, the image of the 
Statue of Liberty--not necessarily the inscription, but the image of 
the Statue of Liberty. It says all of you who come here legally into 
the United States have an opportunity to access theAmerican Dream. When 
you access the American Dream, you have an obligation to leave this 
country and this world a better place than it was when you came. And 
into that bargain is this: God-given rights.
  We are the only country in the history of the world that has been 
founded upon that principle. Others might aspire to it, others might 
look across the ocean here to the United States and aspire to God-given 
liberty, but this is the only Nation in the world that is founded upon 
it. And the beacon that comes out of the Statue of Liberty, the beacon 
of that liberty, itself, is what attracts people here to the United 
States. When they get on that ship or on that plane, or whatever their 
method of transportation is to legally come into the United States, 
they come for the dream. They are attracted by the freedom of speech, 
the freedom of religion, freedom of press, the right to keep and bear 
arms, the protection against double jeopardy, to be tried by a jury of 
your peers, to have property rights.
  There is a State's right component of this that devolves these powers 
down to the States so each State can be a laboratory; and the Federal 
Government is to be a hands-off minimalist government, not an all-
powerful, omnipotent government.
  Mr. Speaker, that vision, that attraction, that magnetism of American 
liberty brings people from all over the world here to the United 
States.
  Who does it bring?
  We have the visa lottery, and even that gets a better cross section 
of the global humanity than you would have if you just went out and did 
a random selection of 6-plus billion people on the planet and brought 
50,000 in under the visa lottery. At least those that sign up for the 
visa lottery have a dream: They want to come to America.
  And 50,000 a year get lucky and cash in on the visa lottery. I think 
it is a bad policy. And you add the visa lottery to the family 
reunification plan and a number of other plans that we have, and 
anywhere between 93 and 89 percent of the legal immigrants in America 
are not measured by their merit, not measured by their ability to 
contribute to the United States; they are measured simply by their 
ability, their desire to come here, or if they have a family member to 
come and join, or if they got lucky in the visa lottery, or if they 
happen to receive asylum as directed by the Secretary of State or some 
other method.

                              {time}  1910

  But we only have between 7 and 11 percent of legal immigration where 
we actually set the criteria here in this country. The Constitution 
says that our job is and that Congress has an authority to establish a 
uniform form of immigration. Well, ``uniform,'' to me, would mean a 
standard for everybody who comes into the United States, and I would 
set that policy to reward those people who could most contribute to the 
United States of America.
  Why wouldn't you have an immigration policy designed to enhance the 
economic, social, and cultural well-being of the United States?
  That's the logic and the rationale that we had when the Constitution 
was drafted and when it was ratified. It should be our logic and our 
rationale today, Mr. Speaker.
  But what's good? There are many good things about our immigration 
policy, but what's good?
  In particular, it is that it has attracted the cream of the crop of 
every donor civilization on the planet. Every country that contributed 
immigrants to the United States has sent us their dreamers, their 
doers, their workers--those people who wanted to access the American 
liberty and develop out the American Dream.
  So, when you think about America as being an appendage of England or 
Scotland or Ireland or Italy or Ethiopia or Colombia or any other 
nation on the planet, we're not an appendage of that. We're the country 
that set up the filter, that screened out those also-rans--those people 
who had only a mediocre dream--and let through that filter people who 
had the exceptional dream, the dream that gave them an exceptional 
energy, an exceptional vision, an exceptional desire to come here and 
add to American exceptionalism.
  American exceptionalism is built upon those liberties, those rights--
the freedom of speech, religion, the press, to keep and bear arms, the 
protection from double jeopardy, property rights, States' rights, to be 
tried by a jury of your peers. The list goes on. It's all of those 
things, and free enterprise capitalism is an essential component.
  If you want to be naturalized into the United States and if you want 
to study for the naturalization test, then you can use the flashcards--
the glossy flashcards put out by CIS, Citizen Immigration Services--to 
study in order to become a naturalized American citizen. They have 
these little flashcards. You look at them, and on one side, it will say 
a question such as: Who is the Father of our country? Snap it over and 
it says--we all know the answer, Mr. Speaker--George Washington. Then 
you pick up the next card, and it might say: Who emancipated the 
slaves? Snap it over: Abraham Lincoln. The next card: What is the 
economic system of the United States of America? The President might 
flunk this, but the answer is--snap it over--free enterprise 
capitalism.
  Those are principles that give us American vigor. When you look at 
the American vigor and the component of that and at the American vigor 
that comes from a filter, the filter of the difficulty of legally 
coming into the United States that skimmed the also-rans out and 
skimmed the global vigor in and redirected them into the United States, 
we have this saying: The dreamers came to America. The doers came to 
America. We are an American vigorous civilization and society of people 
who came here because they wanted more opportunity than they had in the 
country that they left. There was only one place they could go that had 
the opportunity that matches that, and it was the United States of 
America. They came here to do, and they did. They came for religious 
freedom. They came to raise their families. They came to leave this 
country a better place than it was, and they succeeded in all of that.

[[Page 1116]]

  Mr. Speaker, the United States of America is the unchallenged 
greatest Nation in the world because of the fundamental principles, the 
fundamental rights, the fundamental American liberty--that exercise by 
dreamers and doers who stood on principle, who came here for religious 
freedom, for economic freedom, for property rights, for all of the 
things that are listed and laid out in the Bill of Rights. They were 
not just a mediocre cross section of the global population. They were 
the dreamers, the doers. The vigor of the planet came to the United 
States of America, and this vigorous American character, culture, and 
personality is unsuitable for the nanny state. It's unsuitable for the 
nanny state. The nanny state cannot be used and should not be used to 
oppress a free people--a people of vigor, a people of personality, a 
people of can-do spirit.
  Yet here we are with what happened in the last Congress. The ruling 
troika imposed upon us Dodd-Frank, ObamaCare, and they tried to impose 
upon us cap-and-tax. All of them should be rejected by a vigorous 
American people who will regulate themselves, who will moderate and 
control themselves, who will set their own moral standards, and who 
need to have those standards implemented and enforced at the closest 
level to the people as possible. That's the cities, the counties, and 
the States, not the Federal Government, Mr. Speaker.
  So I think it's important for us to realize and recognize that the 
American people are a unique race of people, that we are not like 
anyone else on the planet. We may not look like anyone else, but 
underneath whatever those looks might be of your idea of what a cross 
section of Americans are is an American vigor, an American personality, 
an American culture, a common sense of history, a can-do spirit, people 
who are members of the society and the culture and the civilization of 
the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world. We derive our strength 
from free enterprise capitalism, Judeo-Christianity, Western 
civilization. That's the core of America, the vigor of America, and 
that's what we must continue to protect, regrow, and refurbish.
  Mr. Speaker, I am aware that the clock is winding down, and whether 
there is another speaker who is about to arrive, I have more in me, but 
I would pause for a moment to receive my instruction from the Speaker.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman has 30 seconds remaining.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. In which case, Mr. Speaker, I would recap this with 
my gratitude to the American people: We are here. We are putting a mark 
in place for posterity, and posterity watches us today. They're 
inspired, and they're informed by the actions of this Congress and by 
the actions of the President.
  As I watch what unfolds here in the continuing growth and dependency 
and in the growth of the regulatory class in society and as I think 
about the growth of the nanny state--the nanny state that seems to 
think that it can be the protectorate for all of us and that somehow we 
can't make decisions for ourselves and for our well-being--Mr. Speaker, 
yes, we can, to quote the President, but not in any foreign language 
like ``si se puede.''
  Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate your attention and the 
opportunity to address you here on the floor of the House of 
Representatives.
  I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________