Extended Unemployment Benefits Are Hurting Main Street

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. MACE. Mr. Speaker, for the last eight years, Charleston, South Carolina, has been named the number one city to travel to. Even despite the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen thousands of folks come and visit our beautiful, historic city.

In the next 10 days, Charleston is going to welcome a PGA Tournament in Kiawah, South Carolina. There is opportunity everywhere. Our airports are full. We are seeing a record number of travelers this month and this year alone. People are on the roads driving to our beautiful city. Yet with all of this great tourism that we are having, we are having a massive labor shortage.

Take, for example, one of my friends, Wade Boals, who owns Saltwater Cowboys in Mt. Pleasant, a beautiful waterfront restaurant where you can enjoy sunsets and a great cocktail or adult beverage of your choice. Rather than be excited about all this tourism, he is desperate to find help, desperate to find workers and staff to work his restaurant. So imagine a restaurant that once had 20 employees now has three, and the demand on those staff who see no end in sight right now.

But he is not alone. In the State of South Carolina, there are 85,000 jobs available in the last 30 days, and we have 116,000 people on unemployment today. If you want a job, you can have a job. And Wade is offering great benefits, great salary, right on the waterfront. There is no better place to work than Mt. Pleasant, right on the water.

The $1.9 trillion COVID relief package, meant as a short-term financial solution to help those most in need, has really turned into an entitlement. We are making people dependent on the Federal Government for their day-to-day life, when opportunity is all around them every day, even in the middle of the pandemic.

It turns out, when you pay people to stay at home and not go to work, they actually do that; they stay at home.

Wade is just one example. There are examples everywhere. Literally everyone in every industry that I talk to, businesses large and small, are having the same problem. Employers are desperate to find employees.

Everywhere, even in the supply chain--you look at what is happening this week with our supply chain. Truck driver shortages, a shortage of CDL drivers. Many of those folks are on unemployment right now, rather than go back to work. We have enormous needs in every industry across the country today.

The reality is that no business, large or small, could ever waste as much money as our Federal Government does. When I look around us here today, I see a House of Representatives that has the slimmest majority in a generation, and I see a U.S. Senate that is evenly split 50/50, yet we are chasing radicalism. This is not a referendum on socialism or radical policy. This year should be a referendum on both Chambers working together, in a bipartisan way, to get our kids back in school and our people back to work and through COVID-19 successfully.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source