Blueprint For Recovery
Floor Speech
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I thank the gentleman for yielding and for putting together the Populist Caucus.
Once again, as Mr. Braley has pointed out, we're populists because we are standing with our feet on the factory floor. We don't have our heads sitting in a board room on a corporation on Wall Street. We do not share their values. We have those working class values that ordinary people have.
This battle that we're in now, this battle for America's future to create the jobs that we need to work our way through today's troubled times and work our way back into prosperity, this battle that we're in didn't just start 10 years ago, it just didn't begin with 10 years of net zero job creation. I will take us back a century because it's really not 2010, it's 1910 all over again. In the words of Teddy Roosevelt, who, on August 31, 1910, in his speech entitled, ``The New Nationalism,'' set forward the idea of the progressive movement and the Populist Caucus--and I will quote him in part because it was a very long speech:
``Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics; that is one of our tasks today. Every special interest is entitled to justice, full, fair and complete. And now mind you, if there were any attempt by mob violence to plunder and work harm to the special interests, whatever it may be, that I most dislike. And the wealthy man, whomsoever he may be, for whom I have the greatest contempt, I would fight for him, and you would if you were worth your salt. He should have justice, for every special interest is entitled to justice, but not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in any public office. The Constitution guarantees protection to property, and we must make that promise good; but it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation.'' We the people have rights, corporations don't.
Now, over the short period of history that we've been here in Congress, beginning in 2006, with Representatives SUTTON and BRALEY and WELCH, we took forward some ideas that we gathered from people. And everywhere I go in Wisconsin, Mr. Braley, people are telling me the same thing: We want our money back, we want our jobs back. For too long, our jobs have been shipped overseas. Instead of our values being shipped overseas, it's been our jobs. And here on my left is a short picture of where the jobs have gone.
During the previous administration under George Bush, just before President Obama came into office in January, we had lost 700,000-plus jobs; this January, 2010, 20,000. We are moving up in the right direction. And, yes, we need to generate more jobs, but how did we get into this mess that started really back in 1910 and we're not done yet? We've had two wars at the same time without paying a dime for it; we've had two tax cuts to the rich without paying for a penny; we've had a $400 billion handout to the big drug companies on Wall Street without paying a nickel for it. And then at the tail end of the last administration we had a looting of the United States Treasury of nearly $1 trillion while they fed their friends on Wall Street, again, without paying a single dime for it. Well, in Wisconsin, much like in Ohio and everywhere else across the country, including Iowa, we have a saying, you know, there is no free lunch, we have to pay our bills.
So we have to pay our bills, we have to live within our means; and to do that, the Populist Caucus has put forward a blueprint for America's future, and I yield back my time.
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In Wisconsin, we have got a number of companies which have run into problems with regard to ``buy American.'' We have buy American clauses in our government contracts today. Yet Miller Electric Company, which makes the finest welding apparatus in the world, put in a bid for a shipbuilding company, a government contract for the Navy. This foreign-owned shipbuilding corporation down in the South decided, instead of buying American, they would use a loophole, and they bought something from a competitor from Germany.
Can you explain how this bill, this Buy American Improvement Act, would close the loopholes in these contracts?
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I thank you. I will just summarize what everyone here on the House floor understands. We are about $2.1 trillion to $2.2 trillion behind in our investment in our infrastructure, our roads, our bridges, our schools, our wastewater treatment plants. What good would it be if we generate several million jobs, even 10
million jobs, when we manufacture things and then we don't have the railroads or have the highways and the water infrastructure to transmit our goods to the world's marketplace? So we are indeed several trillion dollars behind in our infrastructure development.
I will just point out one of the facts about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that few people realize. Apart from the fact that it was the largest tax cut in American history, little known is the fact that the transportation and infrastructure investment, which was only 4 percent of that amount of money we invested in America, generated 25 percent of the jobs.
Nearly 900,000 people are working because of that American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. It put people back to work in our infrastructure. And that multiplier is significant. For every person working in transportation, that money turns over many times over.
So let me just see if I get this straight, if I understand where we are going with our ideas about rewarding people or encouraging people with the taxation code.
If you are sitting in a boardroom on Wall Street and you are rewarding yourself for your failure with the taxpayers' money, according to the Populist Caucus, we would like to put a significant tax on that bonus and use that revenue and put it back into the American economy to generate small business activity through the SBA, put it back into people's hands.
We do believe that people are more important than profits. We should in fact reward work rather than wealth. If I understand the transfer tax on Wall Street speculators, it is one-quarter of one penny of each dollar being traded on nanosecond trades. This is not going to be a fee or a transfer tax placed on those who are speculating for the long-term investment. It is going to exclude any tax-favored retirement accounts, any HSA, Health Savings Account, any Education Savings Account, and would exclude the first $100,000 of your income generated from your investment in America's future on our American exchanges.
Some people have pushed back against that Wall Street transfer fee by saying then people will trade overseas. In London, which is the most active trading floor in the world, they do have a transfer fee twice what we are suggesting.
So, again, the idea is we want to use the Tax Code to reward people for their good activity. And, most especially, we want to use existing structures like our community banks, our credit unions, and regional banks to find the finances and credit necessary for small businesses once again to have access to the credit they need to generate the economic activity and generate the jobs.
Don't think for a minute that the Federal or State government can employ you and work our way through this recession with government-sponsored jobs. We can't do that. So it is the role of government to set up a system wherein you are rewarded for your work rather than your wealth. By focusing on our transportation and infrastructure needs, we can begin to generate millions and millions of jobs to do just that. We want people to stay in their own homes once again, rather than have this foreclosure crisis come back and bite us.
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