Heidi Alexander: “Senator Coons will come to the floor in a few minutes. He and I have been working together on legislation that many…”

“Senator Coons will come to the floor in a few minutes. He and I have been working together on legislation that many Senators on both sides of the aisle support. Very simply, it pins a green card on the lapel of any foreign student who is involved in science, engineering, technology graduate programs who gets a degree and who wants to stay in the United States and work. What we would like for them to do, instead of going home to create the next Google in India or China or some other country, is to stay here and create it here. The legislation has broad support. It is a recommendation of the American Competes Act which I worked on and many others did in 2005 and 2007. We will come to the floor and talk about that tomorrow. But I wanted to salute Senator Coons for his leadership on this issue and recognize it. Now I will turn to the budget with my remaining time. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently said the worst mistake President Obama made was not embracing his own fiscal commission's recommendations to reduce our debt by $4 trillion over the next 10 years. Today, our national debt is more than $15.6 trillion, which is nearly $1.9 trillion higher than it was when the fiscal commission released its recommendations and $6.4 trillion higher than when President Obama was sworn in. In January 2013, the first thing the next President will have to do is to ask the Congress to increase the debt ceiling.…”