Let Americans Buy American

June 21, 2019

The United States is currently enjoying an energy production boom. In 2017, for the first time since 1957, the U.S. became a net exporter of natural gas. In fact, according to the Energy Information Administration, the U.S. is set to become the world’s third largest liquefied natural gas exporter next year.

Unfortunately, not all Americans are benefitting from this energy revolution. Many residents of Boston, Massachusetts still rely on natural gas from Europe to supply the heat and electricity they need in the winter months. Our American citizens in Puerto Rico are also forced to buy all of their natural gas from Trinidad and Tobago, despite higher prices.

Why are Americans being forced to buy more expensive natural gas from foreign countries despite cheaper prices from American produced sources?

The answer goes all the way back to 1920 when Congress passed the Merchant Marine Act (more commonly known as the Jones Act). This law requires that all goods transported by water between U.S. ports must be carried by a ship that is constructed in the U.S., registered in the U.S., owned by U.S. citizens, and crewed primarily by U.S. citizens.

The purpose of the Jones Act was to encourage the construction of a merchant marine fleet that could help the U.S. Navy in time of war or national emergency. But the law’s strict requirements have become far too burdensome for modern shipping fleets. Today, just 180 ships meet Jones Act requirements, down from 737 in 1985.

Without Jones Act compliant ships to transport American goods between American ports, many Americans have been forced to turn to more expensive foreign goods to meet their needs. Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico have been hardest hit.

This is unacceptable. The federal government should not prevent American consumers from buying American products.

That is why I have introduced the “Protecting Access to American Products Act.” This bill creates an expedited process for American citizens to obtain a waiver from the Jones Act. If an applicant claims they failed to find a Jones Act compliant vessel for a specific product, the federal government must approve or deny that waiver within 60 days.
Americans can disagree about what, if any, trade barriers we should have with foreign nations. But I would hope we should all agree that Americans should be free to trade with each other. Protecting Access to American Products Act would better ensure that happens.

Make Trade Accountable Again

June 14, 2019

It’s not every day that a topic near and dear to my heart — the separation of powers — becomes front-page news, but that’s exactly what happened this past week as thousands of manufacturers, farmers, retailers, builders, and restaurateurs realized that President Donald Trump was absolutely serious about implementing a 5% tariff on all Mexican imports on June 10.

President Trump ended up calling off the tariff hike after receiving promises from Mexico to help stem the tide of Central American migrants causing a humanitarian crisis on our southern border, but the very real threat of suddenly higher import costs have left many businesses looking for policy predictability.

Some have argued that President Trump’s threatened tariffs are unconstitutional because taxing and regulatory authority belong to Congress. And it is true that Article I Section 8 of the United States Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations,” as well as to impose “taxes, duties, imposts, and excises.” In fact, the first major piece of legislation passed by the First Congress was a trade bill, the Tariff Act of 1789.

Unfortunately, starting during the progressive era, Congress began giving more and more of its tariff-management authority, and a slew of other legislative powers, to the president. At first, the Supreme Court blocked many of these delegations of legislative authority, but by the late 1930s the court had almost completely relented, allowing Congress to give away as many of its legislative powers as it wished.

As a result of these court decisions and decades of Congress punting power to the president - as much as some members of Congress may hate to admit - what President Trump did was most likely constitutional and legal. He was only exercising the legislative powers that past Congresses gave to the executive branch.

But what legislative powers Congress has given the executive branch, Congress can also take back. That is why I introduced the Global Trade Accountability Act in January of 2017.

The Global Trade Accountability Act would reform the Trade Act of 1974 to require congressional approval for any “unilateral trade action” undertaken by the executive branch. Before raising any trade barriers, the president would be required to submit a report to Congress outlining the proposed unilateral action, the costs and benefits of the action, and the effective period of the action. Both chambers of Congress would then have to pass an expedited joint resolution approving the proposed action before it could go into force.

Take back powers and start with trade

Presidents rarely give up power easily. Taking back trade power from the executive branch will be no different. But the executive branch still needs congressional approval for many things, including nominations, appropriations, and other legislative priorities. If Congress makes reclaiming our tariff-making powers a priority, we can get them back. We should. And we shouldn’t stop there.

From trade to energy to health care to transportation, Congress has given far too much legislative power to the executive branch. Instead of taking the time and responsibility to make hard choices and take tough votes, Congress has instead chosen to avoid accountability by giving power to faceless bureaucrats in Washington.

This is not how our Constitution was designed to work. The Constitution was specifically written to protect the American people from government without consent. It intentionally gave the lawmaking power exclusively to the most accountable branch of the federal government — Congress. It is far past time Congress took these legislative powers back. We can start with the Global Trade Accountability Act.

Making Housing Work for Utah Families

June 7, 2019

There are many pressing issues today that deserve our attention – so many, in fact, that it can sometimes be difficult to keep them straight.

But there is one issue – one challenge facing the American people today – that rises above the rest. That issue is the family, and I believe that its break down may be the single defining challenge of our time.

More than just a provider of material protections, the family is the shaper of human character. By teaching us what it means to live with duties and obligations toward others, the family prepares us for citizenship and teaches us how to live as members of a community.

The family has always been the linchpin of American life, but today more than ever, the American family is in trouble.

Fewer Americans are getting married today than ever before, and when they do marry, they are getting married later in life.

In 1960, 72 percent of adults between the ages of 18 and 64 were married Today that number has fallen to just 50 percent. The median age for first marriage was 20.3 for women and 22.8 for men in 1960. Today, the average woman doesn’t get married till 27.4 years and the average man waits until 29 and a half.

With marriage being pushed off until later in life, or sometimes being abandoned altogether, our nation’s fertility rate has also fallen to an all-time low. And for those that are lucky enough to be born, the odds of being born to married parents is lower than ever. In 1960, just 5 percent of births were to single parents. Today that number is 40 percent.

And this decline of the American family has real impacts on Americans. A 2015 report by Princeton University and the Brookings Institute concluded that, “Reams of social science and medical research convincingly show that children who are raised by their married, biological parents enjoy better physical, cognitive and emotional outcomes than children raised in other circumstances.”

Research also shows that intact families create strong communities that benefit everyone. Economists from Harvard and Cal-Berkeley recently published a report finding that low-income kids are more likely to succeed – regardless of whether their parents were married – so long as they grow up in a community with lots of two-parent families.

In other words, strong families make strong communities.

Unfortunately, there is a growing body of evidence that the high cost of housing is a big reason marriages and families are starting later, if they start at all.

According to a recent YouGov poll, 40 percent of young adults say they would not consider getting married until they can buy their own home. Similarly, a recent Bank of America report found that 72 percent of Americans prioritize owning a home over getting married.

These delayed marriages seem to be leading to delayed family formation. A 2012 University of California at Los Angeles study found that being in an expensive housing market delayed a mother’s first birth by three to four years after controlling for education, ethnicity, and labor market participation.

The evidence is clear: if we care about the strength of the American family, then we should also care about high housing prices.

Now, like every other issue in Washington, I don’t believe there is a silver bullet fix to these problems. But our own Salt Lake City community is leading the way in identifying possible solutions, and this Tuesday at the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Innovative Housing Showcase, I spoke with two entrepreneurs who are working to solve this issue.

Dustin Haggett, the founding partner of Modal Living, builds “accessory dwelling units” which allow working families to install pre-built plug-and-play homes on their existing residential properties. These units both increase density and housing supply, thus making housing more affordable, and provide a new stream of income for working families.

Last year, the Salt Lake City Council rolled back local land use regulations to allow more of these units in the city.

Chris Gamvroulas, president of Ivory Developments, talked about the need for local governments to provide more flexibility when permitting new developments. He noted how something as simple regulations on the thickness of roads in new developments can significantly drive up building costs.

There is a lot more localities can do to make land use regulations more flexible and there may even be a role for the federal government to remove financing distortions for working families who want to pursue this option. I am proud Utah is already a leader in effective housing reform and I look forward to helping that tradition continue.

Make Disaster Spending Responsible Again

May 24, 2019

This Thursday the United States Senate passed a $19 billion disaster spending bill supplementing the already $7.9 billion dollars Congress appropriated for disaster relief in 2018.

This extra emergency spending has become a far too common an occurrence in Washington. In the last five years alone, Congress has spent more than $173 billion dollars outside the discretionary caps for emergency spending and disaster aid.

Not only are these extra billions in disaster spending not offset by spending cuts elsewhere, but these bills always come larded up with non-emergency waste. For example, the bill passed this week included $2.4 billion for the scandal-plagued Community Development Block Grant program and another $55 million for the proven-failure Head Start program.

And don’t believe for a second that these unbudgeted disasters are caused by climate change. According to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, climate change has not caused any “detectable changes in flooding magnitude, duration, or frequency.” And there has been a “decreasing trend” in the number of hurricanes in the last decade.

So, if climate change isn’t driving the increase in emergency spending, what is? Well in 1988, Congress amended the Stafford Act to increase the amount of money local governments could get from each presidential disaster declaration. Since then the number of emergency declarations has skyrocketed. Before the change, the Reagan administration issued 28 disaster declarations a year. That rose to 43 a year under President H.W. Bush, 89 under President Clinton, 129 under President Bush, and 107 under President Obama.

We need to restore some responsibility and common sense to our emergency spending. In the private sector, businesses budget for rainy days and so should the federal government.

That is why I co-sponsored Sen. Mitt Romney’s (R-UT) Budgeting for Disasters Act, a bill that would require future disaster funding to fall within the statutory budget limits set by Congress. In addition to raising the threshold for waiving a budget point of order on emergency spending from 60 to 67, the bill also instructs the Government Accountability Office to produce a report identifying ways to tighten the federal qualifications for emergency declarations.

The federal government should not be able to avoid difficult financial realities by simply marking funds as emergency or disaster relief. We’ve seen in the last 5 years that Congress would rather borrow and spend instead of cutting wasteful, unnecessary programs and saving for a rainy day. While this bill would only impact a small portion of total federal spending, it is a step in the right direction.

Holding the Swamp Accountable

May 17, 2019

On at least eight separate occasions between March 2008 and June 2012, President Obama told the American people he did not have the constitutional authority to unilaterally rewrite our nation’s immigration laws.

Then, on June 15, 2012, at the height of a presidential election, President Obama did exactly what he had previously swore he had no power to do: he unilaterally granted temporary amnesty to potentially millions of illegal immigrants through his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. And all this happened just months after Congress specifically rejected legislation that President Obama was now essentially implementing through executive fiat.

What made DACA such a violent breach of separation of powers, legal norms, and the rule of law, was that the program did far more than simply exercise legitimate prosecutorial discretion by choosing which illegal immigrants to prosecute and which illegal immigrants to leave alone. The program also went a step forward and directed the Department of Homeland Security to issue work permits to DACA recipients. No congressional statute gave President Obama this power.

Fast forward to January 2018, when Senate Democrats filibustered a temporary government spending bill that would have kept the federal government open for three weeks because the legislation did not include a permanent amnesty for DACA recipients. The federal government then shutdown causing almost 700,000 federal employees to be furloughed as many government agencies were closed.

But despite this shutdown, but the processing of work permits for Obama’s illegal amnesty kept right on going. It turns out the agency that issues the permits, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, isn’t funded by Congress. It is funded by application fees, so it can continue functioning on completely unaccountably on autopilot without any funding by Congress.

And this isn’t the only example of the executive branch using independent sources of money to bypass congressional accountability. The Department of Justice has a history of using money from settlements with major corporations, like Volkswagen and Goldman Sachs, to enrich progressive Democratic Party allies that no Republican in Congress would ever vote to send taxpayer money to. Former-Attorney General Jeff Sessions limited this practice in 2017, but a future Democratic president could easily turn the spigot on again.

That is why we so desperately need the Agency Accountability Act, a bill that would direct any agency that receives a fee, fine, penalty, or settlement to deposit that money into the general fund of the Treasury. Exceptions would be made for the Post Office, the Patent and Trademark Office, and payments to whistleblowers.

Article I, Section 9 states that “no money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.”

It is far past time we restored financial accountability the Constitution granted Congress over the executive branch. The Agency Accountability Act is a great place to start.

When The United States Became United

May 10, 2019

On May 10, 1869, a golden spike was driven into the last link joining the rails of the First Continental Railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah. Made of 17 carat gold, and driven into a pre-drilled hole in the last ceremonial tie, it bore this inscription: “May God continue the unity of our Country, as this Railroad unites the two great Oceans of the world.”

And indeed it did. With the joining of the Union Pacific Railroad, stretching from the Missouri River near the Iowa-Nebraska border, and the Central Pacific railroad, stretching from Sacramento, California—East met West. The Unites States became truly united. As the spike was struck, a telegraph was sent around the nation, and bells rang out from coast to coast.

Tomorrow marks the 150th anniversary of this pivotal moment, and it is only right that we pause to recognize it. For this, Mr./Madam President, was a moment that changed the course of history in Utah, our nation, and ultimately the entire world.

With the driving of the golden spike, the arduous 6-month journey required to cross the country, costing $1000, had become a mere 10-day trip, costing only $150.

Thousands of miles of tracks were laid across the country, allowing people to migrate West and establish new settlements far more quickly and easily.

And it transformed the economy in Utah and across the nation. Goods became efficiently transported across farther distances; sellers found new markets; and buyers on the frontier and in rural areas were able to purchase items previously unavailable to them.

It spurred a boon in communications, commerce, agriculture, construction, and mining.

It started a significant new chapter in our relationship with Asia and the Pacific region; and it served as a model of innovation and prosperity for the rest of the world.

All of this came about, it’s important to note, through the perseverance and efforts of many different people working together.

It required a clear-eyed vision from President Lincoln and the federal government; and a fruitful private and public partnership which allowed the engineers, railroad companies, and local communities the freedom to do their jobs well.

And it would not have been possible without the work of the Chinese, Irish, Mormons, Civil War veterans, Native Americans, and other laborers who toiled to build these railroads.

Most of this is in the history books, as well it ought to be. Most of us have a sense of the enormous achievement that this was, the great impact it had on our nation, and the legacy it has left behind.
But what we often don’t know are the stories of the ordinary men and women behind these achievements. There are hidden heroes that make history; and unseen efforts of people who work to keep that history alive.

Heroes like Theodore and Anna Judah, who worked tirelessly to advocate for the “Central Route” of the Transcontinental Railroad.

While many routes were surveyed as possible paths for the railroad, the Judahs had an often-scoffed-at dream of laying rails through the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, from California eastward.

And Anna Judah shared Theodore’s dream of connecting the First Transcontinental Railroad. When Theodore hiked and surveyed the Sierra Nevadas, Anna hiked and worked right alongside him. She sketched the terrain, gathered minerals and fossils, and took copious notes of their travels.

After their time in the Sierra Nevadas, Theodore and Anna fell in love with the idea of the railroad taking the Central Route across the Sierra Nevadas, believing that it would be the perfect path.

So they began traveling back and forth from California, dedicating their efforts to lobbying for their dream in Washington.

Anna was sharp, charming, and tenacious; and undoubtedly Theodore’s biggest booster.

She had the idea to display an exhibit in Washington, DC showcasing her drawings, notes, and collection. Hundreds of senators, congressmen, and lobbyists, visited her display, which helped convince the Eastern legislators to choose the Judahs’ proposal for the Central Route.

Tragically, Theodore contracted yellow fever and died before seeing the railroad completed, and even before it was started in earnest.

But Anna lived to see their dream to fruition; and in fact, the driving of the last spike took place on what would have been their 22nd wedding anniversary. On the date of the ceremony, Anna visited her husband’s grave; and she wrote that there, her husband’s spirit – so long dedicated to the railroad – felt somehow near to her again.

The Wealth of Relations

May 3, 2019

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said it would lead to “Armageddon.” President Obama’s National Economic Council Director Larry Summers said it would cause 10,000 deaths a year. But 18 months after the Tax Cut and Job Act became law, the economy is booming.

Last week the Commerce Department reported that the gross domestic product of the United States grew by 3.2% in the first quarter of 2019. And today the Labor Department reported that 263,000 jobs were created in April, sending unemployment to just 3.6%, a 49-year low.

These are great numbers that every American should celebrate. But the American Dream is about more than just numbers. As Tim Carney writes in his important new book, Alienated America:

“[T]he things we think accompany the American Dream are the things that really are the American Dream. What if the T-ball game, the standing-room-only high school Christmas concert, the parish potluck, and decorating the community hall for a wedding—what if those activities are not the dressings around the American Dream, but what if they are the American Dream?”

Unfortunately, as the Joint Economic Committee detailed in their 2017 report, What We Do Together: The State of Associational Life in America, these activities that used to define the American Dream are slowly withering. Fewer Americans are forming two-parent families, more Americans are born into single-parent homes, fewer Americans are participating in volunteer organizations, and more Americans, especially men, are not working.

For two years the JEC’s Social Capital Project has documented and described these alarming trends. And now they are beginning to develop a policy agenda to address these problems. Specifically, the Social Capital Project will be releasing five reports, each one focusing on one of the five policy goals outlined below:

1) Making It More Affordable to Raise a Family - The most important source of social capital for most people is the family in which they are raised. When families are unhealthy or diminishing in number, the social capital effects ripple across our other relationships and civil society, reducing happiness, hurting opportunity, and exacerbating inequalities. Unfortunately, both marriage and fertility have declined dramatically since the mid-20th century.

Has it become less affordable to raise a family, or is it just too expensive for too many people, regardless of the change over time? Who faces affordability problems? And above all, what should be done to help Americans who cannot afford the family that they desire? The Social Capital Project will pursue these questions over the coming months.

2) Increasing How Many Children Are Raised by Happily Married Parents – In 1960 just 5% of births were to unmarried woman. In 2017, that number rose to 40%. And half of children today will experience at least some time living without both parents. Hundreds of studies find that on just about every outcome, children who grow up with single parents do worse than children who grow up with married parents.

Reversing this trend could entail a variety of strategies: fostering the conditions that lead to more happy marriages; improving men’s economic prospects to make them more “marriageable;” or removing penalties in the tax code and in safety net programs that discourage marriage among those who would otherwise wed. We will explore these and other policy approaches during the rest of this Congress.

3) Connecting More People to Work – The share of working age men, ages 25 to 54, who are employed or looking for work, has fallen from 97 percent in 1953 to just 89 percent today. Compared with employed men, men out of the labor force are more socially isolated and less happy. They were less likely to be married, to live with adults, or to live with children, and they were more likely to be divorced.

Our proposals will seek to reverse the deadening social disconnection that is subsidized by work-discouraging federal benefits, inflicted by government regulations that price many people out of employment, and exacerbated by economic policy that limits job creation and wage growth.

4) Improving the Effectiveness of Investments in Youth and Young Adults – If opportunity were perfectly distributed in our country, then one in five children raised in the poorest fifth would make it to the top fifth in adulthood, and one in five children raised in the top fifth would stay there. In reality, as few as one in 33 poor children rises to the top fifth, and almost half of poor children (46%) end up in the poorest fifth of adults.

Our project will examine ways parents, voluntary institutions, and government can increase the value of social capital available to young people. Given the low rate of success that social programs have demonstrated, however, government must evolve to emphasize more evidence-based policymaking—requiring evaluation of publicly-funded programs and strict accountability. There are any number of ways to increase the value of social capital accessible to youth and young adults through parental and institutional investment in them, and policymakers should be open to all of them.

5) Rebuilding Civil Society –Rebuilding civil society will require a fundamental change in how we perceive policymaking. It will require policies that respect the strengths of localism while accounting for its weaknesses.

The Social Capital Project intends to think creatively about how policy—including federal policy—can rebuild civil society. Federal policy can strengthen local institutions. It can leverage existing institutions and refrain from impeding their efforts. In particular, it can reduce barriers to church-based service provision using federal funds. It can also devolve more authority to local institutions in administering federal programs, and it can reduce its involvement in policies that could be better pursued locally.

This agenda will necessarily be incomplete, but it should offer a policy menu of sufficient variety to appeal to policymakers with a range of priorities. It will, hopefully, inspire others to think more creatively about investment in social capital and how public policy might make us wealthier not just financially, but in terms of our relationships with each other.

Civility Is Not Enough

April 12, 2019

Americans don’t agree on many things these days, but according to a recent poll the vast majority of Americans (79 percent) are very concerned about the lack of civility in Washington.

I share this concern, but I also believe we need to set our sites a little higher if we really want to improve how we treat each other in this nation.

Arthur Brooks recently gave us this example: if someone asked you about your relationship with your spouse or child, and you answered, “we’re civil” – you’d see that as a big problem. If someone asked you what your coworkers or neighbors thought of you, and you answered “oh, they tolerate me” – you’d know that there is a serious issue.

Civility and tolerance just aren’t enough. As Americans, we owe it to ourselves and to each other to aspire to much more, and to much higher standards. In fact, what we ought to be aspiring to is love – patriotic and fraternal love of our neighbor, even when they disagree with us.

After all, civility is not the vine; it is the fruit. And severed from its root of fraternal love, it inevitably withers and dies. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, if we aim for love, we get civility thrown in; if we aim merely for civility, we’ll get neither. We have only to spend a few minutes on social media to find evidence of that.

To a political community today beset by division, hostility, and rancor, a call to love our countrymen as ourselves might sound radical. But then again, so did Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, and the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

And so did the early Christians. The third century Christian theologian Tertullian described the way that the pagans were struck by the witness of Christian love: “see how they love one another,” they marveled. But the radical message of the gospel changed pagan Rome, then the rest of the world for 2,000 years, up to and including the Founding of our exceptional republic.

Thankfully, one of the ways in which it influenced the founding of our republic – and one of the things that makes it exceptional – is our Constitution’s absolute commitment to religious liberty, which is indispensable to keeping a healthy republic.

If the work of civility and civic health is ultimate a project of fraternal love between citizens, their nation, and their God, the law must protect the space between the isolated individual and the overpowering state. Because it is in that space where citizens can express their faith, hope, and charity in the public square. It is what we call “civil society” – the space where we both make a living and build a life, but also where improve the lives of those around us.

Unfortunately, as the federal government has grown bigger and stronger, it has encroached into this space. It has begun to crowd out and interfere with the vital institutions of families, churches, and communities – the institutions that make living the ideals of civic virtue possible.

And so I believe that a big part of my job is to make sure that these institutions have the space and the freedom to carry out their good work and build up our civil society. I will continue to strive for that goal as long as I serve in the United States Senate.

In this work, I also believe that the “why” is just as important as the “what.” The reason we have a republic, the reason we fight to protect religious liberty, and the reason we are called to love our neighbors is the innate dignity of each individual person.

There is much that remains to be done, but with this principle as our starting point – and by keeping the end in mind – I believe there is much we can accomplish together.

If we truly want to restore our civic health, we must have the courage to aim much higher than mere civility: we must love our neighbor as ourselves. Our republic depends on it.

Flexibility for Working Families

April 5, 2019

There are few commodities on this earth more precious than time. And this is particularly true for working parents, who are constantly trying to manage the juggle between work and time with their children. Many American families know this struggle all too well.

A law passed in 1978 aimed to help hourly-paid government employees with this struggle by allowing them to choose between taking overtime pay or paid time off. So, if they worked more than 40 hours one week, they could take a bigger paycheck home for that week or instead bank that time to use for family priorities when needed.

But under current law, this practice is illegal in the private sector. Employers are actually prohibited from coming to an agreement with their employees about how their overtime is used.

The only option available to private-sector employees is to receive monetary compensation at 1.5 times their normal pay. They don’t have the option to spend those precious hours with newborns and toddlers, or at doctor’s appointments, parent teacher conferences, and little league games.

This legal disparity unfairly discriminates against working parents in the private sector, and it’s long overdue that it be addressed.

That’s why this week, I reintroduced the Working Families Flexibility Act of 2019.

This bill would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to provide private-sector employers with the flexibility to give their employees either the option to choose either traditional overtime pay or paid time off – both accrued at 1.5 times the overtime hours worked.

Employers would not be able to force comp time on their employees, and employees would not be able to take comp time whenever they wanted. Instead, the legislation requires employers and employees to come to a written agreement on how and when accrued overtime can be exchanged for comp time.

If an employee wants to cash out all of their accrued time at the traditional overtime rate, they can do so at any time. And if an employee has any unused comp time at the end of the year, employers must cash that time out at the traditional overtime rate.

It’s a totally voluntary proposal for both employers and employees: employers are not forced to offer it, and employees are not forced to take it.

In addition to offering safeguards to ensure that the choice to use comp time is voluntary, it retains all existing labor protections for employees, including the 40-hour workweek and overtime accrual protections.

Today, there are more dual-earner households than ever before. The needs of American parents and families have changed, and the labor regulations of 1938 are too rigid to address them.

Unlike other proposals that burden employers and harm employees, this legislation would make paid time off more realistic for employers and more accessible to employees.

If we are to invest in our greatest resource – American families – this is a commonsense solution for us to put our money where our mouth is. It’s time that we give private-sector employees the same flexibility as government employees and support all working parents, allowing them to spend invaluable time with their families.

Yes, Babies Are A Better Solution to Climate Change Than The Green New Deal

March 29, 2019

One doesn’t bring posters of tauntauns, Aquaman, and President Reagan riding a velociraptor while firing a submachine gun to the Senate floor without expecting a little bit of controversy. If you are going to poke fun at the prevailing pieties of progressivism on a national stage, a little pushback should be expected.

But what was surprising about the reaction to my speech on the Green New Deal, has been which chart garnered the most vehement anger. It wasn’t Ronald Reagan riding a dinosaur or Utah Gov. Gary Herbert battling tornado-propelled sharks or Speaker Nancy Pelosi asserting that the resolution’s own supporters don’t know what is in it. No, the most controversial poster of the 14-minute speech turned out to be a simple image of six smiling babies.

Why such an aggrieved reaction to such a heart-warming image?

I’ll let Emily, a 28-year-old woman who talked to ABC News from Spokane, Washington explain. “We have physical proof that we cause a lot of harm to the planet,” Emily told ABC, “and I think the statistics show an imperative to reduce the footprint of our population, which has grown so fast. I think that having children can be immoral for a lot of reasons.”

Emily is not alone in suggesting that having children is immoral. An author of the Green New Deal recently said on Instagram, “Our planet is going to hit disaster if we don’t turn this ship around, and so it’s basically like, there’s a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult. And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question, you know, ‘Is it okay to still have children?'”

Emily and the authors of the Green New Deal are not the first people to believe that bringing children into this world is a morally questionable act. Quite the opposite. The belief that the human population must be limited and controlled by government is a founding principle of the environmental movement.

As far back as 1798, when scholar Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population, utopian-seeking elites have made the case that human population growth must be controlled in order to ensure a sustainable society. These well-intentioned beliefs led to policy changes like the Corn Laws which raised taxes on grain imports to the United Kingdom. Opposed by classical economists like David Ricardo, who warned that such laws would make food more expensive, the Corn Laws were eventually repealed after they worsened the Great Famine in Ireland when over one million people died of hunger.

Fast forward to 1968 when American biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, a book arguing that the government must take urgent action to limit population growth or humanity would face imminent ecological disaster. Ehrlich’s gloom-and-doom prophecies were quite popular with a segment of the American public as the book went on to be a best seller.

But many economists pushed back, including University of Maryland professor Julian Simon who believed humanity, if left free to innovate, could find new ways to make limited resources provide for an ever-expanding world population.

Simon and Ehrlich even made a bet testing their beliefs in 1980, picking five commodities to track over a ten-year period. In 1990, Ehrlich was forced to admit he lost, mailing a check to Simon in the amount that the commodities had fallen in price over that ten-year span. Since that time, the earth has added billions more people, all while global poverty continues to fall.

What Malthus, Ehrlich, Emily, and the authors of the Green New Deal keep failing to understand is that human consumption and production patterns are not static. Since the beginning of our species, humans have constantly been innovating and changing the world around them. In fact, it is our ability to function as a collective learning brain that sets us apart from every other animal on earth.

And, as Harvard University Department of Human Evolutionary Biology chairman Joseph Henrich explains in his book The Secret of Our Success, the size of our population does matter. “The most obvious way the size of a group can matter is that more minds can generate more lucky errors, novel recombinations, chance insights, and intentional improvements… So, bigger groups have the potential for more rapid cumulative cultural evolution.”

Now the size of a population is not the only thing that matters. A society must also have in place institutions, cultural norms, and a legal framework that encourages experimentation, innovation, and creativity.

And here is where the failure of the Green New Deal as a serious response to climate change is the clearest. Instead of fostering an open-ended approach to addressing climate change, it demands top-down policy programs that forbid certain avenues of exploration, like nuclear energy, while also tacking on irrelevant policy goals, like universal health care, that have nothing to do with the issue the authors of the plan claim is so urgent.

Climates change. It’s what they do. There is even evidence that humans have been affecting the climate since at least the Neolithic era. And these changes to the climate have always presented a challenge to humanity. Today is no different.

We have always survived, and even thrived, in new environments. Just look at California. Left in its natural state, the Los Angeles river basin can support maybe 100,000 people. Today, thanks to a creative web of dams, aqueducts, canals, and pipelines, there is enough water for over 10 million people to live there.

This is the creative, practical, life-affirming path that will help us solve the climate change challenge. Instead of looking to limit and even shrink humanity’s footprint on the world, we should be looking to improve and expand it.

And yes, this means more babies.