American Jobs and the National Debt

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. STUTZMAN. Thanks to my colleague from Arkansas. I appreciate his comments and what he is saying, and I agree with him wholeheartedly. I can tell you as a small business owner from Indiana, coming from a family farm background and having a small trucking operation, all of the talk here on this floor and in Washington doesn't make a lot of sense to a lot of Hoosiers. Growing up in the agricultural industry, it's hard work. And I know that my granddad and my father and other family members, my brothers, they're all willing to work hard. But I can tell you what: When the government makes it difficult, it's tough to go out there and say, I'm going to keep doing it. When the government comes in and says, We're going to make it harder for you to do your business, you start thinking twice, Do I really want to do what I love to do.

Who creates jobs? Is it the government? I know some in this town believe that the government creates jobs. Well, how do they create that job? They take your dollar, my dollar, they collect it in taxes, and then they put it in a pot, and then we have this large entity we call Congress and bureaucracies, and our Federal Government decides we're going to pick and choose what type of jobs we're going to create. We're going to take those dollars that we've collected from the hardworking taxpayer and create a job.

Well, that's not creating wealth. The folks in my district who build cars, they build steel, RVs, and medical devices that help enhance the quality of life. Agriculture. Boats. We're one of the largest manufacturing districts in the country. That's where wealth is created. That is where jobs are created. The government doesn't build any of that stuff. And they shouldn't. They can't do it as well as what the private sector can. But what the government does is spend money. That's why our jobs are looking somewhere else--because of the threat of higher taxes, the threat of regulation.

We've got the EPA that comes in. Most of the folks that come into our office since I've been elected to Congress--this last year, I would say 90 percent of them come in and start talking about the regulation that the EPA and the enforcement attitude that the EPA has on our small businesses. How can any small business grow to be a big business if they're going to continually be hampered by our own government? FDA, OSHA mandates. We're going to be talking about Medicare. What is that going to look like in the future? And taxes.

We hear our colleagues on the other side of the aisle talk about the way government can grow business. The best way is to get out of the way. Right now, America has the highest corporate income tax in the industrialized world. Look at the other countries, whether Japan, Greece. All these other countries are finally figuring out because of just natural economic laws that you can't spend more money than you take in. Why would we want to raise taxes even more when people are starting to say, I'm out of here. I'm tired of doing business here. I don't think my dollar is safe in this country. And they're going to start taking their money overseas. That's why our jobs are leaving.

I believe it's important that we have a flattened tax policy--one that is fair to everybody across the country, one that is not going to pick and choose winners.

I appreciate what you're saying because jobs are not created by the government, they're created by Americans just like Henry Ford. The government didn't subsidize Henry Ford in creating the combustion engine. They didn't go out and subsidize Henry Ford in creating the Ford Motor Company. How many other small businesses started? So many American businesses started in a garage or somebody's shop and grew into some of the greatest companies in the world. But our government now wants to go in and make it more difficult for them and for small businesses.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source