When You Make it in America, Every American Can Make it

Floor Speech

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, we are going to spend the next hour talking about what's on the minds of most every American: jobs. How do we get a job? What's it going to take to finally go back to work? There's a lot of pain out there, and there's a lot of suffering. And people really wonder what this Congress is going to do to help alleviate this crisis of unemployment.

I want to just share a couple of stories and then ask my colleague from New York (Mr. Tonko) to join me. I was at a meeting that was set up in Berkeley, California, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the premiere laboratories in the United States. And the director of the lab was talking about technology transfer; that is, research, the product of that research coming out of the laboratories, and then jobs being created from that, and new businesses, the entrepreneurial spirit. As he went through his story, I suddenly was so upset, not by the research, not by the technology transfer, but rather by the fact that his final statement was, ``And this company is moving to China to manufacture the product of this research.'' And I thought to myself, How can that be, that the investment of the American people in the research, the education of the engineers and scientists, and then this research coming out of the laboratory and all of the development work, but finally we find that the whole thing winds up in China?

So what we want to talk about today, at least in part, is this: making it in America. What are the governmental policies that will, once again, create a situation where we will be making it in America, and the director of the laboratory won't be telling me in a meeting that, Gee, this great idea is moving offshore so that the manufacturing will take place in China? The reason he said that the manufacturing was going overseas is that there was no capital formation, no capital available. So I'm going to spend just a few moments on this before I turn it over to my colleagues.

Here is what's important. This is where innovation is, and this is where innovation fits into our economy. If you take a look, over the last decade, the enormous growth in the sales of the innovation companies, it's grown from about $1.5 trillion to $3.1 trillion. And all of this is in an innovation economy. So this is exceedingly important in the job growth of this country.

Another thing to keep in mind is this: The innovative companies create the jobs, and they grow quickly. Just looking at the total GDP--the innovation companies that I showed in the previous chart, the total volume, over 21 percent of the American GDP is in these innovation companies. So why is it that this new company can't find the capital to build a manufacturing facility in the United States? Well, one of the reasons is Wall Street and all the games that are going on on Wall Street. But there's also another one. And this is particularly important to California. That is venture capital and IPOs, the initial public offerings.

If you take a look at this, you will notice that a decade ago, we had a lot of public offerings. And over the last several years, we've seen a decline in the public offerings. What the public offerings do is to free up capital by going out to the public, offering stock. That money then comes back to the venture capital firms, and this whole process goes round and round and over and over again, creating jobs in innovation. This is something we're going to have to address, and legislation is going to be introduced in the weeks ahead to address this part of making it in America.

So with that as an introduction to one piece of this larger picture of making it in America, I would like to yield to Mr. John Larson of the great State of Connecticut, who is our caucus leader.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Larson, thank you so very much. You speak well of Connecticut and you speak well for Connecticut.

I guess we are going to do our East-West show here. I would just point out before we go there that America has lost about 40 percent of its manufacturing jobs in the last 20 years. We can rebuild it. Most of the economic indicators are that America can be competitive in manufacturing. We need to have a level playing field, so China currency is an issue.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Tonko, thank you very much. The view from New York is very similar to the view from California. We've lost 40 percent of our manufacturing jobs. We can get them back. We need a level playing field. China currency issues are very much on the mind of the Democrats. We want to make sure that China currency is no longer used to the advantage.

But there is also something here, and I will take just a couple of seconds before I turn to my friend from Texas, American manufacturing does exist. It's the great middle class. I want to give you one example where public policy makes all the difference. Near Sacramento, there is a very large and very new heavy manufacturing facility in place. It stretches about a quarter mile, maybe almost a half mile. It is thousands of square feet of buildings, and in those buildings they're manufacturing trolley cars, streetcars, light rail, and they're also manufacturing locomotives. The company is a German company. In fact, it's one of the largest manufacturers in the world--it's Siemens--and they have moved to Sacramento to manufacture these pieces of equipment, transportation equipment, because Federal law said that the money from the Federal Government must be used to buy American made equipment--buy American-made equipment so that we will, once again, make it in America.

Now I happen to have two bills that do that, that extend that stimulus bill law into the future not only for transportation but also for solar systems, wind, and renewed green energy system. Our tax money supports it. Let's use our tax money to rebuild the manufacturing base by buying it in America.

I know the view from Texas is also similar. I've heard Sheila Jackson Lee, the honorable Representative from the area of Houston, speak on this issue. She's joining us here today on the floor.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Tonko, thank you very much for carrying on; and, Mr. Ryan, thank you for your insight into what is so obvious. The American people do not want their rights taken away from them. They have the right of collective bargaining; you're quite correct about that.

Excuse me for having to step out. My constituents from California were here in town, and interestingly enough, they were talking about one of the jobs programs that we really need to do.

I represent the central valley of California, the great California Delta, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the largest estuary on the west coast of the Western Hemisphere, and there's always been severe flooding problems in that area. So they were asking about how are we going to fund the necessary flood projects.

It's been a long, long history of the Federal Government through the Corps of Engineers supporting the construction of levees and other flood protection devices. But all of that seems to be ramping down as this mania of cut, slash, and burn the budget occurs around here.

Now, the President offered the American Jobs Act; and in the American Jobs Act, there's $50 billion for infrastructure, part of which is water systems, sanitation systems, road transportation systems, but also flood control systems--desperately needed in our area. We could probably employ a couple hundred thousand construction workers immediately if somehow this House were to pass the American Jobs Act.

So I'm just thinking about the relationship of what we're talking about here on the floor and what my constituents were talking about, the necessity of developing water projects as well as flood control. We really ought to do that, because we can take these unemployed construction workers, several hundred thousand of them who are now receiving unemployment checks--they're tax takers. We can put them to work building the infrastructure, the foundation for tomorrow's economy, and they become taxpayers.

You started off this conversation with something that is so very, very true--I guess Mr. Larson did--and that is the best way to deal with the deficit is put Americans back to work. It was an interesting side bar to our work here on the floor; but it fits so well with what we're talking about here, which is jobs, putting people back to work, using our collective powers of citizens of this great country to employ people by building the foundation for future economic growth. And you mentioned education as one of those pieces. There's so much to do.

If you would kind of wrap us up. I think we've got 3 or 4 minutes, and we can go from there.

It's been a good afternoon sharing our thoughts about how we can create jobs, get Americans back to work, get our economy back to work. And the President's laid out a good, bold program.

Incidentally, it's paid for. We're not going to borrow money to put these construction workers back to work. It's paid for. The way it's paid for is that those 1 percent of Americans, the superwealthy who've had an income of more than a million dollars a year after all of the deductions--that's after adjusted gross income, a million dollars or more--they have enjoyed enormous tax reductions over the last 11 years, what we would ask is some basic fairness, that they contribute to putting Americans back to work with a small increase in their taxes over and above a million dollars. No increase below.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. The gentleman from New York says it so eloquently.

Long ago, I did a study of the California economy. We decided there were basically five things that needed to be done, and now, from the Federal level, I'd add a sixth. They are the things that you've been talking about:

Education, the best education in the world, so that our workers are capable of carrying on the new tasks.

Research, as I discussed earlier, from our laboratories and our universities of the new products.

We need to make sure the research is there and then take the research out of the laboratories and create the new products--making it in America because manufacturing matters.

The fourth thing is the infrastructure, which I was discussing and that I know you discussed while I was gone here, and laying the foundation upon which the economy will grow--transportation, communication, sanitation, water-flood protection--all of those infrastructure items.

Then we need to always think in this context about our Nation's security and use our money wisely to provide the kind of defense and security that we need. That's also an energy issue, which we didn't bring up today but that we will the next time we talk.

Finally, the sixth thing is one that I think is so very, very important, which is the willingness to change. What we did yesterday will probably not work today or tomorrow, so we must always be willing to change and not be stuck back in the 1790s, but rather deal with the reality of the world in which we live today and change our systems and be willing to adapt and change.

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