Byron Dorgan

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate Committee on the Judiciary be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate, to conduct an executive business meeting on Thursday, February 12, 2009, at 10 a.m. in room SD-226 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship to meet, during the session of the Senate in the Reception Room, immediately off the Floor to conduct a vote on the Committee's budget and rules for the 111th Congress. The Committee will meet immediately after the first roll call vote occurring on Thursday, February 12, 2009.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Select Committee on Intelligence be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on February 12, 2009 at 2:30 p.m.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I would like to announce that the Committee on Indian Affairs will meet on Thursday, February 12, 2009 at 9:30 a.m. in room 628 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to conduct an oversight hearing to receive the U.S. Department of the Interior's views and priorities with regard to Indian Affairs related issues in the coming year. Those wishing additional information may contact the Indian Affairs Committee at 202-224-2251.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I always enjoy hearing my friend from Oklahoma. But I regret he feels that what is happening in America today somehow relates to 1992, implying that when Democrats assume power, somehow things are going to collapse, and we find ourselves in a tough situation because all they want to do is spend, and all this and that. The fact is there is plenty of blame to go around with respect to what has happened in this country. It is not one party, it is both parties. I say to my friend: We have seen a hemorrhaging of red ink in this country the last 8 years. I am not going to spend time talking about it--but I could, and almost should, except I don't think it contributes too much at this time to point out that we decided to go to war and not pay for a penny of it in 8 years, to charge it all and run up the Federal debt. Look, there are a lot of things wrong. A lot of things have been done wrong by the past administration, by Republicans and by Democrats. I understand all that. That is not the issue. The question is what do we do to put it right. You know, there was a situation in Miami the other day. They had 35 jobs for firefighters and a thousand people showed up to apply. Now, look at these faces. Look at the faces of these people, one by one. All they hope for is an opportunity. A thousand of them showing up, thinking perhaps they will get a shot at one job, because there are only 35 available. These people don't give a rip whether you are talking about Republicans or Democrats. All they care about is whether you can talk about what might succeed to help put their life back in order, to help put this economy back on track, and to give them a feeling that they might have an opportunity to find a good job, one that pays well and provides benefits, and one that allows them to help take care of their family. That is all they care about. That is why a thousand of them lined up down the sidewalk in search of 35 jobs. Now, this looks like a crowded picture. But what if we could take a look at 2.6 million of them? There is no picture of the 2.6 million. That is the number of people who lost their jobs last year. Actually, it turned out to be just over 3 million in the last 12 months. What if we had a picture of the last 2 months, with over 1 million people lining up wanting a job because they got laid off? Think of it. More than one million people had to come home, or call home and say to their family, the person they love, you know what, I have lost my job. No, it is not because I have done a bad job. I have worked here 10, 15, 20 years, and I did everything I could. I got all evaluations that were in the top 5 percent. I am a terrific worker, but I lost my job because the company had to cut back. I wish we could have a picture of a million people lined up so we would understood the faces and the agony and the despair of losing your job in the last 2 months. And it would describe the urgency. No, not the urgency to come and talk about Democrats and Republicans, but the urgency to talk about what we can do to put this place back on track. I wonder sometimes whether anyone knows what exactly the right medicine or the right dose of medicine is needed to fix what ails this economy. I confess I don't know. I know what we shouldn't do. I have a pretty good handle on what we shouldn't do. Let's not take the position of being an observer and deciding, you know what, we intend to do nothing. Let whatever happens happen. If our economy is perched on the edge of a cliff and falls off the side to a deep depression, so be it. That is not my position. I think our position has to be to do whatever we can to try to put a foundation under this economy and see if we can lift this economy to provide jobs, provide growth, and expand and give people hope once again. I have given many speeches on the floor of the Senate about the past. I have talked about what has caused this wreck--and this clearly is a wreck. In 1999, this Congress and the President decided what we wanted to do was to get rid of all those old-fashioned things that were put in place after the Great Depression to separate traditional banking from risk. Let's get rid of all of that and see if we can allow banks to create big old holding companies and merge, and so it happened. They ran that through here like a hot knife through butter, and everybody was fat and happy and singing songs of celebration. Not me. I voted against all that. I fought against it all. I said at the time that within a decade I thought we would see massive taxpayer bailouts. And we have. The biggest financial institutions in this country, the biggest banks and the biggest financial institutions in this country got involved in a series of risks--buying toxic assets, doing things that were unbelievable--and the whole tent came collapsing down. Then we were told, you know what, it is the taxpayers' responsibility. So the Federal Reserve Board rushes in with a net and a pillow to say to the big financing institutions: We have money for you. You know, it is interesting. We are told now, at the latest count, that $8.9 trillion--no, not the $800 billion we are talking about on the floor of the Senate--but $8.9 trillion has been used of taxpayers' funds to lend and guarantee certain things, most of it by the Federal Reserve Board and some by FDIC. Most of it was done without a vote. It is done well outside the sunlight of good government. In fact, an enterprising news organization called Bloomberg had to sue the Federal Government to find out how much has been committed. I don't know that there is some divine right of all the biggest banks in this country--who got bigger and created holding companies and became too big to fail--to be kept to succeed and to continue to live. Maybe--and we won't talk about this much, because no one wants to--we should recreate or create new financial institutions. But no one wants to talk about that. Why is it we decide to invest in failure? Probably we should invest in success. Maybe we should decide, if these financial institutions ran this country into the ditch, to create new financial institutions, to help capitalize those institutions that won't do that. Again, briefly, as I talk about why we must do something, it is not strange that we have seen this wreckage. I had someone on Saturday at a meeting I was at in North Dakota, saying: You know what, the government has caused all this. I said: I tell you what, the government has plenty to answer for. You are darned right the government has a part of it-- fighting a war without paying for it. Part of it is a trade deficit of $700 billion to $800 billion a year. Most people here are willfully blind about the fact that we are consuming significantly more than we produce. Two billion dollars a day represents our trade deficit, every single day. You can't keep doing that. Our fiscal policy deficits are way out of control because we fought a war and we didn't pay for it. So government has plenty to answer for. But I told the person who asked me that question--isn't this all the government's fault?--I said: Government didn't put out all this bad paper. That was greedy mortgage companies out there writing bad mortgages, unbelievable mortgages, no different than Madoff's Ponzi scheme, and then packaging them in securities and selling up to hedge funds, and then selling up to investment banks, and the whole country is larded now with toxic assets that we are told threaten the entire banking system. So now the American taxpayer has to be a backstop in order to save the very companies that ran this into the ditch. You wonder why the smartest in the room, the best and the brightest, didn't understand it was a bad security when you put a mortgage into the hands of someone who can't pay it and then tell them they only have to pay interest; you don't have to pay any principal; in fact, if you don't want to pay interest, you can pay no principal and only partial interest, and you don't have to document your income in order to get a loan from us. Bad credit, no credit, bankrupt, slow pay, no pay, then you come to us. Those were the advertisements by Millennium Credit, Zoom Credit, and Countrywide Mortgage. They all did it, and they put out a lot of bad paper. The whole thing's collapsed. The banks were all happy because they were all buying these things and they had high yields. And the reason they had high yields is they loaded them up with prepayment penalties, so the borrower couldn't get out of it. So here we are with this system that has collapsed around us, and what are the consequences? Do you think most of the people who did this have lost their jobs with the big banks? Absolutely not. They are still accepting big paychecks. But these people lining up in Miami, a thousand of them for 35 jobs, are the victims of an economy that has collapsed. The question is: Do we do nothing? Some of my colleagues are perfectly content to do that. They come to the floor and talk about, you know what, this is all about 1992; or let's go back to Calvin Coolidge. How about let's blame it on Calvin Coolidge or Jimmy Carter? It doesn't make any sense at all to be doing that. Let's talk about where we find ourselves and where we want to be and how we might get from here to there. I confess I don't know exactly what is going to work. I used to teach a little economics in college, but I don't know that there is any economist or anybody who can say that if we do these three things, this is going to work. I confess that we don't know. Normally, there are two tools in the toolbox to try to fix the economic engine of this country: One is called fiscal policy--taxing and spending. But the fact is we have had a stimulative fiscal policy for a long time. We have been running big deficits for a long time, so it is not exactly that that tool hasn't been available. That tool has been used and reused, and I don't know how effective it is. The other tool in the toolbox is monetary policy. There is nothing in the toolbox left there. Interest rates are down nearly to zero with respect to the Fed and what it charges. So there is not much juice left in monetary policy. But what the Fed has done is used its ability--somewhere in the shadows--to push a lot of money out the door with no transparency as to who got what and how it was used. So I don't know, with respect to the fiscal or monetary policy, the impulses they might have to help fix this economy. What I do know is this: A piece of legislation--an economic recovery plan--has been put together. That follows on the heels of the $700 billion TARP legislation--the Troubled Asset Relief Program. I voted against TARP, and am happy I did. I didn't think they had the foggiest idea what they were going to do with that money, and I was dead right. I have no idea where it went or what was accomplished with it. There was no accountability and no strings attached. This is different. This legislation is an attempt to say: You know, we can learn at least something from some things that we have tried in the past. We have an unbelievable backlog in infrastructure investment that should have been made in this country and has not. I will give an example: In the last few years, we have been funding 900 water projects in the country of Iraq with taxpayers' money--900 water projects. We have tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure backlog in this country--of water projects--which we have not been doing what we should about. So how about investing here at home repairing the roads, repairing the bridges, repairing other infrastructure--building the water projects that are authorized and ready to go, fully designed and fully engineered? That puts people to work. It puts people on a payroll. It takes people out of this line and says, we will put people to work even as we build infrastructure for this country's future. Is that a good thing? It seems to me it probably is. My colleagues have put together a piece of legislation, and I have been a part of it. I was involved in the negotiations last Friday for about 3 hours to see if we could find middle ground, which we have done. We cut nearly $110 billion out of the proposal that existed. I was all in favor of those cuts. It seemed to me there were areas that could and should be trimmed, and now are trimmed from that proposal. But at this point, the question is: What do we do? I certainly have respect for those who have a different view. Some have a view we should simply use tax cuts, because tax cuts have the biggest juice. But the economists say that is not true. It isn't the case. And besides, if that were the menu, we have been through a decade of that. We know the function of all of that. So I have respect for those who believe that; I just believe there is a different approach. The key is not to use some proxy to put people back to work. The key, at the short term, is to see if you can put people back to work now doing something that represents gainful employment and which will build an asset for this country. That is what our attempt is here. And, boy, I think there is plenty of reason to be critical. I understand that fully. The question is: Are we willing to do something? I have often told my colleagues, I think it was Mark Twain who was asked once if he would be willing to engage in a debate. He said: Oh sure, as long as I can take the negative side. And the person who asked said: But we haven't even told you what the subject is. He said: Oh, it doesn't matter. The negative side will take no preparation. So it is easy, it seems to me, to decide what doesn't work and to oppose it. It is much more difficult to decide how you put together something that is constructive and positive that you think will give this country some help and some hope. I said when I started, I don't know, and no one does, exactly what will work. I told a meeting on Saturday when I was asked the question: Can you guarantee this will work? I said: No, I can't. There isn't one person you can bring into this room who can tell you, yes. If they do, they are not telling you the truth. What unites all of us is none of us have ever been here before. We have never seen a circumstance where the system of finance has virtually collapsed with toxic assets laced everywhere in the system, a system in which we have had a subprime loan scandal. It has resulted now in the complete collapse of the housing bubble--which was, by the way, aided and abetted by my friend, Alan Greenspan, who was supposed to have been overseeing this sort of thing and did not. But now you have, according to Martin Feldstein, one in four homes in this country in which the home has less value than the mortgage on the home. That is a pretty significant problem. Then you have 598,000 people told their jobs are gone as of the last month and a half million people the month before. It is running into the millions of people who lose their jobs and lose their homes and then lose hope and lose confidence. I would say this: When I taught economics--I did the things you do. You teach the supply-demand curves, Gresham's law, and all the things you teach in economics. But, by far, the most important thing I taught students is confidence. If the American people are confident, believe their future will be better than the past, have confidence in tomorrow, then they will do the things that represent and manifest that confidence. They buy a suit of clothes, buy a car, take a trip--they do the things that will expand this economy. Why? Because they have confidence in the future. When they lose confidence in the future and they are unsure of that future, they do exactly the opposite. They say I am not going to make that purchase. I am not going to take that trip. I will not buy that car. That is the contraction side of the economy. You can do all the things you want to do in the Senate, and the Fed can do all they want to do. The fact is, we are in trouble if we don't provide some way to say to the American people: You can have confidence in this country. You can have some belief that things will be better for your kids than they were for you. So we can start the economic engine on the ship of state and get it moving again. If we can say that to the American people, we will turn this economy around. I know that there is not just one idea that represents a silver bullet. I understand that as well. But at the end of the day, the Senator from Montana, the Senator from Hawaii, who are managing this legislation--at the end of the day, it is our responsibility, their responsibility, it is the responsibility for us to govern in a way that says to the American people: Here is a plan we think has a chance. Here is an approach we believe has an opportunity to put us back on track once again. I want to make one final point. Even as we do all of this as best we can to try to help this country recover, it is very important for us to seek accountability, going backwards and forwards. We need to investigate exactly what has happened. We need a prosecution task force, we need a select committee in the Senate, we need to do all these things. We ought to be subpoenaing people in front of committees to say: What did you do? We need to get to the bottom of all of this and make sure it can never happen again. This notion of deciding self-regulation, quote-unquote, according to Alan Greenspan, works in the interests of everybody--let's understand that. Self-regulation did not work. What happened to us in self- regulation is we were stolen blind and the American people have paid for it now to the tune of maybe $9 trillion and still counting. We need to put a lot of things back together. I want to be a constructive party of one, saying I want to play a role. Whatever the consequences, I want us to take action to try to help this economy recover. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the Committee on Indian Affairs Rules of Procedure. There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. I ask that amendment No. 200 be withdrawn.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask for a vote on amendment No. 138, as modified.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, we have cleared this amendment on both sides. I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to substitute amendment No. 138, as modified, requiring economic impact reports for my amendment No. 200 for purposes of the previous order.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask that amendment No. 138, as modified, be called up.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, this amendment is cosponsored by Senator Inouye and Senator Cochran. It is a simple amendment. A voice vote will be satisfactory. I think it has been cleared on both sides. It simply asks for reports about who is receiving this money we put out in an economic recovery program. Did you receive the money? How did you use the money? And how many jobs do you believe were created with the money? I hope the full Senate will agree with those objectives.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, has amendment No. 200 been withdrawn?

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask we consider amendment No. 300.

Mr. DORGAN. I ask unanimous consent the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. DORGAN. I offer this amendment on behalf of myself, Mr. Baucus, Mr. Inouye, and Mr. Brown. It simply says the ``Buy American'' section shall be ``applied in a manner consistent with United States obligations under international agreements.'' I yield the remainder of my time to Senator Brown.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, both Mr. Smoot and Mr. Hawley are dead, but this amendment is a part of a very significant debate that is on the floor of the Senate and across the country. Mr. President, 20,000 people a day are losing their jobs--20,000 people a day. We are going to shove a lot of money out the door of this Congress in support of economic recovery. The question is, Are we going to try to put people back to work? Will we put people back to work on America's factory floors making iron and steel and manufactured products? We already have a ``Buy American'' provision under current law. That is not violative of our trade agreements. We just added an amendment that says this section, the ``Buy American'' section, ``shall be applied in a manner consistent with United States obligations under international agreements.'' I don't think anyone can credibly argue that somehow this undermines our international agreements. But we do have a $700-billion-a-year trade deficit, and my hope would be that as we push this money out the door, we do it in support of American jobs.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I would like to announce that the Committee on Indian Affairs will meet on Thursday, February 5, 2009 at 11 a.m. in Room 628 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to conduct a hearing on Advancing Indian Health. Those wishing additional information may contact the Indian Affairs Committee at 202-224-2251.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I will speak briefly. I believe Senator Mikulski is perhaps going to offer the next amendment. I do not want to disadvantage the time that has been allotted. I did want to, however, point out that I intend to talk about three amendments very briefly. I filed two of them; I will file the third shortly. All of us understand what has happened in recent months. In the last 4 or 5 months we have seen money go out the backdoor of this Government unlike any time in the history of our country. In fact, you can read the U.S. Constitution. I don't think you can find a place in the Constitution that describes the mechanism by which massive amounts of money have gone out of this Government--$8.5 trillion, to the extent we now know how much has been moved from our Government to support various enterprises. The reason we know that is Bloomberg News sued the Government and the Federal Reserve Board, which is the only way anybody got the information about how much money has been obligated by the Federal Reserve Board which opened its discount window for the first time in history to investment banks. It has never before happened. How much money was committed? We know some snippets of all of that. We know that, for example, Citigroup got about $45 billion, and then we are told we have reached an agreement, along with the direct funding to Citigroup, that we are guaranteeing nearly $300 billion for toxic assets for Citigroup. We know that. We know how much has gone to some of the other investment banks. We know how much money went to AIG. We have a notion of how money went in certain directions. But no one knows exactly how much went out of the Federal Reserve Board, to whom, in what direction, for what purpose. How much from the FDIC, how much from TARP, when, why, how much--we don't know the answers to all of those questions. Here is what I propose: Last week there was a lot of discussion about bonuses. I believe last year the Wall Street investment firms lost $35 billion in income and paid $18 billion in bonuses to their employees. I don't know. I have a masters in business. We went through a lot of casework in business school. I don't think I came across a case that said: Here is good business--lose $35 billion and then pay $18 billion in bonuses. I don't guess I saw that in the Harvard Business Review. One amendment is, we ought to, as a government, have the right to understand what kind of bonuses are being paid by firms that are receiving financial assistance under the structure of the financial assistance that has been offered by our Government. I propose an amendment. It is an amendment that would report bonuses to the American taxpayers. I want all companies receiving emergency economic assistance from any Federal financial agency to publicly release information on any bonuses paid, including the bonus recipients and the amount of the bonuses. The American people have a right to that information. After all, these are companies that have asked for and received Federal assistance. Let's have the American public be able to shine a spotlight on what has happened to that money, including, especially, the use of that money potentially for bonuses. Second is an amendment I have filed that is what I call the Jobs Accountability Act. This is all about creating jobs. If we are, in fact, about creating jobs, then this proposal would be to say we should have quarterly reports in the Congress after this legislation is passed because tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars will have been spent in the pursuit of creating new jobs. Why is that important? Mr. President, 20,000 people will likely learn today they lost their job, 20,000 people today and every day; 2.6 million last year, and they say 2.6 million more in the first 6 months of this year. This is a deep crater. We have to care about trying to create jobs, putting people back on payrolls to give them some hope and some confidence again. If we are spending money to do that in what is called an economic recovery program, let's try to track that money. This amendment is very simple. It is the Jobs Accountability Act. What I propose is that when this money goes out the door to the recipients--State governments, local governments, and others--we ask them to file quarterly reports with the Congress to say three things: One, I received the money; two, here is how I spent the money; and, three, here is how many jobs I estimate we created with this money. It is the only place we will get this kind of information. Does anybody think we ought to just ship money out the door and not ask for some sort of reporting requirement about how many jobs we created? Otherwise, it is sort of the helicopter theory of money. Get the money in bags, take it up in a helicopter, shove it out the side, and let it scatter. That is not what this is about. We are supposed to be focusing like a laser on jobs. Let's get the reports from everybody who received this funding in order to determine the effect of what we have done. That is an amendment I have filed. The third amendment I have not filed but will file today is the issue of runaway manufacturing plants. It is something I have worked on in the past with my colleague from Maryland, Senator Mikulski. This is an interesting proposition. We are trying to create jobs because we are losing jobs in this country. We have a perverse provision in our Tax Code that says this: If there are two companies in Maryland right across the street from each other, making exactly the same product to be sold in this country, in our marketplace, and one of them, on a cool January day, decides: You know what, I am leaving Maryland. I am getting rid of my workers. I am moving my production to China and I will make that product by hiring 30-cent-an-hour labor and I will ship the product back to America to be sold--after that transaction is done. What is the difference between the company that stayed in Maryland and the company that left Maryland to produce in China? The difference is the American company that left and got rid of their jobs and moved to China has a tax bill that is lower than the company that stayed. We actually provide in this tax system of ours the most pernicious incentive I can imagine, and that is an incentive to say to companies: If you have a choice, we will actually pay you an incentive in the Tax Code to move your jobs overseas. My runaway plant amendment will fix that situation. I have offered it, I believe, four times with my colleague from Maryland and some others. We have come up short four times. But we have a lot of new Senators who I think would very much like to vote on this amendment. We also have a new President who campaigned on it, a new President who went all across this country and said: Let's stop the incentives for shipping jobs overseas. This is the perfect place, it seems to me, to have this vote. The reason is because we have a tax bill on the Senate floor now. This is, it seems to me, exactly the wrong incentive. If we are trying to create jobs, why should we have provisions in our Tax Code that move jobs elsewhere? Let's plug that hole, and we can do it with the amendment I will be offering. My amendment has had over the years many cosponsors and the strong support of my colleague from the State of Maryland. I will file that amendment today. A tax bill is on the Senate floor. If not now, when should we ever plug this loophole that says as a country, we stand behind shipping jobs overseas. Let's say we stand behind keeping jobs here. No tax advantage for those who export them. Let's provide tax advantages, if we are going to, for those who create jobs and keep jobs in this country.

Mr. DORGAN. I will be happy to yield.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, there has been a generous amount of discussion and debate. In fact, I was sitting listening to it and curious that my friend from California described those who would speak in opposition as being engaged in demagoguery before she heard the opposition. So there is a clairvoyance here, I guess, before we have an opportunity to speak on these issues. I will not engage in demagoguery, but I will not disappoint her in my opposition to this piece of legislation. Let me describe what this piece of legislation is. If you like the notion that we want to encourage companies to move their jobs from our country to other countries, then this is the legislation for you. This is an acceleration of what we have done for far too long and what some of us have tried to correct for a long time. There is an unbelievably pernicious provision in our tax laws that says: If you have two businesses right across the street from each other and one of them decides they are going to fire all of their workers and move to China, and they both make the same product and sell the same product in the United States, the only thing that is different once they have moved those jobs to China is the company that left our country and fired their workers ended up with a lower tax bill. What an unbelievable thing to have in the middle of our Tax Code. I intend to try to correct that with another amendment, by the way. But this repatriation tax holiday amendment is kind of a cheerleader amendment for that proposition: Well, we like that; in fact, let's encourage more of it. Let me straighten out a couple of things with facts. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts. First of all, the corporate tax paid in this country is not 35 percent. That is a statutory rate. The effective tax rate paid by corporations in America is around 17 percent, not 35 percent. So when we talk about it, let's talk about what is real. All right. So big corporations on average pay 17 percent. But what we have in this piece of legislation is to say those corporations that have, in many cases, moved their plants overseas and made profits overseas with the full understanding in our tax laws that they will at some point repatriate those profits and then pay the corporate tax rate on those profits in our country, this amendment says no, that is not going to be the case. What we are going to try to do is say: If you bring them back, you get to pay a 5.25-percent tax rate--not a tax rate that ordinary folks pay, a tax rate that is almost one-half of the tax rate the lowest income folks pay. That is pretty unreasonable, in my judgment. Now, let me just say that in the ranks of bad ideas, the pantheon of bad ideas, this ranks way up there. It is tired, old, shopworn, and they try to slide it through here with a thick coat of legislative Vaseline, just sort of slip it all through here while we are debating how to promote economic recovery in this country. Let me just turn to a few facts, if I might. This is the New York Times, Lynnley Browning talking about the one-time tax holiday--this isn't new; we have done this before--in 2004 that offered companies the chance to bring that money back at a reduced rate of 5.25 percent. Put another way, the tax break gave each company claiming it an average of $370 million in tax deductions. So we are probably not at odds that the proposition is to give very big tax deductions to big companies. That is what this amendment is. Now, the New York Times. The drugmakers were the biggest beneficiaries of the amnesty program--this is the 2004 program-- repatriating about $100 billion in foreign profits and paying only minimal taxes. That is the purpose of this amendment. But the companies did not create many jobs in return. Instead, since 2005, the American drug industry has laid off tens of thousands of workers in this country. I was part of that 2004 debate. I remember the claims that were made: Do this. Give a special deal to these companies. They will create jobs. Well, the biggest beneficiaries were the big drug companies. They didn't create jobs; they cut jobs in our country. A success or failure? It seems to me that is a failure, and now we have the same proposition back saying: Let's have another round of this. Hewlett Packard: $14.5 billion in repatriated profits, 14,500 jobs cut. Colgate-Palmolive. Motorola. I could spend a lot of time, but I got rid of most of those charts, so just to show an example. This is an editorial by the Chattanooga Times: It shouldn't escape Americans' attention--this is 2005--that U.S. companies have disclosed plans to repatriate some $206 billion in foreign profits--that is as a result of the 2004 legislation--under a one-time tax break allowed by Congress on the grounds--you guessed it--that such a big break would ignite a strong spurt in growth. The upshot, of course, is that no such job spurt appears to be materializing. Some have even announced plans to cut domestic operations and jobs. Colgate-Palmolive repatriated $800 million in foreign profits and cut 4,450 jobs and shut a third of its plants over the next 4 years. Even the primary advocate--and I mention this because my colleague just mentioned Mr. Allen Sinai--even the primary advocate for the special one-time break, economist Allen Sinai, is now soft-pedaling his reduction of 660,000 new jobs over 5 years. He now says the efficacy of the tax break will be hard to prove. Well, some other thoughts about this. Michael McIntyre, Wayne State University: There is no evidence that the tax amnesty added a single job to the U.S. economy. Michael wrote a piece about this in December of 2008. Again, Michael McIntyre: Most of the repatriated money was used to buy back corporate shares and for other expenditures favoring management. Not exactly something that fits very well in an economic recovery plan. One study found that repatriations did not lead to an increase in investment, employment, or R&D. Instead, a $1 increase in repatriations was associated with an increase of approximately $1 in payouts for shareholders. So much for new jobs. Professors Clemons and Kinney, Texas A&M research study: On average, firms appear to have responded to the opportunity to reap tax savings provided by the act but did not use the funds to increase domestic investment. Finally, Robert Willens, tax and accounting authority, New York Times article: It was basically worked out to be one big giveaway. The law never took into account the fact that money is fungible. That is the most important point. Money is fungible. You can say it will create jobs; it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean a whit. So here we are in February of 2009, 5 years after the last time the proposal was made to give a very big tax break by saying to some corporations: You know what, we have tax rates that we want you to pay, but if you are big enough and if some of you move jobs overseas from our country, we will give you a 5.25-percent tax rate. Now, this is the Bismarck, ND, phone directory. We are not a metropolis and we don't have the largest city in the country, but I could go through this phone directory and read some names. We have a lot of Olsens, by the way, and a lot of Schultzes because we are a lot of Scandinavians and Germans and so on. But I could go through all of these names and ask the question: Do you think Mr. Copeler would like to pay 5.25 percent income tax? I think so. I hope so. How about Mr. Clause? Would he be able to pay 5.25 percent? I am sure he would like it if we just cold-called him and said: What do you think about this? But no person I am aware of will be invited by this Senate to say: We would like to give you a 5.25-percent income tax rate--just the biggest companies in America, many of which move their jobs overseas, and we say: We will give you a big fat reward. We will claim that you are going to create jobs, but we know better because the studies are clear. As for the studies that have been done about the cost of this, we don't have to debate that. This loses $29 billion in 10 years. There is no debate about that. We only have one entity that makes those estimates. This costs $29 billion in losses over 10 years. But the major point--which I assume causes the gritting of teeth by those who believe it is demagoguery--is we have been fighting for years to say to American employers: For God's sake, stay here in this country. Don't go in search of 30-cent labor in Shenzhen; keep your jobs here. And many of them said: Tough luck. Take a hike. We are leaving. We are going to go produce Radio Flyer little red wagons in Shenzhen, China. Yes, it was produced in Chicago for decades, years, but tough luck, we are firing all of those folks and we are producing the little red wagon in China. We are doing the same thing with Huffy Bicycles and with Etch A Sketch. I could talk about a hundred products that are all in China. We gave them all a tax break to leave. Isn't that something? This now says to American companies that own the product that is now going to be produced in China: If you bring your money back here, we will cut your tax rate by 85 percent. There is an old country saying, ``There is no education in the second kick of a mule.'' We don't have to relearn what we knew in 2004. Some of us made the case in 2004 that this was an unbelievably bad idea, that it rewards exactly the wrong thing. I am all for tax breaks. I would like to see on this bill a 15-percent investment tax credit that has an end date to it, which says if companies--small businesses and large businesses--make these investments now, before July 1 next year, they will get that. I would like to see a big investment tax credit and require investments in the early period. I am all for big tax breaks for consumers to buy cars and homes. I would like to see people start buying homes and cars again. I think that would help the recovery. I am not opposed to tax breaks. I want us to do things that provide incentives to keep jobs in this country, to create jobs, and we know-- we don't have to guess--this amendment does exactly the opposite. I have heard numbers and studies discussed. This is not rocket science. We have the definitive analysis of what happened in 2004. We have an estimate of what this will cost now. We lost jobs in 2004 and forward, and this will cost us $29 billion in lost income now. It will say to any other company, if you ever think about moving jobs overseas, understand there are enough people in Congress who in 2004 and 2009 will come up with another idea in 2014 and 2019 that will cut your tax rate to 5\1/4\ percent some day and you will never have to pay your full measure of income tax on profits as an American corporation. This rewards all of the wrong things. I don't accuse my opponents of demagoging. I think they are wrong and they are using bad facts. We disagree about that. I agree that there are very different opinions on this issue. One is wrong and one is right. Ours happens to be right. There is only one public interest here. The public interest is demonstrable here, not even a close question. I hope if we are talking tonight, on a day when 20,000 Americans lost their jobs--every day somebody comes home and says, ``Honey, I lost my job''--when we are trying to create jobs and restore jobs by creating an economic recovery package, we don't have people coming to the well of the Senate and saying count me in for providing a 85-percent tax cut to big companies that moved overseas, that we know will not create jobs and we know will further deepen the Federal budget deficit. Mr. President, having given full measure and vent to my concern and interest, I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN. The Senator asked me about backtracking. He made the same prediction in 2004 and then backtracked. I predict he will do the same thing.

Mr. DORGAN. That is exactly the case. Most people would not even believe that to be the case. They would say: How on Earth would someone have constructed a system that allows that to happen? Oh, but they did, and they have fiercely protected it. The reason the steel company that stays here pays a higher tax is the steel company that leaves and ships back to this country gets what is called a deferral of income tax; they don't have to pay the tax until some point later. Of course, we know from history and from the history what has been described as being filed to this bill, ultimately if they are repatriated, they get to pay a tax rate of 5\1/2\ percent, something no other American gets to pay. It is a pernicious tax incentive that we certainly ought to put an end to, in my judgment.

Mr. DORGAN. That is exactly the case. There is a ``Buy American'' amendment I helped put in this bill that has caused a fair amount of controversy, but it is not violative of any trade agreement. It represents in this bill mostly grants to the States and others for public works projects. It seems to me to the extent we possibly can, we ought to urge the purchase of steel or iron or skids steer loaders in this country to do so. I recognize it is controversial. I am not interested in being violative of any trade agreement that we have, and my understanding is this provision does not violate trade agreements because it will largely come from State grants for public works projects. I hope to offer the amendment dealing with the tax issue, and I will file that this afternoon. I hope I can get in line so we can have a debate because it is first and foremost about jobs.