Make It in America: Manufacturing Matters
Floor Speech
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I look forward to this hour with my colleagues to talk about jobs. How do we create jobs in America? We are now well over 14 months of the Republican control of this House, and not one significant bill has passed this House that would create new jobs. There are many bills to wipe out environmental laws, many bills to wipe out regulations that protect the citizens of the United States from pollution and contamination of one sort or another, but where are the jobs bills? We absolutely have to create the jobs in America.
Today, we are going to take about an hour to discuss how we can create jobs in America. One of the principal ways is to Make It in America: Manufacturing Matters. Manufacturing was the heart and soul of and the foundation for the great middle class, the rise of the middle class here in the United States. It wasn't too long ago that manufacturing in the United States was a big deal. About 20, 23 years ago, we had almost 20 million Americans in manufacturing. It also happened to coincide with the largest percentage of Americans that were in the middle class.
Over the intervening years, we've seen the slow decline until we hit this period of 2000 to 2009, and we saw a precipitous drop to just over 11 million manufacturing jobs in America. That coincided with the decline of the middle class in the United States.
So what we want to do today is to focus on, how can we rebuild the American middle class? One of the principal ways of doing it is to focus on manufacturing and to focus specifically on rebuilding the great manufacturing sector in the United States. There are many, many ways to do this.
My colleague from Oregon is here to join us, and I know that there are many things that are happening in Oregon that speak directly to this, one of which is competition between Oregon and California for the manufacturing of light railcars. I'll let my colleague from Oregon go first, and then I'll pound on him that California is a better place to manufacture light railcars than Oregon. But either way, they're made in America, and that's to the benefit of all Americans.
Please join me, and let's see where we can take this.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Thank you so very much for circling back to the transportation issue. That issue is still before this House. There has been no hearing, and the bill that was put forth by the Republicans simply has gone nowhere. In fact, it hit the brick wall. I'm sure one of the reasons it hit the brick wall is that there is no way to create a modern transportation system in that bill. For example, we both talked about streetcars and light-rail cars. In California, there is a factory near Sacramento that makes light-rail cars. I'm delighted there's a factory now in Portland, Oregon, that is building streetcars. And the factory in Sacramento is also building locomotives.
The reason this is happening is that the Democrats, in their recovery legislation, the stimulus bill that gets such bad press--totally undeserved, I might add--actually had a clause in it that American taxpayers' money was going to be used to Make It in America. And that started or propelled both of these operations as cities decided they would use some of their own money, some State money, and some of the Federal money to enhance their public transportation programs.
However, the transportation bill that you brought up just a moment ago totally removes the public transportation sector from the bill. Now I don't know how we're ever going to build buses, trains, and light rail, Amtrak, without the support of the Federal Government.
I know you were deeply involved in this. I heard you talk about this once before--with a little bit of animation. You may want to circle back and pick that up again.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Well, you're right on an issue that is very close to my own policies, which is, if it's American taxpayer money that's being used to buy a bus, a light railcar, a streetcar, a locomotive, or a train set for BART in California or the Metro system here in Washington, D.C., then our money must be used to buy American-made equipment. Plain and simple, those are American jobs.
We had a terrible example of bad policy in California. The San Francisco Bay Bridge, Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge, a multibillion-dollar project, the steel in that bridge went up to bid. It's $1 billion or so of steel for the bridge. One contractor put in two bids. One bid was 10 percent cheaper, and that was Chinese steel. The other bid was American steel, and it was 10 percent more. So the bridge authority, in its wisdom, selected the cheaper.
It turns out that cheaper is not necessarily better and, ultimately, not cheaper. It turned out that it was far more expensive. There were serious flaws in the steel, in the welding, and 6,000 to 8,000 jobs were in China rather than in the United States. Ultimately, the cost was higher, and we did not benefit in the United States, even in California, from the increased economic activity that would have occurred if the direct jobs in manufacturing and welding and fabricating that steel were in the United States.
We don't want that ever again. If it's our taxpayer money, from whatever source, then make it in America. Use our money to buy domestic-made buses and trains and steel. We've got work to do.
I put this one up here, not to get away from the transit systems and the public transportation systems, which are critically important, but we've got 150,000 miles of road that need repair. The transportation bill that had been offered by our colleagues on the Republican side doesn't even get close to keeping up with what we need in the highway system and repairing the bridges that are falling down or could fall down across America. We have work to do.
We need to reignite the American Dream, and part of that dream has been the world's best transportation system. Unfortunately, over the last decade or two, we have seen that decline in American status in transportation. Whether we're in the third world or the second world, we're surely not in the first world for highway transportation or for the public transportation system.
We have work to do to reignite the American Dream. This transportation bill that ultimately we must pass, the Senate and the House, we must come together and pass a bill that is adequately funded, that provides for public transportation as well as for the road transportation. Our Republican colleagues are not even close to that. They've got a $75 billion hole in their wallet not filled by the programs that have been put forward.
I know that you've been serving on this committee. You're far more familiar than I am with it. So let's just continue with this for a little while.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. I would like to have handed this to you as you were talking about the expansion that occurs when you invest in infrastructure. I ran over to get this, but I didn't want to interrupt your discussion.
For every dollar invested in infrastructure investments, $1.57 is pumped into the American economy. That's the multiplier effect that occurs when you invest in this. These are investments that pay dividends year after year. This is the immediate turnaround. You described it so very well. It's the small business that is fabricating, it's the steel mill, and on and on. $1.50. If we invest a dollar today, we get $1.50 back in economic activity, people paying taxes. We recoup much of that dollar investment. That is just the immediate multiplier effect.
Let's say we have an investment in a water system in Portland, Oregon, that is old and needs to be replaced. That's now in the ground, and it's going to serve year one, two, three, and probably for the next century. So it's not something that is used up. I suppose if we were to invest in an artillery shell, and we shoot it off in Afghanistan, well, okay, that is a one-off, one time, and it is gone. Perhaps to good purpose, but gone. You invest in infrastructure in America, you get an immediate return, and it is there for the next generation and the generation beyond.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. I would like to have handed this to you as you were talking about the expansion that occurs when you invest in infrastructure. I ran over to get this, but I didn't want to interrupt your discussion.
For every dollar invested in infrastructure investments, $1.57 is pumped into the American economy. That's the multiplier effect that occurs when you invest in this. These are investments that pay dividends year after year. This is the immediate turnaround. You described it so very well. It's the small business that is fabricating, it's the steel mill, and on and on. $1.50. If we invest a dollar today, we get $1.50 back in economic activity, people paying taxes. We recoup much of that dollar investment. That is just the immediate multiplier effect.
Let's say we have an investment in a water system in Portland, Oregon, that is old and needs to be replaced. That's now in the ground, and it's going to serve year one, two, three, and probably for the next century. So it's not something that is used up. I suppose if we were to invest in an artillery shell, and we shoot it off in Afghanistan, well, okay, that is a one-off, one time, and it is gone. Perhaps to good purpose, but gone. You invest in infrastructure in America, you get an immediate return, and it is there for the next generation and the generation beyond.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. We ought not dance around one of the issues involved in this infrastructure. That's, where is the money coming from? How are you going to pay for this stuff?
Our colleague Rosa DeLauro for more than 15 years has made a proposal here in this House that we create what Europe has had for the last almost 30 years now, an infrastructure bank, a way to finance those projects that have a cash flow, the specific ones that you're talking about. The bridge has a toll, has the ability to pay off a loan. The water system has a fee associated with the delivery of water, the sanitation system. All of those are what I call cash-flow projects.
Rosa DeLauro from Connecticut has proposed an infrastructure bank in which the Federal Government provides the initial capital, say a 10-year note. We could borrow at the Federal level for less than 2 percent now on a 10-year note, put that in the bank, go to the pension funds around the Nation, and they all invest in the bank. We may have $25 billion, $30 billion, $50 billion. And in some cases, depending on how robust you want to go, you could have $100 billion of capital available in the infrastructure bank to finance the kinds of projects that have a cash flow associated with them: toll roads, water systems, sanitation systems, airports, bridges.
All of those things are possible. In doing that, you not only create the opportunity to finance those projects and obtain this kind of economic stimulation, but you also have taken off of the general fund of the Federal Government and some State and local governments, taken off their general fund the burden of financing those and are freeing up money for those infrastructure projects that do not have a cash flow associated with them, such as, for example, many of the highways and biways and county roads throughout America where there's no fee associated with them.
We have the opportunity to finance these things if we could just get off the dime. Please, the leadership in this House, move us forward, give us a project that we can actually put in place, an infrastructure bank, and other kinds of projects that will actually create jobs.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. We have work to do, and Americans want to go to work and they want things made in America.
I was interested in what you were saying about the use of our Tax Code. The Big Five oil companies in America--Exxon, Chevron, BP, and the other two--have in the last decade made a trillion dollars of profit. Yet at the same time, those Big Five get $4 billion a year in tax subsidies. Our tax money is going to those companies as if theydon't have enough of our money already. They do. If we dial that back and bring that back into the system for infrastructure investment, you could use it, as you say, for transportation because it's associated with transportation. You could use it for clean energy. Let's say you take 3 years of that and suddenly got $12 billion, we could capitalize an infrastructure bank. All of these things are possible if we get away from the notion of continuing to help the oil industry.
The wealthiest industry in the world doesn't need our tax money as a subsidy, and we ought to reel that money back in and use it for things that really create investments in America.
There are other ways we can do this. We had what are called bonds, Build America Bonds. Those have expired, but those were extraordinarily useful for small cities, big cities, and counties to build infrastructure. Many, many things that could be done, but unfortunately we are now 12, 14 months into the current control of the House by Republicans and not one of these things have come to the floor to rebuild the American economy. We have work to do. And we can do it.
I want to just point out that the Democratic Caucus, our colleagues on the Democratic side, have introduced 36 Make It In America bills, different kinds of ways to do it.
My two bills deal with our tax money for transportation. The gasoline tax, use it to buy American-made steel, equipment, buses, and the other one I have is using our tax money. If we're going to subsidize wind turbines and solar cells, we buy American made, and this is a way of keeping the jobs in America.
I know you have some additional thoughts on this, and let's continue on.
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