January 8, 2020 - Issue: Vol. 166, No. 4 — Daily Edition116th Congress (2019 - 2020) - 2nd Session
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PUT MANUFACTURING ECONOMY AT THE FOREFRONT; Congressional Record Vol. 166, No. 4
(House of Representatives - January 08, 2020)
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[Pages H58-H60] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] PUT MANUFACTURING ECONOMY AT THE FOREFRONT The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2019, the Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from Michigan (Ms. Stevens) for 30 minutes. Ms. STEVENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise this evening to recognize a new year and a new decade in which we find ourselves, the second half of this session of the 116th Congress, an incredible delegation of individuals who have come together on behalf of the American people, for the American people, to usher in an agenda of renewal, of standing up for everyday hardworking Americans: to protect their healthcare; to advocate for infrastructure and good, sound infrastructure spending; as well as to stand up for hardworking Americans who have always played by the rules and have worked for their retirement savings, my pensioners back home in Michigan. It was a delight to close out the end of the decade back home in my district with so many of my beloved constituents and the community members who make us so strong. Mr. Speaker, it is a fact that on January 3, 2020, this new year, this new decade, 1 year from when this Congress was sworn in, this session of Congress was sworn in, the headline became pronounced that industrial activity has come down to its lowest point since 2009, since the heart of the recession, with production, inventories, and new orders falling. These are real headlines. These are headlines that affect the heart of America. And while so much hums in our national media and in our national news, this is a reality for so many. This is a reality for Michigan's 11th District. We were delighted, we were pleased to see us pass the USMCA overwhelmingly bipartisan for the manufacturers, for the manufacturing economy, for the hardworking union members who will get a better deal because we are advocating for buy American content. We know the road to implementation will be long, but it is an implementation that the suppliers in my district, from Auburn Hills down to Plymouth, an implementation they are planning for. Yet the reality is such that a manufacturing recession hangs before us, a manufacturing recession as marked by low levels of productivity. {time} 1900 Over the last 6 months of 2019, manufacturers lost a net of 23,000 jobs and average hours worked fell to its lowest levels in 8 years. Who is talking about this? Your Congresswoman from Michigan's 11th District is talking about this here tonight. The reality of tariffs has cost us. Tariffs imposed have cost U.S. corporations $34 billion as of October 2019, as marked by that day since they were implemented. Also, as October 2019 has marked, manufacturing taxpayers have paid $1.8 billion in 2019 in additional tariffs, in additional money. I talk to these employers. I talk to these small businesses. I talk to the lifeblood of the American economy, and they are paying more. They are squeezed. Their margins are tight. Can this continue? No, it cannot. So that agenda that we are ushering in here the first month of 2020, is that we do not forget that we need to address the problem of tariffs for our manufacturers. We have given certainty with USMCA. We knew we needed to give that certainty, in part, because the jobs were going to go elsewhere. The investment was going to be made elsewhere. It wasn't going to be made in the American workforce. We are in a global race to compete. We have got to compete as Americans. We have got to compete as manufacturers in small communities, in suburban communities like the ones that I have the privilege and honor of representing. Comprised within that are the people who are going to work every single day: in snowstorms, in rainstorms, on sunny days, in the middle of summer, putting food on the table. We look at wages and we ask ourselves as we are now in this third decade of this millennium of this century: What has transpired with wages? The alarming headline as we were closing out 2019 was that the richest, the wealthiest 500 individuals increased their wealth in 2019 by $1 trillion, by over $1 trillion, when wages for our middle class have remained stagnant; where wages for the lowest earners in our economy--we are still advocating to raise the minimum wage from $7, just about. It is the year 2020. Who is working those jobs, by the way? Single mothers; people who have played by the rules and who have children, who aren't just working temporary jobs. This is the promise of America. This is the dream of America, Mr. Speaker, that we are representing, and that I am fighting for all of you, where my sleeves are rolled up. The things that I am eyeing here. Because if we don't start addressing this, we stop winning. We stop having [[Page H59]] an American-first agenda. So we have got to put the manufacturing economy at the forefront. We have got to look at the plight of exports. We saw that with the USMCA, the passage of the USMCA. Over 95 percent of the world's consumers are outside of American borders. We want to sell the best-in-class, American-made product from Michigan by the best-in-class Michigan workforce to the world. We want to get it into these markets. So we look at how we can be smart. We can look at the things that we did during the big recession, right, the big recession of 2008-2009, and what got us out of that, the strategies and the policies that we put forward in export agenda, Mr. Speaker. The Speaker knows this from where the gentleman sits. I acknowledge my friend from South Carolina who is in a port destination. We got smart about how we sold American product. We invested in small business, awards--the States Small Business Act is what I am talking about. It awarded money through the Small Business Administration to States like Michigan. We qualify for these dollars. This was $200,000 that the State of Michigan got and made awards to companies who applied, who met the qualifications, the small businesses, and gave them seed money that they matched with their own money to go sell their products in Europe and overseas and to different consumers. The results were exponential. That money paid for itself. Then the political tides changed and we got rid of it, and we are still here 10 years later trying to figure out how we are going to make those investments. Well, let's go back and look at the States Small Business Jobs Act of 2010. Let's figure out how we can get in front of a manufacturing recession. It is technical. Look at auto sales. They are down. They are down in 2019. Not as dramatic as it was in 2008 when we had the largest drop in automotive sales in the history the automobile. Auto sales are down because hardworking men and women put things on the line. They went on strike. They asked for better healthcare. They asked for fair wages. They asked for retirement packages. When we talk about middle-class job growth, when we talk about growing our middle class, what are we talking about? We are talking about lifting people out of poverty. The facts are clear: productivity is not at its highest level. Productivity is at some of its lowest level, and inequality is at some of its highest level; inequality matched by wage disparity, Mr. Speaker. Then we have this interesting reality with our skills gap in this country, and this is something I hear all over my district. Every time I am talking to a manufacturer, or an educator, or a champion in my community, it is: Where are we going to find the workers? Just today, I was talking with folks from the coding organization, Hour of Code, and they gave me a few minutes. And I had the opportunity to be reminded that we have tens of thousands of open computer science jobs in this country, and we are not graduating the level of computer scientists that we need to graduate to fill those jobs. We have got to invest in our own. This is something in Michigan we know very well. We have got great universities. Our students stick around. We want them to stick around. That is part of my charge here. It is what I am trying to represent as your Member of Congress, the attraction agenda, the boomerangs, those who maybe took a job or an educational opportunity elsewhere but have come back to invest in our community. We see that all over. We see that in the rich innovation transpiring throughout the district: two-to-one patents in autonomous vehicle technology; 75 percent of the R&D taking place here. And then we remind ourselves, in the previous Congress, in the 115th Congress, there was a big tax bill that got passed into law. It was so partisan in certain respects. And now, the effects of this tax bill are playing out. Who has benefited and who hasn't? The wealthiest individuals, Americans, have seen their wealth increase by over $1 trillion. Our middle class is still paying. They are not seeing the growth that they have expected to see. Many large, multinational corporations are paying nothing in taxes, while we all pay, and, yet, our deficit has ballooned yet again. In this case, it ballooned astronomically, Mr. Speaker. It ballooned by $1.5 trillion as projected from this tax scam. When are we going to start investing in the middle class? That is what we are up to here. That is what the second part of this session of Congress is about, the infrastructure guarantee. When we say, guess what? Every single American has got the right to clean and safe drinking water, to fresh air to breathe, to safe and maintained roadways and bridges so we can continue to create jobs. This is why I created the Congressional Plastic Solutions Task Force in partnership with our Congressional Recycling Caucus. We have a plastics problem globally and in this country. Why? Because of a fallacious trade war, tariff war, that has been started. China stopped taking our recycled goods. They stopped taking our plastics. So you talk to your municipalities, and who is paying? They are. Who is paying? You are; our taxpayers, yet again; our communities, yet again. If you didn't know that, your municipality of residence pays to do the recycling. Now, let's think about this really clearly, because I believe we have the greatest opportunity to create and awaken an incredible supply chain in recycling technology in this country. As the chair of the Research and Technology Subcommittee of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, I had a hearing about this. It was absolutely brilliant: industry, research, academia, and my municipality--Paul Sincock, the Plymouth City manager--all saying the same thing: Give us standards. Mark the goods. Tell us what to do with them. And then let's think about how we can invest, and pilot, and inspire; more so, get strategic about how we actually want to do recycling in this country to create jobs. Because if we think about the sorting and the materials and what goes into it, the onus is on all of us. It is on us as a Federal Government and as a partner with local government, State government, and individual consumers, and the companies who want to see the reuse of these materials. So we are quite enthusiastic about these opportunities, but it begins with investing in R&D, research and development. And this is what kind of gets my goat with the tax bill that was passed before I got here. Because according to the International Monetary Fund, only one-fifth of the tax gains to businesses were directed toward capital and R&D expenditures, so we are not seeing that investment going to the new technologies that will create the new jobs, that will employ more people. We know it is exciting. We know it is there. We know if we gave every municipality in this country the opportunity to recycle to their full potential, to reduce, reuse, reuse those materials, we would not only gain back those materials that we have sourced, but we would have new jobs as a result of that. Mr. Speaker, as we talk about the jobs and as we look at the skills that our employers are looking for, that we are training for in this year 2020, in this new decade, some reference that we are in this fourth industrial revolution of which I am a champion. This is where I came out of before I was in this body. I was working in the industrial Internet of Things space, collaborating with nonprofits and universities and community colleges and local school districts, like my good friends in Novi Community School District. We had a lot of fun and we are identifying those skills. We have identified them. We codified the job roles: technology and computer skills; digital skills; an understanding of the ones and zeros; programming skills for robots and automation. {time} 1915 These are things that have great meaning to those of us in Michigan's 11th District because I am home to the company that has the largest robot, with FANUC in the world in Rochester Hills/Auburn Hills. It is really quite exciting, working with tools and different techniques, different technical skills and critical thinking. [[Page H60]] These are things that don't know partisan lines, by the way. These are things that make you stand up and say: I am going to be a champion for this, addressing the root pain that is seeping into our economy. These are realities. Last year, Michigan lost 6,200 factory jobs, yet we are creating and innovating at exponential rates. We decided to go it alone with tariffs, and we are paying the price. We are being squeezed. I believe we can all work together to solve this. I am not being a naysayer because we all know we need to hold China accountable. This is something that has been a project of mine throughout my career, which is how to take on the bad actors with the illegal dumping, the currency manipulation, the stealing of our patents, and the unfair playing field that affects our workforce. We still know that we value American work and that we value the craftsmanship and what goes into making a regional economy like mine hum in really exciting and exponential ways. We understand that, and we recognize that we can come together in meaningful ways. We also continue to call on the Senate to pass the bills that we have sent forward, the many bipartisan bills, the very bipartisan Butch Lewis Act, to protect the pensions of our hardworking Americans, those who did everything right and are still waiting. I have not forgotten in 2020 that we are still working to get that deal done. We are still working to increase the wage. This is something in Michigan that we voted on, to increase the minimum wage, to raise the wage. One job should be enough. Your valued work should be enough. We are not seeking to overregulate and get rid of good deals, but what we are looking to do, Mr. Speaker, is to stand up for individual, hardworking Americans, those who are counting on us. It is incumbent upon us. We sit in this body of 435 individuals. They increased that number the last time in 1913. Many, many years later, the population has grown. History is important, my friends. I encourage you to read your history. I encourage you to learn the facts and figures of our past and embrace how that has changed our future. We are in some trying times. We closed out 2019 in this session of Congress with some things that I was very proud of. I got my first bill signed into law, the Building Blocks of STEM Act--bipartisan and bicameral--signed by the President on December 24, I believe it was, a bill that will support investments in early childhood education. I want all of my Michiganders lining up for this. It is the National Science Foundation. We get a lot of NSF dollars, millions, in Michigan. The investment in early childhood education, Mr. Speaker, is priceless. That continuity for those jobs in the future is how we get in front of the skills gap. That is how we start addressing some of the rumblings in our regional economy. We also, though, recognize that the headlines that we have embraced in this new year and in this new session of Congress have many Americans concerned. Many individuals are asking: What is going to happen? What is taking place in the Middle East? What does this mean for my family? Constituents say to me: ``I have teenage sons. Are they going to be drafted?'' We take that responsibility that the Congress is charged with very seriously. Mr. Speaker, I look to this, which is that President Barack Obama gave us the words that change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. He said: ``We are the ones we have been waiting for. We are the change we seek.'' That is what our House majority is about. That is what our For the People agenda is representing. That is what we are taking up this week when we say no to war, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time. ____________________
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