Make It In America: The Economy
Floor Speech
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Mr. RYAN of Ohio. If the gentleman would yield too, I'd just comment on the infrastructure piece.
So here we are today, needs abound in the country, both rail, combined sewer, highways, bridges--I mean, each of our counties, you pull out how many bridges in our counties aren't up to specs; I think it's like 50 or 60 just in one of my bigger counties.
These projects are only going to get more expensive. The energy costs going in are going to get more expensive, the labor costs are going to get more expensive. Everything associated, the materials, everything associated with what needs to get done is going to become more expensive. So I think the good business move, on behalf of the taxpayer, would be to get this done now, get people back to work.
And I recognize that we're still running deficits. But the interest rate at which we're borrowing the money is minimal, 1, 2 percent.
So we're going to wait. Here's what's going to happen. We're going to wait. Accidents are going to happen, bridges are going to collapse, things are going to just need to get done, and then these local governments, State governments, we're going to have to go out and borrow the money at 4 or 5 percent, as opposed to 1 or 2.
So I think as we're thinking about this, it's not that we're sitting here saying, oh geez, we don't have anything better to do, let's just spend a bunch of government money. No, these are strategic investments. Like in Virginia, they're going to increase productivity so people aren't sitting in their cars. They're more productive, have a higher quality of life, more time with their families, all these things that we say are very important.
So, to your point, we're going backwards, because at some point this stuff's got to get done.
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Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Well, one of the things that you were talking about--and I just started to learn more and more about this new additive manufacturing. And there's a center in Youngstown, Ohio now that's a regional center for additive manufacturing.
So the old school manufacturing is you would cut things out, and they called it subtractive manufacturing. The new stuff is a printer that you have that would be like the printer you have in your office, except you pump material into it, and instead of ink on a piece of paper, it's a material that would make a component part. And the cost is down now to about $700 or $800 for these things. So this is the next generation of manufacturing.
And I bring it up because the President put together a proposal, Department of Energy, Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, to partner with the private sector to create one of these innovation institutes. And he wants to do 15 more for a billion dollars.
If you would see the activity going on in Youngstown, Ohio now, the companies that are partnering with us, with the private sector, with Carnegie Mellon, it goes all the way to Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon, Case Western Reserve, Youngstown State, University of Akron, Lehigh, Penn State, West Virginia--we've got to get Buffalo in this somehow.
But the point is, public/private partnership to expedite the development of new technologies. And the President and his team get this. And Democrats, we get this.
We've got to get away from this narrative that anything the government spends money on is bad; it's a waste of your tax dollars. Whether it's infrastructure, whether it's public/private partnerships like this additive manufacturing institute or the other institutes that we need to create, that's the seed corn for the next generation of alternative energy, windmills, solar panels, whatever the case may be.
We don't know what it is. That's why the recipe has always been to invest in this basic research, put these public-private partnerships together, and magic will happen. Because you have the basic scientific intellect and intelligence there, partnering with the private sector, who has a profit motive, and magic happens. And now we've gotten a scenario where government has no role here. No role at all. And it's not either/or. So I'd like to ask my friends who think it's either/or, what other relationship with another human being do you have that that's that black and white?
This stuff is complicated. It's complex. It takes nuance. And that's what's happening in Youngstown, and I think it's a good example of what can happen around the country in older areas where we don't have the local tax base that we used to have, to have the Federal Government come in. And you should see the ripple effect already happening--and it's a beautiful thing--but it takes that kind of comprehensive plan.
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Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And you look at what our top competitors are spending as a percentage of their GDP. I think we're at 1 percent of our GDP that we spend on infrastructure. It maybe went up to 2 during this recovery package. But if you look at India and China, it's 7 or 8 percent of their GDP. Now, granted, they're still developing in so many different ways. But for us to be at 1 and they're at 6, 7 or 8, how are we going to be able to keep up when our infrastructure is so much older?
It's time to rebuild America. And I don't know anybody in my district, Democrat or Republican, who's really not for that. I've had Republican friends of mine have the light bulb go off and they say, Wait a minute. We're going to have to do this at some point. And we've got a high unemployment rate and we've got low interest rates. This doesn't make any sense to put it off.
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Mr. RYAN of Ohio. As you said, you've got to ship that stuff. That stuff needs to be shipped. It needs manufactured and then it needs to be shipped somewhere on a road and over bridges and ports and airports and logistics facilities and everything else. You've got to make that investment, and that'll grease the wheels of the commerce.
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