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.
“PUT AMERICANS BACK TO WORK: PASS THE REBUILD AMERICA ACT” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the Extensions of Remarks section on pages E1798-E1799 on Sept. 16, 2003.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
PUT AMERICANS BACK TO WORK: PASS THE REBUILD AMERICA ACT
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HON. JAMES L. OBERSTAR
of minnesota
in the house of representatives
Tuesday, September 16, 2003
Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Speaker, on September 1, we celebrated Labor Day, a day to honor America's working men and women. On that same day, America's most respected journalist, Walter Cronkite, wrote a newspaper column reminding us all of the millions of Americans who are unemployed and the need to put them back to work.
Mr. Cronkite recalled how public investment in our national infrastructure, through programs such as the Works Progress Administration, once created jobs by building new public facilities: highways, bridges, airports, libraries, schools, courthouses, even New York's Lincoln Tunnel and the Overseas Highway linking the Florida Keys.
``The W.P.A. built what in many ways is the America we know today,'' Mr. Cronkite wrote.
I salute Mr. Cronkite for once again reminding us who we are, where we came from and how we got here. I further commend him for recognizing that the same approach that helped America recover from the worst economic disaster in its history, the Great Depression, can and will work today.
Mr. Speaker, a few short weeks ago, I joined the gentleman from Illinois, Mr. Costello, and the rest of my Democratic colleagues on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, in introducing H.R. 2615, the Rebuild America Act of 2003. This bill is designed to put Americans back to work now--within 90 days of the bill's enactment. It invests
$50 billion in our national economy by building and improving roads, bridges and transit systems, expanding airport capacity and enhancing safety, rebuilding wastewater systems and treatment plants, upgrading beds for high-speed service and many other projects.
Over the 10-year life of this bill we can generate $310 billion in economic activity and, most importantly, create 2.3 million jobs.
The Rebuild America Act is built for speed. It gives priority to projects that are ready for construction, thereby creating jobs immediately and giving our economy a quick jump-start. Mr. Speaker, if we were to enact this bill by the end of September, we could be putting Americans to work by Christmas.
And next Labor Day, Mr. Cronkite can write about all the new jobs we created.
I call upon my colleagues to bring up and pass the Rebuild America Act without any further delay, and I commend to you all the complete text of Mr. Cronkite's column, as published in the Sioux City Journal, and I ask unanimous consent to include in the Record a summary of the Rebuild America Act:
Little to Celebrate for Unemployed
So Labor Day comes again. Many will celebrate this annual recognition of the dignity of our American labor force.
But there is little to celebrate for 9 million Americans on the unemployment rolls and somewhere around 1 million others, our invisible unemployed, who we are told have yielded to soul-searing despondency and no longer even seek work. Maybe we should make them visible. We could put yellow ribbons on their homes in the same manner we recognize our heroes, for those civilians who, through no fault of their own, have fallen on outrageous fortune.
As they get jobs, the yellow ribbons would be removed. Perhaps that would make it harder for administration representatives to disguise how serious the unemployment problem really is.
We might note here that the frightening number of unemployed does not include the tens of thousands of others who have lost good jobs in industry and commerce and have only been able to find work in menial or low-paying temporary jobs. At the same time, we see a rise in the U.S. productivity data, an important economic indicator. However, that improvement is in part because thousands of jobs have gone overseas, where wages are lower.
A few days ago, the Labor Department reported that the number of persons filing new unemployment claims last month was the lowest in six months. Good news that things aren't getting worse, but the numbers still leave millions unemployed, an unacceptable figure in a caring society.
With that and some other favorable economic indicators, the Bush administration finds cause to boast. It sees justification of its contention, when it was negotiating its
$1.6 trillion tax cut, that the rich who immediately benefited eventually would put their tax savings back into the economy and thus feed its recovery and gradual re-employment. This trickle down theory might work in time, but the thousands of unemployed don't have that time as their families do without life's essentials--food, clothing and shelter.
To speed their re-employment, there recently have been suggestions, mostly by Democrats, that what is needed is the resurrection of Franklin Roosevelt's formula to deal with the Great Depression he inherited in 1933.
Roosevelt's brain trust believed in ``trickle up'' rather than trickle down--give people work, and the vast payroll spread widely across the country would speed recovery from the Depression.
His program, called the Works Progress Administration, almost instantaneously put one-third of the country's unemployed back to work--some 8.5 million people. The WPA built what in many ways is the America we know today.
In the eight years of its existence (until wartime demands created a labor shortage), the government-subsidized workers built 116,000 buildings--including schools, libraries, hospitals and courthouses--78,000 bridges and 651,000 miles of highways, and improved 8,000 airports. Among the WPA's other monumental achievements: the Golden Gate Bridge, New York's Lincoln Tunnel, Virginia's Skyline Drive and the Florida Keys' Overseas Highway.
A similar project today could answer the urgent need to repair and upgrade the nation's crumbling infrastructure--our electric power grids, our bridges and highways, our dams and waterways, our schools.
Such a program would cost billions of dollars, which our Treasury does not have, thanks to the Bush tax cut and disastrous underestimation of the costs of the Iraq war and reconstruction. What is required now is political leaders courageous enough to defy the maxim that no one ever gets elected proposing higher taxes. They would call for repeal of the Bush tax cut and the imposition of the new taxes that will be necessary not only to put our unemployed to work but to begin reducing the national debt, that financial burden that we are unconscionably about to unload on future generations.
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A Bill to Rebuild America by Investing in Transportation and
Environmental Infrastructure and Security
[Introduced by Cong. Costello, Cong. Davis, Cong. Oberstar and other
Democratic Members of the Committee on Transportation and
Infrastructure, June 12, 2003]
$50 BILLION FOR INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT
Provide $50 billion for infrastructure investment to enhance the safety, security, and efficiency of our highway, transit, aviation, rail, port, environmental, and public buildings infrastructure. By leveraging Federal investments, the ten-year cost to the Treasury of this bill is less than
$34 billion.
Highways, $5 billion; transit, $3 billion; aviation, $3 billion; high-speed rail, $14 billion; passenger and freight rail, $7.5 billion; port security, $2.5 billion; environmental infrastructure, $11.5 billion; water resources,
$1.5 billion; economic development, $1.5 billion; and public buildings, $500 million,
The bill requires these funds to be invested in ready-to-go projects. Priority shall be given to projects that can award bids within 90 days of enactment. The bill also requires funds to be obligated within two years.
The bill includes a maintenance of effort provision to ensure that recipients continue their current investment levels, particularly with regard to infrastructure security.
Finally, the bill allows recipients an extended period of time to meet their state and local match requirements.
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