Crowdfunding

Floor Speech

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, in my townhalls we talk about a lot of things that are very different from what people argue about in this place. One of the issues we talk about is the economy. And we talk about these four lines, as shown on this chart.

The first line is our gross domestic product, the economic output of the United States of America, which is higher today than it was before we went into this recession. A lot of people do not know that. We are producing more than we were producing before we went into the recession.

Our productivity has gone up dramatically since the early 1990s, as we have responded to competition from China and India and other places, as we have used technology to enhance our economic output. We have the most productive economy we have ever seen.

But we also face some very potentially catastrophic circumstances in this economy, one of which is that median family income has fallen for the last 10 years--the first time that has happened in our country's history.

And the other is that we have 23 or 24 million people who are unemployed or underemployed in an economy that is producing what it was producing before the recession happened. That is a structural issue. I have spoken on this floor about the importance of education in that context because the worst the unemployment rate ever got for people with a college degree during the worst recession since the Great Depression was 4 1/2 percent. That is a pretty good stress test of the value of a college education.

The other thing we need to make sure we are doing as a country is continuing to innovate and drive innovation across the United States because it is those companies--the ones that are created tomorrow, the ones that are created next week--that are going to create new jobs in this country. That is going to drive our median family income up instead of down.

That is why I am on the floor today to talk about a bipartisan bill, a bill Senator Merkley and Senator Brown and I have worked on, on crowdfunding. It is an amendment that I hope will come to the floor. I hope we can get to a vote. Over the past months, we have worked together in a bipartisan way on a crowdfunding proposal that would allow crowdfunding to thrive but would also create an appropriate level of oversight and investor protection.

We have done something very unusual in this town: we took time to listen to people. We listened to crowdfunding platforms, entrepreneurs, and investor protection advocates. Many of them support this bill and have endorsed this bill. We worked hard to incorporate their ideas. As a result, we have a bipartisan amendment that has the support of both businesses and consumer advocates. That is something which does not happen frequently in this town.

I hope we will have a chance to vote on it. I will urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to see this as a real opportunity to take one step--not a huge step but one important step--forward to filling this gap we see, to creating an economy again where rising economic output also means rising wages, and that rising economic output also means growing jobs. This crowdfunding amendment is a chance to do it. It is bipartisan.

I have some letters of support, and I ask unanimous consent that they be printed in the Record.

There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the RECORD,

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Mr. BENNET. It moves this ball down the field. I hope it establishes a model for how we can work together to make sure that we are actually addressing things I am hearing about in the townhalls and that we are driving wage growth and job growth here in the United States.

I yield the floor.

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