Getting Americans Back to Work

Floor Speech

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Mr. NEHLS. Madam Speaker, I stand here today after speaking with business owners across my district and the country. I have heard story after story of businesses struggling to get entry-level, minimum-wage workers back to work. Why is that? Because they are actually having to compete, not against COVID or lockdowns, but against the Federal Government to get employees back to work.

In my home State of Texas, you can make up to $535 in unemployment insurance, but add in the additional $300 per week payments that came from Federal COVID relief, and that is $835 per week not to work. That equates to nearly $21 an hour. That is exactly why Texas and 20 other States have opted out of Federal COVID unemployment insurance benefits. But there are still States where business owners are being forced to compete against the Federal Government for employees.

My own brother, Tyler, who owns a construction company in Wisconsin, told me business has picked up for him. What a blessing. Now, he is trying to hire additional employees to grow his business. He has just got one problem: Folks are telling him they are making more sitting at home at $17.50 an hour. They tell him if he wants them to work, he is going to have to pay them $25 an hour.

Situations like my brother Tyler's were hardly an unexpected consequence of paying workers more not to work. So expected, it seems as though when Democrats failed to get their minimum wage hikes through the Senate in February, they used the Federal unemployment insurance program to accomplish the same result, albeit temporarily.

While there are many who are still struggling from the effects of COVID, whether it be from health effects or the effects of lockdowns on their business, millions more are taking advantage of the unemployment insurance system and sitting at home playing Xbox instead of working and being productive members of society.

On top of a labor shortage driven by the Federal Government paying people not to work, President Biden is proposing historic levels of spending and raising taxes on our job creators. His multi-trillion- dollar proposals, like his $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan and $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, will cost thousands of jobs through tax hikes amid an already struggling market.

What message does raising the corporate tax rate send to job creators when they are trying to rebuild in the aftermath of the pandemic? It sure sounds like we are telling them to take their business overseas or hire less.

To bounce back from the Biden administration's dismal job reports in April, which showed just 266,000 new jobs added, certainly underperforming the Dow Jones estimate of 1 million new jobs, we need to be stimulating economic opportunity and growth with less taxes and less regulation, which will create good-paying jobs that encourage people to get back in the workforce.

What won't fix our struggling economy is throwing money at the problem, which seems to be all the Washington swamp knows how to do. The liberal tax-and-spend model is failing our economy and failing the American people. Gas prices are up, homes are more expensive, and the per pound cost of copper is more than double what it was just 12 months ago.

We are not going to spend our way out of this mess with $1-trillion programs that do nothing but serve liberal special interests. We do it by letting the free market flourish through lower taxes, lower regulation, and more economic freedom.

This model worked under President Trump, who delivered record lows in unemployment for Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and women, and it will work again, if only the Biden administration will put the American people first and not special interests.

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