Issue Position: Budget, Jobs and the Economy

Issue Position

Issue Position: Budget, Jobs and the Economy

We must do more to safeguard the economic future of our nation. Creating and keeping good jobs here in America will help men and women provide for their families. Ensuring that every American has decent health care and can retire with dignity must be among our priorities. Every high school student who wants to go to college should be able to do so. Just as our parents did for us and their parents did for them, we need to guarantee that our children have better lives than we do.

Protections for American Workers

Our economic policies must reinforce the most important family value: that of earning a decent living and providing for one's family. The Congress recently passed an increase in the minimum wage, and I will continue working to keep American jobs in America and filled by American workers. Too many H-1B visas are being used to facilitate the outsourcing of American jobs to other countries. I want to set up safeguards for American workers, and provide much-needed oversight and enforcement of employers who fail to abide by the law. Our nation's workers must also be able to earn their livings in safe workplaces, whether they work in factories, offices, farms or mines. When these workers reach the end of their working lives, they must receive their pensions quickly. As businesses increasingly shift from defined benefit plans that guarantee a certain pension to defined contribution plans that provide no guarantees, it is more important than ever to help protect pension benefits that have already been earned and to create incentives that help families save on their own. I will continue to work to strengthen our pension rules so that companies must fulfill their obligations to their workers. And I am working on creative proposals that will help increase our national savings rate (measuring how much we save versus how much we owe in debt), which has dipped below zero.

Additionally, workers deserve to be treated fairly if their employers end up in bankruptcy. I support legislation that gives employees a seat at the table when executives and banks are divvying up the assets of such a company, so that when that company emerges from bankruptcy its employees will have more of the wages and benefits that they deserve. I have also introduced legislation designed to encourage "patriot employers," which would provide tax credits as a reward to the companies that supply American jobs, pay decent wages, offer good benefits including health insurance and retirement plans, and support their employees when they are called to military duty.

Federal Budget

A budget is an expression of values; it represents a set of choices about how money will be spent now and in the future. As the majority of our federal budget continues to be spent on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, we should keep in mind what else we could accomplish with that money both here at home and in other places in the world where the need is great.

For the approximately $134 billion that we are spending in Iraq this year, we could have paid for all of the following this year instead. Provide the extra money required to fully fund No Child Left Behind for elementary and secondary students. That would cost about $14.8 billion. Pay for full tuition, fees, room and board for every undergraduate student attending a four year public university in America. That would cost about $55 billion. Double the budget for the National Institutes of Health to support critical medical research. That would cost about $28.5 billion. Provide health insurance for every uninsured child in America. That would cost about $26.4 billion. Feed every hungry child in the world. That would cost an estimated $9.3 billion. We could have done all of these things for roughly the same amount of money we are spending in Iraq this year. I am pushing for a more sensible budget. We must provide for national defense. At the same time, we must not forget about education, health care, hunger and poverty.

Trade

Fair trade is essential to a healthy economy, both nationally and globally. We must demand that the Bush Administration include in all future trade agreements much tougher language on labor, environmental, and human rights standards. Most importantly, we must insist that the Administration enforce our trade agreements.

We cannot continue to enter into binding agreements that are meant to protect the interests of our companies and our workers in the global marketplace, only to have our trading partners flout the rules of engagement. We must take action and fight for American workers and American interests when our trading partners have broken the rules.

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