House Republicans on Job Creation

Floor Speech

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Mr. GRIFFITH of Virginia. Thank you, Congressman Griffin, I do. I agreed with what you had to say and wholeheartedly support your concepts and where we need to be moving this country.

Let me say to each and every one of you that the American worker is second to none in this world. When you look at our workers, they are the most innovative workers in the world, and they are the hardest workers in the world. Statistics, different reports continue to show us this point.

We will never compete with the Chinese and other countries on wages; nor do we want to. But our advantage, Congressman Griffin, is that we have the ability to use our energy resources in a way that we can create jobs, and we can fight for American jobs by having affordable energy. That's our trump card. For some reason, those in the administration want to tie our hands behind our backs and not allow our businesses to use our trump card to keep jobs in the United States and bring jobs back, and that is that we have great energy resources in this country.

The President was recently in Florida, and he mockingly described the Republican plan on energy and getting gas prices down. He said step one is drill, step two is drill, step three is drill. The President is just wrong. We have a true all-of-the-above policy. I like to describe it this way: it is drill. That's step one. Step two, dig. Step three, discover. Step four, deregulate.

Let me explain a little bit. Drill is easy. We have vast untapped resources in oil, and we have huge resources in natural gas. If we're allowed to drill for natural gas and for oil, we can turn around a lot of the things that are happening in this country.

Let's talk about gas prices because that affects jobs. Listen, some of this has to do with looking at the world market. If we signaled immediately that we were ready to start using our resources, the prices would come down because those people who are speculating that oil is not going to be available in the future and the not-so-distant future, but also even 2 or 3 years from now, would realize that the giant in the world of energy was finally awaked from its slumber and ready to go on the march for jobs. So I think it is important that we look at drilling. I don't think we should be mocking it.

Dig. Obviously we have a lot of coal resources in this country. My district has a lot of coal. It also has natural gas. We are number one in the world in coal resources. Everybody else in the world is using the coal. We are the ones who refuse to use it. As I said before, we have our hands tied behind our backs. Ladies and gentlemen, I've got to tell you something. We need to have reasonable regulations, but we've got to untie our hands and be ready to use our coal. The Chinese are now buying our coal to use our coal to make the products, the goods that we used to make in this country.

Guess what, a lot of times folks say we don't want to use coal because it has pollution and it creates problems; but a NASA study has shown us that if we have the Chinese using our coal to make the products we used to make, they get the money for those products, their people have the jobs. And guess what happens to the pollutants in the air? It takes roughly 10 days to get from the middle of the Gobi Desert to the eastern shore of my beloved Virginia. Just 10 days. We know that a significant portion of the mercury in our air is coming from foreign sources. Not our plants, but foreign sources.

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Mr. GRIFFITH of Virginia. Absolutely. I would have to say we do a much better job here.

It's almost like I can remember when I was much younger, liberals always said to conservatives, Well, you all act like the United States is the only country in the world, and we have to look at the whole world. Now the liberals are looking at it and saying, Well, the United States is the only country in the world. We have to only look at the United States and we don't look at the big picture.

I think, inadvertently, even with good intentions, there are, in fact, greater pollution risks by us not using our energy than there are with us using our energy with the reasonable regulations that have been in place for some time.

That being said, let's take a look at how that impacts on jobs. Not only do we get the pollution, but we don't get the jobs. We don't get the money.

You talked about living within our means and so forth. Let's take a look at my district.

AEP, American Electric Power, is the biggest power provider in my district. There are others. They have estimated, with new regulations, energy costs are going to go up 10 to 15 percent as they spend an additional $6 billion to $8 billion. Ten to 15 percent on hardworking American families is tough, but when you look at the job component, when you look at that job component, that means it's going to cost more in my district to make potato chips. It's going to cost more in my district to work the family farm. It's going to cost more in my district to make furniture. It's going to cost more in my district to make paper products, whiteboard. I just touched on the surface.

Every single retail establishment, every single business has to use electricity; but when you raise the cost of manufacturing goods or using electricity to manufacture goods by 10 to 15 percent over the course of the next few years, you're making us less competitive in the world, and we lose more jobs and we have more people who are unemployed and more people who aren't able to go out and buy products, which then means more people lose their jobs because they're not selling those Fords down at the Ford place. They're not selling washing machines and TVs and all of the products that are out there. We lose even more jobs because of the failure to recognize that the regulations are killing our jobs, and our jobs are going elsewhere.

I have to say, getting back to what I call the four Ds--drill, dig, discover, and deregulate--I'm not saying we don't look at all of the above. The President was in Florida. He said we only wanted to drill, drill, drill, and he was talking about algae. I'm not one of those people who's going to criticize the President for looking at algae. I think algae actually has a positive future, but it's a positive future that is probably 15 to 50 years away. We need energy now. We need affordable energy now. We need jobs now.

To be looking at something, I think it's absolutely right. That's the ``discover'' part of those four Ds. We need to encourage discovery. But one of the ways to encourage discovery is to deregulate and let people make a product without having all kinds of regulations put on top of them.

It's interesting how folks want to do all of these things, and then they come up with regulations and they find out that the new start-up companies oftentimes have difficulty creating the new alternative energies because they run into other regulations that prohibit them from going forward.

So I think we need to make sure that we look at drill, dig, discovery, looking at those alternatives, finding more ways that we can be efficient and finding new alternative energies. Then let's not regulate our industries out of existence, which is where we're headed at this point. When you do that, we continue to lose jobs, we continue to have a flat economy.

The unemployment situation has gotten better, but we're still in the neighborhood of 8 percent. I don't think that's anything to celebrate. I'm glad it's better, but I don't think it's something that you go out and go, woo hoo, we've solved our problems. I believe that we have not solved our problems at this point. We're working on it, and that's good.

The economy in this country, because of our hardworking Americans, because they're innovative and because they work harder than anybody else, is not going to just roll over and die, but at the same time it could be doing so much better, and we need to maintain that we are the number one economic power in the world. The way to do that is to keep our jobs by keeping our energy and our energy sources and our energy costs at a reasonable level so that we can, in fact, compete with the low-wage countries of the world. We don't want the low wages, but to do so, to make sure that we can still compete, we have to keep our energy affordable.

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