The Deficit and Jobs
Floor Speech
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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Garamendi, I thank you not only for your yielding, but more importantly for the extraordinary time you have invested in educating all of the Members of this House on both sides of the aisle in what can truly be perceived I think as an absolutely nonpartisan, bipartisan, pro-American agenda that says we ought to make it in America. And if we do, we are going to make it in America. We're going to succeed in America.
You've got our logo up there, Manufacturing Matters. I want to congratulate you, and I want to congratulate Ms. Sutton from Ohio, who has been such an extraordinary advocate. Her legislation in many respects took the automobile industry and put it back on track. That was an action that saved literally hundreds of thousands of jobs. Thousands of jobs in the automobile industry, but all the jobs that are related to the automobile industry. And I congratulate Betty Sutton for the leadership she showed. That legislation of course was passed in a bipartisan fashion. Not a partisan divide on that issue.
Mr. Garamendi has been not only educating the Members of this House, but as the American public watches the proceedings in this House, educating them as well. I go all over America and talk to groups, and there is not a group that I have talked to, no matter how liberal, how conservative, whether it's a Democratic group, a nonpartisan group, anywhere in this country, and I have talked to a number of the heads of major corporations, and I have talked to a lot of heads of small corporations, 200, 300, 400 members, and all of them are appreciative of the fact that we have focused the Congress of the United States and the administration and America on the importance of making things in America.
Betty Sutton, as I walked on the floor, was talking about the kinds of jobs that we create in manufacturing, which have on average a 22 percent higher salary. That middle income, middle class workers, working Americans can have the kind of quality of life that they deserve. And when you see Ford bringing jobs back to America, you see Whirlpool bringing jobs back to America, you see other corporations bringing jobs back to America, why are they bringing them back to America? Because they are finding out that they get better quality and higher productivity.
The gentleman from California mentioned the steel in the bridge that's being built. We make the best steel in America. I was visiting the president of U.S. Steel in Pittsburgh. Extraordinary technology. And we are the most productive producer of steel now. We frankly in the fifties sort of rested on our laurels. And then in the sixties and seventies, the Japanese, the Koreans, and others built new plants and they overtook us in technology. But it wasn't because we couldn't compete; it was that we weren't competing.
What Make It In America says is American workers can compete with anybody in the world. And we are prepared to do so. And this Congress hopefully is going to give them the incentives and the tools to do that. So I wanted to come on the floor and join you, as I have in evenings past, to thank you, because I believe this agenda, if it's known to our Republican colleagues fully and our Democratic colleagues, but much more importantly to the American people, it's an agenda that I have found has the support of 8 to 9 of every Americans who shake their head and say, yes, that's the deal. I don't mean that the 1 or 10 percent are against it. It's just that about 85 percent say, yes, that's what we need to do. America can compete. America can be again the center of manufacturing and growth and the creation of jobs.
We know that we've lost some 8 million jobs over the last few years, 3 or 4 years. We know that Americans are struggling to find employment. Well, if we want to find employment for them we need to create jobs for them. We need to focus on creating jobs. I am hopeful that as we move on in the coming months that we will in fact start focusing on jobs, on job creation. We have created, as you know, 1.75 million new private sector jobs over the last 13 months. But that's not enough. It's progress, but it's not enough.
So I congratulate the gentleman and thank him for his leadership. And I thank Ms. Sutton for hers as well. Two giants in focusing on an agenda that we call Make It In America.
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