The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“ISSUES OF THE DAY” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Commerce was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H3962-H3964 on May 15, 2018.
The Department includes the Census Bureau, which is used to determine many factors about American life. Downsizing the Federal Government, a project aimed at lowering taxes and boosting federal efficiency, said the Department is involved in misguided foreign trade policies and is home to many unneeded programs.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
ISSUES OF THE DAY
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2017, the gentleman from California (Mr. Garamendi) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, thank you very much for this opportunity. I am particularly pleased to have the opportunity to follow my colleagues on the Republican side as they were talking about the tax bill that passed the House of Representatives, the Senate, and was signed into law last December.
I always like to start my discussions here on the floor by some sense of purpose, some sense of what, at least, I, and I think many of my Democratic colleagues are trying to accomplish and the many different ways that this might be accomplished. But this is a statement of values. It comes from Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression. It could easily apply to the Great Recession in 2008 and
`09, and it even applies today, and certainly applies to the tax cut that took place in December.
Let me read this to you. He said, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: ``The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.'' A statement of value. A statement of purpose.
Having listened to my colleagues talk about the great tax cut, I think we need to understand exactly what it was all about and the implications of that tax cut and what it means to America, not just to the working men and women that was so well discussed by our colleagues. And indeed, they did get a benefit from the tax cut.
However, I think we need to understand the size of that tax cut. It is estimated that that tax cut will reduce the revenues to the Federal Treasury; that is, to the American Government and all of the programs that it does--funding the military; funding Social Security and Medicare, Medicaid--keeping in mind that about 60-some percent of the Medicaid money across this Nation goes to seniors who are in nursing homes and care facilities; keeping in mind that that money is used to subsidize farmers out there, to provide conservation programs, to educate our kids, to train our workers.
So the tax cut really drained from the Treasury about $1.6 trillion,
$1.8 trillion over the next decade. That is a pretty good sum of money. Where did it go? Who benefited from it? Did the working men and women, the people who, it was so eloquently stated, are sitting around the kitchen table trying to figure out what to do at the end of the month? Certainly there is a benefit there, but do keep in mind that that benefit ends in just five years, six years from now. So it is not a permanent benefit, but it is a benefit that is of importance.
But where did the money really go? We sometimes call this the great scam, because it is sold one way but the reality is different. The top 1 percent and American corporations received 87 percent of that $1.6 trillion. The top 1 percent and America's great corporations.
Presumably, the corporations were going to bring jobs to America. Let me give you two examples. But first, where did the remaining 17 percent go? Well, it went to all the other Americans. It went to those small businessmen and women who were discussed a moment ago, mom and pop sitting around the table. They got 17 percent of the $1.6 trillion.
The top 1 percent of Americans and American corporations took the rest of the pie, 83 percent of it. So what are we to make of this? Well, we can make that, wow, this wasn't how it was sold.
And what did the corporations do with it? Well, out in California--
and I am from California--there is a company called Apple. Keep in mind that they do research in the United States. They develop the various software and apps and so forth. The manufacturing is done over in China, for the most part. Some of the assembly comes back to America.
They were able to repatriate from their overseas earnings, as a result of this, over $100 billion. That $100 billion is going to be used over the next several months and probably year or so to create jobs in America? No. No. That money is going to be used to buy back stock, which will have the very nice event of enriching those who own Apple stock.
Do any of you out there own Apple stock? Well, if you do, it is good. You are going to get some cash. If you do own Apple stock and you don't choose to sell your stock, guess what? The stock price is going to go up because there are fewer shares around and the earnings per share can remain the same.
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It is a great scam. And, oh, by the way, the executives benefit by the stock price going up. So maybe there is something to be said for that.
Another company, Pfizer, big American pharmaceutical company, got about $5 billion to $6 billion of reduced taxes as a result of this tax scam. Did they create jobs with it? No.
The day that they announced that their taxes were going to be reduced by that much, they eliminated their Alzheimer's research program, saying that they would rather spend their money on buying back stock than engaging in pharmaceutical research to deal with the most expensive element of the Medicare program, Alzheimer's, and similarly, Medicare.
Oh, and, by the way, every family in America is affected by dementia and Alzheimer's either directly or indirectly.
So, there you go, the great tax scam.
Now, let me talk about another thing. You may not have known this, but this is infrastructure week in America. Now, the President is off tweeting, as he did on Sunday, which is the beginning of the week, that he was concerned about China. He was concerned about a company called ZTE, which is a big Chinese telecom company that manufactures smartphones or not-so-smart phones.
It seems as though those phones can be used for espionage, and that is why our military will not allow military members to own phones manufactured by this company and not allow these phones to be sold on military bases around the world, because, guess what, China is able to use them, we believe, for espionage purposes, that is, to gather all the information that comes off the smartphone.
So this is infrastructure week, but, apparently, the President, in his tweet, said he is concerned about the lost jobs in China; and, therefore, he has ordered the Commerce Department to end the restrictions on this Chinese telecom company so that that company can buy some things from the United States and can then have a lot of jobs in China. Gee, Mr. President, I thought it was about making America great again, not making China great again.
But I digress. Do you recognize this picture? This is a picture of the Interstate 5 bridge just north of Seattle, and on the other side of this river is Vancouver, British Columbia. American infrastructure, this is infrastructure week in America, the President is off worrying about jobs in China.
I am worried about infrastructure in America. We have some 56,000 bridges in America that are deficient, subject to collapse. Oh, Interstate 5, that is just a little road out on the West Coast that goes from Canada to Mexico, through Washington, Oregon, and California. It is the artery of commerce on the West Coast, and it has an infrastructure problem.
A little closer to my home is this. This is the largest waterfall in America, and, I would dare say, would rival the great falls on the Zambezi River in Africa. This is one big waterfall, or is this a spillway on the largest dam in America? Well, it is both.
It is the spillway at the Oroville Dam that failed a winter ago--
actually two winters ago now. An infrastructure problem just down river from this massive waterfall is a place called Marysville and Yuba City and Live Oak, communities that I represent--200,000 people had maybe an hour to evacuate. Had it not stopped raining, an emergency spillway over here, which was being overtopped, would have failed, and a 30-foot wall of water would have descended upon the town of Oroville in about 30 minutes and downriver in about 2 hours.
Infrastructure in America: 56,000 bridges, tens of thousands of dams, and we have $1.6 trillion taken out of the Treasury, and we wonder why we cannot repair our roads, our water systems, our sanitation systems. It is about that--what was it?--a movie. I forget the name of it now:
``Show Me the Money.'' Well, here is where the money went, to the top 1 percent.
And the President decides that he ought to have an infrastructure plan and he ought to have an infrastructure week, so he develops an infrastructure plan. Here it is, the President's infrastructure plan. It actually was said to be a $1.2 trillion infrastructure plan, and then, you know, we do what we kind of do around here, we read the details, and it was one of those ``OMG'' moments.
The details are: Wait a minute, Mr. President, I know you are worried about jobs in China, but if you are worried about jobs in the United States, your infrastructure plan doesn't measure up. What it actually does, it cuts some--this is over 10 years--$122 billion out of highway safety.
The TIGER grants, which are grants for special projects, some in my district, to repair a two-lane road, which is known as Death Valley, those are gone. Amtrak--anybody travel on Amtrak? Well, they are going to take a--what is that?--$7.5 billion cut; Rural Air Services, half a billion; Army Corps of Engineers, we are talking floods here, we are talking floods in Houston. Well, what do we do there? Oh, yeah. Well, we are going to cut that, too.
The infrastructure plan was a paper tiger. There is no money. In fact, when you added up the money, it was actually less than what we spend today.
We need a real plan. We need A Better Deal for America, and it is the determination of my party, the Democratic Party here, that we can and we must provide A Better Deal for America. Not just in infrastructure, which I will talk about in a moment, but in education, in the environment, in jobs, job training, wages, business opportunities, trade policy. All of these things are part of our program, which we like to call it A Better Deal for America.
It is not the phony-baloney infrastructure program that the President proposed. It is a program that has the potential, if we could enact the laws, to really build a proper infrastructure.
And as we do that, an issue that my team has been talking about for the better part of 8 or 9 years now--this little placard is getting worn out--we call it ``Make it in America.''
We are pleased that the President has taken up that subject. In his speeches during the campaign, in his programs that he put forth, he talks about Making it in America, and I suppose that is why he tweeted out that he was concerned about Chinese jobs and making China great again.
But the Making it in America agenda is based on several things. First of all, a real infrastructure program. There are several that we have proposed, one of which was, unfortunately, made difficult to put in place because of the tax program that the President and the Republicans put forth.
What we wanted to do--remember that money I talked about Apple bringing home? We wanted to take that money that Apple and other corporations had stashed overseas and bring that money back to America, put it into an infrastructure bank, giving the corporations an opportunity to earn a good interest on that and maybe even a profit over time, and use that infrastructure bank to finance infrastructure programs of all kinds: highways, rail projects, upgrading Amtrak, looking at the water systems, the sanitation systems of America.
It could have worked. It has been talked about for years. But with the tax scam having gone into place, that money just came back from overseas and now winds its way to people that already have a lot of money and is used for buying back stock, not used for research and development, which we would have had in the tax plan that we put together.
The gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Delaney) had put together this piece of legislation--bipartisan, could have, should have, would have if the Republicans had cared to work with the Democrats on a real tax plan that would be used to build the infrastructure.
There was a better deal, A Better Deal for America, and a good deal for the corporations and for the wealthy, because as you grow the American economy, we know that people go to work. We know that that then grows the economy, and the entire ship is lifted up by the tide that we would have put in place with that tax program that, unfortunately, was not even heard in committee, not even given a 5-
second review.
But, anyway, we need to move on. The ranking member is a top Democrat on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Mr. DeFazio, has proposed a piece of legislation for the highway system and transit that he calls a ``Penny for Progress.'' It would have increased the Federal excise tax by a percent--by 1 cent. Not a percent, by 1 cent.
And then over the next 20 to 30 years, allow that to increase with inflation and use that to pay back about $400 billion of bonds that would be issued--not much different than the infrastructure bank proposal in which we would use the revenue flow from the excise tax to pay off these bonds so that in the next decade we would not only have the money we presently have, which is about $500 billion or $600 billion over a 10-year period, plus this $450 billion, maybe $500 billion of new money from the Penny for Progress program, and then we can really get things going.
We figure that if we could have done that--and we are not giving up--
we could probably employ 16 million Americans building the infrastructure of America. That is our goal. We are looking forward to A Better Deal for Americans, one in which there is a real infrastructure program, not a phony-baloney, pie-in-the-sky paper talk but not real talk, an infrastructure program that can really develop this Nation.
We are not just looking at the transportation highway system and transit systems. We are also looking at broadband. I represent a large rural community. You can't get internet service out there, let alone broadband service. How can you grow a rural community if you are disconnected from the modern economy? And, unfortunately, too many of my people are.
We need research. I talked about Pfizer taking their tax cut, billions, not investing it in research, not investing it in Alzheimer's, but rather investing it in their stock price. We need that kind of research because from the research comes tomorrow's businesses, comes the next opportunities that are out there.
We need to make sure the wages across America are good. That is why we stand with those organizations that are able to bargain collectively and raise the wage rate of Americans in whatever business, in whatever sector of the economy they may be in.
Another proposal that I will soon be talking about is a much better deal for our maritime industry. It wasn't more than three decades ago that we had about 500 ships that were built in America, they were flagged by American laws, and they had American mariners on it. Today, we have less than 80.
We need to rebuild our commercial shipbuilding opportunities. We need to be able to build ships in America for the export of oil and natural gas, a strategic national asset, because our military, while it may fly here and there, it depends upon shipments across the ocean.
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I can tell you one thing: We cannot depend upon China, or someone other than our own ships, to deliver our military, wherever they may need to be.
We are going to introduce a bill in the coming weeks that we would call ``Energizing the American Maritime Industry.'' Thousands upon thousands of jobs in the shipyards of America; and, when those ships come online, thousands of jobs for American mariners and American security.
A better deal for America includes a lot of different elements: Better education system, better wages, better infrastructure, better research, and better family opportunities across this Nation.
I draw the attention of my colleagues--on both the Democratic and Republican side--to where my Republican colleagues had taken the previous hour. They wanted to talk about the tax cut.
Well, I am going to end up with this, some real news headlines a couple of weeks ago: ``Republican Tax Cuts to Fuel Historic U.S. Deficits: CBO''--the Congressional Budget Office--as reported April 9, 2018, by Reuters; ``Deficit to Top $1 Trillion Per Year by 2020, CBO Says''--the Congressional Budget Office--reported in The Washington Post on April 9, 2018; ``CBO: GOP Policies Add Nearly $1.6 Trillion to Deficit,'' reported by Axios; and ``wider than previously expected deficits and a mostly temporary spurt in economic growth,'' reported by the Wall Street Journal.
If you are looking for a better deal for America, take a look at what our Democrats are proposing. It is a good program. It covers all of the elements that are necessary to see this country remain the wealthiest, remain the strongest, the most vibrant, the most entrepreneurial, and the most opportunity for every American, no matter where they may start in their life. We want all of them to end up with a better life, and we intend to put before them a better deal.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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