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Rick Santorum Addresses the Des Moines Register Concerning Economic Development

311 views · Published 25 September 2015 · 3:15 · Indexed 30 October 2026

Channel: RFD-TV · 2015 · Entertainment

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Q: "My name is Kim Norvel. I’m a reporter at the Des Moines Register. My question is, what is your prescription for revitalizing economic development in rural America?"

A: Rick Santorum: "I think I alluded to it earlier, with a manufacturing plan that will revitalize the country generally. It used to be we were only gonna manufacture near where the resource was or where a body of skilled labor was. Not anymore. I mean, every state in America can now get engaged and involved in manufacturing. Companies are gonna go where there’s available land and where there’s people who want them there, and there’s trained people. So it’s a combination of making sure that we have number one, a competitive tax system, a competitive trade system, and a competitive regulatory system. We don’t’ have any of those right now. We do have one advantage right now. We have cheap energy prices for probably as far as the eye can see. That is a huge game changer for us that allows us to go out and compete for more jobs to come back, so we have now the energy prices. If you, if you elect me president, we’ll pass a tax bill that will put manufacturing back on square one. One of the things we’re doing is for corporations is 20% rate, as I mentioned before, but no corporate welfare anymore. No special tax provisions. Everything will be treated the same. No oil depletion allowance, nothing.  Everything will be 20%, and every expenditure you make that’s related to the business is expensed. No depreciation, no amortization. Everything’s expensed. That’s a huge incentive for manufacturers. Why? Because they’re capital intensive. They spend a lot of money. They have to have depreciate their equipment and their property over time. Now, you can expense it immediately. Huge incentive for manufacturers to come back here. We’re gonna have a repatriation change. Right now we have a system that says that if you make money in China, you pay a 20% rate over there. You wanna bring that money back, you gotta pay the difference which is another 15%-20% here in America. So guess what? They leave their money over there. What we’re gonna say is no matter where you’re, you’re bringing it back from, whatever country, the maximum rate you’re gonna pay is 7% on that money coming back.  We think $2,000,000,000; $1,000,000,000 to $2,000,000,000 will come back into this country from Apple and other folks who have made products overseas that will bring their money back and invest it here in plant equipment. That’s gonna happen in rural and small town America all over the country. The big challenge for rural and small town America will be: are you gonna have people who are gonna be trained to do the jobs, number one? And number two, are we gonna change our welfare system to make sure that there’s an incentive for people to actually take these jobs? I can tell you, here in Iowa, which has very low unemployment, about 3%-3.5%. Every manufacturer, and I’ve been to about 30 or 40 of them so far this campaign, have told me the same thing. They’re having trouble finding people, people who, who are willing to work. They’ll have people come in and sit and meet with them. They’ll talk to them, and they’ll talk about how they wanna work and then they say "well, you know, I get this benefit if I don’t work and if I go to work here, I’m gonna lose this." We can’t have the federal government being an obstacle to growth in America and right now, it is with our welfare system."

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