Oregon Congressman Cliff Bentz
Congressman Cliff Bentz voted against the deceptively named America COMPETES Act (H.R. 4521), which passed the United States House of Representatives by a mostly party line vote of 222-210. This $325 billion spending blowout promotes the interests of the Chinese Communist Party, erodes our global competitive advantage, and dumps billions of taxpayer dollars to Democrat-aligned special interest groups.
“The COMPETES Act is the Democrats’ thinly veiled attempt that pretends to hold China accountable for its human rights abuses, environmental abuses, and aggression towards United States allies in the Pacific. But, instead of a serious attempt to strategically position the United States to meet the serious challenges presented by China, we are faced with a bill that fails to protect American interests at almost every level. Our focus should be on empowering American businesses, universities, researchers, and manufacturers as critical assets as we compete against China. Instead, this legislation stifles America with despotic regulations straight out of the Democrats’ ‘big-government is the answer playbook,’” said Rep. Bentz.
Nearly 3,000 pages long, the COMPETES Act was drafted in secret by Democratic House leadership without any Republican input. It compounds current American vulnerabilities by adding to the national debt, creating regulations that would choke small businesses, and fails to address the root causes of America’s supply chain crisis. This legislation includes the CHIPS Act, which directs $52 billion in taxpayer funded subsidies to chip makers. However, this bill fails to spell out how this huge sum of money will be spent. Moreover, the Pentagon is already working to kickstart chip manufacturing operations in the United States, and construction of a $12 billion chip plant is underway in Arizona. The CHIPS provision would only duplicate existing efforts to meet United States demand for chips. Subsidies will cause massive market distortion and will destabilize domestic production.
Additionally, this bill allocates $8 billion to the United Nation’s Green Climate Fund, which has already sent $100 million to the Chinese Communist Party, puts $45 billion toward a supply chain resiliency program accessible to Democratic special interest groups, and hands out $3 billion to a solar manufacturing program that will provide yet another windfall to China. We certainly do not need to encourage and support, with taxpayer money, China’s minerals industry, which thanks to the Biden Administration’s lock up of American mining operations, is now the world’s leader in rare earth production.
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