BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Ms. STABENOW. Thank you, Madam President. I would ask to speak for up to 10 minutes as if in morning business.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection.
Ms. STABENOW. Thank you. First, I thank the distinguished chair of the Budget Committee for her words and her work on focusing on middle-class families and making sure the economy grows for everyone. I wish to echo and expand upon the very same topics our distinguished chairwoman has been talking about.
First, I think it is important to note that we have seen an improvement in the economy. We are seeing a stock market that has doubled since President Obama took office. We have seen deficits going down. We are seeing projections of slowing increases as they relate to health care and Medicare costs. We are seeing more jobs being created.
The challenge for us is making sure everyone has an opportunity in that economy.
We see an economy that has turned, but yet we see way too many people who are not able to benefit from that economy and who don't have a fair shot to create the opportunities for themselves and their families.
So there is more work to be done and that is what the ``fair shot'' agenda is all about. I thank the Presiding Officer for her leadership around this whole question of how to make sure the economy works for everyone, how to make sure we have a middle class in this country--and we will not have a middle class unless everybody has a fair shot to make it.
We have put together five issues we have voted on that we will continue to bring up over and over again until they get passed--and certainly there are other issues as well but five that would make a tremendous difference to Americans in terms of creating opportunity.
The first one is the minimum wage. If you work, you ought to be receiving more wages than if you were in poverty. Why not be over the poverty line if you are working 40 hours a week. We ought to value work in our economy. Raising the minimum wage is an important piece of that. It is the floor, the foundation that is high enough that your family is not in poverty if you are working 40 hours a week. We raised this issue and we voted on this issue of raising the minimum wage above the poverty line and it was blocked by our Republican colleagues in April.
We then came back and looked at the fact that another part of the burden on middle-class families and those aspiring to get into the middle class is the cost of student loans. In fact, it is shocking to know we have more student loan debt than credit card debt in this country. We are seeing that people are able to refinance their homes to lower interest rates and benefit from lower interest rates for a variety of things, but they cannot refinance their student loans. People are locked in, whether it is current students, people recently out of college--we know there is a certain percentage of the trillion dollars in student loans that are paid by people who are retired, actually on Medicare and still paying off student loans. The law currently does not allow them to even just refinance to the low rates that one can get in other parts of the economy. Back in June we put forward a refinancing bill that would help 25 million Americans--including 1 million in Michigan alone--reduce their student loan debt, put more money in their pocket so they can buy a house, they can raise a family. I know realtors in my State of Michigan and those who are involved in mortgage banking are now deeply concerned about this issue because the debt they have is disqualifying people from buying a home or being able to make other investments, starting a small business or other opportunities for refinancing.
So this is a critically important issue. If someone is following the rules of working hard and doing what we all say to do, getting skills so they can compete and be part of the new economy and get a job, but folks find themselves in a situation where all they can do is create crushing debt in all of this and spend years and years and years, oftentimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, this is a concern. This is getting in the way of allowing people to be successful and have a middle class in this country. We have our student loan bill based on students, and it was unfortunately voted down by Republicans in June.
Then we go on to an issue we didn't originally have on our agenda until the Supreme Court made what I believe was an outrageous decision that affects women in their personal health care decisions, basically saying that for a woman to get a certain kind of coverage for birth control or contraception, she would have to walk into her boss's office and sit down and explain her personal health care issues and get approval for birth control. I don't know any other part of the health care system that requires a boss to oversee a decision made by an employee. But this was something that was decided as being a legitimate option under a Supreme Court decision called the Hobby Lobby decision.
So we put forth legislation to make it clear it is not your boss's business, that women ought to be able to receive coverage for preventive care for women just as men do for their health care decisions. We voted on a bill that would make sure women could make their own basic health decisions in privacy, and that was blocked in July by Republicans, indicating they did not believe women should have the opportunity to make their own health care decisions.
Then a bill of mine with Senator Walsh called the Bring Jobs Home Act came before us. It is a very simple premise again. We are a global economy. We want to export our products but not our jobs, and we have tax policy right now that incentivizes those who want to take the jobs overseas. Some of this is craziness in the Tax Code, I believe.
One of those very simple policies that has sent a message that it is OK to ship jobs overseas is the fact that if a company closes shop in places such as Michigan or Wisconsin or Ohio or anywhere in the country--we have seen too much of this in Michigan over the last decade--they can actually write off the cost of the move.
The employer can say to the employees, you pack up the boxes, and by the way--through the Tax Code--you will end up paying for the move. The Bring Jobs Home Act says, no, we are not paying, as American taxpayers, for your move if you are moving outside the country with those jobs. If you want to come back, great, you can not only write off those costs, we will give you an extra 20-percent tax credit for the cost on top of it.
Very simply put, the Bring Jobs Home Act is for those who want to come home to America. We are all for it. We will support you and help you do that. If you want to leave America, you are on your own. That was blocked by the Republicans in July.
As if blocking those four very important, commonsense bills was not outrageous enough, Republicans once again blocked a bill to guarantee women equal pay for equal work. I can't believe we are talking about this in 2014. Everybody says, wait a minute, we have equal pay for equal work. We have a law on the books that is not enforced at this point in time. We have court decisions that do not allow the actual equal pay for equal work statute to truly be enforced in this country, which is why we find ourselves in a situation where nationally women still only receive 77 cents on a dollar. In Michigan, it is 74 cents on a dollar.
It is hard to believe that in this day and age--in 2014--42 of our Republican colleagues voted against the Paycheck Fairness Act. I hope we are going to have another chance in the near future to vote on that and again give them an opportunity to support equal pay for equal work.
When we look at Michigan, where women are working very hard every day, I find it stunning that they are making only 74 cents on every dollar. They are getting 26 cents less for every dollar that they work. When you go to the grocery store, you don't get a 26-percent reduction. They can't say: Hey, I am paid less. Here is my 26-percent discount. When they go to the gas station, they don't get a 26-percent discount. When they pay their mortgage, they don't get a 26-percent discount. Obviously it doesn't make sense and the numbers don't add up, but it is much more than just about numbers.
I remember when Kerri Sleeman from Houghton, MI--up in the Upper Peninsula--came here to testify in the Senate. She was a senior engineer supervising a group of engineers at the company. After the company closed and went bankrupt, she was reviewing the legal documents and found that she, as the engineering supervisor, had, in fact, been paid less than those whom she supervised.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent for another minute.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Ms. STABENOW. Kerri Sleeman, as a supervisor, deserved to receive the kind of pay she should receive as a supervisor.
One of the things I find outrageous is when we hear folks on the other side of the aisle say equal pay for equal work is nonsense; the bill is nonsense. It is a distraction. In Michigan we have heard people say: Women don't care about equal pay, they want flexibility. Well, flexibility doesn't pay for my groceries. The truth of the matter is women want to have the opportunity to receive equal pay.
We are at a point in time where we ought to move forward quickly in passing each one of these issues. As we know, this is about the economy and growing the middle class in this country. We are not going to have a middle class unless everybody has a fair shot to participate and work hard and be successful, and we need to get about the business of making sure that happens.
I yield the floor.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT