Mr. President, I come to the floor to speak about President Obama’s State of the Union address last week. It was a speech that I believe laid out a positive and forceful agenda for strengthening our middle class and for accelerating our Nation’s economic recovery.
Over the past year, our Nation’s economic progress has become unmistakable and undeniable. In our home State of Delaware, more people are working. People spend much less time looking for work, and job growth has been the strongest it has been since the 1990s.
Nationally, we are amidst the longest period of sustained private-sector job growth on record. Of particular interest to me is that our manufacturing sector has come back and come back strongly as manufacturers have created nearly 800,000 jobs in the last 4 years–jobs that make up the foundation of our 21st century middle class and our economy.
Our unemployment rate has dropped to its lowest level since before the great recession. Our growing private sector is not just creating jobs now. They are also laying the foundation for the jobs of the future.
As test scores continue to improve, high school graduation rates reach record highs, and, as our President said, “More Americans finish college than ever before,” we are laying a path that ensures that future generations of Americans can thrive as well.
But our work remains unfinished. Although we are right to turn the page on the crisis here at home, crises do remain real in the lives of far too many Americans–families I listen to who are struggling to get into and stay in our middle class. For many in the middle class, wages have remained stubbornly stagnant as incomes for the wealthy have continued to grow. At the same time, too many Americans just stopped looking for work altogether during the recession and haven’t begun that job search again. So we have a lot of work to do together to ensure that the middle class experiences the benefits of this recovery.
On that note, I appreciated President Obama’s call for an agenda that would do a lot to strengthen our middle class. Although this isn’t what we will hear about on the news, many of these ideas should enjoy bipartisan support. I wish to spend a few minutes on some of the areas that I think are ripe for bipartisan cooperation and that would go a long way toward actually helping middle-class families and our Nation as a whole.
First, it is no secret to anyone that our country’s infrastructure is badly outdated and in need of repair. From our ports and roads, to our bridges and railways, we have steadily racked up a national debt of investment that we will need to pay for. The only question is when and how we do it. Historically, infrastructure–fixing roads and bridges and ports and railways–has not been a partisan issue. It is something that has been a core value of our Federal Government from its very founding. It is in no small part what the Federal Government was created to help do.
Last Tuesday the President laid out ideas for thinking more creatively about how to make these core investments–from improving efficiency to bringing private capital off the sidelines–and I am encouraged to hear Republican colleagues discussing infrastructure as an initiative they can work on with us. So let’s get this done. Let’s solve our highway trust fund challenges for good and make the long-term investments that will put people back to work and strengthen our Nation’s economic backbone.
Second, the President’s proposal to expand access to community colleges is an initiative that I hope will spark a broader discussion about how to make higher education more accessible and more affordable. I understand there is real disagreement here about how best to pay for it or how wide its scope should be, but that is what we can and should work on together.
We all know that higher education is necessary to ensure Americans have the skills they will need in the 21st century. We know community colleges can and should play a central role in achieving that mission. In manufacturing in particular, community colleges such as Delaware Tech in my home State play a central role in partnering with local businesses to create a talent pipeline that sustains a community and its economy. In Delaware the SEED and Inspire scholarships give students who are willing to work hard the chance to go to college and to learn the skills that will help them to contribute to Delaware’s economy after they finish school. We can replicate Delaware’s example across the country and find ways to work together to make community college and further higher education affordable and accessible. So let’s work on this together.
Lastly, the President laid out some commonsense tax and work proposals to help give middle-class families more of a realistic leg up. Expanding the tax credits for families with children and streamlining childcare support makes sense to me. Making it easier for middle-class families to save for their kids’ college education and to save for retirement at the same time would go a long way toward helping families to plan for the long term.
Around the country, too many of our work places lack family and medical leave policies that appreciate what it really takes to raise a family and live a healthy life. The President’s proposal to work with States to improve their policies would be a great step and would help those communities that choose to, to create policies that suit their own local situations.
Let’s work together on these ideas. Let’s do something for middle-class families in our country. With a Republican Congress and a Democratic White House, we need to come together if we are going to get anything meaningful done. As President Obama made clear, we have a lot of important and difficult work to do. Our economy has come a long way from the great recession, but there is still work to do to strengthen our middle class. There is still work to do to broaden the opportunity that has always been at the heart of the American dream. We can move forward together, and it is my sincere hope that we will rise to that occasion, that we will seize this opportunity and do the critical work of building and sustaining our vital middle class.