Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I want to begin by agreeing with my good friend on many of the points that he made. I was particularly struck by the point he made about the low participation rate in the labor force. That has been a problem that has been with us, quite frankly, for, as he pointed out, several decades, and it is one that has gotten worse. That is attributable in large part to another point that my friend made, effectively the thing around here we call the skills gap. We have literally millions of jobs available in this country, and employers are ready to hire people but they simply don't have the training. I couldn't agree more with my good friend that on-the-job training is sometimes the best training. You actually acquire the skill that you need to be successful, and the situation of this legislation will actually, again, offset the cost of that to the employer and, by the way, not add any cost to the taxpayer. That is something we ought to talk about as well. We are just taking money that we would have been spending anyway, and we are spending it a lot more productively. Now, my friend is right. This is a new program. This is a new approach. So trying it out for a year, spending $100 million--a lot of money--but obviously we would spend more this way if we would know this would be successful. But I can't help but think it will be successful.…”