Job Creation

Floor Speech

Mr. DUFFY. I appreciate the gentleman from Arkansas for yielding.

Just quickly, we have heard a lot about the President's jobs bill, and I think everyone in this House agrees that this country needs more economic growth and it needs more jobs. I'm from Wisconsin, and a lot of folks in Wisconsin and across the country want to see the folks in Washington and in Madison start to get along, try to find points of agreement instead of points of disagreement.

So the President came up with this jobs bill. I said, you know, Mr. President, I can agree with you that we need tax reform. I can agree with you that we need regulatory reform. And I can also agree that we should probably extend the payroll tax holiday.

But the President has gone a step further, and he wants to have a second stimulus. He wants to spend nearly half a trillion dollars because he believes more government spending will lead to economic growth, prosperity, wealth, and sustainable jobs. And we tried that to the tune of a trillion dollars. That doesn't work. But when the President talks about tax reform right after he gives that speech, a week later he comes out and says, my idea of tax reform is to raise taxes.

This doesn't make sense. Do you think that you help the job seeker by raising taxes on the job creator? He talks about reforming regulation. But all we see is more and more regulations coming from the agencies and the White House. And what that does is it makes America less competitive. It's pretty easy to see that we are a global economy; and in this country, we pay our employees more. I think we can do that because American workers are harder working, they're more productive, and they're smarter. But on top of that, our businesses have far more mandates, far more regulations, far more red tape; and now they're going to pay far more taxes.

With that kind of environment, how do we expect our businesses, our manufacturers to compete on this global scale? Sometimes people in Washington sit back and they scratch their head and they say, why are businesses leaving? Well, Washington has made it uncompetitive for American industry and American small manufacturers to compete, succeed, win, and put our hardworking families back to work.

I come from northern Wisconsin. You may not know this, but I grew up doing lumberjack sports. That's chop, saw, logroll, and tree climbing, skills of the old-time lumberjack. That's how our whole region was built. Paper is still a huge industry where I come from, and the EPA was coming out with a Boiler MACT regulation. If that were to have gone through, that would have killed Wisconsin paper, it would have rippled throughout our whole economy, and it would have killed thousands of jobs in our community.

Just the threat of Boiler MACT has sent ripples through the economy. If you look at our loggers--this isn't small business, this is big business. They have big loans and big pieces of equipment, and they can't access the national forest. There are policies coming from this town that make it so much harder for our small businesses to succeed, compete, grow, and hire our hardworking people.

We have to switch around. I'm not a farmer. I said I was a lumberjack, but I do have a garden. And I think the economy is much like a garden. When you garden, you have to have good seed and good soil. Right? And you have to have sun and water. If you put that all together, it's amazing, your plants will grow. Once in a while, you can throw a little Miracle-Gro on them, and they grow a little more. The economy is no different. You can't have no sun and bad soil and just pour Miracle-Gro and expect the plant to grow. It doesn't work that way. We need to set the environment for expansion and growth and American competitiveness. That's not happening right now. We need to change these policies.

So look at what we've done in the House. In this House, those are the bills we've passed. We've passed bill after bill after bill that makes the environment more competitive for American industry, which means we would have more jobs in America, and they die in the Senate. And I think it's almost fruit loop legislation in the Senate, which is no legislation.

Until we start to turn this process around, start to focus on points of agreement that will turn the economy around and put our people back to work, I think you're going to see a continued discontent of people in this country with this town.

So with that, Mr. Griffin, I'm proud to be here with this freshman class doing the hard work in a bipartisan way, trying to change the environment to put our families back to work.

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