Mr. Speaker, a number of innovative medium-sized businesses in my riding have patents and are exporters.
They have told me about the problems they are having with exporting, problems that are partly related to the sluggish American market. However, some of the decisions made here have made it difficult to maintain exports. Nearly all of them have told me that, in the past four years, we have fallen way behind in research and development. All of these elements are related.
We cannot think of our country as strong and maintain our export levels if we are not among the most innovative countries. If we make the same watch as a Chinese or Japanese company, that is not very appealing to Germans. We have to create different things.
All of these bad decisions have been made over the past seven years. The fact that the deficit has been over $45 billion per year is no accident, nor is our poor trade performance over the past five years.
How can the members on the other side of the House stand up and brag about what amazing economists they are in light of these failures?