Raise the Wage Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. SMUCKER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.

When I was a teenager, at 14 years old, one of my first jobs was serving as a dishwasher at Smoketown family restaurant. I had no previous work experience, but the owner took a chance on me. I certainly didn't receive a great wage, but it was a starting point, and the lessons that I learned in that job were lessons that I used during my entire career.

I went on after high school to buy a small construction company, operated it for 25 years, creating family-sustaining jobs for hundreds of individuals.

Today, my 16-year-old son serves food in a skilled nursing center after school at a wage of $9 an hour. He is very thrilled with that; again, learning the skills, the people skills, needed, learning to show up for work on time, learning to work hard.

In fact, one of the best indicators of success in a career is whether or not you had a job during high school.

This bill, unfortunately, would rob many of the opportunity to hold that first job. CBO specifically said 3.7 million jobs will be lost as a result of this bill.

Our friends on the other side of the aisle are not talking about that aspect of the bill.

There is no question here about the desire to see every individual that we represent have the opportunity to live the American Dream: the idea the previous speaker just said, the idea that you can work hard, play by the rules, and you can live your dream.

The question is the prescription, and it is a fundamental choice. It is a choice of believing in our free enterprise system, believing in our economic system that has created more opportunity than ever before in the history of the world, or believing in more government control.

Today, someone can apply at the construction company that I operated for many years----

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Mr. SMUCKER. Today, someone can apply at that company and have no experience and start at $16 an hour. That wasn't a government prescription. That is the free enterprise system at work.

I am very, very proud, as the result of the work that we have done over the last 2 years, the tax reform act, for the first time, we are seeing wages rise.

Again, it is not as a result of a bill like this, which would have exactly the opposite effect on that ability to achieve upward mobility.

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