The Economy
Floor Speech
The Economy
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Mr. PERRIELLO. Thank you very much, Mr. Himes.
I just want to pick up on what you said about the Greatest Generation. I think part of what made the Greatest Generation great was the concept of deferred gratification--the concept of responsibility. I am going to step up and take care of my family. I am going to save ahead of time. I am going to take that opportunity of the GI Bill, that unprecedented opportunity, to invest in my own education and to help move my family into the middle class.
You look throughout history at empires in decline, and you see this idea--the bread and circus period--in the empire of Rome, and you say, What is it about that? Well, it's the difference between being a culture of instant gratification--I want it for me right now--and a culture of deferred gratification, or a culture of responsibility.
I think what we've seen in the last few years in this country is really a deterioration of culture and not just of policy and of the market. We really have to point the finger in all sorts of different directions--at the private sector, at the household sector, at people buying homes they couldn't afford, at the government sector of turning the other cheek--and not in the good way but in the way of saying, I'm going to ignore what's happening on the other side. We know right now what we need is this new era of responsibility, which isn't antimarket; it's pro-market.
What I hear from so many of my friends who are in the investment community is that I'm sick and tired of being the responsible investor who makes the right decisions, who doesn't take the high-risk investment, and then I see my colleagues or my peers who did take the high-risk, high-return investment get bailed out.
This has to be about a system of rules and predictability that encourages responsible investing. That includes the diversified portfolio, as we all know, whether it's a fewer thousand dollars of our personal money or whether it's someone taking a larger amount to invest for other people. This is that moment where we can say we want those rules of predictability, where we want to close those loopholes so that we're rewarding good behavior and responsible investing in the same way that, in the energy sector, we need to start rewarding innovation, not rewarding the status quo.
What that means is, instead of always being focused on how can we cash in on other people's misfortune or hedge against that risk, it's how can we create a system that is going to perpetuate the very balance that we need in our market in order to move things forward.
So I think what you and others have been saying tonight is crucial in terms of that sense of not just a shift in policy but a shift in each of us as consumers, as politicians and others, about whether we're going to reward the responsibility of the deferred gratification that the Greatest Generation understood and which will make us stronger than ever before and whether we're going to recreate that comparative advantage.
With that, I yield.
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Mr. PERRIELLO. Well, I would just echo, I think you and I both come from similar roots from the mother country in Italy, the motherland, but also what we took from that immigrant experience of our grandparents was that idea that if you work hard and play by the rules, there will be an opportunity for you in this country. When this country rewards hard work and responsibility, this country is better than any on Earth.
But when we get away from those fundamental ideals of American hard work and responsibility, we undermine so much of what makes us different, what makes us special. I was meeting with various members from the EU who were here today in part because Chancellor Merkel was speaking to us. They were talking about that quintessentially American spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship.
The great threat to that in our society right now is not one administration or one policy. It's when the influence on this body and that on the other side of this building is such that it rewards what has worked for the last 20 years instead of what we could be 20 years from now. Capitalism is based on the idea of innovation, on the idea of competition and yet too much in our system we see a rewarding of what has worked, not what could work in the future.
If we are going to deliver for the middle class and the working class of this country, for districts like yours and mine that once had strong factories and manufacturing bases, we must have the courage to think again about not just the financial sector policy, but an industrial policy, an agricultural policy, a jobs policy for this country.
But the first piece of that has to be putting in place the rules that will allow lending to begin flowing again, not just on the macro-level, but to the small and medium-sized businesses that create two-thirds of the job growth in our areas in Ohio and Virginia. But the key to that is predictability. Predictability means that we have a system of rules that people can work within. Entrepreneurship works within a system of predictability.
We need to have that system of accountability so that those who act according to those rules are rewarded for their innovation and success. That is a quintessentially American idea.
Here we are challenged today because both parties in the Congresses before us have failed to live up to that standard. Many on Wall Street have failed to live up to that standard. But as Congressman Driehaus mentioned, the line we will draw is not between the right and the left, but between right and wrong, not between one side of the aisle or the other, but whether we will solve the problem.
What we will hope people will judge us by is did we step up to the challenge of the time and try to solve that problem. I believe the people on this floor tonight are dedicated sincerely to the idea of problem-solving, not to ideology or to the next election cycle.
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