America Competes Reauthorization Act of 2010

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. HOYER. Thank you very much, Speaker Halvorson. I appreciate your presiding over this historic piece of legislation.

I want to thank my friend BART GORDON. Chairman Gordon has been an extraordinary leader of this committee, an extraordinary member of the Energy and Commerce Committee; and in both of those venues he has focused on making sure that America could in fact compete and compete successfully and be the great Nation it has been, is now, and will continue to be as long as we keep investing in that which grows an economy--education, science, mathematics and engineering.

I know that he has worked with some of the great industrial leaders of our Nation on this legislation. Mr. Augustine comes to mind. We're very proud of him in Maryland.

But I want you to know how proud I am of BART GORDON. He said that I was one of his close friends. I think BART GORDON is one of my closest friends, not just in Congress, but in life. He and I have been here for a long time together.

The good news is the ranking--used to be Democrat, now Republican--RALPH HALL, is also a very close and dear friend of mine whom I have known all of my service here. He and I came together in the same class. He is a very good friend of Bob Slagle, who is a good friend of mine as well, and I want to thank him for his service to our country.

The America COMPETES Act expands support for research and development, helping the United States to remain the world's innovation leader. It creates jobs for the short-term and lays a foundation for long-term prosperity. That is its key, of course. And it is an important part of the Make It In America agenda, a series of important bills designed to help America regain its manufacturing strength.

Let me say just a word about Make It In America. We heard a lot about made in America, things that were made yesterday in America, things that we did in the past. Make It In America is about what we are going to do in the future.

Make It In America is a non-ideological, non-party, nonpartisan premise; and that premise is shared widely by the American public: that if we are going to be successful in the future and continue to grow our economy, it is going to be in part because we make it in America; we make things in America, we manufacture things in America, we grow it in America, and we sell it abroad. Our products, whether they be hard products or soft products, we sell them throughout the world.

America is the innovative center of the world, one of the enterprising nations of the world. We invent things, innovate and bring to scale. Strike that. We don't bring them to scale often enough.

Andy Grove, who was one of the co-founders of Intel, wrote an excellent article in the New Yorker. I tell my friends on the Republican side and on the Democratic side, this is an issue that can bring us together to make America better, to grow America, to provide the kinds of jobs that Americans need.

Make It In America not only means manufacturing in America, but that we make it, that we succeed, that people believe and have the confidence that there will be an American economy which will provide them with jobs and they will be able to provide for themselves and their families. This is a significant step in making sure that America makes it in America.

One of the things that Andy Grove said in his article in the New Yorker was that the problem we have is innovation, invention, enterprise exists here more than any other place in the world; but what we are doing is we are inventing, innovating and enterprising, and then we

are taking it overseas to take it to scale, to manufacture it.

The Kindle, I bought a Kindle for my grandson last Christmas, about $185. About 40 to 45 of those dollars are U.S. The rest is overseas. Andy Grove's premise is if we do that, what is essentially going to happen over the years is the innovators and the ``enterprisers'' and the inventors are going to follow where we're making it, whether it's in China or any other place. America, we cannot let that happen. This bill is a critical step in ensuring America's prosperity and job creating capacity in the long term.

BART GORDON, congratulations to you. You will leave here in a few days. You will not be a Member of the Congress of the United States. You will never leave here in the sense you will always be in our hearts, and you are going to be on this floor, and we're going to see you regularly. But you will leave an extraordinary legacy for your country for decades and a century to come in this bill.

The bill establishes innovative technology and Federal loan guarantees for small and medium-sized manufacturers. Make It In America. Those loans will help American businesses respond to the needs of a changing economy, increase productivity, and keep pace with overseas competition.

Further, the COMPETES Act makes important investments in science, technology, engineering and math, as I said earlier, because helping our children excel in these fields is absolutely crucial to our economic competitiveness.

Finally, the bill strengthens the crucial national Science Foundation, which funds cutting-edge research in fields from computer science and mathematics to genomics. That's our future. America does it well. Let's do it here. Let's make sure that we're investing so that that will be the future as well as the present.

Federal support for research and innovation is one of the best investments we can make. Federal support helped create GPS, the computer mouse, computer-aided design, and the Internet; and there's no telling the ways in which it might shape our lives in the years to come. But, surely, there is no doubt that shape it, it will. And that's why we must invest. I urge my colleagues to boost American innovation by supporting this bill.

I end again as I started, by congratulating BART GORDON, my good friend, an individual who's given so much to his country for so long, an individual that makes us proud to be his colleague and who has given added luster to service in this House by his own service.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source