“THE BUDGET CRISIS” published by the Congressional Record on April 7, 2011

“THE BUDGET CRISIS” published by the Congressional Record on April 7, 2011

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Volume 157, No. 50 covering the 1st Session of the 112th Congress (2011 - 2012) was published by the Congressional Record.

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.

“THE BUDGET CRISIS” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Energy was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H2510-H2514 on April 7, 2011.

The publication is reproduced in full below:

THE BUDGET CRISIS

The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from California may proceed.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I would love to see what that message is. I think we got some sense of it earlier in the day. And I suspect it speaks to the issue of the continuing resolution, and it is the effectuation of the promise he made earlier in the day that should the legislation that passed here about an hour-and-a-half ago, 2 hours ago, that is the continuing resolution, should it arrive on his desk, he will veto it. I haven't seen it, but I will bet that's what's in that envelope.

Ms. JACKSON LEE of Texas. If you could yield for a moment, I want to thank the gentleman for the clarification, for separating out. I want to add something. Medicare is a program that is going to be wholly privatized and income driven without any basis in substance; meaning, plainly, if you are more wealthy, this has nothing do with how you would do Medicare today, as someone suggested that you staggered the amounts on income. This has to do with, if you can even get Medicare, it will be because you have enough money to get Medicare because it will be in that system.

Then, of course, there is some little secret backroom corner where they throw something out about a public system that is not even defined.

But you make a very good point about nursing homes, which I have a lot in my district. In fact, we are always hearing from them regarding maintaining their status. And certainly we are very keen to make sure that these nursing homes meet their own standards. But they provide refuge and rest, if you will, for not only the seniors, but the frail and the disabled.

And I just want to paint this picture for you, Mr. Garamendi. I just want to paint the picture for you of no room at the inn, lights out, doors wide open, and the drumbeat playing as people are being rolled out of nursing homes in wheelchairs, with crutches, some on beds. Maybe we can just imagine the tragic scenes of Hurricane Katrina, when nursing home residents were pouring out of nursing homes in the wake of the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. Well, let me tell you, we've got Hurricane Ryan, and there is a disaster coming. And, frankly, with all good intentions of our good friends on the other side of the aisle, if we had sat down at the table of compromise and projected how we can best serve America by reducing the deficit, the debt, and recognizing that we have morality and we have values that will help this country.

{time} 1540

Might I just say that we are talking about seniors, but don't forget there are many, many families that take their children to pediatricians on Medicaid, and that's their primary care provider just like Medicare.

So I would just simply add this word that I am not ready to bury Medicare now; and I believe there is a rejuvenation, there is a rebirth coming, and that is the American people saying, no, not on my watch. This is a non-starter, and I am glad to be standing with you today.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Well, do you think this particular gravestone here doesn't have to happen?

Ms. JACKSON LEE of Texas. I believe if we stand committed to educating the American public, it should not happen.

Mr. GARAMENDI. I am going to take this down because I know that the American public, whether they are seniors now or will be seniors in the future, understand the incredible importance of Medicare to the American society. Whether you are young or old, you know that Medicare has always been there since 1964 to provide medical services to those people 65 and over and some who are younger than 65 that have gone through terrible medical circumstances and unable to care for themselves.

So we are going to take this tombstone, and we are going to bury it, along with Mr. Ryan's proposal to terminate Medicare as we know it. So let's be aware, American public, what's at stake here with the proposal that's coming down from the Republican caucus and from Mr. Ryan.

I want to take up another subject and cover it briefly, or maybe not so briefly, and this has to do with the subject matter at hand, which is the deficit. We need to understand where the deficit came from.

The deficit didn't just get created in the last couple of years. Certainly, the Great Recession had a lot to do with it, the stimulus package, made up of two parts, one part was the bank bailout, $700 million or more, almost all of that has now been repaid to the Treasury, so we don't have to worry about that being the a big part of the deficit. A little bit remains, but most of it has been repaid.

The second part was the stimulus, some $750 million. That was borrowed money that is part of the deficit. But that also created, or it maintained, well over 2 million jobs here in the United States. Those people that stayed at work were continuing to be employed and to pay taxes.

You can imagine what would have happened had the stimulus not been there; but, nonetheless, it is part of the deficit. But that doesn't account for all of the deficit.

Let's go back to where Ronald Reagan was President. At the end of each year, the Congressional Budget Office takes a look at status of the budget of the United States and says here's what's happening today and here's the projection for the future. They do a 10-year projection.

At the end of Ronald Reagan's term, the Congressional Budget Office, nonpartisan, not Democrat, not Republican, looked at the budget, looked at the economy and said, well, the way things are, we can project for the next 10 years that the budget will have a deficit of $1.3 trillion.

So Ronald Reagan left office with a deficit. He was followed by George H.W. Bush. And the same projection was made every year, and every year the deficit grew so that at the end of the George H.W. Bush administration, before Bill Clinton took office, there was a projected additional deficit of about 3 trillion additional dollars.

Bill Clinton came into office, changes were made, Balanced Budget Act went into effect, PAYGO which required laws to be paid for with new taxes or with cuts--no more deficit financing for new laws--came into effect; and at the end of the Clinton administration, the normal process took place at the end of that year. What will be the deficit going forward?

Whoa. You mean, there is no deficit? Yes, the Congressional Budget Office estimated at the end of the Clinton period that there would be a

$5 trillion surplus, literally paying off the entire debt of the United States. Policies were put in place during that Presidency, Democrat, Republican votes on both sides that would, in the 10 years, 2001 to 2010, terminate the American debt.

However, in 2001, George W. Bush and the Republicans in control of the Congress and the Senate passed a massive tax cut that immediately turned that projected surplus into a projected deficit of well over a trillion dollars. The next year, the Afghan war was under way and the Iraq war was begun, two wars, the first time ever in America's history that a war was under way for which there was no way to pay for it except to borrow money.

In previous wars, World War II, World War I, the Civil War, the government raised taxes to pay for the war; but not these two wars. This was entirely borrowed, all of the cost of it. And right now the Afghanistan war is costing $100 billion to $120 billion a year and we just voted today, not more than an hour and a half ago, for $157 billion for the Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq wars, $157 billion.

Now, again, this is all on borrowed money. Despite efforts by the Democratic Caucus to raise money, raise taxes for those wars, taxes on the highest, wealthiest Americans, those votes failed.

Now, the rest of the story is this. My friend, Mr. DeFazio, talked about the Medicare drug doughnut hole. The Medicare drug doughnut hole was added during the Bush administration, well over $600 million a year, again, not paid for but rather borrowed money.

And then the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, that Great Recession added to the deficit because employment plummeted along with tax revenues, so that at the end of the George W. Bush administration, this Congressional Budget Office did what it had done every year in the past 50 years, did a projection, in the next 10 years, what will be the deficit.

Guess what the number was? $11 trillion-plus dollars.

And so during the 2001--2010 period, an enormous growth in the American deficit, Barack Obama came into office in January of 2009. And the day he took office, he had an annual budget deficit handed to him of over $1.3 trillion. The George W. Bush legacy was handed directly to Barack Obama the day he took office, over a trillion dollars. We have to work ourselves out of this hole.

This is a deep, dangerous hole and we have got to work our way out of it. We have to do it with wisdom, we have to do it with intelligence, and we have to always keep in mind where we need to go. Two paths: one, bring the deficit down; and, two, provide those services that are desperately needed by Americans: Medicare, Medicaid, education, services that provide people the opportunity to get jobs. Those are fundamental investments that we must make, research and the like also included.

Simultaneously, we must always achieve efficiency and effectiveness in every governmental program, wherever it happens to be. We know that the medical systems in the United States are inefficient, so the proposal put forth by our Republican colleagues to privatize, destroy Medicare, does nothing to deal with the inefficiencies of the medical system.

There are three parts to the medical system: the collection of money, the payment of claims, and the provision of services. Medicare happens to be the most efficient delivery in the collection of money, the payment of claims and the delivery of services of any of the medical services and medical systems out there.

{time} 1550

The private insurance companies, however, are the least efficient, the least efficient created because of the numerous policies that they offer, confusion to the purchaser of the policy, whether it is an individual or business, and to the provider of services. Go into any hospital, and one of the biggest sections in the hospital is not the emergency room, not the operating room, not the intensive care unit. It is the administrative unit. Why? Because they have to deal with thousands of different policies, different deductibles, different copays and different policies from different companies. ``Is this going to be paid?'' ``Who is going to pay that?'' and so forth, creating the least efficient medical delivery system in the world. A full 40 percent of all of the medical costs are in administration.

Keep in mind that Medicare, on the other hand, is the most efficient, spending no more than 3 percent in collecting the money and paying the bills.

So the proposal that we have before us by the Republicans to terminate Medicare and hand it over to the insurance companies will create even additional costs and more inefficiency in the system, less effectiveness. That is not the way to go.

We talked earlier about the dreaded doughnut hole for Medicare seniors. Why was it that the Republicans refused to allow the Federal Government to negotiate prices with the pharmaceutical companies? It is the most ineffective, inefficient and stupid thing in the world to spend tens and hundreds of billions of dollars a year on drugs and not be able to negotiate but simply to be a price taker, not a negotiator, not to use your purchasing power to negotiate.

I don't understand--well, I do understand. I know exactly what it is. It has to do with the effective lobby and contributions of the pharmaceutical industry. Wrong, wrong, wrong. We can and we must go to the medical system and seek efficiencies, and it can be done.

I have spent a lot of my time as insurance commissioner looking at how it can be done, and we will go into that at another time, but I will give you a couple of items along the way.

A doctor goes into a hospital and scribbles on a piece of paper what he believes to be wrong with the person. He writes on a piece of paper in illegible handwriting what the pharmaceutical will be. Medical errors abound. We know that, in fact, infections occur in hospitals. We know that readmissions occur in hospitals. All of those things need not exist in America. We can significantly reduce the costs of medical services by instituting electronic medical records. That can be done, and, in fact, in the health care reform bill, the Affordable Care Act, it is done. Republicans want to repeal that. Somehow they think that that is going to reduce costs. I don't think so. Nonetheless, that is what they want to do.

There are many other things that can be done. Infectious rate, readmissions, we need to be in front of illnesses. We need to have public health services. But yet in the CR, the continuing resolution that passed this House just this day not more than 2 hours ago, the clinics in America are reduced and people will be lined up in the emergency rooms. We know that is the most expensive place in this Nation to get medical care. Yet we get this kind of CR that comes through here, this continuing resolution to fund the government that reduces clinics all across this Nation.

Well, I think I need a glass of water, and I notice that my colleague from Colorado (Mr. Perlmutter) has arrived to join us in this moment.

Thank you for coming here.

Mr. PERLMUTTER. I thank my friend from California. I hope you don't go too far for that water, because I want to express my concern about the way the Republican Party, the majority in the House, is providing for running this country. It is a pretty frightening set of circumstances that we have when this country is run on a week-to-week basis; the funding for our troops, the funding for our transportation, the funding for Medicare, for Social Security and for health care of all kinds is on a week-to-week basis. It is very difficult for a family to operate on a week-to-week basis. It is nearly impossible for a business to operate on a week-to-week basis. But apparently for my friends on the Republican side, it is okay for the Nation to run on a week-to-week basis.

So today, in what they, I think, believe was a great accomplishment, provide for another week of funding so that the various parts of our government, whether it is education, transportation, homeland security, the military or Veterans Affairs, all those kinds of things are just operating on a one-week basis. That is no way to run a railroad or a country.

We have got to do much better than this. And there is no question that we have budgetary issues that this Nation has to confront. My friends on the Republican side of the aisle would like to take it all out, deal with the whole budget, but only in a very slim part, in effect, punish a very tiny part of the budget for the ills that I would say occurred under the Bush administration: big tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, prosecute a couple wars without paying for them, and then allow Wall Street to run amok without any police. That's what caused the debt.

Energy efficiency didn't cause the debt in America. Preschool programs didn't cause the debt in America. The National Institutes of Health didn't cause this debt in America that we really do have to deal with today, there is no question about it. But those are the people, those are the things that they would like to blame for the debt. It is across the board. And there has got to be a shared sacrifice. Both millionaires and billionaires have to put up as part of their approach to all this. There has to be a revenue component to this as well as an expense.

And so I would say to my friend from California that this 1-week approach to managing something as big as America is crazy, and it has got to stop. We need to have a real budget and real appropriations so that people that do business with the government can have solid expectations for their contracts and people that work in the government know that they are going to get paid, people that receive benefits in one fashion or another know that next week things will keep going. Because this country is great and it is strong and it will be here a long time after any of us. But this month-to-month, day-to-day, week-

to-week approach to management is just bad news for America. I hope it changes very soon.

I would return the mic to my friend from California.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Two hours ago, the Republicans in this House passed, without Democratic support, a continuing resolution for a while, and there were cuts in those. For the most part, there was no debate here on the floor about specific cuts, but you raised these issues. I'm going to put some numbers to what you talked about. The Women, Infants, and Children program, the WIC program, is for pregnant mothers at risk during their pregnancy and then after their pregnancy so they have adequate nutrition and health care so they have a healthy baby. It saves us money. If that baby is not healthy, it is going to cost a lot of money. The Women, Infants, and Children program, the WIC program, there is a $200 million reduction in it.

We like to fight crime; right? Well, $149 million out of the construction account so that there can be police stations and other facilities for the police across the Nation.

You mentioned environmental issues. $192 million from the Department of Energy's environmental cleanup. What are they cleaning up? They are cleaning up the nuclear waste material from the previous Cold War nuclear programs. We know a lot all of a sudden about nuclear contamination. Oh, good, we are going to take $192 million out and just leave that nuclear waste out there to do what it is going to do, and it won't be good.

And also, there is another. You mentioned the banking industry. We know that between 2001 and 2008 the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve just said they will regulate themselves; we don't need to police the banks. And so we wound up with the great crash.

{time} 1600

Well, we passed the Wall Street reform. We put in serious policing. We are going to police those characters. We are not going to let them get away with ``greed is good'' and rip off the public. We need policemen. But the Republicans don't believe in this, so they took a total of $590 million out of the financial services programs. These are the policemen that protect America's financial future.

We got a call from CalPERS and CalSTRS, the two big California pension agencies, which came to Congress and said: Do not do this. Wall Street needs to be policed. Don't cut the police.

I'm going to do a couple more. Let's see, how about clean water and drinking water, $700 million out of the clean water fund. This is for communities to build water systems so there is clean water. You go through this and you say: What are they thinking?

Okay, your turn. Continue on.

Mr. PERLMUTTER. And I would say to my friend, look, I wish we were not here. I wish that, going back to 2001, 2002, I wish President Bush hadn't had the country take a voluntary pay cut. We were on the road to a surplus. We were almost done getting rid of the debt. But, no, we are just the opposite right now because we took a voluntary pay cut to this country.

Then we prosecute two big wars, to the tune of a trillion dollars. And under the Bush administration, they had those wars on a whole set of different books. They didn't really account for it as part of the debt of this country. Now, under President Obama, we have real accounting, so we know how bad the books look. And then we had this crash on Wall Street. Now those things all add up to a lot of debt. There is no doubt about it. And when the country hit the crash, the income to the country dropped and the expenses went up.

I don't think we should ever forget how we got here, but we are here, and we have to deal with it. So I respect people who want to confront this, but the values and the priorities that are being expressed by the Republican Party in how to deal with this are just so misplaced. They want to maintain the tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. They want to maintain tax cuts that encourage people to send jobs overseas. And they want to maintain tax cuts for oil companies when we are at

$105 or $106 a barrel, for goodness sake. You don't need much encouragement to start drilling at that high a price.

So those kinds of things have to be looked at very closely when all of a sudden you are taking it out of a number of those programs and people that you talked about: early childhood, health care, education, and transportation. We are going to have to share this sacrifice, no question about it. And as Democrats, we are prepared to do that. It isn't going to be fun. It isn't a lot of excitement when you really have to manage those expenses, but you also have to have the revenue to deal with the budget that we have in front of us.

My friends on the Republican side of the aisle would like to say, you know what, nobody really has to pay for these tax cuts, nobody really has to pay for sending jobs overseas. They are wrong. They are just flat wrong.

We have to change this. And they are in the majority. They are running the show here in the House. This one week at a time, that's a joke. Nobody can really manage, and people doing business with the government, with the country, they need to have some firm confidence in what is going on.

My friends on the Republican side of the aisle just keep undermining the confidence of people doing business in this country. So we have a lot of work to do. It really is going to take both sides of the aisle. I appreciate the President rolling up his sleeves and trying to get this done, and the Senate working on it. But there are some on the other side of the aisle who don't understand what the word

``compromise'' means to get to a greater goal, which is to get this budget under control.

Mr. GARAMENDI. You have raised a couple of issues, and I would like to carry them a little further. You raised the tax issue, in the proposed budget, not the CR today that funded the government for another week but rather in the proposal for the next year and beyond. The Republicans propose to continue the Bush era tax cuts of 2001 for the super wealthy in America. Now that's about $700 billion added to the deficit. Not only that, that tax rate is 35 percent. They are proposing to lower that tax rate to 25 percent. So for the super wealthy in America, we are talking about millionaires, people whose annual income is $1 million and people whose annual income is $1 billion, to give them a lower tax rate. Are we talking shared sacrifice here? I think not.

I want to turn to this chart which was handed to me by one of our colleagues who is actually on the President's deficit commission. She said the facts are pretty clear. Not pretty clear--they are crystal clear. She said between 1974 and 2009, there has been a shift in the wealth and the income of Americans. What has happened is that the rich have gotten really rich and everybody else has been treading water, not really going anywhere. So if you take a look at this, you'll see that over that 20-year period for those at the very bottom, they have seen their income go up by $200 a year. As you move on up, as you get to the top, those in the 80 percentile, they have seen better. They have about $100,000. But when you get to the one-tenth of 1 percent of the population, their average annual income has gone up by just under

$6 million a year, a $5,978,870 annual increase for the top one-tenth of 1 percent.

Another chart, I don't have it with me right now, would show that for these people, the top 1 percent, they now have 25 percent of all of the wealth of America. Go back, go back to 1974, they had 7 percent of the wealth in America; 1974, the top 1 percent had 7 percent. And 2009, the top 1 percent controlled 24 percent of all of the wealth in America. An enormous shift has taken place here. The middle class has been left behind, basically stagnant, basically treading water.

Now, understanding that reality of America, the stagnation of the middle class, the struggle for not one family earner but two, wife and husband, out working, trying to keep the family together in the home with health care, the kids going off to school, that is the struggle of middle America. So what have the Republicans proposed? Their proposal will shift the tax burden away from the super rich to the middle class because they want to reduce the taxes on the super rich from 35 percent to 25 percent. And inevitably, that is going to raise the taxes for the middle class to make up the difference. We will not let that happen.

I notice that my colleague from the great Midwest has joined us. Thank you very much. I suspect you may have something to say about this.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I am watching you go through this, and I wanted to come down and take part. Last night we did the budget for next year. Democrats consistently, all day and all night, offered amendments to try to correct this idea of there not being any shared sacrifice. So as we sift through, we go through the budget line item by line item, and there are millions being cut, if not billions being cut, from Head Start, early childhood programs, the Pell Grant, veterans health, all of these things that get reinvested back into our people, and the RAND Corporation and all of these studies that are done, for every dollar we invest in early childhood, we get about $17 back into society. For ever

$1 we invest in Head Start, we get $7 to $9 back. And all of our friends on the other side who say we ought to run government like a business should look at some of these statistics. These are critical investments that we need to make in the United States if we are going to be competitive.

We have only 300-plus million people in the United States. We are now competing against 1.3 billion in China. We are now competing against over 1 billion people in India. So we have to have all 300 million of our people on the field playing for the United States of America.

{time} 1610

And you know what? That means we've got to invest in their health care to make sure those kids are healthy. We've got to make sure that they're educated. This is not the time to make college more expensive by cutting the Pell Grant from the top rate that we had, that the Democrats put in when we were here. The top Pell Grant would be 5,500 bucks. Now with the cuts that the Republican budget is going to make, if you're sending your kid to college, you're now only going to have

$2,100 as a maximum Pell Grant. To me, if we're trying to get more people into college, more people doing research, more people innovating in our economy, more entrepreneurs, we need to invest in these kinds of things.

And yesterday all of our friends on the other side of the aisle had the opportunity to come down in public with a vote, one side or the other. In each and every instance, they voted against those investments.

In fact, we even offered a few amendments, one saying if you make more than a million bucks a year, which, where I come from, is a lot of money, let's raise the taxes on those people who make a million dollars a year or more and try to offset some of these deep cuts into Head Start, into the Pell Grant, into the Medicare program.

The gentleman from California was talking about wages. We have seniors now who over the past 30 years, whether they worked in the steel industry in Youngstown, Ohio, or the rubber industry in Akron, Ohio, or throughout the industrial Midwest, in many instances they lost their pension. I remember when my grandfather retired in 1979, his pension was $392; and when he died a few years ago, it was $392.

So now what the new roadmap for the Republicans does is it says for these people who are 55 and in the industrial Midwest who have seen the diminishment of their wages over the last 30 years, while the top 1 percent was going up, they're saying now they want to take the Medicare program and just give some support to let the senior go out into the free market and buy their own Medicare.

So Medicare is ``medi-gone.'' You are now going to be on your own. So now if you're a senior citizen in the United States under the Ryan roadmap--not this Ryan, the Ryan from Wisconsin--under his roadmap, the Medicare program will give you money, and it will not increase with the level of health care inflation, which is 10 to 15 percent a year. So they'll give you some money to support you to go out and get your health care. It won't keep up with inflation, and there will be nowhere else to go. These same people who over the last 20 or 30 years projected into the future, wages have been stagnant. So you're going to go into the seniors' pockets so that they have got to pay for your health care.

So we had this----

Mr. GARAMENDI. Tombstone.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Tombstone made up: ``Medicare 1965-2011, created by LBJ, destroyed by the GOP.''

Now is not the time for us to make these cuts and tell our seniors who have paid into this system, who have planned on this system and the people under 55 whom this will affect that they're on their own and do nothing to try to rein in the health care costs. And that's the real issue.

Mr. GARAMENDI. Thank you very much, Mr. Ryan.

I will first yield to the gentleman from Colorado, and then we are going to wrap this thing up, and I want to wrap it up on one of our major themes, that's rebuilding the great American manufacturing sector.

Mr. PERLMUTTER. Thank you, Mr. Garamendi.

The way I would wrap it up is that, yes, we are confronted with a budgetary issue that we have got to deal with. We can't run away from it.

We can't forget how we got here: tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, prosecute a couple of wars to the tune of a trillion dollars, and then a crash on Wall Street--all under the Bush administration. But we're here. We've got to deal with it.

I ask my friends on the Republican side of the aisle that sacrifice has got to be shared, where is that shared sacrifice? It isn't just against early childhood education. It isn't just against medical research. It isn't just against Medicare and Medicaid or education or transportation. You can't just get this budget balanced on a very narrow slice of the budget. Let's share the sacrifice. Let's get this country back on track. Things are recovering. Let's keep it going.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. If the gentleman will yield for a moment.

Mr. GARAMENDI. I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Because one of the amendments last night in the hearing, in the budget markup, was to implement the framework from the Debt Commission, the Bowles-Simpson Commission, which said two-thirds of the savings should be cuts and one-third should be revenue primarily from the top 1 percent of the people who have had all these benefits over the last 30 years. Every single Republican on the committee voted against implementing that framework, which was Heath Shuler's amendment, and it is to be noted that they had an opportunity to vote for that and they shirked their responsibility.

Mr. GARAMENDI. It also speaks to the fact that the Democrats are willing to put up shared sacrifice on both sides.

I want to just wrap up with this, and every time I come to the floor I want to make it clear that we need to rebuild the American manufacturing base. Twenty years ago there were 20 million-plus Americans in manufacturing. Today there are 11 million. A lot of reasons for it. But these are the kinds of investments you were talking about, Mr. Ryan, that we need to make. We really need to make sure that our policies on trade are fair, that they don't harm our manufacturing industry.

We've been talking about taxes here. We need to make those taxes encourage growth. A couple of examples on taxes: we put out a tax bill without any Republican support last year to end the tax breaks that corporations had to offshore jobs. And we gave corporations and businesses an immediate write-up of all capital gains. So we're serious about tax policy here to encourage manufacturing.

Energy is a huge issue, and there will be a discussion on another day.

Labor policies: let's understand that it was the labor unions that built the base, and you go down through the line--education, intellectual property, research, and, again, building the great infrastructure. These are things we can do. These are critical investments in our budget. We should be doing these things.

I am going to yield to my friend from Colorado (Mr. Perlmutter). You get the last word.

Mr. PERLMUTTER. I would just reiterate, if we make it in America, we will make it in America.

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SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 157, No. 50

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