Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, it is my great pleasure to congratulate ACDI/VOCA on the occasion of their 50th anniversary. This outstanding organization was founded in 1963 with the mission of empowering people around the world to take advantage of economic opportunities and improve quality of life for their families and communities. To this date, ACDI/VOCA continues to fulfill this mission, as they help millions of individuals and families fight their way out of poverty. Their notable accomplishments include contributing to the launch of the Green Revolution in India, strengthening Ethiopian co-ops to bring their coffee into global prominence, and pioneering grassroots financial services across the former Soviet Union. With a staff comprised of 90 percent locally-hired employees, and working through a network of over 3,000 local partner organizations, ACDI/VOCA combines the best in international development expertise with powerful grassroots capacities to implement effective programming that has a real and sustained impact. I commend ACDI/VOCA on their history of outstanding service and am confident

that they will continue to make a difference in people's lives around the world long into the future.

Mr. Chairman, my colleagues from California and New York are sincere, and like, I think, all 435 of us, they possess a deep sense of humanity and the necessity for America to reach out in our best spirit to help those in need.

This is the reality: this is a picture that my wife took in Eritrea a few years back. That's the American Food for Peace program. It is not broken. The American Food for Peace program is really about humanitarian, economic, and national security. It is extremely important. My wife and I have spent many years and many days in the famine camps around the world.

This is the statement of America. It's not a check and it's not cash, and it's not a credit card or a debit card. It's the delivery of food. The Food for Peace program really does work. It's not broken. It is not broken at all. Prepositioning food overseas does work. When the great flood occurred in Pakistan just a couple of years ago, it was this program--the delivery of American food in sacks--that actually arrived before there was any local food that was purchased.

The Food for Peace program is not broken.

I agree about the need for flexibility and we actually have it. We have the International Disaster Assistance program which is in place and can be used, and it can be cash purchases.

You don't need to change the Food for Peace program to deal with it. You preposition food. You send American products, American food overseas. It is the very best way that we can help. And it turns out that in the Pakistan disaster, this program, the Food for Peace program, delivered food faster and better than the local programs because the local programs had totally broken down. And that will happen over and over.

We don't need to destroy something that's worked for 50 years.

I thank my friend from New York.

I thought it so very unfair that the majority party would be fighting this out without somebody from the minority party jumping in in opposition to the proposal.

I am delighted that the FCC has provided $400-plus million for what is a very essential service. I am also very happy that the Department of Agriculture continues with the program in which they have a unique ability to reach out to these rural communities. The Department of Agriculture has the men, the women and the organizational structure to provide direct access and direct service. Perhaps--just perhaps--the Department of Agriculture program, together with the FCC program, might actually get the job done. It's very, very important.

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

To the disappointment, I suppose, of everybody that is here, this isn't nearly as much fun as the last amendment. This is a rather simple amendment. It deals with a 1990 law, the Forest Legacy Act. It simply allows the Forest Legacy Act to be much more efficient and effective. It would allow those States that would like to participate in the Forest Legacy Act to also allow within that State a qualified trust, a land trust, to hold the easement.

The benefit of this is that it reduces the burden on the State government. The State government doesn't have to manage that easement. It would be managed by a qualified land trust, and it also allows for greater leverage of the money that would be available from the forest legacy projects from both the State and the Federal Government. It's a win all the way around. This program has been very, very successful in protecting forest lands all around the Nation, and this amendment simply would provide another opportunity to do even more to protect our forests.

Now, these forests are not going to be held as national parks or wilderness. These are operating forests. These are forests that would be operating with good, modern forest practices, providing wood and fiber into the community and the jobs that go with it.

With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

May I inquire as to how much time I have available?

I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to my colleague from the State of New York (Mr. Gibson).

Mr. Chairman, my colleague from Pennsylvania, I thought, was making a wonderful argument in support of this legislation, in that you talked about the success of the Forest Legacy Program, and it really has been eminently successful.

And you also talked about the demands on the program, and that's true. Many, many States want to implement this program.

But you didn't mention the fact that many States don't have the resources to manage additional properties, to manage additional trusts that they've taken. This would allow those States to make a decision. It's a State decision, it's not a Federal decision, it's not a decision by a private nonprofit qualified trust. This is a decision by the State to welcome into their program a private, nonprofit, qualified trust that does this kind of work that could then manage the trust without the State having to spend the money.

The State maintains oversight and, should something happen that the trust is unable to continue, it would

then revert to the State. But this is a way of really expanding what, apparently, the three of us want to have happen.

You mentioned another program that does exist. Wonderful. Those programs could work in unison with the Federal Government participating, the State government participating, and the private.

But the problem here is that, under the Forest Legacy Program, the private, nonprofit qualified trust can't participate in that program.

I reserve the balance of my time.

I wish we had time to sit down and talk about this. It's really a shame that we're here on the floor at this moment. Really, I think, both of us are in support of protecting our forests, of enhancing their ability to continue to produce jobs, the food, the fiber and the wood that we need in our economy and in our society.

We're not very far apart. If there's something here that needs to be worked out between these two programs, I'm sure we could do it. But this really gives us an opportunity to really do what I think all of us want, and that is to preserve our forests, keep them in operating production, and allow the nonprofits to participate together with the States.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chairman, after three debates in support of my colleague from New York, I find myself on the opposite side of this issue.

We are in the process of developing a very viable American olive oil industry, one that has great potential. At

the same time, that industry faces a question from the consumers about the quality of the oil that is available, both domestically produced, as well as internationally produced.

There have been numerous studies done that indicate that there is a lot of misrepresentation as to the quality and the nature of olive oil. This bill, the FARRM Bill, simply establishes the opportunity for the creation of a marketing order that would eventually provide a farmer- oriented regulation of the quality and the type of olive oil that's going to be on the market. That would apply both to imported, as well as domestically produced, olive oil.

The cost of this need not be as high as my colleague from New York suggests. It is probable, and most feasible, that the olive oil that's imported would be checked as to its quality and consistency at the point of export, certainly not at the retail and probably not at the point of import.

This can be done. This is done in many, many products that are produced in America, as well as imported--quality controls, consumer awareness.

This is a very important bill for the domestic nascent olive oil industry.

This is a marketing order. The underlying law establishes a marketing order. A marketing order allows the producers to come together and decide how they're going to market their products and do it in a way that sets up standards for their products. This is common across virtually every aspect of American agriculture. This is nothing new. When you have a marketing order that involves imported as well as domestically produced, those imports are also affected by the qualifications and the standards set on that marketing order. This is not new.

In fact, virtually everything you'll find in the produce, including many of the products that were described a moment ago, are controlled by a marketing order. We're not exactly sure, until the marketing order, what kind of regulations and quality standards will be put in place; but once they're in place, then whether it's an imported or a domestically produced oil, they'll have to abide by the same regulations.

With regard to the cost, this is not new either. This happens in virtually most of the kinds of commodities and products that are imported and produced domestically. We're not talking about something radical.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor Mark Burton, who has served Northern California labor, specifically, Napa and Solano Counties, since 1978. I ask all my colleagues to join me in recognizing the many outstanding achievements of Mark during his lifetime.

Mark Burton has touched the lives of many with dedication and grace. Evidenced since his early childhood; Mark's driven and compassionate nature laid the foundation for a legacy of inspiration to all who know him.

Mark was born in Richmond, California, on June 11, 1957; and Mark graduated from Pinole Valley High School in 1976, where he met the love of his life, Becky, who Mark later married and raised their two sons, Andrew and Adam, with.

Mark is committed to making the world a better place and his grace and ability to effectively communicate with people from all different backgrounds, he courageously stands up for what he believes is both fair and right not only in the workplace, but in life as well.

Mark's reputation for being dependable, fair, and loyal propelled Mark to become a foreman for Bechtel before joining the Local 3 staff as a Business Agent in 2000. Mark was promoted to District Representative for Napa and Solano Counties in 2006 and has dedicated his time to improving working conditions throughout organized labor.

Mr. Speaker, we are truly honored to pay tribute to our friend and dedicated public servant Mark Burton. We ask our colleagues to join with us in thanking Mr. Burton for his long and dedicated service to the citizens of Solano and Napa counties and wishing him continued success in all his future endeavors along with a happy retirement.

Madam Chair, I want to thank the ranking member and the chair for making my amendment an en bloc amendment.

This amendment deals with the 50-plus billion dollars that we have spent on the Afghan National Security Forces. An additional $7.7 billion is to be added this year. That is a 50 percent increase over last year.

The $2.6 billion addition is for equipment with absolutely no justification, no idea what the equipment is--airplanes, related. There is no knowledge of whether the Afghan National Security Force can use it or not. The amendment simply says that money will not be available until and unless there is clarity as to where the money is going to be spent, how it's going to be spent, how the equipment will be purchased. We don't want to write a $2.6 billion blank check for additional graft and corruption in Afghanistan.

This amendment will be in the en bloc amendment, and I thank the committee for making it possible.

Thank you, Mr. McGovern.

I want to follow up on the previous comments.

A strong case was made for changing the way in which rape is handled and sexual assault is handled, but it doesn't go far enough. Unfortunately, the rule doesn't allow for a full discussion and a full vote by the House on this very, very important issue being brought to us by my colleague from California (Ms. Speier). We need to have that debate here. We need to really go outside the chain of command for the most important piece, and that is the charging of the incident.

Beyond that, the Rules Committee did pick up an issue that I put forward. The Afghan National Army is going to receive $7.7 billion in this legislation. Unfortunately, $2.6 billion has been added to last year's money, and there is no indication as to how that $2.6 billion will be spent. So the Rules Committee did adopt my amendment, and it will be en bloc. It deals with: we can't spend that money until we find out how it is going to be spent, which is the basic policy that we apply to every military acquisition in our own military.

The east coast missile defense site remains and is not to be debated on the floor. That's unfortunate. It's $2.25 million this year and more in the future. Language in this bill about Syria ought to be debated on the floor. Fortunately, it will. We are going to also debate the authorization to use force.

We need that debate. Unfortunately, in the committee markup, only moments were spent on the Afghanistan war, and more than $80 billion will be spent there.

At a time when we are reducing our forces by 40 percent, we're actually spending at least as much as we're spending in the current year. Why? We need to ask that question. Why are we spending that amount of money as we reduce our forces? It was not discussed at all during the markup. We need that full debate on the floor. And therefore, for these reasons, I oppose the rule.

We must debate this $700 billion bill in full.

Trust and verify. Wow. In the New START treaty, it's trust and verify. But to get to the trust and verify, we're going to have to begin the process--$70 million requested by the military to begin the process.

I know the gentleman on the other side of this question has spent days and days working through this budget. The military plans years ahead; And in order to carry out the New START treaty and see the reductions that we need to make on our side, as obligated by that treaty, we need to begin that planning process now.

It's not a matter of throwing the weapons out or disposing of these weapons today. It's how we go about getting to that point, and the $70 million is essential for that.

We'll delay by one whole year the process of carrying out our treaty obligations. Russia is in the process of carrying out their treaty obligations, and we should too.

It's very simple, guys. It's about carrying out an obligation that we have. It's about giving the military the money that they need today to begin the planning, to do the early parts of that process.

Trust and verify. The Russians want us--they trust us, maybe, but they want verification. We want verification from them also. This is all about carrying out a treaty obligation, getting it going.

May I inquire as to the time available?

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

A lot of analogies come to mind: slippery slopes, camel's nose under the tent.

Syria is an extremely serious matter, and the role of the United States in the serious issue of Syria needs to be fully vetted by the Congress and the Senate. We are debating; 435 of us are given 10 minutes, 10 minutes of time to this issue, plus perhaps another 5 minutes in the committee hearing, to this matter of what is the role of the United States in the serious Syrian issue.

Slippery slope, red lines, military aid, nonlethal aid. What does it all mean? Where is the House Foreign Affairs Committee on this matter? And by the way, how did this slip by the requirement of dual referencing? It did. We're here.

Ten minutes, 10 minutes on a matter that could very easily suck the United States into another war in the Middle East. We need time. We need to debate this. We need to understand all the ramifications of this. The language in this particular section is really serious language. It's far more than has been stated on the floor. Put it aside, step back, take our time, understand what all the ramifications are.

Madam Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to spend a few moments this evening talking about things that are on my mind, and I suspect on the mind of the American public. There's certainly a lot of news recently about collecting data on American citizens. Having attended a conference this afternoon, I can tell you that I think the great majority of the 435 Members of this House share the deep concern of the American public about our civil liberties perhaps being taken away from us in the process of data collection. I would expect that this House of Representatives and a couple of our committees, the Judiciary and the Intelligence Committees, will be spending time over the next few weeks going into this in great detail trying to assess whether we all made a mistake when we voted for the various laws that have allowed the National Security Agency and the other agencies to collect data on all of our phone calls and more. I would hope that's the case.

We need to know exactly what's happening, how it has happened and what impact it may have on our civil liberties. One of the most precious things given to us in the Bill of Rights is that freedom, freedom from an oppressive government. So we'll see what happens here. For my own part, I want those hearings to take place right away. I have great concerns about all of this, and we'll see how it all plays out.

As to people stealing secrets, yes, that's against the law and there ought to be a punishment, and I suspect they will very quickly find that punishment available for those have who have stolen these pieces of information.

Now, moving on, I wanted to talk this evening about the American Dream. I think it was probably best put forth by President Clinton, although down through the ages and for generations and generations, the dream has been pretty much the same. But since he has the most recent quote that I could find on this, I think I'll just use it. He said:

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

freedom and opportunity to pursue your own dreams and leave

your kids a country where they can chase theirs.

I like that. In fact, I like President Clinton and the way in which he was able to articulate some of our most fundamental values. In this case, he so very well laid out the essence of the American Dream: if you work hard and you play by the rules, then you ought to be able to have a good life in America. You ought to be able to see progress for yourself and for your families.

This issue was brought to my attention at a recent town hall that I had in my district. A gentleman in the town hall, not a Tea Party, not a liberal or whatever, he just said:

I've got a question for you, Congressman. I've got two

kids. My wife and I both work, and we've worked all our

lives. I'm in my mid- to late forties now, and I have to tell

you, we're not getting ahead. We still have those student

debts from our children. We still have our home, but it's a

modest home, we don't own a big boat, or any boat for that

matter. We just can't seem to get ahead. What's happened?

What's happened to the American Dream?

I went on to cite a few things that I thought were the essential elements of that. I want to cover some of those tonight. This is not going to be an exhaustive description of the issue. I want to save that or come to that in subsequent Special Order hours that my colleagues and I will take up in the coming weeks. But just a couple of things that came across over the last weekend that I think really exemplify some of this. The ideal: education is open to everyone. In America, everyone can get a great public education. The reality is different. In 2007, one-half of the children from the wealthiest households completed their college education. Only 9 percent of the children from low-income families completed their college education. That's a gap that has never been wider since 1989. So with regard to that ladder of success, education, if you happen to be poor or in the lower income, chances of your completing your college education is one out of ten.

How about being able to have freedom from want, one of the four freedoms that Franklin Delano Roosevelt so beautifully articulated during the Great Depression? But as a result of the Great Recession in 2010, a total of 46.2 million Americans were below the poverty line. That was the highest number in 52 years. And as best I could find more recently--the last 2 years--that number has not really changed very much. So we're looking at 46 million Americans that are living below the poverty line. So freedom from want may not be readily available to a very, very large percentage of Americans.

How about the land of opportunity? We all believe America is the land of opportunity. Well, not really. On average, it takes five to six generations, five to six generations, that's 125 to 150 years, for a child from a poor background to rise to the middle class--not to the upper class; to the middle class. I looked at that, and I said, clearly, that has to be an inaccurate analysis. But it's not. So for a child from a poor background--that's those 46 million Americans in poverty--they could wait five to six generations on average--that's not everybody, obviously some will do it faster, and others won't do it at all--to get to the middle class.

That is interesting, sad and challenging for us.

Income inequality, this is what some people like to call--well, I won't use that right now. But income inequality, you work hard and you do okay. I think that's what President Clinton said, if you work hard and play by the rules. Hmm. Really? The United States ranks 93rd in the world on income equality, behind Great Britain, Australia--and here's one that caught my attention, Nigeria, Argentina, and Japan.

What income inequality means is the distribution of wealth within the economy. When you have income inequality, the share of the pie that is available to the wealthy is significantly greater than the share of the pie to the great mass of the population. That's income inequality.

Fascinating statistics. Statistics are kind of the basis for many of our arguments. There are many more statistics along this line that we ought to be paying attention to. Over the next couple of weeks, we are going to be speaking

to these as we pursue the reality of the American Dream and what we can do to rebuild the American Dream.

A couple of notions that I have right at the outset that I'd like to share as we go through this shortened 1 hour: first of all, the American Dream very much depends upon a job. If you don't have a job-- and we've got maybe some 12 million Americans that don't. They would like to work, but in some cases they've given up and in other cases they simply haven't been able to find a job. So you've got to have a job.

There are ways that we can create jobs in this Nation. Certainly, we depend upon the private sector; but down through the decades of this democracy, beginning with our very first President, there has been a common bond, if you will, a partnership between the government and the private sector in creating jobs.

In his very first days in office, George Washington asked Alexander Hamilton, his Treasury Secretary, to develop a program, policy on manufacturers, which is another word for manufacturing. Alexander Hamilton came back, I guess, a couple of months later with a report on manufacturers--very, very interesting and instructive to us today in that our very first President and very first Treasury Secretary said that the Federal Government has a significant role in developing the economy, manufacturing. We did then, and we do today.

Alexander Hamilton said: George Washington, here's what we need to do. We need to use the purchasing power of the government, that is, the tax money that's spent by the government, to buy American-made goods and services. Now, there's a good idea. We've had the Buy in America policy in the United States for many, many years all often ignored by the various agencies that are supposed to oversee the purchasing. Right now we have a problem with the military that is supposed to go green to develop alternative power sources that they can depend upon if the grid goes down.

However, they're routinely ignoring the Buy America requirements that the law has because they're purchasing these massive solar arrays as though they are available in Home Depot. I don't think so. But, nonetheless, it's an example of how the various arms of the U.S. Government in one way or another ignore the purchasing requirement of Buy America--literally using our tax money to buy American-made goods and services to employ Americans.

It turns out that this is part of what I like to call the Make It in America agenda, a series of proposals that my Democratic colleagues and I are putting forth to build the American manufacturing sector. For example, the Department of Defense obeying the law and buying American- made solar panels for those large arrays that they are putting up on various military bases or the private sector is putting up for the military. Buy America, Make It in America, use our tax money to buy American-made equipment. By the way, I've got a bill that I have introduced on this for the last to 2 years now that simply increases that purchasing content to 85 percent.

I didn't have time to bring up another photo, but I'll tell you about it. In the American Recovery Act--otherwise known as the stimulus bill--there was a provision for Amtrak to have $480 billion to purchase new, advanced, efficient locomotives for the Northeast Corridor. These would be electric-power locomotives--I think 7,000 horsepower machines. Somebody--and I'm not sure who it was--wrote into that requirement that these had to be 100 percent American-made. Now, nobody in America was making 100 percent American locomotives; in fact, very few locomotives were made in America anyway.

But, nonetheless, contractors, manufacturers of locomotives said, half a billion dollars, hmm, have to be made in America. So a German company--one of the largest manufacturing companies in the world--said, oh, we could do that. So in Sacramento, California, just outside the edge of my district, Siemens--who already had a factory manufacturing light rail cars and streetcars--said, hmm, let's expand this factory, and we're going to build one hundred percent American-made locomotives.

Three weeks ago, the first of those 70 locomotives rolled onto America's rail tracks--now being tested in Colorado, shake-down crews. We can look forward to thousands of jobs in America as a result of that--200 specifically at that new manufacturing plant in Sacramento; and then the supply chain, all the people that are supplying those American-made parts to that locomotive are going to have jobs. Now, that's a good thing. That's part of our Make It in America agenda. And here's back to the first point: those jobs are middle class jobs.

One of the fellows I met at that ceremony when this locomotive was rolled onto the tracks was telling me about himself. He was about, I don't know, maybe 35, 37 years old. I asked him, How long have you been here? He said, I've been here 5, 6 years. I said, Really? What are you doing? He said, Well, that's my train; I built that train, along with my coworkers. I was responsible for building that train. I said, Wow, you must have a lot of experience. He said, No, 5 or 6 years. I said, 5 or 6 years and you know how to build that? He said, Yeah, I was trained by the Germans, who came over here and helped us understand how to build it, but now I'm responsible.

I said, What did you do before this? He said, Well, I finished high school and messed around for a while and wasn't going anywhere, so I hired on here at the lowest-paying job.

He is now firmly in the middle class, taking pride in his work, taking pride in building it in America. That's a lesson for us here in Congress. We really ought to take that lesson and put it into law, into a law that says we're going to use our taxpayers' money to purchase American-made goods and equipment.

Think about the infrastructure in America, and let me give you an example. It's kind of interesting when you have a long airport flight like I did today from Sacramento to Washington to read the newspaper. Occasionally, you can find some interesting things in the newspapers. Oh, here it is, yes. California could use $44.5 billion to fix an aging water system over the next two decades, according to a Federal survey by the Environmental Protection Agency. Oh, that's California. We have the greatest need, $44.5 billion. And Texas, who likes to think it's going to be bigger than California--maybe in size, but certainly not better, with apologies to my Texas colleagues--$34 billion; New York, $22 billion. And that doesn't include repairing from Sandy.

It turns out that these are repairs to investments that were made by our fathers and mothers and grandfathers and their fathers and mothers. So these are water systems that have been built over the last--in California, over the last maybe 120, 130 years; in New York, it probably goes back a couple hundred years. These are water systems that were investments by previous generations that we have been living on, literally consuming these investments, and not repairing and replacing and upgrading. Shame on us. It's as though you go to the supermarket once a year and you fill your pantry and freezer and refrigerator with all the food and you simply sit there and you consume and you consume. Eventually, the refrigerator is empty, the pantry is empty, and you go really hungry. That's what we've been doing here in America. We have been consuming the investments of previous generations. Here we are with this new report that's out for my State, California, $44.5 billion; for Texas, $34 billion; and for New York, $22 billion, just for the water systems.

That doesn't include sanitation systems. That doesn't include the road systems, bridges, highways.

We're living off the investments that were made by previous generations, and we can see the result of that. We've had bridge collapses recently. Hello? I-5, Washington State, we had bridge collapses. Anybody been on the interstates and notice the disrepair? I have, and I suspect most Americans have.

So we're going to have to once again invest in our basic infrastructure. And when we do, do you know what happens? Americans go back to work in middle class jobs. So that perhaps that average American that will never in five generations get out of the bottom poverty level can jump up into the

middle class by getting one of those solid construction jobs, which across America are middle class jobs.

We have enormous needs. And, by the way, we're going to have to pay for it. I remember when I was in college buying gasoline at about 19 cents a gallon, 20 cents a gallon. That was a long time ago in the 1960s. And one day I was out buying gas--I don't know, I had some time because my car was empty and it was slow to fill--and I looked at the sticker on the pump and it said, 12 cents of that 18 cents was tax, an excise tax, State and Federal. So two-thirds of the total cost of that gasoline at that time, and that was in 1964, was for taxes. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness.

Is the American public aware that it's been since 1990 since the excise tax on gasoline has been raised? It's about 18\1/2\ cents on gasoline, a little higher for diesel. What is the cost of gasoline in the United States today? $3.50, average? Do you want to do that mathematics? It's not two-thirds, not at all. So you wonder, where's the money for investments?

We have decided to consume the investments that were made in the '60s when the general public--at least in California--was willing to pay two-thirds of the cost of a gallon of gasoline in taxes. So today we consume, and we pay the price: we pay the price in congestion; we pay the price in safety; and we pay the price in jobs.

This is something we're going to have to consider here in Congress. We're going to have to look at ourselves and we're going to have to take up our courage and say: What are we doing here? Are we going to be consumers or are we going to be investors? Are we going to consume the investment of our fathers and mothers or are we going to invest in that infrastructure so that our children can have the kind of modern, necessary infrastructure that they need upon which their economy will grow?

We're going to have to deal with this because the Surface Transportation Act has to be renewed this session of Congress. Not likely to occur this year, but before we end our work in January of 2015, we must deal with this issue. And so the American Dream, if you work hard and you play by the rules, you will have the freedom and opportunity to pursue your own dreams and leave your kids--and leave your kids--a country where they can chase theirs.

Let's just say this is the opening of what I hope will be many sessions in the evening--or following our session in the afternoon or evening--in which we engage in a discussion on the American Dream, a discussion about really the future of America, a discussion that--I see one of my colleagues has decided to join us this evening.

Welcome. Share with us your thoughts. We're pursuing infrastructure and the American Dream, jobs, how we can deal with creating opportunities in America.

The President wanted to do two things in this area: one, the normal programs--the surface transportation program, the water resources bill, which we're going to be working on--but he also wanted to add on top of that $50 billion of infrastructure investment and create an infrastructure bank, which you so well described in your discussion here. None of that has been done, which is to the detriment of the American worker.

For example, of the water programs that I was talking about early on--the $44 billion that's needed in California--for every $1 billion that you spend on a water project, you put 28,000 people to work with good middle class jobs, and I think the numbers would probably be similar for highways and bridges and the like. This is the great tragedy--that we're not moving in a direction of creating the fundamental investments. Rather, we are disinvesting--we are consuming--and that doesn't last very long, as you so well said.

So what are we going to do about it?

Hopefully, this House will undertake the same process, find the same wisdom of the House of Representatives

and the Senate when Dwight D. Eisenhower, President Eisenhower, brought to the Congress a proposal for a national defense highway system, which we now call the interstate system.

I'm sure you've got some examples that you'd like to share with us. Let's go back and forth, and we'll kind of toss the ball here.

A combined sewer system. That's the stormwater that flows into the sewer, and it's not disconnected from the sanitation-- toilets and the like; is that correct?

That's how we deal with the deficit. You put Americans back to work, and automatically the tax revenues increase; and we then have a very solid, good way to deal with the deficit. On the other hand, as you suggested, cuts alone don't do it. What cuts do is to create unemployment, and we've seen that.

We've talked about this extraordinary investment that we need to make in rebuilding our existing systems. Yet in looking at the budget that passed this House, which was the Ryan Republican budget, they have an unallocated $886 billion cut in these kinds of programs over the next 10 years. More than $80 billion a year would be taken out of these kinds of investment programs that we're talking about here so that what we do instead of investing for our own generation and the next generation is we actually increase the consumption of yesterday's investment, leading us nowhere but to more bridges falling, more sewers backing up, more levees breaking, and more highway congestion.

I am so pleased that you have brought that subject up, because it is critical. It is absolutely critical for the future economy of this Nation and, really, for solving problems of the world. Those investments are critical.

You did leave out agriculture. I happen to represent the University of California at Davis, which is, by my argument, the largest, best agricultural research program in the world. We know the population of the world is going to grow, so we're going to have to continue the agricultural research. Yet in the budget proposals that have passed this House and in sequestration--let me just put it this way: in sequestration alone, there is a reduction of $45 million of research in agriculture at the University of California at Davis.

Now, with health research, I was talking to the former dean of the medical school at the University of California at Davis last week, and she was talking about the significant reduction in health research, which is affecting projects that are already under way. As for research programs that were going along, suddenly the money is gone, and that's sequestration, which is also part of this.

We can solve America's problems by getting government out of it, by reducing the role of government. As I said at the outset, George Washington didn't believe that. He believed in inserting government into the economy as a partner in growing it, in growing the economy.

We talk about Thomas Jefferson and education and how he believed that education--education and research--go together. These are fundamental investments along with infrastructure. Yet, in this House, there's an unwillingness by the majority party to address this fundamental axiom of economic growth: education, research, infrastructure, manufacturing the things that come from that, building the middle class, building the economy.

Let me give you an example.

Today, in the Daily Republic newspaper in Fairfield, they ran a story that's exactly on your point. I'm just going to take a second and read some of this.

This is a program that EDF Renewable Energy, which operates wind turbines between Rio Vista and Fairfield and Suisun City in my district--we have a big wind farm there--they are funding a program at Rio Vista High School for this year as a way to promote job training in green industries.

Jim Bard is the instructor in the renewable energy class, which emphasizes wind energy. So it's exactly what you said. This private company that has these numerous wind turbines--I think several hundred wind turbines on this big wind farm--needs workers. So they've gone to the local high school, and they're creating what I suppose at one time was called a vocational education class. It's getting the kids educated and prepared to take jobs in their own neighborhood.

So here you see the green technology--wind energy--coupling up with education to provide middle class jobs. It's a great example. My congratulations to EDF and their renewable energy program, to Jim Bard and to the folks in Rio Vista at the Rio Vista High School, which I proudly represent.

Thank you so much for bringing that out.

Back to George Washington. I like to talk about the Founding Fathers because it's often used on the floor to disparage one or another programs. But I'd like to talk in a positive way.

He also said the Federal Government has a fundamental role in infrastructure development, and he cited three different things: ports, roads and canals.

The very first President of this Nation was doing what we continue to do to this day, although at a much lower level than our Nation needs today. So this is a long tradition of America, and it's one that really works.

Education, research, infrastructure and manufacturing, you tie those together and then you build the foundation for economic growth and a just and equitable society so people have a chance to climb the economic ladder, to go as high as they want to. You're giving them the tools that they need to succeed.

Thank you for raising that, my colleague from the great manufacturing sector of, I guess, the eastern part of the middle west. Is that fair enough?

This is an interesting chart that I came across a while ago. It talks about income growth, the issue you were just talking about: How does an individual rise and climb the economic ladder and what kind of success do they have?

This is the income growth from 1996 to 2011. I kind of displayed this on a football field. Years ago I played football with some modest success.

I did wear a helmet, and I don't recall any concussions.

The bottom 90 percent of our population has seen an income growth-- this is adjusted for inflation--of $59 over this period, 1966 to 2011. That's some 55 years.

Basically, 90 percent of the population has stalled out and is not able to climb the ladder. That's about 1 inch. I guess that's even a referee's error if they pull the chains out.

The top 10 percent of the population has gone half the football field, and they've seen their income growth expand by $116,071 over this same period of time. So 90 percent of the population has seen $59 in growth, and the top 10 percent have seen a little over $110,000.

The 1 percent of the population, the very tip-top--these are not the 3 percenters. This is the 1 percent. They have gone 2\1/2\ football fields in comparison, and they've seen their income grow at over a half-million dollars a year, $628,817.

Now, even a smaller group, one-tenth of 1 percent of the American population, have seen their income grow by 72 football fields compared to the bottom 90 percent. They have seen their annual income grow by $18 million a year.

So what's happening here in the United States--and I talked about it earlier before you arrived--and maybe this is a reasonable place to leave it because we are going to run out of time. This is not class warfare. This is economic reality. This is where the middle class and the lower income poverty class have been static. And the very tippy top, the top 10 percent and above, have seen significant income growth over that period of time.

Wall Street was taken care of, but not Main Street. That's what happened.

This is not just the result of just a free market system operating. This is a result of specific government policy over the last 50 years that has resulted in a skewing of the wealth of America, a skewing of that wealth from the great majority of Americans, as many as 90 percent, to the very tippy top of the income class.

And so over the next, I don't know, 3, 4 weeks, maybe 2 months, I want to take this issue up of: What happened to the American Dream? What happened to it?

When you see these kinds of statistics that children live in poverty and it takes four or five, five to six generations before a child that is in poverty today, their successor generations will be able to rise to the top of the middle class, almost 150 years, five, six generations before a person in poverty can climb the economic ladder, that's incredible, and that speaks to something terribly wrong here in America.

When education, when half of the children from the wealthier families graduate from college and only 9 percent of the children from the low- income classes are able to graduate from college, these are problems that exist.

If you want to take one more shot at a closing statement, then I'm going to end by quoting Bill Clinton.

I thank you, Mr. Ryan, for that analogy. I really like that one.

I'm going to end with this by President Bill Clinton:

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

freedom and opportunity to pursue your own dreams and leave

your kids a country where they can chase theirs.

That's our goal. We're going to talk about these things, about the American Dream, what happened to it and what we need to restore it, and how we can make things in America and how we can rebuild the American economy.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, tonight we want to talk about jobs in America, we want to talk about how we can rebuild the great American manufacturing sector, and we also want to spend some time talking about a very special part of the American economy, and that is the infrastructure upon which that economy can grow and prosper. So there are many pieces to this puzzle about rebuilding the economic strength of this Nation.

Much of it comes down to what we call the Make It in America agenda. It's an agenda to rebuild the great manufacturing sector of this Nation. That's where the middle class found its strength. That's where the middle class grew following World War II. Unfortunately, in the last 15 years or so, we've seen a decline from some 20 million Americans in manufacturing down to perhaps 11 million.

In recent months, we've seen a resurgence in part due to some changes in law that we've put in place that end tax breaks that American corporations received when they sent jobs overseas--really foolish tax breaks. We ended many of those, and we have a few more to go. What we want to do is give manufacturers, American corporations and others, who want to on shore bring jobs back to America, we want to give them a tax break.

So the Make It in America agenda is about rebuilding that great American manufacturing base. There are many different parts to it. Part of it is the infrastructure system.

I was talking to one of my friends from the Connecticut area just a few moment ago, and he said, Listen, I can't be with you tonight, but what I want you to say is we had a terrible Amtrak train wreck in Connecticut just a week ago, and we think it may have been due to bad track.

That's the infrastructure, folks. We really need to build that train system here in America, the infrastructure for it.

I'm going to put up one more sign here before I call upon my friend from New York. Here it is. Now, that's a beautiful locomotive. That's an American-made locomotive. So this is manufacturing. This is an American-made locomotive by a German company, Siemens, one of the great industrial companies in this world. They bid on almost a half-a- billion-dollar project that was in the stimulus bill for 70 locomotives for Amtrak that had to be American made. This German company said half a billion dollars, American made, we can do that. They set up a factory in Sacramento, California, and that's the first American-made locomotive in many, many decades, or generations, and it's a beauty. It's electric. I think it's about 7,500 horsepower, and it's going to be used here on the East Coast and on that Boston to Washington, D.C., track. Hopefully, it'll be rebuilt.

Joining me tonight in this discussion about infrastructure and jobs and Make It in America is my friend from New York, Paul Tonko. We're redoing the East-West show.

Mr. Tonko, you have come to a very important point here, and that is: Before you came to Congress, you headed up a consortium in New York that did precisely that, didn't you?

Well, the Make It in America agenda has many, many parts to it. It has a research piece. It has an innovation piece. It has some tax issues to it. All of these have been packaged and pulled together by our leader, Steny Hoyer, who I see has joined us on the floor.

Maryland is on the East Coast. California is on the West Coast, so now we've augmented our East Coast-West Coast show. Mr. Hoyer, thank you so very much for your leadership on Make It in America.

Mr. Hoyer, thank you so very much. As I've heard you say over and over again, America will make it when we Make It in America.

Thank you very much for joining us.

Mr. Tonko, education, innovation, infrastructure--those are keys. There are a couple of other keys, as Mr. Hoyer was saying. Part of it is our tax policy, the policies that come out of this building. And we can really do the kinds of things, laws, that really make a difference.

I put up that picture of that new Amtrak locomotive. It was a law, the Stimulus Act, that allowed the men and women in Sacramento, some 200 of them, plus another 70 companies that are the supply chain that supply the various parts to this locomotive to have a job.

And what happened in the stimulus bill was, okay, we're going to spend half a billion dollars for 70 locomotives for Amtrak. But, another sentence, they must be American-made, using American taxpayer money to buy American-made equipment.

So we now have this manufacturing plant in Sacramento. We now have men and women employed, not only in Sacramento, but around the Nation, making the various parts for this most advanced locomotive.

So it's public policy. I have a bill in that does that. It requires that if we're going to build the infrastructure and locomotives, buses, trains, roads, bridges, and use American taxpayer money, then we must be buying American-made products. Pretty simple stuff. It's the Buy America, and it creates jobs in America.

I know you have several pieces of legislation that you're sponsoring and supporting. You may want to bring those up. We'll talk about them for a few moments.

Mr. Tonko, I certainly agree about logic and the sometimes lack of logic, the sequestration, which is no sense, otherwise known as nonsense, but extraordinarily damaging.

But you're talking about Rensselaer and what came out of that. I'll give you an example in my own district, Davis, California, University of California-Davis. And here's where your discussion really meets the road.

The engineering school did computerized programming for machine tools and did some very advanced research on how to do that. One of the Japanese companies that manufactured machine tools, one of the most advanced machine tool manufacturers in the world, Mori Seiki, came over to University of

California-Davis, talked to the engineers and the students and the professors that were putting together this computerized system for machine tools and said, we want to be part of that.

And so they began to use it and realized that what they needed to do was to be right next to the research so that they could constantly upgrade their machines. And they, therefore, came to Davis, California, built a factory, hired, I think, about 120 people now; and they're making the most advanced machine tools, computerized-driven machine tools anywhere in the world right in Davis, California.

So we can see the connection between research, the adaptation of that research into the manufacturing process, and then the jobs. These are all middle class jobs and above that are now available in Davis, California. And there are others that spin off from that, providing certain parts of it. So these are the keys.

Now, here's where the nonsense comes in. If those are the keys to industrial growth and manufacturing and job growth, why is it that we have a budget that's going to be back on the floor tomorrow that actually cuts research, cuts the educational components, cuts the job training, the retraining that's necessary, and doesn't do anything to create jobs except reduce the Federal support that has been critical in this Nation's history?

Why would we do that?

I don't understand, but it's going to be back here. This is the Republican Ryan budget. They're going to play some games tomorrow, try to pretend that somehow it passed the Senate when, in fact, we really need a budget conference committee so that we can sort out our differences, so we can lay the platform for future economic growth.

But that's not what that budget does. It's exactly the opposite. It's an austerity budget, and it cuts those things that really do create economic growth.

Unfortunate, but we have a different agenda; and we want that agenda of growth.

We, perhaps, ought to shift our gears here a little bit and talk about the infrastructure component which is integral to this. You mentioned it earlier.

I know that in your area a year ago you had tremendous flooding; and so the infrastructure, the protection from that, you may want to pick that up, and I'll follow along.

It's global warming.

The infrastructure system of this Nation is the foundation for the economy. And any economic growth that we have has to be built on a solid infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers rates the American infrastructure at a D. That's not good. That's doggone bad, actually. You take a look at the other countries of the world, China and others, that are building first class infrastructure, and you come to the United States and see that we're really not. We're way behind.

You talked about the safety issue. I have probably well over 1,100 miles of levees in my district that are flood protection. And they're decades old. They need to be upgraded. So just in terms of the communities being safe--for example, Natomas, in Sacramento, is an area that I share with Congresswoman Matsui and is one of the riskiest places in America for flooding, right behind New Orleans. We need to upgrade those levees so that that community can, A, be safe and, B, grow. We know that other areas in my district have the same problem.

Yet at the same time, the sequestration, to go back to that nonsense, removes $250 million of levee improvements from the Army Corps of Engineers' budget. So projects are going to be delayed. We're going to have another winter and, God willing, we won't have a flood. But it could happen. The money that is necessary to rebuild those levees is gone.

The President has been very, very upfront about this. The President was standing right behind us here at the State of the Union and said, We need to build our infrastructure. And he proposed three things. First of all, he wants to put in an additional $50 billion to be spent in the near term--this year and the year after--to really give a major push for America's infrastructure. He also said we need an infrastructure bank. Europe has had one for nearly three decades, and it really helps to finance projects that have a cash flow: sanitation systems, water systems, toll roads, toll bridges, and the like.

The other thing that I think we ought to do is, when we spend that money, we ought to spend it on American-made equipment. And that's what my bill does. The other part of this is that we really need to address the infrastructure issue with a very robust program.

I'm going to take this for just a second. For every $1 that we invest in infrastructure, there is a boost to the economy of $1.57. So by investing in the infrastructure, we actually grow the economy more than a one-to-one basis. It's $1.57 for every $1 that we invest. And so you set this kind of economic growth going on and you've built the foundation for the future. That's what we ought to be doing.

So I ask my Republican colleagues here: pay attention. Forget about whether it's President Obama or President whomever. Infrastructure is really, really important. Take up what the President has suggested. Call it a Republican suggestion. Boost the infrastructure spending in this Nation. Put the men and women who build America's foundation back to work so that

we have a foundation for economic growth and for safety.

Let's realize that we had a train wreck in Connecticut. Was it caused by a bad track situation? Possibly. We had a bridge collapse in Washington State. We know that that was an infrastructure maintenance problem. We have potholes. We know that the economy of this Nation has slowed down because of traffic jams and insufficient capacities on our highways. And we know that we have insufficient transit systems. In New York, you need to rebuild, as you just discussed, from Superstorm Sandy.

No, it certainly won't. You've been talking about bridge collapses, the bridge that collapsed in the Twin Cities, Minnesota and Wisconsin, lives lost. We're continuing to see the infrastructure, bridges and others, unable to really carry the modern loads that are there, rusting and falling down. We need to really address that.

You did raise an essential point about the electric grid, that power infrastructure, the electric power infrastructure of this Nation, critically important. We need to make the investments there. And we're also making--Mr. Hoyer talked about the energy independence that we're moving towards in the United States. One part of that is the natural gas that is now being more readily available and at a reasonable price, and we're seeing the repowering of many of the coal-fired power plants using natural gas, which also reduces the greenhouse gas emissions from coal. All of that is good.

I want to pick up another area of infrastructure that's really important. I've now become the ranking member of the Coast Guard and Maritime. While I've always been interested in the ports, at least in the California ports, I'm now in a position here to spend even more time focusing on the ports and the maritime industry. International commerce, critically important to economic growth, Mr. Hoyer talked about the export potential that this country has and will even grow more in the future, but that is also the ports and the airports.

Both of these, airports and the ports, are unable to meet the demands of modern and advanced transportation. Many of the ports in America need to be deepened so that the new container ships that are now coming into play and many of the new oil tankers and the rest can access the American ports. In doing so, we will be able to maintain the vitality of international trade, the export market, which we really must, once again, dominate, and the jobs that go with the ports.

And so it's ports and it's railroads that lead out of the ports and the trucking industry that goes out of it so that we need a comprehensive transportation plan. We're going to rewrite the Surface Transportation Act in this session of Congress, start on it this year, get it done in, well, hopefully this year or maybe next year--not maybe. We have to do it next year because we see the expiration of the current transportation plan.

So there's enormous responsibilities that we have to create the infrastructure upon which America grows. It's the roads. It's the ports. It's the airports. It's the electrical system and the communication systems. All of these are critical, and all of them, in one way or another, are dependent upon the actions taken by the 435 of us in the House of Representatives and the 100 Members of the Senate and, of course, the President.

Bear in mind that the President has presented to the Congress a very robust infrastructure plan that takes into account all of the elements that we've discussed here tonight. Very, very little of that has actually been taken up in any committee hearing, and what we have seen pass the House thus far is not the kind of robust investment that is needed for infrastructure but quite the opposite: a disinvestment through such things as the sequestration and the Ryan budget which will be back on the floor again in the next day or so. These are not the way you grow the economy. These are austerity programs that actually reduce the investments that we need for the foundation of America's economic growth: education, research, infrastructure investment, modern manufacturing. These are the keys, and we have to do it.

Mr. Tonko, we've gone through most of our time. If you'd like to take a wrap, and then I'll take a wrap and we'll call it a night.

Mr. Tonko, thank you so very much. Your passion on this has been displayed on this floor numerous times as we talked about making it in America, about jobs and infrastructure. As you were going through that recitation of American history, I want to go back even further than the canal period. Let's go back to our very first President, George Washington.

He refused to go through the Inaugural in a suit made by England. So he wanted an American-made suit. He found the cloth from Boston and a tailor, and wore an American-made suit.

He also, immediately on taking office, our very first President in the very first days in his office, turned to his Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, and said: We need to develop the manufacturing in this country. I want you to develop a plan on manufacturers.

Hamilton went out--I don't know if he had a committee or not--but he came back with a report. It was probably 30 to 50 pages. Now it would be 30-50,000 pages. But nonetheless, he came back with a report--I think he had about 15 different thoughts in it--and they were precisely on this subject of ``making it in America.''

You will love this. One of the very first things in that document was: We need to build the infrastructure; canals, roads, and ports. The very first President said: The role of the Federal Government is to help build the infrastructure. And here we are centuries later still debating how we're going to do it. Well, just pay attention to the Founding Fathers. They told us how to do it.

They also said we ought to spend the American taxpayers' money on American-made goods. It's in that document dating back to the very first policies of this Nation. And so when I introduced this bill that says use the taxpayer money to buy American-made products, it's not new, folks. I'm simply copying what Alexander Hamilton suggested to George Washington and the first Congress of the United States.

There are other elements in it that play into this in a similar way. And certainly we know that Thomas Jefferson was really big on education. And so the University of Virginia came up. These are the elements of economic growth.

Here we are--435 of us in the House of Representatives--and the question for us is are we going to put in place policies that provide the foundation for economic growth, or are we going to go the opposite direction and continue on the austerity route which actually disinvests on those key elements that create economic growth?

For me, I'm an investor, I want to invest in America's future with infrastructure, education, innovation, research, and manufacturing in America. Those are the policies that I believe we need to put in place, Mr. Tonko. You and I have been here many nights and we've talked about these issues many, many times. And we're not going to stop, are we?

Mr. Tonko, I don't think I could say it better. And so what I think I will say is, Mr. Speaker, we yield back our time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 55 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, June 5, 2013, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to congratulate Wheatland Union High School on its selection as a 2013 California Distinguished School.

The California Distinguished School award is given by the California State Board of Education to public schools that best demonstrate educational excellence for all students and progress in narrowing the achievement gap. It is awarded to approximately five percent of California schools each year, and none is more deserving than Wheatland Union High School.

Since it was established in 1907, Wheatland Union High School has been a cornerstone of the south Yuba County community, which has a rich history of supporting the state's vital agricultural sector. Serving the communities of Wheatland, Plumas Lake and Smartsville, as well as Beale Air Force Base, the high school covers an astounding 150 square miles, and has always been dedicated to providing the best possible education for all students. This is the first formal acknowledgement of their efforts.

Mr. Speaker, I am honored to recognize the impressive achievement of this fine school. I ask my colleagues to join me in congratulating Wheatland Union High School and thanking them for their continued efforts in serving Yuba County students.

Mr. Speaker, I had intended to talk about this subject, rebuilding the American manufacturing sector, and I will. But I just heard the most remarkable 1-hour debate in my life--not a debate, but a whole slew of accusations and incorrect facts. I guess a fact shouldn't be incorrect. But I've never heard such gobbledygook and misstatements in my entire life.

The last one--I'm absolutely delighted the gentleman's father is healthy, but to think that a 2 percent tax on medical devices is somehow going to stop medical technology when those devices are extraordinarily profitable to these companies is just lunacy. I know nobody likes to pay taxes, and certainly the manufacturers of those devices don't want to have to pay a 2 percent tax. But come on, you think that's going to stop medical technology from advancing when there's so much profit in it? I don't think so.

Okay. Thirty-seven times now, 37 times this week the Republican majority is going to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act--37 times-- when Americans are already benefiting from the Affordable Care Act. Is it that my friends who spoke here for the last hour want to tell every 22-year-old or 21-year-old in the entire Nation that they can no longer stay on their parents' health insurance? Because that's exactly what the repeal would do. Those young men and women who are counting on being able to have health insurance--no, repeal ends that part of the Affordable Health Care Act.

Are they to go out and tell 40 million Americans that they're not going to have health insurance at all? That's what the repeal of the Affordable Health Care Act will do, 40 million Americans. Are they to say that somehow this is costing more money to have an insurance policy where you can stay healthy, where you can get care before it becomes a crisis and wind up in an emergency room, that that's going to be cheaper when you repeal the Affordable Health Care Act? Sending people to the emergency room is going to be cheaper? What planet are you from? That's not the way it is. The most expensive care in the world is the emergency room, where somebody does not have the continuity of care that an insurance policy provides for them.

Or maybe they want to discriminate against women as existed before the Affordable Health Care Act. Every woman in this Nation faced insurance discrimination, but the Affordable Health Care Act ends that discrimination.

And how many families out there, how many families out across America have a member of that family--or maybe many members of that family-- that have some preexisting condition--high blood pressure, onset of diabetes, maybe some incident in their past? I will tell you, I was the insurance commissioner in California for 8 years, and I know exactly what the health insurance companies will do if the provisions that prevent insurance discriminations are eliminated with the bill that these gentlemen and ladies intend to take up later this week.

Insurance discrimination has harmed millions upon millions of Americans--many of whom came to me as insurance commissioner in California pleading for some justice in their insurance program. Justice was to be found at least in California because I knew that the insurance companies had an obligation and they had a contract. But you eliminate the Affordable Health Care Act and you'll see insurance discrimination reemerge in the United States in a way that will harm millions upon millions of Americans because they will not be able to get insurance. And if they did, they will have to pay far more simply because they are a woman.

Thirty-seven times. Thirty-seven times you've attempted to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act.

Seniors--every senior in this Nation that's on Medicare is able to get a free annual checkup. And ladies and gentlemen, you need to understand in your arguments that that free, affordable annual checkup has reduced the cost of medical care in Medicare programs. And the inflation rate in Medicare has come down since the Affordable Care Act has gone into effect.

The statistics you toss around about the extraordinary cost, you need to understand that we have been plagued by health care insurance inflation for decades. The Affordable Health Care Act has built into it the very first opportunity this Nation has had nationwide

to bend the cost curve on health care, and we're seeing it happen today. We're seeing it happen today in the Medicare program because seniors are able to get prevention. They're able to get that drug that brings down their blood pressure, or the advice on how to deal with diabetes and avoid the extraordinary cost. Oh, yeah, 37 times repealing the Affordable Health Care Act.

You talk about jobs in America. Okay, let's talk about jobs in America. Let's talk about the fact that there's not been one significant piece of legislation out of this House since the beginning of this session to create jobs. President Obama stood here on this dais and talked about creating jobs, but this House has not brought forward one significant piece of legislation.

The President called for an infrastructure program--$50 billion--to put people back to work, to create the infrastructure--the streets, the roads, the bridges, the water systems, the sanitation systems--not just to put people back to work, but to build the foundation for future economic growth.

So where is that legislation? Has it even been heard in one committee controlled by our friends in the opposition party? No. No. Well, we will take up a transportation act soon, but will there be adequate funding for infrastructure? Probably not. Probably not.

The President called for an American Jobs Act, not even heard in committee here. Americans want to go to work. They want jobs. They want to go to work, and we have a program on the Democratic side to do that.

We want to deal with the big problems facing this Nation. We want to deal with the fact that we have millions of people that want to work in America, and we have serious problems to solve.

We ought to put aside this business of repealing the Affordable Health Care Act. Change it? Yes. Make a reasonable change and let's talk about it. Make a proposal about how to make it better, and we'll talk about it; but we're not going to talk about repealing it. We're not going to go there.

Maybe we ought to go with some things that are really important. Maybe we ought to go with something that was in the news today.

It's been determined that for the first time in at least 3 million years the carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere is over 400 parts per million. What does that mean? Climate change? Oh, yes. If you were in Los Angeles this last couple of days, you would have seen record- high temperatures in early May. Reports are coming out about firestorms this summer season. We've seen Superstorm Sandy, and around this world we've seen many super-environmental effects.

The scientists tell us that that climate change will bring more severe weather events and there will be disruptions in our food supply like the current drought in the Southwest. Four hundred parts per million; in the last 3 million years, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has never been that high.

Now, the good news is that this Nation, the strongest economic nation in the world, despite the inability of this House to get things done, we can solve the climate change problem, or at least lead; and in doing so, we can put people back to work.

Here's how it can be done: clean energy. Clean energy is spurring business development across this country and its future is very, very bright. Not a month goes by without some entrepreneur, a scientist, an inventor, coming to me with another idea about how you can improve solar technologies, photovoltaic technologies. One just came up the other day, a very inspired way of doing it, perhaps two times more efficient, or one-and-a-half times more efficient than the current solar panels.

Companies are investing. U.S.-based venture capital investments in clean energy surged 30 percent from $5.1 billion in 2010 to $6.6 billion in 2011, and the trend continues. Jobs in the solar energy industry are in every State, and there are over 5,000 companies involved employing over 100,000 American workers. And wind energy, which is big in my district in Solano County, 75,000 people across this Nation, and many of them my own constituents.

There's great potential out there as we move from coal and oil, the energy of the previous two centuries, to the clean energies of the future. We'll see that in agriculture as we grow crops that can generate energy. We'll see it in geothermal. We'll see it in wave energy in our oceans. There's enormous potential. And the research that goes into this is also jobs.

Our colleagues on the majority side have attempted in the last year to reduce research for energy and agriculture. To what effect? Well, maybe they want to go to 500 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I don't think Americans want to go there. I don't think the people of the world want to go there. I don't think they want the calamity that will come.

There's many other ways this can be done. Yesterday, as part of our Make It in America agenda, I was in Sacramento, California, on the edge of my district and a remarkable event took place, an event that was actually caused by a piece of legislation that was passed here, the very first piece of legislation signed by President Obama in 2009. It was the stimulus bill, the much-maligned stimulus bill. They said it didn't work. Well, it did work, Mr. Speaker, and it is working today, and it's being made in America. Here's what the American Recovery Act is doing for Americans. Here's what the stimulus bill, in yet one more example of success, is doing for America.

This is the most advanced locomotive built in the world. It's built in Sacramento. The stimulus bill provided $466 million for Amtrak to buy 70 advanced electric locomotives. And written into that bill was a sentence that said these locomotives must be American-made.

So, Siemens, a German company with large manufacturing facilities around the world, certainly in Germany and other countries on every continent except Antarctica, looked at that and said, 466 million? Hmmm. Made in America? We can do that.

They put a bid in. They went to their manufacturing plant in Sacramento that was previously manufacturing light rail cars, set about building a new factory, and that new factory employs 200 people today. Yesterday, the first of 70 new locomotives rolled onto America's rail tracks and will soon be providing service on the Northeastern Corridor. Two hundred new direct jobs in Sacramento at the Siemens factory and hundreds around the Nation--it works.

The climate change issue here is very important. The advanced technology in this locomotive that has 9,000 horsepower has the ability to generate electricity when it slows down, when it brakes for curves or stations, putting back into the grid electricity that it consumed in its previous travel.

Make it in America. Use our Federal tax dollars to buy and to build American-made equipment and supplies and materials. That's precisely what Siemens is doing.

This is a success story. This is the kind of thing we should be talking about here on the floor of the House of Representatives. This is the kind of work we should be doing in our committees: putting Americans back to work, laying the infrastructure for the future growth of this country. But, oh, no, we are going to spend this week dealing with the 37th attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

There's so much more to do. There's so much more to do here in America. Why don't we put our shoulder to the wheel of progress and provide a transportation bill that actually builds the infrastructure for this Nation, that provides these kinds of locomotives and train sets.

In the early days of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signed the Transcontinental Rail Act. Little known, but in that Rail Act was a provision, not just to build a rail line across America, but that all of the steel, all of the iron that was to be used in that line had to be American made. Made it in America, creating jobs, connecting the east to the west, 1862. And here we are all these decades later with the same idea: a new locomotive on American rails and American made.

I want to congratulate Siemens. I want to congratulate this German company that is here in America, is providing American jobs, and is providing the most advanced locomotive in the world, and they're building it in Sacramento, California.

So, what else can we do? What else can we do to provide jobs? There's so much. If we had listened to the President when he proposed to Congress the American JOBS Act, perhaps 2 million more Americans would be working today. Construction crews would be putting bridges and dams and levees and flood protection facilities, they would be building the infrastructure. And we would also be working on our energy systems.

The piece of legislation that I have introduced would require that tax subsidies for individuals and businesses that wanted to put up a wind turbine or a solar panel would only be available to them if they bought American-made equipment. Spend our tax money on American-made equipment made by Americans: a pretty simple thought. Abraham Lincoln must have had that thought, and the Congress in 1862 had that thought and passed a law that did it.

There is more that we can do.

When we passed the transportation bill, as we should this year or early next year, a new highway bill, we should put into it a proposal by Ranking Member Rahall. That proposal said that the money in this bill will be spent on American-made concrete, steel, trucks, buses-- putting Americans to work. The Democrats on that committee think that's a really good idea, and we hope our Republican colleagues agree and that we write into the transportation bill a very strong ``buy America'' provision so that Americans can have the jobs and so that we avoid the egregious and humiliating fact that the steel in much of the new Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge was not made by American steelworkers, not by American companies, but Chinese. It went out to bid. It was supposed to be 10 percent cheaper, so the Chinese company took the bid, built a new highly advanced steel mill, and sent faulty steel to San Francisco Bay, requiring even more expenditure.

So there are things we should learn from the history, and we will if we listen carefully, if we pay attention to what science is telling us about climate change, about the buildup of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, and if we listen, then we must have the courage to act. I would pray for our children's future and their children's and their children's beyond that that this House of Representatives and the Senate have the courage to act decisively on the climate crisis, and that in the farm bill that we mark up tomorrow we take the opportunity to write into that farm bill serious conservation programs that conserve the Nation's forests and farmland and water and streams. I would hope that we would do that.

I would hope that this House would find the courage to take on the oil industry and the coal industry and move decisively to green energy systems and stop, slow down what is a terrible process underway of filling our atmosphere with ever-increasing levels of carbon dioxide. After all, it's about the next generations. My generation will soon be gone, and so will most of the Members of this House. It's the future generations that are going to face our apparent unwillingness and inability to attack the climate change problem. As I said a moment ago, we can do it in a way that builds efficient transportation systems, like this locomotive that Siemens built in Sacramento, California, that builds green energy systems, renewable energy, low carbon dioxide- producing energy.

I've noticed that my colleague from Texas has joined us.

Sheila Jackson Lee, thank you so very much for joining us this evening. We've gone on here about the Affordable Care Act and how we ought to turn our attention to jobs for America, and I'm sure you have some thoughts on those subjects and others. Please join us.

Sheila Jackson Lee, thank you so very much. You are a leader in all of these issues. You've often and almost always present these issues to the American people on the floor of the House, and you do it with passion and knowledge.

There was an hour spent earlier by our colleagues about the 37th time that they're going to attempt to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act. It reminded me that they also have a piece of legislation to end Medicare as we know it. If you go back to when Medicare was put in place in the sixties, 1964, 1965, the Republican Party opposed it then and have often, through those years, to this date, attempted in various ways to eviscerate or to end it as we know it. Apparently they're going to try to do the same thing with the Affordable Health Care Act. It is such a waste of time because these programs are so fundamental to our ability to survive. This is health care for Americans and spreading that opportunity out.

It's a long discussion. We've had that discussion on the floor for many days. What we really ought to be focusing on is putting Americans back to work. This piece of legislation is one of about 30 pieces of legislation that's put in by the Democratic Caucus. This is mine. It deals with your tax money. It simply says that it's going to be spent on American-made clean energy, solar panels, wind turbines and the like. It's not a bad idea to spend your tax money on American-made equipment, American jobs, American businesses.

There's another bill that I have dealing with the transportation system. It's the same thing. That bill is now finding its way into the rewrite of the highway transportation program, the transportation bill; and hopefully it will be there. It's a very strong buy-American provision for our buses, our trains, our light rail, locomotives and steel and concrete for bridges.

We've got a lot of work to do in America. We've got a lot of work and a lot of need; and this House ought to be spending its time on that.

We'll take another night and we'll go into the tax policy side of this, which there is a lot to be said about changing our taxes to encourage manufacturing. Some of that has been done. I'll leave the one example that 2 years ago when the Democrats controlled this House, we eliminated about $12 billion of tax breaks that American companies received for shipping American jobs overseas. We put a stop to that. There's about another $5 billion that needs to be done, but we no longer control this House. But we ought to bring those jobs back home. We ought to flip that over and give a tax break for reshoring, bringing the jobs back to America.

That's another night's discussion. We'll take that up in another evening. But for tonight, it's about putting Americans back to work. It's about focusing the attention of this Chamber, the 435 of us, on what we really need in this country, which is a very strong and growing economy.

We've seen progress every quarter since the beginning of 2010. Every quarter we've seen private sector employment grow. We're not where we ought to be. We have more work to do. And when we finally rebuild the American manufacturing sector, when once again we make it in America, Americans are going to make it.

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 9 o'clock and 10 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, May 15, 2013, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the University of California, Davis. This historic land grant university excels in a wide range and variety of fields, including medicine, physics, law, and agriculture.

Today, the University of California, Davis, agriculture and forestry program was recognized as the best in the world by QS World University Rankings, a respected firm that measures publications and citations in scientific journals and the program's reputation among both academics and employers in the field. I offer my highest congratulations to the school's faculty, students, and staff.

For decades, the University of California, Davis, has developed cutting-edge farm practices, research, and local partnerships. Right now, they're studying genetics, nutrition, milk, wine grapes, and so much more. As epitomized by the mechanical tomato harvester and other inventions developed there, this work directly boosts agricultural production and profits.

As we write the new farm bill, I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting agricultural studies and research.

Mr. Speaker, once again we're back here on the floor of the House of Representatives to talk about what I believe is the most pressing problem here in the United States, and that's jobs. Americans want to work, Americans are capable of working, and it ought to be our job here on the floor of the House of Representatives to talk about how we can create jobs.

We've just heard about 1 hour of discussion from our good friends on the Republican side, the Doctors' Caucus, about how to destroy the Affordable Health Care Act. For 36 times, the Republicans have put up legislation that would essentially gut, amend, or destroy the Affordable Health Care Act, which has the promise and the probability of providing health insurance for 50-plus-million Americans that are today uninsured.

Why would you want to deny those people health insurance? I can see no reason for it.

I notice that they also did not spend any time at all talking about their effort to destroy Medicare. Medicare was a promise made to seniors by the American people that when they reach 65 years of age, they would have a guaranteed health insurance program. Yet, for the last 2 years and 4 months, the Republicans have continually put up legislation that would end Medicare as we know it and turn Medicare over to the insurance companies.

One of the last statements made here on the floor by one of our colleagues was decisions on medical services ought to be in the hands of the physician and the patient. I agree. I was also the insurance commissioner in California, a statewide elected position for 8 years; and I can assure you that under the private health insurance programs, it is the insurance companies that are making the decisions about what medical care will be given to individuals. That is wrong. We did our best in California to stop that. But if you turn Medicare over to the private insurance companies, as the Republicans want to do with their voucher plan, then it will be the insurance companies that will decide what medical services will be available, if at all, to seniors.

I'd like to put that aside and go back to the issue that I really wanted to talk about, but there are some things that you just cannot let go, things that are said on the floor that need to be at least discussed in their fullness.

Let's talk about jobs. Let's talk about the fact that over the last 30 years we have seen the middle class in America held down. The middle class in America has made very little economic progress over the last 30 years. We're going to discuss that in some detail and specifically what we can do here with public policy, with proposals that have been put forth by the Democratic Caucus in the House and our colleagues in the Senate, solid proposals to put Americans back to work and to rebuild the American Dream so that every American has the opportunity to put their foot on the rung of the ladder and climb just as high as they can do so.

Before we get to those rungs on the economic ladder, I'd like to have a more full discussion about what has happened to the middle class over the last 30 years. Joining me in that discussion is the Representative from South Carolina, the Honorable Jim Clyburn.

Jim, if you'll join us, I know you have some things you'd like to discuss; and I see you have your own chart there.

Thank you very much, Mr. Clyburn, for your excellent exposition of the problem faced by the middle class, by the working families of America: the fact that over the last 40 years they've seen virtually no progress in their economic status while those very, very few at the very top have seen extraordinary wealth. It's also a shifting of wealth, and some say that this discussion is a discussion of class warfare. Well, I wouldn't call it warfare, but I would say that the middle class of America is clearly losing, while those very, very few at the top are clearly winning. And the reason is the policies of the United States are pushing the wealth to the top and literally taking the wealth from the working men and women. We need to change those policies, and our discussion here is very, very much about that.

Thank you for your excellent discussion.

I see that our colleague from Washington, D.C., Eleanor Holmes Norton, is here. Thank you very much for joining us. And, Mr. Clyburn, if you'd like to stick around, we will engage in a discussion, but I think you have other obligations.

I thank you so very, very much for really bringing to all of our attention the extraordinary impact that the sequestration is having on American families. Jobs are being lost. Real jobs are disappearing, and Americans, working men and women, are feeling their paychecks being significantly reduced.

Now, another word for sequestration is austerity budgets. Shortly after the Great Recession began in 2008, there was the debate about should the governments of the world, the United States, Europe, China and Japan, should they take a policy of actively engaging in the economy to boost demand, which would be a Keynesian model of increasing the purchasing power within the economy, or should there be a reduction in government spending because of the deficits that were created as people lost their jobs and as tax revenues declined?

That debate was robustly engaged here on the floor of the House, with the decision being made to engage the government in increasing the demand. So the stimulus bill came forth, and it really worked. It really had an effect. Hundreds of thousands of jobs were created. The decline was stopped, and slowly in 2009 and 2010, the American economy began to recover.

Now, Europe made a different decision. In Europe, they made a decision not to stimulate the economy but rather to go into austerity, to reduce the budgets of the governments. The result in Europe has been perfectly clear. They have headed into a deep, deep recession yet again. They never came out of it. And so the entire European economy has been continuing to decline over these years. Austerity has gained in Europe a very, very bad name. In fact, conservative magazines such as The Economist magazine have been for the last 2 years saying, no more austerity, you have to stimulate the economy. We now see policies in Europe that are now turning around and looking to the stimulation of the economy as we did here.

China did exactly the opposite of Europe. They followed the American model--or we followed theirs, depending on how you want to look at this--and they put into place a very heavy stimulus program, almost all of it in infrastructure, creating enormous demand and growth in China.

Now, unfortunately, here in the United States, our initial effort at stimulus was cut short. It was cut short by the 2010 election. We had a new Congress, and the American Government since that moment has been involved in an austerity program. The sequestration is but one of the austerity programs that have been foisted upon the American public by our colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle. We have had fiscal cliff after fiscal cliff, and every time we come up against that cliff, we've seen a reduction in the role of the Federal Government in so many ways.

Ms. Norton, you so clearly pointed out dozens of ways in which the Federal Government is backing away from previously important tasks, tasks such as, well, flight controllers, airline flight controllers. Now, we passed a bill to deal with that, but nevertheless, we took money out of the construction of airports and the upgrading of air traffic systems to keep the air traffic controllers going. So the austerity continued even in the airline sector.

We've seen it in my district. I've got maybe more than a thousand miles of flood levees. The Army Corps of Engineers, $250 million reduction in their ability to upgrade and to deal with the levees and to prevent flooding. On and on. I won't go through all the list that Ms. Norton put forward. But those are

the continuing austerity measures that have been forced upon us.

It can't continue. It cannot continue. Our task is to create jobs. Our task is to put Americans back to work. Our task is to make sure that this incredible income disparity ends and that we find ways to rebuild the American middle class.

Exactly.

Well, we certainly will create a new recession. We know that 750,000 Americans will be unemployed, lose their jobs by the end of this fiscal year--that would be the first of October--as a result of sequestration.

Now, it's not that we haven't tried to do a different proposal. Our budget proposal is one that would maintain the reduction, but push it forward so that it doesn't immediately dampen the American economy. The President has made a similar proposal, but we've had no action. Right now, we are calling on our colleagues and Speaker Boehner to appoint a conference committee so that we can actually do a budget. Please, let's get that budget going. Let's get this thing out of the way of America's job growth.

Well, that's exactly the problem. We need to get this sequestration out of the way of America's growth.

There are many things that we can do. I'd like to remind everybody that the President, more than 2 years ago, put forth an American jobs proposal, an American Jobs Act. In that proposal--which has never been taken up by the leaders of the House of Representatives--those who are in control of the House now, our colleagues here on the right side of the aisle, have never taken it up.

So what was in it? There was a $50 billion immediate investment in infrastructure. Well, what is infrastructure? Infrastructure is highways, our roads, our streets, our sanitation facilities, our water facilities, airports, flood levees, the kinds of things that upon which the economy can grow and be built. It is the foundation of the economy. They brushed it aside, wouldn't even consider it. One of the most basic things that any economy, any government must do is to make sure the foundation is in place.

The President had also proposed--and it's part of our Make It in America--an educational program to make sure that our students are ready for the jobs that are part of the American economy today and to retrain American workers.

A proposal that I have is that our tax dollars be spent on American- made equipment. Oh, my, how strange would that be. But yet we go out and buy Chinese steel to build the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. No, we don't buy American-made steel and give Americans the jobs; we turn the jobs over to China.

Wind turbines, solar panels, all of the new energy systems, our tax money supports those systems. Shouldn't we be buying American-made equipment with your tax money? I believe we should. That's my legislation.

The Democratic agenda, the Make It in America agenda, is about 30 different bills dealing with rebuilding the great American manufacturing sector. I know that if we were to carry these policies forward, if they were to become law, we would see a resurgence in the American manufacturing sector.

The reason that that is so important is this--Mr. Clyburn spoke to this earlier when he was here. I've got a little different display. This is what's happened to the American middle class, and beyond.

I'm going to use a football analogy here--I played football back at the University of California a few years ago--actually, many years ago. So we can use a football analogy.

The bottom 99 percent of America, 99 percent of every family and 99 percent of all of the workers and men and women in America have, since 1966, seen a net increase in their take-home pay of $59. This is in constant dollars. The top 10 percent have seen their income grow by $116,071 over that period, '66 to 2011.

The top 1 percent--remember the 99 percent thing? Well, this is the top 1 percent--have seen their income grow by $628,817. Now, the very, very tippy top, that is, the one-tenth of 1 percent--we're talking the superwealthy

billionaires here; Mitt Romney wouldn't fit into this category--they have seen their income grow by over $18 million annually.

So what we're seeing in the American economy is a skewing of the wealth in this economy. Literally, the wealth in the economy is flowing to the very top so that the wage increases are not among the men and women that work every day, that put in their 40 hours a week or more. But, rather, it's flowing to those at the top. This is the result of economic policies that are put in place here in the Congress--tax policies, educational policies, other kinds of policies that lay the foundation for this extraordinary inequality.

This has never been seen in America. During the Gilded Age in the 19th century, this kind of wealth disparity was not in existence. During the Roaring Twenties, this type of wealth inequality was not seen in the American economy. Only now, in the last 20, 30 years, have we seen policies put in place that have created the most inequality ever in modern American history.

What does that mean? What does that mean to the average American family? It means that both mom and pop are working. It means that they cannot afford to send their children to school. And added on top of that, the Great Recession has stripped the wealth from the 90 percent. The wealth was stripped, mostly in the housing market collapse.

So now we are faced with the situation, what can we do? Well, what we can do is to rebuild the American manufacturing sector, because this is where the middle class had decent wages. We are not talking about a $7.50 an hour minimum wage. We are talking about wages that a man or a woman could earn to protect and to provide for their family.

I would be happy to.

If the gentlelady would yield for a moment, you're exactly right about the infrastructure. We need to build it.

I notice that our colleague from Ohio has joined us. The last time we were on the floor, we talked about these issues. So if you would like to carry on here for awhile, please, Mr. Ryan.

If you use American taxpayer money to buy American- made equipment, supplies and products.

I want to thank the gentleman from Ohio, who knows what it is to rebuild the manufacturing base, and I thank you for the work that you've been doing.

We have just a few seconds, Ms. Norton, if you could wrap and then I'll wrap, and we'll call it a day.

We must start thinking about what we can do rather than what we cannot do. This is America. This is the country that built the future--we really did--and we can claim the future if we reach back into our history and do what we did before. We were builders. We built the foundations.

Mr. Ryan, as you said so very clearly, it's investment. It's investment in the intellectual ability of Americans--in education and research. It's investment in the infrastructure. It's investment in the business community. There is a combination of government and private sector. It's the history of America. It's an exciting history. It's a potential. Unfortunately, we are ignoring the key role that the governments--local, State and Federal--play in that process. We're builders, we're Americans, and we're going to do it. We will make it happen, and I will tell you this: when America begins to make it in America, Americans are going to make it.

I thank my colleagues.

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

Mr. Speaker, it's good to be back here for another week of work. We certainly have work to do. Out across this Nation there are a lot of people that are still unemployed, and it's time for Congress to take this extremely important task and to get it done.

We've been talking here on the floor for a long time about how we can create jobs in America. The Make It in America agenda that my Democratic colleagues and I have put forth over the last 2\1/2\ years is an extensive number of bills designed to bring jobs back to the United States. And we need them.

An article that appeared in the newspapers this last day or so talked about this. This is Paul Krugman talking about the long-term unemployment that we now have here in the United States. He cites that for the last 5 years we've been in a crisis. Unemployment remains elevated, with almost 12 million Americans out of work. But the real striking and huge number is in another category, and that's the long- term unemployment: 4.6 million Americans have been unemployed for more than 6 months, and more than 3 million have been jobless for more than a year. The programs that my Democratic colleagues and I have offered over the last 2\1/2\ years would have gone directly to that problem.

He argues that when you have this long-term unemployment, you create a problem that these men and women are not likely to ever get back into the workforce, citing several statistics that are found around the Nation. But we can do something about that, and the Make It in America agenda is exactly what we ought to be working on.

Before I go into the specifics of that agenda, I'd like to cover one other issue. This is seen in a report from the International Monetary Fund that they just came out with in the last couple of days warning the United States to be very careful about continued reductions in our budget. They argue that the austerity program that the United States has actually been on for the last 2 years--now, remember, immediately after President Obama became President the United States took on a stimulus program, an enormous stimulus program of a little over $700 billion. That actually created the start of the rebirth of the American economy, but it only lasted for a year, a year and a half.

Then we undertook, at the behest of my Republican colleagues, an austerity program, one that involved seriously reducing the Federal budget. Over the decades, beginning in 2011, we will see a nearly $2 trillion reduction in Federal expenditures in the 10-year period. That is what austerity is all about.

Today, if you were trying to get on an airplane somewhere in the United States, you were beginning to see yet one more effect of austerity, and that is the air traffic controllers going on furlough, so that 1 day out of 10 air traffic controllers will not be working, meaning that there will be a shortage. Some say, well, they should have moved the money around and they could have done it some other way, but that's not the way the austerity program is in the United States, and that's not the way the sequestration law is written.

Sequestration is across-the-board cuts, expenditure item by expenditure item, with no--or very little--authority to shift money from one lower priority to a higher priority. Therefore, today, the air traffic controllers, some were not working. There was a general slowdown of air traffic across the United States resulting in some of my colleagues not getting to work today to vote on the three bills that we had up here on the floor just a few moments ago.

In any case, the IMF warns: U.S. austerity will slow growth. This was a warning that was issued to the United States. It was also issued earlier to the United Kingdom, who have been on a very serious austerity budget for the last 3 years. The result is that the United Kingdom has actually seen a shrinking in their economy, as has most of Europe. Austerity did not work in Europe as an effort to deal with the downturn of the economy and the Great Recession, and it certainly is not working here.

We need to create jobs in the United States. A rational economic strategy would say that when you have a general decline in the economy caused by a lack of consumer spending, then it is time for the government to step in and to provide support for the economy. We can do that in a way that actually is an investment strategy. This is where I would like to take this conversation.

Instead of talking about austerity and cut, cut, cut at the Federal level to deal with the deficit--an issue that, indeed, we must deal with, but that's a long-term issue that we have to get about--but we have a short-term crisis right now with employment and the lack of demand here in the United States.

So, what do we do about it? Well, first of all, we end sequestration; give a rational way for the government agencies to address the $85 billion of cuts that are taking place in the next 6 months--better yet, to put that off into the future. Let those cuts occur in the years 4, 5, 6, 7, out in the future rather than right now, when what we ought to be doing is increasing the government expenditure on key investments, like keeping the airplanes in the sky, like

keeping the men and women who are at my Air Force base in Travis, continuing to provide the support that the Air Force needs in moving men and equipment out of Afghanistan, and shifting those budget cuts off to the future. I hope that happens. I have asked my colleagues, and certainly the President has asked for this to happen. We'll see if my colleagues here are ready to do that.

So, what do we do in the meantime? It's about investments, those kind of Federal Government expenditures that actually will create immediate jobs as well as long-term economic growth. There are several, and I'll go through them very, very quickly.

First, education. The most important investment that any economy will make, any society will make is the investment in education. And it's not just K-12; it's the higher education system, a doctorate education, as well as the retraining of those long-term unemployed who need to be prepared for the jobs of today and tomorrow, not the jobs of yesterday. So that's the education.

The second piece of it is research. It's the foundation of future economic growth. You need to have a robust research program if you intend for your economy to stay ahead. Fortunately, America has had such an agenda for a long time. However, the sequestration cuts--for example, $45 million out of research at the University of California- Davis in just the next 6 months--that means layoffs, layoffs of technicians and others who are involved in those research programs. And it means that those research efforts will not come to fruition in the near future. They will be delayed, and the benefit of them will not be seen for some time.

Some of this is real jobs right away. For example, some of that research has to do with bioherbicides and biopesticides. These are naturally occurring organisms that occur somewhere in the environment. They are discovered, they are brought back to the laboratory and grown and become a bioherbicide or a biopesticide. Research in that area is clearly going to be delayed as a result of sequestration. So let's delay the sequestration, put it off in the future years so that we can grow the economy today.

The third element of economic growth is in the area of infrastructure. You have to have infrastructure. This is about moving Americans across our landscape. This is about our ports, our highways, our airports, and other critical elements in the transportation infrastructure.

We know that we are woefully behind on meeting the infrastructure needs. Probably eight out of 10 bridges in the United States are deficient. We know that our highways are filled with potholes and don't measure up to the standards that we would want, simply for the protection of our automobiles' suspension systems. We know that there is far more to infrastructure than just highways and ports and airports.

For example, the Mississippi River is flooding. So what is the status of levees in the United States? Well, the status of levees in the United States is not good. In my district, I have more than 1,200 miles of levees, and many of them are insufficient to protect the people who live on the land side of the levees, the farms and the cities.

One of the most dangerous cities in the United States is Sacramento, California. It ranks number two after New Orleans. We need to have that levee repaired, yet the Army Corps of Engineers is taking a $250 million cut in its levee budget and in the projects that it does in deepening the ports and maintaining the ports. It makes no sense that at a time when we know there is severe flooding, even to this day along the Mississippi, that we would take $250 million out of the Army Corps of Engineers budget. But that's precisely what is happening with sequestration.

Infrastructure goes beyond that. I'm going to come back to infrastructure in a few moments, but I see I'm joined by one of my colleagues.

I'll just rapidly finish with the other two elements in a program for building the American economy.

The final two elements are manufacturing. You have to make things. I'll come back and talk about that in a few moments. And the final element is you must change. The economy is changing, people have to change with the economy, our education system, our infrastructure. All of these require that we are willing to change.

Now, my colleague from the great State of Ohio, please, share with us your thoughts on sequestration, jobs and what we can do here in the United States to put people back to work.

Mr. Ryan, your lesson on American history is right on. We often hear some of our colleagues talk about the Founding Fathers-- the Founding Fathers wouldn't do it this way, they wouldn't do it that way, or they would.

It's very interesting that George Washington on becoming President, the first President, went to Alexander Hamilton, his Treasury Secretary, and asked Mr. Hamilton to develop a strategy to grow the American economy. Alexander Hamilton came back with a report 3 or 4 months later, laid out about a dozen different elements, and in that report that Alexander Hamilton brought to President Washington was the genius of what you just described. He said, the Federal Government

should provide for infrastructure investment. He didn't call it infrastructure. The Federal Government should build canals, ports, and roads. He also said, the Federal Government should buy American-made products to encourage manufacturing in America. So this is not new.

Your recitation of American history down through the line actually began with our very first President, laying out the partnership, the public-private partnership, the Federal Government playing a key role in those investments that create economic growth.

Unsafe.

Let me give you an example.

The American Public Works Association--these are people with the sanitation systems, the water systems and the like--estimate that 25 percent of all of the fresh-treated water in our municipal water systems is lost to leakage, and they estimate, together with the EPA, that we need to spend over $300 billion immediately to deal with sanitation systems in the United States that are inadequate and $335 billion in drinking water so that we have clean, available drinking water.

One more point here: for every billion dollars we spend, you put 28,000 people to work immediately. Those are the engineers, the draftsmen, the architects, the men and women who are operating the equipment, who are back-filling the ditches, laying the pipe. And if we use another strategy that we've developed on the Democratic side called Make It in America--if you use our taxpayer money to buy American-made equipment--then in your district, the steel mills begin once again to produce American-made steel, and all of the pipe and other equipment that's needed can be produced in America, using our money.

I love your example of the 1 percent. There have been Democratic proposals--and in fact, the President talked about it here in his state of the Union--about creating an infrastructure bank. If you take that 10-year or 15-year money that the government can borrow at a percent to, maybe, a percent and a half and put it in an infrastructure bank and then loan it to those cities and municipalities and counties and others that need to build these systems--well, let's say we borrowed a percent and a half and that you loaned it out at 1.6 percent--that's enough to pay that back. We circulate that money in our economy, we use that money to buy American-made products, and we get this economy moving.

It's there for us. We can do this if only we'd put our minds to it. Set aside for a moment the deficit issue. I said for a moment, not forever. We know we have to deal with the deficit, but you cannot solve that deficit unless you have Americans working, and we can put Americans back to work.

You reminded me of my college football career at the University of California, Berkeley, where I was an offensive guard and a defensive tackle, blocking and tackling.

Oh, it resonated with me just fine--along with a lot of bumps and bruises and cuts and the like.

But this is the public-private partnership. This is the role of our government to make these critical investments in education, in research. In fact, one of the Make It in America agenda items is the extension of the research tax credit--a permanent or at least a long extension of it.

Representative Carney has introduced House Resolution 905, which would extend that. We have been extending it 1 year at a time, but that doesn't give the businesses the opportunity to plan on a long extension or on a long period of time for research. For example, I was at Genentech in my district. They have a major biopharmaceutical program there--the biggest biopharmaceutical plant in the world. They conduct a lot of research, but the start-stop of the research and the development tax credit makes it difficult for them to plan long into the future.

So this piece of legislation, part of the Make It in America agenda, does that extension and gives this certainty to businesses.

We also have the infrastructure bank being reintroduced by our colleagues here on the Democratic side. This is one of about two-dozen bills that the Democrats have introduced for the purposes of moving the economy by bringing the manufacturing back home. We also have the Patriot Corporations of America Act, by Representative Schakowsky from Chicago, that rewards companies when they bring the jobs back home. Previously and even today, American corporations can take a tax break for shipping jobs offshore. They don't get a tax break when they bring those jobs back home. We want to reverse that.

There is a series of bills. I call the attention of Congress to these bills, the Make It in America agenda, so that we can once again Make It in America, not only make things in America, but Americans can make it--infrastructure, a critical element of this.

Alexander Hamilton and George Washington had it correct: the American Government working with the private sector can make the difference.

When we talk about infrastructure, we have an opportunity this year, Congress and the President, to make a huge impact on American jobs. We are going to rewrite, in this session, the Surface Transportation Act for America.

Mr. Rahall and I have authored a bill that we hope becomes part of that Surface Transportation Act, that simply says: as we spend the taxpayers' money--this is money that is collected from the gasoline and the diesel excise tax--that that money be spent on American-made steel, concrete, bridges, buses, trains, whatever.

It can work.

One quick example. In the stimulus bill, there was an opportunity for Amtrak to buy new locomotives, about half a billion dollars to be spent on these new locomotives. In that section of the law, one sentence was added that said, These must be 100 percent American-made. Nobody was making locomotives in America before that, but Siemens, a German corporation, one of the biggest manufacturers in the world, said, Oh, half a billion dollars? We can make locomotives. In America? Sure.

In Sacramento, California, they opened a manufacturing plant. There are probably somewhere between 200 and 300 people working there today manufacturing 100 percent American-made locomotives. And on May 13, 3 years after they began this process, the first 100 percent American- made locomotive in probably more than a century rolls onto the tracks of America.

We can do this.

Mr. Rahall's bill, H.R. 949, will provide that opportunity, American- made, using American taxpayer money. I also have another bill that does the same for solar and wind projects.

We can do these things; we just need to put our mind to it and get past this business of austerity. We cannot solve this problem of American jobs with an austerity budget. We've seen it fail in Europe, and we see it failing here in the United States as the long-term unemployment continues to harm 4.5 million Americans that have been out of work for more than 6 months and another 3 million that have been out of work for more than a year. We need an investment strategy, a Make It in America strategy, an investment strategy in those things that create long-term economic growth.

Mr. Ryan, I thank you very much for joining us this evening. If you'd like to wrap, and then I'll wrap, and then we'll call it a night.

Mr. Ryan, I thank you so very much for joining us this evening.

We're still the strongest, best country in the world. There's no other place like America. And if we begin acting like we can and are a strong, robust, building, growing, dynamic country instead of being weak and pulling ourselves back and saying, Oh, we can't do it; we can't do it--no, we can do it. We can build. We can invest.

Every time we invest a dollar in infrastructure, we put Americans back to work and we give them an opportunity to take care of their family, to stay in their home, to provide for their children's education. When we do that, we create the foundation for future economic growth, whether it's education or research or building the infrastructure and making it in America. As we do these things, this agenda is the American agenda, the one that created this country.

As you so well said when you opened here: It's the American history. It's there before us. We can do it. We must do it. We owe it to the American people.

Mr. Ryan, thank you.

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