Make it in America

Floor Speech

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I will engage in a colloquy here, with the permission of the Chair, with my colleagues to discuss an extremely important issue for America--that is, manufacturing. If America is going to make it, we're going to have to make it in America.

But before I go into the subject of how we can restart and rebuild the American manufacturing sector and make it in America, I'd like to do a little review of history first.

Years and years ago, I played football at the University of California. And it's football season, and my friends have often accused me of using football analogies, and, well, it happens to be true. So, okay, it's football season. Healthy; modest breaks to the middle class; two wars that were not paid for, the money was borrowed; the Medicare drug benefit, not paid for, creating an enormous deficit and the regulators stepped back. The period of no regulation occurred during that first quarter. Wall Street went crazy. It collateralized debt obligations. The meltdown of the housing industry, subprime loans. All of those things led to this extraordinary decline.

In January of 2009, President Obama came in and we began the second quarter. Tough situation going into that second quarter, but we began to see immediate action taken. The Wall Street stabilization programs went into effect, and the way in which that was administered began to stabilize Wall Street. We had the stimulus program, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It went into effect. And we saw numerous other pieces of legislation go into effect during the Obama second quarter.

I'm going to go through some of these very, very quickly.

The stimulus program, 3 million jobs as a direct result of that since it went into effect in February of 2009.

We saw also the Worker, Homeownership, and Business Assistance Act dealing with the foreclosures, trying to keep people in their homes and to provide tax relief for small businesses.

We saw the Student Aid and Financial Responsibility Act, the biggest effort since the GI Bill in the 1940s and 1950s, to give people an opportunity to get job training and to get new skills when they got back into the job market.

Cash for Clunkers, stabilizing the automobile industry.

And we also saw the American Government stepping in to save two great icons of the American industry and the hundreds, in fact, thousands of small businesses that depended upon the auto industry with the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler--to good effect. We were able to maintain those small business jobs that were directly impacted there.

We also saw the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights. How many of us have reached into our pockets for our credit cards and we go, ``I just know those banks are going to screw me one more time.'' But no more, because we passed the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights.

Other legislation is now pending. All of those are laws.

And one that passed just 3 weeks ago, which was the teachers and the medical legislation, that went into effect fully paid for; 160,000 teachers across the United States will stay in the classrooms providing that education that our students need, and paid for by ending an extraordinarily bad piece of policy that's been in effect for many years that gave a tax break to American corporations that off-shored American jobs.

So what do you mean? Do you mean to tell me that American corporations were able to get a tax break every time they sent a job offshore? Yes. That's exactly what is over today as a result of action taken.

On every one of these bills, every single effort made by this Congress to bring jobs back, to stabilize the economy, we found virtually no Republican support. In the stimulus, none at all. In the credit card, only a handful of Republicans. Republican opposition was uniform for every single effort made by this House, by the Democrats.

The result of our work without Republican support has been a steady improvement, so that for the last 8 months we have seen private sector jobs actually increase--not as much as we need, not as much as we want, but we have seen a clear differentiation between the first quarter with the Bush debacle and the rebuilding of the American economy in the second quarter.

Where are we today? We're at halftime. We're in the locker room here in Washington, D.C. We're in Congress. We're working to complete our plan for the second half--the resurgence and the rebuilding of the American economy. And in this half, we have a series of bills that we put forward--some already law; others that will go into effect in the months ahead--hopefully passed. We'd love to have the support of our Republican colleagues, but, as in this moment, their seats are empty. But when they're filled, they still vote ``no'' on every effort to rebuild the American economy.

So it's halftime. The question for the American public is: Which team's going to go back on the field for the second half, for 2011 and 2012? Which team's going back on the field? The team that brought us this great debacle, the great crash of the American economy, or the team that has slowly, but every month, brought progress back to the American economy? We're talking now about making it in America.

Joining me today for this discussion is my colleague from the great State of Wisconsin, Dr. Kagen, an extraordinary individual, an entrepreneur in his own right, who is going to talk about some of the efforts that he's made and some of the issues that face his district in making it in America and the things that we need to do.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Let me take a moment here and bring it back to something you were talking about. You mentioned the wind turbines and the solar systems. We developed the technology here in the United States, and, in fact, the stimulus bill that provided the largest increase ever in research is going to once again put the United States in a position where we can dominate these green industries.

That research is there. Incidentally, not one Republican voted for that enormous research program and tax cut and jobs program and infrastructure program. Not one Republican voted for the program that created 3 million jobs.

But there is something going on here that we need to pay attention to, and this is a piece of legislation that I have introduced. We are spending billions of dollars to promote the wind industry, the solar industry. These are tax credits that we give to companies for a production tax credit or for someone that's putting a solar cell on their house.

We need to make sure that that tax money is spent on American-made wind turbines and American-made solar panels, biofuels, and other kinds of green technologies. If it's our tax money, then Buy America. Buy American.

A little later here, I suspect, I want one of our colleagues, Marcy Kaptur, to come and talk to us about a bill that passed out of this House just hours ago that would require that you and I, not just talk the talk, but that we walk the walk and that in the equipment that we purchase for our offices, it be made in America, once again, American tax money used to buy American-made products.

It's a piece of legislation I have introduced. I like it. I like it because it's going to create in my industry wind turbines that are actually going to not only be on the hills but actually made in America.

Enough for me for a few minutes. I notice my colleague from New York, Mr. Paul Tonko, has joined us. You have been at this a long time. You were in one of the original manufacturing sectors of America. Please tell us.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. We have talked about various ways we can make it in America, certainly the fair trade dealing with China's currency and the whole idea of competition. We have talked about the way in which we have to make sure that our tax laws support programs of hiring in the United States rather than off-shoring. In all of these things I would hope our Republican colleagues would come along with us to make it in America. But on maybe 20 different bills that we have moved out of this House, there has been virtually no Republican support.

There are other opportunities, and we offer these opportunities to our Republican colleagues to come along with us on some other programs. A piece of legislation that I am working on deals with these buses that were once made in the Midwest, in Ohio, and are still made in California. Right now we spend about $6 billion of our gasoline tax money to buy buses, light rail trains, intercity rail systems for Amtrak and the like. In the law, there are four waivers that allow the Department of Transportation to ignore the Buy American rules, and so what has happened over the last 20 years or so is that those waivers are routinely used and transit districts simply buy buses that are made overseas. Our tax money flows out of the country, our jobs disappear, and our industry, the transportation industry, is almost gone.

My legislation tells the Department of Transportation, no, no, those waivers are finished. Three of the four waivers are gone. If there is an extraordinary cost difference, okay. But we want that money spent on American jobs so that when in the San Francisco Bay area, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, BART, goes out, as they will, to buy $300 million of train sets for the BART system, where will those trains be made? Will they be made in China? Given the monetary advantage that China has, quite possibly they could win the bid. Given the issues of worker safety and environmental issues that China ignores, they may win the bid. But my legislation says no, we are going to make these trains in America, $300 million there, $6 billion to $7 billion a year across the Nation for transit districts everywhere, we can make it in America if we bring our tax money back. So whether it is wind turbines or solar or buses and trains, it is our tax money. Let's spend it in America, rebuild the American manufacturing system, and make it in America.

Would that be a good thing for Ohio?

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Mr. GARAMENDI. You talked about the investment.

A week ago, President Obama spoke to this issue of making it in America and of rebuilding the American industries. He spoke about the need to give significant tax breaks to businesses that want to invest capital to expand their businesses, to expand their manufacturing bases. Here is a very, very powerful notion.

I was meeting with three of my friends who are in the business community. They are manufacturers--one in the food industry, another in the high-tech industry. I was talking to them about this notion of would you increase your business, would you increase your capital investment on your production lines if you could write off in 1 year the cost of that capital. They said, Absolutely. You put that into law, and I'm investing tomorrow. I'm going to put people to work building my manufacturing base.

So the President has now spoken to this. It's one of the proposals that he has put forward. Today, I introduced a piece of legislation that would do exactly that. Any business that wants to increase its capital investment in that business--broadband, production lines, machine tools, whatever it is--they could write it off in year one. We can restart the American manufacturing system if we are committed to making it in America, which is a whole series of legislation: ending tax breaks for offshoring, ending tax breaks for businesses that are routinely killing the American economy by sending jobs offshore, using our tax money to build a green economy here in America rather than buying it from manufacturers overseas, making sure our buses, our trains, our planes are made in America.

Dr. Kagen, you've been in the high-tech industry, in the medical industry. You understand these issues.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Dr. Kagen, thank you so very much for joining us.

As I started this discussion, I used an analogy of a football game. We're talking about the most important game of all. It's not even a game. The most important thing of all is the American economy and how to keep it going and growing.

To go back over it, during the Bush years, these are all of the reasons we've stated: Two wars for which money was borrowed, creating an enormous deficit; the deregulation of Wall Street, anything goes; the collapse of Wall Street; the issues of tax policy where the wealthy were rewarded for their wealth, not for their work, which led to the largest decline in the American economy since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

It was plain to see that when President Obama came in. That was the first quarter. In the second quarter, we began to see policies that were put forth by the Democratic Party and the Democratic administration, policies that began to restore the American economy--a steady upward climb. It's not where we need to be, but we are on the road, and we did all of that with almost no Republican help at all. If you go back through all of those votes, the Republican Party was standing over there, saying no, no to the programs that actually brought us back, and we continue on today. We are in the locker room, ready for the second half, which begins in January 2011. The question is:

Which team are you going to put back on the field? Where do you stand?

Well, we know pretty clearly where the Republican Party stands. It stands with the old failed policies of the George W. Bush administration. It stands for ending Social Security and for ending Medicare. It stands for anything goes and no regulation; let it rip and it's ripped us off. It stands for tax breaks for the wealthy and the heck with the middle class. That's where the Republican Party stands.

The Democratic Party wants to make it in America, to rebuild the American manufacturing base and the American manufacturing industry.

If you would, Dr. Kagen, put the picture back up of the family, of the family in your district in the paper industry. This family is losing its job because of unfair competition. If we were to use the Capital Investment Program together with the program that you talked about of restoring fairness and trade, perhaps that company, that family and families in my district would be able to have well-paid, middle class American jobs.

Dr. Kagen, would you like to close us off here and bring us back to real America.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Dr. Kagen, thank you so very much and my colleagues for joining us, and thank you to my colleagues in the Democratic Party, who are committed to manufacturing matters and to making it in America. We have put forth many, many policies and programs. We ask our Republican colleagues to join us in making it in America.

I yield back my time, Mr. Speaker.

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