Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the bill, and I thank Congresswoman Waters and Mr. Grimm for their work.

This is desperately needed. There is a lot to be said, and a lot more work will go into this before this becomes law, but it is a major step forward.

One example: Isleton, California, in my district, in a zone that was mapped with 100-year flood protection, was downgraded by the Army Corps of Engineers and is now a high hazard area. Last year, it cost $700 a year for the flood insurance. This year, it is $7,000, which is about twice the mortgage on that $115,000 house. It is not workable.

We are seeing, across my area, insurance premiums of $10,000, $25,000. This bill would stop that, move things back,

give us time to deal with what is the fundamental problem in flood insurance, and that is the catastrophic coverage, which has to be spread out across the Nation.

More to be worked on, good progress, good bill. Let's vote it out of here and get this thing solved.

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.

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.

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.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 7 o'clock and 41 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, March 5, 2014, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to be back on the floor once again. I won't take a whole hour here, but I wanted just to talk about something that is so very important to America and, really, to the future of this country.

I like to start these discussions with what are we all about? What should we really be thinking about?

I find myself often going back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt during a very difficult time in America's history, the Great Depression. He put forth a principle, if you would, a values statement of what he was about and really what this country could and should be about.

He said 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 a values statement. It is a statement of what I like to believe I am here for, to deal with this profound, important issue in this, another period of stress for the American family.

We often find ourselves here on the floor, and I do this almost all the time, talking about this subject, the subject of Making It in America. This is a manufacturing strategy for America, and in this strategy there are many elements that we spend time on the floor talking about and legislation that we push here dealing with how to revive the manufacturing sector, and in doing so, give the American family, the American middle class, an opportunity that it once had: to find a good-paying job, to be able to make it in America with their family, to provide for a home, for food, for clothing, for education, vacations, sort of the American Dream, to be able to do those things. They knew that if they would work hard they would be able to make it.

Well, one way of achieving that is with this strategy of rebuilding the American manufacturing sector to make it in America, whether that is manufacturing food, as occurs in my district--it is a big agricultural district--or some of the new technologies of biotechnologies of one sort or another.

The high-tech industry, the automotive industry is coming back, and indeed, for a variety of reasons, some of it had to do with on our legislative agenda. We are seeing the revival of the American manufacturing sector. Good, wonderful. That is where the middle class jobs will largely come from.

There are various pieces of this. There is the trade policy, and there is much debate here on the floor now and in the months ahead about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a new trade deal. Is it going to be fair trade or free trade?

We don't need free trade. What we need is fair trade.

The tax policies--certainly we see this in the kind of tax breaks that are out there. Does the oil industry need additional tax breaks?

Their incomes, which are the largest profits in the world, do they need to be supplemented with American taxpayer money?

Right now they are, the Big Five: $6 billion a year of American taxpayer money going to them.

We talk about tax policy, talk energy policy, but I want to really focus this evening on these two issues, labor and education.

We will leave aside the research issues--which are fundamental to future economic growth because you have to be out ahead, and that is where research comes in--and the infrastructure, which I will weave into this.

But I really want to focus on labor and education. And I want to focus on a very important part of this equation, this very important part about the middle class and those who want to be in the middle class.

Specifically, I want to talk about women, and I want to talk about a women's economic agenda, about why this is critically important not just to women and their children and the families, but also to America and to America's future.

We know that the American family has changed. We know that, over the years, more and more families are raised by a single parent, and in most cases, that is a single mother. And so a women's economic agenda is critical for those children.

It is also critical for the American economy because, when women succeed, America succeeds. This is a theme we are going to spend a lot of time talking about. We are going to talk about women in the American economy and their success.

And here are three of the principles that we need to talk about. America's success is dependent upon the success of women because women are a major part of our workforce today, and they are a major part of the poverty issue in America.

One in three women in America are living in poverty or are teetering on the brink of poverty. That is 42 million women, plus the 28 million children who depend upon them.

And the American family has changed. Today, only one in five families has a homemaker, a mom that is a stay-at-home mom, and a working dad. Two out of three families depend on the wages of the working mom. Two out of three families depend upon the wages of the working mom who is struggling to balance caregiving as well as breadwinning.

The average woman continues to be paid just 77 cents for every dollar that a man working in the same job, the same skill sets, and the same amount of time at that job earns, so the living wage and equal pay for equal work is critical.

The average African American woman earns 64 cents compared to a man doing that same work, and an average Latina earns 55 cents. This is a huge problem for those individuals. It is also a huge problem for the American economy because a large portion of the American workforce is held back by simple discrimination, obviously discrimination based on race.

An African American woman, a Latina woman, 55 percent of the wage that a man would earn in that same job, or 64 percent for an African American woman. It is discrimination, for which there ought to be no place in America.

Closing the wage gap between men and women would cut the poverty rate in half. Closing the wage gap for an African American woman, for a Latina woman, for a European woman would reduce the poverty rate in America by 50 percent.

Is this on the agenda for America? Is poverty on the agenda? You would think so, listening to the debate on the floor of the House of Representatives. How do you close the gap? End wage discrimination. That is how you do it.

This is not a new issue. This is an issue that has been with us at least for the last 60 years. President Kennedy talked about this in the early part of his all-too-short Presidency.

Women make up nearly two-thirds of the minimum wage workers in America, and a vast majority of these workers receive no paid sick days, not one, not one paid sick day; yet these are the mothers, these are the mothers that have the children, and these are the children that get sick.

So what is that mother to do? She might very well lose her job. Even though she is earning less than a man, she might very well lose her job when she does what every mother wants to do, and that is to care for their sick child.

More than half of the babies born to women under the age of 30 are born to unmarried mothers; and most of those mothers are White, a single-parent family and a woman, a White woman earning 77 cents doing a job that a man is paid a full dollar.

There is something wrong with this, and this is something that the House of Representatives and the Senate must deal with, and I am sure the President would sign that bill.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans and 85 percent of the millennials believe that the government should adapt to the reality of single- parent families and use its resources to help children and mothers succeed, regardless of their familial status.

An overwhelming 96 percent of single mothers say paid leave in the workplace policy would be the most help to them, and 80 percent of all Americans say that the government should expand access to high-quality, affordable child care.

A living wage, equal pay for equal work, paid family and medical leave, and affordable child care, this is an agenda. This is the Democratic agenda; this ought to be the Republican agenda; and it surely ought to be the American agenda, because when women succeed, America succeeds.

Three things that have been on the agenda for America for a long time and that are obviously not yet done. A living wage, this is the minimum wage issue. This is swirling around the congressional debate. Should there be a living wage, a minimum wage, a minimum wage of $10.10 for every American? What would it mean to women? It would mean that half of the women in poverty would no longer be there.

When you couple it with equal pay for equal work, suddenly, you have an American agenda where we can go after poverty, where the great debate about the equality of opportunity in America is addressed, where the equality and the wage disparity is addressed, where we can make some real progress in dealing not only with poverty, but also dealing with the well-being of our children.

We are in America, where one out of four American children go to bed hungry. You want to deal with that issue? Then you deal with a living wage and the minimum wage issue, $10.10, which is actually just about equal to what the minimum wage was when Ronald Reagan was Governor of California, long before he became President, and then you pay equal for equal work. This is an agenda that ought to be the American agenda.

Here is a little bit more on it. The challenge, the gender pay gap, where an African American woman earns 64 percent, or 64 cents, of what a male would be paid for in that same job, where a Latina earns 55 cents for what a man would earn doing that same job, and where, on average, across this Nation, it is 77 cents, the gender pay gap.

The Paycheck Fairness Act, H.R. 377, raise the minimum wage, H.R. 1010--which, by the way, ought to be $10.10--these bills have been introduced. These bills have strong Democratic support. These bills are not heard in those committees that our Republican colleagues control.

It is time for these bills to be taken up. It is time for America to end the gender pay gap with H.R. 377. It is time for the minimum wage to become, once again, equal to what it was in purchasing power when Ronald Reagan was Governor of the State of California in the 1960s, H.R. 1010, $10.10 an hour for every worker in America, wherever they are, whether they are a woman or a man.

Working family, how is a parent to care for their children? If you care about family values, this is important. This is important if you care about family values. What is a working mother to do? Remember, roughly half of the American families are now headed by a single woman.

If that child gets sick, in many places across America, that mother is faced with a terrible quandary. Are they going to go to work and leave the child at home sick? Or are they not going to go to work, lose a day of pay or, quite possibly, lose the job, which is not uncommon in America?

So we put forth H.R. 1286, the paid sick leave act, something that is common, in fact, in every European country, advanced economies around the world understand family values, like ours should, too. They understand that parents, man and woman, husband and wife, single father or single mother want to take care of their children.

We have six children. We have raised those children. We have 11 grandchildren. And we understand that those kids are little petri dishes that collect germs and get sick. We understand what it takes to care for a child. It takes the attention, the full attention, of the husband or the mother or the single mother or the single father.

H.R. 1286 is languishing in the committees controlled by our Republican colleagues. We talk a lot about family values around here. If you really care

about them, then you would let that parent have a paid sick leave so they can care for their child.

Children, oh, we spend a lot of time talking about children, our future, the destiny of America, children. What can we do now to help every child in America? What can we do now to help every family in America?

Well, I would suggest that we take a look at H.R. 769, the Permanent Child Tax Credit Act. We have a child tax credit. It bounces up and down, depending upon the whims of Congress and the Senate and the President.

This would permanently increase the child tax credit so that every working family, from the top down to the bottom, those people that are on the edge of poverty, those people are not now earning $10.10 an hour, that are at just above the now minimum wage at the Federal level, say $7 an hour, so that those people would be able to at least have a little more income with the permanent child care tax credit.

How long have we known that, if you could give a child early education, pre-K, prekindergarten education, that that child, in the formative years of their brain development, would advance faster and longer in the development of their mind and their capabilities to address the challenges that they will have out ahead?

We have known this for decades. We know that, if you can get your child into pre-K, into early childhood education, that that child can be advancing faster, be better able to handle first grade, second grade, and on, all the way through college.

This is not just an American issue. Around the world, countries that want to advance their economy, countries that want to have social justice, countries that want their families to have economic opportunity, they want early childhood education.

So we put forth H.R. 3461, the universal pre-K education act. Universal pre-K, can we afford it? Of course, we can. When you consider the benefit to this Nation and when you consider the benefit to that individual child, you would say of course we can afford it, and, alternatively, we cannot afford not to do it. We cannot allow a large percentage of our children to not succeed in school, to not be able to keep up, to go into a classroom ill-prepared, whether it is kindergarten or first grade, to begin behind on the first day of school. It is not uncommon--I don't know, the percentage is probably somewhere less than 25 percent of the children in America are able to get pre-K education.

But I will tell you who is able to get it: those families that have the upper income, those families that are not worried about the gender pay gap, and those families that are not worried about the minimum wage. Those families are able to send their kids to early childhood education courses of all kinds. And so when those children enter kindergarten, when those children begin the first grade, they are the ones ahead. They are the ones that are likely to stay ahead. And for those children that don't have this opportunity, they are the ones that are behind. They are the ones that are going to fail. They are the ones that will drop out and likely to become the troublemakers of the future.

So why not give every child in America an equal opportunity to succeed? Can we afford it? You bet. We cannot afford to not do this. This is critical. This is our agenda. When women succeed, America succeeds. This is a family value agenda. This is an agenda where, if you care about the American family, if you care about its success, if you care about its health, then these are the issues that we ought to be pushing: the gender pay gap, equal pay for equal work, the Paycheck Fairness Act, H.R. 377; raise the minimum wage, H.R. 1010.

I would ask our Republican colleagues who care deeply about family values--and I know they do--to consider these two pieces of legislation. And if you don't want a Democratic author, find a Republican author and we will support it. We don't care who carries the bill. We just want paycheck fairness, equal pay for equal work. We just want the minimum wage to provide enough for a family to at least survive and thrive.

If you care about family values, then you will want to talk about paid sick leave so that a mother or father doesn't have to make a choice between their job and their child's health.

H.R. 1286, let's give every family a chance. Let's give this a hearing. Let's give this bill a hearing in committee.

And, finally, all of us will stand here on the floor and we will talk for hours about our children, but are we willing to actually do something? Are we really actually willing to fund early childhood education? And are we willing to make permanent a tax break, a child tax credit? Or are we just willing to yap and talk?

Here is something positive. Here is something real. Take up H.R. 769, the Permanent Child Tax Credit Act. Take up universal pre-K education, H.R. 3461. If you are not willing to take these bills up, if you are not willing to introduce something similar to address these issues, then it is all talk. It is just a lot of hot air, for which there is justifiable belief that that is most of what is done around here.

Give the American family a chance. Give American women the opportunity to succeed. Let's do it. And we can. So this is our agenda. This is part of the Make It In America agenda when we talk about labor, when we talk about education, we talk about women in the workforce, and we talk about their opportunity. We can Make It In America. We can make things. We can make locomotives, we can make solar cells, and we can make windmills. But if we want the American people to make it, if we want them to be able to take care of their families, if we want children to thrive, and if we really want the American family to make it, then we had better be thinking about women, and we had better remember that when women succeed, then this country will succeed.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I don't know if it is proper to ask you a question, but is this February 2? I am reminded of the movie ``Groundhog Day.'' We continue to repeat what happened yesterday and the year before. This is a repetition of a bill that came to the floor 2 years ago. It was a bill that had a lot of different pieces to it but was very, very simple in what it accomplished, or attempted to accomplish, and that was to take water from someone--the environment, fish, and the delta, farmers, communities, Contra Costa County, the East Bay of San Francisco--and deliver it to someone else. That would be the San Luis Unit of the Central Valley Project. That was 2 years ago. It must be February 2. It must be Groundhog Day because we are doing it all over again. Whatever little whistles and bells and bows you want to put on it, this is essentially a theft of water from someone to give to somebody else. Plain and simple, that is what it is about.

In this case, the water is going to be stolen--and I use that word because that is accurate--from the delta, from the environment, San Francisco Bay, from the salmon, which is a huge industry in California, all the way up the coast to Oregon, to be given to the largest single- water district in the Nation. A district that, by its contract with the Federal Government, is specifically set to take shortages in their water when there is a drought. If this bill becomes law, that won't be the case. They will get the water and someone else won't.

Okay. We have seen this show before. We also saw before that this type of legislation, as does this bill, overturns the California constitution, pushes it out of the way, and all this is done by folks who normally call themselves State righters.

Well, this is the biggest grab of power by the Federal Government on water anywhere in the history of reclamation law dating back to 1904. Never before has the Federal Government made such an attempt to grab the water rightfully belonging to a State and saying, in this case, California, you are going to use that water as seen fit by the farm bill.

Current water law and current law and practices for a century and more have been the opposite. This doesn't solve the problem. We have got a real problem. These have been seen before and they are going to have to be seen over and over, because that was a year ago. We turn it upside right. Whatever, it is a lot of snow; right? That was a year ago, snow in the Sierras. That is this year, no snow.

And by the way, the Central Valley looks pretty much like a desert-- not just the San Joaquin Valley, but the whole valley.

We have got a problem. We have a very real problem. We really need a real solution. This bill isn't a solution. This bill is a call to arms. This bill is the clarion call of yet one more battle in the great California water war, and we are all veterans of that war. My colleagues over here on the Republican aisle, my colleagues over here on the Democratic aisle, we are veterans of the water war.

Unfortunately, this bill doesn't solve the problem of California. There are solutions available. We really need to get to them. We really need to sit down and work with a bill that passed the House and the Senate and was signed by the President less than 2 weeks ago, the omnibus bill.

In that omnibus bill there is a restoration, a reauthorization of the Federal drought emergency program that has some 16, 17 different provisions that provide for specific things that we should be funding. There's no money in this bill for funding. We are going to have to fund this. This is a Westwide problem, a problem that reaches across many, many States, and it is going to take all of us working together to help each individual State, each community, and every water district deal with a very real problem. It is a battle. It is a call to arms. Get to your barricades. Pull out the old weapons. We really need a sensible solution here, and, unfortunately, this bill simply doesn't do it.

Mr. Chairman, we continually hear about the 800,000 acre-feet. Indeed, there is 800,000 acre-feet. It is not out to the ocean; It is into the delta. That water is available for a variety of purposes, including Contra Costa, the entire East Bay, and Solano County that I represent. It is there as environmental water, but it has multiple purposes, so it is not wasted water at all.

The other thing is this allocation chart that keeps coming up. That is an allocation based upon a prediction of the amount of water that rain will fall that year. It is not the actual amount of water delivered. If you take a look at the actual amount of water delivered, it is substantially greater.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

We are going back and forth with a lot of numbers here, and there's something we need to understand. The allocation is a number that is taken from the nature of the--that the water year is supposed to be. That is the early allocation.

Mr. Speaker, I have a motion to recommit at the desk.

I am opposed.

Mr. Speaker, this is the final amendment to the bill, which, unfortunately, will not kill the bill or send it back to committee. If adopted, the bill will immediately proceed to final passage, as amended.

Perhaps all of you have heard that there is a drought in the West. If you haven't, I am here to tell you there is a serious drought in the West--not just California, but throughout the West.

This particular piece of legislation is said to deal with the drought. It does not. This legislation does two things that every one of us ought to be concerned about.

First of all, it is a water grab. It takes water from somebody and gives it to somebody else.

Secondly, if you are interested in states' rights, if you are interested in the power of a community to decide its own future, you had better be paying attention to this bill. This bill is very, very much about the power of a community, a power of a State to decide what it wants to do with its water.

This is an issue of profound importance to every State in the West that has a reclamation project, because this bill sets out for the very first time the Federal Government overriding State constitution, in this case the constitution of the State of California, State water law, and contracts. This is serious stuff.

If this were to somehow solve the crisis in California, you may accept it. But it does not. It does not create 1 gallon of water. It simply steals what little water there is available from some and gives it to another.

I yield 1 minute to my colleague from California (Mr. Bera).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to my colleague from California (Mr. Huffman).

Will it take my time?

I am afraid I cannot yield. Sorry, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Speaker, I want to be very, very clear with my colleagues. California water issues go back to the very beginning of the State, the Gold Rush, and as they have said, whiskey's for drinking, water's for fighting.

Unfortunately, this bill does nothing to solve the current crisis in California. What it does, it sets in motion a series of pieces of legislation that will unravel 150 years of California water law and set in place extraordinary chaos.

It does deliver water from one area to another area, literally stealing that water and giving it to others.

It does override the California State Constitution and what we call the Public Trust Doctrine, that is, the water of California belongs to all the people of California. It is allocated by law, by precedent, and by water rights that are allocated. This overrides that.

We don't want the Federal Government to go there if you care anything about your State, about the water in your State, and about your community. We need a long-term and short-term solution.

Fortunately, in the omnibus bill, we did reinstate the Federal drought protection drought response act. We have many of the tools in place to deal with

the drought today. What we don't have is money.

I would ask the majority to put up a bill that delivers the money to carry out what is already in the law, which we did just 2 weeks ago.

Unfortunately, this bill puts in place a new water war which we do not and cannot have at a time when we need to come together to solve California water problems.

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

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield for a fact?

Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker, it is good to be back on the floor once again as we have for most every week to talk about jobs in America, to talk about the unemployed, to talk about those who are less fortunate and those who need a strong Federal program to create jobs.

I often start with this because it is kind of the compass, the touchstone of what, at least, I would like to think we ought to be doing.

This is from Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This is actually on one of the marble slabs at his memorial here in Washington, D.C. It reads this way:

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.

All across America today there are far too many that have too little. A couple of weeks ago, I did a jobs fair in Fairfield, California. It was about 38 degrees outside that day, and we had just under 1,000 people come to that jobs fair--there were about 50 employers--and maybe 50-70 people actually got jobs.

This is a picture of the men and women that were lined up waiting to get in to have a very quick interview with one or more of those 50 potential employers.

I have used this photo before here on the floor to point out the need for a jobs program here in America. The President 2 years ago in his State of the Union put forth a proposal. It had several elements--and we will probably cover some of those today--but it has not been enacted. The Republican leadership in this House has refused to pass even one of those jobs programs. There was infrastructure, education, reeducation; there were programs to provide for the opportunity for men and women to get jobs here in the United States.

But I was looking at this photo just today and I said, I am going to use this again, because in this photo approximately half of the people lined up, 1,000, just under 1,000 were women. It caused me to think about another program that the Democratic minority here in the House has been working on for some time, that is, the issue of women in the American economy.

I know that in my own district there is this issue of equal pay for equal work. A woman doing stenography work next to a man doing stenography work would be paid 85 cents while the man is paid $1. So it is 85 cents when a man would have the same job, same skill set, same tenure, would get $1. That is wrong. It is one of the issues we want to address.

Also we know that many of the women that are searching for work here are going to be finding minimum-wage jobs. Now, California is different. We have already passed a minimum-wage law in California that in another year and a half will be $10 plus a little. But the national is still at $7-plus; way, way under what anybody working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year could possibly support a family on. So the minimum wage is another issue for women, as it is for men; but I dare say more so for women than for men.

There is a multitude of issues that we need to consider as we talk about jobs, employment, increasing the employment opportunities in the United States for these people; men and women, and particularly women, that are lined up wanting to get a job.

Joining me tonight is an extraordinary group of people who have been working on this issue of women and jobs, employment, equal employment opportunities, daycare, family care programs.

I would like to start with Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, who has been one of the leaders throughout this entire Nation, often seen on television speaking to this issue and the issue of opportunity in America.

Jan, would you care to start us off on this 1-hour and talking about women and jobs.

Would you like to have it?

Those statistics are a wake-up call for America. More than half the population are female, and yet our policies are not women-friendly policies. Our laws are not women-friendly laws, and we need to change that.

I would like now to yield to my colleague from California, Janice Hahn, a longtime city councilwoman in the City of Los Angeles, a woman who knows these issues from her experience representing the communities in that area and now an outstanding Member of the Congress.

If I might interrupt for a moment.

I am highly motivated. My wife of almost 48 years now and my five daughters keep my constantly abreast of this issue.

Representative Hahn, thank you so very, very much.

This chart here, When Women Succeed, America Succeeds, picks up a handful of the bills that have been introduced by the Democratic Caucus, many of these bills by women, a few men along the way. These are the kinds of things that we really ought to be dealing with here as we move--or, unfortunately, fail to move--legislation.

Paycheck fairness, this is the issue of that 77 percent in California, my district being about 85 percent.

The minimum wage, which we talked about here. The issue you raised Representative Hahn about paid sick leave and the problems that occur. Make permanent the child tax credit, which is exceedingly important in providing that income necessary to support the kid. The education issues, and I notice one of my colleagues, Mike Honda, will talk about that in a few moments.

I would like now--and we will pick up the rest. This one down here is one really at the bottom, Alzheimer's, and you mentioned this. The children are now taking care of their parents. Of course, the children are now in their fifties, sixties, and the parents are in their seventies and eighties and beyond. And this issue of Alzheimer's, an overwhelming tidal wave is coming on us.

I know in our own home, the last 2 years of my wife's mother's life was spent in our home. She and I, my wife had night care taking care of her. Fortunately, we were able to have day care come in. This is a huge, growing issue, one in which we need to find ways to support the children taking care of their parents in their homes.

I would like now to turn to another colleague from Ohio, one who has often joined me here on the floor. And thank you so very, very much, Marcy, for joining us, Marcy Kaptur, who has a great deal to do with the appropriations process. Congratulations on the omnibus bill just coming up.

Thank you so very much for your work on the appropriations and pushing these issues along.

Representative Mike Honda from California has been working on the issues of education for many, many

years and has some insights into how this issue of women and equality are taken up in the educational area.

Mr. Honda, if you would like to proceed.

Representative Honda, thank you so very much.

Among the many pieces of legislation that the Democratic Caucus has put forward on this issue of when women succeed, America succeeds is the issue of universal pre-K. Head Start is one part of that. There are many other kinds of programs, but it is absolutely clear that if we have universal educational opportunities before kindergarten and beyond that the chance of a kid making it in this economy is going to be substantially greater.

This is just part of the agenda over the next several months. We will be talking about the remaining portions of the agenda that we are putting forth.

We know that if this Nation is to succeed, we better make sure that the majority of our population, the women in our society--girls young and old--have every opportunity to succeed. There are barriers, some legal, some historic, and some custom, that make it very difficult for women to have an equal chance in our economy.

So we are going to address those. We would like to have the Republican side of the House work with us on those issues. We know that one of the major parts of that is the minimum wage issue. That is front and center.

I would like now to turn to my colleague from New York, who has joined me all so often, but never quite enough, on the floor.

Representative Tonko, you have been on this issue of economic development for so long. I think it is almost 4 years now we have been dealing with this, not every week, but often talking about jobs in America, economic growth, and what we can do.

Why don't you pick it up and carry the ball for a while, and then we will see where we are.

Mr. Tonko, I knew that I would enjoy listening to you. The passion, the knowledge, the intensity that you bring to this issue is critically important. You have worked at these issues for a long time, and I want to talk, just wrap up the unemployment insurance issue with going back to where I started here some time ago.

Again, in early December, a jobs fair in Fairfield, California, nearly 1,000 people came to it, 50 employers. More than half of the people in this line are women. I could probably go down through this line. I remember a conversation with a couple of the women here, and they were on unemployment insurance.

Now, unemployment insurance actually started with the New Deal. It was part of the effort to deal with poverty in America, and it was an insurance program, a program into which the employer and the employee pay for insurance for the employee should there be a layoff, should they be unemployed, should that individual be unemployed. It is an insurance program. It is not a welfare program. It is an insurance program.

But if I were to go back down this line and talk to each one of these individuals, probably, maybe, 15 percent of them have lost their unemployment insurance because the House of Representatives has refused to extend the long-term unemployment insurance.

So where are they today?

They are without a job because, as you said, Mr. Tonko, for every job available in America today, there are three people looking for that job. So two are going to go without the employment.

Minimum wage doesn't count because they yet don't have a job. We need to develop a jobs program, and we need to extend that unemployment because these women are mothers of children that now have a family with no income, no unemployment insurance.

The food stamps, the proposal on this floor by our colleagues was to cut the food stamp program by $40 billion. So where will the food come from? Not from SNAP, which is the new name for the food stamp program, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. That is going to be cut.

Hunger in America among children--one in four children go hungry, and we are adding to it. We are adding to that number today by the refusal to extend the unemployment insurance.

Some 72,000 people will lose their long-term unemployment insurance each month as this rolls along--each week.

Thank you, Mr. Tonko. You are welcome to interrupt me whenever, and we can have a dialogue here. So thanks for the lipreading.

Each week 72,000 people. At the end of the year, another 3\1/2\ million will have lost their unemployment insurance. Will they have a job? They could have a better opportunity for a job if we carried out the President's jobs program.

I think we have got about 10 minutes or so. Let's spend some time on that.

I am going to put up one of my favorite and often-used charts here. Mr. Tonko, you will recognize this.

It is the Make It in America chart. It is the revitalization of manufacturing in the United States. And I could probably give your speech on the industrialization of the State of New York. I will let you do it, however.

But these are the issues that we think are critical. We have spent most of this night talking about this one--labor. Last week I said we would pick this up, and we are, and particularly focused on women in the labor force. But here it is, trade policies, international trade.

I gave a speech this morning on the maritime industry, the decline of the maritime industry, the necessity of maintaining it. We are a maritime Nation. We have oceans surrounding us, whether it is the Arctic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the Caribbean, or the Atlantic Ocean.

So it is trade issues.

Tax policies, why do we continue to subsidize the wealthiest industries in this world? The oil industry, why do we continue to subsidize the oil industry? Energy policy. Fortunately, we are having a good run on the energy issues, and we will come back and talk about that.

Mr. Honda talked about educational policy, research and infrastructure. These are the elements of the Make It In America agenda. And when we use our tax money to buy American-made equipment, really good things happen. Americans go to work.

In my district, or just on the edge of my district, in Sacramento, Siemens, that huge German manufacturing company, opened a manufacturing plant to build 100 percent American-made locomotives for the first time in generations because, in the stimulus bill, a sentence was added to the support for Amtrak, and that sentence said these locomotives will be 100 percent American-made.

A German company said, oh, $600, $700 million contract, we will make them in America. And so all across this Nation, manufacturing companies are now participating in the construction of 100 percent American-made locomotives using American taxpayer money.

That is the key here. Mr. Tonko, I know you get really excited about this issue, as you were about poverty and equality in America just a moment ago. Why don't you pick this up and carry it for a while?

Representative Tonko, once again, you have laid it out very, very clearly, the challenge that we have. There are 435 of us here in the House of Representatives. I think we are a little lower than that because of some retirements, but let's just say 435, and 100 Members of Congress. Together with the President, we set the national policy. We set the national agenda. And frankly, at the moment, the agenda is one that has stalled out. Really, we have been prevented from pushing forward an aggressive agenda such as you have described. Those elements, research, education, manufacturing, infrastructure, the role of labor, particularly the role of women

in the labor force, those issues are roadblocked.

There is a stop sign that has been put up here in the House of Representatives that basically says we shouldn't do any of that, that government has no role in any of those issues. I would challenge that philosophy. I would challenge that philosophy with the Founding Fathers.

Our colleagues on the right often talk about we ought to do what the Founding Fathers did. Well, one of the things that George Washington, one of the Founding Fathers, did was to turn to Alexander Hamilton and say, Develop a strategy for American manufacturing, for building the American economy. So Hamilton went off, probably talked to a few people, and came back with a lengthy report, which you would never see nowadays, which was like 30 pages. And in that document, he laid out a strategy for building the American economy.

Interestingly, guess what he talked about. He talked about trade. He talked about infrastructure. Among the infrastructure that was specifically in the plan that Hamilton presented to George Washington, who then presented it to the Congress, was canals. And shortly thereafter, about 30 years later, the Erie Canal.

Here in Washington, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, the canal on the Potomac River. It also talked about roads. It talked about ports. Those were the infrastructure projects of the day. The Constitution, by the way, says that the Federal Government must maintain and build postal roads. Infrastructure, we talk about that nearly all the time we are here.

Research. At that period of time, Thomas Jefferson--not exactly in league with the representatives from New England, but nonetheless--was pushing forward the research agenda and the education agenda. Go back to the Founding Fathers, pick up those elements of economic growth that they put on the American agenda in the very earliest days of this Nation, and carry those forward.

We are not a shy country; but if one would look at the policies emanating from the Congress today, you would think that we are a country that does not envision the necessity of grabbing the strength of the past and using those elements that have created the economic growth and pushing them forward.

We can, and we must, do this. And as we do it, I want to go back to where we started today's discussion, and that is, we started this discussion with the role of women in our economy. 77 cents. Equal pay? No, no. A man will earn $1; and a woman at the same job, same skill sets, same tenure on the job will earn 77 cents across this Nation. In my own district, it is 85 cents.

A woman working full time at minimum wage cannot earn enough money in this Nation to feed her child and pay the rent. A woman in this Nation with a child, she has a job, the child gets sick: she is faced with a dilemma.

We need to address these issues; and we must keep in mind the Make It In America agenda, the jobs agenda that we push forward; and we must always remember that when women succeed, America will succeed.

And with that, I thank my colleagues Mr. Tonko, Mr. Honda, the three women that joined us earlier, Ms. Kaptur, Ms. Hahn, and Ms. Schakowsky, for bringing this message to the American people and to our colleagues here on the floor.

And I yield to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Tonko) to wrap up.

Mr. Speaker, I thank you for the hour, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to provide a reason for my absence during a series of votes on Thursday, January 9, 2014. During Roll Calls 7-10, I was suffering from severe back spasms and went immediately to the Attending Physician's office for assistance. If present, I would have voted yes during Roll Calls 7, 8 and 9 and I would have voted no during Roll Call 10.

Thank you, Mr. Grijalva, and I thank the chairman for bringing this bill to the floor.

What is there to say? 150,000-or-more men and women from America have gone out across the world to give the very best of this country, the service, to assist in numerous ways, everything from teaching to community development and everything in between.

My wife and I were two of those 150,000-plus Americans. Our service was in Ethiopia. And it is hard to say, coming back from those years, what actually happened. But what actually happened is progress was made.

The school in which my wife taught now has computers in their school as a result of her work and the work of her students who came back 30, 40 years after they had graduated from that elementary school, to help in their school to carry on the tradition of service.

This particular piece of legislation would simply authorize an effort by a nonprofit organization to build a commemorative program here in Washington, D.C. No Federal money is needed.

There is a long, long process that would lead to the culmination of this, but I believe, having seen the 50th anniversary program here in Washington, in which tens of thousands of returned Peace Corps volunteers and young men and women that want to become Peace Corps volunteers, came to Washington to commemorate the 50th anniversary. So, now, a year and a half later, here we are moving this piece of legislation.

We ought to do it; and, ultimately, I believe that there will be a commemoration, some sign of a memorial here in Washington, D.C., that will speak to peace, will speak to the yearning that Americans have for peace around the world, for a better world for all of us, wherever that may be, whether it is in the former Soviet Union countries or in those developing countries in Africa, Asia, or in Latin America.

This is a good thing, and I am going to give just one more example. In the year 2000, a group of returned Peace Corps volunteers returned to Ethiopia and Eritrea. In the midst of a war in which some 80,000 Ethiopians and Eritreans were killed, that group of returned Peace Corps volunteers were able to speak to the heads of state.

The U.S. Government couldn't talk to them, nor could other governments. But it turned out that both of those heads of state were taught in their high school by Peace Corps volunteers, and they were willing to talk to those returned volunteers. And from those discussions came the formulation of the settlement of that war.

You never know where the impact will be felt, but I know it is felt in every country in which Peace Corps volunteers have served, and it is felt here in the United States and in this Congress by men and women that have served in the Peace Corps.

I thank you, Mr. Speaker.

It is good to return from our 3 weeks back in our districts. I suspect that most of us spent time talking to our constituents, observing the good and the bad and the cold and the wet--not in California, where we have been in the midst of a drought--but working, as we should, back in our districts and also spending some time with our families along the way. For me, it was one of those periods of time where we were reaching out, trying to gain an understanding of the challenges that face our constituents.

As I returned here today, I realized that in 1964, Mr. Speaker, right below you on the podium where one of our key assistants is now standing, a fellow by the name of Lyndon Baines Johnson gave a speech-- here is a picture of him--on January 8, 1964, speaking to a joint session of Congress. I think it was his first speech after becoming President, following the tragic assassination of President Kennedy. There he stood. And among the things he told America was that it was time for a war, a war on poverty, and he urged the United States to take on the troubling and continuing issue of poverty in the United States.

I remember that speech. I was in college at the time. I remember him standing there, and I remember that challenge, following shortly upon the challenge that President Kennedy had given us to ask not what our country could do for us but, rather, what we could do for our country.

So those two things came together, and they have been with me these many, many years, together with one other very famous and very important challenge. And this was from Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It is etched into the marble in his memorial here in Washington, D.C. President Roosevelt said:

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.

That ethical moral position was taken up by Lyndon Baines Johnson when he declared the war on poverty 50 years ago--50 years ago--at a time when seniors in the United States, 47 percent of them, were impoverished.

I remember well during those years when my father took me to the county hospital to visit a neighbor, the poverty, the ward, the odor, the hopelessness.

So what did America do? What did America do to face this challenge? Well, Social Security was already in place, one of the fundamental pillars to deal with poverty among seniors. In this Chamber, in the Senate Chamber, the men and women who then represented the American people put forward an extraordinary effort to deal with poverty in the United States. And one of those major second pillars to address poverty was the establishment of the Medicare program for seniors. Men and women over 65 years of age were guaranteed that, if they lived to 65 in the days and years following, they would have a health insurance program, which was an incredible step forward.

Many other things were done. Programs were put in place for jobs, job programs across this Nation, in Appalachia, in the Central Valley of California, and all across this Nation. There was an outpouring of sympathy, an outpouring of the basic morality of this country took place.

In 1967, 29 percent of the children in this country were in poverty. In 2012, it was 19 percent, one out of five. That is

far too high. It is a challenge for our generation.

How did they bring it down from 29 percent to 19 percent? They did it with government programs of many kinds--Head Start, food stamp programs, programs dealing with earned income tax credits, which, by the way, was added during the Nixon period. All of those things together reduced the poverty. Today, take away those government support programs for children and we would have 30 percent of the children in the United States living in poverty.

I would just like to remind my Republican colleagues that what they have attempted to do this year in their budgets, in their appropriation proposals, is to reduce those programs that 30 percent of the children of the United States--nearly one out of three--depend upon to stay out of poverty. That is not a good idea.

If this is one of our moral compasses, adding to the abundance of those who have much or providing for those who have too little, if that is a moral compass, how are we doing? Well, let's look at it. Let's look at how we are doing.

One of the things that FDR said from the four freedoms: the freedom from want. As a result of the Great Recession in 2010 and beyond, 46.2 million Americans live below the poverty level, the highest number in 52 years. Food lines in America today are as they were in the 1930s. Men and women are lining up at the various food programs to get food. That is America today.

How about the children? How about the children today, those one in five? Well, let's see. If FDR says the test is not how well the wealthy are doing but, rather, how the poor are doing, in 2012, the wealthiest Americans took home the biggest share of income--the biggest share of income, in 2012--ever recorded in America's history. One out of every four children in America go to bed at night not knowing where their next meal comes from.

In my own area, Sacramento, California, as reported by the Sacramento Bee, the capital's newspaper, the bottom 20 percent of the region's people lost 27 percent of their income between 2007 and the beginning of 2013. The bottom 20 percent earned less than $23,000 a year, yet they lost 27 percent of their income. The next 20 percent, those making $43,000 down to $23,000 lost 22 percent of their income. The next 20 percent--we are now up to 60 percent--those making between $43,000 and $71,000 in annual income, lost 15 percent of their income. This is America today in my area, where the bottom 60 percent have not moved forward but, rather, have moved backwards. Oh, but if you are in the top 20 percent, these folks here, they took in 50 percent of all of the income generated and earned in the Sacramento region. The bottom 20 percent took in 3 percent.

So Franklin Delano Roosevelt, how are we doing with our moral compass? How are we doing? Are we adding to those who have little or are we adding to those who have much?

It is clear that, not just in the Sacramento, California, region but across this Nation, those who have much are doing extraordinarily well while those who have little are falling further and further behind. Hmm.

Fifty years ago today, President Lyndon Baines Johnson stood right there and he declared a war on poverty. And where are we today? We are not winning that war at all. But there are solutions. There are ways in which we can deal with this, and one of them is to put a stop to this kind of situation.

This is a photo taken outside of a workshop that I conducted in Fairfield, California, for the unemployed. It is a jobs workshop. In a town of less than 100,000, 1,000 people showed up seeking a job. Unemployment is very real, and unemployment is a specific cause for the statistics that indicate growing poverty in America.

These folks want a job. But yet on December 28, 1.2 million Americans--some of them here in this line--lost their unemployment insurance. So are they wealthier having lost an average of $265 a week on a long-term unemployment insurance check or are they poorer? What are they going to do? Of every one of these people, 2.9 of them are looking for the one job that exists. So one out of three will find a job, maybe.

The long-term unemployed have an even greater challenge, and we will talk about that tonight. We have an enormous challenge here in America. We have got to put people back to work.

In Solano County, where Fairfield is, 2,640 of the folks that stood outside searching for a job in early December--by the way, the temperature there was not below zero, but it was below freezing--they were standing in the cold, below freezing temperatures for more than an hour to get in just to have a chance to talk to the 50 or some employers that were there.

By the way, 50 veterans did get an opportunity to get a job that day. 2,640 long-term unemployed lost their unemployment insurance, and they don't have a job today. So what of them?

Colusa County, which I also represent, is one of the poorest counties in America and is also one of the wealthiest counties for those at the top. A population of 21,244 people lost their unemployment insurance.

The stories are in the faces of these people desperate to go to work. We're going to talk today a little bit about that with my colleagues.

A second way in which we can deal with this poverty issue is to deal with the minimum wage. Yesterday, I had a meeting of my agricultural advisory committee. I have a very big agricultural district, $3 billion farm gate. One of the farmers, a conservative fellow, came up to me, and he talked to me about food stamps. He said, hey, listen. I know you're working on the farm bill, and I know this issue of farm subsidies is very much in play, but I'm telling you where I'm coming from. You can reduce the subsidies, but make sure people have food. Make sure that the SNAP program, the food program, is in place. I'll trade the subsidies so people have food. He said--and this was the interesting part, because I had not heard it from a conservative before--he said, and raise the minimum wage. Raise the minimum wage.

Interesting. Today, the Federal minimum wage is $7.25. If you were to use equal dollars, take out the inflation, $7.25 equates to a minimum wage in 1978--this is Ronald Reagan period, 1978--of $10.60. So in equal dollars in 1978 the minimum wage was $10.60. Today, it is $7.25. So you wonder why, why is it that in America today we have food lines? Why is it in America today that one out of four children goes to bed hungry worried about where their next meal is going to come from? Why in America after 50 years with LBJ standing right there and declaring a war on poverty, that we are where we are today?

Does minimum wage have something to do with it? Oh, yes. Does unemployment have something to do with it? Oh, yes--and it's going to be worse tomorrow, as it was on December 29, January 1, January 5, 6, today the 7th and tomorrow the 8th, when 1.2 million people don't have that unemployment check and unemployment insurance is gone. By the way, it will get worse unless this Congress acts on the unemployment insurance. The statistics are there--right there. By the end of this year, unless Congress acts to put people back to work--and we can, and we will talk about that tonight--unless Congress acts to extend the unemployment insurance, 4.9 million Americans will lose their unemployment insurance, and this will be the face of America: hungry children. This will be the face of America: hungry adults and families without jobs.

This is America. This is the place where we can solve problems. We have it within our capability as a nation and as an economy to put people back to work. We can do it if we have the will to do it. It's up to us to look into the faces of poverty in America, to look at the children of America, and say, we can address this issue.

We can put people back to work. We can do it now by rebuilding America's infrastructure. We can pay for the unemployment insurance by not spending nearly $90 billion this year in Afghanistan for the most corrupt government on the face of the Earth, $6.8 billion needed to keep Americans with food, shelter, and clothing. We can take it out of the pocket of Mr. Karzai and his cronies and still meet the challenges that my colleague spoke about earlier this evening.

We're making choices here. We can build our infrastructure. We can pay for the unemployment insurance. We can educate our children. For those

long-term unemployed that need a reeducation, need to have that job skill, we can do it. When we do it, this economy will grow. The taxes will flow into the governments of the United States, including the Federal Government. The deficits will shrink. You leave that long-term unemployment as high as it is today, and we have put an anchor out the back of the great economic ship of the United States, and we will not be able to move forward in a way that addresses this issue, this fundamental, moral issue of America. Are we providing enough for those who have too little? Today, we are not, but we can.

Joining me tonight are two of my colleagues. From the east coast is Paul Tonko. You and I have spent many hours here on the floor discussing these issues. Joining me is our new colleague from the State of Nevada (Mr. Horsford). I'd like you to start. I know you had an experience this last week in your district when you met with people that were unemployed. Please share with us your view of this issue from the State of Nevada.

Mr. Horsford, thank you very much for bringing to us the message from Nevada, the message of compassion and the message of hope and the challenge that we face. This House is fortunate, as are the constituents that have elected you, to have your voice heard on the floor and heard across America.

Now, over the last 3 years, my colleague from New York and I have talked about jobs, talked about making it in America, and talked about this problem of unemployment. So joining me now is Paul Tonko from the great State of New York.

Take a break.

Mr. Tonko, thank you so very, very much. We have got about 10 or 12 minutes here. Let's do kind of one of those back and forth real fast.

I am going to go through a bunch of placards here very, very quickly. This is part of our job agenda. It is called the Make It In America agenda. They are trade policies, and we are going to be dealing with a major one of that.

Mr. Horsford talked about tax policy, critically important; energy policy, which we have not come to tonight; labor issues; we have definitely talked about the minimum wage, critically important; equal dollars. Minimum wage in 1978, Ronald Reagan, was $10.60. Same purchasing power today at $7.25. Education. We talked a little bit about the education--not a little bit, Mr. Horsford. You talked a great deal about the education, reeducation programs. Research, which we haven't covered today. And, of course, the infrastructure issues.

And by the way--you are using American taxpayer dollars for all of these things--we ought to be buying American-made products. So we will make it in America using American taxpayer dollars.

We talked a lot about infrastructure. Every dollar you invest, $1.57, pumped into the economy, jobs created. Mr. Horsford, you talked about the unemployment in the building trades, very important. Most people can go back to work, and this can go immediately.

Oh, by the way, August of this year, unless we fund and expand the transportation programs in the United States, there will be no more new bids for transportation programs. This issue is before the Congress today.

This one, this is what happens when you don't invest in infrastructure. This is the Interstate 5 bridge in Washington just near the Canadian border. You talk about commerce, it came to a halt. This bridge collapsed. More than a couple of thousand bridges in the United States are in similar jeopardy and could collapse. Major infrastructure needs to be done.

This is my district. I have 1,100 miles of levees, floods. We have a Resource Development Act bill in conference--I am fortunate enough to be on that conference committee--and this is what we must do. We must improve our levees, we must deal with Superstorm Sandys, and we must make sure that we are protecting our citizens.

Once again, how do we pay for it? Why are we giving the Karzai government $3 billion not knowing how they are going to spend it? I will tell you where you can spend $3 billion. You make sure our levees are sound and up to date.

Mr. Horsford, would you like to join us and we will do the quick minutes here.

I am delighted that you came here. I think the people of America as they come to know you over the years that you will serve here in Congress will share that delight, your wisdom, your ability to articulate key issues. Thank you so very much for joining us tonight.

Continuing our lightning round, Mr. Tonko.

Mr. Tonko, somehow I knew from previous experience here on the floor that you were going to mention the Erie Canal.

And he did too.

So actually, before the Erie Canal it was George Washington that laid out an economic growth agenda for the United States. He asked Alexander Hamilton to prepare a policy on manufacturing, or manufactures as they called it there. Part of it was the development of a canal system, in other words, the infrastructure the ports, the canals, and the roads. In fact, the Constitution says there should be post roads in the United States.

Much to talk about. Make it in America. Use our tax dollars to buy American-made products in these areas: trade, taxes, energy, education, and research.

Oh, by the way, 2 years ago, the President of the United States stood right there in his State of the Union and said, here is an American jobs program. Do you know what he talked about? Every one of these issues.

If this Congress had acted, trains, locomotives, 100 percent American built in Sacramento, California, and a new contract coming up for even more of these state-of-the-art locomotives.

Mr. Horsford, end the lightning round, and then we will turn this back to the Speaker.

Mr. Horsford, thank you so very, very much.

Mr. Tonko, thank you.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to present a true American agenda.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 30 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, January 8, 2014, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Representative Speier, thank you so very much. It is good to be on the floor. I noticed thus far it has been Californians, but this is far more than California. I see Chicago, Illinois, just arrived, and we will pick up on that.

This is an issue that touches every single American. It is not a California issue. I represent northern California, not far from the Bay Area. The University of California/Davis campus is in my area. There are major, major programs in research, not just with the National Institutes of Health and the health issues that we are talking about here, but agriculture, energy research, and on and on.

It turns out that that powerful engine of research is found in every part of America. So listen out there, those of you that are watching. This is not just a California issue. This is an American issue, and it is an international issue because this particular National Institutes of Health is dealing with the health of this entire world. Every person in the world is, in one way or another, affected by the research done by the National Institutes of Health, the funding that they, then, provide to the 250 universities all around this Nation to deal with illnesses, to deal with the human body and beyond.

For example, Davis, which was originally known as an agricultural research institution and continues to do that, has discovered that, interestingly enough, with the mad cow issue, there is a virus that can be identified specifically with that illness so that for the cattle industry, if some cow goes a little weird, you can find out whether it has mad cow disease or it is just weird. And the very same thing applies to the

human body. So this virus can be identified both in a cow--is it mad or not? Well, it may just be angry but not crazed--and in a human.

Dealing with a very, very serious human issue and also a serious economic issue for those of us in the cattle business. This is a big thing. And what has happened--I love charts.

I noticed, Representative Speier, that you love charts too. So I borrowed this. I think you used it earlier today. This is instructive.

You were just talking with the Representative, our friend from San Diego, about the enormous increase that took place for the National Institutes of Health during the George W. Bush conservative period of time. It is right there, $21 billion; and then over the years, it began to lose a little bit of its, I guess, interest. And then, as we went into the late years of the George Bush administration, it dropped down there. And then, of course, the great crash. A little bump here, which I think is the stimulus bill, pushing more money into research at the National Institutes of Health. And then we have seen, beginning in 2010, what has got to be one of the stupidest policies this Nation has engaged in.

It happened to be in 2011, when the House changed from Democratic control to Republican control. We have seen a very steep decline--a $1.5 billion reduction and annual decline in the National Institutes of Health.

This same decline in the last 3 years is what is the result of the austerity budgets that have been imposed upon us by the Republicans trying to solve the national deficit by cutting Federal expenditures. The entire European community has come to the conclusion that doesn't work. Austerity budgeting does not increase economic growth. It has caused stagnation. Certainly, in Europe we are beginning to see, I think, a large part of the slow growth in the United States caused by austerity budgets.

But specifically to the health care of Americans--our health, our well-being--this is really serious. This means people are going to have additional illnesses. You spoke earlier about some of those, like diabetes. Diabetic research funding is cut through the National Institutes of Health.

This one I really find frightening. I find this frightening because this is very personal. My mother-in-law spent the last 2 years of her life with a very, very serious case of Alzheimer's disease. She died in a hospice program in our home. We, I suppose, were a very small part of this because we took care of her. But right now we are spending $200 billion a year dealing with Alzheimer's.

We know that the population is going to increase and the elderly population is going to skyrocket as the baby boomers move into their later years. By 2050, it will be $1.2 trillion for Alzheimer's.

Is there anybody in America, any family in America, that is not concerned about Alzheimer's? I don't know who they are. I know my family is concerned about it. Every family that I know--and I know many because I have been in public life for a long time and met perhaps thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of people--and every single one of them is concerned about Alzheimer's.

This is the financial side of it. The human side of it, I can tell you, is serious. I can tell you the effect it has.

I would.

I am so glad you interrupted because that is an extremely important fact.

Let's go back and look at that. In 2015, the savings are how much?

They are $51 billion. We are going through this budget exercise where, by the way, the sequestration cut continues, although the across-the-board is eliminated. Half of the sequestration cut will continue because of this budget, but we will be able to try to balance out the prioritization.

But the total savings in 2015 is less than the $50 billion that you have suggested could be saved if we could extend the onset and the severity of Alzheimer's. We watched this very closely in my family. The fact of the matter is that the National Institutes of Health's funding for Alzheimer's is coming to understand the nature of Alzheimer's and, therefore, how to deal with it.

Thank you, Mr. Waxman, for bringing up the leadership that China has.

I notice that the leader of our hour talked about China's leadership in another field.

Let me turn back to our leader, Representative Speier.

In the red, going down.

If I might just add to that, it is my understanding-- and I get this from the University of California-Davis--that they are losing their new Ph.D.s to other countries, particularly to China and to India, because those countries are not only increasing their total research but they are also providing these very bright, innovative, forward-thinking Ph.D.s with a full laboratory and all of the support that they might need to continue to conduct their research not only on the issue of health care but also in all of the sciences and technologies, from high technology, energy, and so forth.

So we really need to get on it.

My final point is here twofold. First of all, if we are going to build this economy, there are five things we have to do consistently through time. And they require public investment.

First of all, education. You have got to have the best educated workforce in the world.

Secondly, you have to have the best, most advanced research because that is where the future is. That is where the future economic growth will come from.

You need to make the things that come from that. You need to have the infrastructure, and you need to think globally. We are not doing that.

The budgets that have been put forth by our colleagues on the Republican side go exactly the other direction. They cut educational funding, beginning with early childhood education. They cut the funding for research. You see it here.

Tomorrow, we are going to take up the new budget. It continues to cut research across the board, the National Institutes of Health probably included. It goes on and on. Transportation, infrastructure--forget it, there is no money for it.

We have got to turn that around. These are the fundamental investments of economic growth and, more important, social justice.

Congresswoman Speier, thank you so much. You have been at this, beating this drum. Don't stop. You stay with this. This is a message that the American public has to understand. These are the investments about our own personal health, our children's health, and our future economic growth, as well as addressing worldwide problems.

Thank you so very much for what you are doing here and for loaning me your charts.

Mr. Speaker, we come here about every week to talk about jobs in America. This last Friday, we held a jobs fair in my district in Fairfield, California, and it was a remarkable event. I have been around a long time. I have seen many, many things. As remarkable as it was, it was also one of the saddest events I have been to. I have been to a lot of funerals and a lot of tragedies over the years, but this one ranks very high.

I put this picture up here because this is a picture of the second hour after that job fair had begun. The line outside the building, where we had some 40 employers that were offering to hire people, stretched over 200 yards. The temperature was about 37, 38 degrees. It was one of those cold mornings, and these people were determined to get a job. They were willing to stand in that line for up to an hour and a half, some of them perhaps even 2 hours, just to have a shot, just to be able to talk to an employer, to have the opportunity to look face- to-face at an employer and say, ``I want to work.'' The stories were incredible. I spent about an hour, maybe an hour and 20 minutes, talking to the men and women that were in this line.

I remember one gentleman who had served several tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. He said he was with the Army Rangers, said he had four Purple Hearts. He left the military and is now unemployed. In fact, in this line were 141 veterans, unemployed, looking for work. They have skills, know when to get up in the morning, know what it takes to go to work, to put in a full day or more--unemployed.

A young woman, fresh out of school, a child at home, she wanted to go to work. She had an associate's degree in social welfare programs, human relations, anything in that area. She said: I will take any job. I just want to go to work. I want to take care of my child.

Another woman, 50, 55, divorced, had an 18-year-old child. Her alimony is over: I have got to go to work. I have got to support myself.

The stories of life, the stories of America, the stories of 971 people that stood in line just to have a shot at a job.

There are 435 of us in this room on a full day. We have a job. We are employed, and we have a good wage. We have a very good wage, and we have health care. And we are not doing our job. We are not doing the job that America sent us here for. America sent us here to put America back to work. That is our job. We are not living up to that.

Two years ago, the President of the United States put forth in his State of the Union message an American jobs plan, an American jobs plan to put people in this Nation back to work. It was complete: education, retraining, a research component for the next sector of this economy for the future, a transportation infrastructure sector, a way to finance it--2 years ago.

Mr. Speaker, 971 people were standing in the cold in Fairfield, California, just wanting a shot at a job; and here we are, 2 years after the President of the United States put forward a jobs plan for America, and it has not been done. The majority in this House has refused to bring up even one of those programs.

I am going to talk about those things tonight, those things that we can do here in America, that we can do so that when 971 of my constituents are willing to line up to get a job, they will have one. They will have that opportunity. They will have a shot at the future.

It is a disgrace that after 2 years with a complete plan that would put people back to work, the majority has refused to bring forward any part of that legislation. It is a disgrace. It is time for this country to go back to work. It is time for this House to go back to work to put Americans back on the job.

You want to deal with the deficit? Put people to work. They will become taxpayers. You want to deal with food stamps? You want to cut food stamps? Put people to work. Build the infrastructure. Put the teachers back in the classroom. But no, you are going to slash the benefits.

These people, searching for a job, know that unless this Congress-- and I see our esteemed leadership and the Republicans leaving this House, this floor. These people want to go to work. They are losing, in the next 2 weeks, their unemployment benefits. What will become of them? What will become of those 971 people, including 141 veterans who have fought, who have been wounded? What is going to become of them?

Joining me today are my colleagues on the Democratic side. I would like to start with my colleague from Illinois, General Bill Enyart, who is now a Member of the House of Representatives.

Bill, please join us.

I have one of those in my district, too.

Thank you very much, General Enyart.

Joining us also is another Representative from the Midwest who has considerable experience here in the House of Representatives--Ohio, in this case--Marcy Kaptur.

Welcome. I am delighted you are with us. You talked about making it in America and about American jobs many times, and we have shared this floor on that subject in the past.

Welcome.

Representative Kaptur, you have been at this for a long time. You come from an area in this Nation that in recent decades has been called the Rust Belt. I think that is not the situation, with your leadership.

We have seen a resurgence in American manufacturing; and 20, 25 years ago, we had just under 20 million Americans working in manufacturing with those middle-income jobs. This is the middle class. They were able to support their family, educate, get a boat, go on vacation, buy a house, provide the food, and take care of their family, just as you described.

And then we have seen in the last 20 years an enormous decline--from 20 million down to just under 11 million manufacturing jobs, and a lot of that decline had to do with American policies.

You mentioned trade programs. Clearly, that had a lot to do with offshoring tax policies that encouraged corporations to send jobs offshore rather than keeping jobs here. And there are other labor policies and the like that made it difficult for the American family to earn that living.

Our challenge is to reinvigorate the working American families' opportunity. And to address that, I will say that I heard a remarkable speech by a freshman. And it is not that I have been here so long. Steve Horsford from Las Vegas gave a speech on the floor here about a week ago, talking about these issues and talking about the challenge that American families face. I asked him to join us. I was impressed by his grasp of the issue and the passion with which he spoke.

Representative Horsford, welcome to the one hour of what we call Make It in America, the American Jobs Program.

Thank you so very much, Mr. Horsford. Thank you for your passion, for your knowledge, for your concern about your constituents, and particularly about those men and women that are from the military.

I also have two major Air Force bases in my district with a very large population of veterans, both young and old, from the various wars and conflicts of the past. And they need a shot. Your legislation ought to be the law. It simply should be the law of the land. We should put these people back to work. We showed the picture earlier of the people lined up; 147 of those were veterans. I think about 14 were actually hired that day and given a chance.

I often put this up when we have these opportunities to speak on the floor about jobs and putting men and women back to work, because this is kind of a compass that I like to use when I think about legislation, when I think about what we ought to be doing here.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR, talking about a New Deal, he said this:

A 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.

We need to think about that often here on the floor. The issues that we have talked about today--putting people back to working, the minimum wage, and unemployment insurance, and food stamps or the SNAP program-- all speak to this fundamental

test of America's moral compass. A 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.

December 28--Representative Horsford laid out that date--December 28, millions upon millions of Americans will lose their unemployment insurance, not because they are lazy, not because they don't want to work. These people, 971 of them last Friday in my district at my jobs fair, they want to go to work. Many of them will lose their unemployment insurance on December 28.

Joining us today is a remarkable woman, incredible background in caring about the people of America, working on a national program to make sure that women have a good shot. Incidentally, let me put this up there just before I introduce Representative Edwards. Today is a remarkable day for women. The new CEO of General Motors is a woman. She is not going to be on the unemployment line. She has spent 30-some years with General Motors, has visited the very, very top. I understand coming from the factory floor, all the way to the top. That is your story too, Donna Edwards, incredible Representative from the State of Maryland. I think you wanted to talk to us about your citizens, your constituents.

Excuse me for interrupting.

You are talking about some really, really important issues here. Bridges falling down?

One of the reasons is this: this is the infrastructure investment from 2002 to 10 years later. That is about an $85 billion reduction in infrastructure investment.

I wanted just to drive home the point that you have made about putting people to work and about what happens when you bring down the infrastructure investment. People are unemployed, construction workers and beyond.

Congresswoman Edwards, thank you very much. I have known you for the almost 4 years that I have been here. The passion that you have for the American people is unmatched. Your willingness to stand for them has been seen in many pieces of legislation and votes and also on the floor of the House of Representatives. I thank you for that.

How correct you are. We are going to leave here Friday, probably around noontime. The question Americans ought to ask us is: So what have you done for America? Tell us what you have done, Congress, for America.

I will tell you what we want to do. We want to put people back to work. This ought not be America. This is the inside of the hall where we had the 40 employers that were looking to hire a few people. The outside of the hall, that was 200 yards in 35 degree weather, people standing there well over an hour, some an hour and a half, two hours, wanting to at least get a shot at a job.

Have we forgotten, have we forgotten about Franklin Delano Roosevelt's moral compass, the moral compass that we ought to be employing here? I am going to put up something. Ms. Edwards, if you will just stick around just a few moments.

America has gone back to work, at least some Americans have gone back to work. This is the recovery; this is the reduction in the unemployment. The moral compass of America. Are we doing more for those who have much or are we doing for those who have little?

This is the fact of the growth of the American economy, the creation of wealth, the creation of wealth in America. Billions of dollars. New wealth created. Where did it go? Where did that wealth go? Where did all the labor, all the hard work, all the men and women that got up in the morning and went to work, put in their 8 hours or 12 hours, their 40 hours a week or more, where did that labor, where did it go, what was the result of it?

Here it is. Here is the fact. The tale of two Americans: 95 percent of the wealth created in America from 2009 to 2012 went to the top 1 percent of Americans. So all those people out there, all the 99 percenters that worked day in and day out, that struggled for a job, that stood in line to get a job, what did they get? They got 5 percent of the new wealth of the wealth created in this Nation.

This is an indictment of the fundamental policies of this Nation. It wasn't always that way. During the Clinton period, the top 1 percent did very well. They got 45 percent of the wealth. The top 1 percent took 45 percent home. They did leave 55 percent for the 99 percent.

This isn't just happening because the Sun comes up in the morning and sets in the evening. This happens because of public policy, tax policy, employment policy, social welfare policies, food programs, unemployment programs, and the crash of the American economy caused by greed, Wall Street greed principally, and greed of others to be sure.

Keep in mind, America, this is our Nation today. Work hard? No, you may not get ahead. Keep in mind the moral compass of Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the

abundance of those who have much; it is rather whether we

provide enough for those who have too little.

December 28 is coming. Today is the 10th of December. Eighteen days. Just after Christmas, 3 days after Christmas, days after the holidays, 1.7 million Americans are going to lose their unemployment insurance and, since the farm bill hasn't been brought to the floor, the question of what kind of cuts will be made in the farm programs specifically for the food programs.

It is not the loafers that are out there, although there are some. It is the men and women that stood in line waiting for a job in my district last Friday, stood in line at Representative Edwards' job fair here in Maryland in the past days, those people, unemployed, depending upon the supplemental food program, the senior citizens who are trying to make it with the meager benefits of Social Security. They are the ones that are receiving the supplemental food program, the food stamps. $40 billion over the next 5 to 10 years taken away, away from farmers' income, yes, and away from the men and women that are hungry.

One more thing. I am going to put this up. I have seen this so many times. You want to take $40 billion away from the children of America? Is that what our Republican leadership wants to do? This is the face of America's children right there. One out of every four children in this Nation wondering where their next meal is coming from. Jobs? Absolutely. Unemployment benefits? Essential, unless you want this to be the American story. Food stamps? That is where he gets his food; that is where these American children are able to get their food during these hard times. They want to cut it. Where is the moral compass in that? Where is the fundamental moral compass when one out of four children in this Nation goes to bed hungry?

Where is the moral compass that takes 95 percent of the wealth created in this Nation and gives it to the 1 percent who have millions and, indeed, billions? Something is wrong here.

I yield to the gentlelady.

We will go home for Christmas, and how many hungry will there be? How many unemployed will there be? We have work to do.

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

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 5 o'clock and 47 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, December 11, 2013, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, we have an opportunity today to talk about some things that are really important to America. I want to start really with this quote by Franklin Delano Roosevelt which kind of talks about where I am coming from and where I think we ought to be going as a Nation right now. I will try to explain this in a few moments, and then move on to really deal with this problem that we have in our Nation of income inequality, lost opportunity, or the absence of opportunity.

FDR said:

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the

abundance of those who have much, it is rather whether we

provide enough for those who have too little.

In America today, there are many, many Americans that have far too little. One out of four children in America goes to bed hungry at night. Unemployment remains at a peak level, somewhere north of 7-8 percent. Real unemployment, that is, the unemployment of people who would like to work more, would like to have a full-time job, remains very, very high. What can we do about it?

Well, we can think about the great American ideal, the American Dream. This gentleman pretty well laid it out. This is Bill Clinton talking about the American Dream. He said:

If you work hard and play by the rules, you have the

freedom and the opportunity to pursue your dreams and leave

your kids a country where they can chase theirs.

So between these two Presidents, I think we lay out a philosophy that is well worth our attention: make sure those who have little have an opportunity, that we pay attention to their needs, and that we make sure that the American Dream is always in place.

Let's talk about that dream. How about the dream of going to college, college education. The ideal is college education is open to everyone. In reality, in 2007, one-half of the children from wealthy households completed college. Only 9 percent of the children from low-income households completed college. This gap is widening and has continued to widen since 2007, and obviously since 1989. The American Dream.

How about this dream: FDR also talked about the four freedoms and one of them had to do with freedom from want. Part of the American Dream, it has been denied. As a result of the Great Recession, in 2010, a total of 46.2 million Americans were below the poverty level, the highest number of 52 years. The American Dream denied.

When we talk about the American Dream and we talk about what Roosevelt said about those who have much versus those who have little, so what is going on in America? In America today, income inequality is growing. The ideal is you work hard, you will do okay. In reality, the U.S. ranks 93 in the world in income inequality, behind Great Britain, Australia, Nigeria, Argentina, and Japan. The American Dream: you work hard, you will do okay. The reality: income inequality in the United States is greater than the income inequality in Nigeria. Yes, it is.

So what are we going to do?

Well, here is what we are doing. Since the Great Recession, the recovery has been slow. We Democrats have some answers on what to do about that recovery, and we will get to that in a few moments, but I think we need to understand what has happened in the last 5 years.

We have seen the economy grow. Every quarter since 2009, the economy has grown. The private sector economy has grown. Where did that wealth go? Where did the wealth of this Nation go? Well, 95 percent of the wealth generated in this Nation since 2009 has gone to the top 1 percent of Americans. The remaining 99 percent have had to split what was left. During the Clinton economy, it was reversed. The top 1 percent took 45 percent, and the bottom 99 percent took the remaining. So 1 percent took 95 percent, 99 percent were left with 5 percent.

Income inequality: What do we do about it? How do we achieve the goals of President Clinton when he talked about the American Dream? How do we achieve the goals of FDR when he talked about our purpose, not to provide more for those who have great but to provide for those who have little? How can we do it?

Well, one way we can do it is a long American tradition dating back to George Washington. In his first year in office, George Washington called upon Alexander Hamilton, his Treasury Secretary, to figure out how to grow the American economy. They were interested in manufacturing. The United States was basically exporting raw materials to Great Britain. George Washington wanted to build the American economy. So he said, Alex, give me a plan. So Alexander Hamilton came back a few months later with a plan, an economic development plan, based on manufacturing, and in that economic development plan, he said we need to do about a dozen things.

He said we need to build the infrastructure of the United States. He said we need to build the canals, the roads, and the ports. He said we needed to protect American manufacturing, so make sure that there are proper duties and tariffs on imported goods so that they would not overcome American manufacturers but, rather, level the playing field so that American manufacturers would have a shot. He said we needed to also make sure that we had good international trade agreements and use the American taxpayer money to buy American manufactured goods. It is all there. So for those who want to pay attention to the Founding Fathers, they ought to pay attention to what George Washington and Alexander Hamilton talked about in the first days of the first administration of this wonderful democracy we call America.

Let's talk for a moment about infrastructure. Let's talk about those roads that George Washington described, Alexander Hamilton talked and wrote about in his report. Where are we with our infrastructure today?

Joining me today is my colleague from Oregon, who has been working on the infrastructure issue now for more than a decade. He understands the problems that we have in our transportation systems and has a proposal.

I now yield to Earl Blumenauer of Oregon.

Mr. Blumenauer, there is no doubt that you are taking up the responsibility. You have been a leader for many years on this issue of transportation, how we can fund it, what we must do.

I guess I knew, but I didn't realize it was coming so quickly, that we would fall off the transportation cliff, that the next fiscal year, 10 months from now, the transportation programs funded by the Federal Government simply run out of money. Isn't it 90 percent or more of the funding that will be gone? Did I understand that correctly?

Just before we came on the floor to talk about this issue of inequality in America and how we might deal with it, we heard our colleagues from the State of New York talk about the tragic transit accident that occurred. In listening to them, a couple of the Members talked about the need for rail improvement, upgrading the rail system in New York. If I am to hear you correctly, unless we provide additional revenue in the transportation funding program, there will be no money to upgrade the rail systems in New York or anywhere else around the United States.

Amazing.

Mr. Blumenauer, you are bringing about a very important piece of legislation that will help us finance the systems that we need to build.

We talk about immediate jobs. In talking about those immediate jobs, for every dollar that we would invest in transportation infrastructure, you get $1.59 of economic growth immediately back.

Mr. Blumenauer, I know you have to go. You have another meeting. Thank you very much for bringing this critical issue to our attention.

Now let me carry on for a few seconds about the infrastructure issue.

If we make that critical investment, if we follow the leadership of Mr. Blumenauer, where we actually collect the money that is needed for our systems and put those dollars to work in America, several very important things will happen in the American economy.

First of all, you lay down the foundation for immediate and future economic growth. You cannot grow the economy if you cannot move goods, services, and people across the Nation. In my State of California, we understand what gridlock is. We have got gridlock here in Congress. That is political gridlock. In California, when you are talking about gridlock, you are talking about sitting on a freeway and going nowhere; you are talking about the shipments of goods in and out of the ports that are delayed because they cannot get to the rail systems. They cannot get to the highways of America because of gridlock at the ports. We have an enormous necessity to lay in place the transportation infrastructure that can then allow the American economy to grow. That is point one.

Point two is, in doing that infrastructure improvement, if we use the American taxpayer dollars--in this case, collected from the excise tax on gasoline and fuel--if we use that money to buy American-made equipment, we generate an additional economic growth model, and that is the reestablishment of the American manufacturing system.

Twenty years ago we had about somewhere between 19 and 20 million Americans in manufacturing making all kind of things, from Caterpillar

bulldozers and graders and loaders, to farm equipment, to airplanes, and technology systems from computers and the like. That was 20 years ago.

Today there is just over 11 million in the manufacturing sector. We have lost 9 million manufacturing jobs in America. Those are the heart and soul of the American middle class. That is where a mother or a father could get a job, provide the income for their family, buy a home, buy the car, the boat, take the vacation, send their kids to college.

That was where the American middle class found its foundation. It has been decimated by a number of policies that were enacted by previous Congresses and by a lack of attention all across this Nation to the foundational imperative of manufacturing.

So we have been talking here for more than 2\1/2\ years now about a Make It In America agenda. If we are going to finance our transportation systems, then add to that a clause that says, the material, the bridges, the steel, the concrete, the equipment, will be American-made. It will be made in America.

In doing so, we can go right back to Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, who wrote the first economic development plan for this Nation, and said use the American taxpayer money to support American industries.

Hey, I am with Alex and George. They were correct. Use our taxpayer money to support American businesses, buy American, make it in America.

It works. Let me give you an example. In Sacramento, California, near my district, is a manufacturing plant that was expanded, actually doubled in size in the last 2 years. It was doubled in size to build electric locomotives for Amtrak on the east coast corridor, between Washington, DC, and Boston.

About 80 new locomotives are going to be built in Sacramento, California because, in the stimulus bill, the Recovery Act, somebody, probably a staffer, maybe a Senator, maybe a Member of Congress, wrote in one sentence and said, this 700-plus million dollars for the locomotives will be spent on American-made equipment, 100 percent American-made.

American companies looked at that, shrugged their shoulders. A German company, Siemens, said, oh, $700 million contract, we can do it.

Siemens took their light rail manufacturing plant in Sacramento, took that contract, doubled the size of their plant, doubled the size of their workforce, and is now building 100 percent American-made locomotives in Sacramento, California. Where 100 years ago they used to build locomotives, now they are doing it again.

Why?

Because somebody went all the way back to the very first President, took something that he said, and it was, we are going to spend American taxpayer money on American-made goods, in this case, American-made locomotives.

Think about it. Think about the potential. Think about the potential if we were to really invest in infrastructure, if we were to follow Mr. Blumenauer's piece of legislation, take the money, invest in the roads, invest in our freeways, rebuild the bridges, of which more than 6,000 are about to fall down or could fall down in the United States.

Repair, rebuild, expand, allow the foundation of economic growth to grow, and use that taxpayer money for American jobs, buying American- made equipment.

Think of the possibilities. Think of the possibilities. Think back to where we started this conversation, about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that it is our task not to add more to those who have much, but, rather, to add to those who have little.

Those men and women in the construction trades that have lost their job, where unemployment is well over 30, 40 percent, think about them being able to get that middle class job building the infrastructure.

Think about the manufacturers out there, the small businesses, the large businesses, the supply train that Siemens has set up all across this Nation to provide the electronics, to provide the electric motors and all of the steel, that huge supply train.

Think about what could be done if we put in place policies today, here in the United States Congress, to build our infrastructure, to use our taxpayer money for American jobs; that unemployed individual that is now on food stamps, perhaps on a welfare check, getting a job in that manufacturing sector that is providing that tool that is going to be used on that locomotive.

Think about that unemployed family, that construction worker, the operating engineer who has been sitting on the sidelines, surviving on food stamps and on assistance, able to go back to work, sitting on that Caterpillar tractor that is manufactured in America, providing the income necessary for his family and providing the taxes necessary for the growth of this Nation's ability to reduce its deficit.

It is possible. We can do this. We can rebuild America. We can compete with anybody. There is no other culture in the world that is so entrepreneurial, so driven to succeed.

But here we are, 435 of us, caught up in a gridlock where we can't do anything, where the transportation bill languishes, where the farm bill languishes, so that our farmers don't know what to plant next year. This has got to end. We have got to stop this.

We need to think back on those giants of America's past. George Washington told Alexander Hamilton, give me a manufacturing program for the United States, an economic development program.

Alexander Hamilton came back; we need to build ports, roads, canals. We need to protect American industry with wise laws and trade laws. We need to have a tax policy that encourages investment, and we need to make sure that we are using the tax money to buy American-made.

Think back on Jefferson, who told his Treasury Secretary, give me a plan for the next century, the 1800s, an economic development plan.

Teddy Roosevelt, and then Franklin Roosevelt, Eisenhower, men of vision, leaders of vision that were willing to step forward, willing to use the resources of this Nation, collecting those resources and dispensing those resources across the Nation to build the foundation for economic growth.

The Make It In America agenda is available to us today. That agenda is a trade policy that protects American industry, not a free trade that gives it away, but a fair trade policy that protects American industry; a tax policy that encourages economic growth here in the United States, that rewards corporations for bringing it home, and ends tax breaks for corporations that ship the jobs offshore, an energy policy that utilizes the great energy capacity of this Nation, everything from conservation and wind and solar and, indeed, the petroleum products.

We need that energy policy in place today so that the wind industry in the United States, which is a huge industry in my district, can count on tomorrow's tax policy, which will end in less than a year, so they are not building.

When we give a tax credit for solar, and when we give a tax credit for wind, or to the oil industry, we tell them, you only get that tax credit when you buy American-made solar panels, wind turbines and the like, because, after all, you are using American taxpayer money.

We need a labor policy so that we can re-educate those men and women who will no longer have a job in an industry that is no longer in existence. We need to make sure that labor has a fair shot, and in the labor policy we absolutely must raise the minimum wage. That holds up the floor, and deals with the issue of poverty in America.

Education, research, infrastructure. This is the Make It In America agenda. This is the agenda that we can grow jobs in America. This is the agenda that can address the American Dream.

This is the agenda that goes back to what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said when he talked about freedom from want. Freedom from want means that you must be able to get a decent job in America to support yourself and your family, so that the working men and women of America have a shot at the generation of wealth that this country can produce.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt said it is our task not to provide more for those who have much, but to provide for those who have little. So when you find that the policies of America have allowed this kind of wealth distribution to take place over the last 5 years, you know that those policies need to change. Those policies have to change.

When 1 percent of the American population is able to gather 95 percent of

the wealth generated in this Nation between 2009 and 2012, something is terribly wrong with the policies of this Nation. That is what happened.

That is what Americans have labored for, so that 95 percent of the wealth generated by the men and women who work in America winds up in the hands of 1 percent of this population.

We have got some policy problems. We have to deal with this.

If you believe what Bill Clinton said about the American Dream, being able to provide for your family, being able to provide that education, being able to make things better not only for yourself but for the next generation, then this kind of issue has to be dealt with.

This is a fundamental economic problem. The growth of this economy is dependent upon the ability of the American workers to have an income so that they can pursue their dream, and when the wealth winds up with this kind of a skewed situation, the 95 percent are not able to become the consumers to buy the home, to buy the car, to develop the opportunities that they need for their family.

How can we deal with this?

Well, one way we heard about today. We heard from Mr. Blumenauer about the necessity of building our transportation system so that the foundation for economic growth is in place, the transportation system. We need to do that, and doing so will put Americans back to work with those good, middle class jobs for working American families.

We need to put in place a Make It In America policy. Trade, taxes, energy, labor, education, research infrastructure, that is our agenda. That is our agenda for growth in America.

It is also our agenda for dealing with the deficit. You want to deal with the deficit, put Americans back to work. Watch that tax money come into the coffers of this Nation's treasury. It will happen.

But you keep a large percentage of Americans out of work, you keep them at low wages, and you keep them unemployed, you are not going to able to deal with the deficit. Go back to work Americans--and you deal with the deficit.

How do you do that? Infrastructure, trade policy, make sure your tax policy is in place that encourages economic growth and investment and all the rest.

We can do this. We can do this. We are America. We have done this in the past. We have had leaders in the past that have talked about these things and done them. We have had a Congress in the past that has listened to their own leadership, to those among their caucuses that said, Let's get on with it. Let's build for the future. Those leaders are here--not at this moment, but they are here on this floor day after day. They know. They understand, If you want to deal with the deficit, put Americans back to work. If you want to deal with the American Dream, give them a good job. Raise the minimum wage so that every working person at least can provide food on their table and shelter for themselves and their families. It is all possible.

This isn't something new to America. This is what America has done before. And this is our job. This is our job. The Congress of the United States, the Senate, the administration, that is what we are here for. That is our job.

Mr. Speaker, before I yield back, first I have got to talk about one other thing, and that is another challenge that we face, and that challenge is about climate change. This is real, folks. This is not something that a bunch of scientists have dreamed up. This is a very, very real issue for this world. Many of the policies we talk about here can directly go to the issue of climate change.

I represent 200 miles of the Sacramento River Valley, from the very beginning of the Sacramento River at the beginning of the San Francisco Bay, 200 miles up, past the city of Sacramento, past the cities of Yuba City, Marysville, all the way to Chico. It is an area that is one of the most flood-prone areas in America.

Climate change is going to increase rainfall--maybe not the total rainfall throughout the year, but the incidence of extraordinary, heavy downpours will increase.

Not too many people want to ascribe the recent typhoon in the Philippines to climate change, but there is ever-increasing evidence that extreme storms are a result of climate change. And it figures: more heat, more moisture, more storms, more precipitation--it is all there.

So as we go forward, dealing with these issues of economic development, of infrastructure, we need to keep in mind the issue of climate change and its immediate effect: droughts in some areas, where there weren't droughts before; floods in other areas, where there is a need to put in the infrastructure.

In the case of my district, the infrastructure of levees. My constituents are at risk. My constituents need the Federal Government to pass a Water Resources Development Act that provides the foundation and the authorization for levee improvements, and they need the appropriations. They need the money.

It is our task to keep America safe, whether that is from some military threat from somewhere in the world or from some natural threat, for example, extreme storms, extreme flooding, making sure the infrastructure, the levees, and the protections for our citizens are in place.

I want us to deal with that; and as we put together the Water Resources Development Act, where I have the privilege of being on the conference committee, we intend to do our best to make sure that the authorization for those projects necessary for water development, as well as flood protection, are in place. And then we must go about the task of finding a way to pay for it.

Mr. Blumenauer is introducing a bill tomorrow to find a way to pay for the transportation systems. We need to do the same for the water infrastructure systems. We cannot neglect this task. It is our job.

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize Officer Rudy Xavier Contreras, Jr., who is retiring this December after 30 years of law enforcement service with the California Highway Patrol.

After graduating from the CHP Academy in West Sacramento on December 22, 1983, Officer Contreras served with the CHP across the State of California, including many years in the Solano and Woodland areas. He handled a variety of assignments throughout his career, with assignments ranging from Field Training Officer to Officer in Charge. During Officer Contreras' assignment to Dignitary Protection, he served a distinguished term as my security officer when I was California's Insurance Commissioner and Lieutenant Governor. He was also the primary officer assigned to Lieutenant Governor Abel Maldonado and State Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones.

Officer Contreras was a loyal representative of the law enforcement community and admired for his hard work, dedication, and positive work ethic. He has become a dear friend and I thank him for his service.