The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“Economic Growth (Executive Calendar)” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the Senate section on pages S2558-S2560 on May 1, 2019.
The Department provides billions in unemployment insurance, which peaked around 2011 though spending had declined before the pandemic. Downsizing the Federal Government, a project aimed at lowering taxes and boosting federal efficiency, claimed the Department funds "ineffective and duplicative services" and overregulates the workplace.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
Economic Growth
Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, first, I say thanks to my colleague from Delaware for the touching tribute to Chris and his service in the U.S. Navy.
I am here to talk about our economy, what is going on out there, and how we can do a better job of bringing people off the sidelines and into work. They are needed.
Right now we have an incredibly strong economy. We just learned in the first quarter of this year that the economy grew by 3.2 percent. That is strong and way above expectations. In fact, when you look at the expectations that were set by the Congressional Budget Office, which is a nonpartisan group that analyzes what is going to happen in the economy going forward, prior to the tax bill being signed into law--that is, the tax reform and tax cuts from the end of 2017--they said this first quarter growth would be 1.6 percent. It is interesting. It was exactly twice the economic growth than was projected before the tax bill.
By the way, before the tax bill, they also made a projection on jobs. Over the last year, we have produced just about exactly twice as many jobs--a little more than that--than was projected. The tax cuts and the tax reform have worked, along with regulatory relief, to give this economy a shot in the arm. That is so important.
I will say that when you look at what happened in the first quarter of this year, the 3.2 percent is great, but it would have been even better had we not shut down the government. I say that because we have some new numbers from the Congressional Budget Office that say that the level of GDP this first quarter would have been 0.2 percent more if we had not had the government shutdown late last year, which was the longest government shutdown in the history of our country. So it would have been 3.6 percent instead of 3.2 percent. Wow, that would be terrific. I guess I bring that up only because I think it is time for us, again, to prepare for the potential of our having another impasse year at the end of this fiscal year on September 30. I hope we will avoid going into another government shutdown. It just doesn't make sense. It is shooting ourselves in the foot.
There is legislation called the End Government Shutdowns Act. Almost all of my colleagues on this side of the aisle have now sponsored that legislation. It just avoids our going into a shutdown but still allows us to continue to move forward on our spending and, over time, reduce that spending until we get our act together and do the appropriations bills here. Again, there is good news in terms of job growth in the first quarter.
The other thing I think is really important and may be the most important statistic of all is the fact that wages are going up for the first time in a decade. Really, in Ohio, for a decade and a half, we have had flat wages--higher expenses but flat wages. It is really frustrating to the families who are working hard and doing everything right but can't get ahead. Over the last year now, we have seen wage increases. A 3.4-percent wage increase is the strongest we have seen since the great recession. I love the fact that this wage growth is happening not just among higher paid individuals but, actually, primarily among what is called nonsupervisory employees. That is how the Department of Labor terms it. These are blue-collar jobs. These are middle-class jobs. These are jobs of people who, again, have had a tough time making ends meet. I know in my State most people work paycheck to paycheck, and it is great to have that higher wage come in.
We passed tax reform because we believed it is the right thing to do for our economy, for employers, for investment, and we have seen that positive impact. I have had over two dozen townhall meetings and roundtable discussions in my State, talking to employers, usually smaller businesses, about what happened to them with regard to tax reform. Every single one of them said the same thing: We have reinvested in the business. We have invested in technology, in new equipment, and we have invested in our people. In some cases, that means better benefits. In two cases, small businesses acknowledged to me that they weren't providing healthcare before the tax cuts, and now they are because of the savings from the tax cut. They have also invested in people's 401(k)s and other benefits. That is what is happening out there in terms of the business side of the tax reform and tax cuts.
In addition to that, there are also a lot of Americans who now have more of their hard-earned money coming home. Their paychecks are better because of the middle-class tax cuts that are in the legislation. For Ohio, this amounted to $2,000 per year, on average, for a median-income family. I know there has been a lot of discussion by others saying: Well, really, these tax cuts didn't happen. Yes, they did. They did. That is a fact. Most people I represent have seen a tax cut, and a lot of those individuals saw their overall tax liability go down--not just that the monthly checks were better, but on April 15 they had better news. Let me give you some facts about that.
According to H&R Block, which is probably the firm that handles more middle-class tax returns than any other firm in the country, the average Ohioan saw a 23.3-percent decrease in their overall tax bill in 2018. This is from H&R Block. They also said that there is a 2.3-
percent increase in the average refund in Ohio. I know there has been a lot of discussion about this back and forth, and early on people were concerned about their refunds. These are the numbers. These are the facts from H&R Block. Overall, about 90 percent of middle-class Americans received a tax cut in 2018, which means more money in their pockets to pay down student debt, to save for retirement, to take a long-awaited family vacation, and to be able to, again, achieve whatever their dream is in life.
The economy is growing, creating jobs, and wages are rising. That is all good news. But with more jobs there is a problem that has developed, and that is a lack of workers. I can't go anywhere in Ohio--and I just had a bunch of meetings in Ohio, talking about this--where people don't tell me: We don't have enough qualified workers to fill the jobs that we have. Some people call it the skills gap, and that is true in Ohio. We have a mismatch between the skills that are out there--the skills that people who are looking for jobs have--and the jobs that are available. If you go on the OhioMeansJobs website right now, you will see about 145,000 jobs being offered. When you look at them, these are good jobs. A lot of them, though, require a certain level of skill. Some are information technology jobs, coding jobs. Some are skilled manufacturing jobs, like machining or welding. Some of the jobs are in bioscience, healthcare jobs, technicians. The problem is we don't have the people who have the skills to fill those jobs. That is a shame for those individuals who aren't achieving their hopes in life because they aren't getting those good jobs and certainly for our economy, which would be even stronger if we had more people to fill those jobs.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the Department of Labor, 7.3 million U.S. jobs are currently vacant, again, largely because of the shortage of qualified workers. The National Skills Coalition estimates that nearly half of all job openings between now and 2022 will be what they call middle-skill jobs. This means jobs that require education beyond high school, like a certificate program, but not a 4-year degree. The supply of skilled workers in this category--
students pursuing post high school certifications--still falls way short of what the industry demand is.
This is why career and technical education is important. CTE is part of the answer to this. If you are in high school and looking for an opportunity, check out your career and technical academy. In many high schools, it is combined in one CTE program. It is a great opportunity. It will give you the knowledge and training necessary to succeed in your career.
I am the cofounder and the cochair of what is called the Senate CTE Caucus. We have been working to raise awareness of this issue, so many of my colleagues have now joined this caucus because they go home and see the same thing. How do we connect our hard-working Ohioans to good-
paying jobs, and how do we strengthen these CTE programs to make them more affordable and more accessible?
One answer is legislation recently reintroduced by Senator Tim Kaine and me. It is called the JOBS Act. It is really very simple. It says we should be allowed to use Pell grants not just to pay for college but to pay for shorter term certificate programs. These have to be qualified programs, programs that provide real credentials to people. Right now, with the Pell grant, if it is a program of less than 15 weeks, you can't use it. So low-income students all over the country are told: You can go to college. That is great. We are going to encourage you to do that, incentivize you to do that, but you can't get this short-term training program that can get you the job right away.
In Ohio, if those students graduate--and most don't--their average debt is $27,000 compared, again, to the opportunity to go through the short-term training program, get the job, and begin to make money to buy the car, to be able to buy a small home or at least to rent an apartment and not be in your parents' basement, and to be able to move ahead with your life and your family. So career and technical education is a great opportunity, and the JOBS Act would make it much more likely that people would take that opportunity.
By the way, the community colleges around the country love the JOBS Act. I believe it is their top priority this year. Why? Because so many of them are now offering these certificate-based programs because they are responding to the needs of the community and what the businesses are telling them they need.
It is going to be different in every community, by the way, and that is good. There is no ``one size fits all.'' In some communities in Ohio, because we are a big manufacturing State, it is welding, and it is machining. In other places around the country, it might be something else. It might be for the fishing industry, the oil and gas industry, or bioscience. All across Ohio I have seen how these programs are working and could work even better if we had the JOBS Act.
Last week I toured Venture Products. It is a family-owned company that designs and makes tractors. They make an incredible product called the Ventrac. They have a really impressive facility, and it was great to see them and their success. The company has benefited from tax reform and has made additional investments in its business and its workers with their tax savings, just like all of these companies that I have gone to visit all over our State.
After the tour of the company, we had a roundtable discussion. It was with educators--people from the local community college and career and technical education folks who came in--also business people and people from the area who were involved in economic development because they are very concerned that without the workforce they can't expand the businesses in this community in Ohio. We talked about the need to strengthen CTE programs, and we talked about the JOBS Act. All of them agreed that this would be really helpful and helpful right now.
I also had a visit at the Central Ohio Technical College. The investiture ceremony took place last Thursday, and I had the chance to meet the new president, Dr. John Berry. There are a lot of exciting things happening at this career and technical college.
They work pretty closely with Ohio State, which is terrific. So you have Ohio State, a 4-year college, and a great series of graduate programs, working directly with these community colleges that focus on skills training. They are expanding their programming, which will help to meet the needs of today's workforce. The JOBS Act, according to them, will greatly benefit the students who are using these shorter term programs to put them on a path to a good-paying job.
In Walnut Creek, OH, I spoke at the Eastern Ohio Development Alliance's annual meeting in Hockley County. This meeting represented counties from all over eastern and southeastern Ohio. We talked about a lot of things, including the shortage of skilled workers, because it comes up again and again. In this case, Ohio has this wonderful opportunity with the Marcellus and the Utica Shale finds to develop our natural gas and our wet gas and our oil industry, but they need workers. We don't want to have workers coming in from out of State, frankly. We want to develop our own Ohio workforce, and we can only do that with skills training because a lot of these jobs require skills that are not available in Ohio today.
In Columbus, last week I spoke at a reentry conference. This is an annual conference talking about how to get people going from prison into our communities with the job skills they need and the mental health and drug treatment they need to be successful. Again, it all came down to this issue of workforce training being so important, both because it helps people to get a job and not go back into the prison system and also because getting a job is an essential part of so many successful recovery programs for people who have drug and alcohol addiction and want to be able to participate in our economy. This gives them meaning and purpose in life and helps with their recovery.
I was in Knox County at a roundtable discussion. Again, in this case, it was with first responders, local elected officials, and the leadership of their mental health and recovery organization there. Their board there is focused on dealing with the crystal meth problem. It has almost pushed the opioid problem to the second most troubling drug problem in the community. They still have overdoses from opioids. They are still concerned about that. Crystal meth has now come in with a vengeance--pure crystal meth from Mexico. Their big issue is how to get people in recovery and successful recovery. Again, the issue of job training came up. How do you give people the skills they need to get a job, and how do you incorporate job skills in a recovery program, again, so people have a reason to turn their life around to get back with their family. That purpose and meaning come from a job, so often.
So it was an opportunity to talk about the need for us to develop the workforce to meet the needs of our communities and the opportunity to talk about the need for the JOBS Act. I am really pleased that the JOBS Act is in the President's budget this year. I thank President Trump and his administration for including that. It makes all the sense in the world. The higher education bill will be reauthorized this year, we all hope. That is certainly the plan. If that happens, it is the perfect place for having the JOBS Act included.
Senator Kaine of Virginia and I are the coauthors of this legislation. We are hopeful that our colleagues on both sides of the aisle will join us in this legislation and help us to get it in the Higher Education Act. I know that it is a priority of many members of that committee, and Chairman Alexander, in particular, has a passion for ensuring that we have the training we need out there to get people the jobs to let them achieve their dreams in life.
Passing the JOBS Act will give us an opportunity to help so many Americans have better opportunities, and, just as importantly, it would enable us to help our economy right now because the biggest concern I hear is no longer the taxes. People love the tax cuts and tax reform, and they love the regulatory relief, but they are looking for skilled workers. This is an opportunity. Let's seize it. Let's keep growing our economy and help Americans fulfill their God-given potential.
I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Nebraska.
Honoring Our Armed Forces
