Appointment of Conferees on H.R. 4520, American Jobs Creation Act of 2004

APPOINTMENT OF CONFEREES ON H.R. 4520, AMERICAN JOBS CREATION ACT OF 2004 -- (House of Representatives - September 29, 2004)

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Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.

Mr. Speaker, what we are talking about in this motion to instruct is what we should do: send to President Bush a bill to try to help American companies create jobs. Secondly, we want to help American companies create jobs, some of us at least do, in America, not overseas.

What we are seeing today is a wholesale shipping-out of American jobs so that today, when you buy a product, if you look at your home and take a look underneath that dish or if you take a look at that chair, if you take a look at the curtains and find out what that label says about where it was made, chances are it will not say "made in America."

It used to be that toys were manufactured here. It used to be that your furniture was manufactured here. It used to be that just about everything in your home was made in America. Today, virtually nothing that you have in your home is made in America. Not only is it the case that what was manufactured is no longer made in America, but today, we are talking about all sorts of things from data entry, word processing, transcription, phoning services, product design, architecture, movie production. X-rays are being analyzed overseas for Americans who go to see a doctor to find out whether or not there is a particular condition or illness they are suffering from. X-rays are being exported for analysis today. That is where we are.

Is it bad? It sure is. Every hour America loses 127 manufacturing jobs overseas. That means that there are 3,200 jobs that will be lost today as we speak. At the end of the year, 1.2 million American jobs will have left.

My colleague, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Brady), said this is an effort to scare America. My God, if those figures and those facts do not scare America, then we are in trouble, because we have to wake up, wake up to the fact that we are losing jobs to others overseas, and we are giving incentives as a government for us to see American companies send those jobs overseas.

Now, every company has a right, and we should try to help every company make a profit; otherwise, they will not be around. But my God, if we have an opportunity to use the government to help incent companies to keep those jobs in America or create new jobs here in America for American workers, then let us do it.

So why are we here? The bill that stands before us would actually give $60 billion worth of incentives to companies who ship those jobs from America to overseas.

Let us change that. This motion to instruct simply says, you will get a tax break, you will get that incentive from the government, from the people, the 280 million Americans who pay taxes, if you create that job not in some other country, but here. That is pretty simple. And by the way, this also says, this motion to instruct also says, let us do this in a way that does not increase the size of the Federal deficit. We have a $440 billion deficit, the largest this country has ever known; and this is going to spend money to give incentives to companies, this bill will give money to companies through incentives to send jobs overseas. That is crazy at a time when we do not have money to begin with, and we are losing jobs by the hour.

If we are going to continue hemorrhaging jobs in America then, by God, we should be scared about what is going on. We should not hide the facts. We should not try to deceive Americans. We should do everything in our power to help the private sector create the jobs that we need.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bush administration Bureau of Labor Statistics recently revised its prediction on the growth of the number of high-tech jobs, white-collar jobs here in America that we would have, somewhere between 2002 to about 2012, over that 10-year period. They have revised that figure. Not up; they are not saying they are going to create more jobs; they are saying 70 percent fewer jobs. This is not some left-wing think tank saying we are going to lose jobs; this is the Bush administration's Bureau of Labor Statistics saying, folks, we made a mistake. When we told you a few years ago that we thought we would be expanding the number of high-tech, white-collar, good-paying, for the most part, $70,000-and-above-paying jobs, we were wrong. Today, guess what? We have to revise that figure down by about 70 percent.

Other analyses recently have told us that America is in jeopardy of losing a total of about 14 billion jobs into the future if we do not stop the hemorrhaging now. Between 300,000 and 500,000 jobs were lost in the U.S. since 2001, having gone overseas. That figure, by the way, did not come from another left-wing think tank; that came from none other than Goldman Sachs. You can go to Wall Street in New York and talk to them there, because those are the folks that told us that between 300,000 and 500,000 jobs have been lost, simply since 2001 overseas.

It is a crisis. Let us deal with it. It is not a scare tactic; it is real. Let us pass this motion to instruct.

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Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield on that point?

Mr. THOMAS. Not on my time. If the gentleman wishes to seek more time, I would certainly respond to him.

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Speaker, I just want to mention that I have no choice, Americans do not have a choice. We cannot buy American products for our home.

Mr. THOMAS. Regular order. You always have a choice.

The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Aderholt). The gentleman from California controls the time.

Mr. BECERRA. Show me the store that sells American products, and I will buy them. Show me the store that sells American products for my home, and I will buy them.

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Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time, and I want to apologize to the chairman for trying to have him yield me some time.

I just want to make the case I am willing to stay on this floor if the gentleman can name me an American product from my home that I can purchase, I will look to buy it, but I have looked. Whether it is an electronic product, whether it is dishes, whether it is curtains, tell me, and I will look to buy it.

There is no reason why we cannot try to give incentives to American companies to be able to produce here at home. If it is a little bit more expensive, I guarantee my colleagues the American consumer would say, if I have to pay a little bit more for that product, but it is made by American hands, I will do so.

The difficulty is that we have no right using taxpayer dollars to help companies ship jobs abroad. That is my point. When we have an administration that has actually had a net job loss of the last 3 or 4 years of close to a million jobs; and by the way, if we did not include the government-sector jobs that have been created under a Republican administration, that would actually rise to over 1.5 million jobs that have been lost. Almost 3 million of those jobs that have been lost have been in the manufacturing sector. So if it were not for government jobs created, we would have a massive job loss. We do not even create today the number of jobs we need just to keep pace with the new people who are entering into the system.

So it becomes very difficult when we are trying to do something to see that we are spending $60 billion which will, for the most part, help companies who may be American companies, who may have some of their operations here, but are still sending jobs abroad. Again, they have got to remain competitive. That is not a battle we want to fight. What we want to fight, though, is to give incentives to companies who are willing to commit to Americans here.