Congressional Budget for the United States Government for Fiscal Year 2005

CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET FOR THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2005

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I want to talk for a few minutes about the Boxer amendment, which would raise taxes by $24 billion, and to say why I think this amendment is a miscalculation. Unless, of course, the intent of this amendment is to try to convince the American people that the American economy is in the tank and offers no opportunity, no hope-something this economy has always provided to American workers, and I believe still does today.

If, in fact, our colleagues across the aisle believe the economy is doing so badly, I wonder why it is that home-ownership is at an all-time high in this country. Interest rates are low. Productivity is booming. The gross domestic product is growing by leaps and bounds.

If the economy was really doing badly, which it is not, the last thing you would want to do with a slow economy would be to raise taxes to make it harder for the job creators in this society to create new jobs. I would just ask all of my colleagues to consider what is being proposed here. I believe it is simply the wrong answer to the challenges that confront us when it comes to encouraging further job creation and an economy which continues to be the envy of the free world.

The amendment we are discussing would do exactly the wrong thing. It conflicts with every free market principle this country stands for. We know that entrepreneurs, the risk takers, those who invest their money to try to create a profit for themselves and their families, are the ones who create jobs. When they have more money to invest in their businesses, they create those jobs.

Once again, this amendment is the best indicator that there are still those who believe government really does know best, who want to raise taxes on the American people by $24 billion and throw it around at government's whim and then expect new jobs to somehow miraculously appear.

Let's just step back for a moment and see what the whole picture reveals. Sometimes it seems the world is moving faster every day. New technological advancements have given citizens of the 21st century access to instant information; on-demand services are available everywhere. We have an ability to communicate faster and more comprehensively than ever before in the history of the world. Yet with these technological advancements and enhanced abilities, many companies have come to the conclusion that when it comes to manufacturing and customer assistance and many other areas, location no longer matters. There is not a day that goes by that there isn't another article, another report about a company outsourcing some facet of what they do to another country, to another part of the globe.

Sometimes these changes are noticeable to every consumer, and sometimes not in a positive way. Indeed, what we see with this amendment, and the comments made in the Chamber, demonstrates the backlash that sometimes occurs when jobs leave
our shores and go to other countries.

The fact is, there is a real and discernible benefit to consumers from the lower prices that come from efficiencies in labor costs. The dollars American consumers spend on products and services buy them a lot more than ever before.

Yet sometimes these changes are hardly noticeable at all. If a small part of the newest computer is now made in India instead of Abilene, TX, what does it matter to the consumer? It may not matter to them, but it matters to Abilene and it matters to the people who live and work there.

Yet even as outsourcing continues to be a subject of discussion, even as some of my colleagues in this body throw it out as a trend that is bad for America, we all seem to have forgotten that it also runs the other way.

I am proud to say that Texas is one of the leading beneficiaries of in-sourcing, which is just a fancy way of saying "out-sourcing by foreign companies on American soil." According to the Texas Department of Economic Development, Texas benefits from more than $110 billion in foreign direct investment in the state. There are 430,000 Texans on the payrolls of foreign corporations. There is approximately $5,000 in foreign investment in our state economy per Texan. That is a good thing. That helps create jobs for hard- working citizens of my state.

But I believe we are missing something important in terms of the overall context of the debate. The economy is clearly on the right track back to recovery. The latest numbers bear that out no matter how much some would try to disparage the booming economy and what is reflected in those numbers. That recovery of the economy will take care of the joblessness concerns we all share, regardless of partisanship, regardless of any other issue. Yet we are facing another problem in this recovery, and this recovery is an opportunity for us to face the problem head on: The real motivation behind outsourcing, behind the desire of a manufacturer of a product or a service to find efficiencies in the way they operate so they can grow and continue to prosper and hire more people here in America has to do with the labor force.

Given our advanced technological capabilities, why would a business pay someone in America to do a job when they can go to another country where there is no minimum wage or labor laws or other restrictions on what they do? The conventional wisdom is that no business will choose America merely out of loyalty, that instead they will study the numbers and realize it makes more economic sense to run their telephone banks in Malaysia, for example, instead.

In response, some in this body and elsewhere have concluded that the answer is more job training and funding for education and advanced learning programs. Statistics suggest more and more people are taking advantage of these educational and work-related resources.

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently commented:

Generic capabilities in mathematics, writing, and verbal skills are the key to the ability to learn and to apply new skills and thus to earn higher real wages over time.