Manufacturing
Floor Speech
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Ms. STABENOW. Mr. President, as everybody in the Chamber knows, I am extremely proud to be from Michigan. Our State leads the world in innovation. We created and built the automobile, the automotive assembly line, and the American middle class along with it.
And today, our workers are still putting the world on four wheels-- and really amazing wheels right now.
I got to show one of our Nation's foremost car guys, President Biden, some of Michigan's latest and greatest creations during last week's Detroit Auto Show. He was so happy behind the wheel of Chevy's new Corvette that I was a little worried he was going to put on his aviators and drive right out of the exhibition center. It took a lot to get him out of that car, he was so into it.
He was inspired, and we all were. Of course, the auto show is always inspiring, but this year it was even more, and that is because our Nation is in the middle of a manufacturing renaissance. And I don't say that lightly. We are in the middle of a manufacturing renaissance.
Democrats in Congress, along with President Biden and Vice President Harris, are helping to revitalize American manufacturing. With tiny House and Senate majorities and the car guy in the White House, Democrats have done more to advance manufacturing in America than at any point in the past 70 years. We are not just bringing back the jobs lost during the pandemic; we are going far beyond that. Already, nearly 700,000 new manufacturing jobs have been created under the Biden administration. This represents the strongest manufacturing job growth since the 1950s--in our lifetime. In 2021 alone, more manufacturing jobs were created. Just last year, more manufacturing jobs were created than in any single year, any 1 year in nearly 30 years, which is extraordinary, and it is exciting.
And over the past year, the construction of new manufacturing facilities in the United States has grown by over 100 percent--116 percent. Meanwhile, 80 percent of our CEOs in a recent survey were either in the process of moving manufacturing operations from China or were seriously considering doing so. So we are seeing a real shift about bringing jobs home, and we have been providing the incentives and the support to do that. So that is really great news because we know if you are going to have an economy, somebody has to make something-- somebody has to make something. And, frankly, that is what we do in Michigan. We make things. We innovate. And then we make things even better and then we do it over and over again.
Of course, we can't make much of anything if we don't have the semiconducting chips--these little microchips the size of a nail. Whoever thought that not having microchips would shut down a whole plant, and that is what has happened in Michigan, unfortunately, during the height of the supply chain breakdowns.
A lack of chips means that auto manufacturers have to idle plants. Assembly lines shut down, and workers get sent home. Parking lots at plants fill up with cars that can't be sold because of these missing chips. And I see many of them not very far from my home in Lansing, MI.
Car lots that normally are full of different makes and models sit empty, and the price of new and used cars goes up and up without these chips--all because of a tiny piece of technology no bigger than a thumbnail.
That is why the legislation that we passed, the CHIPS and Science Act--this legislation that was signed into law is really a big deal. This law is bringing semiconductor manufacturing back to the United States where it belongs. Instead of the majority of what we need being overseas, it is now going to be coming home and creating millions of jobs in the process, and that is, frankly, great news. Currently, U.S. manufacturers only have 12 percent of the world's semiconductor manufacturing--12 percent. And it actually was down from 37 percent in the nineties. And now we are going to reverse that and bring those jobs home.
We are already seeing it make a difference. Intel is building new semiconductor fabricator plants in Ohio and Arizona. This year, Micron Technologies is breaking ground for a new $15 billion factory in Idaho, and we would love to see them come our way. It is a great beginning, and we are just getting started.
The American manufacturing boom goes far beyond semiconductors, though. The investments we have made in research and development will ensure that the next generation of clean energy of telecommunications and transportation technologies will be developed and manufactured right here in America as well.
President Biden got a taste of what that was like in the auto show when he got behind the wheel of an all-electric Cadillac Lyriq and drove it across the floor. Again, we were hoping he was going to restrain himself from driving it off the exhibition floor.
Democrats provided a huge boost to manufacturing, including clean energy manufacturing, through the Inflation Reduction Act, which unfortunately none of our Republican colleagues voted for. It created new and expanded tax incentives for the next generation of clean energy technologies. I have constantly been talking about the importance of battery production tax credits--production tax credits, meaning you don't get the credit unless it is actually produced in the United States. We have done that now. That is now law.
And the new solar manufacturing tax credit is going to help American manufacturers like Hemlock Semiconductor create new products and good jobs as well. They create one-third of all the polysilicon materials for solar panels, but the production has been in other countries, primarily, China. Now, with the production tax credit, the incentive will be to build them, to make them here in America.
The CHIPS and Science Act also provided $11 billion to develop cutting-edge technologies, including up to three new Manufacturing USA initiatives. We are proud to have two Manufacturing USA initiatives already in place from the Obama administration. There is the Lightweight Innovations for Tomorrow, or LIFT, and Michigan State University's Scale-Up Research Facility, or SURF. Both are located in the same facility in Detroit, and LIFT projects include research into better welding processes for Navy ships and an anti-rollover system for military humvees. SURF is partnering with the Department of Energy and Ford and GM to make sure that America is a leader in advanced technologies--advanced vehicle technologies.
And the CHIPS and Science package also more than doubled funding to develop technologies that are crucial to our national and economic security. That includes cyber security and biotechnology and artificial intelligence and quantum computing, advanced materials science, and 6G communications.
Now, if we are going to be inventing all of this new stuff, we also need workers. You hear that all the time. We need workers who are skilled to produce these things, and that is something that we as Democrats have been laser-focused on also. In everything that we have done, there has been a workforce development piece of it, which is so critical. The CHIPS and Science Act includes dedicated funding for the development of semiconductor workforce opportunities.
The Inflation Reduction Act includes incentives for clean energy manufacturers to create high-paying jobs and apprenticeship programs, which we know are so successful and so needed. And we have also invested in workforce development programs in regions all around the country.
The Build Back Better regional challenge awarded $1 billion to 120 projects across 24 States to help people get the skills that they need for these great new jobs. These projects are building a sustainable mariculture workforce in Alaska, training aerospace workers in Kansas, and ensuring that Michigan has the highly skilled workers needed to build the advanced vehicles on display at the Detroit Auto Show.
One thing I am also particularly proud of in all that we have been doing around manufacturing as well is that we have worked to ensure that our tax dollars are spent on American products made by American workers and American companies. Now, that sounds like a no-brainer. I know, Mr. President, you agree with that, but we have had laws on the books for a long time that have not been enforced. There has not been transparency about what was going on, and now they are going to have to be accountable and transparent.
``Buy American'' needs to be more than a slogan on a bumper sticker, and now it is. We have ushered in the most significant expansion of ``Buy American'' policies in decades, including a new Made in America office at the Department of Commerce that is working with each Agency to make sure that they are exhausting all the possibilities to buy American before they are allowed to have a waiver to that provision, which is very important.
Decades from now, people are going to look back at the past 2 years as a real turning point. I really believe that. It is the point when we really truly stopped talking and started acting to rebuild American manufacturing. It is the point when we created hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs, the kind of jobs that support families. And it is the point when we started to really bring jobs home.
Democrats are standing on the side of American manufacturing. We are standing on the side of good-paying American union jobs. We are standing on the side of the American worker and our American middle class. And we are building things in America again--building things in America again--and that is really good news.
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