American Jobs Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Madam Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to discuss employment, or lack of employment here in the United States.

We just listened to a discussion about the problem, and certainly immigration is a piece of the problem. But in the whole totality of the extraordinary unemployment in the United States, it is but one piece. The solutions to the crisis that faces America and Americans is way beyond just the immigration policy.

I would hope that my colleagues from the Republican side would work towards a comprehensive immigration reform program, one that certainly will deal with the border and security on the border, although I think much of what was said earlier is overblown.

And dealing with deportations, I would point out that the current Obama administration has deported more people in the last year than in the entire 8 years of the Bush administration.

Much needs to be done. A comprehensive immigration policy needs to be put in place. But if it were in place today, the unemployment in this Nation would not be solved by that alone.

There is a solution that's at hand. There's an opportunity for this Congress to act immediately to bring back American jobs, to put Americans back to work. It's the American Jobs Act.

A week ago, a little more than a week ago now, the President stood before a joint session of Congress here in this Chamber filled with Democrats, Republicans, Senators and Members of Congress, and he presented to us a comprehensive program to put Americans back to work. I want to discuss that tonight and also pick up the issue that he raised yesterday about how we do that, how we put Americans back to work and, in the next several years, bring the deficit under control and put America's financing back in shape.

It's the American Jobs Act, a very comprehensive proposal, a very bold proposal, and one that would actually, not by his estimate but by the estimate of independent economists, employ some 1 1/2 to 2 million Americans immediately. And I'd like to tell you how that might come about if this House were to pass the legislation.

We know that for America to succeed both in the short term and the long term, it's not only about going back to work, it's also about critical investments.

Over the weekend, back in my district in California, the East Bay area of San Francisco Bay and up into the Central Valley, I had the opportunity to talk to teachers, teachers who were very concerned that given the financial situation in California, that they were going to be laid off, and generally it's the new, the young teacher that has only been there a little while that's given the pink slip and sent on down the road.

This is a personal issue in my family. My daughter and son-in-law are teachers, and their class size has already grown from 20, 21 to 34, 35 in the second-grade class. A very difficult teaching situation. Yet, more layoffs are likely to occur.

One of the fundamental investments that needs to be made in any society that wants to grow, that wants to prosper, that wants to have social justice is the education of the young, and in the case of the United States, with the extraordinary number of unemployed, some 12 million to 14 million, and underemployed, perhaps another 10 million, it's the reeducation of those that have already been in the workforce. So a key investment is education. In the American Jobs Act, the President has proposed a very strong, vibrant, and necessary program to keep teachers in the classroom and to bring teachers back into the classroom. He's proposed that we fund 280,000 teaching positions across this Nation. Now, that's a huge number of teachers, many of whom have already been laid off and did not arrive for this fall school year. We can put them back into a classroom as soon as this Congress and the Senate passes the American Jobs Act. It's about $30 billion, $35 billion to do this.

Is it money well spent? Well, if you want to consider investments in the most critical of all the things that a Nation does, it's the education of their children. This is an enormous and the important factor in building the future of America and simultaneously putting people back to work.

When these teachers go back to work, that cycles money into the community. So the grocery store, the arts store, programs that require books and pamphlets and so forth, all of those things will begin to be circulating in our community.

So this is one of the key programs that the President has proposed, the American Jobs Act--fixing our schools, putting teachers back to work. And that is a critical investment.

If I might just put up another way of describing this.

If you really care about America, and you want to have a better America, then we simply have to invest in America. There are numerous ways we can do it. We talked about the education programs, and that's certainly one.

This is another one here that relates to education. I don't know if you can see this, but that's a young technician in a laboratory, perhaps in a hospital or quite possibly in a program, a new business like I saw in Davis, California. It's a biotechnology firm that actually produces herbicides and pesticides that are taken out--well, first discovered in the environment. These may be bugs, these are a fungus, these are bacteria that exist naturally in our environment that in one way or another kill bugs or kill unwanted plants.

So they're discovering these, they are then understanding the chemical, the biological nature of it, and then mass producing these biological pesticides and herbicides.

Two things they need. They will eventually go out with an IPO so they'll need capital, and that's another piece of what the President is proposing. But they also need technicians in the laboratory. In going through this particular lab, I said, How is your employment? The owner of it said, Well, we're at 90 employees now. We're 2 years, 3 years old, and we need to grow, but I can't find the technicians.

In the President's program there is a specific reeducation program that's available for young men and older men and women that want to learn a new technology, a new trade, and that's the technicians here, so that they can fill those four immediate openings that exist in Davis, California, for lab technicians.

Similarly, the community colleges will be able to receive the Pell Grants and the grants and loans for the first time ever to provide money so that these people can go to work.

There is yet one other program, and we'll get to the construction here in a little while as we go through this.

One of the key aspects of the President's jobs program is the fact that we have about 3 million, almost 4 million men and women who have served in the Iraq and

Afghanistan theaters. Many of those are still there but most have come home.

When they leave the military, they have one of the highest unemployment rates of any group in the United States. This is simply wrong. These are men and women that have served this Nation heroically and in considerable danger, and in many, many cases having suffered grievous injuries.

We need to pay special attention to them and recognize that they have acquired some very, very important skills. They know how to work, they know how to show up on time. They know how to take instructions. What they don't know is how to be a lab technician, and they don't know that there are job opportunities out there.

So the President has proposed a special program to encourage American employers, for example the biotech firm that I discussed earlier, to reach out to veterans. There is a $5,600 tax credit. This is not a deduction. This is right-off-the-bottom-line taxes, $5,600 for any company that has less than $50 million of payroll to hire a veteran returning from the wars. It's incredibly important and the right thing for America to do.

The other thing, and this is even, I think, more--well, just as important and perhaps more important. This $9,600 tax credit--again, this is a reduction in an employer's taxes of $9,600 for each wounded veteran, disabled veteran that has returned from the wars. We only need to look at the photos that are too often in our newspapers about post-traumatic stress syndrome, about the men and women who have suffered grievous injuries of one sort or another. But if an employer is willing to reach out, they will be able to receive a $9,600 tax credit for those wounded warriors.

These are America's heroes. These are the men and women who should be first in our thoughts and first in line.

This can be combined with the educational programs that I discussed earlier so that as these veterans come back, they have the opportunity to learn a new skill, perhaps as a lab technician, and carry on and work through with a good career ahead of them that has enormous upside potential.

Once you're in these high-tech businesses and the laboratory is there, the opportunity to go on and get additional education and additional pay and benefits is clearly before you.

So this is one of the other aspects of the American Jobs Act. It's good for employers. They need an employee they can deduct off their taxes. It's $5,600 by hiring a veteran or $9,600 for hiring a disabled veteran. It's a very good, a very, very solid program in the American Jobs Act.

It doesn't stop there. Let me bring up one other item that I think we should really be focusing on.

I said earlier I'd come back to this issue of the construction worker over here. The unemployment in construction is probably well over 30 percent. In some parts--and I know this is in California--it's in the range of 50 percent. So the men and women who are in the construction industry have suffered enormous unemployment, in part because of the housing market, in part because of the cutback in State and local government expenditures.

But in the President's American Jobs Act, there is a critical investment for this Nation, and that is the investment in the infrastructure. A big word. Most of us now know it. Infrastructure are roads, airports, water systems, sanitation systems, and even the modern communication systems, not of telecommuting, but of various kinds of microwave systems and other fiber optic systems. All of those are modern infrastructure.

Now, across America, we have allowed our infrastructure to deteriorate. Our bridges are in bad shape. More than 60 percent of the bridges in America need to be repaired and made stronger. There are earthquake standards that are not met. Virginia wasn't thinking too much about those until about a month ago, and then suddenly Virginia began to think about earthquake standards. I will tell you that this building--this Capitol--was built a century or more ago, and they weren't thinking about earthquakes at that time.

All across this Nation, the infrastructure needs to be modernized; it needs to be brought back up to speed. So the President has proposed a $50 billion sum of money immediately available for the infrastructure of the Nation--bridges, roads, airports, the infrastructure of the modern communication systems. All of that is immediately available and, in addition to that, a very innovative--and I think a very important--idea called an ``infrastructure bank.''

An infrastructure bank has been talked about for a long time. Europe has had one for more than two decades. What it is is an initial investment by the government and then an additional investment by public pension funds, by individuals. That infrastructure bank operates just as a commercial bank does. It's not a bunch of pork barrel projects by me or any of my colleagues but, rather, projects that are brought that are cash flow. They are able to repay the loans, repay the loan guarantees, and perhaps, depending upon the structure of the proposal, are able to get a grant of some sort. That could turn into another $50 billion very, very quickly.

I know that, out in California, CalPERS--the big public pension fund--has already said they're going to commit $800 million to infrastructure in the State of California. With an infrastructure bank in place, such as the President has proposed, they may put in $2 billion, $3 billion, $4 billion. They certainly have the money.

Now, in this House, my colleague from Connecticut, Rosa DeLauro, has pushed the infrastructure bank for several years, but has gotten no traction from our Republican friends. At the same time, several Republicans have signed onto that infrastructure bill, so it is bipartisan and bicameral, as the Senate has a similar bill on that side.

This is something we can do immediately. This is not new science. This is not a new program. It's a program that has been around a long time, that is not yet in law but that has been fully vetted; and it can happen very quickly as soon as the American Jobs Act is passed. If that happens, we'll be looking at at least $50 billion for infrastructure projects and quite possibly much more than that if the infrastructure bank comes along.

Let me take up one other aspect of this program. There is not a community in America that has all of its public schools as neat, as well painted and as well conditioned as a community would want. In fact, in many of our communities, our schools are an embarrassment. They're rundown. The paint is chipping off the walls. The playgrounds are in disarray. The toilets don't work. The lab is a 1950 laboratory. There are no Internet communications within the school.

The President has proposed about a $25 billion to $30 billion program to renovate America's schools, to take those schools that are rundown whether they are in rural areas or in urban areas. Schools that are rundown, schools that are in need of rehabilitation, remodeling and upgrading would be in line, and it's calculated that there are 35,000 schools that could benefit from this program.

Now, who's going to do the work? These are new jobs--these are new job opportunities--and much of this work is not of a very high skill but, rather, of a skill that could be met by many of the unemployed. So this is cleanup. It's painting. It's the other kinds of work that may not require the highest of skill levels, but that is one of the additional programs that's available and is a key infrastructure program. So, as we go through these various elements that the President has proposed in the American Jobs Act, we will find the opportunity to put Americans back to work.

I notice that my colleague from New York has joined us; and we'll begin, once again, the east coast/west coast.

Earlier on, I talked about the education program. I talked about the veterans programs that the President has proposed, and I'd gotten into the infrastructure. We have yet to hit the unemployment and some other areas, but take us wherever you want, Congressman Paul Tonko

from the State of New York, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. We haven't talked about Making It in America yet, which is one of your favorite themes. So please, Mr. Tonko, share with us your thoughts.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. You also, Mr. Tonko. You have been here night after night with the same theme, the Make It In America theme. You went through these so very, very well, a trade policy that really positions America to once again be the manufacturer for the world.

Tax policy, we've done a lot on tax policy already. Let me just mention two things. One we did last year. Unfortunately, none of our Republican colleagues were with us on that, but at that time the Democrats had the majority. We eliminated about $12 billion of tax breaks that American corporations received. Our tax money was given to those American corporations for shipping jobs offshore. What? You mean they got a subsidy for shipping jobs offshore? They did. We ended it. So those are the kinds of tax policies we're talking about.

Now the President has proposed a continuation of another tax policy that we put in place last year. He wants to continue it as part of the American Jobs Act, and that is to give a business the opportunity to expense in 1 year, in 1 year, the cost of capital equipment so that it's not depreciated over 7 years. That's an enormous advantage for a business to make the capital investment.

Now, there is one thing that I would add to that. The President said it, but it wasn't specific to this, and that is that that capital equipment, that that lathe, that that welding machine, that that saw, whatever it happens to be, or the cultivator, the tractor out in farm areas, that that be an American-made piece of equipment, that the equipment be made in America. Because, once again, we're using our tax money to subsidize the capital equipment when I want my tax money to be used for American-made equipment.

And, in fact, guess what? I've got a piece of legislation--I got so excited, you will have to forgive me, but I have a piece of legislation that does just that. It couples up with what the President's been talking about. He talked about American made, that we buy American. Well, H.R. 637 says for that construction, for that infrastructure, airports, highway, high-speed rail, trains, et cetera, that they are made in America. These are opportunities for all parts of America, and it works. It works.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. We can rebuild America, and we're certainly going to have to rebuild your part of America. You and your constituents in upper New York and in Vermont were devastated by Hurricane Irene, floods that had not been seen, perhaps, in the entire modern history of those areas. So that needs to be rebuilt.

But you are quite correct about the rest of the Nation. San Francisco Bay Bridge went down in the 1989 earthquake, the Loma Prieta earthquake, and devastated the economy of San Francisco. Freeways collapsed.

So we know that we need to build to a higher standard and we know we need to repair. These are American jobs that are readily available today. And when we couple it with the American-produced cement and steel and equipment that's American made, we will generate a new resurgence of America's manufacturing industry. It can be done. All we need is a vote of this House. All we need is a vote on the President's American Jobs Act.

It's all there. The Buy America, Make It in America is there. The construction jobs are there; the education is there; 1.5 million to 2 million Americans going back to work the day or shortly after the President signs that legislation. This is really an opportunity. And to sit here and to waste time, it just seems to me to be a tragedy.

We need help in Vermont. We need help in New York. Your people do. They have been devastated. And yet that bill hasn't even passed this House to provide the money for it. We have to do it. It's up to us. This is our task.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. If I might just add, I was the insurance commissioner in California twice, first in the early 1990s, and then again from 2003 to 2007 or 2008. During that period of time, we had many emergencies in California. We had fires and earthquakes, and always we could count on the Federal Government immediately providing assistance. Sometimes fast, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, of dollars made available immediately to rebuild. And it was never, never a question of having to take money away from an existing program so that aid could be brought to California.

When the hurricane went through New Orleans, nobody said, well, we're going to take care of New Orleans and we're going to cut education or we're going to cut research. They simply put the money together during the Republican, the Bush period, to rebuild New Orleans. And that was a multi-billion-dollar project.

Now here we are with these disasters in the Northeast. And our Republicans are demanding an offset, that is, in order to provide money to rebuild the Northeast, we're going to have to cut out the research for advanced auto technology. This is the future of the American auto industry. This is how to build a better electric motor for a car, a better battery so that we can make those things in America rather than importing them from China or Korea or Japan.

The opportunity for America's auto industry to advance with more fuel-efficient cars, all of that will be pushed aside for the first time in anybody's memory here. And some people have been here 50 years. Never before was an offset required, particularly one that would harm the future of the American automobile industry.

So we are going, This doesn't make any sense. Let the compassion and the generosity of America express itself, as it has done so many, many times. And simply say, okay, we are going to appropriate the money. We'll dig deeper. We'll appropriate the money. We'll rebuild. And in rebuilding, much of it will be made in America.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. We can. Yes, we can. We can rebuild America. We really can do it. You gave a wonderful example of the way in which the great Industrial Revolution in this country took place, government doing its piece and the private sector doing that piece, government setting the stage with infrastructure and then the private sector coming along building the mill towns, building the factories, and the government aiding in the research all along the way.

There's a very interesting story about the telegraph. It would not have happened had not that idea been brought to the Congress and then the Congress funding the initial implementation of the telegraph. So we've seen over the history of America the role of government. The President has laid out in the American Jobs Act a very powerful message about the role of government, together with the free enterprise entrepreneurial system, building once again the America that we want.

We have maybe another 15 minutes, I think, here, and I want to take this to another part of what the President talked about yesterday. There are two Americas. We are two very different Americas. There is the very wealthy America, and then there is the rest of America. I put this up because I was listening, as I was traveling to one of my meetings in the district over the weekend, to a radio talk show. It was KGO radio in San Francisco. They had a talk show on in support of food banks. They were taking the entire day and assisting in raising money. This is one of the most-listened-to stations on the entire West Coast. They go from Vancouver all the way down to San Diego with their radio signal, and it was a whole day dedicated to food banks and raising money for food banks.

The story line was very simple. Food banks are being inundated by men and women that can no longer buy food. They are unemployed. They are simply to a point where they cannot any longer. The stories were heart-wrenching. Men and women, families that had worked their entire life, that had always been able to come home with food and a paycheck and been able to pay the rent or pay the mortgage had lost their job, and they didn't know what to do. They were embarrassed to go to the food bank. They thought it was begging. That's not the case.

Nonetheless, the stories tore me apart and caused me to come back and find out about child poverty in this Nation, the richest nation in the world. No other nation, no matter what you think of China, no matter what you think about India and how they have grown or any part of the European Union, no other nation in the world has the wealth of America, and no other industrialized country in the world has the same extraordinary child poverty. What are we? What are we in America if we don't care for our children?

Look at this. Nearly 25 percent, some were 23, 24 percent, one in four children in this Nation live in poverty, and they're hungry. They are hungry. This has to be addressed. The President's jobs program puts men and women back to work so that they can care for their children.

There is another story behind this, and that is that the rate of poverty in America is the highest it has been since 1962, during the Kennedy period. In the Johnson period, 1963, '64, '65, America started a war on poverty, and the poverty rate in this Nation fell precipitously. Senior poverty with Medicare and Medicaid; men and women in their senior years were taken out of poverty because they could afford health care. They had health care available to them. And other programs were institutionalized. Here we are, 40-some years later, the highest incident of poverty in America since prior to the war on poverty in the 1960s. We have to address this.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Let me put a couple of more facts on the table and then let's talk about the policy changes that can redirect that. This is the last 40 years, 1979 to 2006, prior to the Great Recession. During that period of time, there was a shift of wealth and of income, wealth and of income, from the middle class and the low-income to the very wealthy. This lays it out. Again, this is prior to the Great Recession. If we look at it in the Great Recession, these statistics are even more startling.

For the low end, the poorest, 11 percent growth. And then you move up to the second group, 18 percent, 21 percent, 32 percent. For the top percentage, the top 20 percent, a 256 increase in income and wealth.

Looking at the statistics, a wage earner in a factory versus the CEO, it used to be 1 to 40, now it's 1 to 300. We've seen an enormous shift in wealth from the working middle class families to the very, very wealthy. If you overlay this with the 2007, 2008, 2009, and where we are today in 2011, it would be even more startling because now these are running negative, as you said just a moment ago. For the middle class, that's here and down, not the top 20 percent, but down here, this is the top 1 percent.

Mr. TONKO. So pre-recession, we were 32 percent at the best, anywhere from 11 percent to 32 percent growth, versus 256 percent growth for that top 1 percent perched at the top of the economic ladder, the income strata.

Mr. GARAMENDI. We use Donald Trump as the example here, but there are probably 400 to 500,000 that fall into this category; extraordinary wealth.

Now, we've been talking all night about the American Jobs Act, so I'm going to put this back up for us to ponder for a moment: the American Jobs Act. Total cost of the American Jobs Act: $450 million. The President yesterday said it can be paid for, and he laid out a way to pay for it and, simultaneously, over the next decade, bring down the American deficit--solve the deficit and pay for the Jobs Act. And he said that there are three ways to do it:

First, those who have much must participate. They must share in bringing America back. So he has suggested that the highest income, that 1 percent, those who make over $1 million, that they participate, that they no longer would be able to have a tax rate lower than their assistants. That's the Buffett Rule. That's a big piece of it, about $800 billion over the next decade.

He also said that corporations that pay no income tax today--corporations like General Motors, corporations like Verizon, some of America's biggest corporations pay zero income tax. Last year, General Electric paid zero and got about $5 billion back in rebates. Something is seriously wrong, the President says. That cannot happen anymore. Everybody has to participate.

He also said that other tax breaks for the oil companies should end. So putting together these tax increases on those who have much, the superwealthy in America, the hedge fund manager that pays 15 percent on his income where you and I and others may pay 30 percent, something's wrong here. So that's what he is recommending.

We need to move very vigorously forward on the American Jobs Act, put people back to work, and simultaneously solve the overall budget deficit by not only new taxes, but also with additional cuts. That's the President's proposal.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. The East-West show will continue, and the Make It in America agenda will be the American agenda because Americans want to make things in this country. They want to rebuild the manufacturing industry. The President has given us a way to do that with the American Jobs Act. Trade policy, tax policy, energy, labor, Make It in America. Make the jobs in America. Rebuild America's manufacturing base. Rebuild the American middle class. We will do it. And if we pass the American Jobs Act, it can happen very quickly.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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