American Jobs Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. GARAMENDI. We all like to think about ``what if''--what if I had actually gotten an A rather than an F in that high school class? What if I had hit that home run instead of struck out? The what-if game is part of our life. But I want to take that up today in a very, very serious way. This is about what if this Congress, led by our Republican colleagues, had taken up and passed President Barack Obama's American Jobs Act.

Last September, the President made a very bold proposal to put Americans back to work, a comprehensive piece of legislation that covered many, many different parts of the American economy. It's called the American Jobs Act. Fully paid for, not increasing the deficit at all, but paid for with the elimination of unnecessary tax breaks for Big Oil, unnecessary tax cuts for the extraordinarily wealthy 1 percent of Americans, a fully paid-for American Jobs Act proposed by the President last September.

What if? What if this House under our Republican leadership had taken up the elements of the American Jobs Act, modified them, as is our nature and our responsibility, but nonetheless passed those very significant proposals that would, according to economists, create somewhere between 1.3 and 1.9 million jobs immediately? Not some day in the future, but now. What if we had done that last September? What if our Republican leadership had allowed those measures to come before the committees and on this floor to be signed by the President? Then 1.3 million Americans or maybe even 1.9 million Americans would have a job today.

We're going to talk today about the most tragic what-if this Nation is pondering at this moment. What if the American Jobs Act had been implemented?

Let's talk about what it is. What are the elements of the American Jobs Act? Bear with me, if you will, as we go through these. I'll go through them rather quickly, and then we'll come back and touch on them as we go on.

If you've been watching here in the gallery or if you are watching C SPAN, you would have heard my Democratic colleagues talk about the transportation bill. The President said last fall, We need to have a transportation bill, and we need it now. We need to put men and women back to work in the construction industry repairing our bridges, building our highways, paving our airports, building the infrastructure that this Nation needs.

The student aid bill. We know that if America is going to compete, we have to have the best educated workforce in the world. And so the President proposed a student aid bill, legislation that would provide additional sources of funding so students can go to school in community colleges, in 4-year schools, and in the master and doctorate programs.

The President took up one of the great conundrums and problems that this Nation faces from our competitors. Yes, China. China manipulates its currency, and the President said that has to stop. He asked for the House of Representatives and the Senate to pass a piece of legislation dealing with the manipulation of the Chinese currency, which gives them somewhere between a 20 and 25 percent price advantage on all the things that they manufacture and import into the United States. He said, Do something about that. Give me, the administration, the power to deal, to put a tariff on those Chinese goods if the Chinese Government continues to manipulate its currency.

He said we ought to buy American-made products. We ought to use our money, our taxpayer money, to buy American-made goods.

I have a piece of legislation that would do just that, and I'll talk about that before this hour is done.

Buy America. Enhance the Buy American provisions. Do away with the waivers that have created a 12-lane freeway for foreign products to find their way into America despite the laws.

The President said that there are millions of homes in America that are inefficient, that leak energy and cost the homeowner or the renter vast amounts of money. He said we could put people to work putting in new windows, caulking, putting insulation in the attics. We could put people to work and, in the process, reduce our consumption of energy and create jobs.

He said there ought to be a permanent research and development tax credit so that our industries would stay ahead of the competition around the world, so that they would know year after year after year that the research and development tax credit would be there and the more that they invested in research, the more that they took that research and developed products, the more jobs would be created, and they didn't have to worry that, well, maybe, it won't be there next year, so this 5-year research program, we won't do it. No, he wants certainty. His American Jobs Act would have given certainty. But the leadership in this House refused to take up all of those provisions.

The President went on and said we need a payroll tax cut for businesses and for the worker. We did a little of this. Businesses didn't get a tax break on their payroll; however, the men and women that do work and do get a salary did get half of what the President proposed.

He said we ought to put veterans to work. And fortunately, on Veterans Day last year, we did pass a bill to do that, and we should consider even more.

285,000 teachers have lost their jobs this year across America. The President said that we cannot survive as a stable, growing country with a just society if we don't educate our kids, and so he said let's put those teachers back to work, 280,000 of them, and police and firemen along with them, so that we would have the public protection.

He said that in addition to a transportation enhancement, an additional $50 billion over and above the transportation bill, we ought to put people to work and give a jump start. Just like you would with a dead battery on your car, he wanted to put those jumper cables on the American construction industry, $50 billion, get it up and going.

And he said we need a permanent infrastructure bank.

I'll finish this up quickly, because it gets to be a rather long what-if. But, oh, what if. What if we had done these things?

How about rebuilding our schools and houses, again putting people to work. And how about allowing Americans to refinance their homes to stop the inevitable decline of the housing industry as more and more people were forced into bankruptcy and losing their homes.

It's the American Jobs Act, proposed by the President of the United States last September, and to this day, two of those policies have been adopted. What if? What if?

The economists say 1.3 million Americans would be working today if this legislation had been allowed to be brought to the floor of this House, had been allowed to be brought to the Senate and the President to sign it.

And don't forget this: It was fully paid for. It was fully paid for. The deficit would not have been increased. However, the oil companies would not have $12 billion of your money in addition to what they've taken at the gasoline pump--the wealthiest industry in the world. We'd get our tax dollars back, and we'd put people to work.

And for those with a million dollars of annual income after all of the deductions, after all of the credits, for those with a million dollars of annual income, their taxes would have gone up to pay for putting 1.3 million Americans back to work. What if?

I'd like now to call upon my colleague from the State of Oregon who for years has fought for transportation, one of the senior members on the Transportation Committee.

Mr. DeFazio, you were here late last night fighting one of the most foolish proposals I have heard of, to cut the transportation budget by $37 billion. Thank you for fighting that fight and informing us. Fortunately, this House rejected that foolish proposal.

I yield to the gentleman from Oregon.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. DeFazio, for years you have been fighting for infrastructure. I didn't watch last night's debate as you fought fiercely to prevent one of the most foolish pieces of legislation--well, there have been many foolish pieces of legislation proposed by our colleagues, but you couldn't be more correct.

Let me just put this up. I came across this yesterday. Basically what this is is it's a diagram of the employment in the construction industry. We had about, what is that, 5,570,000 men and women working in the construction industry in January, and here we are in May and we're just over 5,500,000--some 20,000, almost 30,000 have lost their jobs. And the proposals that our Republican colleagues are making would guarantee that once these projects are finished, it would be over, nothing more.

But the President laid out not only a transportation bill, but he laid out a very robust jump-start to it--$50 billion of additional money invested. Now, let's understand, this is not government money; this is an investment by the American people. It is their gasoline tax, their diesel tax. It is their investment in the highways and bridges and transportation systems of this Nation. Well, I guess if you're anti-tax and you're anti-roads and you're pro-gridlock, you're guaranteeing that the economy will slow down and eventually, who knows, even collapse.

Fortunately, there's a gentleman here from the great Mid-Northwest, Mr. Keith Ellison. You've been on this issue for a long time. I know in your area you've been very, very concerned about the issues that are in the American Jobs Act. Please join us.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. GARAMENDI. Well, Mr. Ellison, in your community and my community, people want to go to work. They want a job. They want to be able to be part of the American machine that creates the wealth of this economy. They want to have the opportunity to provide the money for their family, take care of their needs. They take pride in their work. They're hardworking people, but they
can't make it.

We have a long, long tradition in America that dates back really to the very first day of the American modern government. The day George Washington was sworn into office he undertook an industrial policy. I know our Republican colleagues like to talk about the Founding Fathers. Well, they really ought to listen to the Founding Fathers. And if they had listened to the Founding Fathers, they would have paid attention to the President's proposal on the American Jobs Act, because here's what George Washington did: he turned to his Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, and said, Mr. Hamilton, we need to grow this economy. We need to put people to work. We need to be a strong Nation, a strong economy, and I want you, Mr. Hamilton, to develop a policy to do that.

Hamilton came back a few months later with an industrial policy, 13 different items on about five pages--now it would probably take 5,000 pages, but nonetheless, he did it. Do you know what was in it? What was in that industrial policy that Hamilton presented to Washington and to Congress--and mostly implemented over the next decade or so--were policies that--let me put this back up. Let's see here. How many of these were in it? And here's the great ``what if?''

There was a transportation part to those policies--in fact, two different ones. One, Hamilton said if we're going to grow this economy, we need to have good roads, we need to have good canals, and we need to improve our ports. He proposed legislation that did become law--some of it by the States, some of it by the national government--that created the canal systems, put the roads in place, and improved the ports of America. Very beginnings of this Nation. Pay attention, my colleagues who like to talk about the Founding Fathers: the Founding Fathers said we need America to have a transportation program.

Currency reform was on the agenda. Yes, it was. Hamilton, Treasury Secretary, said we need to pay attention to the currency issue. There was a huge fight going on at the time about the Federal bank, about the currency issues, but he said we needed a common currency, and we needed to be aware of the international exchange rates that were going on so that we were not put at a disadvantage.

There was a Buy American program. Hamilton told George Washington and the Founding Fathers that we needed to put in place a Buy America provision. You just heard our colleague from Oregon talking about a robust Buy American provision--and sometime before I end I'll talk about my legislation
that says if it's our tax dollars, it's going to be spent on American-made equipment and American jobs. We're not going to use our tax dollars to buy foreign equipment. That's precisely what Alexander Hamilton told George Washington in the very first Congress of this Nation, and they began to implement it.

Energy efficiency wasn't there. He did, however, talk about this one, this was one of the 13. He said we needed to have a robust research and development program--they called them patents at that time. We need to be ahead of everybody else. He wanted to put in policies, and they did become law. And here we have it today, just on these issues alone, these six issues.

The Founding Fathers said transportation. They said watch the currency. They said Buy American. And they said we need to be ahead with research and patents and be on the cutting edge of technology.

What if President Barack Obama's American Jobs Act had been taken up by the Republican leadership that control this House?

What if they had listened to the Founding Fathers and actually implemented what the President wanted to put in place? 1.3 million, 1.3 million jobs, perhaps as much as 1.9 million jobs Americans would be working today. The great ``what if'' question of our time.

What if they had listened to the Founding Fathers?

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. GARAMENDI. Americans would make it if we made it in America. We'd have those middle class jobs. That's where it is.

Mr. Ellison, thank you very much. I know you've got a plane; you've got to get back to Minneapolis. Thank you so much for joining us.

This is part of the Democratic agenda. This is something we've been working on now for well over 2 years, and we call it ``Make It in America.'' This is rebuilding the American middle class. This is about the American middle class coming back.

Over the last 20 years, we've seen a decline in American manufacturing. In the early nineties, we were a little more than 19 million, almost 20 million, Americans in the manufacturing sector. Those were middle class jobs, where you can go to work, earn a living, live a middle class life, buy your bass boat, take the kids on a vacation.

Today, we're just over 11 million middle class manufacturing jobs in America. So looking at this dismal situation, a couple of years ago, shortly after I arrived here, we began looking at what do you do about this. Why did this happen? Why is it that the American manufacturing sector declined?

We did our studies. We did the economic analysis. But mostly, we looked at public policy. We looked at the laws of this land. We looked at what was going on in the public policy sector; and what we found was the policies of this Nation discouraged manufacturing and, in fact, rewarded American corporations that would offshore jobs, literally, actually, giving American corporations a reduction in their taxes for every job they offshored. Total about $16 billion a year.

I know; you don't believe that. How could there be such a policy? That was my question. What? You mean to tell me that the tax policy of the United States gives a tax break to American corporations when they ship a job offshore?

Can't be. In fact, it was. And so in the last year, the last months of the Democrats' control of this House in 2010, we undertook to change that. We put a bill on this floor that would eliminate $12 billion of that $16 billion tax break that American corporations had for offshoring jobs. It passed without one Republican vote. Not one Member of the Republican Party voted to end a tax break for American companies that offshored jobs.

The Senate took it up; it passed. President Obama signed that legislation.

Public policy matters. Public policy matters a great deal.

We've talked here today about the Buy American provisions, been in law for 30, 40 years, that basically say, if it's our taxpayer dollars, it ought to be used to buy American equipment.

Over the years, probably beginning in the eighties and carrying on, those provisions began to gain loopholes, one after another, so that at the end of 2010, the loophole was a 12-lane freeway that you could drive any project through and buy whatever you wanted to buy from wherever it came from. So much so that in San Francisco, when the Oakland Bay Bridge between Oakland and San Francisco had to be rebuilt because of earthquake safety issues--some of it fell down in the Loma Prieta earthquake--the largest construction project, public works project ever in California. The main central steel column for a uniquely designed bridge, $1 billion or more, Chinese steel, Chinese welders, 6,000 jobs in China to save 10 percent.

It turns out the steel was faulty, the welds were faulty, the jobs were still in China and the inspectors were Chinese.

If we'd have had a Buy American provision that meant anything at all, we
would have had 6,000 jobs in America; the inspectors would have been American; and there would be American jobs.

So my legislation, H.R. 613, says this:

If it is your tax money, it's going to be spent on American-made equipment, American-made steel, and the jobs will be in America.

Where is that bill? It hasn't even been taken up for a hearing in the Transportation Committee.

We're nibbling around the edges here. Of every bill that comes through this floor that's relevant to this issue, we try to shoehorn into it a Buy American provision. We try to increase the Buy American laws. We try to make certain that your tax money is going to be spent on American-made equipment. That's our agenda.

Have we been successful? No. No, we've not.

When the half-baked, worthless transportation bill was brought to the floor by our Republican colleagues, who could not even get agreement in their own caucus, we tried to put a provision on, an amendment on, and it was rejected. It was rejected.

Americans want to go to work. Public policy matters. Will your tax dollars be spent buying Chinese steel? I'll give you another example.

In Los Angeles, they went out to buy new light rail cars. Two bids were the final bids. One was by Siemens--yes, a German company that has a manufacturing plant for light rail cars in Sacramento, California. Siemens said that their light rail cars would have a minimum of 80 percent American-made content. A Japanese company came in and said, We'll do it for 60 percent. There was a slight difference. I think there was about a 2 percent difference in the bids.

So what did the MTA, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, do? It chose the Japanese company. American jobs were lost immediately in Sacramento as a result of that decision.

Now, whose money is going to be spent buying those cars, those light rail cars? Whose money is it? Your money. It's your tax money. Good for Japan. They're going to get some jobs. Bad for Sacramento. Layoffs have already occurred, and there are more to come.

Do you want another example? I'll just use California. That's where I'm from.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit System, BART: $3.2 billion for new trains over 10 years. $3.2 billion. Two bids. One, Bombardier, a fine Canadian company, said they would build them with 66 percent American-made content. Okay, that's good. It's not good enough because Alstom, a French company, said they would build them with 90 percent American-made content. Yes, it's a little more expensive, but we're talking $1 billion of American jobs here.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit System said, Well, the Federal Government says it's 60 percent, and we're going to have to go with 66. I said and thousands of Californians said and New Yorkers, which is where most of these jobs would be, that Alstom has a plant in New York to manufacture light rail and heavy rail cars. They said, Wait, let's take 2 months--2 months--and let's rebid this, and let's see what we can do. Alstom was prepared to lower their bid if they would have had an opportunity, and $1 billion of American jobs are not here. They're somewhere else around the world.

Public policy matters. Public policy matters.

I think it's about time to wrap up here, so I'm going to go back to where we started.

What if the House of Representatives under the control of our Republican colleagues--totally under their control and the Senate also under the control of the Republicans because it takes 60 votes there--what if the President's American Jobs Act had been taken up and passed? We'll modify it, and don't forget it was fully paid for, 100 percent paid for with no increase in the deficit. The economists said clearly that 1.3 million would immediately result from the President's American Jobs Act. What if?

What does it mean to you in your community? Would that road have been built? Would you have had the job paving that road? repairing and painting that bridge? down at the local school, painting the school? cleaning up the playgrounds? putting new toilets into the restrooms or, specifically, a new laboratory in the high school--not a lavatory but a laboratory? What if?

What if we had put aside partisan politics?

Keep this in mind that the Republican leader of the Senate, on the day or shortly after President Obama was inaugurated, said that his number one goal was to make sure that this was a one-term President. So how do you do that? Well, when the President proposes an American Jobs Act that would employ 1.3 million Americans immediately, you make certain that it doesn't become law. You slow it down. Everything has to be 60 votes in the Senate; and here in this House, you do not even take it up. You don't allow a vote on it.

You don't do a transportation bill. You don't take the $50 billion injected immediately into infrastructure--totally paid for. You don't do it even though that would employ tens of thousands of Americans. You make certain that the 288,000 teachers who have been laid off across America are not rehired so that my daughter's classroom is not 22 students but 35 students.

How do you destroy a President? You make certain that this economy doesn't move. You take his American Jobs Act, and you sit on it. That's what has happened. The great ``what if.''

What if we put Americans back to work? Yes, maybe Obama would get reelected--maybe I'd get reelected--but I'll tell you this: Americans would be working. Americans would be working. What if?

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Source