Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, thank you very much.

I'm joined tonight by two of my colleagues, Mr. Tonko from New York and Mr. Altmire from Pennsylvania. We're going to be talking about the President's budget and about one of the issues that we think really will propel America back to the leading edge of the world's economies.

We've had some tough times, but we've seen some progress. If we can once again make it in America, we're going to see this economy grow, we're going to see the middle class come back to life. We're going to see an expansion of wealth and the opportunity for families to make it in America when we make things in America.

Let me just start off this discussion with the progress that's been made. Some of our colleagues here would like to say that nothing good has happened over the last 3 years when, in fact, this chart, which is from the Department of Labor Statistics office, points out very, very clearly where we have come from since the Great Recession began.

If you take a look at this, the gold columns over on the far left--or far right, depending on your perspective--you can see the great decline that took place from 2007 until January and February of 2009, when President Obama came into office. Since that time, we've seen a steady improvement in the number of jobs in America. So even though we were seeing here in this particular 2009 period a continued decline, each week that went by we saw improvements, less of a falloff, and we began to emerge from the depths of the Great Recession.

So beginning here in about 2010, we began to turn around and we began to see positive job growth. Every month since that time we have seen positive job growth in America--not enough, not enough to satisfy any of us on the Democratic side and not enough, I'm sure, on the Republican side, and certainly, as President Obama said when he appeared here at the State of the Union, not enough to satisfy the President.

So we're now looking at the President's budget going forward, proposed, came to the Congress yesterday. That budget lays out how he would like America to move forward, and how we in the House of Representatives and the Senate can put into place the laws, the programs, and the money to pay for the advancement of the American economy.

So we're going to spend tonight building off the President's budget and the things that are in there.

Over the last year, my colleagues and I have been talking about the key ladders to success, those things that create opportunity in America. And certainly, they're education, it's the research, it's the manufacturing, the infrastructure, and the opportunities that come with them.

Tonight we'd like to start by focusing on one part of the President's budget, which was the R&D, the research and development portion of the President's budget. Now, in any economy, if you're going to grow that economy, you have to stay in the forefront of technologies. America has been the best in the world at this. And in doing so, we have created extraordinary growth in the economy and opportunities for new businesses.

Unfortunately, in the last 20 years, we've seen those businesses go offshore. But the genesis of that growth is often in the research and development, usually funded by the Federal Government. And that research and development comes in several different parts of the Federal budgets. Certainly, we see it in health care, the National Institutes of Health. We see it in the national science, in the Energy Department, and in the military. Each of those organizations has a research budget, and from that budget comes new innovation, new products.

For example, the defense research agency, known around here as DARPA, really did the grunt work, the initial development and research to create the Internet. And we've certainly seen what that has meant to America.

Now, with that introduction, $148 billion in the President's budget for all the research and development that the Federal Government supports gives us the opportunity to create the new solutions to today's health problems, today's economic problems, energy issues and defense issues.

Fortunately, my two colleagues today are well-steeped and very, very knowledgeable about the research budget. My colleague from New York ran a research program in New York. Share with us, and then if you'll reflect on the President's budget.

Mr. Tonko, thank you so very much, and thank you for your extraordinary experience in dealing with research and then translating that research into real things that Americans could make.

Now, the great manufacturing center of America is represented here by my colleague from Pennsylvania (Mr. Altmire). Thank you for joining us, and share with us your thoughts as we look at the President's budget and on making it in America.

Thank you, Mr. Altmire, and thank you for the work that you've done for us in western Pennsylvania. Indeed, at one time, I know, when I was growing up, it was the center of the American steel industry and manufacturing there, and to the immediate west in Ohio and Indiana and on.

I want to put up this chart because it really demonstrates the challenge that we face and the opportunity that we have.

This chart speaks of the 12 years with 6 million American manufacturing jobs lost. Let's go back about 20, 25 years ago. There were just under 20 million manufacturing jobs in America. Over the years, it was up and down, with a slight decrease. Then beginning around the year 2000, we began to see a precipitous decline, basically the outsourcing of American jobs. The great manufacturing heart and heartbeat of America just began to slow down to a rhythm where now we are down to just over 11 million manufacturing jobs. This is our work. This right here. This decline is the challenge that this House faces.

When you start with what the President has suggested, you start with R&D, because that's the genesis. That's where the new ideas and the new products are developed. Then you have to couple that with manufacturing.

I want to give just two examples from my own district, one that I learned last weekend when I was back home in the Sacramento Valley just west of Sacramento.

A university town, the University of California, Davis, about 10 years ago, some graduate students at the engineering campus or the engineering school there at the University of California, Davis figured out a new program, a new way to do advanced manufacturing. They were into machine tools, and they figured out a way to take machine tools and make them far more productive and innovative and capable of doing some really different things. They took that idea--these were the entrepreneurs that you talked about, Mr. Tonko. They took that idea and they started a small business. In the intervening years, they began to grow. They now employ 75 people in the Sacramento region for the development of these advanced machine tools.

A company in Japan took a look at this and said, Oh, we want to do that. They were in this business. So they bought the company, and they thought about taking the company back to Japan. No. Didn't happen. Instead, they decided to build that manufacturing facility in Davis, California. That factory is now being constructed, and it will soon employ a hundred people.

So here we have an example of where research out of the University of California, Davis engineering school led to the creation of a new business in the machine tool industry and the continuation of research and development and advancement and, now, manufacturing taking place in California.

There are a couple of other pieces of public policy that fit into this continuum of development of economic growth, and they were policies that were put forth by the House of Representatives when the Democrats controlled the House. It was this: For any company that wanted to make a capital investment, they could immediately write off that total investment in the first year. Rather than depreciating that investment over 7, 10, 15 years, they were able to take advantage of it. A very, very powerful incentive to make it in America, to build your manufacturing facility in America.

So this company, DTL, is now growing in California as a result of the research at the university, coming out, entrepreneurs taking the ideas, building a business, and now investments, in this case by a foreign company, into the United States. We call that insourcing.

I'll come up to the other example a little later.

Mr. Tonko, take it from there.

Mr. Tonko, may I interrupt you for a moment?

You mentioned something that we actually talked about last week. I want to hand you this chart. If you would hold that one up there and let me go back to the microphone.

You mentioned the effort that we made in the 2002 change from a manufacturing economy to what this chart calls a FIRE economy--finance, insurance, and real estate--a FIRE economy, one that collapsed because it was about manipulating money instead of creating mechanical engineers and chemical engineers and nuclear engineers. We created financial engineers. The result? Not good. The Great Recession.

Please excuse me for interrupting.

Indeed we do. We have much work to do.

Mr. Altmire, you've been working long and hard here in the U.S. Congress on these issues. Carry on this discussion.

Thank you very much for pointing out the eye of the eagle. We have to keep our eye on this particular prize, and that's rebuilding the American manufacturing sector.

I handed this chart to Mr. Tonko a while ago. It really needs a further explanation.

What we did beginning in 2000, actually before that, was to develop a FIRE economy--finance, insurance, real estate--not manufacturing. So manufacturing was allowed to decline, and of course real estate, finance, and insurance grew and became the essential economy in the year 2000 to 2010. And, of course, the great collapse in 2007 and 2008 as a result of, as Mr. Tonko said, regulatory oversight disappearing and anything goes. We're reversing that.

Mr. Altmire, you talked about the egregious tax policy of giving the tax breaks when companies offshore jobs. It was actually in 2009, just before the new Congress came into effect, that we enacted legislation that eliminated much of those tax breaks.

Now, there is more to be done. In the President's budget, he calls for the full elimination of tax breaks to companies that offshore jobs and, as he said here in the State of the Union address, turns that around and gives a tax break to companies that bring jobs back to America. In his budget and in his proposals are specific actions on tax law that we must take to carry out that commitment to American and foreign countries that want to bring jobs back to America.

We can do this. Public policy plays into this--the budget and the research and development piece of it. That's the genesis. That's the start of the idea of a new business or of a new technology and then the manufacturing support

that goes with it. There is the tax policy, and we've talked about the vast manufacturing systems. All of those are the feedstock to get these companies up and going so that the entrepreneur, in using the research and creating a small business, will ultimately create a bigger middle class, reigniting the American Dream in doing that.

Mr. Tonko, I'm not sure where we want to go with this. I think we ought to spend a few moments talking about transportation if that's okay with you gentlemen.

Mr. Tonko, thank you. And you really hit one of those issues directly, particularly the education issue. And we ought not jump to transportation before we deal with the investment in the human capital, that is, in the American worker.

And the President did, in his budget, lay out $8 billion for community colleges to work directly with companies to educate their workforce. I can give a specific example. Again, in Davis, California, there is a biopesticide firm that actually goes out and finds microbes, or various kinds of naturally occurring materials, and uses that and makes that into a biopesticide, not a chemical but a biopesticide. They need technicians in their laboratories and in their manufacturing. They go to the community college to bring up the necessary skills and bring those workers in.

So there are jobs out there, but they have to have the education behind them. So much of what the President is proposing--not only with community colleges, but with the Pell Grants and proposing $30 billion going into our K-12 schools so that those schools can be upgraded, and an additional $30 billion to bring the teachers back into the classroom.

Exactly.

Thank you, Mr. Tonko.

Mr. Altmire, I see you are kind of ready to go here.

Mr. Altmire, if you could wait just a moment. Now you've got me engaged in this, and you talked about your community college. We are going to be going to our community college in Fairfield, the Solano Community College, and we're going to take the work that was done by this Congress in 2010 when it brought the Pell Grants down into the community colleges.

Previously, the Pell Grants were only available at the 4-year college level, but now the community college students can also vie for the Pell Grants and the loan programs that had been significantly improved back in 2010, before we lost the majority here. We took back from the big Wall Street banks the student loan programs, reducing the interest rates, reducing the hassle for students, and making loans far cheaper and more available.

Just this year, the President took one additional step under his authority and stretched out the payment mechanisms so that no graduated student who had taken out a loan needs to pay more than 10 percent of their annual income to repay that loan. All of this is part of investing in the human capital, investing in the workers.

I suspect the three of us could go on for a long time about education.

Mr. Altmire, I was about to respond that, while the lighting at Rensselaer is obviously good, it's California where the light-emitting diode--the LED--is actually being manufactured by a new startup company called Bridgelux, which has taken that technology and, with a little bit of assistance, is going to being able to manufacture in America.

However, controlling this for the next 20 minutes, we're going to move to transportation. Mr. Altmire, why don't you get us going on transportation.

Thank you, Mr. Altmire, for getting us started. And I've got to compliment you on the really neat segue that you used, the Erie Canal to move to modern transportation. That was very nicely done.

We do have a real challenge. This week, we're going to be taking up a transportation bill that the Secretary of Transportation, who has now been in office nearly 3\1/2\ years and who was a Member of the House of Representatives for I think over 20 years and a Republican, says that this is the worst transportation bill he has ever seen. Ever seen.

This transportation bill that we are going to be taking up is underfunded.

It totally eliminates from the funding stream the public transportation sector. So we're talking about Amtrak, buses, light rail, the metro systems here in Washington, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta and other places that are going to be cut out of the funding stream.

There's a whole lot of other things that are within this piece of legislation that are nonsense and nonstarters and ultimately detract from the goal that you so well stated, Mr. Altmire, of building that infrastructure that we need for a modern, thriving, growing economy that's based upon manufacturing.

Now, if all you're doing is sending buy-and-sell signals over the Internet, I guess you don't need a highway. But if you're sending cars and rail systems and you're sending equipment back and forth across America, you better have all of that transportation infrastructure in place. So as we rebuild the American manufacturing sector, we will need this in place.

Now, Mr. Tonko, you took the train from New York today.

What happened that you were talking about earlier?

Mr. Tonko, you are so very correct about reigniting the American Dream. One of the dreams I have is to drive down Interstate 5 in California and not have my car knocked to pieces on the unimproved and the falling-apart highways. In America today, we have 150,000 miles of roads that are in desperate need of repair--150,000 miles. That's about 50 times back and forth across America.

Now, if we did that and repaired those highways, what could happen? What could happen if we actually built a real robust transportation network in America? Well, back to the jobs issue, back to making it in America: What if our tax dollars were to be used to buy American-made equipment? This piece of legislation, H.R. 613, is now working its way into the transportation bill. The bill that our Republican colleagues put out has a very, very weak Buy America.

This particular bill, H.R. 613--I happen to be the author, and I'm kind of proud of the piece of legislation--would require that our tax dollars, which will be used to fund the transportation program, the airports, the NextGen system and the roads and bridges that both Mr. Tonko and Mr. Altmire talked about, that those be made in America, that we make it in America. We would use our tax dollars to actually make these things in America. So if we're going to build a high-speed rail, let's make it in America.

In fact, that's happened. In the stimulus bill, the American Recovery Act, there was a provision for some $12 billion for high-speed rail in various parts of the United States, and an additional sentence was added to that law that said all of this money must be spent on trains and equipment made in America. Guess what happened? Foreign companies that built high-speed systems decided, oh, $12 billion, we want a piece of that. And so they came to America, and they built manufacturing facilities. One was built in Sacramento. Secretary LaHood was just there a couple of days ago visiting that factory. The German company, Siemens, built a large manufacturing plant in Sacramento, California, to make light rail and to make locomotives for Amtrak, to make and to be prepared to build the high-speed rail systems that are coming.

Why did they do it? Because it was the law of the land that said your tax money, American taxpayer money, must be spent on American-made equipment. But what this bill does is it extends that idea as we go forward so that when we build bridges, the steel is American steel, and it's put together by American welders and by American ironworkers, and that the cement is American cement and that the computer systems that are being used to develop these things are American made. We can rebuild the American manufacturing sector when we decide it is the public policy that we use American taxpayer dollars to make it in America once again.

There's another piece of legislation that does the same thing for energy products. You've heard of solar systems, the photovoltaic systems, the big wind turbines that we're beginning to see across America. All of those energy products are essential elements in the future. Once again, our taxpayer money is used to support that. And my legislation says if you're going to get American taxpayer money to support your solar system or your wind farm, then you're going to buy American-made solar panels, solar equipment and wind turbines. We can make it in America.

So all of these things fit together--a transportation program that is going to give America what it needs to travel and an education program so that our workers are prepared and an R&D, research and development, program that allows us to innovate for tomorrow's economy.

Mr. Tonko, I think we have about 2 minutes left. Could you wrap it up for us?

We have work to do indeed.

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

Mr. Speaker, I commend President Obama's administration for the steps it is taking to bring the longest war in our nation's history to a close. Last week, Defense Secretary Panetta expressed the hope that ``by mid- to the latter part of 2013 we'll be able to make a transition from a combat role to a training, advice and assist role.'' I urge the administration to fulfill this aspiration and bring our troops home to their families. They have sacrificed enough.

Afghanistan began as a war of necessity. After the horrific September 11th attacks, we sent troops to eliminate Al Qaeda, killing their leaders and destroying their training camps to prevent a future terrorist attack. Our troops carried out this mission with extraordinary courage and dedication. Osama Bin Laden was driven out of Afghanistan and he is now dead. Furthermore, our intelligence community affirms that Al Qaeda is virtually extinguished from Afghanistan, yet the war continues. End this war now and focus like a laser on terrorists whereever they may be.

Our troops in Afghanistan are no longer fighting terrorists who pose a threat to the United States. They are now fighting domestic Afghan factions and defending a corrupt and inept Afghan government. Our servicemembers are dying in another country's civil war. This has become a war of choice.

I recently met with Lt. Col. Danny Davis who described to me what that civil war looks like on the ground. He has served two combat deployments in Afghanistan, and has traveled throughout the country talking with US troops stationed all over. A recent evaluation of Col. Davis reads: ``His maturity, tenacity and judgment can be counted on in even the hardest of situations, and his devotion to mission accomplishment is unmatched by his peers.'' This is how Col. Davis describes what he has observed:

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements

by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.

Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn

that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan

were improving . . .

Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually

every level.

I saw the incredible difficulties any military force would

have to pacify even a single area of any of those provinces;

I heard many stories of how insurgents controlled virtually

every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a U.S. or International

Security Assistance Force (ISAF) base. I saw little to no

evidence the local governments were able to provide for the

basic needs of the people. Some of the Afghan civilians I

talked with said the people didn't want to be connected to a

predatory or incapable local government. From time to time, I

observed Afghan Security forces collude with the insurgency.

. .

Col. Davis's candid testimony reinforced my conviction that there is no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan, only the prospect of continued shedding of American blood in a war that is not ours to fight. Only through a negotiated political settlement amongst the Afghan factions, not through an open-ended U.S. military presence, could Afghanistan become a stable, developing country.

America faces new threats now. The more than a trillion dollars spent on two wars over the course of a decade undermines our financial stability and takes away from much needed funds for American jobs and investments at home. The Obama administration has shown courageous leadership in eliminating Osama Bin Laden and other top Al Qaeda leaders. They have also shown leadership in bringing the war in Iraq to an end and in planning to ensure that the U.S. military commitment in Afghanistan is not an open-ended one. As President Obama clearly stated in his speech on the drawdown plan last year, we need to focus on nation-building at home. I agree, and I strongly support ending U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan and bringing our troops

home by mid-2013, if not sooner. It is the people in this body, the United States Congress, that can choose when this war ends.

Mr. Speaker, I stand here today to speak about the Afghanistan war. I commend President Obama's administration for the steps it has taken to bring the longest war in our Nation's history to a close.

Last week, Defense Secretary Panetta said that by mid- or the latter part of 2013 we'll be able to make a transition from a combat role to a training, advice, and assistance role. I urge the administration to fulfill this aspiration and bring our troops home to their families. They have sacrificed enough.

The Afghanistan war began as a war of necessity. After the horrific September 11 attacks, we sent our troops to eliminate al Qaeda and their leaders and destroy their training camps to prevent a future terrorist attack. Our troops carried out this mission with extraordinary courage and dedication. Osama bin Laden was driven out of Afghanistan, and he is now dead.

Furthermore, the intelligence community affirms that al Qaeda is virtually extinguished from Afghanistan; yet the war continues. End this war now and focus like a laser on terrorists wherever they may be.

Our troops in Afghanistan are no longer fighting terrorists who pose a threat to the United States. They are now fighting domestic Afghanistan factions and defending a corrupt and inept Afghanistan Government. Our servicemembers are dying in another country's civil war. This has become a war of choice.

I recently met with Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis, who described to me what a civil war looks like on the ground. He has served two combat deployments in Afghanistan and has traveled throughout the country talking to U.S. troops stationed all over. A recent evaluation of Colonel Davis reads: ``His maturity, tenacity and judgment can be counted on in even the hardest situations, and his devotion to mission accomplishment is unmatched by his peers.''

Now, this is what Colonel Davis has described as to what he has observed: ``What I saw bore no resemblance to the rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground. Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan were improving. Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level.

``I saw the incredible difficulties any military force would have to pacify even a single area of any of those provinces; I heard many stories of how insurgents controlled virtually every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a U.S. or International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, base. I saw little to no evidence the local governments were able to provide for the basic needs of the people. Some of the Afghan civilians I walked with said the people didn't want to be connected to a predatory or incapable local government. From time to time, I observed Afghan security forces collude with the insurgency.''

Colonel Davis' candid testimony reinforced my own conviction that there is no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan, only the prospect of continued shedding of American blood in a war that is not ours to fight. Only through negotiated political settlement amongst the Afghan factions, not through an open-ended U.S. military presence, could Afghanistan become a stable and developing country.

America faces new threats now. More than $1 trillion spent on two wars over the course of a decade undermines our financial stability and takes away much-needed funds for American jobs and investments at home. The Obama administration has shown courageous leadership in eliminating Osama bin Laden. They have also shown leadership in bringing the war in Iraq to an end and in planning to ensure that the U.S. military commitment in Afghanistan is not an open-ended one. As President Obama clearly stated in his speech on the drawdown plan last year, we need to focus on nation-building at home. I agree. I strongly support ending U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan and bringing our troops home by mid-2013, if not sooner. It's us, the 435 Members of this body, the United States Congress, that can choose when this war ends.

Mr. Speaker, thank you very much for the opportunity to share with those folks that are watching C-SPAN--and hopefully there are many--some of the issues that really confront America today.

We just heard an hour discussion on the fate of the American family, and it comes at that issue from one specific point of view and one specific section of the total problem, and that has to do with the issue of marriage and how we define marriage here in the United States.

But there's also another way to, and other very, very important issues that define the fate of the American family. And I'd like to take that issue up tonight in the context of the economy.

The American family is faced with many, many challenges. One of the most significant challenges is income, jobs. How can the American family make it in America today? What does it take for an American family to make it?

One of the most compelling charts that I've seen over these last several months is this one, which really describes the fate of the American family compared to the fate of the top 1 percent of Americans. We've seen an enormous shift in the income and the wealth in America over the last 30 years, largely because of governmental policies.

This blue line indicates how well the superwealthy are doing. They've seen nearly a 370 percent increase in their annual income. Their wealth would see a similar enormous increase.

Down here on the bottom are the rest of Americans, the other 99 percent. If you took all of this together, you would see that the bottom 50 percent have seen very, very little increase in their annual income; and most of that increase is due to both husbands and wives working simultaneously.

This is the challenge for the American family. How do they make it in America when, in America, we've seen an enormous decline in the great American manufacturing sector, where the middle class really, really succeeded?

And so, tonight, what I'd like to talk about with my colleagues who will

shortly be joining me is how we can make it in America by, once again, ``Making it in America.'' We can do this. In America, manufacturing matters.

American manufacturing has been in deep trouble for the last 20 years. That trouble has been caused by a variety of issues, some of which are beyond the control of anybody in this Nation, and certainly any Member of Congress or the Senate and the Presidency.

But a far greater part of the American manufacturing issue has been governmental policy.

Let's see if we can lay the foundation for a discussion on what it takes to once again make it in America. This charts shows what has happened to American manufacturing since 1975. In the seventies, American manufacturing peaked out somewhere just under 20 million American jobs. Those were the good days. That's when the American middle class was at its peak, when more Americans were enjoying the greatest share of the wealth in this country. That was the time when America was at its ultimate strength, when we had the greatest economy anywhere in the world.

Beginning in that year in the mid-seventies, we've seen a steady decline of the American manufacturing base. We've seen that decline for a number of reasons. What we need to understand is that through the seventies and into the eighties, and even into the nineties, even though there was a slight decline from some 19 to 17 million manufacturing jobs, it was in the century of 2000-2010 that the great decline took place. We are now down to just over 11 million manufacturing jobs in this country. Why did this happen? Why did we see this great decline?

As we try to answer that question, we need to also understand that there was a great increase in one, two, and three sectors of the American economy, but it was not matched by the manufacturing sector. The manufacturing sector was headed downward from 19 million to just over 11 million jobs. At the same time, the American economy was on fire. The finance, insurance, and real estate economy took off in the United States.

I think all of us have heard the term ``financial engineering.'' I am a graduate of Harvard Business School. Financial engineering was their schtick. That's what they wanted to do. It wasn't over at the engineering or the nuclear engineering or the chemical engineering schools, it was across the river at the business school, and at every other business school in America. If you wanted to make it in America, you had to be a financial engineer.

We saw the economy grow in the areas of Wall Street finance, insurance, real estate. And throughout the nineties, it peaked out. The best and the brightest of America decided that they didn't want to be in manufacturing. After all, that was some sort of dirty, greasy job. They wanted to be financial engineers in real estate, insurance, and Wall Street finance. We know where that got us. What that did to us was get us into the great bubble of 2000-2007, and the great crash that occurred. Financial engineering turned out to be nothing but paper. We're not talking about dollars here; we are talking about worthless paper. That worthless paper nearly crashed the world economy. So there we have it. We became financial engineers rather than chemical engineers, manufacturing, and the rest. Where did our money go? Where did the American wealth go?

As we saw the decline of the jobs in manufacturing, we also saw the rise of imports. If you go back to the year 1976, you will see that we were running a very small trade deficit. We were importing and exporting approximately the same amount. What we were exporting was American-made equipment. We were exporting food that had been processed, food that had been grown. We were exporting machinery, machine tools, and airplanes. We were the great exporter of the world. Then Government policy began to shift, and we wound up here in 2008, the great exporters of American money, the great exporters of American wealth. We need to turn this around.

We've seen a slight improvement here in the most recent years, but all of this red is basically China. What's happened is that the United States has given up its manufacturing power to China, and to a few other countries. We can see this in certain industries, for example, the automobile industry. Thankfully, as a result of laws that were passed by the Democrats and signed by President Obama giving him the power, through the stimulus program, the American Recovery Act, to bail out the American automobile industry, he did. The President said, On my watch, I will not allow the American auto industry to die. And he took action. He bailed out General Motors and Chrysler. In so doing, he saved the American auto industry and the tens of thousands of small businesses that rely upon that industry for their jobs. However, that's only part of the story.

Here is the rest of the story. Other countries that are automotive manufacturers have been able to increase their supply chain. And while we still have an automobile manufacturing sector in the United States, we heavily depend upon imported parts for the assembly of automobiles here in the United States. So other countries actually manufacture the parts, and assemble the autos. But not in the United States. We assemble, but we also import many of the parts.

We can change this, and here is what the Democrats want to do: We want to change the trend line. We want to rebuild the great American manufacturing sector. And we can, with good, wise, public policies. We say make it in America so that America and Americans can make it once again. Manufacturing matters.

As my colleagues begin to join me, I want to share with you some of the ways in which we can do that. Here are the policies that we want to put in place: We want to seek manufacturing within the United States. We want jobs and income within the United States. We are targeting specific industries, and we want to align the trade and tax policies in the United States so that we can once again reignite the American Dream. We're going to go into these in somewhat more detail as my good friend from New York (Mr. Tonko) takes over for a moment.

Thank you.

Mr. Tonko, thank you very much for joining me. I needed a break.

Beyond that, let's talk about the specific policies that we've been discussing here in the House--legislation that has been introduced--that will bring back the American manufacturing sector because, indeed, it was specific laws that were written here over the years that were largely, in my view, responsible for that outsourcing of jobs.

It's an interesting word, ``outsourcing.'' Until December of 2010, an American corporation could receive a tax cut for every job it outsourced. That's largely over. There is a little bit more to be done, but most of those tax breaks have been eliminated by a law that was passed by the Democrats--not one Republican voted for it--eliminating the tax break for the outsourcing of American jobs.

The President said it so very well in his State of the Union. He said that we should not reward companies for sending jobs overseas; rather, we should reward them for bringing those jobs back to the United States. That can be done by some of the policies that we're talking about. The President signed a bill, authored by Democrats and voted on by all Democrats and a few Republicans, that actually encouraged that by giving companies a 100 percent immediate expensing of all capital equipment that they would invest in the United States.

Those are two examples. I know you've got some that you've been interested in, that you're actually authoring, and you may want to talk about those. Then we'll come back and talk about the specific things that we can do.

I'll give you another example of how policy can change what has happened.

For a long, long time, we would send our tax dollars overseas to buy buses, railcars, light rail, ferryboats, and the like. Every one of us who buys gasoline or diesel fuel pays a Federal tax on that--18\1/2\ cents for gasoline and 25 cents for diesel fuel. That money is used to build transportation systems--roads, bridges and the like.

And where does it go?

The Buy American laws were largely ignored. However, in the American Recovery Act, in the stimulus bill, money was provided for the additional purchase of railcars, buses, and ferryboats. Somehow, wisely, the Democrats, who authored the bill, put in a clause that said that that money could only be used--only be used--to buy American-made equipment. So what happened in Sacramento, California, is that Siemens, the large German manufacturing company, decided that they would like to have some of that stimulus money. They wanted to build streetcars, light-rail systems, so they opened and expanded their manufacturing plant in Sacramento to manufacture the streetcars for Austin, Texas, and San Diego--made in America because of a law that was passed. It is a prime example of what can be done when we pass the right law that says that our tax money must be used to buy American-made equipment.

Who represents that district? It is Tonko?

Well, that reigniting of the American Dream will be dependent upon two factors, that is, the public, the small businesses, the entrepreneurs putting together their businesses. And at the same time, it's going to be dependent upon public policies.

You mentioned education. For the last 2 years, the Democrats have been proposing and pushing a series of pieces of legislation to enhance the ability of Americans to go to school. The Workforce Investment Board, very, very important. I suspect that that was one of the programs that your plastics company took advantage of in retraining. Our Republican friends last year, in the budget and in the appropriations, tried to reduce the workforce investment, but we wouldn't have that, and we've been able to at least maintain it.

We were able, on the Democratic side, to increase the Pell Grants so that kids can go to college. Now, I would hope they would go to college to be chemical engineers, process engineers, and not financial engineers, which I discussed early on. But I think that if we can just continue to support the educational system, including such things as vocational education--we used to do vocational education in America. We let it go. And as it went, we saw more and more dropouts. So supporting the educational system.

You mentioned--and I think we need to drive this point home tonight-- the research side of it. This is something, Mr. Tonko, that you know a great deal about. You headed up, as I recall, an organization in the State of New York that was specifically looking at how to enhance the research within the State. Share that and then also share about our policies, as Democrats, for enhancing research.

The Internet came directly from DARPA. DARPA is a defense research agency.

The reigniting of the American Dream is going to depend upon, once again, those small businesses out there, the entrepreneurs who are willing to take the risks, willing to take their concept and their idea and put it into a business.

Along the way, the history of America, as you well described it with the Erie Canal, we can look at all of the other great industrial advances that have been made. There has always been a partnership between the government and the individual companies and the entrepreneurs that are out there.

For example, the oil industry has enjoyed for more than a century over $13 billion a year of tax subsidies to encourage the production of oil. And there is an incredibly successful partnership between the government, not only with tax subsidies but making the public lands available for the exploration and the extraction of oil over the last 100 years, creating the wealthiest industry in the world.

Now once an industry has matured, as has the oil industry, we should remove those subsidies and use those subsidies for the new industries that we need.

We've been discussing since Carter and the first oil embargo the need for American energy security. Most people now believe that American energy security is going to be based upon the continuation of the oil industry and the coal industry at some level, using the natural gas that we now find is

more plentiful than we once thought as a bridge, let the oil and the coal industries wane while we build the renewable industry.

So if we took those tax subsidies that the oil and coal industry have enjoyed for a century, shifted them to the new industries, we could then see a blossoming of the green industries.

In California today, the solar and wind and biofuel industries employ some 320,000 people. It is a growing sector of the American policy. The policies that emanate from Washington, D.C., can either help or hinder that growth. That growth is not only new jobs here in the United States, but it's also energy independence.

The sun shines on the United States. Well, not at night, but it does shine during the day in most parts of the United States. So solar. The wind blows--and I'm not just talking about the wind in this Chamber, but across the Nation. Now, we have to couple that with public policies, and I want to speak to one specific policy, and that is shifting the subsidies that the oil industry has had for a century, shifting those subsidies over to the renewable side of it. Here again on the renewable side, this bill, H.R. 487, I happen to be the author, I'm kind of pleased with this piece of legislation. This bill would require that the subsidies be used to buy American-made solar and wind and other renewable energy equipment.

We should never use our tax dollars to buy a solar panel made in China. We should never use our tax dollars to buy a wind turbine manufactured in Germany. If somebody wants to go out and buy a solar panel using their own money, buy whatever you want. But if it's our tax dollars, buy American. Use our tax dollars to buy American-made equipment. Use that to reignite the American Dream, to build those machines, those solar panels, in the United States. Use our tax money to buy American-made equipment, whether it's a bus, a train, a plane, or a solar panel or a wind turbine. These are public policies that emanate from this House. We can change what's going on in the American manufacturing sector.

Mr. Tonko, why do we keep coming back to the 21st Congressional District?

There are so many pieces to this puzzle. You've talked about the research; you've talked about the support of new businesses, particularly in the clean energy sector. As we discuss those things, I keep thinking about what is happening, I think very unfortunately, in this debate. It's a political year, and we've got our elections. We have the election of the President and the Senate, all of those things are up, and so we take issues, and we may take a specific problem and drive that problem to the point of destroying other good programs that are under way.

This is happening right now. The Solyndra case, three times on the floor today I heard the word Solyndra come up. This was a problem, this was a company that was supported by a loan guarantee, and it failed. It largely failed because of China's policy of dumping--dumping on to the American market underpriced solar cells. That's why the company failed.

Now we have the opportunity to deal with this; but before I get to how we can deal with that China problem, I want to just ask my Republican colleagues to be very, very careful as they drive this political issue because they may succeed in making this a big political issue for this country; but by doing so, they may cause America to turn its attention away from renewable energy--the very issue you raised, Mr. Tonko.

We have to have energy security, and renewable energy of all kinds is going to be part of that. So we must be very careful. Whatever political advantage there may be to the Solyndra case, be aware, America, that underlying this is an extremely important policy in the United States to achieve energy independence, to free ourselves from the slavery of the oil barons and dictators around the world so that we can have a secure energy system in the United States.

It will, by necessity, involve renewable energy. Solyndra is a problem. Make it into a political problem, okay, but don't turn Americans' view and hopes away from the renewable, clean energy sector. It is vital, and we have to have policies in place to support that, just as we have supported the oil industry for more than a century.

Put that same support behind the batteries that you talked about, Mr.

Tonko; put that same support behind the bio-fuel industry; put that same support behind the solar, wind, and also the smart grid. Right now, in my district, Lawrence Livermore Labs is looking at developing a research program on how to integrate these renewable and variable energy systems into the grid so that they all mesh and provide the energy that is needed by America as it changes hour by hour across the United States--a very, very important research project. All of these things come back to government policy and support. So we must be very careful about that.

I do want to take up the China currency issue and the dumping of, in this case, solar cells on the American market. Would you like to start that discussion, Mr. Tonko?

Well, that American Dream is going to be held back by unfair trade policies that are seriously harming the American economy. Early on, I put this up. I don't know that you were here at the time. This is the American trade deficit. Much of this deficit is a deficit in trade with China. A lot of that deficit is caused by Chinese currency manipulation. The Chinese currency is undervalued somewhere around 20 to 25, maybe 27, percent, which gives their manufacturing sector a 20, 25 percent advantage because of the currency manipulation.

Thank you. I really hadn't noticed, but they almost parallel. One is right on top of the other. You can put that blue line, and it copies the red line that is the growth in the American trade deficit.

I want to just deal with this China thing quickly. We only have another 7 minutes here before we yield the floor. A year ago, this House, with both Republican and Democrat support, passed the China currency legislation that would require the Department of Commerce to put a countervailing tariff on imported Chinese goods if that currency manipulation were to continue.

It went over to the Senate. It did not pass the Senate. This year--I should say, this session, in 2011, the Senate passed a similar bill that would impose a countervailing tariff on Chinese goods as long as China maintained its currency manipulation. It came over to the House nearly 7 months ago. The Speaker and the Republicans have refused to take up that bill--the very same bill that a previous year we voted on bipartisan.

This is an important piece of legislation because it would deal with two issues: the loss of American manufacturing jobs and the extraordinary trade deficit, that is, the export of American money to China.

It is the policy behind many of the problems in the manufacturing sector, and it is policy changes that we have the power to put in place to reignite the American manufacturing sector, to rebuild it, and, simultaneously, put in place the ladders of success--education, research, entrepreneurship, support of the small businesses--all of those things that actually do reignite the American Dream.

Mr. Tonko, why don't you take the last 2 minutes and then we can wrap up.

Thank you, Mr. Tonko.

I notice that we still have a minute. I see my Republican colleagues are going to take the floor in a few moments. If I recall last week when they did this, they said the answer lies in doing away with regulations. Clearly, regulations are a piece of the issue.

I would hope that they don't want to eliminate the regulations that we put in place to bring Wall Street under control. But regulations are a small part of the overall problem.

There is a large number of other issues, some of which we've talked about today, others of which we will bring up as we discuss, for example, infrastructure, which will be our next piece. But those regulations that are in place today are there for the protection of key parts of the American economy--worker safety, the pollution regulations so that our streams and rivers are not polluted, our air is not polluted, so there's not mercury and other carcinogens in the air, and regulations dealing with the way in which business operates. Now, they can be modified; but be very, very careful if that is your only solution to the demise of the manufacturing sector, because it is but a small part of the overall issue.

We've discussed many of the other parts here today. We ought to be, all of us, Democrat and Republican, alike in dealing with the twin problems: the trade deficit, and the extraordinary and disastrous loss of manufacturing jobs. This is where the American middle class lost it when the American manufacturing sector declined. We can rebuild it with wise public policies. Wise public policies are what we ought to be doing, rebuilding the American manufacturing sector and reigniting the American Dream as we do that.

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

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

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

I am in its present form.

Mr. Speaker, I want all Members to pause for a moment and think about your family, think about your community, and the people you represent. I want you to put in your mind Alzheimer's and the effect that it has on the individuals and families. Now are you envisioning the effect of Alzheimer's, not only on the individual but on the family?

I want you to put in your mind that terrible auto accident that left that young child totally disabled. I want you to put in your mind the diabetic, think about the diabetic, long-term diabetes, and the effect that it has.

Now, the point of my amendment is not to kill this bill but rather to amend it in such a way that it can be taken up on the floor with all of us supporting this.

Long-term care is a major challenge for families, for individuals, and for this Nation. Today 5.4 million Americans have Alzheimer's, and at the end of this decade, it's expected to double, more than 10 million.

Keep that vision of the Alzheimer's patient in mind. It may be someone in your family or in your circle. Twenty-four million Americans have diabetes, 26 million have heart disease. Think of that stroke victim. You know that person. They've been our colleagues, disabled, and in many cases, totally disabled.

What this amendment does is to deal with a profound problem in America. How do we care for those who are disabled, unable to care for themselves for a lengthy period of time? How do we do that? There is no effective way to do it today until that individual and family is flat broke.

There is no mechanism today to deal with this problem unless you have become totally bankrupt, no assets, and then you get to go on the Medicaid program, a burden on our general fund and on every State's general fund.

This amendment offers a solution. This amendment says that we will keep the CLASS Act in effect but seek a national voluntary insurance program. Now, I happen to know insurance, and I happen to know that all of the long-term insurance programs out there have failed to work because they are narrow, because they've been unable to reach across the broad spectrum of America to provide a broad base of risk. You need a very, very large pool to deal with this very large and very expensive problem.

If my amendment is adopted, we will be able to go forward and to repair the CLASS Act into a voluntary insurance program that would involve the entire Nation and thereby provide a premium that is affordable. The present programs do not.

As we know from the CLASS Act itself and the work done by the Department of Health and Human Services, it too is flawed. But the problem remains. The problem has not disappeared. It is in fact in every one of our families and, quite possibly, with us as individuals.

We need a solution. Whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, we have to find a solution to this problem because now it falls back. When all other resources are gone for the individual and the family, it falls back onto the general fund of the State and the Federal Government. Not a good solution at all.

So I ask for your support on this. If you adopt this amendment, we will immediately vote on the CLASS Act itself, and it will be repealed, but not real. It will be maintained as we work

forward towards a solution. That's our task here. That's our task as Members of Congress. Find solutions for the real problems that face every American.

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

Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker, I want to join with my colleagues this evening to take up an extremely important subject. This is about the heart and soul and the opportunity of the middle class of America. This is about, once again, rebuilding the great American manufacturing machine. Through the last century, America came to prominence for many reasons. But one of the most important was that we knew how to make things. This was the manufacturing heart of the world.

Just 20 years ago, nearly 20 million American workers were employed in manufacturing, and that gave rise to the great middle class and the stability of this Nation, and the opportunity for an individual to get an education, go into the manufacturing sector as an engineer or as a line worker and earn enough money to buy a home, take care of their family, and pay for their education--lead and live that good middle class life.

But that was yesterday. Today, we have about 11 million people in manufacturing. We've seen the decline of manufacturing in the United States keeping pace with the decline of the middle class.

It doesn't have to be that way. Tonight, my colleagues and I are going to talk about policies that we can put in place here in Congress--policies that we must put in place--to rebuild the American manufacturing machine. Joining me is Mr. Blumenauer of Oregon, Ms. Jan Schakowsky from Illinois, and a couple other of my colleagues who are coming in a little later.

What this is all about is government policy. We already, on the Democratic side, have taken steps to begin the process of reversing this very awesome and dangerous trend. For example, a year ago December, we introduced and passed a piece of legislation that took away from American corporations over $12 billion of tax breaks that they received for off-shoring jobs. I know it's hard to believe, but they were actually getting a tax break for every job that they off- shored. Those days are significantly reduced. That's just but one example of what we have been working on.

I'd like now to just point out to you this logo. Those of us in the Democratic Party here in the caucus keep this on our desk, and we've got it on our coffee cups, to remind us that it is our mission in the Democratic Caucus to push for legislation to create American manufacturing jobs. And we're going to talk about some of these tonight.

Mr. Blumenauer from Oregon, I know that you're very interested in an important piece of this. I see you've got a bicycle on your lapel. Perhaps that has to do with transportation. And I will note that we do have a major transportation bill coming up here in the House later this week, or later, on the new transportation program for the next 6 years. I know you have some concerns about this, so please share those with us.

Thank you very much, Mr. Blumenauer, and your work on this has been noted for a long, long time. You've been a leader across this Nation on providing all types of transportation well beyond just the bicycle, which you happen to have on your lapel. But this is a very important moment.

This week, this House, in the Transportation Committee, is taking up a long-term transportation bill. You've described all the shortcomings, but I do believe there's an alternative. Now, our colleague from Pennsylvania (Mr. Altmire) would like to talk about an alternative, which is basically the Democratic alternative.

And so, as we look at this transportation bill, is there some way that we can write a piece of legislation that would give us the infrastructure and the ability to move goods and services and people and, simultaneously, enhance American manufacturing?

Please share with us your thoughts.

That's billion dollars, $4 billion.

Well, Mr. Altmire, you're raising the San Francisco Bay Bridge fiasco, which is one that gets the adrenaline flowing in California because the State of California decided they would put it out to bid. And there were two bids that came out by the same contractor. One was a bid that said the steel would be coming from China and the other was a bid that the steel would be coming from America. So that is not just the steel, but the formation of it and the structure itself.

So the Bridge Authority, in its infinite wisdom, decided to go with the 10 percent cheaper. Well, be careful if it's too good to believe. In this case what happened is the steel was manufactured in China. The bridge sections were welded together there. And it turns out that the welds were faulty; the inspections were faulty; the steel was not up to, and the overruns were well more than the 10 percent savings. Not only that, but you're employing some several thousand Chinese steelworkers. And mills in China are just revved up to get the steel going, and the mills in America shut down and American bridge and ironworkers were out of a job. We cannot let that happen anymore.

And so, as this transportation bill moves forward, one of the key elements in it--and this is being proposed, I understand, by Mr. Rahall, and I think you want to talk about this in more detail--is that, associated with the program, not only is there more revenue and better in dealing with the issues that Mr. Blumenauer raised, but also a very, very important policy that the money will be spent on American- made products.

Please continue.

Well, that's exactly what we should do.

About 2 months ago, the gentlelady from Illinois spoke on the floor about a history lesson that I was unaware of. I'm not sure she wants to go into that today, but it dates back to the Presidency of George Washington. If she doesn't cover it, I'll remind her and we'll have her cover that piece of it. But I know she wants to jump in here. Illinois, a great manufacturing sector of America, as well as finance and commerce.

Ms. Schakowsky.

If I might interrupt just a second, I'm going to complete the story you told on the floor here just by my memory. If I'm wrong, please correct me.

But he told Alexander Hamilton to develop an industrial policy for America.

So those free traders who say get government out of the way need to go back to the very history, the very beginning of history of this where President George Washington told his Treasury Secretary to develop an industrial policy for America so that we can make it in America.

This is not new. We need policies that do it.

Please excuse me for interrupting.

Excuse me. That is called the Patriot Act?

Well, don't leave us, because we are going to go around on this subject again.

Mr. Blumenauer, you were kind of anxious to jump in with some ideas.

And the transportation system goes with it.

Mr. Blumenauer, you are rightfully talking about the glories of Portland, Oregon; however, I want to bring to your attention that streetcars are now being manufactured in Sacramento, California, near my district. I will not let you get away with boosterism without mentioning my own State and what is happening there.

Now, the reason that both of these plants are operating goes back to a very important action that the Democrats took here in January of 2009. Shortly after President Obama came into office, the American Recovery Act was voted on. I wasn't here at the time, but my colleagues on the Democratic side did. You voted for the American Recovery Act; and in the American Recovery Act, there was a provision for streetcars and rail systems, locomotives, that they be manufactured in America.

The direct result of that--not speaking of Oregon, because I don't know--but in California the direct result of that is that one of the largest manufacturing companies in the world, Siemans, came to Sacramento, built a factory to manufacture streetcars, and now they're producing eight locomotives for Amtrak as a direct result of a specific provision built into the American Recovery Act, the stimulus bill, that said you get the money but you've got to spend it in America on American-made products. That's what we need to do.

Joining me now, I see my colleague in part of the East-West program here, my colleague from New York (Mr. Tonko). Welcome.

You've used some very, very challenging words for us, reigniting the American Dream.

We have an opportunity. It's this week. This House is going to take up in the Transportation Committee an extraordinarily important bill that speaks to the transportation infrastructure. The way that bill is currently structured, A, it's underfunded--it can only add to the deficit or not fulfill its mission and its purpose--and, B, has nowhere in it requirements that will cause jobs to be in America.

For example, here's what we presently do. We presently use our tax dollars. We send them overseas to buy buses and rail cars and ferry boats and the like. When this bill leaves that committee, and certainly if it were to leave this floor, it must have a make-it-in-America provision so that our tax dollars are spent on American-made equipment, buses, trains, steel, bridges, whatever. Why in the world we would export our money and our jobs is beyond my understanding.

But the bill as presently composed has no make-it-in-America provisions. It can be done. Those ideas have been presented.

I'm going to take just one more second and put up one more of my favorite charts, which happens to be my legislation, H.R. 613. It simply says: ``If you're going to use American taxpayer money to do a high-speed rail or build a bridge or a bus, then it's going to be made in America.''

Mr. Altmire, you were talking about this earlier. Let's reignite the American Dream and build the middle class by making things in America.

How did you know my problem?

I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania very much.

It's about jobs, isn't it?

At the end of the day, it's about jobs.

Those jobs, if they're in the manufacturing sector, will be middle- American jobs, and it will reignite the American Dream. Men and women can see the opportunity. They can see the opportunity to buy a house, to educate their kids, to take care of their families, to put food on the table. That's the American Dream, and we intend to reignite it.

Ms. Schakowsky, if you would carry on here, you have more things, and I know you were talking earlier about some of them. So, please.

That history of partnership goes back to the very first President of this Nation. George Washington set up an industrial policy: Mr. Hamilton, Go out and develop an industrial policy because we're going to make things in America.

So at the very earliest day of this Nation, government and the private sector became partners to make things in America and to make a great manufacturing sector.

Mr. Tonko, a few moments ago, you talked about reigniting the American Dream. So how are you going to do that?

We have work to do.

We need to put these things in place.

Let's see, we've had the Northeast, New York. We've had the Midwest. We've had western Pennsylvania. How about Texas? Let's go to Texas.

Sheila Jackson Lee, thank you for joining us tonight.

Ms. Sheila Jackson Lee, thank you very much for once again joining us in these dialogues and how America can make it. Certainly if we make it in America, we'll be well on our way. Manufacturing does matter.

Just this last weekend I was in one of the small communities of California, the town of Colusa, very small, 6,000 people. There was a General Motors-Chevy-GMC truck dealer that came up to me--it was a crab feed--and we were chatting, and he came up and he said, I just want you to know that I'm still in business.

I thought about that, well, that's a strange way to start a conversation. I'm still in business. And I said, it was President Obama that made a very courageous decision to bail out General Motors, and in doing so, not only does General Motors survive, but maybe tens of thousands of the supply chain manufacturers survived. And way off in California, a little town, up in the Sacramento Valley, an auto dealer said, I'm still in business.

He would have been gone, along with tens of thousands of other manufacturers and hundreds of thousands of jobs, if President Obama, together with this House, with the American Recovery Act providing the money, President Obama had not stood forward and said, I will not allow General Motors and Chrysler to die, not on my watch. Those two companies are now in business and profitable.

There is a partnership that needs to exist through time, beginning with George Washington and carried through, as you described the Erie Canal which was, what, 30 years after that, a partnership of business and private sector working together to create opportunity, to create the American Dream. Our task is to reunite it.

Mr. Tonko, why don't you pick it up.

Mr. Tonko, thank you very much for your leadership and your steadfastness on this issue of rebuilding the American middle class. The President spoke here less than 2 weeks ago on the issue of manufacturing, on the issue of jobs and making it in America. We need to follow up with that.

We have an opportunity this week, and I would ask my Republican colleagues to pay attention to what we're saying here, in the transportation bill that should be marked up, put together in the Transportation Committee, there is an enormous opportunity to put in place policies that allow the American manufacturing sector to thrive as we spend our tax money on infrastructure issues, on buses, on trains, highways, and bridges. All of those essential transportation needs we ought to couple that with the notion that that money must be spent on American-made equipment.

It's a simple concept, but it is so powerful and it will create jobs, and that is our task, to reignite the American Dream, to put in place all of the ladders so that the middle class can once again succeed, eliminate the barriers that exist and get on with building America. Make it in America so that America can make it.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I believe my hour is nearly up. I thank my colleagues for joining us, and I turn this over to our Republican colleagues and hope that they will be responsive to our plea that we use the transportation bill to make it in America.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, it's good to be back and wishing you and all of our colleagues the best of this new year and happy new year, and I hope yours and the other 433 Members of this august body had a great holiday season.

For many Americans that was not the case, however. Unemployment remains high and, unfortunately, just before we broke for the Christmas holidays, we did pass a piece of legislation that extended the unemployment insurance, and that's really important, and also extended for 2 months the reduction in the payroll tax, and that put money into the pockets of working men and women around this Nation.

We have much work to do this year. We just heard a presentation on the Keystone Pipeline, which will add a few jobs, some 6,000 jobs, temporary, building the pipeline, and that's good. The rush to judgment on it, however, should be very cautiously approached. Pipelines can be dangerous. You only need to look in California, where a gas pipeline exploded and the recent Yellowstone contamination that was caused by a broken oil pipeline.

Haste can make waste, and it can cause problems, so I would urge us to be circumspect. I suspect someday this pipeline will be built, but it ought to be built properly and in the right locations.

But the subject of tonight's discourse is really about jobs. I'll be joined a little later by my friend Paul Tonko from the great State of New York, and perhaps Marcy Kaptur from Ohio will be here. But what we want to talk about is jobs, not just temporary jobs building a pipeline, but rather solid, American jobs in the manufacturing sector. For more than a year, we've been talking about making it in America, rebuilding the great American engine of wealth, the great American engine that created the biggest middle class anywhere in the world, and the great American engine that over the last 20 years has seen an incredible decline, often caused by policy, governmental policy.

A couple of examples to give you: outsourcing. Outsourcing doesn't just happen. It happens because the economics of the situation have changed.

When I arrived here in November 2009, a debate was under way about how to rebuild the American economy. One of the things that we took up was the issue of taxes. It turns out that American corporations receive somewhere between $12 billion and $15 billion a year in tax reductions. That is you and I, all of us, get to pay corporations for doing, what, sending jobs offshore--offshoring American jobs.

Fortunately, in December of 2010, without any support at all from our Republican colleagues, we passed legislation that terminated $12 billion of those subsidies, providing a positive encouragement--or eliminating a positive encouragement--for corporations to offshore jobs. We can do more, and that's what the Make It in America agenda is all about.

There are many, many pieces in this. Economists who look at the American economy and where we are today will note that we have seen significant growth in jobs. The unemployment rate is down to 8.5 percent, and that's a good thing; but it is still far too high. We have seen some 330,000 manufacturing jobs created just this last year; and that's good, but it's not enough. On the other hand, we have also seen layoffs.

The government sector, despite what you might hear, has actually seen a very significant decline in employment. State governments and local governments all across this Nation have been laying off people. In California, 42,000 teachers have lost their jobs in the last 2 years. An incredible statistic. At a time when we need a more highly educated workforce, to layoff teachers seems to be a real serious no-brainer. Why would we do that? Well, we did it. And we have layoffs like that occurring across this Nation. We need to turn that around, and we can. We need to turnaround the decline that occurred over the last 20 years in the manufacturing sector, and we have made a start.

But there is much more to be done. We have lost perhaps 45 percent of all of our manufacturing jobs, from some 19 million down to just over 11 million in the last 20 years. Coming back, 330,000 this year. More to be done.

Fortunately, we have an ally in the White House. That ally is President Barack Obama who, as he said just last week, wakes up every day thinking about how can we, Americans, solve this crisis in our economy. What can we do to put men and women back to work? How can families know they have a secure future?

Way back in September, President Obama proposed the American Jobs Act. It wasn't the first thing that was done to get Americans back to work, but it's a very, very important step. The first thing that was done by President Obama and the Democratic majority in this House way back in January of 2009 when the new administration took office was to create the American Recovery Act. Some people call it the stimulus. No matter what else you hear, the stimulus works; and it's working today.

In my district out in California, you can't go very far down a highway, across a bridge, see a levee, see a new manufacturing facility in place without knowing or seeing a sign that says the American Recovery Act. Bridges are being built. Highways have been repaired. The Caldecott Tunnel on the East Bay in the Oakland Hills has now been drilled through the mountain. It'll be completed, almost totally financed by local government and a larger majority of the money from the American Recovery Act. We can rebuild jobs in America. That was step one.

Along the way, we've seen tax policy changes. We've seen a tax policy that the President proposed and enacted by the Democrats with some Republican help in 2010 that actually gave companies a 100 percent write-off for every capital investment that they made. The result of that, some of the greatest capital investment in the last 20 years has been made just in 2011. We're putting people back to work. We have a long way to go. We're not nearly where we need to be.

And for employers, an incentive in the American Jobs Act that the President proposed last September has now become law, with both Democrat and Republican support, bipartisanship really does exist; and that proposal, now law, gives employers a tax reduction, a credit, for every returned veteran from America's wars. They can go all of the way back to the Vietnam war. An employer that takes a long-term unemployed veteran can get a $2,500 reduction in their taxes for every veteran they keep on for a full year. For a disabled veteran, injured in the line of service, a $9,600 reduction in the employer's taxes. That's a very, very powerful incentive to hire those veterans who have sacrificed so much for this Nation, for the very safety and the freedom we enjoy. That's one part of the American Jobs Act.

A couple of other pieces of the American Jobs Act still have to be put in place, and the one that I like is called the infrastructure bank. We know that we are not flush with cash. We know the Federal Government has a serious deficit, and we know that we need to solve that. We also know that we're not going to solve it unless we actually put people back to work. And the infrastructure bank is a very good way to deal with two problems simultaneously, putting people back to work,

building infrastructure, perhaps pipelines, certainly those kinds of projects that have a cash flow--sanitation systems, water systems, toll roads, toll bridges--all of those things where there is a cash flow where we pay a fee for using that particular piece of infrastructure.

The infrastructure bank would be started with a loan from the Federal Government. The President recommended $10 billion. I say go the whole route, let's put in $20 billion, $25 billion of Federal money, and then reach out to the pension funds around the Nation and give them an opportunity to invest in this. Right now a government bond, it's less than 2 percent return. An infrastructure bank could probably give you a 5, 6 percent return. So the pension funds would have a place to invest both public and private pension funds. Most who have looked at this believe we could generate anywhere from $70 billion to $100 billion of loan capability that could immediately be used to build projects.

I know in my district that we have sanitation projects that need to be built. We have water projects. We have levees. We have dams, and we have other infrastructure that needs to be built. Those that are cash- flow possible can use the infrastructure bank; and in so doing, we free up those other infrastructure projects for which there is not a cash flow; for example, the levees that I just mentioned. And there are many other projects, highway projects, universities, laboratories, research facilities that you can then use the general fund, as we have done for more than a century, to build these infrastructure projects.

So the American Jobs Act, as proposed by the President, has an infrastructure bank in it. It also has a major infrastructure project tandem to it. So those two things together would put men and women to work across this Nation.

And even more can be done if this particular piece of legislation were to pass. This is the real Make It in America piece of legislation. I happen to be the author of it. I wasn't the first to think of it. For some time we have had what we think as Buy America, but it has been routinely ignored over the years. So the Buy America provisions, while ignored, need to be strengthened; and that's what this piece of legislation does.

What it does, it says that our tax money, gasoline tax, 18\1/2\ cents, diesel tax of 25 cents a gallon goes into the transportation fund. Is that money being used to buy American buses and railroad and high-speed rail, the transit facilities? Is it? Often, it is not. But if this bill passes--and it is now before the Transportation Committee here in the House--were it to pass, it would require that all of our tax money spread out over a 5-year phase-in process would be used to buy American-made equipment.

Do you want to travel up to San Francisco? You ought to. We could use your tax dollars out there. Come and visit. But as you travel from Oakland to San Francisco, you'll travel on the old Oakland-San Francisco Bay bridge. Just adjacent to it is a new, magnificent bridge being built. But it's not being built with American steel. And most of the welding was done not by Americans, but by Chinese. In an effort to save 10 percent, the State of California decided that they would buy Chinese products, Chinese steel. Thousands of jobs were created in China, virtually none in America. Chinese engineers came to see that the steel was properly erected. Where were the American engineers?

This piece of legislation has now been adopted by the State of California. It's the law there now. And I dare say that if this type of legislation were the law when the San Francisco-Oakland Bay bridge was put out to bid, that steel would have been made in America, American steelworkers would be employed, American welders would have done the welding, and there would not have been the quality problems that were found in the Chinese product and their Chinese workmanship. Let's make it in America. Lets use our tax money to buy American-made equipment.

We just had a long discussion about oil, and we're going to use oil for a long time. That discussion also talked about natural gas, which many people see as a transition away from the dependency on oil to a dependency on renewable and green energy systems of the future. So we're probably going to be in a transition period for several years. But in order to get to that place where we are totally independent of the oil dictators around the world, where we are no longer using oil for transport but rather using electricity or natural gas, we're going to need assistance to move to that.

For many years now, starting way back in the 1970s, the United States has had a policy of implementing what are known as green energy systems, principally solar. And I think all of us are familiar with solar and similarly the wind turbines that are now being found on hilltops across this Nation.

So where are those things made? Where do we make those? Where do those solar cells come from? Where are the wind turbines manufactured? Until very, very recently, not in America. But your tax money and my tax money is used to subsidize this new industry. And as that money is being spent, it must be spent on American-made equipment so that Americans can have those jobs. We're going to continue to import. If you want to go buy a solar system for your house, you can buy whatever you want. But if this bill passes, if you want that tax subsidy, then it's going to have to be an American-made solar system. No more outsourcing American dollars to China or Europe or wherever. Bring those dollars home. Put Americans back to work at home.

These are things that can be done. It is a policy direction. And this Congress and the Senate should be moving quickly to make sure that things are made once again in America, particularly those things that use our tax dollars, whether it's a bus, a rail line, a bridge, a solar cell, or a wind turbine. All of this is possible. All we need is a law that says that our tax money will be used to buy American-made equipment. That is just one part of what we call Make It in America.

This initiative has many other pieces. Some of it deals with education. We know--anybody that looks at any economy around the world knows that if you're going to have a strong economy, you have to have a very well-educated workforce.

So where are we in America? Are we the best educated workforce in the world? We used to be, but not today. Not today. Earlier, I mentioned 42,000 teachers were laid off in California. President Obama had a solution to that. In the American Jobs Act introduced last September, President Obama said, let's hire teachers. Some 280,000 teachers could have been hired across this Nation for the fall semester if our Republican colleagues had brought that bill to the floor and we had found the sufficient votes here and in the Senate. That's not a bad thing to put 280,000 teachers back to work.

And, by the way, what kind of a facility will they be working in? If you were to look across our Nation at the schools, you will see many that are rundown, old, the laboratories either in disuse or very ancient equipment, not up-to-date--even in Kansas City. So what are we going to do about this? The President said, let's invest in refurbishing our schools, putting men and women back to work, painting, fixing up the school grounds, repairing the toilets, building the new laboratories that are necessary for today's educational system.

It hasn't happened yet. I would ask our Republican colleagues if they care so mightily about the economy, they ought to care about the most fundamental investment that any society can make in its economy, and that is education.

The American Jobs Act has many pieces to it: infrastructure, transportation, infrastructure bank, tax credits for hiring the unemployed and a tax reduction for every American working through the payroll tax reduction. A good program. We're now in the middle of January. By the end of February, Congress will have to face the reality of terminating the payroll tax reduction and raising taxes on every American or continuing it. For me, we ought to continue it, and we also ought to continue the unemployment benefits because the jobs are not yet there. Had we passed the American Jobs Act, there would be far more jobs available. That has not yet happened.

And so we will face some very tough sledding ahead as we debate how shall we pay for this; how shall we pay for the February 29 extension of the payroll tax reduction and the unemployment insurance. Our Republican friends have basically said we ought to pay for it by taxing the middle class and by reducing those programs that the middle class depends upon, from health care to jobs to education. The Democrats have a different plan. We think President Obama is correct that we ought to ask those that have been so extraordinarily successful in the last two decades, the super-rich in America, the top 1 percent, to pay their fair share in keeping Americans in their jobs and providing them with enough food that they can eat and pay their rent through the unemployment insurance.

Let me just show you a chart here of why those superwealthy, those whose annual income is over $1 million a year, why they can pay just a little bit more. The bottom three lines here are the bottom three- quarters of the population. The low, those in poverty, low, middle and middle class. The top line are those in the very top, the top 10 percent. They've seen their wealth grow by extraordinary numbers, some 350 percent increase in theirs, while down here at the bottom, very, very little. In fact, most of this comes from two, from the husband and wife both working, two members of the family working.

There's plenty of opportunity here. The President has suggested a very small tax increase of 3\1/2\ percent of that amount over $1 million. It's not going to bust anybody's bank. They're still going to have plenty of money to go to their golfing and buy whatever they need to buy. But what will happen is Americans will continue to have an unemployment check if that job is not available to them, and Americans will also be able to see a reduction in their payroll tax so that they, too, can participate in this American economy.

So with that, I think we'll wrap it up for the evening. And we want to keep in mind that America can make it when we make it in America. Federal policy is critical if we're going to succeed. There are many things we can do. We have reviewed some of them here tonight, and we'll be talking more about it as this week and next week goes on and we approach that February 29, once-every-3-year opportunity for this Nation to do what's right for those men and women and working families out there and for those who are unemployed.

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 8 o'clock and 31 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, January 18, 2012, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

I think somehow I made a mistake. I came over here to listen to the debate, and it's almost like ``Alice in Wonderland,'' like we all fell down the hole here--up is down, down is up, black is white, white is black. I mean, this is confusing to the folks out there, so let's just try to understand where we are at this moment.

We sent a bill--that is, the Republicans in this House sent a bill to the Senate that was rejected, rejected for several reasons. One of them was the pay-for, how is it going to be paid for--ways that dealt, I think, unfairly with workers who are unemployed. It shortened the period of unemployment not to 99 weeks, but even shorter, to just over 50. And it also went after Medicare recipients, causing them to pay more. It was rejected by the Senate.

The Senate put together a compromise. Ninety percent of the Senators--well, just short of 90 percent--89 Senators, Democrat and Republican, voted for a 2-month compromise that was paid for, with the understanding that they would spend the next 2 months trying to figure out how to make this thing last a whole year.

We're really far apart on many of the underlying things, and so here we are running up against the deadline. And, by the way, if we had a conference committee, if we actually had a conference committee and they came to a conclusion before the end of the year, did anybody consider the Senate rules? There is a potential of 90 hours of debate in the Senate before it could be taken up and passed.

So what are we doing here?

We ought to think about the people out there and about the foolishness of all that's going on around here. Let's just agree to where the Senate is. We've got 2 months to figure out how to make the rest of the year work. And the rhetoric goes back and forth.

We're not in ``Alice in Wonderland'' here. This is about the people of the United States. We have an opportunity to get this thing done only for 2 months. Nobody is happy about that, but at least we can get it done and we can come back and deal with some very difficult underlying issues for which there is no agreement at this moment. We need time to do that. The conference committee could surely not do that.

Mr. Speaker, thank you for the opportunity this evening. I'm joined by my colleague from Ohio, Marcy Kaptur.

I want to thank our colleague from Texas for the explanation he gave about the tragedy at Fort Hood. It was, indeed, an American tragedy, as were other acts of violence against this country, both within the country and around the world.

No doubt that there is radical Islam, no doubt that it is killing, not only Americans, but others around the world. And it is part of our task to find an appropriate way to deal with it. It's also part of our task to appropriately recognize the tremendous sacrifice made by our soldiers, both here, as in the Fort Hood incident, and certainly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Today marks a very, very special day in American history. It is the end of one of the great American tragedies, and that is the war in Iraq. No matter how we may think of this today, I think we can be very confident that this war of choice was, indeed, a very bad choice. More than 4,000 Americans have been killed in this war, and perhaps several times that number injured.

Physical injuries, we often see them just off the floor as these men and women return from their medical treatment at the Bethesda hospital, and we mourn their physical loss.

The mental problems that our veterans have incurred after multiple deployments in Iraq will go on for years, as will the physical injuries. Post-traumatic stress syndrome is a major,

major problem among the thousands of veterans, hundreds of thousands of veterans that have returned. These are issues that we must deal with.

And as we mark, today, the final withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, our heart, our compassion, and indeed our actions go out to those veterans who have served this Nation in this war. Whatever we may think of the war, we must always think well and appropriately of these soldiers, men and women, multiple tours, National Guard, the Reserves, and the active Army and Navy and Air Force and Marines, all serving this country.

Many things have happened here on the floor to deal with those issues that they have incurred. Just 2 weeks ago we passed major pieces of legislation that are a followup to earlier pieces of legislation for the veterans. The Democratic Congress, in 2009 and `10, enacted the most far-reaching veterans benefits since the end of World War II. A new GI bill is in place. Job opportunities and training are in place. Enhancement of the medical services through the Veterans Administration and many other that were culminated last week--wrong word. Not culminated, but added to last week with the legislation that provides a very strong incentive for employers to hire unemployed veterans.

The unemployment rate for veterans is generally twice as high as the average American unemployment rate. Those benefits go to the employer, reducing their taxes by $2,600 for every veteran they hire. If they hire a long-term unemployed veteran, it'll be $5,600, and if it happens to be one of the disabled veterans, perhaps one that we often see outside this Chamber, then it's a $9,600 reduction in the taxes for that employer. We hope employers all across this Nation hear this and reach out to the veterans in their community and give them a job.

The rest of the time we have tonight I'd like to talk about jobs for Americans. As much as we may want to think about the wars, and today we did, we passed the Defense Authorization Act, we have to also think about Americans here at home that need a job. We've been working for some time on a program that we call ``Make It in America,'' a rebuilding of the strength of the American manufacturing industry.

Over the last 20 years, we have seen a rapid decline in the manufacturing base of America because that's where the middle class found its place. That's where the middle class found their opportunity to use the skills, whatever training they may have, whatever education they may have, and get a good, solid job that would support a family. Twenty million Americans were employed in manufacturing 20 years ago. Today, it is just over 11 million, almost a 50 percent decline.

We can't let this continue. We cannot allow the outsourcing of American jobs. We have to bring those jobs back home, and there are many ways that we can do that. And our ``Make It in America'' agenda by the Democratic Party here in Congress is taking root. And tonight we're going to talk about many parts of that.

Joining me is Marcy Kaptur from Ohio, which once and will be the heart of the American manufacturing sector. I know you have many pieces of legislation, and I know your intense passion on rebuilding the manufacturing sector in America. So let's talk about some of the things that are going on here in Congress and what we can do.

It really does, if I might take a moment here.

You raised one of the very important points. I know later in this discussion you're going to take this up in much more detail. But it's very, very clear that the financial sector, in their rush for profit, created the housing bubble. Didn't do it all by themselves. There was plenty of greed on the part of certain people that bought houses, and the real estate community was involved in that, the mortgage community.

But here we are after bailing out Wall Street. What is Wall Street doing to bail out Main Street? Not much.

I heard a discussion earlier today from a banker that said, Oh, we're making all kinds of SBA loans. Yes, that's guaranteed. Those are loans guaranteed by the Federal Government. But what risks are they taking?

We passed the Dodd-Frank language, which was designed to rein in Wall Street. Good. Very good. As strong as I would like? No. I would go back and put in place the Glass-Steagall Act. I was the insurance commissioner before the Glass-Steagall Act disappeared, and insurance was over here and banks were over there and investment banking was separate. So that the kind of problem that existed in 2000 where the banks went berserk and crazy in greed creating all of these CDOs and other kinds of really fake instruments, they couldn't do it. But nonetheless, the Dodd-Frank is there. Our Republican colleagues are refusing to fund the implementation of that program, putting all of us at risk once again.

I want to go back to the manufacturing sector and some of the issues that arise there, and particularly the unemployment rate in your communities.

Now, we have to reauthorize the unemployment insurance program; otherwise, is it 3.3 million Americans are going to lose their unemployment insurance in the first of the year? And when you have such high unemployment as you do in your communities, what are they going to do? How are they going to feed their families, pay their mortgages? And when you provide an unemployment check, it immediately goes into the economy and creates $1.6 for every dollar of the check.

And I know you see this in yours, and you've talked to me about the unemployment and the way in which the cessation of the unemployment insurance would just devastate people here

at holiday season. So share with us what you were sharing, just this, earlier in the week when we were talking about this issue.

I see it in my own district in California.

One of the things that we've been trying to do is to take up the President's call on this matter. The President, back in September, put forth the American Jobs Act. Many pieces of it. We'll talk about some of those pieces today.

But in the American Jobs Act, there was an extension of the unemployment insurance, which economists, left, right, and center, all say it's the best way to stimulate, to keep the economy moving. He suggested that we extend it for those who have been unemployed for 2 years or more. And I think it's the only humane and compassionate thing to do, particularly here at the holiday season.

He also made the suggestion that we continue the payroll tax reduction, which was 2 percent, that is from 5\1/2\ percent to 3\1/2\ percent. He suggested that the reduction be 3.1 percent.

Now, we are as concerned as our Republican colleagues about the deficit, and the President is, too. And he suggested that this needs to be paid for. We cannot borrow money from China to do the unemployment insurance or to do the payroll tax deduction.

Now, the payroll tax deduction, it's rather important. It's over $1,500 in the pocket of every working person in this Nation. That's an enormous amount of money for a person that's earning $10, $20 an hour. So he wanted to do that.

How is he going to pay for it?

He suggested that we pay for this in what is called tax fairness, that we take the upper income, those people that have earned a million dollars a year or more, and increase the tax that they pay over a million dollars by 3\1/2\ percent. A 3\1/2\ percent increase above a million dollars--not below but above. Now, that's fairness, because these folks have had an enormous tax reduction over the last decade, part of the Bush tax cuts.

Unfortunately, that didn't happen, and you and I have been here. And perhaps we ought to share with the public what happened yesterday when a bill came to the floor to provide unemployment insurance extension and a payroll tax deduction. It was really not a shining day for the House of Representatives.

We'll go into some detail here, but essentially what happened was that the legislation put forth by our Republican colleagues basically said, okay, we'll continue the payroll tax deduction, not at 3.1 percent but at a 2 percent reduction, which is about a thousand dollars for an average worker, and that's good, certainly better than not doing anything; and we will also do the unemployment insurance, but only for half the time that the President suggested.

And here's the kicker. All of that will not be paid by those who earn more than a million, the millionaires and billionaires. That will be paid for by the middle class. It was the 99 percenters that were going to have to pay for this. Not the 1 percenters, but the 99 percenters. It was the great shell game, and a very, very sad day. Fortunately, the President said, I will veto that if it ever gets to my desk; and the Senate has said, No way; this is not fair to the working men and women of America.

Now, we were here, and we heard some of the debate. Share with us your thoughts about all that went on yesterday in that rather sad piece of legislation.

Yes.

If I might interrupt for just a moment, you raised a very, very important point about the fate of the American middle class and of the extraordinary benefit that has grown for the top 1 percent. This is where the 99 percent comes in.

Let me just show you this chart. It has become one of my favorites. This chart is about the growth of income.

Down here on the bottom are the bottom 99 percent of Americans and the income that they have seen since 1979: virtually no real growth in the income of the working men and women, of the middle class of America. So, if you look at these lines, this is the top quartile; this is the middle quartile and the bottom quartile here: no growth or just a little tiny growth. Incidentally, most of that comes because now both the husband and wife are working, not because just one of the wage earners has seen it.

This top line, Marcy, is the 1 percenters. We can see, over the last 25, 30 years, the 1 percenters have done very, very nicely, and there are many reasons for this. One, they are very productive. They've been able to find good opportunities and to make the most of them. We wouldn't deny anybody that opportunity to become very, very wealthy in America if they play by the rules. I know, a little later,

you're going to talk about some who have not played by the rules and who have become extraordinarily wealthy. But if you play by the rules, you ought to be able to do very well in America.

Yet what we're talking about here is tax fairness. A lot of this growth right here in the last decade was as a direct result of tax policy. Now, the George W. Bush tax cuts for the super wealthy, which were supposed to create jobs, didn't create jobs. In fact, we had a loss of employment in the United States. Even if you discount and take out the great crash of 2007-8, in the George Bush era, the argument for reducing the high-income tax rate was that it would create jobs because these were the job creators. It didn't create jobs. It did not create jobs. So now we're talking about how do we keep this economy going, about how do we provide for those who don't have jobs. How do we put money back into the economy? As you say, it will be spent. We do it with tax fairness.

As the President suggested, for those people who earn more than $1 million a year after all the deductions, the amount of income above $1 million would be taxed an additional 3\1/2\ percent. That's fair. That's fair to the American workers, if they're unemployed or if they're looking for jobs, so that they'll have an opportunity.

Before we go back to Make It in America, which is our principal policy, at least among those of us who are talking about the Make It in America agenda, I want to just make it very clear that this debate over the payroll tax reduction and the unemployment insurance is not over. We've got a little bit of time to get this done before the end of the year when all of these opportunities for people to continue to survive terminate.

Right now, the Senate is going to take up the House bill, and it is our understanding that that bill is not going to move in the Senate. We need to get past this gamesmanship that we saw in the legislation that passed here just yesterday, and we need to get serious about finding a compromise that can deal with this problem.

Here is our wish list. This is the American wish list. We have Santa up here, but let's just say it's to the House of Representatives--all of us--and to the Senate. What we would like to have in the stocking is not a bad lump of coal but, rather, a payroll tax cut extension. We could probably settle for the present. If we were to compromise, we'd want 3 percent, but we could settle for the 2 percent reduction. That's $1,000 in the pockets of every working man and woman in the State. That's 160 million people. That's an enormous thing for us to do.

So this is one of the things that we would wish would happen, that we wish that we would do--your Representatives, Democrat and Republican alike, and the Senators--for the working men and women of America so that they can have food on their tables and roofs over their heads.

The other deals with the unemployment insurance--5.7 million people are going to be losing their unemployment insurance in the coming year. What in the world are they going to do? Their jobs are not there, as you so clearly pointed out, Ms. Kaptur. The jobs are not there, and they need help. That's where the unemployment insurance program will help them and will simultaneously help the economy, as Ms. Kaptur pointed out. We can pay for this. We can pay for this with a Fair Tax system in America.

We should work together. Excuse me for interrupting, but in my district, we have a ravioli company. We're talking out of this world. Now, maybe your sauce on top of their raviolis we could actually get on the shelf.

Obesity.

Black Friday, a week ago. It is all about the big retailers. But Small Saturday, now that was exciting. A lot of advertising out in California about, Go to your local shop. Buy local. Buy small. And it was just what you are talking about, and that is to find a way to provide opportunity, moving, in this case, customers to the local stores. Instead of the big box store, go down to Main Street. Stop at the local shop. Very, very powerful. And I suspect that many of us did that. We stopped at the local store, and we didn't go down to Home Depot. We went down to the Ace Hardware.

I don't think we're talking about a law or a new regulation here, but we're talking about something that we ought to do for our communities, and that is recognize that we're all part of a community.

You said something a few moments ago that caused me to come back to this issue. You talked about the trade deficit. And the way in which we are literally exporting our money, we're also exporting our jobs.

Last December--just a year ago--on this floor, we took up a piece of legislation that dealt with this issue. In the previous Tax Code, there were tax breaks given to American corporations for shipping jobs offshore. For offshoring American jobs, they got a tax reduction. And some of us said, Well, what in the world is that all about? So we scrambled and tried to find out where the codes were. And a bill came forth on the floor that eliminated about two-thirds of those tax breaks given to American corporations when they offshore jobs.

A very interesting division occurred here on the floor of this House. It was a straight-up bill. It wasn't complex. It was on that issue: Should American corporations continue to receive tax breaks for offshoring jobs? That was the bill. No riders. No hidden agendas. No extraneous sentences put in. This House divided right down the middle. The Democrats voted to end the tax cuts. The Republicans, not one Republican voted to end those tax breaks given to American corporations for offshoring jobs.

And I'm going, I don't get it, guys. You guys talk about jobs all the time. You talk about small businesses, and here you want to continue to subsidize the offshoring of American jobs? What's that all about? We never got an answer. But it speaks directly to the point that you were making earlier about policy choices. Our work is policy, policy choices: Are we going to do this, or are we going to do that? Are we going to continue to support American corporations for offshoring jobs, giving them our tax dollars? Are we going to continue to allow the oil companies to be subsidized?

The wealthiest industry in the world takes about $15 billion a year of your tax money, and we give it to them. The oil, the gas, and the coal industries, about $15 billion a year in tax subsidies. Why do we do that?

Wouldn't you love to go into Wal-Mart and find ``Made in America''? Wouldn't that be something?

A little bit of patriotism.

Let me give you another example of what we can do with policy. Right now we have a ``Buy American'' policy that really has not been enforced much. So I've introduced a piece of legislation, H.R. 613, that simply says that if it's our tax money--and every time we buy a gallon of gasoline or a gallon of diesel fuel, we pay either 18.5 cents for the gasoline or 26 cents for the diesel fuel in taxes, where's the money going? Some of it all too often, in fact, a lot of it all too often, winds up going offshore.

I will give you an example: the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge, a multibillion dollar project, $1 billion worth of steel going into that bridge. It will be a beautiful thing when it's completed. The bids for that came in for an American-made steel bridge or a Chinese-made steel bridge.

It was a 10 percent difference in cost. That's a lot of money. So the State of California Bridge Authority decided that they would take the 10 percent cheaper Chinese steel. The result is after years, the steel had problems. The welds had problems. The cost went well above 10 percent, and 3,000 jobs wound up in China, and zero jobs wound up in America.

So what this bill does, it simply says no more waivers. No more. If it is American tax dollars that are being used, it is going to be used to buy American-made equipment--buses, trains and the steel and concrete. It works.

In the stimulus bill, which all of our Republican friends want to dismiss, in the stimulus bill there was one line for the several billion dollars of money that went into transit that said that money can only be used to buy American-made light rail, transit trains, and locomotives for Amtrak.

Siemens opened a factory in Sacramento, California, to build those light-rail cars and the locomotives because the policy, drafted here on this floor, passed by the Senate and signed into law by President Obama, said that tax money can only be used to buy American-made equipment. And it created hundreds of American jobs in Sacramento, California.

This bill, and another one like it that has now been introduced by the ranking member Democrat in the Transportation Committee, will bring hundreds of thousands of jobs when our tax money is going to be used to buy American-made equipment.

Let me just add to this. This was a result of the stimulus bill that put the money there, if need be, to rebuild certain sectors of America. President Obama courageously, and with enormous opposition from Republicans, said, I will not let the American automotive industry die. This is a fundamental industry in the United States; I will not let it die.

And so he authorized the money that went to bail out General Motors and

Chrysler. Ford didn't take advantage of it because they had a different financial situation. But the result of that is precisely what you've described. It is precisely the saving of the American automotive industry and all of supply chain that goes with it. A very courageous action by the President, one that worked for the benefit of America so that we can once again make it in America.

I'm going to wrap this up very quickly because I know you have a couple of things you want to talk about with regard to Wall Street.

Why don't you go ahead, and then I will wrap up at the end.

Let me just give you another example. I thank you for raising that very, very important issue.

Last year, this House by an overwhelming bipartisan vote set out to address the China situation. It was a piece of legislation that simply said that when any government anywhere around the world unfairly subsidizes its business sector in a way or to the detriment of American businesses, then that country will face sanctions. And specifically, it had to do with the Chinese currency. The Chinese currency is significantly undervalued, perhaps giving as much as a 20 percent advantage to China in its exports. Bipartisan, it passed here. It did not pass in the Senate. However, this year my Republican colleagues would not even allow that to come up for a vote here, even though it has now passed in the Senate. So the Chinese currency bill passed the Senate; it is languishing in this House. I do not understand why our Republican colleagues want to continue to allow China to have an unfair advantage.

I was going to wrap up with this. China subsidizes to a fare-thee- well its solar and wind industries. So much so that they have taken over the market and have led to the bankruptcy of a couple of American solar manufacturers, Solyndra being one example that is much discussed around here. But it was really as a result of China driving down the price of solar panels.

This bill, again one that I have introduced, and it comes directly from my district because we have a major wind farm and solar system there, it says that our tax money that presently goes to subsidize the purchase of solar systems and wind turbines must only be used to buy American-made wind turbines and solar panels. In other words, buy American, make it in America, and rebuild our industry.

I am going to just wrap up quickly.

It's the holiday season. It's that time when we think about our families. It's that time when we think about our communities. We have a real obligation here in the House of Representatives to put forth really solid legislation to support those men and women and families in America that, through no fault of their own, are unemployed or are having a very difficult time in making it in the current economy as wages are driven down and as opportunities for advancement are diminished.

What we hope for, and literally pray for, is a consensus, a compromise, in the next couple of days here on the floor of this House and with the Senate so that we can pass legislation that would actually help the American workers, those that are unemployed and those that are seeking a job or have a job and are unable to make it, and with that payroll tax deduction put another $1,000 in their pocket. And I want us to keep in mind that in America today there are 1.4 million children-- 1.4 million children--that are homeless. Their parents have lost their job, they've lost their home, and they're sleeping in cars. They're homeless. They may be able to find an opportunity at a motel. We've seen some of this on television. But this is in all of our communities. Every community in America has this problem.

And it's up to us here in Congress to use what compassion and wisdom we possess to find ways of addressing it. We have such an opportunity with the payroll tax deduction, with the welfare. And, unfortunately, the bill that passed here yesterday basically would put money into the right pocket through a payroll tax deduction or an unemployment check, and then take it out of the left pocket with an increase in fees, a reduction in medical services, the closing of clinics or other ways in which that money would be extracted.

Yes, it would balance. It wouldn't increase the deficit except for the working men and women of America. We think that's wrong, and we've offered a different solution.

My colleague from New York has come for a couple of short comments. I promised Ms. Kaptur the last few moments of this. Welcome, Mr. Tonko. The East-West Show is back in session.

I thank you very much, Mr. Tonko, for bringing that up.

I'm going to ask Ms. Kaptur of Ohio to take the podium here and to tell us about Wall Street and some of the reforms that she is advocating.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in honor of Captain Richard J. Leonardini, who

is retiring after more than 31 years of law enforcement service, with 22 years of that service to the City of Fairfield. As his colleagues, friends and family gather together to celebrate the next chapter of his life, I ask all of my colleagues to join me in saluting this outstanding public servant and defender of peace and safety.

Richard started his law enforcement career as a Deputy Sheriff, serving three years for the El Dorado County Sheriff's office and over five years with the San Joaquin County Sheriff's office. On March 6, 1989, he was hired as a Police Officer with the Fairfield Police Department. As an officer, Richard worked in various capacities that included Patrol, Investigations, Street Crime Apprehension (SCAT) and Field Training. He joined the Crisis Negotiations Team in 1991, the Special Activity Felony Enforcement (SAFE) Team in 1992 and was promoted to Police Sergeant on July 30, 1999.

As a Police Sergeant, Richard served in Patrol and then Personnel and Training before being promoted to Police Lieutenant on December 14, 2001 and serving as the Commander of the Special Operations Division. He was a thoughtful and capable manager which led him to receiving the Manager of the Year award in 2002. On March 19, 2004 he was promoted to Police Captain and served in Administration, Support Services, and Field Operations.

Richard has been a valued employee and his commitment to the community was evidenced on a daily basis. He was a loyal representative of the law enforcement community and admired for his hard work, dedication, and positive work ethic.

Mr. Speaker, I am truly honored to pay tribute to this dedicated public servant. I ask all of my colleagues to join with me in wishing Richard J. Leonardini continued success and happiness in all of his future endeavors.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in honor of Police Sergeant John M. Dugan, who is retiring after nearly 30 years of law enforcement service to the City of Fairfield. As his colleagues, friends and family gather together to celebrate the next chapter of his life, I ask all of my colleagues to join me in saluting this outstanding public servant and defender of peace and safety.

John started his career of service as a Firefighter for the California Department of Forestry and the City of Paradise. On March 19, 1982, he was hired as a Public Safety Officer with the Fairfield Police Department. As an officer, John worked in various capacities that included Patrol, Investigations, Special Operations, and Field Training.

John was promoted to Police Sergeant on July 22, 1994, and ultimately supervised a number of different units including Patrol, Traffic, Crime Suppression, and Youth Services. In 2000, he earned the California Highway Patrol's 10851 Award for recovering 12 stolen vehicles in eight months; three of which were occupied vehicles. Sergeant Dugan was a strong, decisive, professional, and respected leader. As a result of these superb traits, he received the Manager of the Year award in 1999 and 2006.

In 2007 and 2010, as the Police Department experienced changes in leadership and command staff, Sergeant Dugan stepped in and assisted the City management in filling the gaps. Over the last four years, he has assumed the Police Lieutenant's position twice and managed Patrol Operations. Sergeant Dugan has a can-do attitude and he consistently provides quality service to the community

John has been a valued employee and his commitment to the community was evidenced on a daily basis. He was a loyal representative of the law enforcement community and admired for his hard work, dedication, and positive work ethic.

Mr. Speaker, I am truly honored to pay tribute to this dedicated public servant. I ask all of my colleagues to join with me in wishing John M. Dugan continued success and happiness in all of his future endeavors.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in honor of Police Sergeant Michael B. Mitchell, who is retiring after nearly 30 years of law enforcement service, with 23 years of that service to the City of Fairfield. As his colleagues, friends and family gather together to celebrate the next chapter of his life, I ask all of my colleagues to join me in saluting this outstanding public servant and defender of peace and safety.

Michael started his law enforcement career as a Police Officer with the City of South San Francisco for six years. On September 5, 1988, he was hired as a Police Officer with the Fairfield Police Department. As an officer, Michael worked in various capacities that included Patrol, Traffic, and Investigations. In 1998, he completed the distinctive Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST)--Robert Presly's Institute of Criminal Investigation (ICI) certification course with a specialty in homicide investigation.

Michael was promoted to Police Corporal on September 8, 2000, and served in Patrol, Youth Services, and earned a City Manager's Commendation in 2003 for his contribution and dedication to the City of Fairfield Driver's Training Program. On January 5, 2007 Michael was promoted to Police Sergeant and supervised teams on Patrol and then the Traffic Unit beginning in 2008. As the Police Department experienced changes in leadership and command staff, he stepped in and assisted city management by filling the gaps and acting as a Police Lieutenant and managing Patrol Operations when needed. In 2009, he earned the California Office of Traffic Safety's Award of Excellence for his outstanding motivational and leadership skills. His guidance and efforts dramatically increased the successful implementation and completion of traffic safety activities in the City of Fairfield.

Michael has been a valued employee and his commitment to the community was evidenced on a daily basis. He was a loyal representative of the law enforcement community and admired for his hard work, dedication, and positive work ethic.

Mr. Speaker, I am truly honored to pay tribute to this dedicated public servant. I ask all of my colleagues to join with me in wishing Michael B. Mitchell continued success and happiness in all of his future endeavors.