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.
“UNEMPLOYMENT BY EDUCATION LEVEL” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H2047-H2050 on April 21.
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:
UNEMPLOYMENT BY EDUCATION LEVEL
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2021, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert) for 30 minutes.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, this is going to be one of those evenings where you have a lot of things to share, but they are actually really about two subjects. And I am going to ask us to try to think about things a little bit differently. And as is my bad habit, I brought a number of charts to just try to get our heads around it.
Some of what I am going to share tonight--I am going to try to dial back the sarcasm, but we have got to get our heads around facts and reality.
One of the first things I want to go through is what we did employment-wise, who got hurt during this last year.
Our brothers and sisters who have sort of less-than-a-high-school education, if you see this green chart right there, this is sort of talking about the unemployment levels for those who are lower on education.
You have got to understand, this last year was absolutely crushing to our brothers and sisters who really either didn't graduate high school or barely graduated high school. Their value that they sell is their labor. And the numbers are still just really, really high. Look at the disproportion between those of us who have bachelor's degrees or graduate degrees. We had a blip, but not much of one.
Individuals here who didn't graduate high school, they are getting their heads kicked in, and they still are. So we are going to talk about some of the policy going around us.
{time} 2045
And the next part is, it is beyond just unemployment. For those of us in the Joint Economic Committee, those on Ways and Means, those who actually pay attention to the numbers, the U-6, and all these things put out by the Labor Department, the real number we need to pay attention to is actually something called labor force participation.
What does it mean when someone is not in the labor force with their skill sets, age?
Their attachment to work gets broader and more difficult to reattach. Their ability to climb to a supervisor or watch their pay go up gets really damaged.
And on this one, do you see this line down here?
We are, right now, seeing some labor force participation by education levels. For those who didn't finish high school, half of them aren't in the labor force.
Do you understand what is going on right now with what we would traditionally refer to as the working poor, except they are not working?
Now, part of this is because of the absurd policies we have engaged in. What happens when you make public policy by your heart, by feelings, instead of math, instead of facts, instead of actual compassion that understands what makes someone's life better?
We just financed keeping people out of the labor force.
Do you understand? Do we understand? Do we understand? As a body, do we understand what we just did to the future earning powers of those individuals that we incentivized not to be in the labor force?
And we are already seeing it.
Was the goal here to make these individuals permanently poor?
Because that is what we are accomplishing right now.
So, obviously, because the rhetoric around here, particularly from the left, is that they care about the working poor, we would be seeing public policy that actually takes care and helps the working poor, makes the value of their labor more valuable.
What is the single number one thing that crushes the labor value of the working poor?
It turns out--and we were a little surprised, but we did a bunch of research--it is when you have an open border policy, because, all of a sudden, you have those who actually--
their value economically is selling their labor.
You now have decided you are going to make them compete with those coming across the border. And, on occasion, we will be here on the floor and we will hear arguments about compassion for individuals from around the world who have presented themselves at our border in Arizona. And I just desperately wonder, Where the hell is the compassion for the working poor in our own country?
Here is the math. I mean, you know, the peak pandemic unemployment rate was well over 20 percent for those who didn't finish high school, for those who basically--their economic value is their labor. But it is worse than that. When you have an open border policy, you have basically crushed their wages. Their future wages go negative.
You know, I know we all just heard an hour of border policy and those things. Maybe I see too much of the world through sort of an economic lens, but I think that is also a fairer lens. It is not meant to be brutality right or left. It is a love and compassion for those in our society who were being left behind for so long. We are crushing them again.
I mean, the best math we have come up with is if you didn't finish high school and you have a society that has moved to open borders, which functionally is the math you have added hundreds of thousands of new moderate- to low-skill workers.
What is the value of the skills or lack of skills of a population who are already with you?
On the chart, it goes down well over 6 percent. They are going to be paid less. We have just created more poverty not by those who have presented themselves at the border, but to our domestic population here.
This is a type of economic cruelty. I mean, it may be a little rhetorically flamboyant, but it is a type of economic cruelty on the very population that so many of us here talk about we care, talk about we want to help. And what is going on right now to the working poor with the policy, particularly being promulgated by the left, is crushing. And this is just the open border side.
Do we understand that what we have also done economically?
Say I came to you tomorrow and said, Hey, here is what we are going to do. We are going to pump stunning amounts of money into the economy, and we are going to look the other way when we start to see inflation on commodity prices, on food prices, and on a lot of the basics. A lot of our constituents are going to shrug, and say, Okay, a little bit of inflation, fine.
Has anyone also talked about what inflation does to the working poor?
The fact of the matter is, when you start to look at the actual data--if you are in the top 10 percent of income, a little bit of inflation actually makes you wealthier because you own real estate, you own assets. They become more valuable. But if you are an individual where a substantial portion of your income just goes to pay your food bill--what we have engaged in in economic policy this last year is substantially malpractice. We are making their lives miserable. And the solution from the left is, well, we will just subsidize them more.
So let's talk about that. Do we understand what you have just done?
If I incentivize you by--we are going to send you a check, and then we are going to give you an additional monthly check, an enhanced unemployment benefit, and we will give you maybe some more money for this and that. None of those things incentivize you, saying, we know you need help, we are going to help you get reattached to work so you can gain skills, so you can move up in the organization, so your wages can go up so there is actually productivity in the society, so you are actually paying taxes into what is your Social Security and Medicare account, so you have, what is it, your 60 quarters, all of those things that are so important to raising the poor out of poverty.
Instead, we have done just the opposite. We have financially incentivized millions of Americans not to be part of the labor pool. We have incentivized millions of Americans for a year to not gain the skill sets, the labor attachment.
There are some of our economists we are talking to that say we are going to spend decades paying for this. And it is right in front of us. We all knew what we were doing. It was just easy, because creating policy says, hey, we are going to give you this to help you work through the devastation of this last year, but here is the incentive to get back in the labor pool and the market.
So when we actually have our small employers complain to us that they can't hire anyone, yet at the same time--we go back to my previous slide about labor participation. We have millions and millions and millions of Americans who aren't working. Unemployment has been going down. It is because these folks have dropped out. They are not counted as unemployed.
We will pay a devastating societal price for doing this to so many people.
And why is this so important and why is it such a contrast to where we were in 2018, 2019, and the first quarter of 2020?
Do you understand what a miracle we were living for a couple of years there?
The fact of the matter is, if you look at income and equality, which used to be the harbinger of society fairness after tax reform, as to the regulatory reform, after making labor valuable for our working poor, they got dramatically less poor, and we have lost that.
In this last year, we have basically wiped out one of the steepest curves of progress in economic history of the United States. You take a look at this chart and you start to think about the wage gains that Hispanics, African Americans, Asians were having. Their wage gains were going up much faster than Anglos.
This is what we all claim we desire. This makes a much fairer, more egalitarian society. We made the value of our brothers' and sisters' talents, skills, labor, much more valuable. And then now we have adopted policies that crush them. We have done everything half-ass backwards.
And you start to take a look at what happened after tax reform, regulatory reform, and many of the things we did before. It really was just stunning. One of the most interesting numbers was the value of female participation in the economy. Remember, before the pandemic, we actually had more females working than males. They had a dramatically faster wage gain. We had one of the year's--actually, I think if I do 2018, 2019, African-American females had double-digit wage gains, finally.
The rhetoric in this place for decades: We need to think and care about the working poor.
Suddenly, economic policy did something for the working poor. It just happened to be making tax policy and regulatory policy that invested in plants and equipment and technology that made those businesses more productive. Meaning--because you all remember your elementary economics class.
What are the two common factors that change your wages?
Inflation. Okay. That doesn't get you anywhere. Your wages go up just to catch up with buying the same thing with more dollars.
Productivity. Wages go up with productivity. This was a productivity curve because of what was done in tax reform. And it was the beneficiaries--they weren't rich people. They were poor people, except it is heresy to tell the truth with the math around here.
So what breaks my heart is we have come so far and we have lost it. We keep adopting policies, whether it is what is going on at the border, what we have done to subsidize people not to join the labor pool, what we have done to promote inflation. All these are things that will crush the working poor.
Once again, if you take a look at just the employment groups of the population that had just amazing growth, Hispanic women, African-
American women and men, White men, down here, White women. It was all the groups that my brothers and sisters on the left claim they care about. In 2018, 2019, these numbers are miraculous. They aren't little fractions. These are big deals.
So why would this body on one hand be rhetorically--that this is the populations they care about, and then turn around and knife them with economic policy that will make the working poor poorer.
Is it they don't know better? Is it they are just leading with their hearts and their feeling instead of some calculator math?
I do this because there is a path. We can be compassionate, but we need to understand what makes poor people less poor. What actually drives income and equality. It is not trying to make rich people less rich. The idea is to make the multitudes of poor people less poor.
And I can give you sort of a disruptive thought. In Ways and Means, we have had hearings and discussions of the healthcare outcome differential by populations from COVID. It is absolutely real. If you are a Native American, which I represent a couple of Tribal communities that are good friends; if you happen to be an urban minority, you have had much worse healthcare outcomes.
But if you want to be honest about what you are seeing, is that racist?
Well, the data says no. What it says is there were precursors in those communities of health presentations that were much worse. So if you take a look at the charts--and we are working on this chart now--
the early numbers are fascinating.
Take a look at an urban minority population, my diabetes, my hypertension, the still use of tobacco products, and you line that up with the bad outcomes from COVID, they almost line up exactly.
{time} 2100
Madam Speaker, if you give a damn about poor people, minority populations--and my Native Americans who are suffering in remarkable numbers from diabetes, which actually turns out to be the key precursor for why they have had such horrible outcomes during COVID--then it is time to step up and say that we can basically do the typical vision of the left which will put in some more health clinics, because we are going to try to make your misery more tolerable, or we can do a disruption and end the misery.
It is time for something like an Operation Warp Speed for diabetes. Instead of patching over the misery, let's find a way to cure it. I understand type 1 autoimmune, type 2 lifestyle, these are complicated and difficult. But if I came to you a couple years ago and said, mRNA vaccines, we are going to do it in just several months, you would have thought I was out of my mind, Madam Speaker. You see the discussions now that we just leaped 10 years in technology of using the mRNA. We are functioning, it is a software problem now.
The ability to cure virus infections, a number of cancers, and a number of other diseases is now a software problem. We are on the edge of miracles.
Is this going to be the continued policy of, well, we are going to just patch over people's miseries, or are we going to cure them?
There are some brilliant examples in just the last couple years.
Do you remember hepatitis C, the projections it was going to cost for the coming liver transplants and the number of people who had served in the military who were going to be dying miserable deaths waiting for that liver transplant?
Then what did we do?
We came up with a cure. The cure was really expensive at first--
dramatically less expensive than a liver transplant--and now with competition and technology we have crashed the price.
We have a cure for hemophilia.
Madam Speaker, you saw that with the mRNA technology, we may be on the cusp finally for a vaccine for HIV.
As a body and as Members, we talk about how much we love and care about the minority populations we represent, and then we are not willing to think disruptively on what ends the misery. We seem to have our heads stuck somewhere decades ago that we are just going to make the misery more tolerable. My passion is let's make it go away.
Madam Speaker, if you really care about healthcare differentials between ethnic populations, understand what caused it--we have that data--and go at it. Let's cure it.
It turns out over the next 30 years--the best number I have come up with for the next 30 years of Medicare--Medicare will be the primary driver of U.S. debt. Ten years from now, we are at $42 trillion of debt and the curve steepens. It is demographics. It is just baby boomers are getting older, and we are going to consume a lot of resources. But it turns out 30 percent of that healthcare spending in Medicare, it actually turns out that over 30 percent is diabetes.
If compassion and love for our brothers and sisters in curing something like diabetes isn't what drives you, Madam Speaker, how about just the debt?
The single biggest impact we can have on the debt, it turns out, would be a cure for diabetes.
So if you are a fiscal hawk, Madam Speaker, go at it. If you claim to be compassionate, go at it. If you want to keep people just having a nicer way to suffer, then leave the types of policies we are doing right now where we are going to do a patchwork quilt of a couple more healthcare centers.
So, Madam Speaker, I am incredibly distressed that the Democrat policies adopted so far this year, when you lay them out--when our brothers and sisters who are on the sidelines, because they have been able to financially live--survive, if that is what you want to call it, and they are out of the workforce, what is their economic skill set a year from now when the rug is pulled out from underneath them when we go back to something semi more normal?
What violence have we done to their futures?
I hope someone out there is listening and thinking about this.
One of the other things I want to walk through is: my understanding is, over the next couple weeks we will talk infrastructure, we will talk the environment, we will talk global warming, and we will talk greenhouse gasses.
Can I beg of some of the folks around here to actually read?
The amount of folklore that is spewed at these microphones is just intensely frustrating.
Madam Speaker, can I give you a simple, simple example?
I have used this one before, but it is sort of the hallmark of the thought experiment.
Madam Speaker, if I came to you tomorrow and asked you: Do you care about plastic in the oceans?
Yes.
Should we get rid of plastic straws in Washington, D.C., in your community?
Of course.
How many plastic straws are in the ocean from North America?
None.
We do an amazingly good job in our waste management, so why is there so much plastic floating in the ocean?
It doesn't come from the U.S. straws. There are 10 rivers in the world. Nine of them are in Asia and two are in Africa that account for 90 percent of the plastic in the oceans.
Getting rid of your plastic straws is called virtue signaling. Hey, look at me, I care. Except that caring doesn't do anything. It may make you feel better, it may give you a selfie you can put up on your social media, but it didn't do anything.
Madam Speaker, if you actually cared about plastic in the ocean--and we have dozens of variations of this type of thing where we have folklore around the environment.
We need to start doing the math. Go to the 10 rivers--eight in Asia and two in Africa--and finance the collection of the plastic. Create the recycling. Yes, it is a type of foreign aid. Yes, it is the adoption of technology. But if you want to deal with 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean, then go to where the plastic in the ocean is coming from, and it is not straws in your community. That is theater. This place rewards theater. We get campaign contributions from theater. We get behind these microphones so we can do theater.
If you actually give a darn, Madam Speaker, then do something where the math actually says it has an actual impact.
One of the other proofs--and oddly enough, we relate this to tax policy. One of the really neat things that has been happening the last several years--and this goes back to the Obama administration and the last administration--do you see this line here, Madam Speaker?
That is GDP growth. This curve coming down, particularly after tax reform where the curve dramatically steepens--we are still working on our 2019 numbers, we believe it steepens even more--this is greenhouse gases going into the environment.
Do you notice something, Madam Speaker?
We were growing as a society and economy, yet environmental pollutants were crashing. We believe some of this inflection had to do with tax reform, the expensing portion where a company can say, I get to deduct 100 percent of the new, cleaner, better, faster, cheaper and more environmentally sensitive equipment, and we saw massive capital expenditures where productivity went up and greenhouse gases came down.
It is a demonstration that if you get the regulatory and the tax policy right, you can have economic growth. People can have those opportunities. It doesn't have to be a Malthusian world where you crush people.
Some of this is new. If I came to you right now and said, hey, here is a ton of carbon, here is a ton of methane, the math is changed. So that is why a lot of the environmental calculations have changed the last couple years.
My best guess is, from the latest things I am reading, methane has about a 9-1 ratio as a greenhouse effect. But also its half-life has been cut back dramatically in some of the formulas. If you wanted to have a remarkable impact on greenhouse gases, then stop the flaring and design a way to go collect the methane where we are producing natural gas.
It turns out we now have the technology where you pull up a truck, it super chills, compresses it, takes it away, and it is useable fuel; and it has a remarkable calculus.
We actually did a thought experiment--actually, it was more of a math experiment. I was blessed to have a Ph.D. of nuclear physics on staff, so his math was just remarkably good.
We did a thought experiment. If I could run a major pipeline through west Texas capturing methane, did you know you basically come within a fraction of hitting the Paris accords, Madam Speaker?
When I proposed that to a number of my Democrat colleagues who are my friends, they said, David, I love the math. This is exciting. But you have to understand, I can't support a pipeline, because pipelines are heresy on our side.
{time} 2110
I said, if we would basically find the tax regulatory policy to make a pipeline work like this that collects methane where you compress it and make it a usable fuel, it turns out you could get all the way to the Paris accord by a single major project.
Yes, David, but you don't understand. It is actually not about hitting the numbers. It is about surviving politically.
I am going to beg of us to start using actual math and science instead of worrying about our next campaign contribution or our feelings.
The last one on this tirade--and when we come back, we have a stack of these. There is a revolutionary technology that is happening at this moment. Remember that curve we showed where we were having economic growth, GDP growth, yet greenhouse gases, particularly carbon, were going down for the United States? We can make that curve dramatically steeper.
This is a facility that is about to be built by Occidental Petroleum in west Texas. There has also been a remarkable improvement in the technology. MIT, about a year ago, had a major breakthrough and almost doubled the capacity of taking ambient air and pulling carbon right out of it. It is almost carbon mining out of the air.
This is a really big facility about to go in. They are going to take the carbon and shove it back into the ground. It is a negative calculator. We should be finding joy as conservatives and liberals that technology has brought us these types of opportunities.
If we get the regulatory, if we get the Tax Code, and we update our thinking to this century, we can stop arguing about greenhouse gases and how much of the economy and how many people you want to unemploy or, you know, green jobs don't pay as much, and say: Let's just have the disruption in the economy like we always do. Let's promote the things that make our world cleaner, healthier, more prosperous. Then, if we do things like this, maybe we end the economic violence on the working poor.
Maybe this could be a really amazing decade instead of what I see going on right now, where we are pandering to functional extremists in so many of the environmental and other types of communities. They may be passionate, but their math is really, really bad.
Madam Speaker, I think I have had far too much caffeine today. I yield back the balance of my time.
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