Make It In America

Floor Speech

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Mr. HOYER. I'll be very brief.

I thank the gentleman for his continuing focus. If I am the corner of the phrase and the focuser of Make It in America, you are its chief spokesperson and salesperson, so I thank you for that effort.

It's so important because, clearly, Americans are rightfully very concerned at the fact that we don't have enough jobs for the people who are looking for jobs. We've got to have a growth agenda in America. We've got to have an agenda in America that focuses on expanding opportunities. We've got to have an agenda that gives to Americans the sense that they and their families and their children can make it in America.

You have been focusing night after night, week after week, month after month on a jobs agenda, which we call ``Make It in America.'' We've introduced over 25 bills that are focused on trying to help us focus on that agenda, on trying to help business--small, medium and large--expand their businesses and on trying to give them assistance in doing so.

I want to say to the gentleman that, in his continuing to focus on this jobs agenda, it is critically important that Americans understand what the Make It in America agenda is all about so they can contact their Members of Congress and Members of the United States Senate and say, Look, we support the Make It in America agenda. We believe that it's an agenda for our opportunities and our children's opportunities.

I want to say something about the statement, to which the gentleman referred, made by the president of Conoco, a statement that apparently indicates he believes that his company is entitled to a tax preference and that if we did not give that tax preference that somehow it would be un-American. Of course, life, as I like to say, is a series of trade-offs: if we're buying things; national defense; defeating terrorism; making sure our seniors are secure in their pocketbooks and in their health; making sure that we participate in helping young people, particularly disadvantaged young people, get the educational start that they need; making sure that our college students can develop their talents so they can make us a more competitive Nation; and that the innovation, an innovation to which the gentleman referred earlier, will still be done in the United States. Then we need to make sure that the products and technologies that are developed through that enterprise are, in fact, then subject to a Make It in America reality.

As for the gentleman from Conoco, I don't know him, but I applaud the oil companies, and we need the energy that they give us. The fact of the matter is we gave subsidies, and we give subsidies in various areas, as the gentleman from California knows, to encourage doing things that are not now profitable but that will have a long-term payoff for not only the companies but for America. That is why the government invests its money, as governments all over the world do, in developing emerging technologies. The gentleman spoke, of course, of solar, wind and other renewable technologies that will have a tremendous payoff but not in the short term; therefore it's hard to get investors to put money in. That's why governments, not just in this country but all over the world, have done this in the past: for instance, when the prices of gasoline were not such that they provided the resources to encourage research, which we knew we needed, and drilling, which we knew we needed.

Yet now, when you have the profits of the product, I am shocked, frankly, that those who promote the free market system, which ought to be driven by the markets, driven by demand, driven by profits, would now say, notwithstanding the fact that oil profits among the Big Five, in particular, are up to historic levels, that we should still continue to ask our taxpayers to subsidize them even further. That seems to me to make no sense.

But back to the principal focus of making it in America: The gentleman has been so right in his focus of making sure that we create the kind of environment in this country that will empower people to make things in America, to grow things in America, to sell them here, but also to sell them around the world. The President has indicated he wants to double exports. The only way we're going to double exports is if we make things in America to sell overseas. That's the only way you can get exports whether they be goods, frankly, or services. We ought not to preclude the growth of the service sector in our economy servicing overseas, whatever that service agency might be.

So I want to thank the gentleman for continuing to keep the focus on an agenda that, I hope, our Republican colleagues will embrace as well. This is not a partisan agenda. I don't think there is a Member of this Congress who doesn't want to grow the economy and create jobs. We believe that the Make It in America agenda is focused on doing just that, and I would encourage our Republican colleagues, our Democratic colleagues, our brethren in the Senate to join together to pass this Make It in America agenda so we can see a resurgence of the manufacturing might of this great country that when we continue to be the inventing, innovative, developing center of the world's economy that we also, once we've done all that, then bring it to scale, or make it in America.

Andy Grove of Intel, as you know, has observed that if, in fact, what we continue to do is do the voltaic cells, do the chips, do the other technologies and if we then take the products to scale overseas, inevitably, Andy Grove believes--and I share this view--that our inventors, innovators and developers, themselves, will go overseas. The American public, by large numbers, understands that that's not a policy that is defensible or profitable for them, for their families or for America in the long term.

So I thank the gentleman from California for his focus, for his tenacity and for his compelling advocacy of the Make It in America agenda.

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