Jobs

Floor Speech

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Mrs. BLACKBURN. Madam President, I hope that you had a marvelous Mother's Day. I enjoyed so much being back in Tennessee, and over the past week, I really had the pleasure of hearing from so many Tennesseans who are just celebrating having reopened businesses and music venues and public spaces in our communities.

There was a lot of happiness across our State as I was there. Everywhere you looked, you could see evidence that people are ready to get back to work, and they want to get back to life as normal.

There is also a lot of evidence that local businesses are ready to get back to normal. You cannot walk 10 feet in Knoxville, TN, for example, without running into a ``help wanted'' sign. Normally, this would be an indicator of a successful economic comeback, but here is the problem: Those signs just are not working, not for retail or restaurants or even for the industrial sector with small business manufacturing. Some businesses are getting so desperate for help that they are offering signing bonuses worth hundreds of dollars to anyone willing and able to come back to work.

All year, we have used a particular catchphrase to encourage people to get their vaccinations. We have said that if we could only get shots in arms, then we could get back to normal. Well, as it turns out, that was step 1. We are getting the shots in arms. People are getting vaccinated. Now it is time for step 2, and that is getting people back to work, getting them to fill these jobs.

I have said time and again and I will say it again: The best economic stimulus there is, the very best economic stimulus there is, is a job. It is a job. This holds true not just for those pulling in a paycheck but for the businesses that are hiring.

My Democratic colleagues--many of them--disagree with me on this point, but I firmly believe the best economic stimulus is a job. For months, some have refused to discuss an end to the various emergency relief programs we all agreed were necessary to help workers and businesses survive the lockdowns. But they were never meant to be permanent programs; they were there for a time of specific need.

I think, if some of my colleagues took the time to speak to the owners whose businesses are short on labor, they would hear the same story over and over again. Their pool of potential employees was drained dry, at least in part by the unemployment insurance plus-up that we initiated last year. Because of the way that program was designed and because my colleagues on the other side of the aisle rejected our offers to amend it, potential employees are drawing in more in unemployment than they would make at some jobs.

Now, some of my colleagues across the aisle dispute the notion that this imbalance has led to a labor shortage. They claim that if there are people staying home and collecting unemployment rather than taking their old job back, or maybe a new job, that those examples are anecdotal. But to that point, I would ask: How many anecdotes does it take to create a trend?

In Tennessee, there are at least a quarter of a million jobs available, but as of last week, we still have about 49,000 people receiving the $300 plus-up. This means that there are five jobs--five-- five jobs available for every single one of those 49,000 people.

I want to make it clear that these business owners have no reason to lie about the trouble they are having finding help. Their survival depends on their ability to hire a team of employees. They gain nothing by poisoning the well with false accusations. Anyone who has ever run a business knows that.

They also know it is a difficult call for these potential employees to make, even when signing bonuses and higher wages are on the table, but therein lies the disconnect. While businesses are incentivized to do all they can to attract workers, the Federal Government has incentivized workers to hold out as long as they can before taking the leap into a new job. It is not their fault, but it is the reality that Congress created.

What we are seeing now isn't economic stimulus. I would offer that it is an economic stalemate. And if we don't break the ties that bind recovery to the success or failure of a government program, we will suffer long-term economic consequences.

As I said, some of my Democratic colleagues fundamentally disagree with that approach. They have made that disagreement clear to the tune of $6 trillion worth of spending that would be like nothing else that we have ever seen and making it a permanent part of our economic landscape.

They gave us a COVID relief package that had almost nothing to do with fighting the pandemic, an infrastructure proposal that dedicates 60 percent--60 percent of its total pricetag to job-killing proposals like the Green New Deal fantasies and, most recently, a supposedly pro- family proposal that, if implemented, will in fact replace the stability of the nuclear family with a lifelong tether to the welfare state.

Talk about never letting a crisis go to waste. This isn't compassion, in my opinion, and it isn't recovery. This is a power grab. They took the majority, put pen to paper, and produced a wish list. They have wanted to check off items from that wish list since 2010. So their list is long.

This version of economic stimulus, which, in reality, is just a destructive cycle of spending and dependency and taxation and inflation, will require more than just a general buy-in from the American people. They are going to have to persuade people to cede authority, to cede authority over their lives, their families, their businesses, their jobs, their employment--cede that authority to the Federal Government.

Now, if this isn't true, if this isn't their goal, let the Democrats dispute it. Let them come to the table and listen to what these business owners are telling us. Let them help figure out a way to offer a light at the end of the tunnel to the unemployed and underemployed instead of keeping them tangled in a safety net that was neither designated nor intended to be permanent.

We still have a long way to go before we can declare victory over the COVID-19 pandemic. But what my colleagues on the other side of the aisle refuse to acknowledge is that we will never make it across the finish line if we don't allow the American people to hope for that victory. We need to allow them to hope that last month's terrible jobs report was just an anomaly. I certainly hope it was.

And most importantly, we need to allow them to remember that a little over a year ago, we didn't have to rely on emergency supplements and direct payments from the government to survive. We had the most robust economy we had in decades and decades. Unemployment numbers were at record lows. Wage gains were at record highs.

So we have been there before. We can and we will recover. But encouraging total reliance on the government is not going to be what gets us there, especially when so many businesses in this country are trying to hire workers, and workers are not taking the jobs.

I yield floor.

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