Devastating Harm Caused By Trump Administration
Floor Speech
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Mr. FOSTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank Congresswoman Kaptur and Congresswoman Budzinski for giving us a chance to set the record straight on President Trump's abject failure to restore the strength of U.S. manufacturing, perhaps his number one campaign promise.
I am best known around here as being the Ph.D. physicist in Congress. Before that, I was a manufacturer.
When I was 19 years old, my little brother and I started a company in our basement with $500 from my parents. That company now manufactures more than half of the theater lighting equipment in the United States. Our company does hardware, software, sheet metal, wiring harnesses, and customer support. We have kept all of those manufacturing jobs in the United States, and it is something I am very proud of.
I think it is significant also that now, 50 years after we started that company, due to an employee stock ownership plan, it is 100 percent owned by the employees who built the company.
I know how to create jobs, and I know that with what President Trump and his administration are doing, they are not going to deliver. I am, unfortunately, not surprised.
Why is this? I think it is best summarized, actually, by paraphrasing the pithy tweet of Elon Musk when he said, You guys, meaning you guys on Trump's tariff team, haven't built squat, though he was a little more rude in his choice of words.
The point I want to make is that this is not new. The ignorant tariffs that he is applying come from the fact that they simply don't get it with manufacturing because none of them--think about it. There is no one on the Trump tariff team who has ever built anything in their career. They are a bunch of finance people. They are a bunch of real estate dealers.
If you are a real estate dealer, it is a very different kind of job than a manufacturer. If you are a real estate wheeler-dealer, what you want to do is rook your counterparty. You succeed as a real estate wheeler-dealer if your counterparty goes away angry. I tell you what, if you are a manufacturer, the last thing you want is an unhappy customer.
Democrats understand that the real job creators in this economy are customers, and we understand that customers come from the middle class.
For time immemorial, the Republican Party has been about sucking money out of the middle class to provide giant tax cuts for the very wealthy. We can see how that has ended time and again for manufacturing employment in the United States.
Here is the history: Here we have, since before I was born, the history of U.S. manufacturing employment, depending on which party held the Presidency. You can see the huge job increase when FDR--that was when we were coming out of the Depression, which is understandable. It continued through President Truman. Then, it went down when the Republican Dwight Eisenhower took over. Then, it went up strongly under President Kennedy, down under President Nixon, up in Carter's administration, down in Reagan's administration, and down again in Bush the elder's administration. It went up during the Clinton administration and down strongly during George Bush's administration. That was, frankly, because of the historic mistake that was made by both parties to let China into the World Trade Organization without having an understanding that they should obey the requirements of good membership in the WTO and not manipulate their currencies. That is not what President Bush was about.
Then, it went up, of course, during President Obama, down during the first Trump Presidency, and up during the Biden Presidency. Now, of course, it is trending downward again in the Trump Presidency, so this is not a surprise. This is something that is really, I think, easy to understand because of the basic philosophy of the Republican Party.
This is just the data in a bar graph, just the same thing.
In Presidency after Presidency, when the middle class is strong, demand is strong, and manufacturing is strong. Manufacturing employment follows.
This is not rocket science. This is simple, basic economics. A strong middle class yields strong manufacturing growth and strong manufacturing employment. It is a lesson that we have had to learn again and again in the history of our country, and I hope we remember that history and don't forget it in the future.
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