Economic Populism

Floor Speech

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Mr. KHANNA. Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative Deluzio for his leadership and for convening this group and focusing us on an agenda of economic patriotism.

The reality is in this country, and as you know in western Pennsylvania, we have watched industry after industry leave the country for China and Mexico.

Western Pennsylvania won us our freedom. They produced more steel than Japan and Germany combined in World War II, and yet today we have got 4 percent of the world's steel. China has 50 percent of the world's steel.

Aluminum left, paper left, and textiles left. Town after town in this country was hollowed out since 2000, and 90,000 factories have closed. That doesn't just mean jobs leaving. We have all heard the stories of people whose families were destroyed. The reality is that these factories left and people faced suicide. One of the folks in Warren, Ohio, told me 13 people, because of these plant closures, took their lives or faced severe depression. Our country has watched for 50 years. Rosa DeLauro didn't watch. She was speaking out against these bad trade deals.

However, for most of American history in the last 50 years we have watched the hollowing out of these communities, and we watched wealth pile up in districts like mine in Silicon Valley and New York. My district has $14 trillion of wealth. The income inequality in this country soared.

So one of the things this group wants to do is to renew economic revitalization in advanced manufacturing in these communities and to have a real plan for new semiconductors, new robotics, advanced steel, advanced automobiles, and have new factories and new industry come up.

Now, the President and JD Vance understood that the country was hollowed out, and they understood that people were angry, legitimately angry, and they understood that the ship of America had a huge hole in it.

The problem is they get here and their plan to solve this is to hand the reins to a number of headstrong billionaires who are libertarians. I have known these folks. I have known Elon for 15 years. I don't know what Elon knows about Johnstown, Pennsylvania, or Farrell, Pennsylvania, or Youngstown. He is going to go out and make deals with the UAE, and they are supercharging the private-sector deals. The problem is that is not going to build the communities that have been hollowed out.

We know what builds communities from Hamilton to Lincoln to FDR. We need a government that says: If you make it in America then we will buy it. That is what we did, by the way, for SpaceX. That is what we did for Intel. That is what we did in World War II. We need a government that says: If you skill the factories here we will help finance it. We need a government that says that we are going to work to invest in the plumbers, electricians, and machinists so we can actually have a workforce that builds the new factories we need.

We need to say that we are going to have housing in this area to have economic revitalization. We need a national economic development strategy, and Senator Rubio and I actually coauthored a bill on that.

That is not what the White House is doing. Instead, they think that just having these billionaires cut deals with the private sector is going to help the working or middle class. It will help my district. We will make more money with AI. It will help more of the financial and technology elites.

I will tell you what it is not going to do, Mr. Speaker. It is not going to rebuild the communities that have had a raw deal in America.

What economic patriots believe, even though we have different ideologies, is that it is ordinary Americans who built this country and it is working-class Americans and middle-class Americans who built the country. The genius lies not with billionaires and technologists. It lies with hardworking Americans. We are going to build this country back from the bottom up. That is our belief.

I appreciate Representative Deluzio's leadership on this.

My friend, Fareed Zakaria, had this whole spiel on how manufacturing doesn't matter. I like Fareed usually, but on this he is dead wrong. He cited Japan and Germany as countries that did manufacturing and missed the tech boom. So he said: Well, we should do the tech boom and the finance boom, and we don't need to do manufacturing.

He did cite one country that did a bit of both, China. China did a lot of manufacturing. They took all of our manufacturing. America needs to understand if we are going to innovate, then yes, we should innovate on technology, and yes, we should innovate on finance. However, we also have to have advanced manufacturing in this country to remain the world superpower.

People say comparative advantage, but comparative advantage is you get to choose what your comparative advantage is in, Mr. Speaker. If China had just done comparative advantage, then they would have been growing rice for 30 years. That was their comparative advantage. They said: No, we want to build things.

It is time America realizes we want to be building things and realizes the value of advanced manufacturing. Representative Deluzio certainly gets it. He is one of the brightest voices in Congress.

I also want to recommend his op-ed. It is the best piece written on trade policy in the last 30 years of any that I have read.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman's leadership, and I appreciate his convening this.

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