Providing for Consideration of H.R. 3393, Student and Family Tax Simplification Act, and Providing for Consideration of H.R. 4935, Child Tax Credit Improvement Act of 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. PASCRELL. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this rule. I urge my colleagues to defeat the previous question, so that we can offer an amendment to consider my legislation, H.R. 851, the Bring Jobs Home Act. Yesterday, it passed in the Senate 93-7.

Now, there is something fundamentally wrong if we

can't get a boost here, and it passes 93-7 across the board, Democrats and Republicans.

So what are we talking about here? An ``aye'' vote for the previous question is a vote to keep giving corporate America a tax break for every job they ship overseas to China. Let's start there.

Over the last few weeks, I heard a lot about corporate welfare in reference to the Export-Import Bank, before we debate it next week. It costs the government not one dime to help out the businesses. In fact, the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Cole) has 255,000 jobs in jeopardy in Oklahoma.

The Bring Jobs Home Act ends taxpayer writeoffs that pay moving costs when companies ship jobs abroad. We, as a body, have supported in the past giving money to businesses and corporations that send jobs overseas. That does not make sense.

What we want to do is to help those companies to come back because these are good-paying jobs. That is how manufacturing jobs primarily left this country.

Over the last 10 years, 2.4 million American jobs have been shipped overseas, and U.S. taxpayers have helped foot the bill. That, to me, is insanity. It is like paying someone for the rope they are going to hang you with.

Economists estimate that across the country, over 21 million jobs are at risk of being outsourced, 500,000 of them in my own home State of New Jersey.

At a time when we are trying to create good-paying manufacturing jobs in the United States, it quite simply makes no sense for the U.S. taxpayers to help foot the bill for companies that want to outsource jobs instead. My bill ends this taxpayer subsidy once and for all.

Instead, the Bring Jobs Home Act would provide a new 20 percent tax credit for companies that bring jobs back to the United States of America. This will provide a substantial incentive for more and more companies to create jobs and invest right here in our own country.

We are already seeing a trend towards insourcing. Manufacturing employment is up by 600,000 jobs since the end of the Great Recession, and for the first time, in 2013, companies were reshoring jobs at the same rate that they offshored them. We have still got a big hole to dig ourselves out of from 2003, with up to 150,000 jobs being offshored each month. We are still out of balance by about 1 million jobs.

Companies like Master Lock, Caterpillar, Ford, GE, and Walmart even--which is not one of my favorites--are starting to see the value in bringing manufacturing back to this country. We have got the R&D, the infrastructure, the educated workforce, and we have got the consumers, and, again, we have the most productive workers in the world.

It is not just the big guys. More than 80 percent of companies bringing work back have $200 million or less in sales, so let's give these companies a little extra incentive to make it in America by providing them with this tax credit to help our manufacturing economy continue its rebound.

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Mr. PASCRELL. A robust manufacturing-based economy will lead to widespread prosperity for businesses and the people who work there. Manufacturing jobs pay 23 percent more than workers in other parts of the economy, and every $1 in manufacturing sales creates $1.40 worth of economic impact.

Mr. Speaker, it is time to stop the shortsighted policies that stifle investment here in America and focus on what we can do to incentivize investment and job creation. I urge a ``no'' vote on the previous question.

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