Roy Blunt: “certainly I want to thank my colleagues today for the credit that they have shared with me and that I am reluctant to…”

“certainly I want to thank my colleagues today for the credit that they have shared with me and that I am reluctant to accept. This is clearly an effort to establish what our priorities are. There are a lot of things in this bill that are goods things for somebody to do. In some cases over the years, we have not done them as well as we should have, and well-intentioned programs didn't work. We have gone through the process of eliminating programs and combining programs so we could set the priorities mentioned just this morning by Senator Collins, Senator Capito, and Senator Moran. When you think about what we are talking about here--healthcare research, the opioid epidemic, and what is happening in the Alzheimer's space--we would have never imagined these numbers in cost or family impact. There is one thing I want to mention just briefly before we end this part of our discussion. I think between votes and other things this morning--Senator Cardin is here and, like me, planned to do what I am doing now about an hour ago. So I am going to take just a couple minutes. I want to talk a little about the labor part of this bill. For the first time in the 20 years we have been keeping statistics on jobs available and people looking for work, this is the first time there are more jobs available than people looking for work. That is a big number and a big thing to think about.…”