Mr. President, I come to the floor once again today to talk about jobs, about manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing jobs, as we all know, are high quality jobs.
Manufacturing jobs come with higher pay and higher benefits. Manufacturing jobs help create other local service sector jobs and manufacturing jobs contribute more to the local economy than jobs in any other sector. And beyond that, Mr. President, manufacturers invest the most of any industry sector in research and development, something critical to America’s continued growth and our security as a leading innovation economy.
So last week, 21 Senate colleagues and I joined in a new initiative, the Manufacturing Jobs for America initiative, to help create good manufacturing jobs here at home today and tomorrow. It’s grown now to 25 senators who’ve all contributed different policy ideas. This isn’t one big mega-bill with dozens of sponsors, but just one bill. Instead, it’s a constellation of 40 different proposals. Some of them have already been introduced as bills and half of those that have been introduced are bipartisan.
These bills represent some of our best ideas about how we can work together across the aisle to provide badly needed support for our growing manufacturing sector here in the United States.
There are four different areas that these 40 different proposals fall into and I wanted to talk about one of them today. The first three are: how do we open markets abroad, how do we strengthen America’s 21st century manufacturing workforce, and how do we create a long-term environment for growth through manufacturing strategies? But the fourth is how do we ensure access to capital? So of the four, today I wanted to speak to access to capital.
As any business owner knows, you can’t ensure the long-term growth and vitality of your business unless you have capital to invest – whether in research and development, new workers, new products, or new equipment to expand into new markets. So access to capital is absolutely essential to manufacturing jobs for America. The three bills I’m going to talk about today – which are part of this constellation of 40 different proposals – each would expand access to capital for manufactures in different ways.
Let me start with the Start-up Innovation Credit Act. This is an existing bipartisan bill that I’ve introduced along with Senators Enzi, Rubio, Blunt, and Moran, who are all Republicans, and Senators Schumer, Stabenow and Kaine, all, like me, Democrats.
Although we represent different parties, come from different parts of the country, and have different backgrounds, we’ve all come together to strengthen our economy and, in particular, to support innovation and entrepreneurship. One way we do that now is to support private-sector innovation in manufacturing through the research and development tax credit. The R&D tax credit generates new products and industries, benefiting other sectors. But there’s a critical gap in the existing, in the long-standing R&D tax credit. It isn’t available to start-ups because they’re not yet profitable. This is a tax credit that you can only take if you have a tax liability and are profitable.
So we worked together, Senator Enzi and I and the other cosponsors, to fix this hole with a relatively simple tweak. That’s what the Start-up Innovation Credit Act does. It allows companies to claim the R&D tax credit against their employment tax liability rather than their corporate income tax liability. Supporting small, innovative companies in their critical early stages of research and development could unleash further innovations and unleash greater growth that would spur good job creation for Americans for the long run.
Between 1980-2005, all net new jobs created in the US were created by firms five years old or less. In total, that was about 40 million jobs over those 25 years. This credit is specifically designed with those new, young firms in mind, those early stage firms that are the font of the greatest source of creativity and of jobs. It’s limited to those companies that are five years old or less and it’s limited to being an offset against their W-2 liability so we can provide some access for early stage start-ups to this R&D credit that encourages them to hire more folks and to grow more quickly. Just a part of Manufacturing Jobs for America.
The second bill I’d like to talk about today is the Master Limited Partnerships Parity Act. That’s a mouthful, Mr. President, but it also levels the playing field in access to credit. Instead of giving smaller early stage start-up companies the same access to capital that larger, more mature firms have, this bill levels the playing field in the energy sector and it levels the playing field in particular for clean energy firms.
This is a bipartisan bill as well. I introduced it with Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow as my lead cosponsor and Republican Senators Jerry Moran and Lisa Murkowski. And I am grateful for their persistent and engaged leadership on this bill. I’m thrilled in the last couple of days that Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu and Republican Senator Susan Collins have signed on as cosponsors as well. The MLP Parity Act allows us to really have an all-of-the-above energy strategy.
As I’ve heard as I presided in my first two years, as I served on the Energy Committee, there are many senators here, Republican and Democrat, who think we shouldn’t be picking winners and losers in technology and we should be promoting an all-of-the-above energy strategy, and this bill makes that possible in clean energy financing and in preserving a widely used tool for existing traditional energy financing. Oil and gas will play a significant role in our nation’s energy picture for the foreseeable future, but right now we don’t have a level playing field between renewables and between oil and gas and pipelines.
For nearly 30 years, traditional nonrenewable sources of energy have had access to master limited partnerships. MLP’s give natural gas, oil and coal companies access to private capital at a lower cost. That’s something that capital-intensive projects, like pipelines, badly need. But alternative energy projects, I would argue, now need that as well and, in fact, in some ways more than ever.
I spoke just last night to a group of board members at the National Academies of Science. And what we spoke about was how much technology has developed, has sped up in the clean energy space, but how financial innovation hasn’t kept pace. This has held back renewable energy and investments in energy efficiency, even as technology has made energy production and distribution and energy efficiency cheaper to achieve.
Expanding access through this broad bipartisan bill to low-cost, long-term capital would be an important step to letting new energy sources take off and letting them compete on a level playing field with all sources of energy. That’s exactly what the MLP Parity Act intends to do.
Last but not least, I was proud to be able to join a number of other senators in cosponsoring the Small Brew Act. Senators Cardin and Begich, Senators Collins and Murkowski, Democrats and Republicans, have worked together to give small brewers a leg up by lowering the excise tax that they face on the beer they produce.
Small brewers, such as Dogfish Head in my home state of Delaware, are big job creators in communities across this country. As Senator Ben Cardin said on the floor earlier this year, while some people may think this is a bill about beer, it is really about jobs. And, I would say, jobs in manufacturing.
Small and independent brewers today employ more than 100,000 Americans and pay more than $3 billion in wages and benefits. Sam Calagione, the owner of Dogfish Head brewery in my home state of Delaware, now employs 180 workers at his facility in Milton. Of course, what they’re manufacturing is not a new or innovative or recently invented product. People have been brewing beer for thousands of years. But Sam’s done a remarkable job of coming up with a very broad range of different brews and, in fact, of bringing back brews that are centuries or millennia old by recovering ancient recipes for fantastic and tasty beers.
What I’m focusing on today though is about the expansion. This particular company has invested $50 million in a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility. And when I recently visited, I was struck at how different it was from the beer bottling plants of the past, from what some may have seen on “Laverne and Shirley,” or what they might have imagined a traditional manufacturing plant to look like. Those folks who work on the bottling line, on the manufacturing line at this particular facility have to be able to use programmable logic controls; they have to be able to do quality control and math and to communicate as a team, and to communicate in a way that puts them at the cutting edge of advanced manufacturing.
This highlights some of the biggest challenges in manufacturing. It takes a lot of money to invest in a plant and machinery to make it capable of competing as a modern-day plant. It takes access to capital. But we also need to change the public’s perception of what manufacturing is. It is a very different place to work, a manufacturing line, than it was 20 or 50 years ago. They’re safe, they’re clean, they’re well-lit. These are decent, high-paying jobs. And if we’re going to win in the global competition for manufacturing, we need to strengthen the skills and the perceptions of manufacturing across our country.
Well, Mr. President, each of the three bills I’ve spoken about today will help create good manufacturing jobs here in America and I believe are ready for consideration on a bipartisan basis by this chamber. We need to take action together on a bipartisan basis to get our economy going again.
And I’ll remind you, manufacturing jobs are not just decent jobs, not just good jobs, they’re great jobs. They’re the jobs of today and tomorrow. They’re the jobs that sustain and build the backbone of the American middle class. We already have all the tools in this country to ensure its growth, but if we work together and put in place stronger and better federal policies in partnership with the private sector, we can put jets on our manufacturing sector and it can take off and grow again.