Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity, and it's always a pleasure to follow my good friend from northeast Ohio (Mr. LaTourette), who is not only a good advocate, I think, for his congressional district but also a very good friend and…
Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity, and it's always a pleasure to follow my good friend from northeast Ohio (Mr. LaTourette), who is not only a good advocate, I think, for his congressional district but also a very good friend and a fellow Lebron James fan. So we want to congratulate the Cavaliers, and I want to thank Mr. LaTourette.
Madam Speaker, we are representing the 30-Something Group here tonight, a group that was started several years ago by then Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi when the Democrats were in the minority, and we were talking about issues that were facing the men and women of this country in their thirties and began to frame some of the Republican agenda at that point as it affected the 30-somethings and also used it as an opportunity to talk about the young people in this country, how the decisions that were being made by then--the then Bush administration would not only have a short-term effect on the young people of our country but also have long-term consequences. And unfortunately today, Madam Speaker, we are dealing with many of those consequences that were laid at the plate of now President Obama, laid at the plate of the now Democratic Congress and, quite frankly, laid at the plate of the American people.
So as we speak here tonight, and I will be joined later by Congressman Boccieri and Congressman Altmire, we're going to discuss where we are today in our country and in our congressional districts and also some of the approaches that we need to make over the course of the next several months and over the course of the next several years.
I represent a district, Madam Speaker, that is just south of Mr. LaTourette's district. I represent Akron, Youngstown, Warren, Niles, and the Mahoning Valley. And over the course of the last several months and over the course of the last year, for example, in Trumbull County, our unemployment rate has doubled. And this has not been just a short- term problem; this has been a 30-year problem that our communities have been dealing with. And if you look and you see what has happened in communities like ours where companies, longtime companies in this country like Delphi, like General Motors, steel mills like WCI are near closure. We have Delphi retirees who are both salaried and union who are now joining together to figure out what they're going to do with their families, what they're going to do with their kids, their house payment, their mortgages, their college tuition that they have to pay, their daughters' weddings that they have to pay for, over the course of the next several weeks, months, and years. So, Madam Speaker, we need a strong agenda here in Congress and a strong agenda coming from the President as to what exactly we are going to be able to do.
Madam Speaker, the President has approached this, I think, in a very comprehensive way, and the Congress and Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid have approached this in a very comprehensive way. We are trying to address this on all fronts. We are dealing with a credit crisis. We are dealing with a manufacturing crisis. We are dealing with a foreclosure crisis. We are dealing with home equity problems.
We are dealing with lost wages. We are dealing with all of these issues all at the same time. So, Madam Speaker, we see the President of the United States has taken a comprehensive approach, and I think it's been a good one.
Now, on the backs of 8 years of the Bush administration, some people say, you know, we shouldn't go back and we shouldn't talk about the past, that we should just move on. But we are getting criticized on our side of the aisle for the decisions that we have made based on the problems that were left for us to deal with, and the criticism is coming from the same group of people who put us in the exact same position that we are in and then criticize the solutions that we are presenting because those solutions in some way may be different than the philosophies that got us to where we are. So tonight, Madam Speaker, we are going to talk about some of those solutions.
Now, recently in Congress we have done a couple of different things. We have passed the supplemental appropriations bill to deal with some of the defense concerns. But I think more importantly one of the things that we have done, one of the first things that President Obama pushed for over the course of the first few days in office and between the time he got elected to the time he got sworn in, is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. So, Madam Speaker, although the supplemental is not passed and signed into law, it is on its way and it does reflect, I think, the priorities of not only this administration but the priorities of the Congress.
So let's look at how things are different. Over the 8 years of the Bush administration, we saw the wealthiest in our country get tax cuts. We saw the wealthiest in our country, the top 1 percent, gain all of the income. And it's interesting if you look, and I think it goes back to 1990, and it may be 1980, but I think it was 1990, since 1990 where 80 percent of the income growth went to the top 10 percent of the people in this country.
And since 2000, 90 percent of all income growth went to the top 10 percent of the people in this country. And that means that the middle class has been squeezed. So they are not getting the income growth, their energy costs are going up, gas was $4 a gallon, health care costs were going up by 15 percent. The Congress and the President both, both controlled by the Republican Party, had a very laissez faire attitude, not only for the economy, but for everything, that the government had no role, and it should be parsed off and given to the highest bidder.
And that's what happened in the war in Iraq, that's what happened with health care. And I think it's important for us to remember as we are dealing in these difficult economic times, as tensions are being wiped out, as 401(k)s are being halved, that it was the Republican Party who stood on this floor and wanted to privatize Social Security.
The only thing that many people have left is Social Security. And can you imagine if our friends on the other side had the opportunity to take the Social Security system and put it into the stock market, where this country would be. Imagine where our retirees would be, imagine where our grandparents would be, imagine where our parents would be, and imagine where this country would be if we had to bail out the Social Security system in this country.
And so when we are receiving criticism for what we are trying to do, I think it's important for the American people to remember the big picture and to remember how we got here and to remember that there are two different governing philosophies in this country. And one of the philosophies, as sad as it is to say, Madam Speaker, got us to the position we are in. And we are going to move on, and we are going to talk about our response to this.
But it is critical for everyone to recognize and everyone to know that the Republican, conservative, extreme right-wing agenda was implemented in the United States of America. From the year 2000 to the year 2006, they controlled every branch of government: the House, the Senate, the White House, the Supreme Court. Many of the State legislatures, like the ones that Congressman Boccieri and I come from in Ohio, all were controlled by Republicans.
So they implemented their agenda. They implemented Chicago-style economics. They implemented the shock doctrine. They implemented supply-side economics. And, today, because of a lack of regulation, because Wall Street was run like the wild, wild west, because there were no cops on the beat, here we are today, billions of dollars in debt, borrowing the money from China, a middle class getting squeezed, energy costs going up, increased reliance on the Middle East for our energy, health care costs going up, insurance companies hiring more people and knocking more people off the rolls, any kind of income growth in our country going to the top 10 percent of our people, where everybody else is left behind, school funding problems all over the country, mental health issues, soldiers coming back with PTSD not getting the proper treatment. Walter Reed was falling apart, and on and on and on. So the issues that President Obama is dealing with today and the Democratic Congress were issues that were laid on this table left for us to try to deal with.
And so President Obama came with a plan, a stimulus plan, because there was a $3 trillion hole, gap in our economy. And all the economists were telling us that we had to somehow fill this hole or we would have a continual slide for our country.
And so President Obama, his economists, John McCain's economists, on both sides of the aisle, we are in agreement that we needed to do something. We needed a stimulus package.
And the stimulus package was going to be something different that Washington hadn't seen for a long, long time. This stimulus package was going to go to the middle class. It was going to go for those programs that were going to lift people up, where the middle class would be able to spend money and fill this hole. We were going to invest in education. We were going to invest in energy research. We were going to fund NIH, National Institutes of Health, so that we could increase cancer research.
And now all over the country we have Relay for Lives, all over the country, my congressional district, and I am sure yours, where thousands and thousands and thousands of people are walking for a day, at night and through the night for 24 hours straight to raise money for cancer research. It was President Obama's stimulus package that increased funding for cancer research, because it was a national priority. And we can talk about a lot of the different investments in the research and into energy research, weatherization, tax cuts for 95 percent of the American people.
But I just want to talk for a second about the investments that he made in education. Because there is no greater investment we could make in this country than to invest in the young people in our country and to make sure that they get the kind of education that they need, that they deserve, because they are the next leaders that will be in this body. They are the next teachers. They are the next astronauts, the next scientists that are going to keep America strong in the future.
And so the difference in priorities from the last administration to President Obama can be summed up, and there are a lot of different examples, but I think they could be summed up in this, a $2,500 opportunity tax credit to go to college, where the same parents that we had, growing up, middle class, northeast Ohio, Italian, were working hard to send their kids to school, and that was the number one priority. And President Obama recognizes that and makes sure that that tax credit was in this stimulus bill.
And he made sure that there was an increase in the Pell Grant so that people could get grant money to go to school and then stood up at that podium and challenged the American people, all of us, to go one more year to school and contribute, that it was in the national interest for that to happen. This is a much different approach than President Bush saying after 9/11 the greatest thing you can do for this country is to go shopping. That is a tremendous difference in leadership styles, and, I think, approaches.
And I think the focus on education, as we will continue to talk about it through the next hour, I think is something that is very critical. I think this is the first time we have shared the
floor together. Congressman Boccieri and I started our careers together, I want to say a long time ago, but it wasn't that long ago.
So I yield to my friend.
Will the gentleman yield?
I think coming from our area--and you can go to Wisconsin, you can go to Indiana, you can go to Pennsylvania--you can go all throughout the industrial Midwest and you read statistics that say, Hey, for every manufacturing job, there are five spinoff jobs, and for every service job, there's two spinoff jobs.
So if you go to get a massage, you have the masseuse and then you have somebody that's going to wash your feet and put a warm towel around your neck or clean the towels. If you have a manufacturing job where you're working in a car plant, you have the suppliers of that and the people around the one manufacturing job that support it.
I read this a lot in economics classes and everything else, but it hit me a few months ago when we lost a third and then a second shift at a General Motors plant in Lordstown, because they said that the second shift was going to go, and then about a couple of days later the local seat manufacturer--the second shift was maybe 800 or 900 people.
A couple days later, the seat manufacturer laid off a couple hundred. Then, a couple days later, the logistics company that did all the logistics for coming in and out of the General Motors plant laid off another hundred people. Just the spinoff.
So when we say we need to make things in the United States, it's important to recognize the ripple effect. Ross Perot said in the early campaign in the early nineties, You can't run an economy on back rubs. You just can't do it.
That's something that I think we're staring right in the eye. If you look at the history of the world with the Dutch and the Spaniards and the Brits, when 20 to 25 percent of their GDP became finance, that was the beginning of the end for those countries. Because, like you said when you first started, all you start doing is moving money around. You're not making anything. You're not adding value to a product. And you start these Ponzi schemes like we just ended up having here in the United States.
So I think it's important that we do focus on this manufacturing policy.
I yield back.
Well, we need it I think from the perspective of investing in research and development, but I want to go back to the point you were making about the defense industrial base that we have.
Right outside your district and in my district is Goodyear. Goodyear is the last American tire manufacturer in the United States, and there's a huge movement within the city of Akron, within Summit County, State of Ohio, Federal officials to keep Goodyear's headquarters in Akron.
One of the problems is--and Goodyear is actually doing fairly well now--trying to get Goodyear, the only American tire manufacturer, to be a supplier of military tires. I mean, it's like you've got to beg people at the Pentagon to have Goodyear supply. It's hard to get them as a second source sometimes, to back up Michelin, who is a French company.
Now I was against the war. I thought it was one of the worst geopolitical decisions in the history of our country, and we are going to pay for it for many, many years to come.
But when our country goes to war, you'd better be able to supply our own military. And we are getting dangerously close to losing our defense industrial base in this country. It's tires. And we have the same issue with RTI, a titanium company in our region, both in your district and in mine. There used to be 10 titanium companies in the United States. Now there's two, and one of them is in Niles in Weathersfield Township and one of them is in Canton I think.
And the problem is, there's an amendment called the Berry amendment, which says the military has to buy their specialty metals from American companies. But there's a waiver, and there's this process that always gets waived. So the RTIs of the world have to struggle to get military spending to go to their companies.
So it went from 10 titanium companies to two.
We're getting dangerously close to not being able to supply our own military because the titanium comes from Russia, our tires are coming from France. This is getting dangerous here.
We've got to be very, very careful with that. And I think part of it is the investment, what we did in the stimulus package with transportation, infrastructure, research to rebuild the country in many, many ways.
But if we don't have that defense industrial base, it's going to put us in a real predicament to try to supply our own military.
I yield back to my friend.
If you look at the difference between the past philosophy that got us here where if you cut taxes for the top 1 percent and hope they maybe invest into whatever it is that they invest in, and it hopefully will trickle down to the middle class, cut research funding, fail to invest into higher education, fail to invest into research, fail to invest into health care research, health care technology, you get what we've got. And you end up where we are.
But if you look at the dramatic change in the stimulus package--and we can go through the whole thing. For example, increases in NIH and all the different energy research, weatherization to try to create markets for all these new alternative energy projects,
$7.2 billion to increase broadband access in usage to unserved and underserved areas of the Nation, which will better position us for economic growth so that all of our kids, not just the ones that happen to be in a nice school district where there's a good property tax base, and they have good schools and good jobs, but all our kids can have access to the Internet, and all communities could access broadband, and all hospitals could be plugged into this.
If you look at the billion dollars for prevention and wellness programs, $10 billion to conduct biomedical research for cancer, Alzheimer's, heart disease, stem cells, to improve NIH facilities, if you have a family member who has cancer, Alzheimer's, MS, Lou Gehrig's disease, ALS--they're on the Hill today--this President and this Congress are backing you up.
We're saying, this is a priority. Your family members being sick and the government not putting in the proper resources to do the investment is wrong.
President Obama came in and said, We're going to put science back on the table, and 70 to 80 percent of the American people agree.
And that creates jobs at the Cleveland Clinic, at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, in the Stark County hospitals, Summit County hospitals, hospitals in Youngstown, all of the information technology to make sure that our doctors and nurses and health care technicians aren't making mistakes so that people who go to the hospital don't get hurt because of miscommunications.
This President and this Congress are saying, We've got your back. We're going to make these investments. You can't have a strong country and just wish and hope it may happen.
There are very strategic investments that were made in the stimulus package. And I love some of these people saying, Yeah, but it's one- time money. Well, how about no-time money? No-time money means a bunch of teachers get laid off. That's what no-time money means. And in our State, some of the Republicans are telling Governor Strickland, you know, this is one-time money. What are you going to do next year? Well, we've got to deal with this year.
And we are plugging holes, and we are making sure we are not laying people off, at least as many as we can, prevent as many layoffs as we can. And we have infrastructure money that President Obama made sure was included in here, $2 billion in grant funding for the manufacturing of advanced batteries.
We are now ceding the battery industry to China. President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Reid, the Democratic caucuses, probably 70 percent of the American people thinks that is probably a pretty bad idea. So we can sit here and say, Oh, my God, the Chinese are taking-- we are going to have all these new cars, plug-ins, and the battery is going to be made in China. And we will be sitting here, Congressman, 10, 20 years from now, how are they going to let that happen? We are saying put money into helping companies and universities research this stuff so we can make it in Youngstown, Ohio, we can make it in Canton, Ohio. That is the goal here. And we cannot wish this to happen, and there are difficult decisions that need to be made.
Leadership is lonely, and you've got to make some difficult decisions. But I love the fact that President Obama is coming up and saying, This is what we have got to do. The American people elected me, and this is what I talked about, and this is what we are doing. And in 4 years, I will run again on that record. But let's not sit around and hope good things may happen and our friends on the other side vote against everything.
They borrowed more money from China. President Bush and the Republican Congress, Madam Speaker, borrowed more money from China and from foreign interests than all the other Presidents and Congresses before them combined. They lay this on the table, and we have got to borrow some money to make sure that the economy doesn't completely collapse, and all of a sudden we are the bad guys.
These investments that we are making are critical: Head Start, Early Start, child care development, block grants, supplemental nutrition assistance programs so that our kids can eat, community health centers so that people who can't access health care now can go and get some preventive care before they end up in the emergency room costing everybody billions of dollars.
So these are very strategic investments. These aren't things that we just picked out of the air to throw money at to just say we are doing something. We are going to look back on this time, and we are going to thank President Obama. And we are going to thank the Democratic Congress for making these investments because they will pay great, great dividends for thousands in the long run.
If you look at what all these investments are, infrastructure and science, $120 billion. Now I think you hit the nail on the head. We are at $1 trillion that we have spent in Iraq. One trillion. Now, I don't know about how anyone else feels, and I don't think I'm actually going out on a limb here to say we have a lot of projects in our communities that could use a little bit of that money.
Sewer overflow. My goodness gracious, these cities that are dealing with combined sewer overflow issues is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Sewer lines, septic tanks that need to be cleaned up and sewer lines put in, water lines, roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, health care for our citizens, these are basic investments that our country needs to be making. And this stimulus package is a step in that direction.
And when you look at it, I mentioned the broadband, if you look at $27.5 billion for highway construction, $16.5 billion to modernize Federal and public infrastructure to save energy costs in the long run, $19 billion for clean water, flood control, environmental restoration investments, $17.7 billion
for transit and rail to reduce traffic congestion and gas consumption, these are all programs and investments to help reduce our dependency on foreign oil so we are not in this morass that we get involved in and all these little political situations that we get in because we have to pull oil out of some of these countries to run our country.
Thirty billion dollars to transform the Nation's energy transmission distribution and production systems so we can have a smart grid. Those are good investments. Five billion dollars to weatherize modest income homes. These are investments that we need to make.
Lower health care costs, education, helping workers. Twenty billion dollars to increase the food stamp benefit by over 13 percent. Look at what the Democrats have done even when we got in and had to fight to get a couple of these things done.
We raised the minimum wage for the first time since 1997 when Democrats got in and basically had to jam it down the White House's throat in order to get it signed into law. The largest increase in veterans' spending in the 77-year history of the VA, and we had a lot of people running around this town in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005, who is more patriotic? And it was all red, white and blue when the lights were on and cutting the veterans' health care budget and benefits in the back room.
And when we got in, the largest increase in the 77-year history of the VA. And you see it again with our budget this year. You saw it in the 2009 budget that President Obama signed. You are going to see it again now. You saw it in the supplemental, which we can go over some of the investments that were made. But this is a commitment to our Nation's veterans who served this country so well. Again, an investment in our people. You serve our country, you will be rewarded. Four years of free education if you served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Benefits have increased. We reduced and got rid of a lot of the fees and assessments that were put on by the other side. These are steps.
Have we done enough? Not even close. I'm not here to say, and I don't think anyone else is, to say that we have been in for however long, 110, 112, 114 days, whatever, and things are great now. They are not.
And before you came in, I stated the economic distress of the 17th Congressional District, but these are steps in the right direction. These are steps that are lifting up people that need help. This is not a handout, but a little bit of help along the way to where they can get themselves back on their feet and this economy can get moving again, and then these green jobs, the investments in science, investments in infrastructure, rail and all of these things we are talking about, Rolls Royce, which they are doing in your district which is phenomenal, these are the kinds of things that will grow. But they take some seed corn. They take a little water, a little fertilizer, and the government now, I think, is responsible for doing a lot of that.
So we are making these investments. We will continue to make these investments, and we will continue to, I think, strategically invest the taxpayers' money prudently, judiciously invest the money.
I think the other point there with the stimulus is because credit locked up, that clearly shut down, and still is, we are still getting calls in our office that people still can't get loans. So the TARP money and all of this other help that we have given to the banks has not yet kicked in. If there was not even the stimulus package, imagine what the economy would be doing, if there wasn't a little bit of money in everybody's paycheck. I ran into an operating engineer the other day who was finally getting himself back to work because of some road projects that were happening. All over Ohio, the Governor just made a tour around the State with different infrastructure projects that he was spreading around from the stimulus money. So we are filling this gap. There would be a complete shutdown.
And, yes, we are taking some of this money and, yes, we are borrowing money to make investments now. But imagine the tax loss we would have in this country if we weren't making any investments. And who knows what the yield will be from the investments we are making into energy and the NIH for the Cancer Institute.
I mean, what is the value in the long term of reducing the cost of cancer to our health care system, of Alzheimer's to our health care system? What benefits will stem cell research yield for our country in terms of health care? How many accidents will be prevented because of better communication with the investments into the health care information technology?
These are things that you can't put a price on. And it is the old saying, some people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. And you can't always pinpoint what piece of research yielded the best benefits because all of this research tends to build onto itself.
And we are making these investments now, and we are going to find out in the long run that these were good decisions that we made, courageous decisions that the President has made.
I yield to my friend.
And I would be remiss if I didn't talk a little bit about what we are doing locally here in the last minute between Congressman Boccieri's district in Canton and my district in Akron to Youngstown and also Cleveland, all the way over to Congressman Altmire's district over in the Pittsburgh area, creating a technology belt in which all of the health care and green energy and the legacy manufacturing that we have in this area can help stimulate this mega- region from Cleveland to Akron, Canton, through Youngstown, Warren, over into Pittsburgh, to try to plug into all of this because if areas like ours aren't benefiting from these investments, then really it's all for naught. It's the heartland of our country.
So with that I want to thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania. I want to thank the gentleman from Ohio.