Make It in America

Floor Speech

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, thank you very much for this opportunity to delve into what is a major piece of our work here in Washington, and that is the budget and the appropriation process.

Today is one of those very, very important days in the process of government. Today the President delivered to Congress his proposed budget. It is required by the Constitution. George Washington did it, and every President since that time has done it every year, and today, we have President Obama's budget before us.

I want to spend a few moments on that budget, together with my friend from New York, Mr. Paul Tonko and our East-West show. So we have got California and New York here.

I would like to start off by kind of framing my own work and how I think we really need to approach what we do here.

This is from Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression, and he laid out this test. It is on the Roosevelt Memorial here. It is etched into the granite stone there. It says: ``The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much. It is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.''

It is how I like to frame the issues, and I think we can frame the President's budget that way, and also, this way:

Those of you that have seen us here on the floor, Mr. Tonko and myself, we often and usually talk about this issue of Making It in America, rebuilding the great American middle class by rebuilding the manufacturing sector of America.

Twenty years ago, actually 24 years ago, it was about 20 million, 19-plus million Americans were in that manufacturing sector. They were making everything from wine to automobiles and jet planes and even computers. Then we lost it. Maybe 11 million right now.

We are beginning to see the rebuilding of the manufacturing base, and along with that, we will see the American middle class rise up once again and be able to support their families, be able to take care of those things like food and shelter and education.

These are the seven ways that we talk about this. The President's budget picks up many of these, and I want to just focus on some of them tonight. My friend, Mr. Tonko, will pick up the energy piece.

In the President's budget, there are these key sectors, tax policy, education, research, infrastructure. Let's start at the bottom and work to the top.

The President has proposed a $305 billion, 4-year transportation program for the United States. Now, anybody that has driven today here in the East Coast or in the West Coast knows that we have gridlock, we have transportation problems of all kinds.

So the President comes forward with this major initiative, really, a significant increase in what we have done in the past. He wants to focus it, first, on repairing what we already have, the potholes, the bridges that have fallen down and others that might, saying let's get to that.

He then goes about building the more modern transportation systems that we need, expanding our highway program, but also the rail systems, the inner city rail, the inter-city rails, and the street cars and other kinds of mass transportation systems; very, very important.

He proposes how we pay for it. He says, we ought not give the oil companies, the Big Four, a $5 billion annual tax break, literally giving them our money at the gas pump, but also giving them our tax money in unnecessary subsidies.

He has other proposals in this part of the budget so that this would be fully paid for. That is the infrastructure piece.

One of our colleagues here on the floor just a few moments ago was talking about deepening the Savannah River port. Yes, we ought to do that, and the other ports. We know the Panama Canal is going to be widened, and when it is widened, we are going to have larger ships, deeper draft. We need to deepen our ports.

That is an infrastructure project, and the President's budget directly focuses on that.

Why is this important for individuals?

Because these are jobs, these are American jobs in construction, and if we will couple it with one more thing that I have proposed, and that is that these taxpayer programs buy American-made equipment so that the steel for the bridges, the concrete, so that the trains, so that the other things that will be part of this infrastructure, the pumps and all that goes with rebuilding the levees and the sanitation systems and the water system, that they be American-made equipment and supplies.

In doing that, we not only put people to work on the infrastructure projects, but we, once again, make it in America, and we rebuild the American manufacturing.

I would like now to turn to my colleague, Mr. Tonko, who wants to pick up a special piece of this, the energy piece in the President's budget.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Thank you very much, Mr. Tonko, and thank you for your years of service in the area of energy and for moving this entire program forward.

I think there is another very, very important piece of this, and that is that the climate is changing. The climate is changing. We know that the greenhouse gases have passed the 400 mark, which was thought to be the point of no return.

Hopefully, that is not the case, but we do know that, in the President's budget, he goes after this issue of climate change with the kind of programs that you talked about, about the programs supporting renewable energy, making permanent the energy tax credits for renewables, which is very, very important in my district.

I have a major wind farm that starts and stops, depending upon whether the production tax credit is renewed here in Congress. Right now, it is stopping, and that is a major part of the potential energy that we need.

The President talks about an all-of-the-above strategy, and yes, we ought to do that. One of those strategies is a natural gas strategy, which is now replacing coal in our power plants and, when properly managed--that is, methane doesn't leak--it is clear that we will reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by that strategy. There are many, many different pieces to this. You spoke so well to it.

I want to just pick up a couple of others very, very quickly, and it is a part of this Make It In America, particularly the manufacturing. The President proposes that we create more advanced manufacturing hubs.

These are innovation hubs. There are several in the United States. He wants to put more of these out there. They have coupled the research with the manufacturing, and that allows for the advancement here.

He also does one thing that is very important in this, and that is the education and the reeducation of our workers and our students. I was at an extraordinary manufacturing facility in Yuba City over the weekend, and they make bearings.

I am not talking about these little ball bearings that you find in small appliances and the like. We are talking about bearings that are huge. These weigh several tons. They are the bearings on a shaft in a hydroelectric plant, maybe 2 or 3 feet in diameter.

I had no idea this existed there, and the one thing they wanted me to know was that they cannot find skilled machinists that are able and capable of doing that work.

In the President's budget, he has a major program to train and retrain the workers of tomorrow, men and women that will do not only the computer work, but also men and women that are capable of becoming the machinists of tomorrow, so that we are able, in America, to produce these very extraordinarily important, unique pieces of equipment, like the shafts, the turbines, and in this case, the bearings that are so important to make those things work.

So there is this whole complex in the President's budget--education, early childhood education, going after climate change with energy, going after infrastructure--as we talked about earlier.

There are many more pieces of this puzzle, and as we come back in the future, I want us to pick up each individual piece, talk to the American public about what is in the President's budget, and hopefully persuade our Republican colleagues to go along with this pro-growth deficit reduction budget that the President has proposed.

I think, with that, I will turn it over to you, and if you don't have any more comments, we will call it a night.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Thank you, Mr. Tonko, for being such a leader on these issues.

As I was about to turn around to the Speaker and sign off, I realized I had left off a major piece of the infrastructure. We have a major drought in California, and we know that for California to be able to address this issue in the future, we are going to have to prepare by building reservoir capacity.

Well, I am not supposed to speak directly to anybody on the floor, but we are going to be putting forth a series of bills to build reservoirs in California. That is another critical piece of the infrastructure.

It may be the pipes. It may be the plumbing. It may be the sanitation system. But we desperately need to store water in California, not only in surface storage, but also to store that water in the underground aquifers.

If we do that, when the droughts which come occasionally to California, as they have in the past, we will be prepared to deal with them because we will have set aside the water that we needed.

Somebody asked me about this a few days ago, and they said: Well, why do we need to do that? Well, people will just consume it.

I said: Not if they listen and read Exodus in the Bible. It is there--7 years of good, 7 years of bad. You had better put it aside during the 7 years of good.

So that is what we intend to do. We will be introducing legislation later this week on building one of the major reservoirs in California.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I will look to you and say that I look forward to working with you on these projects, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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