Rick Santorum (R)
Rick Santorum served as a U.S. Senator for the state of Pennsylvania from 1995 to 2007. In 1990, Santorum was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania’s 18th district where he served until 1995. He holds B.A. in political science from Penn State University, an M.B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh, and a J.D. from the Dickenson School of Law. Since his defeat in 2006, Santorum has worked as a legal partner at Eckert, Seamans, Cherin, and Mellott, LLC. He also joined the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank, is a contributor on Fox News, and writes an Op/Ed piece for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
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Rick Santorum has suspended his bid for the Presidency.
At a campaign stop in Chillicothe, OH, Rick Santorum spoke about his plans for the American economy. The Cleveland Plain-Dealer reports:
During a 40-minute speech before about 300 people at Chillicothe High School, the Republican presidential candidate stuck to economic themes in a region still trying to rebound from the economic downturn.
"What kind of country do you want to hand off to the next generation?" asked Santorum. "We need innovative solutions to liberate the American people."
Meanwhile, Forbes is reporting that as Super Tuesday approaches, the candidates have stepped up their rhetoric, and are pledging to hold China accountable:
“If I’m president of the United States…on Day One, I will declare China a currency manipulator, allowing me to put tariffs on products where they are stealing American jobs unfairly. We can compete when there’s a level playing field and we’d win…. I’m going to insist that China plays by the same rules that everyone in the world plays by.” — Mitt Romney (my humble guess is he can call China chopped liver if he wants, but will do nothing to retaliate other than what Obama has already done. Romney’s the most anti-China of the bunch.)
“I want to beat China. I want to go to war with China and make America the most attractive place in the world to do business.” — Rick Santorum (quite mild; doesn’t want a trade war like Romney says he wants.)
“I think we’re going to have to find ways to dramatically raise the pain level for the Chinese cheating, both in the hacking side, but also on the stealing and intellectual property side. And I don’t think anybody today has a particularly good strategy for doing that.” –Newt Gingrich (he’s mostly come out against Chinese stealing of intellectual property; a legitimate, non-emotional complaint based on facts.)
“To fight with China now? They are our third best partners and are great customers. Why say that they are the problem? We complain that they’ve messed around with their currency. What have we done with the dollar over the last three years?” — Ron Paul (Doesn’t think China is the cause of our problems.)
Rick Santorum appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press this weekend. Below is a transcript of his remarks on manufacturing:
MR. GREGORY: But the question, the question is about who's politically pliable. I mean, I've interviewed you before, we talk about the fact that you endorsed Romney in 2008, said that he was the one who'd stand up for conservative principles. And then you've admitted basically you were just playing politics. You didn't like John McCain, so, you know, you made the political calculation that you would endorse Romney. Or voting for a steel bailout even though you say you're principally opposed to voting for bailouts.FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: Whoa, whoa, whoa, I didn't vote for a--whoa, whoa, I didn't vote for a steel bailout.
MR. GREGORY: You didn't support that.
FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: What, what I voted for was to--what, what, what I voted for was to enforce the law, the, the--enforce the tariffs when, when, when China was illegally dumping steel in this country. That's not a steel bailout. That's--there are laws in place in this country that protect domestic manufacturers from illegal dumping into this country. They went through the process, they did the evaluation. The evaluation was that China was, was, was breaking the law, and I supported imposing tariffs. There was a process here. That wasn't a bailout. In fact, the steel industry has never been bailed out. That's, that's the, that's the example that I talk about all the time. I went through the 1970s and '80s and saw the destruction of the steel industry in southwestern Pennsylvania. And the steel industry didn't get a bailout. You know what, it turned out just fine for western Pennsylvania. We have a much more diversified economy. And I didn't stand for bailouts then, I didn't stand for bailouts of Wall Street nor Detroit. Governor Romney supported his friends on Wall Street and bailed them out. And they're, and they're doing just fine. And then...
MR. GREGORY: But you're, but you're not opposed, Senator, to using...
FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: ...violated his--hold on, let me finish, David. He violated his principles, I guess, because he's for bailouts, and, and denied a bailout for, for Detroit. That's the hypocrisy here, not what I've done on the issue of bailouts.
MR. GREGORY: But you're interested in using government for different means, right? In your economic plan you would like to incentivize manufacturers to try to affect the playing field to help manufacturers in this country because of the economy. But you're opposed to extending unemployment benefits because you think that that's creating too much dependency on the part of government. But isn't that hypocritical when in fact you're using government in the way that you see fit to help corporations but not to help people who are out of work for so long.FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: I'm really glad you asked me that because I get that question from conservatives a lot, "Why are you picking manufacturing? Isn't that picking winners and losers?" No, it's not. What, what, what we have to realize is that manufacturers have to compete not against just other manufacturers in this country, they have to compete internationally, directly, internationally, for the jobs to stay in America. And so the, the problem is the government and our tax and regulatory policy, the government's policy is making manufacturers in this country uncompetitive, and as a result, manufacturing jobs are moving offshore. So if the government is causing the problem, then government has a responsibility to fix the problem.
MR. GREGORY: Mm-hmm.
FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: In other words, to, to change the regulatory environment, which I do on our plan, and to change the tax climate, which I do on our plan. It's about creating a level playing field. I'm for equality of opportunity, and, and, and to compare that to providing unemployment insurance, I'm for providing unemployment insurance, my concern is the length of that unemployment insurance leads--and there's all sorts of studies that the longer you're on, particularly if you're on, you know, a year or more, leads to long-term chronic problems of getting back in the workforce. You lose skills, you lose all sorts of things. And it's not beneficial for people.
MR. GREGORY: OK.
FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: While it may sound beneficial to help people, but it's not beneficial over the long term to be on long-term unemployment.
MR. GREGORY: I...
FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: That's the argument that I've made.
Rick Santorum stunned the political world on Tuesday with his come-from-behind win in the Colorado and Minnesota caucuses, and the Missouri primary. This morning on MSNBC’s Moring Joe, he looked ahead to the Michigan primary on February 28.
[Michigan] is a great place for us to plant our flag and talk about jobs and manufacturing and giving opportunities for everybody in America to rise.
Last night’s GOP Debate (the 18th for those of you keeping track) was woefully lacking in manufacturing points. The candidates couldn’t avoid it entirely, however.
Rick Santorum made the sole mention of the evening:
I had plans out there that included everybody, plans like I have today, talking about manufacturing, talking about things that -- that are touchstones with the Reagan Democrats that provided that 49-state win.
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I was at a manufacturer in Sarasota County today and was talking about them as a manufacturer and that, you know, the -- the importance of manufacturing jobs, yes, even here in the state of Florida, and the price of energy for them to be able to be competitive.
In last night’s GOP Debate, the four remaining candidates faced off in South Carolina. Here’s what they had to say about manufacturing:
Rick Santorum:
We need a party that just doesn't talk about high finance and -- and cutting corporate taxes or cutting the top tax rates. We need to talk about how we're going to put men and women in this country who built this country back to work in this country in the manufacturing sector of our economy.
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I was in Boeing today and I was up in BMW yesterday. South Carolina can compete with anybody in this world in manufacturing. We just need to give them the opportunity to compete. And we are 20 percent more costly than our top nine trading partners, and that's excluding labor costs. That's why I say we need to cut the corporate tax in manufacturing down to zero. We need to give manufacturers a leg up so they can compete for the jobs, half of which -- we went from 21 percent of this country in manufacturing down to 9 [percent] and we left the dreams of working men and women on the sideline. We need to show that we're the party, we're the movement that's going to get those Reagan Democrats, those conservative Democrats all throughout the states that we need to win to win this election to sign up with us, and we'll put them back to work.
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I'm the only person on this stage that will do something about it. I've got a specific plan in place that I've put out there, called the Made In the USA plan, for exactly these kinds of companies, that have great technology and then go somewhere else to make them because America is uncompetitive.
And that's why we have to cut the corporate tax for all corporations who manufacture and process in this country.
People have said, well, why are you doing it for corporations and only cutting it in half -- which I do -- to 17 1/2 percent for the rest? It's because the local pharmacy's not going to move to China. They're not going to -- they -- we -- the jobs that we're losing are jobs that we have to compete with other countries, and those are manufacturing jobs. The reason they're going there is not because our -- our -- our workers or our management in this country are not productive. We have great productivity gain. It's amazing the -- the transformation that has been made in the last decade or two about our manufacturing process here. It is simply government getting in the way.
Mitt Romney:
We have to open up markets, and we have to crack down on China when they cheat.
In last night’s GOP debate, the candidates traded many jabs, but not much was said on the subject of manufacturing. Here’s what we culled from the transcript:
Rick Santorum:
What we do is cut corporate taxes for everybody. We cut it from 35 percent to 17.5 percent, make it a — basically a net profits tax. And then we take the area of the economy that’s under competition from overseas for our jobs. The rest of the economy is not being shipped off like the mills here in South Carolina were to other countries around the world because of foreign competition.
Why? The foreign competition that we are dealing with right now is much cheaper to do business, excluding labor costs than we are, about 20 percent more, and that 20 percent differential is government. It’s government regulation and it’s also government taxation.
So part of what we are trying to do is to have a government system that can compete with who our competitor is. The competitor at the local drugstore is not China. The competitor is other people.
And as long as that is level and everybody’s paying, the big corporations and the little ones — and that’s why we have a flat 17 1/2 percent — so we keep the little guys paying the same rate as the big guys who have — right now, with this very complex code, a lot of folks in there trying to reduce rates by using the tax code to shrink their tax liability.
So we’ve leveled the playing field for the guys here in this country and we’ve created a competitive environment for the manufacturer.
Mitt Romney:
First — first of all, I think — I think Governor Perry makes a — a very good point about — about Georgetown [SC]. For those that don’t know, it was a steel mill and — and my firm invested in that steel mill and another one in Kansas City, tried to make them successful. Invested there for seven or eight years. And ultimately what happened from abroad, dumping steel into this country lead to some 40 different steel mills being closed.
And — and that was one of those. I understand what happens when China cheats, or when others cheat and dump products into this country. That’s one of the reasons I’m running is to make sure we crack down on cheaters. By the way, we also started a new steel mill with new technology in Indiana. That one’s growing and thriving. I — I think that experience is what America needs in a president. Secondly I — I agree with the governor with regards to regulations. Regulations are choking off this economy.
I will do everything in my power to put a halt to all the Obama era regulations, review those that kill jobs and get rid of those so we can get the private sector working again.
Rick Santorum has been getting a lot of press recently for his appeal to working-class voters and his focus on manufacturing issues. However, in a recent interview with National Journal, Santorum showed little support for either Buy America policy or efforts to crack down on China’s currency manipulation:
He came out against so-called domestic content legislation requiring that a certain percentage of parts be produced in America -- the kind of "domestic content" proposals that were popular in the 1980s and which the Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor Poll shows are back in fashion. He also denounced the auto bailout, saying "all it did was pay off a special interest" -- unions -- "because they're big buddies with Barack Obama."
Santorum tried to strike a middle ground on trade noting that he had opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement but was not a Pat Buchanan-style protectionist and said he did not think dealing with China's "currency manipulation" was "worth a trade war."
On Saturday, the GOP candidates faced off in the 14th debate of the primary season. Here’s what they had to say about Manufacturing
Santorum:
I come from southwestern Pennsylvania, the heart of the steel country, the heart of manufacturing. And it’s been devastated because we are uncompetitive. Thirty years ago we were devastated because business and labor didn’t understand global competitiveness and they made a lot of mistakes. They did -- they weren’t prepared for it and we lost a lot of jobs.
That’s not what’s happening now. Our productivity gains, our labor force, their doing their job, they’re being competitive. But they’re running into a stiff headwind called government. And it’s government taxation, 35 percent corporate tax which is high -- the highest in the world. It’s a tax that doesn’t easily offset when we try to export, which makes it even more difficult...
Huntsman:
We are once again on the cusp of a manufacturing renaissance in this country, if we do it right. China is going down in terms of GDP growth from 8 percent, 9 percent, 10 percent to 4 percent or 5 percent, 6 percent. And as they go down in growth, unemployment goes up.
We have an opportunity to win back that manufacturing investment, if we are smart enough, with the right kind of leadership to fix our taxes. No one up here is calling for the complete elimination of all the loopholes and the deductions, where the Wall Street Journal came out and endorsed my tax plan. That’s what needs to be done, not tinkering around the edges.
On China, however, there were more varied statements:
Hutnsman:
Listen, we have the most important relationship of the 21st Century with China. We’ve got to make it work. Of course we have challenges with them. We’ve had challenges for 40 years. It’s nonsense to think you can slap a tariff on China the first day that you’re in office, as Governor Romney would like to do.
Romney:
My own view on the relationship with China is this, which is that China is stealing our intellectual property, our patents, our designs, our know-how, our brand names. They’re hacking into our computers, stealing information from not only corporate computers but from government computers. And they’re manipulating their currency.
And for those who don’t understand the impact of that, I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. And that is, if you hold down the value of your currency artificially, you make your products artificially low-priced and kill American jobs. That has happened here in this country.
And if I’m president of the United States, I’m not going to continue to talk about how important China is and how we have to get along. And I believe those things. They’re very important. And we do have to get along. But I’m also going to tell the Chinese it’s time to stop. You have to play by the rules. I will not let you kill American jobs any longer.
Gingrich:
You cannot compete with China in the long run if you have an inferior infrastructure. You’ve got to move to a 21st-century model. That means you’ve got to be -- you’ve got to be technologically smart, and you have to make investments.
With Rick Santorum's recent surge to the head of the GOP pack, many pundits are trying to find out what fueled his rise. Over at The Nation, John Nichols seems to be on to something:
To a far greater extent than Romney, the venture capitalist who made his money dismantling American factories and offshoring jobs, and to a significantly greater extent than the wonkish Newt Gingrich and the ideologically rigid Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, Santorum appealed to blue-collar workers and to Iowans who would like to be blue-collar workers. And he’ll do more of that in New Hampshire.
Eschewing predictable “let-the-market-decide” rhetoric about free markets and free trade, Santorum has made proposals for the renewal of American manufacturing an important part of his Iowa agenda. That is not an approach that endears the unexpected contender to the hedge-fund managers and Wall Street speculators who provide so much of the funding not just for Republican candidates but for conservative groups such as the Club for Growth.
But Santorum bet on the appeal of industrial renewal message. And there is good evidence to suggest that it was a smart bet. Santorum won communities such as Newton, a United Auto Workers town that was hit hard by the shuttering of its sprawling Maytag plant, and Ottumwa, a packinghouse town where the United Food and Commercial Workers union has a rich history. These are both communities President Obama has visited since his 2008 election, and they are communities where Obama will do well in 2012. But Santorum made inroads where Romney never will. In Ottumwa-based Wapello County, for instance, while Santorum finished first, Romney ran fifth—behind not just Santorum but Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry. In the Newton area, it was Santorum, then Paul and then Romney.
Yesterday we brought you David Brooks’ take on Rick Santorum’s appeal to working-class voters. Matt Yglesias takes a more skeptical look at that claim, going point-by-point through Santorum’s tax plan:
There are a number of arguments you can make in favor of this agenda of lower taxes on corporations and rich businesses—conservatives of various stripes have been making them for decades—but in terms of the overall focus of his fiscal agenda, Santorum is in no way different from Romney or John McCain or George W Bush or Bob Dole or any of the other long list of Republicans who've touted regressive tax cuts as a way to super-charge growth.
In today’s New York Times, columnist David Brooks makes the case for Rick Santorum as the candidate of “white working class” voters:
Santorum is the grandson of a coal miner and the son of an Italian immigrant. For years, he represented the steel towns of western Pennsylvania. He has spent the last year scorned by the news media — working relentlessly, riding around in a pickup truck to more than 370 towns. He tells that story of hard work and elite disrespect with great fervor at his meetings.
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If you took a working-class candidate from the right, like Santorum, and a working-class candidate from the left, like Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and you found a few islands of common ground, you could win this election by a landslide. The country doesn’t want an election that is Harvard Law versus Harvard Law.
Last week was the final Republican debate before the Iowa caucuses. Here’s what they had to say on manufacturing and jobs:
Rick Santorum:
Yes, what I proposed in the “Made in the USA” plan is that if money has been made overseas, that it can come back at 5.5 percent rate, which is what we did back in 2004, and it did cause a lot of money to come back. But I put a special rate, zero, if they bring it back and invest it in plant and equipment in America.
We need to rebuild the manufacturing base of this country. When I traveled around to all of these counties in Iowa, I went to a lot of small towns, like Sidney and Hamburg down in Fremont County, and I was in — the other day in Newton, where they’ve lost jobs to overseas. Why? Because we’re not competitive.
We need to have our capital be competitive and — and come here free so they can invest it. We need to cut the corporate tax on manufacturers to zero. Why? Because there’s a 20 percent cost differential between America and our nine top trading partners. And we — and that’s excluding labor costs.
Mitt Romney:
What do I happen to think will be the future? I think manufacturing is going to come back. I think manufacturing, for some of the reasons Rick just indicated, it’s going to come back to the U.S. I also think, of course, that high-tech is going to be an extraordinarily source — extraordinary source of growth for a long time in this country.
This past Saturday, six of the GOP presidential candiates gathered for a debate in Des Moines, Iowa. While there were some sharp words exchanged, the debate began on a strong note, with questions about jobs and the economy. Here’s what the candidates had to say:
Mitt Romney (In answer to the question “What is your distinguishing idea, distinguishing, from all of the others on this stage, about how to create jobs in this create, how to bring jobs back from overseas.”):
Number three, to have trade policies that make sense for America, not just for the people with whom we trade.
This president has not done that. And China, that's been cheating, has to be cracked down on.
Rick Santorum:
Well, I was just down in Fremont County, which is down in the far southwest corner of the state, and they just lost about, a couple hundred jobs at a ConAgra plant down there. And Governor Branstad and Lieutenant Governor Reynolds understand, that's why they asked us to have a forum here in Pella a few weeks ago on manufacturing.
They understand that the heartland of America is suffering because the manufacturing economy of this country continues to go down. We used to have 21% of people employed in this country in manufacturing, it's now nine. And it hurts disproportionately small town and rural America. So what I learned from traveling around Iowa is we had to get a plan together that'll revitalized manufacturing.
So I took the corporate tax, not the 12%. I zeroed it out for all manufacturers. We want manufacture, we want "Made in the U.S.A." to be the moniker under my administration.
The star of the evening may have been moderator Diane Sawyer, who attempted to steer the discussion toward jobs, correctly citing it as the number one issue on the minds of the voters. She even noted after the first round of questioning that Mitt Romney was the only candidate who adequately addressed the issue:
I just wanna point out, I think that Governor Romney is the only one who actually gave a four-year, first-term number, which was again, 11.5 million jobs. Wondered if anyone else wanted to come in with a four-year, first-term promise for the American people.
In last night’s CNBC Debate, Your Money, Your Vote, the GOP candidates faced off on economic and fiscal issues. What did they have to say about manufacturing issues?
Rick Santorum:
The reason I put forth this manufacturing plan is not just so we can say "Made Here in America," that we can create opportunities for everyone in America, including those that don't have that college skill set, people who built this country, like my grandfather, who was a coal miner. So -- so that is a very important part that Republicans, unfortunately, are not talking about.
We need to talk about income mobility. We need to talk about people at the bottom of the -- of the income scale being able to get necessary skills and rise so they can support themselves and a family. And that's what manufacturing does, and that's why I'm laser-beam focused on it.
Mitt Romney:
I've been in business all my life, 25 years. I consulted to businesses around the world. I've been in business where we competed around the world. I understand free trade; I like free trade. I know that America can compete with anyone in the world. Newt is right about -- about our capacity to manufacture and compete heads-on versus the Chinese.
But I've also seen predatory pricing. I've seen people price their goods at an artificial level for an extended period of time, such that they can drive other people out of business. And then when the other people are out of business, they can raise their prices. That's what China's doing, by holding down the value of their currency.
Let the currencies float. If the U.S. currency, for instance, is being inflated, let it float. Let us float. Let us have a market mechanism determine the value of our respective currencies, as opposed to the Chinese government continuing to put an advantage to their -- their producers. This -- this is no longer a time for us just to sit back and say we're going to let them steal our jobs.
Michele Bachmann:
Well, the Chinese have been bad actors. Recently we found out that they dumped counterfeit computer chips here in the United States. We're using some of those counterfeit computer chips in the Pentagon in some of our weapons systems. This has national security implications.
Newt Gingrich:
... first of all, you've got to decide, how are we going to be more competitive and how are we going to be the lowest cost? And there's a new Boston consultant (ph) that says, by 2015, South Carolina and Alabama will be cheaper than the Chinese coastal provinces to manufacturing.
Second, in terms of dealing with China strategically, I think we're going to have to find ways to dramatically raise the pain level for the Chinese cheating, both in the hacking side, but also on the stealing and intellectual property side. And I don't think anybody today has a particularly good strategy for doing that.
Rick Santorum participated in the Republican Presidential Forum on Manufacturing in Pella, Iowa yesterday. As the former Senator from Pennsylvania, Santorum has firsthand knowledge of the benefits of manufacturing jobs:
If there is one thing I hear when I go out across the country it's that we need made in America again, we need to make more things in America again and it's not just that pride of making things but it is the opportunity for those at the bottom end of the income scale to be able to get the jobs and I think the average manufacturing job earns about $20,000 more than non-manufacturing jobs. That means folks at the bottom end and the middle can move up that income scale and if we create a competitive environment -- I've heard some candidates talk about we need a trade role with China. No we don't, we need to just beat them. We need to have to have an environment here that can attract those jobs back from China and the new innovative products to be made here.
With the rollout of Rick Perry’s tax plan, there are now eight different tax proposals floating around the GOP Field. The Washington Post has a handy breakdown of the candidate’s various proposals.
The only candidate to put an emphasis on manufacturing in his plan is Rick Santorum, who “wants to cut the corporate tax for manufacturing from 35 percent to zero”
Last night’s Republican debate featured some sharp discussion between the candidates, each fighting to differentiate themselves from the other contenders on stage. Unfortunately, very little of the discussion was focused on job creation, and even less touched upon manufacturing jobs.
The only two candidates to mention manufacturing jobs at all were Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum.
Mitt Romney:
But there are also a lot of good jobs we need in manufacturing, and high-tech jobs, and good service jobs, technology of all kinds. America produces an economy that's very, very broad. And that's why our policy to get America the most attractive place in the world for investment and -- and job growth encompasses more than just energy.
Rick Santorum:
…that's why I focus all of the real big changes in the tax code at manufacturing. I cut the corporate rate for manufacturing to zero, repeal all regulations affecting manufacturers that cost over $100 million and replace them with something that's friendlier, they can work with. We repatriate $1.2 trillion that manufacturers made overseas and allow them to bring it back here, if they invest in plants and equipment. They can do it without having to pay any -- any excise tax.
It’s sad, really, that the clips from this debate already getting the most play on cable news are of the candidates sniping at each other, rather than discussing the issues that matter to most Americans.
Read the transcript here.
Rick Santorum grew up in an industrial town in Pennsylvania, and his was the strongest voice for a strong industrial base:
“Yeah, the [manufacturing] jobs can come back if you create a climate for them to be profitable.
“I -- I -- we have a lot of businesspeople, manufacturers in Pennsylvania. I don't know a single one who wanted to ship their jobs offshore, who didn't want them in their own community to be able to employ people and see the fruits of their labor being -- benefiting the community that they live in. What happened was we became uncompetitive.
So we need to be competitive. And that's why I proposed taking the corporate tax from manufacturers and processors, taking it from 35 percent and eliminating it, zero percent tax. Allow this to be the -- the -- the manufacturing capital of the world again. Take that money -- $1.2 trillion that over -- that's overseas from manufacturers who did send their jobs overseas -- bring it back, zero percent tax rate if you invest it in plant and equipment in this country.
Repeal every regulation the Obama administration has put in place that's over $100 million. Repeal them all. You may have to replace a few, but let's repeal them all because they are all antagonistic to businesses, particularly in the manufacturing sector.
And do as Governor Perry suggested. We need a bold energy plan -- I've put one out there -- to drill. Pennsylvania -- I don't want to brag, Governor, but Pennsylvania is the gas capital of the world right now, not Texas…”
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“The -- the cool thing about my plan as opposed to Herman's plans and some of the other plans out here, it'll pass tomorrow. It would pass tomorrow. Why? Because industrial-state Democrats want those jobs and they know if we put a pro-manufacturing- jobs plan on the table it will pass overnight. We'll get votes from Indiana and Pennsylvania and Ohio and Michigan, all of those states.”
” Well, I already put forward a plan. You know, Mitt, I don't want to go to a trade war. I want to beat China. I want to go war with China and -- and make America the most attractive place in the world to do business, and we need to do that with the agenda that I outlined, which, unlike Herman's plan, which could not pass, because no -- how many people here are for a sales tax in New Hampshire? Raise your hand. There you go, Herman. That's how many votes you'll get in New Hampshire.”
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“As was mentioned, I grew up in a steel town, and one of the things that I realized is that when manufacturing left, a lot of the people in the middle income of America left.
And what we -- what I -- I just read a recent study that actually income mobility from the bottom two quintiles up into the middle of -- up into the middle income is actually greater -- the mobility in Europe -- than it is in America today. We need to change that, and the way you do it is by -- in -- by creating jobs in the manufacturing sector of the economy, which is what I will do. It creates that income mobility. It'll create the opportunity for semiskilled and lower- skilled and -- and skilled workers to rise in society. It will take those people off of Occupy -- and bring them into the workplace, where they can -- they can have family-sustaining jobs.”
Rep. McCotter has suspended his bid for the Presidency
In last night’s CNN/Tea Party debate, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum took a stand for manufacturing jobs:
What we need to do is have a pro-growth plan that can pass the Congress with Democratic support and, as Newt mentioned, be able to rally the American people. What the American people want is a policy that's going to get people the opportunity to rise in society, to fill that great middle of America, and that is manufacturing jobs.
That's why my plan takes the corporate tax, which is 35 percent, cuts it to zero, and says, if you manufacture in America, you aren't going to pay any taxes. We want you to come back here. We want you to have "Made in America" stamped on your -- your product.
