Make It In America
Floor Speech
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Mr. Speaker, thank you for the opportunity here to discuss something that we have talked about now for almost 7 years. It is called infrastructure. It is called Make It In America. It is all about American bridges falling down. This is the bridge in Washington State as one approaches the British Columbia boundary, Interstate 5, the interstate that runs from the Canadian border to the Mexican border. And on this particular day, you couldn't get there because the bridge collapsed. Not unusual. All across America, there are tens of thousands of bridges that are in a state of imminent collapse, downright dangerous. But, hey, we don't have any other way to get across the river, so take your chances. After all, it is American infrastructure.
There was a lot of discussion in the last presidential campaign about infrastructure, a lot of hooting and shouting, and maybe in the months ahead some progress. Last year this Congress, together with the Senate and with President Obama's signature, passed a 5-year surface transportation bill. Good. Very good. However, there's not even enough money in it to maintain our bridges so that they don't fall down. So we need to get on with rebuilding America.
I could probably quote the words of the President-elect or the Democratic nominee who didn't successfully win that election, but they would all come down to the same thing: we need to build our infrastructure. And indeed we do. In doing so, we are going to put people to work, lots of people to work if we do it right.
Here is how you multiply the effect of infrastructure construction on the employment. There is no doubt, for every dollar we spend on infrastructure, we will grow the economy by a little more than $2, and we will put several tens of thousands of people to work if we spend a billion dollars or more. We know those statistics; they are out there, and they are true. But if you really, really want to grow this economy, and you want to bring manufacturing back to the United States, then you ought to pay attention to what we have been working on here for the last 7 years, and this is what we call the Make It In America agenda. Yes, that infrastructure is essential. But what if your tax dollars were spent on jobs in the United States, on American-made steel, American-made concrete, American-made rebars, structural elements of all kinds? What if your tax dollars were actually spent here in America rather than in that very sad, sad situation in California, in my California?
Oh, yes, let me put this up. This is an embarrassment. Oh, not this one. That one. You see, that is the San Francisco Bay bridge. It was completed about 4 years ago, 3 years ago now, and the original cost was somewhere around $1 billion or so. It actually turned out to be some $6 billion or more. But the thing that really, really was embarrassing is that the steel in that bridge was not American steel. It was Chinese steel. The toll dollars of those who cross this bridge for the next 50 years wind up in China, not in the United States, not in American steel mills, not in the pockets of American workers who are working those mills, and not in the pockets of the welders who put together the steel structures but, rather, in China's pocket.
Terrible embarrassment. Why did it happen? Well, they thought it would be about 10 percent cheaper. It didn't happen. It turned out that it was much, much more expensive. Why? Because the steel was of less quality, the welds weren't good, and the inspectors were Chinese and overlooked some of the problems.
Let me give you another example here. This is really embarrassing. For my California colleagues, please forgive me, but these are facts; and for all of us, pay attention. What happens when you build into a project, a buy America provision? What happens is American jobs and things are done well and things are done on time. The New York Tappan Zee bridge made with United States-produced steel, about a $3.9 billion total cost, and 7,728 direct American jobs as a result of that steel being American steel. On time, on budget, and made in America.
So here is the deal, folks. If, Mr. President-elect, you want an infrastructure program, if you want to bring manufacturing back to America, then you better pay attention to this, which is Make It In America. Use our tax dollars, your tax dollars, the American tax dollars on American-made goods and services, not on something from some other place. This doesn't violate trade agreements; and if it does, those trade agreements ought to be changed. This is about rebuilding the American manufacturing sector. Let me give you another example. Yes, one of my favorites. Another example, beyond the bridge, the Tappan Zee bridge, which is a very good example, and a very bad example, the Bay bridge, San Francisco Oakland Bay bridge. For those of you who don't know what a locomotive looks like, that is an Amtrak locomotive, 100 percent made in America. But America doesn't build locomotives anymore. Well, that used to be true.
Maybe a decade ago we didn't build locomotives. However, in the wisdom of this Congress and President Obama and the Senate, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed, otherwise known as the stimulus bill. In the stimulus bill, there was written a few tens of billions of dollars to build locomotives--let me put it this way, to buy locomotives for the Amtrak system. This one is an electric locomotive for the Northeast corridor here on the East Coast. Somebody somewhere in that piece of legislation--maybe it was a Democrat, maybe it was a Republican, maybe it was a staffer, an independent, I don't know, but somebody wrote into that provision for the purchase of Amtrak locomotives, about 70 of them, actually a little more than 70 of them, that they must be not 10 percent American made, not 20, not 30, not 90, but 100 percent American made so that every single thing on that locomotive had to be American made.
Well, the great manufacturers in the United States--General Electric and General Motors--and some foreign manufacturers looked at that and said: 100 percent American made? It doesn't work. They don't build locomotives in the United States anymore. How could you build 100 percent American made?
Well, this little German company called Siemens, one of the biggest industrial companies in the entire world, said: How many billions involved here? Lots of zeros, lots of billions. Seventy locomotives, 100 percent American made. We are a German company, 100 percent. How many billions was that? I will tell you what. We will do it. And Siemens did it. In the United States, they built that locomotive and about 60 some others in Sacramento, California, where there was no locomotive manufacturing plant until the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act became law and billions of dollars became available. That German company went to Sacramento, California, just outside my district where I spent more than 40 years representing the area, and said: We can do it. And they did it. And now they have contracts across this Nation to build in America not just locomotives like this but also railcars, light railcars, transit systems, and the like.
We can make it in America, and your tax dollars can actually be used to employ people in America and to build manufacturing systems in the United States if--and here is the key--in the months ahead, this Congress, working with the next President, actually decides that they are going to put into public policy that your tax dollars are going to be spent on American-made equipment.
Now, in that bill I talked about a little while ago, the FAST Act, which is a 5-year transportation bill, I and a few of my colleagues were successful in increasing by a little, teeny, tiny bit the American content on buses and light rail systems--not to 100 percent which is what I wanted, but from 60 to 70 percent. And that will be several thousand jobs over time across the United States. But we should be bold. If, as the President-elect says, he wants to rebuild American manufacturing, make America great again--which of us doesn't want that to happen--we all do--then I would suggest, Mr. President-elect and my Republican colleagues and my Democratic colleagues, that we build into any infrastructure bill two very, very important things. The first is that American taxpayer dollars will be 100 percent spent on American- made equipment, whether that is the steel for the wheels of the Amtrak trains, the structures for the bridges, or the concrete, whatever.
American-made. Your tax dollars spent on America.
So what are we going to do here? The second thing. I shouldn't forget this. There are those that would use this infrastructure legislation to further diminish the power of the American worker to stand together united and participate in achieving a fair wage. We must not allow this effort to rebuild the American infrastructure to be an excuse for eliminating the unions in the United States. We have seen enough of that. We have seen the effect of that. The diminution of the wages for the working men and women is directly parallel to the diminution of the labor movement in California and the United States. So, let's pay attention here. Men and women joining together, arguing and debating and standing for their rights and their wages and their working conditions is a time-honored and essential condition of the United States middle class and the working men and women, wherever they happen to be across this Nation.
As we go about this process of building America, of reinvigorating the manufacturing sector of the United States and making it in America once again, let us remember that there are key points that must be paid attention to. There is a term that was used in the California fields by our friends
from Mexico, and the term was, Si se puede; or, Yes, we can. We can make it in America. We can rebuild the American manufacturing sector.
We can strengthen American families financially and otherwise by doing these things, but only if we use your taxpayer dollars here in America and strengthen the buy-America provisions and no further diminution in the American labor movement. Yes, we can. Now, let's keep this in mind. It ought to be our motto. It ought to be the words by which we set our compass: to make it in America, use your tax dollars, buy American products, and strengthen the American family. Mr. Speaker, I have talked about this issue for the last 7 years, and
I have talked about this issue for about the last 17 minutes. I yield to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee), an incredible spokesperson for what is right in America and what is wrong.
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