Insular Areas and Freely Associated States Energy Development

Floor Speech

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THE AMERICAN DREAM

Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I appreciate this opportunity to speak on the floor tonight. People watching at home--to the extent there is anyone watching at home tonight--but to those who have gathered here and are still in the gallery watching the Senate, the Senate is debating a budget. It is a massive budget. It is the largest in the world in terms of any entity--I was about to say any government but of any entity on the planet.

As of right now, if that budget is not passed I believe by tomorrow night, the Federal Government will not have authority to keep operating beyond the bare minimum. That is what the debate is about that you are watching. We will see what is going to happen over the next few hours in terms of ultimately getting a vote and what the leaders of the respective parties have agreed on.

But what I wanted to talk about is related to the budget but goes much deeper than that; that is, the state of America and the state of our economy.

Last night I had the opportunity to come here and speak a little bit about foreign relations and an international situation we were facing. But I wanted to speak for a moment because that is what the budget is about--it is about our domestic affairs. I think the budget is a reflection of that.

You have heard a lot of different speeches here tonight--to the extent you are watching--about different things that are happening in our country. The Senator from Alabama spoke a moment ago about immigration, but in talking about immigration, he talked about the constraints that are upon the middle class. Before that, we have seen others speak about issues. So at the end of the day, as we talk about the budget, increasingly the debate is through the lens of those factors that people are facing in their daily lives throughout this country.

I always tell the story of my parents because, for me, it puts a different framework to my vision of this country. My parents were very poor. They grew up in another country. My father lost his mother when he was 9 years old. He had to go to work literally the next day. He would work for the next 70 years in Havana, Cuba.

My mother was one of seven girls who remembers that she never went hungry, but she is pretty sure her parents did so that their children would have enough to eat. She was raised by her father, my grandfather, who was disabled as a young man. He had polio and struggled his whole life to provide for his girls.

They came to America in 1956 in search of a better life. They came here with nothing more than the dream of a better life and the hope of a better life. They did not know anyone. They barely had any money. They barely had any formal education. They arrived in this country in 1956. They never made a lot of money here. My father ended up settling into a job as a bartender, at a hotel primarily. My mother was a cashier. She was a stock clerk at Kmart. She worked as a maid at a casino in Las Vegas. My parents never became rich, but my parents achieved the American dream because the American dream is never about how much money you make.

The American dream has always been about achieving happiness as you define it. And while they weren't rich, my parents were able to afford and own a home in a safe neighborhood--a neighborhood safe enough that they would allow us, my sister and me, to walk to school when we lived in Las Vegas.

My parents were able to retire with dignity. My parents--just a generation removed from poverty and a lack of any formal education--lived to see all four of their children go to college and have a life much better than their own. They fully lived the American dream.

It is the American dream that has been possible because this Nation was founded on the powerful idea that all people are created equal and that all people deserve an equal opportunity to achieve happiness as they define it.

That American dream isn't just a talking point. It defines us as a nation and as a people. It makes us different, special, and, in my opinion, better than any other nation that has ever existed.

But today something that troubles us is that American dream seems to be eroding in the minds of way too many people, and we understand why. There are people, when they open the newspaper every day and they read--today is a perfect example. The Dow Jones closed over 300 points. Wall Street is setting record profits.

They keep reading about how the economy is rebounding and unemployment is down, but they don't feel any of this. They are working as hard as they ever have, but their paychecks haven't gone up in more than a decade. In the meantime, everything in life costs more.

Think about that. You are working hard, making less than ever relative to how much things cost, and you are frustrated to read that all these other people seem to be doing so great. Everybody keeps telling you about how the economy is doing fantastically, and meanwhile you are being squeezed in your own life. You can't get a pay raise, there is nothing you can do about it, and everything costs more: your rent payment, your health care, your children's education. This squeeze is real and the middle class is feeling it.

We ask ourselves, but why is this happening? This is not just because of a downturn. We had a very serious financial crisis in this country. We had a very serious downturn.

But what I describe to you is not just a feature of that, because if this were just a cyclical downturn, it would go up, down, and back up again.

We have had a very dramatic change in the structure of our economy. Our
policies have not reacted to that, have not changed with those structural changes that have happened in our economy.

Even in this debate about the budget, you will see evidence of that. I didn't come to the floor to be critical of people who worked on it, I know they have worked hard, but our policies do not reflect these structural changes. They are very real.

In the 20th century, practically anybody who wanted a job in America could find one. There were plenty of blue-collar jobs for people such as my parents and there seemed to be plenty of white-collar jobs for people such as their children. But in the 21st century many of those jobs are gone. They have been sent overseas or they have been replaced because of technology or innovation. New jobs have been created, but they require skills that too many of our people still don't have.

In the 20th century, ours was a national economy. Your clients and your competitors were halfway across town, maybe halfway across the country.

In the 21st century, we operate in a global economy where your customers, your clients, your investors, your competitors, and your partners are just as likely to be halfway around the world as they are halfway down the street. That has made a dramatic structural change to our economy.

Last but not least, everything costs more. In the 20th century a bartender and a maid could afford to own a home, own a car, take a vacation once a year with their kids. If my parents tried to do today what they did in 1956, they couldn't. Those jobs just don't pay enough and all those things I just described cost so much more money.

We have to respond to these structural changes. We have to turn the page on these old ideas and, quite frankly, on the leaders who have those old ideas. We cannot continue to confront 21st century challenges with 20th century strategies.

We need new leaders, and we need new ideas that respond to these deep structural changes. For 4 straight years that I have been talking about this in the Senate, the progress in that regard unfortunately has been slower.

I didn't come here today to be overly partisan, but I know in 2008 a lot of people thought that our current President would be that kind of new leader, but that is not what we have gotten. They thought he would be that kind of new leader because he talked about being a champion for the middle class. He talked about a modern agenda of hope and change.

But that is not what we have received. Instead of focusing on working families, he focused on things such as the liberal dream of government-run health care.

He focused on radical environmental policies instead of focusing on the middle class.

Instead of modern ideas, what we got was just old-fashioned big government and crony corporatism. A startling example of it is how the insurance companies have gamed ObamaCare.

Imagine for a moment if you were in a business and the government came in with a law that said: We are going to make the people buy the product that you sell. We are going to give them the money to buy the product that you sell. By the way, if you lose money selling the products, we are going to bail you out with taxpayer dollars.

That is what big insurance companies were able to get out of ObamaCare. People are required to buy insurance, they get a subsidy to buy that insurance, and if they lose that money, they get a bailout with taxpayer dollars. That is outrageous, and it is not surprising that the stock prices of big insurance companies have doubled since ObamaCare passed.

Meanwhile, working Americans are paying more, higher deductibles, higher copayments, higher premiums, and they are getting less coverage. That is an example of corporatism.

Despite all this rhetoric that they are fighting on behalf of the middle class, the past few years have been a bonanza for big business, a bonanza for people who can hire the lawyers and the lobbyists to navigate the complexities of government.

So it is very simple. If you can hire an army of lawyers and lobbyists in Washington, DC, you get your priorities and bills like the one that is before us today, or others, for that matter. But if you are trying to start a business out of the spare bedroom of your home, if you are a small businessperson who works 7 days a week, 16 hours a day just to stay afloat, you can't hire the best law firm in Washington, DC, to navigate those regulations. And you sure can't afford to hire a lobbying firm to come here to write those laws to your advantage.

In fact, I would go farther and say that big government is a competitive advantage for big businesses, because they know that the bigger and more complicated the rules are, the harder it is for someone new to come along and compete with them for that same business.

We have seen that time and again. I saw it during my time as a State official, as the speaker of the State house in Florida, and I see it in Washington, DC.

This is corporatism and both parties are guilty of it.

That is why it shouldn't surprise us that under the past 6 years of this presidency, 95 percent of the income gains in this country have gone to the top 1 percent of earners and 93 percent of Americans have seen virtually no income growth in the past 6 years. Yet we continue to see an effort to push policies from this administration that keeps us on the same course. Here is the course that we are on--radical environmental groups are going to get their way, their policies, and their Executive orders written. Meanwhile, people who work at factories, people who are dependent on energy jobs, they get nothing.

Public employee unions that are well represented and spend a lot of money influencing government, they get all the rules they want from the NLRB and the government. They get their help.

Do you know who doesn't? The UPS truckers, the plumbers, the pipefitters, the electricians, and the construction workers. All these elites who are going around begging for more government spending, they are going to get their way in this bill from this administration--and middle-class Americans who are working as hard as they ever had, they get stuck with the tax bill to pay for it.

We can't keep doing this. If we keep doing this, we are going to lose the American dream. We are going to lose what makes us different, and we are going to lose what makes us special.

But I believe with all my heart that if we can turn the page on these policies, not only can we save the American dream but we can have another American century. To do that, there are three key things we have to do, and I wish more of this was reflected in the bill before us.

The first thing we need is we need better jobs. Jobs that don't just pay more--and that is important, but jobs that provide enough flexibility as well so that you do have time if you need to take time off to go take your kids to a field trip or a doctor's appointment.

Do you know how many Americans out there can't take their kids to a dental appointment because that requires them to take 2 hours off of work? Do you know how many Americans don't have the flexibility to be able to watch their son or their daughter at the Christmas pageant this year in school because their job doesn't have flexibility?

These better jobs that I am talking about are jobs that pay more but ultimately provide the flexibility so you have the time to be a better spouse, a member of your community, and a better parent--and jobs that won't disappear with the next advancement in technology, jobs that give you an opportunity for promotion and upward mobility. These are the kinds of jobs we need.

In order to have those jobs in America in the 21st century, we need to become globally competitive. We are engaged in a global competition with the rest of the world for these jobs. It is the economic olympics every single day.

We can win that competition. We can win it if we had a Tax Code that no longer made America one of the most expensive places in the world to create those jobs. We could win it if we reformed our regulatory code so that we are no longer such a burdensome place to create those jobs. We could win it if we got our national debt under control, which scares people from creating those jobs here because they believe we are headed for a debt crisis in the future.

We can win that competition if we fully utilize our energy resources in a safe and responsible way. We have already seen the benefits of American energy exploration, the jobs it creates, not only in energy but in manufacturing.

You have already seen the benefits of American energy production in the falling price of gasoline at the pump, and that has real-world implications. Being from Florida, we expect that many more people are going to take the drive to Disney World this winter because getting there is a lot cheaper than it was a year ago. Ticket price is another matter, but getting there is a lot cheaper than it was before. This has real implications.

The other thing is we can win that competition, but we have to keep our edge on innovation. We are the world's greatest innovators. We can't lose that edge. By the way, winning that global competition requires us to be globally engaged.

We must remain involved in global affairs. Strong American leadership on this planet is a factor in allowing the world to have the prosperity and the stability it needs for a rising middle class--people who can afford to buy the things we sell, the products we offer, the services we offer. We will benefit from that.

But creating more of those jobs is not enough. The second thing we have to do is to make sure people have the skills for those new jobs because these new jobs in the 21st century are going to require a higher level of skill than ever before. The problem is we have an archaic 20th century education model.

We tell kids in high school that the only way you will ever be successful is you all have to get a 4-year degree. There is nothing wrong with getting a 4-year degree, but it is wrong to tell children and students in this country that is the only way to get ahead when we know in the 21st century there are going to be millions of quality middle-skilled, quality-paying jobs that require more than high school but less than 4 years of college.

We have a system that does nothing, absolutely nothing, about that. We don't offer nearly enough vocational problems in high school.

Why have we stigmatized jobs where people work with their hands, when we know that we need airplane mechanics, electricians, plumbers, and pipefitters? We need high-tech welders and people who know how to do 21st century welding and machinists for 21st century factories and manufacturing.

We can teach these people skills while they are still in high school so they can graduate ready to go to work. We also need more apprenticeship programs, and that is something we can partner with labor unions so we can train and retrain Americans in these higher skilled jobs. We also need to help people who have to work full time.

Imagine for a moment a single mother raising two kids on her own and she is a receptionist at a law firm. She is never going to get a significant raise working as a receptionist. The only way she is ever going to get ahead is if she can become a paralegal. But to become a paralegal, she has to go to school. How is she going to go to school under this current system?

She wakes up at 6 o'clock in the morning, makes her kids breakfast, drops them off at school, drives to work, works 8 or 9 hours, rushes to the daycare center or the afterschool program before it closes, picks them up and brings them home. She is already tired, but she is not done. She has to make them dinner and make sure they finish their homework.

By 11 o'clock she hits that bed and she is exhausted. When is she going to go to school--4 o'clock in the morning?

We need to have an education system that is flexible enough so that she can acquire the skills to become a paralegal while she works full time and she raises that family, allowing her to package learning from online courses and work experience.

If someone is a receptionist at a law firm and has worked there for 8 or 9 years, there are some skills they have picked up working there that should count for credit hours, instead of forcing you to sit through a 2-year program so the college they are going to can make the money off of them. We need to create programs so that people like her can acquire those skills for 21st century jobs.

We also need to create alternatives to traditional college. It doesn't matter where you acquire the learning. You should be able to package all of your learning. Take, for example, someone who has worked 10 years, served in the military, has extensive experience at volunteering, has taken a number of courses at a community college, and wants to get a degree in something. We should be able to package all of that lifelong learning, all of those sources of learning, into the equivalent of a degree program.

Do you know how many Americans out there are sitting on 30 or 40 credit hours from a community college?

But having 30 hours of college credit is the same as having zero because you don't get any degree certificate for it. So the private sector looks at you and says: We are glad you went to class, but where is your degree or your associate's degree?

I wish we had a more concerted effort in helping people who are halfway there to get all the way there by using things such as online coursework and giving them credit for life and work experience.

We need to think outside the box on these issues because if we don't empower people with these skills, they won't be able to take advantage of the opportunities of the 21st century. This is what a 21st-century educational system looks like.

I would make one more point when talking about schools. The most important school a child will ever attend is their home. We cannot ignore the fact that the breakdown of American families is having a dramatic impact on our economy and the quality of life of our people. There is a reality here about this. A growing number of children are born into single-parent homes or are born into broken families. We have to help them because we know that, statistically speaking, children being raised in broken families and single-parent homes with low incomes will struggle to succeed. They will not have an equal opportunity unless someone does something to help them out.

We can help. We can help by helping their parents acquire the skills they need for better jobs, such as the single mother I talked about earlier, but also by giving their parents the opportunity to send them to the school of their choice. It is immoral, it is un-American that the only people in this country who cannot choose where their children go to school are poor people. It is outrageous. Rich people can send their kids to any school they want, and that is their right. The middle class will move to a better neighborhood or struggle to put together just enough money to put their kids into a better school. But if you are poor and the school in your neighborhood is a dangerous school and you are not learning, there is nothing you can do. That is outrageous. The answer to that is, well, improve that school. I agree. But in the 5 years it takes to improve that school, that child has gone from first grade to sixth grade, and you are never getting those years back. Every parent in America--especially low-income parents--deserves the opportunity to put their children in the school of their choice.

There are other ways we can help families. Primarily that is our responsibility as individuals and communities. But we should have a promarriage Tax Code, a promarriage government program. We shouldn't have marriage penalties. We shouldn't tell people ``If you get married your taxes are going to go up'' or ``If you get married you will lose Medicare, Medicaid.'' We have to get rid of those things. We have to remove those marriage penalties in our Tax Code and in our programs.

By the way, we should also protect our faith communities. They are an important part of instilling values because you can have all the diplomas on the wall you want, but if you don't have the values of hard work and discipline and self-control and respect for others and respect for the dignity of the life of all people, you will struggle to succeed. No one is born with those values; those values have to be taught by strong families in a strong home, and they have to be reinforced by strong communities. One of the pillars of a strong community is our faith community, whatever faith you choose. That is why protecting religious liberty is so important.

Last but not least, restoring the American dream isn't just about better jobs and better training and better skills; it is also about dealing with the cost of living. That is why I think in the coming year we desperately need a profamily Tax Code. Instead of all these loopholes that are designed to help big business or the cronies of the people who serve here in Washington, we need a profamily Tax Code. For example, let's increase the child tax credit because it costs money to raise children in the 21st century and these working families are struggling to provide for their children. Let's have a profamily Tax Code like the one Senator Lee of Utah and I have proposed. Let's increase the child tax credit.

We also have to deal with the cost of higher education. It is completely out of control. Do you know who is getting destroyed by that? The middle class.

I had the honor of teaching a course at Florida International University. There are many working-class students there. And here is their frustration, and they are right: Their parents make too much money for financial aid, but they do not make enough money to be able to afford the school. So do you know what they do? They take out loans in the tens of thousands of dollars.

I know about this firsthand because when

I was sworn into the Senate here 4 years ago, I owed over $100,000 in student loans. My parents could never afford to pay for my school. I was blessed to be able to receive Pell grants and other assistance, but I still had to use loans.

When we first got married, it was our single largest expenditure. I used to joke with my wife: You didn't just get married to me; you got married to Sallie Mae. Every month Sallie sent us a $1,300 or $1,400 bill.

There are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of young people across America who are stuck with big loan debt and degrees that don't lead to jobs. I hope we will tackle that this year, and there are a couple of proposals that I think will help. The first is we should make income-based repayment the repayment method for everyone unless you opt out of it.

Second, I think people deserve the right to know before they take out a loan how much they can expect to make. Before you take out a loan to pay the tuition of the school, that school should be required to tell you: This is how much people who graduate from our school make when they graduate with this degree. So you can decide whether it is worth borrowing $100,000 to be a Greek philosophy major because the market for Greek philosophers is very tight these days.

Last but not least, I think we need alternatives to traditional student loans. One of the things I have proposed is something called the student investment plan, which allows people to invest in your future. Basically, it is a venture fund in you. Someone will come forward and say: We will give you the money to go to college. In exchange, you will pay us back 1 or 2 percent of your income for your first 10 years.

They are investing in you. It is a student investment plan. It is not for everyone. It is not a panacea, but it is an alternative to student loans.

One of the things that would help, by the way, that would be an alternative to student loans, is what I mentioned earlier--if you were able to package learning and turn self-directed learning into the equivalent of a degree.

There are other big items contributing to the cost of living. Health care I don't need to tell you about. How many people out there today, particularly in the middle class, are starting to find out they have higher deductibles, higher copayments, higher premiums, and are getting less coverage than they used to have. This is not a myth. It is not a rumor. This is happening to millions of people. We get the calls, and so do you in your office about all these things.

One last point on the cost of living is dealing with poverty. Our antipoverty programs don't work. There are antipoverty programs in this Cromnibus--a term, by the way, none of us have ever used before. I don't know who makes these things up. But anyway, there are antipoverty programs in this bill. Our antipoverty programs alleviate poverty, but they don't cure it.

Imagine if you broke your arm and you went to the hospital and they said: Here is a lifetime supply of pain killers. I am not saying you shouldn't help people with the pain from the broken arm, but you have to fix that broken arm.

Our programs don't fix poverty. They do not cure poverty. We need programs that will cure poverty. That is why I believe we need what is called the flex fund, where we take all of our existing antipoverty dollars--I am not saying cut it; I am saying take our existing antipoverty dollars and put them in a flex fund and allow States and local communities to design specific plans that work in their communities.

I can tell you that in the State of Florida, urban poverty and rural poverty have different elements to them. A program that might work very well in the inner city of Miami doesn't work at all with the rural poverty in South Dade. We should allow States and local communities to design programs that help cure poverty.

The ultimate cure for poverty is a good job. That means everyone who is on these assistance programs should either be in school acquiring the skills they need for a better job or they should be working, improving their skills through experience.

Let me just say this about that, and I have talked about one of the aspects of the reforms we want--a wage enhancement. If the only job you can find pays $8 or $9 an hour but you need $15 an hour to provide for yourself, I would rather come up with government money and make up the difference through a wage enhancement than give you $9 or $10 an hour or the equivalent of $7 or $8 an hour in a welfare check. Because while you are working, you are gaining experience, and we are also helping supplement your paycheck so you can pay your bills.

That condition isn't forever. It can't become a way of life. But if you have been unemployed for 5 or 6 years and you show up somewhere to get a job and they ask you what you have been doing for the last 6 years and you say you haven't been doing anything, your chances of getting that job have just diminished dramatically. It is not good for people to be unemployed long term in terms of their long-term job prospects. That is why I have talked about a wage enhancement program as well.

I think if we do all these things I have talked about--make ourselves a globally competitive economy so the jobs are created here, give our people 21st-century skills, help people deal with the cost of living--I think we have every reason in the world to be optimistic about our future.

I will close by saying that I think sometimes we get confused here about how we measure the greatness of our country or the progress we are making. We look to facts and figures, such as the unemployment rate, and we look at the GDP of the country, and these are important figures. We shouldn't ignore them. But let me tell you how I measure the progress of this country.

I mentioned earlier that my father was a bartender. At many of the events I have been involved in through public service

over the years, I give a speech somewhere, and there is a bartender standing behind a bar in the back of the room. Almost every time I see that, it reminds me of my father, who stood for so many years behind a bar. He was happy for the work he had, but that is not the life he wanted for us. He wanted something more for us. My father stood behind that bar all those years so that one day I could have the chance to stand here on the floor of the United States Senate and talk about things like the American dream. That journey from behind that bar to where I am standing here tonight is the American dream. That is the American dream.

A few years ago someone heard me give that speech in New York City, and after I was done speaking the employees there came up to me and handed me this name tag. It said ``Rubio, Banquet Bartender.'' It was one of the most touching gifts I ever got from anyone, but it was also a reminder that whether we remain a special nation will be determined by whether people today can do what my parents did; by whether people today can still make that journey my father made from behind that bar to where I stand today. Can the single mother provide her children the life she always wanted but never had? Can that worker at that hotel open doors for their children that were closed for him? That is how we will know we are still special. If they can, then this new century is also going to be an American century.

We do have real challenges, but we also have real opportunities. And there is no time in history that I would rather be in than right here, right now. I believe technology will allow us to collaborate and reach more people than ever before. I believe innovation will solve problems we once thought were insurmountable. I believe a rising global middle class will provide more prosperity to more people everywhere than we have ever seen. That is what I believe the 21st century can be about.

I believe you and I live on the eve of another American century. All we have to do now is to reach for it and grab it. All we have to do now is do what our parents did for us--whatever it took to leave for their children a better life and a better future. If we do that, then we will leave behind for our children what every generation of Americans before us has left behind: the single greatest nation in the history of all mankind.

With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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