On the recordNovember 29, 2010
Recapturing a little bit of my time here, talking about the Portland cement issue, when I started looking into this, and first off to make this very clear, we are not talking about company called Portland Cement, we are talking about a process for making cement. It is kind of interesting. Cement is the second most consumed product globally in the world. The first is water. So honestly, just about everything that is constructed, buildings and roadways, has something to do with cement. And the projections on what this is going to do to the Portland cement industry, the people who make the concrete that we depend on, you know probably 90 percent of the skyscrapers of the world use some form of pre-stressed concrete to build a skyscraper. It is a major building material for a thriving economy. What they are telling us now is that construction spending amounts to about a trillion dollars annually, and that is about a fourth of the gross domestic product. The cement industry has declined in relation to the national economic downturn, and so has the construction industry. If they do this, this could cost us around 153,000 jobs nationwide. That is lost jobs. We are trying to figure out a way to create jobs in this Congress; that is lost jobs. The cement industry generates $7.5 billion annually in wages and benefits.
