Securing American Jobs Through Exports Act of 2012--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Madam President, during the worst recession since the Great Depression, which we are now fortunately coming out of, the highest the unemployment rate we ever got, even at the depths of that recession, for people with a college degree was 4.5 percent. We saw unemployment rates of 18 percent, 20 percent for certain groups of people--4.5 percent if one is a college graduate. It seems to me, first of all, that is an incredible stress test of the value of a college degree in this 21st century in which we are living. We ought to be making it easier, not harder, for students to go to college. However, as we know, interest rates on Federal student loans are scheduled to double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent on July 1, unless Congress can get out of its own way and do what is right. For the life of me, I don't know why we
cannot come to an agreement. This is not a Democratic or Republican issue.

The cost of college has increased 550 percent since 1985. Two-thirds of students in this country rely on loans to afford college. In the past decade, average student loan debt has increased by more than 25 percent.

This, by the way, is not a function of people not doing the right thing. It is a function of the fact that median family income has continued to decline in this country for the first time in this country's history, while the cost of college has escalated like crazy. If this increase goes through, it would add thousands of dollars of debt to the more than 166,000 Coloradans who currently receive Federal student loans. Increasing the cost of loans for students already struggling to repay their loans harms both individual students and our fragile economy.

When I visited the University of Colorado at Denver just last month, I heard firsthand from students about how important low-interest rates are to that ability to afford college. Many of the students I heard from were worried their student loan debt would prevent them from achieving their career goals or buying a house or making other decisions they are confronting. In Colorado, the average student graduates with more than $23,500 in debt. Just in the last hour, Jeremiah shared the following story with me on Facebook. This is less than an hour ago. He wrote:

I am studying geography and environmental science with an emphasis on urban studies and planning at the University of Colorado, Denver. I am the first of my family to attend college and 100 percent of my schooling is paid for by grants and student loans. I worry about the interest rate hike that is bound to happen this summer, and with the economy not in full recovery I worry even more about securing a job after graduation and how to afford repayment of my loans, especially if interest rates are to increase.

As the Presiding Officer probably knows, in her State and my State, college attendance is actually at a record high because there are young people all over this country--certainly in my State--who have sought refuge on our university campuses from an economy that doesn't have jobs for them--which is a great place for them to be. It is a great investment in them and a great investment in our future. But for Jeremiah and thousands of others, millions of other students just like them, we are threatening, through our inaction, to actually drive up the cost of college when that is where they need to be. That is the reason why, in the last 2 weeks, more than 1,300 Coloradans have written to my office to demand Congress act to prevent the student loan interest rate from doubling.

Here is one letter I received from Kim Haas, who is from Granby, CO. She wrote:

While I try to keep informed, I don't generally make a point to contact my representatives. On the issue of student loan rates doubling, I had to speak up.

My husband and I live in rural Colorado. I have been working toward becoming a professional counselor. Because of our remote location, I have done most of this online while staying home with my son. This takes a lot of self-motivation and time management skills. It also means taking on a lot of debt. Please take the actions necessary to prevent my rates from doubling. It is imperative to our financial, vocational, and life success.

Her life success. I suspect that most of these students are not all that interested in what party affiliation they are in. I think if they were here on this floor, which is empty today, they could use some Colorado common sense to actually get this done. In the Senate and in Washington today we are facing a filibuster even though we know in the end we are going to find a way to do what is right and keep these interest rates from rising.

Also, our Facebook page is continually updated. This is from Phil Townsend who wrote in--and I thought this was a pressing question about what we are focused on today.

Here is how Phil put it:

If you had a loan that would take you a decade to pay off even if you lived as cheap as possible and only ate ramen noodles, would you want its rates doubled?

This is real life for the people we represent, and we should get this sorted out.

Once again, I urge my colleagues, Democrats and Republicans, to come together and give our students all across the country the security they need to pursue their education. For them this isn't a game. For the people who came to the University of Colorado at Denver a month ago and shared their thoughts with me, this isn't a game. This is real life. It is their lives. It is their futures. They are relying on us to sort this out and get it done, and we should.

Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I want to take the opportunity to discuss the importance of reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank. Last month while in Colorado I had an opportunity to visit innovative businesses such as Coolerado, which creates energy-efficient air conditioners, Sandhill Scientific, which manufactures medical devices, and Leitner-Poma, which builds gondolas for ski resorts. They are building the gondola that is being installed in Vail this year to mark Vail's 50th anniversary. It was fun to see those American jobs being created for that great American industry.

All of these companies rely on financing options from the Export-Import Bank to help them compete in the international marketplace. In fact, while visiting Coolerado, I actually saw an 18-wheel truck back up to the loading dock at Coolerado to load a bunch of their devices to be shipped to Europe as a consequence of the work they had done with the Ex-Im Bank.

These are manufacturing jobs right here in the United States, stamped ``Made in America'' on the outside of these devices, and we have been unable to get this through the Senate. Coolerado used credit insurance from the Export-Import Bank to help enter the international market.

As we emerge from the worst recession since the Great Depression, we should look for more opportunities to support the next Coolerado, Sandhill Scientific, or Leitner-Poma. Instead, we have been in this prolonged debate about the very existence of the bank, and now we are weeks away from the expiration of the bank's charter.

I am quite sure there is not a single one of our international competitors around the world that is engaged in this debate. In fact, they are engaged in absolutely the reverse, which is the question of how to create more exports for their domestic industries, and we should be doing the same.

As we look to strengthen and to reverse that curve I talked about earlier of median family income falling and to see rising wages again in this country and create more jobs, we should be looking for opportunities to increase exports at small businesses like the ones I saw in Colorado.

We face a profound structural issue in the economy today in this country. As I said on the Senate floor before, our gross domestic product is now higher than it was before we went into this recession, and productivity has been going off like a skyrocket since the early 1990s. As we responded to competition from China and India, the use of technology to make businesses more efficient and the recession itself drove productivity through the roof because firms had to figure out how to get through these difficult times with fewer people.

Median family income has fallen, and we have 23 or 24 million people in this economy who are either unemployed or underemployed. Wage growth and job growth--for the first time in the country's history--has decoupled from GDP growth. That happened during our last recovery under the previous administration. I make this statement not as a partisan observation; that is just the time that it happened. We saw economic growth, but we didn't see wage growth and we didn't see job growth. Now I fear we are seeing the same sort of trend in our economy.

There are two important solutions. One I mentioned earlier, which is that education is vitally important because if people are educated, they are more likely to get a job in this 21st-century economy. Remember, the worst that the unemployment rate ever got for people with a college degree was 4.5 percent.

The other part of that equation is innovation. It is businesses that start tomorrow, next week, and the week after that are actually going to create jobs that are going to lift wages. This is one of the reasons I have been so glad to work with the Presiding Officer as we think of new ways of approaching regulations at the FDA to ask the question: Are we driving bioscience in the United States or are we driving venture capital offshore to look for other opportunities? We should be up day and night thinking about this in the Senate because that is how we are going to bring an alignment back between the economic growth the economists tell us we are having and the job growth and the wage growth the people at home want to see.

There is a lot of talk in this Chamber about winners and losers and how the government shouldn't pick winners and losers--we hear that a lot here--as if the current Tax Code isn't full of choices that have already been made about winners and losers. A lot of those choices that have been made have been made for the benefit of incumbents--not here but incumbent enterprises. However, it is the innovators that we are leaving behind.

As we think about comprehensive tax reform, which I hope we get to sooner rather than later, I think on every one of these questions we should be asking ourselves: Is this credit or is this incentive or is this inducement more or less likely to drive job growth in the United States, to drive incomes up in the United States, or to drive exports from the United States? If the answer to that is no, we should stop doing it. This has to be more thoughtful than a fight between one narrow interest and another narrow interest. I think the American people are demanding that, and we should respond.

In the short term, the work in front of us now is to get this Export-Import Bank bill to the floor, to get it voted on, and to pass it as they did in the House of Representatives yesterday.

I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.

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