Kay Bailey Hutchison: “I rise to speak in favor of the Paul amendment. The Davis-Bacon Act was passed in 1931. We had a very different labor…”

“I rise to speak in favor of the Paul amendment. The Davis-Bacon Act was passed in 1931. We had a very different labor and diversity of wages. There were not minimum wages to the extent we have today. Today, every State has a different cost of living, different standards of what kinds of construction requirements there are, and thousands of buildings in this country are built in the private sector very safely, very efficiently. But when Davis-Bacon kicks in, for a government program, it skews the entire wage scale of that community, causing an inflation to other projects. The studies I have seen prove that Davis-Bacon increases costs throughout a community because it sets an artificial standard, not taking into account the cost of living in that area. No one can argue that the cost of living in New York is very different from the cost of living in Texas or West Virginia or Tennessee. We should not be trying to change the norm in an area by artificially inflating the costs, and that is exactly what Davis-Bacon does.”