Executive Calendar
Floor Speech
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Mr. BRAUN. Mr. President, I thank Senator Ernst for allowing me the opportunity to talk about opportunity zones.
So much has happened since President Trump has been elected that I think has brought opportunity. The economy is obviously booming. In the State of Indiana, for instance, we have 156 opportunity zones in 83 different cities and 58 counties. That is a lot in one State. This is investment into these areas that need jobs. Capital investment is hard to measure. Thank goodness it has come along and has been an opportunity that we in the Hoosier State have taken advantage of.
We are one of the lowest unemployment States in the Union. I am from Dubois County, from the town of Jasper, which supports the lowest unemployment rates in our State--a State of enterprise, a State of commerce. Workforce development is probably the most critical issue that faces our State, but we do a lot of other things well. We live within our means. We addressed infrastructure back in 2017 by repairing roads and bridges and by doing a lot of things well.
We have 80,000 jobs in our State that need one simple thing, and that is proper training.
When I went to school back in the seventies--it dates me a little bit--I took industrial arts. You had a shop class. You had a welding class. You had practical training that led you into good-paying jobs. Somewhere along the way, we kind of almost stigmatized that pathway called career and technical education. We have schools like Ivy Tech. When I was a State legislator, there were 19 different programs, and we were spending nearly $1 billion a year, but we were not providing proper training for high-demand, high-wage jobs.
In our State, we are shipping out twice as many 4-year degrees as we use. Something is not right. I just spoke with an online college, which is another issue I want to mention. The cost of these 4-year degrees has gotten way out of hand. Many graduates spend $80,000, $90,000, $100,000. They take on that debt and have jobs that are not marketable.
We need to pay attention to the simple things that most States need by reorienting the focus of education and providing proper training for jobs that in many cases pay more than 4-year degrees, those that start in the neighborhood of $40,000 to $60,000 and have good benefits and potential wages of over $100,000 a year. In our State and in most States across the country, those are the jobs that need to be filled.
In my own company, 80 jobs can't be filled because, really, there needs to be a better curriculum at the high school level, one from which you get basic skills taught rather than the misguided approach of overemphasizing 4-year degrees. There is nothing wrong with that, and everyone should aspire to that, but the market doesn't necessarily need it. It will pay more for a lot less education, and you will not be walking away with the debt that so many students do in this day and age.
Tax reform then came along. As a business owner, I can clearly say that there has been nothing in the 38 years of building a little Main Street business into a national company that has catapulted our ability to do more for our employees than what has happened with tax reform.
An opportunity zone is a great idea. We need to have more of it, and we need to make sure this institution starts to set an example across this country whereby we live within our means and not create $850 billion deficits annually on top of $22 trillion of debt. We all know that is going to lead us nowhere other than into despair down the road.
Again, I am here to tout what tax relief and the JOBS Act did, as well as opportunity zones, which we have run with in the Hoosier State. We also need to fix a few things, like matching training and education with high-demand, high-wage jobs. If we do that across the country, I think we will be into decades of prosperity that will prevent us from maybe going down that trail of some of the things we have heard about recently, like the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and a lot of things that we know we can't afford and that will not work.
Thank you.
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