Douglas Alexander: “let me say to Senator Bingaman, I greatly appreciate working with him. I do not believe there will be a more important…”

“let me say to Senator Bingaman, I greatly appreciate working with him. I do not believe there will be a more important piece of legislation to come before Congress this year because it goes right to the heart of something every American understands, which is, How do we keep our jobs? This is the way we do it. We keep our brainpower advantage. We keep our jobs in competition with China and India. There are other factors as well, but what we know is--and we have a broad consensus in the Senate--that most of our remarkable standard of living, a situation where we have 30 percent of all the money in the world produced in this country for about 5 percent of the people, comes from our brainpower advantage, kindergarten through the twelfth grade, a wonderful higher education system, and our research institutes. That is the importance of this legislation.”