Make it in America: Infrastructure
Floor Speech
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, this chart has been up, really, for the last 4 years, and I keep bringing it back because it is pretty important. This is about American jobs, about how we can rebuild the American economy, and about how we can, at the same time, provide employment opportunities--those middle class jobs that we all want to talk about--and do it in a way that actually improves our environment.
Today, I want to focus on one part of this. I have asked some of my colleagues to join us, and Congresswoman Hahn will be joining us in a few moments to talk about a piece of this.
In the Make It In America agenda, we have these items: international trade, which is critically important that we do right; tax policies of all kinds; our energy policy. Oh. By the way, in the last 5 years, the energy policy of the administration's has almost made the United States energy independent. We are actually producing 4 billion more barrels of oil a day now than we were 6 or 7 years ago, so we do have an energy policy--green energy, moving away from the greenhouse gasses; a labor policy; education, the training of our workers; research, which is critically important. We may come to that later today, but I really want to focus on this one which is at the bottom because it is foundational. The foundation of the economy of the United States is the infrastructure.
Way, way back, the Founding Fathers--everybody around here wants to talk about the Founding Fathers and what the Founding Fathers would do and how they would act. I will tell you what George Washington did in his first weeks in office.
He turned to Alexander Hamilton, the Treasury Secretary, and said: Hey, Alex. Develop an economic development plan for me. How are we going to grow our economy?
Treasury Secretary Hamilton came back--he formed a committee of one, and he came back with a plan of, maybe, 30, 40 pages, and in that plan was fundamental infrastructure development.
He said the role of the Federal Government is to make sure that we have postal roads, to make sure that we have ports and canals--the infrastructure of the day.
So, for those who like to harken back to the Founding Fathers--they ought to also consider the mothers. In any case, infrastructure was fundamental. Today, I want to talk about infrastructure, and I want to do it in a way that will really, hopefully, excite this body into passing a very robust, complete surface transportation infrastructure bill.
Now, President Obama and Department of Transportation Secretary Foxx have made a proposal called ``Build America.'' It is a good proposal that covers all of the elements that we need--the highways, the ports, the railroads, freight. All of those things are in that bill. Unfortunately, it didn't have a hearing last year. Hopefully, it will be foundational this year as we consider in the next 3 months a surface transportation infrastructure bill for the United States because, in May, the world comes to an end as the programs of the Federal Government's for transportation expire. We need a new law going forward, so what we want to talk about today is that issue.
I am going to take just a few seconds. Every now and then, somebody sends brochures and studies to us. This one came from Duke University, the Center on Globalization, Governance & Competitiveness: ``Infrastructure Investment Creates American Jobs,'' and they have got this little executive summary which is really helpful to us:
Old and broken transportation infrastructure makes the United States less competitive than 15 of our major trading partners and makes American manufacturers less efficient in getting goods to market.
Representative Hahn, that is where you want to come in and talk about ports.
This is Duke University:
The underinvestment of infrastructure costs the United States over 900,000 jobs, including 97,000 American manufacturing jobs.
Maximizing American-made materials when rebuilding infrastructure has the potential to create even more jobs. Relying on American-made inputs can also mitigate safety concerns related to large-scale outsourcing.
One of the things that really, really bothers me about my home State of California is the way in which the State of California decided to build the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. We are talking about a multibillion-dollar project, $3.9 billion over budget, 12 years late, and the steel in that bridge came from China. How brilliant was that?
One of the principal reasons for the delay was the steel was delayed, the steel was faulty, and the welds were faulty. There were 3,000 jobs in China and zero jobs in the United States. By the way, the Chinese demanded that they be the inspectors on the job--not good at all. This kind of tells us about why making it in America is important.
There is another example. I don't like to brag about New York, since that is a long, long way from my district, but the Tappan Zee Bridge in New York was built with American steel, had a $3.9 billion total project cost, 7,728 American workers were hired, and it was designed to last 100 years without any major structural maintenance.
I know Ms. Hahn is going to come up here and probably carry on some bragging. We have got a lot to brag about in California, but we cannot brag about what happened with the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge because it was a financial disaster. It was a jobs disaster for the United States, for American workers. Even today, there are continuing reports coming out about the faulty bridge construction.
Infrastructure investment creates American jobs, and if we require that those investments be made in America, we are going to be talking about Americans going back to work. All of us talk about the middle class. Well, let's build the infrastructure, let's use American-made materials, and let's really build American jobs for the middle class.
Ms. Hahn, I believe you have something to say about ports. The fact is that you represent the two biggest ports in America, you will argue: Long Beach and the Port of Los Angeles.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Thank you so very much, Ms. Hahn. The proposal that you put forward almost seems magical. If it was magic, you would have figured it out--and you did--but to use money that is already going into the general fund and divert it back to what it was really intended to--that is the enhancement of our ports--is entirely sensible.
I suppose that I am a coauthor.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Speaking of bridges falling down, this is the Interstate 5 bridge in northern Washington State that fell down 2 years ago. Interstate 5 is the main intercontinental highway from Mexico to Canada through California, Oregon, and Washington. It created a bit of a traffic jam when it went down.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Thank you so very much, Ms. Kaptur.
You notice our Make It In America agenda, they have trade up here at the top, and you very well pointed out the problems that occur with an unfair trade deal, NAFTA being but one.
At this moment, the President has asked us, Members of Congress, to pass what is known as the Fast Track, which basically gives authority to the President to cut a deal and then bring it to Congress, and we don't get to amend it. It is either an up-or-down vote. They say that is the only way they can negotiate.
Well, if that is so, then that is no way to negotiate because we are the representatives--actually the Constitution very clearly leaves to Congress the issue of international trade negotiations.
It is our responsibility, and I am not about to find a situation in which we give to the administration unfettered authority to cut a deal on international trade when you consider what happened with NAFTA, when you consider some of the other trade deals that have hollowed out the American manufacturing sector.
You put that chart up so very clear. Associated with that chart are real lives, real middle class families. We had just over 19 million middle class families in manufacturing in 1990. It went down to just over 10 million as a result of these trade deals that you talked about. We are now beginning to come back up, principally because of cheap energy in the United States, natural gas specifically. So we have got a ways to go here.
We need to be really, really careful, as Members of Congress, representatives of the American people, that we don't give away even more American jobs.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Well, one of the problems--we spent a lot of time talking about this 2 years ago, and it has dropped off the discussion table, although it should come back--is the manipulation of the Chinese currency so that China is able to maintain a very, very significant trade advantage vis-a-vis the United States by the pricing of the Chinese currency. Grossly unfair, something that we need, as representatives of the American people and the middle class and the manufacturing sector, to forcefully address in legislation such as you have just described, where the administration is required to look at the problem, and then make suggestions, or correct the problem if it does not take an act of Congress.
We just can't give it away. We are talking about American jobs. We are talking about the middle class.
The President stood here less than 10 days ago in his State of the Union and talked about the middle class. He called it a middle class economic policy--absolutely correct.
But, at the same time, this trade issue intervenes in that program and, quite likely, will further harm the middle class by hollowing out the American manufacturing sector. So let's be careful here about these trade deals.
You talked about the transportation from Mexico. A few years back, I was the insurance commissioner in California, elected by the people of California, and we were discussing with Mexico the insurance on those trucks that, under NAFTA, were supposed to come into the United States.
At that time, and hopefully this has been solved--I am not the insurance commissioner now, but I remember very well--we were unable to develop with Mexico an insurance policy in Mexico that would transfer into the United States and cover these trucks that were in the United States. They said it wasn't necessary.
Well, my staff and I looked at the details of the insurance and we said, this isn't worthy insurance. This isn't going to protect somebody that is run over by a Mexican truck. So we demanded, and at that time, we actually stalled.
But it appears now that the Department of Transportation is moving forward, and I surely hope that this insurance issue has been solved.
Now, if I might go back to a little bit of infrastructure and the transportation issue, as we pointed out in our discussion thus far, we have to come to grips, within the next 3 months, with a new transportation, surface transportation program for the United States.
And these are real jobs. For every billion dollars--again, this comes from Duke University, which produced this report, ``Infrastructure Investment Creates American Jobs''--the Duke Center on Globalization, Governance and Competitiveness, in their summary, they point out that for every billion dollars invested in transportation infrastructure, there are 21,671 jobs created.
For every dollar invested in transportation infrastructure, $3.54 is returned to the economy.
I have one of those little charts here. This is an older study. I used this 2 years ago. I am going to have to rewrite this because this one says, for every dollar invested in infrastructure investment, $1.57 is pumped into the American economy. That came from Mark Zandi. But this now is 3 years old.
This new study by Duke University indicates that this number, $1.57, really ought to be $3.54. So, wait a minute, fellows. This is even better.
So let's get this transportation bill done. Let's pump it into the economy. And if we just met the minimum needs, as we see them today, it is about $111 billion a year for the next 5 years that we should spend on this infrastructure for transportation.
That is a lot of money. But even $100 billion, we would find that we would create 2,470,000 jobs. That is 58 percent more jobs than the current funding level would provide and over $400 billion in total economic impact.
So if we want to build the economy, if we really want middle class jobs, we would pass a very robust surface transportation program so that the ports, as Ms. Hahn talked about, so that the highways and the trade programs that you talked about, so that all those things could come together, and we could really jump-start the economy and provide that middle class economic impact that all of us are now talking about, including the President. So this could be done, and we fully intend to do it.
I want to pick up another piece. If you would like to join our--to come back into our discussion, Ms. Kaptur, please do.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Thank you so very, very much for bringing to our attention one of your constituents who faced this situation. There were 8 million other American workers who found themselves unemployed as these trade deals went into effect and American jobs moved to Mexico, to China, and other places around the world. So we must focus on Mr. Hahn and on those who share that.
Earlier, I think before you actually came in, I talked about steel. Again, this article was from Duke University, and they have a chapter here, ``A Tale Two of Bridges.'' One is the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge--they have the Chinese flag behind the bridge--built with Chinese steel, almost a $7 billion project, of which $3.9 billion was over budget. It was 12 years late. There were 3,000 Chinese workers hired. Very serious questions have been raised about the quality of the construction.
The State of New York, the Tappan Zee Bridge, built with U.S. steel. The total project cost $3.9 billion. 7,728 workers were hired, and it is designed to last for 100 years without major maintenance. There is Mr. Hahn's job. It is that U.S. steel, made in America.
I very quickly want to give two examples of where Make It In America really, really counts. This is one I have often used. This is near my district--in fact, about a mile or two from my district in Sacramento, California.
In the stimulus bill, in 2009, there was a provision for some $600 million, $700 million for Amtrak to buy new locomotives for the east coast here. This is an electric locomotive. There was a sentence added to that $600 million, $700 million law for it to be 100 percent American made.
Now, nobody was making locomotives in the United States at the time, nobody. But Siemens, a German company, looked at it and goes, 70, 80 locomotives; a $600 million, $700 million contract; made in America--we could do that. So the German company, Siemens, used a plant that they had in Sacramento that was making light railcars and said: Okay. We are going to make light railcars, and we are going to make locomotives.
They are now producing the locomotives 100 percent American made. Hundreds of jobs in the Sacramento area. And then all across America, there are manufacturers that are making the wheels, probably making the doorknobs or the system that attaches to the electrical line overhead.
Made in America. Why? Because Congress wrote a law--by the way, no Republicans voted for it; this was the stimulus bill--made a law that said it must be 100 percent American made.
I don't have a picture. I wish I did. If I had thought about it earlier, I would have brought one.
We are now in the process of deciding how much of our natural gas we are going to export. It is called liquefied natural gas, LNG, liquefied natural gas. There is an export plant, a $20 billion export plant built on the gulf coast in Texas, owned by a company called Cheniere. They are 3, 5 months away from the first export of that natural gas. There is a lot of discussion about how much we can export without driving up the price, and that would be very harmful to American consumers--home heating, manufacturing, and the like. But what they do export will take 100 ships to export from that single export terminal, 100 ships.
And I am going: Let me see now. Natural gas is a strategic national asset that has allowed for a reduction in the cost of energy in the United States, extremely important. American mariners are absolutely essential to our national defense, as are the domestic ships. Thirdly, the shipyards are essential for the U.S. Navy. These are three strategic assets that the United States has.
I proposed an amendment last night in the Rules Committee that almost was adopted that said, if we are going to export a strategic national asset, then let us also build two additional strategic assets. The mariners, the captains, the mates, the seamen, let them participate in this export of natural gas, and let's build the ships in America.
There are five terminals that are presently authorized for construction. Cheniere has completed a second terminal of about the same size. It is going in near Corpus Christi, Texas. And there are three others. So we may be talking somewhere between 300 to 400 ships needed to export a strategic national asset.
So my legislation would say, okay, then let us enhance our Nation's security by building those ships in America. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of American jobs in our shipyards, in our manufacturing facilities in Ohio, building the pumps and the pipes and the valves and the compressors that are necessary. This is a big, big deal. And while we guarantee those jobs for the American shipyards, we also strengthen the U.S. Navy's ability to build ships at a reasonable cost.
We could do it. We could actually do this with one simple piece of legislation that isn't more than 20 lines long. Now, that is exciting.
Trains, planes, ships. It is in America's future. It has been in our past. And it is the policies, the policies of the American Government, that set these in place and in motion.
Isn't that exciting? We can do that, Ms. Kaptur. We can do that. And we can move production to Ohio manufacturing, the shipyards on the gulf coast, the east coast, and the west coast. It is all there for us.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Exactly so. Exactly so. It is absolutely critical to our national defense that we have a strong maritime industry. We used to have the biggest maritime industry in the world. We have just given it away for many, many different reasons. But it can be rebuilt.
I want to give one more example, and then I am going to wrap. And if you would like to participate in the wrap, then we can do that.
At this moment, Amtrak is out with a request for a proposal to build 30, 33 new trains, high-speed rail trains for the northeast corridor, from Washington, D.C., to Boston, high-speed trains that can go 160, 200 miles an hour, reducing the commute time. That request for a proposal to manufacturers around the world is coupled with a waiver of the Buy America requirements. We are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars of American taxpayer money and a waiver of the Buy America requirements because Amtrak said they don't build them in the United States. Well, that is true. We don't build high-speed rail in the United States, and we never will if we give waivers.
But if we set in place a solid requirement that American taxpayer money is going to be spent on American-made equipment, we will build in the United States facilities to manufacture high-speed rail. The same thing applies in California with the California high-speed rail system.
In our future, we will have high-speed rail. The question for us in our policy debates is: In our future, will those high-speed rail trains be built in America, or will they be built in China or Korea or Japan or Europe?
I want them to succeed. But, by God, I want America to succeed, too. And I know that if we stick to this Make It In America agenda, we will rebuild the American middle class.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. It is exciting, Ms. Kaptur. It is very, very exciting that a policy statement, a law put forth by 435 of us here and 100 over in the Senate can really dramatically alter America's economy and do it in a way that doesn't really cost us more money but simply requires that our tax dollars be spent on American-made equipment so that American workers can prosper.
Now, if somebody wants to go out and use their own tax dollars to buy goods from China, that is their business. Fine, go do it. But if it is your tax dollars and my tax dollars, then it ought to be made in America.
Mr. Speaker, thank you for the time.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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