Drug Quality and Security Act-- Motion to Proceed-- Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. COONS. Mr. President, I come to the floor once again to talk about jobs and economic growth.

We are continuing to see signs of a steadily improving economy, with more than 200,000 jobs created last month in the jobs report just released last Friday. Of those, 19,000 were new manufacturing jobs. We have had 43 straight months of private sector job growth, but the unemployment rate remains stubbornly high and sadly particularly for those who are long-term unemployed.

Earlier today the Budget Conference Committee met, and we heard from Congressional Budget Office Director Dr. Elmendorf. He let us know that in his view, the uncertainty--the lack of clarity about the path forward for all of us here, for the solutions we need for the budget and for the deficit--is one of the greatest drags on job creation and on competitiveness for our country and our economy.

In our Budget Conference Committee, we need to come together and reach a balanced budget deal that repeals sequester and allows the Appropriations Committee--ably led by Chairman Mikulski--to move forward with an Omnibus appropriations bill for this fiscal year. We cannot afford, in my view, another long-term continuing resolution at the current sequester levels.

As we heard today from Dr. Elmendorf, and as we have heard from other sources, the sequester will have killed 750,000 jobs by the end of the year, and next year these ongoing, steady, grinding cuts could kill another 800,000. These are jobs. These are investments by the Federal Government that could be helping the private sector create jobs in repairing our crumbling infrastructure. In Delaware alone, we have 175 deficient bridges being neglected.

These are jobs that help families to put food on the table. In Kent County, DE, where Dover Air Force base is, sequester has hurt those who serve our Nation who operate the base and serve our country valiantly. These are jobs that could be going to help research a cure for cancer. NIH supported more than 500 jobs in Delaware in 2011. Now cuts are costing those jobs and setting us back in the fight to find a cure for cancer and many other diseases.

Sequester has been devastating to Delaware and the whole Nation. We need to replace it with a smarter, more balanced set of spending reforms that maintains investments that will allow our country to be competitive. In particular, if I might, we need to refocus on jobs by investing in infrastructure and focusing on manufacturing.

In my view, the 19,000 jobs in the manufacturing sector that we just learned were created in the last month were a promising development but far from as many as we should be filling. Why? Because manufacturing jobs are high-quality jobs. They pay more in wages and benefits. They help create secondary local service jobs. They contribute more to the local economy. And manufacturers invest more in private R&D than any other sector in our economy.

Mr. President, as you know, before I came here to the Senate and before my service in county government, I spent 8 years with a manufacturing company in Delaware. At one point I was part of a large site location team that went around the country to try to decide where to build a new state-of-the-art semiconductor chip packaging manufacturing plant. To make a long story short, in the end we decided on a location where there was a skilled and reliable workforce, a responsive government that invested in the local infrastructure, and certainly we considered other factors--tax rates and incentives offered by the State and local government--but really the skill of the workforce and the quality of the infrastructure were absolutely essential to the decision we made--a surprising decision in terms of where we ultimately located. We invested and were able to get up and running a state-of-the-art plant in record time and were able to contribute significantly to local employment and the tax base. This taught me a lot about the significance of infrastructure and workforce skills.

If I could mention this, the World Economic Forum ranked the United States 25th overall in infrastructure, a key drag on our competitiveness. The American Society of Civil Engineers says we are falling behind by $250 billion a year in deferred maintenance, in investments not made by Federal, State, and local government. In my view, the case for infrastructure investment is a no-brainer. This is exactly the sort of thing we should be doing and that the sequester is preventing us from doing, making wise, timely, and needed investments in improving our infrastructure.

Another critical foundation for growth, as we saw, is a skilled and adaptable workforce. We can be the world's manufacturing leader again but not without investing in workforce skills and in workforce training. There are many programs that can help make this possible. One I like to point to is the Federal, State, and local partnership called the Manufacturing Extension Partnership that helps make it possible for university-based researchers to partner with local manufacturers to deliver skills training that keeps them at the cutting edge, that makes them more productive.

In today's modern manufacturing workplace, there are fewer people, but they are more productive because of their skills. Back in August I visited a new facility, the ILC Grayling plastics manufacturing plant in Seaford, DE, which is a great example of what it will take for America's manufacturing resurgence to continue and grow. This plant has already brought more than 100 jobs to Sussex, DE. These are not the manufacturing jobs of the past. The men and women working on this line need to be able to collaborate and communicate, to do advanced math and adequate quality control work and oversee high-tech machinery and have an intimate understanding of the products they are working with. In the end, this company looks forward to growing, to probably doubling the number of jobs in this facility in Sussex County. To me, in an even more exciting development, these are jobs that had left the United States to go south to a lower wage country and that have been brought back, brought back from Juarez, Mexico, to Seaford, DE, where there are now Delawareans employed in this newly expanded manufacturing facility.

Let me conclude by simply saying that here in Congress we have the opportunity, if we work together across the aisle, to find a pathway toward making these investments in the skills of our workforce, in the infrastructure of our country, that will help grow our economy and help create good manufacturing jobs today and tomorrow.

One of the core challenges we face in the budget conference committee is to find a path forward that will respond to the call that I hear up and down the State of Delaware, and I presume my colleagues hear from their home States, that we should make principled compromises that allow us to invest again, to replace the sequester with a more responsible and balanced package of revenue and cuts that allow us to return to investing in the skills and infrastructure necessary to grow our economy.

I yield the floor.

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