Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I wish to recognize the Senator from Oregon, Mr. Merkley, for his leadership on this issue and for his willingness, when times got tough, to dig even deeper and make sure we get to the balanced approach that is reflected in this amendment. It is a bipartisan amendment, which around this place I think is worthy of all of us taking a moment to recognize, and it is an amendment the people who know most about crowdfunding support. I wish to read several paragraphs from some of those folks.

From Launcht, which is a crowdfunding platform, they note that our compromise:

[i]s important because, unlike previous bills, for the first time, we have a Senate bill with bipartisan sponsorship, a balance of state oversight and federal uniformity, industry standard investor protections, and workable funding caps.

From the National Small Business Association, we hear that our compromise:

[w]ould promote entrepreneurship, job creation and economic growth by making it much easier for small companies to raise capital and get new ideas off the ground. This legislation represents a reasonable effort to accommodate differing points of view and to move this important idea forward.

One prominent investor protection advocate wrote that:

[t]he CROWDFUND Act addresses this concern by providing significant regulatory relief to very small issuers without unreasonably compromising the investor protection provisions on which the federal securities laws are grounded and the long-term success of the U.S. securities markets has been based.

The Senator from Oregon did an excellent job of describing the provisions in this bill, so I am not going to go over that ground again. But I do wish to talk for a moment before I yield to the Senator from Rhode Island about what it is we are trying to solve. Too often I think we don't ask ourselves what the nature of the problem is we are trying to solve before we actually set about solving it, and then--no surprise--we end up actually making matters worse.

In my townhalls the chief concern of the people who come is that median family income has continued to decline in this country. For the first time in this country's history, the middle class is earning less at the end of the decade than they were at the beginning of the decade. That has never happened before in the United States.

So person after person has come and said: Michael, I have done what I was supposed to do. I kept working at my job. Nobody said I didn't do a good job. But my wage is actually less in real dollars today than it was at the beginning of the decade, but the cost of health insurance continues to go up, the cost of college. I have had at least half a dozen people say to me they cannot afford to send their kid to the best college they got into. I can't think of anything that is more of a waste of our productivity than that.

The essential problem we are facing in this economy is structural. Our gross domestic product, believe it or not, as we stand here, is higher than it was when we went into this recession, the worst recession since the Great Depression. Productivity is also way up. The efficiency with which we are driving that economic growth is way up because we have had to respond to competition from abroad. We can't take anything for granted anymore. We have employed technology to drive productivity from the cotton pickers in my wife's hometown to the largest Fortune 500 companies that we have, and we have 23 or 24 million people who are either unemployed or underemployed in this economy.

The economic output is back, but it has decoupled from wages and it has decoupled from job growth and that was true before we went into the worst recession. You see, the last period of economic growth in this country's history is the first time our economy grew and wages fell, that our economy grew and that we lost jobs. It was a decoupling of economic growth from wage growth and from job growth. There is something terribly wrong with that picture, and it is creating an enormous downward pressure on the middle class in this country.

There are a bunch of things we need to do, but there are two major things that I think we need to do; one is, we need to educate our people for the 21st century. The worst the unemployment rate ever got for people with a college degree in the worst recession since the Great Depression, the one we just went through, was 4.5 percent. That is a pretty good stress test, it seems to me, of the value of a college education in the 21st century. But as a country today, if someone is a child living in poverty, their chances of getting a college degree are 9 in 100. If we don't change the way we educate people in this country, we will continue to see 91 of 100 children living in poverty constrained to the margin of our economy and the margin of this democracy. That is an important piece of work. We have a vital national interest in that, and we are not paying attention to it here.

But also we have to create the conditions in this country where we are driving innovation and driving job growth because the days of just expecting the largest companies in this country to create jobs are over. The jobs that went away in the 20th century, many of them are not coming back in the 21st century. It is about businesses that are started tomorrow and next week and the week after that and the month after that. In order to create those sorts of conditions, the amendment we have presented, this crowdfunding amendment, could unleash billions of dollars, as the Senator from Oregon said, of local investment, investment on Main Street--or on someone else's Main Street through the Internet--that could allow people with great innovative ideas for the first time to raise capital from our middle class and from other people who would like to participate in this kind of new business venture.

This is not all we need to do. There are many things we need to do, and I think there are things in this overall bill we need to fix. But this bipartisan amendment represents a real step forward. As we look to the future, it is the reason we need to do comprehensive tax reform in this Congress. It is the reason we need to fundamentally think differently in this Congress about our regulations. We should be asking ourselves the question: Are we more or less likely to be creating jobs in the United States with rising wages? I think we should put the politics of this aside because there isn't a person in this Chamber who doesn't want to do this. We start, though, with the recognition that we have structural issues we need to resolve.

I hope everybody who hasn't had the chance to get a look at the amendment will look at it. I hope people on both sides of the aisle will support this amendment. I am very pleased it is bipartisan, with Senator Merkley and Senator Brown, and I look forward to voting on this amendment this afternoon.

I see the Senator from Rhode Island is here. I thank him for his leadership on this legislation, and I yield the floor.

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