[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 123 (Thursday, July 20, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4106-S4107]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                             Manufacturing

  Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, the White House started out this week with 
all kinds of activities on the White House grounds pertaining to things 
that we make here in America and the importance of manufacturing and, 
frankly, the kinds of good jobs that have traditionally come with 
manufacturing.
  When we have an economy that focuses on making things and growing 
things, that has always been the strongest economy for working American 
families--an economy that competes, an economy that produces. Where the 
Presiding Officer and I live in Louisiana and in Missouri, in the 
middle of the country and close to that great transportation corridor 
and close to the resources of the country, we always particularly 
thrive when we are in an economy that is focused on making things.
  With all of the other discussions this week, it would be a shame to 
not think about those products from every State that the President 
talked about this week, that were on the Capitol grounds, and that are 
reflective of companies that are almost brandnew and companies that are 
a century old, where people had figured out how to be competitive 
enough in what they were doing that they could make a living for 
themselves and lots of other people, doing just that. In fact, 
manufacturing employs 12.3 million people in the country today, 
including more than 260,000 people in my State of Missouri. There is no 
doubt that we benefit from those kinds of jobs.
  I was glad that in 2014 we were able to get the Revitalize American 
Manufacturing and Innovation Act signed into law. This was a new way, a 
new opportunity for businesses to link with each other and to link with 
training facilities, maybe research universities. You have to have that 
kind of public partner, as well, to see what we could be to be even 
more competitive than we are. When we looked at Germany and other 
countries, they were not only doing this sort of thing, but they were 
doing it in a way that made it really hard for us sometimes to keep up 
with that level of interaction between innovation and manufacturing, 
innovation and labor.
  Businesses are really very much impacted, jobs are very much impacted 
by the decisions that government ultimately sets the stage for. If you 
are going to make something in America today, the first two boxes I 
think you would have to check would be can you pay the utility bill and 
does the transportation system work with what you are trying to do. If 
you can't check those two boxes, no matter how great that workforce and 
that location might be, you are not going to take those jobs there. So 
government, either as a regulator or as a provider, is going to be very 
involved in whether you can pay the utility bill.
  That is why I was really glad to see the new director at the 
Environmental Protection Agency look at the power rule. The courts 
fortunately had already said you don't have the authority to do that--
only Congress can do what you want to do here--which is look at the 
power rule and look at States like many of our States in the middle of 
the country where, in my State, the so-called clean power rule would 
have doubled the utility bill for families and the places they work in 
about 10 or 12 years. By the way, nobody pays the utility bill for you. 
The utility bill is paid based on how many utilities you use. There is 
no mythical big government to come in and pay the utility bill unless 
we are going to have a totally different system than we have now. The 
utility bill would have doubled.
  I have often said that in the last three years in this fight to see 
that this didn't happen to Missouri families--and I said it again on 
the radio this morning in an interview, thinking that this fortunately 
had not happened--I said: If you want to test what happens if the 
utility bill is allowed to double because of some needless government 
action--and double before it has to because you are doing things before 
they have to be done--the next time you pay your utility bill, just as 
you are writing your checks out of your checkbook, pay it one more time 
and see what you are going to do with the rest of your family's money 
that month, which suddenly you can't do because you are paying the 
utility bill twice.
  There are ways--when we need to transition to some other kind of 
utility provider if we want to transition in fuels or sources or 
whatever--there are ways to do that. The way to do that is to say that 
the next time you have to build something, the next time you have to 
borrow money that the utility users are going to pay back over 20 or 30 
years, once you have paid for what you are doing now that has met all 
the requirements, you have to do it differently than what that silly 
rule would have said, because it would have said you have to pay for 
what you already have, but you have to also be paying for what you 
immediately had to replace it with.
  This would have been like if you had the CAFE standards, the miles-
per-gallon standards, if that same agency would have said: OK, we are 
going to have new miles-per-gallon standards and they are effective 
immediately, and if you have a car that doesn't meet those standards, 
you of course have to keep paying for your car, but you also have to 
have a new car. That is what we were about to tell utility users and 
families. And if you don't think that would have had an impact on jobs, 
you are just not thinking about jobs.
  There was a water rule, the waters of the United States, that would 
have done about the same thing. Both of those have been pushed back by 
the courts, and hopefully we are walking toward a more reasonable 
situation where we are thinking about how to accomplish the same goals 
in a way that lets families accomplish their dreams.
  Then the second thing, the transportation issue: Does the 
transportation system work for what you want to make? Can you get the 
material where you need to get it? Can you get a product in a way that 
continues to make you competitive? And the State and Federal Government 
and local governments are very, very much in charge of the decisions 
that make that environment whatever it is.
  So when we are thinking about ``Made in America,'' we have to think 
about those things. Then we have to think, with that infrastructure in 
place, what is the third and crucial piece of that puzzle coming 
together? It is a workforce that is competitive and prepared and an 
education system that is prepared to help with whatever comes next.
  If we think we know what the average person, or any person, is going 
to be doing and how they are going to be doing it 20 years from now, I 
suspect none of us are quite that able to predict what 20 years from 
now is going to look like. In fact, if we had thought about the way we 
do most of the work we do now 20 years ago, it would be amazing: Oh, it 
is just 20 years later, but we didn't have the cell phone, we didn't 
have an iPad, we didn't have a computer. There was nothing at the 
factory that did what that machine does right now. We have to have a 
workforce that is ready, and we have to do all we can to make that 
workforce ready.

  On the infrastructure front, we need to look not only at the 
infrastructure bill that is coming up, but also how many more tools can 
we put in the tool box. Senator Warner and I reintroduced the BRIDGE 
Act to provide one more tool to create more incentive for private 
sector partnerships, to do things differently than we have done them 
before. If we are going to get different results, we have to do 
different things. If we do just exactly what we have been doing, we are 
going to get just exactly what we have been getting.
  So as the President focuses, I think properly, on the kinds of 
American jobs that create stronger families and more opportunities, we 
don't want to lose

[[Page S4107]]

this week without also thinking about those jobs, thinking about the 
12.3 million Americans who work at making things, thinking about the 
more than a quarter of a million Missourians who do that. Think about 
the others who work at growing things and how an economy that makes 
things and grows things is a stronger economy than an economy where 
people just trade services with each other. There is nothing wrong with 
trading services, but if you do that on top of a productive economy, it 
has a much better likelihood for everyone involved to serve the people 
who provide the services, as well as the people who are out there 
making things that are competitive in the world to have better 
opportunities.
  I appreciate the President and Vice President this week calling 
attention to that important part of what we do as we move toward 
transportation and infrastructure and other things.