Make it in America

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Mr. TONKO. Absolutely, Representative.

Thank you, Representative Garamendi, for bringing us together in what is this usual important discussion. You have done that time and time again for us to focus on an innovation economy, on building it, and making it in America is an important aspect of the work we do. Thank you for bringing that to the attention of the greater public that watches these proceedings.

I do represent this region in upstate New York where we have the confluence of the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers, and it was birth to the Erie Canal, and that birth to the Erie Canal developed a port called New York, which became a major metro area, and a necklace of communities that were given birth to by that canal movement that became epicenters of invention and innovation, that then inspired a westward movement, and not only inspired the growth of this great Nation, but impacted the quality of life of people throughout the globe.

That pioneer spirit should speak to us again as we develop budgets, as we promote public policy. It should be about investing, not dis-investing. It should be about funding, not defunding.

The current climate here in this House with the new majority is to defund, to take those dollars away from economic recovery and to shift them over to tax cuts for millionaires, tax cuts for billionaires, ending Medicare, block granting Medicaid, dis-investing, providing for corporate loopholes.

This is not the strategy that America needs. This attack on middle class America is unwarranted. It is not going to resolve what we need to resolve here in the great United States of America.

We need to invest in a way that allows us to bulk up and compete and compete effectively on the global scene so that we can drive this clean energy economy, this innovation economy.

I know from my work prior to coming here to the House of Representatives, with NYSERDA, the New York State Energy, Research and Development Authority, there is job opportunity galore. There are entrepreneurs, there are innovators that work with the Angel Network, work with venture capitalists, and work with public funding like that from the Federal Government that enable us to take ideas and move them along. Where R&D is, where research and development lands, so will manufacturing. That's what we have within our grasp, but what I see happening is walking away from that progressive approach and catering to a crowd that has grown stronger and stronger through this recession.

When we look at some of the outcomes as the majority here challenges us about not doing the mindless handouts to oil companies, we're seeing some of the CEOs garnering some quarter of a million shares, prime shares of stock. That's what they're doing with these payments, these handouts to the oil companies, when we could invest that in job creation, and that's what this Make It in America is all about.

I know when we put those down payments on invention and innovation, we can expect lucrative dividends and we can have job growth, and the kind of job growth that is secure because it stakes itself in the community as small business and they grow within the community; they grow and expand their opportunity.

I have, within the capital region of New York, the third fastest growing hub for science and tech jobs, and that's happening because of investment from the public sector, partnered with private sector investments, and it works. It's a winning formula, and I would say that we just need to pursue in that fashion and we can gain tremendously. And why would you change that slow but steady growth upward in recovery from the recession? After 8.2 million jobs lost through the Bush recession, why would you turn that around? And that's the attempt right here. Stop it, turn it around and go back into the ditch that drove this recession.

I just think we don't want to repeat that recent history of Reaganomics and the second Bush Presidency. It is devastating to the economy. It's devastating to America's working families, middle class. It's devastating to job growth.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Thank you very much, Mr. Tonko.

You started with the Erie Canal. It's interesting to note that at that period of time, which was the last decades of the 1700s and the early 1800s, the
United States Government set out on a course to build infrastructure, and the infrastructure was the canal systems at that time, and you so quickly and correctly pointed out the growth that came from that. That lesson, now more than 200 years old, needs to be repeated in America once again.

Mr. TONKO. Absolutely. I think what people will say too is, well, we don't make those products anymore in America. Well, we might be able to if we modernize our manufacturing processes.

But also, if you're going to try and convince, if we try to convince each other that all the products that America can make, design, engineer, discover and manufacture are over, what are we telling ourselves?

There are products coming out as we speak. There are products coming out every week, and a sophisticated society braces itself to invest in education, in R&D, in the down payments of taking ideas and moving them along; and we can then manufacture those latest products on the scene. That's the growth of a sophisticated society.

So this can-do spirit prevails in the Democratic Caucus in this great House in which we serve. I am proud to serve with these Members who are visionary, who are supportive, reinforcing the efforts of manufacturing of a newest kind here in the country.

Mr. GARAMENDI. You talk about innovation and new things.

Last week, I was out in my district talking to manufacturers. One company is called Bridgelux--``lux'' I think is light, bridge lighting to the future. They make LED lights. The kind of things that are now in the stores--when you get a flashlight, it's an LED flashlight. They have taken those LEDs to a whole new level of technology and advancement.

In fact, if we would put them in these lights here in the Chamber, we could reduce the energy consumption by about 90 percent, which wouldn't be a bad thing for the taxpayers. Their particular system would allow those lights to change color, which might put me in a better color; that wouldn't be such a bad thing, and to dim when people are not here, and move the lights, and in that way improve our ability to see while simultaneously saving us a lot of energy.

The company is 2 years old, has 250 employees, is manufacturing these advanced LED lighting systems in Livermore in my district, and I am going, ``Go Bridgelux, go!''

They need something, though. They need access to the American markets. And that is where the use of our tax dollars, in this case perhaps the local tax dollars in the cities around that area, would reach out and save the taxpayers a bundle of money by buying lights from that company.

Mr. TONKO. Not only is it promoting energy efficiency; it can help us along this trail of energy self-sufficiency, which then pulls us out of our dependency, which is gluttonous to date, on unfriendly nations providing us our supplies for energy. It just doesn't make any sense.

The clarion call that we heard at the voting booth last fall was to start growing the economy, stop shrinking the middle class, and that is what we are about with this Make It in America.

I know our friend, Representative Tim Ryan from Ohio, has something to add to that agenda because he has been aggressive on this, also.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Indeed.

Mr. Ryan, you come from a part of the world that was and is going to be, given your leadership and the leadership of this Make It in America agenda, the premier manufacturing place in the world. We will contend in California; we will be happy to contend for that and compete for that title, but you are in the process of rebuilding the manufacturing base in the heartland of America.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. It's interesting. My district, the Youngstown-Warren metropolitan district, was the fastest growing in job development in the last month or two.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Name those places again.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Youngstown and Warren, Ohio.

Mr. GARAMENDI. We are talking about what America thinks was yesterday, and you are telling me it's the fastest growing?

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And it is just recent. But in large part, a couple of different things.

There is $1 billion invested into a steel mill, but also we have a major auto plant. And it was the work of the last Congress and the President saying we cannot lose the American auto industry, and they made investments in companies like General Motors. Now we have three shifts selling the Chevy Cruze all over the world. Every employee got a $4,000 bonus a few weeks back that they are spending in our community. These are the kinds of things that happen when you make things in America, when you manufacture products in the United States of America.

But the goal here I think for all of us is to wrestle control from the major multinational corporations who are running this institution and then have undue influence over the government. Whether it is globalization moving manufacturing offshore, or if it is the oil companies who not only aren't paying taxes but are completely content with our citizens sending $1 billion a day out of the United States to go try to find cheap oil, which isn't so cheap anymore, and diminishing day by day, what we are saying here is, if we drive that $1 billion a day back into the United States economy for the kind of research and development that is going on in Upstate New York, that is going on in California, that is going on in Youngstown State University and Akron University with polymers, if we pump billions of dollars into this, instead of falling from first to second to third in the green energy revolution behind China and Germany, we will start leading it. And it is about coming up with the next technologies that you gentlemen were sitting here talking about, whether it's lightbulbs or something else. We need to discover that here in the United States, and then make it here in the United States.

But what all the major tech companies are saying now, they want to manufacture here in the United States. There is so much risk when you move your operations to China, losing intellectual property, losing the cutting edge, losing the quality, that there is an incentive here.

But if we don't pump money into research, that is why this whole philosophy that every single thing the government ever does is awful and the government should just serve big business, cut taxes for the oil companies, make sure that the big multinationals don't pay anything in taxes, and we will come back and cut NIH, cut energy investment, cut the National Science Foundation, cut the National Institutes for Science and Technology, their standards and technology. These are the kinds of things that we have got to be investing in. It starts with let's get out of this dependency on foreign oil, $4 a gallon is nonsense, and this illusion that if we continue to keep drilling, we are somehow going to drop the price, is an illusion. Let's take control of our own destiny here.

I want to just show real quick this chart. This is the U.S. balance of trade from 1960 to 2010. If you will look in the last 10 to 15 years, we now have $500 billion in a trade imbalance. Most of this is energy. Most of this is oil. What are we thinking? We are giving away the house.

This is not good public policy. This is not good economics. Let's take control. Let's invest in our own people. A billion a day we send to another country that doesn't like us, and it finances the war on terrorism? And then we take our budget and have three wars going on at the same time. So we pay them to run the terrorist operations, and then we pay our own military to go to the Middle East to try to stop it. Meanwhile, the middle class in the United States, we have a $3 trillion deficit on the roads and bridges and infrastructure, sewer. College expenses are going up. We're not doing research. This is a recipe for disaster for the United States.

I yield to my friend from California.

Mr. GARAMENDI. I thank you very much for that.

You just reminded me of last night at 2:30 in the morning, the House Armed Services Committee completed the markup that is moving out of committee, the National Defense Act. We do it every year. Seven hundred billion dollars.

A study done by one of the think tanks came up with the number that America spends about 17 percent of its total defense budget protecting the flow of oil out of the Middle East. So you can add that to the deficit. That is over $100 billion a year that we spend of our tax money to protect the flow of oil, not only for us, but for the rest of the world.

We need to build a domestic energy system not based on carbon-based fuels, but rather the future energy, all of the clean green technologies, nuclear and others, that will provide us with the energy security we need.

In doing so, each and every one of those, if we spend our tax dollars on buying American-made systems, will come back, just as you say, and build our communities stronger along the way.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. We had a group in Cleveland, Ohio, do a study a few years back that, if you added in that cost, the 17 percent of our military budget that protects the oil lines, supply lines for oil all over the world, the actual cost of a gallon of gas would be another $1, $1.50, because of the subsidy. It's another subsidy to make oil come here.

All we are saying is pump that money back into the research. Somebody in this country will come up with some synthetic, some magical something or other that will replicate diesel fuel. It will happen if we put the money into it.

Mr. GARAMENDI. It is actually already there. It is called advanced biofuels, algae-based fuels, everything from cosmetic oils to fuel for the Navy ships. So we can do these things. But, again, it is how we deploy our resources.

We have about 5 minutes, and we are going to do a lightning round between the three of us. I am going to turn to Mr. Tonko.

Mr. TONKO. I would just encourage us here in Washington on the Hill as we develop policy and debate budgets to keep in mind the history that should be replicated, sound history, history that had a proven track record, like that of the global race on space.

Some of us are old enough to have been youngsters or adolescents when that message, that very noble vision, of President JFK and his offering in an inaugural address that we are going to win the race on space, the global race on space, and land a person first on the Moon. And it was more than that poetry of landing the first astronaut on the Moon, that happened to be an American, and his quote of ``one small step for man, one giant step for mankind.'' It went well beyond that. It was this opening of the gates to technology that then invaded every sector of our economy, all aspects of life. And it was that technology investment that grew because of the soundness of a plan that enabled us to win a global race.

Now, that was done with passionate resolve and a thoughtfulness and a clear vision. We need to embrace that sort of American spirit, that pioneer spirit in this present moment and repeat good history, sound history, that grew our economy. I think we can do it and I believe we can do it, and Make It in America is the way to make it all happen.

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