Thank you very much, Senator Brown, and thank you for your tireless and engaged leadership on manufacturing, on fighting for access to foreign markets on fair terms, for fighting for skills and increasing the skills of our manufacturing work force, and in this instance, in this strong bipartisan bill, in working with our colleague from Missouri on a national network of manufacturing innovation centers.
My own work, eight years in a manufacturing company in Delaware, in a materials-based science company that makes things, helped make it clear to me how important research and development, continuous innovation is for manufacturers at all levels. And I have seen this across the state of Delaware, and our presiding officer, long owner and leader in manufacturing a business in his home state of Indiana knows this better than any of us – that if you don’t innovate, if you don’t invest in research and development, in improving the skills of the workforce and improving the productivity and the operating efficiency of any manufacturing company, you can’t survive in the tough headwinds of the global marketplace today.
One of the programs that I championed here in the Senate, and that has bipartisan support, is the Manufacturing Extension Partnership. It’s a long-established program that takes the latest cutting-edge research and development work at universities and moves it to the shop floor.
I have visited companies up and down Delaware, from F.M.C. in Newark and Speakman in New Castle, to Miller Metals in Bridgeville and Baltimore Aircoil in Milford, where they have taken those innovations from the university to the shop floor.
One of the things I’m grateful to Senator Blunt for is his leadership in taking that insight, that in order to have the most productive manufacturing work force in the world, in order to continue to complete globally, we have to find ways to continue to invest in demonstrating the power of innovation, and we have to find ways to do that in a bipartisan way.
So Senator Blunt, I just wanted to thank you for being willing to work with Senator Brown and with others here. This is exactly the sort of stuff that I hear from Delawareans they want us to be doing. There’s lots that divides us, this is something that unites us. Working together to strengthen our manufacturing sector, to make it more competitive, to bring jobs back to the United States, and to grow this sector.
We’ve grown half a million jobs in the last three years in the manufacturing sector. These are good jobs at high wages, high benefits, high skills, but we can and should do more pulling together to lift further this ongoing manufacturing revival. Senator Blunt, if you’d share more about this specific bill and about your experience in what else we can and should be doing together to strengthen manufacturing in Missouri, I’d be grateful.
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Thank you, Senator Blunt, for your work on this bill with Senator Brown. There are other bills that I hope this body will take up and discuss and debate and where I hope we can find ideas that are out there, progress that’s being made, policy innovation that’s being made, and that we can take them up, debate them, and find bipartisan sponsors who will carry them forward.
I absolutely agree with your point that we’re seeing a manufacturing revival in this country for a variety of reasons – one of them is less expensive energy. The shale gas revolution is reducing the feedstock costs of chemical manufacturing and reducing the energy costs broadly for manufacturing of all kinds. We’re also seeing that lots of American companies fear the loss of their inventions, their innovations, if they move offshore, and so some of the attractiveness of operating in other countries has dimmed a bit as they’ve recognized that the United States is one that has a rule of law that protects their inventions and innovations.
There’s also less of a wage gap as wages have come up in the developing world – in China the wage gap is less – so that combination gives us a window, a moment of opportunity.
We lost millions of manufacturing jobs in the first years of this century but in the last three we’ve been growing them steadily. If we can work in partnership across the aisle on manufacturing skills, on access to credit, on innovation, on a coordinated strategy, I can’t imagine a community in this country that wouldn’t rather have high quality manufacturing jobs.
Senator Blunt, as you were mentioning, for every manufacturing job that’s created, there’s 1.6 new support jobs created. For every dollar spent in manufacturing, there’s $1.34 spent in the local economy. It is the sector that has the most positive secondary impact in our communities at home.
I do think that there’s, broadly, in our country a sense that we’ve lost our leading edge in manufacturing because of the large-scale layoffs and the large plants closing, but in my state, and I presume in yours, and in Indiana, and in others, there are dozens and dozens of small and medium manufacturers who have seized this moment, who are growing, and who simply want us to help facilitate their access to the market, their access to innovation and new research, their access to a skilled workforce.
If we can pull together around this, I think we can do great things for the United States going forward. I did also before we close, Senator Blunt, want to thank you for being a cosponsor with me of the Start-up Innovation Tax Credit, something Senator Enzi and I, and many others, Senator Rubio and Senator Schumer, Senator Stabenow, as well as Senator Moran, have cosponsored and introduced and discussed over time. It would help with access to capital for early stage start-up manufacturers.
There are a lot of good ideas that we can and should discuss, on the floor, in hearings, and going forward, but for today I am grateful for your leadership with Senator Brown on this bill that would help strengthen the national network of manufacturing innovation centers. You are a strong leader for manufacturing in your home state of Missouri, and I’m grateful for a chance to spend some time with you on the floor today discussing that good bill and your good ideas.
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Thank you Senator Blunt for your enthusiasm for manufacturing and for your enthusiasm for working together with me on the Start-Up Innovation Credit bill as you referenced and with Senator Brown on the National Network of Manufacturing Innovation Centers as he spoke about. Manufacturing really is the center, the beating heart of the middle class of America. Manufacturing jobs are good jobs. We do need to get back to being a country where inventing things, growing things, making things in this country is an area of bipartisan, sustained, purposeful focus.
I know for the folks who watch at home and in this chamber, nothing could meet the demands and needs of our communities and our states more than for us to come together in a bipartisan, balanced and responsible way to advocate for a stronger manufacturing sector here in the United States. Thank you very much.