Rubio Campaign Press Release - READ: This Republican Candidate Has a Plan to Make American Manufacturing Competitive Again

On December 17, 2015, Marco Rubio delivered a policy address to Iowans at Weiler Manufacturing, in Knoxville, Iowa, about how he'd reinvigorate American manufacturing. Weiler produces cement pavers. Here's his speech as prepared for delivery:

Thank you to Pat and everybody at Weiler Manufacturing for hosting us.

I want to speak today about the future of manufacturing in America. It's a future I believe can be very bright. But to make it so, we have to embrace the economic changes of our time — something few in Washington seem willing to do.

When my parents came to America in 1956, our country's manufacturing strength was unchallenged. It was common to find a job at a local factory right out of high school that paid enough to buy a home and a car, send your kids to college, and eventually retire with security.

This industrial economy peaked around 1980, when roughly 20 million Americans held manufacturing jobs. This fluctuated and declined slowly over the next two decades, but it wasn't until around the turn of this new century that something dramatic happened. In just one decade, between 2000 and 2010, America lost about 6 million — or over 35 percent — of its manufacturing jobs.

Families found themselves out of work and slipping out of the middle class. Entire cities and towns once booming with industrial might saw their factories shuttered and buildings abandoned. Only a small portion of the jobs lost during this period have been regained today, and many are left to wonder whether we'll ever be an economy that makes things again.

Many in Washington recognize this sentiment, and they seem to view it as a political opportunity. They make soaring promises about returning American manufacturing to its glory days. But most of their ideas aren't worth the paper they're written on. Many would only worsen our challenges. And all fail to grapple with the primary cause of our manufacturing troubles.

These troubles aren't a mere byproduct of the recession; they began long before that. And they aren't just the result of bad policy-making, though that's contributed to the problem. The primary cause of our decline in manufacturing has been a fundamental restructuring of our economy.

Over the last two decades, technological advancements have led to machines replacing workers; globalization has led to factories moving overseas; and the rise of information technology has led to a shift in demand away from producing products and toward performing services.

Our economy and our way of life have fundamentally changed, but here's one thing that hasn't: to be the leading economy on earth, we still need products conceived by American minds and built by American hands. And we need to sell those products throughout the world.

American manufacturing can thrive again in this century, but not in the same way as it did in the last. The products we build, the way we build them, and the skills required to do so will be different than in our parents' time. We will never restore American manufacturing by attempting to wish away the economic changes that have occurred, as Hillary Clinton seems to propose; we will only do so by embracing those changes.

The first change that must be embraced is the decrease in demand for unskilled labor and the increase in demand for skilled labor. As president, I will start by revolutionizing higher education and skills training.

The low-skilled manufacturing jobs that have been outsourced or automated in recent years aren't coming back. But in their place we've gained higher-skilled and higher-paying jobs. For example, as technology has been integrated into factories, the need for technicians and support staff to manage that technology has soared. And there continue to be many jobs, such as welding, that benefit from human skill.

But today, we rely on a higher education system that looks down its nose at skilled trades. It tells our kids that if they grow up to work with their hands instead of a computer they're somehow less accomplished. We need a president with the courage to change this perception.

I was glad last year when President Obama pointed out at an event in Wisconsin that manufacturing pays more than art history. But, predictably, the art history majors came after him; and, predictably, President Obama scrambled to apologize for offending them. He shouldn't have. I did not apologize — and never will — for saying in a recent debate that welders make more than philosophers. I got a lot of angry calls about it. It may have cost me the all-important philosopher vote, but that's a price I'm willing to pay!

I promise you this: I will be the vocational education president. I will make skills training more widespread, more accessible, and more affordable. I'll expand apprenticeships so education can come out of the classroom and into the real world. I'll allow students to begin learning a trade as early as high school, so they can graduate ready to enter a good paying career without taking on mountains of student debt.

For example, I'll help establish more programs like the one in Cleveland where high schoolers can work at GE's manufacturing plant to gain practical experience and mentoring. The graduation rate for these students is 95 percent, compared to just 60 percent for Cleveland public schools.

We must equip today's workers to fill today's manufacturing jobs. But we also need to ensure new manufacturing jobs are created tomorrow, including at facilities like this one.

To do so, the next economic change we have to embrace is the fact that Pat and the rest of our leaders in manufacturing don't just have to compete with each other, they now have to compete with the entire world.  Such is the effect of globalization.

Today, we have a tax code and a regulatory environment that puts our manufacturers at a significant global disadvantage. In Canada, the marginal effective tax rate for manufacturing firms is 25 percent lower than it is in America. It's 12 percent lower in China, 11 percent lower in the UK, and 14 percent lower in Mexico, and so on for the majority of countries.  These nations are becoming more appealing to job creators while we're becoming less.

Our approach to regulation is just as bad. Every year, small manufacturers in the United States spend an average of almost $35,000 per employee just to comply with government rules.  That's $35,000 that could have gone toward a raise for that employee, or toward a new job, or toward research and development.

Pat will tell you about how he spends months and has to hire lawyers simply to figure out how to implement a new regulation. And sometimes, he gets a year down the road and finds out that Washington changed its mind on how to implement it. Our bureaucrats are wasting the time and money of our manufacturers, often on the whims of environmental lobbyists. At the same time, other countries are deregulating.

Let's be clear: The global economy is an opportunity, not a burden. It will drive us to be smarter, faster, and to sell our products to more people than ever before. But first we have to get Washington out of the way of the real drivers of our economic progress: our businesses and our workers.

As president, I'll take the first step with comprehensive tax reform. I will lower our corporate tax rate from 35 percent to around 25 percent, and I'll level the playing field between large and small firms. I'll allow businesses to write off 100 percent of their capital expenditures, which will empower firms to invest in R&D and job growth. And I'll create a territorial tax system, which almost every other developed economy already has, so that money earned overseas is not double-taxed when it's brought back home.

I'll limit regulations, too. I'll do so by instituting a national regulatory budget, which will cap the amount regulations can cost our economy. Bureaucrats will no longer have free reign to impose whatever arbitrary rules they please. Checks and balances will be restored to over-eager agencies like the EPA.

For years, the EPA has held us back from our energy potential. The shale oil and natural gas revolution is one of the best things to happen to American manufacturing in the last 100 years, and we'll remove the shackles Washington has placed on it when I am president.

Finally, in order to revitalize American manufacturing in this century, we'll need to embrace the rise of new technologies, including robotics. For so many workers, automation is a source of insecurity and uncertainty, and I want to speak to that today.

It's important to realize that we're not the first generation to confront the often-disruptive forward march of industrial technology — and just like generations before us, we will find that the positive impacts of these new innovations far outweigh the negative.

When the power loom was invented during the industrial revolution, many feared it would eliminate all textile jobs. The truth, however, turned out to be the opposite. The loom increased production, and as production increased, so did demand, and as demand increased, so did the need for skilled laborers who could operate the machines and manage the factories. Jobs in the textile industry actually increased for 100 years.

In the near future, as robots become increasingly capable and sophisticated, it is true that we will see more low-paying jobs replaced by machines. But that's only part of the story. We will also see the creation of higher-paying, higher-skilled jobs that only humans can perform.

When they no longer need as many lower-paid workers, American manufacturers will be able to reclaim certain tasks that had been passed to nations with low labor costs. And if America can succeed in building the best bots in the world, we will gain a significant global advantage. As these machines become more affordable, they will also help level the playing field between large and small firms.

Embracing the rise of robotics is also important because of the new products our manufacturing sector is called to produce. In the 21st century, we don't want to be the country known for manufacturing toothbrushes and toys, we want to be known for manufacturing the rockets of SpaceX, the newest airplane engines, the next big thing in consumer electronics, and cutting edge machinery like what's manufactured in this facility. This will increasingly require the precision and affordability provided by advanced robotics.

We need a president who will empower our innovators to design both the products of tomorrow and the machinery that will help us build those products; and we need a president who will empower our workforce to gain the skills needed to work in the manufacturing facilities of the future. I will be that president.

Saying goodbye to the old economy is difficult, but it must be done before we can fully capture the promise of the new economy. And that promise is too grand to let slip away. In this century, we're going to make things again — and some of them are going to be things we can't even imagine today. By making them, we're also going to expand the hope of a better life to more people than ever before.

Manufacturing will play a crucial part in the prosperity of this century, but that part will be different than it was fifty years ago. And that's okay. Because there is no one formula for achieving the American Dream. The routes our parents took to the middle class won't necessarily be the routes our people take today.

65 percent of Americans now work at information jobs that didn't exist 25 years ago.  And 25 years from now, jobs will be prevalent that don't exist today. It won't be our next president who creates these jobs, but it will be our next president who determines whether business leaders like Pat and so many others have the space they need to innovate, to grow, and to win the global economic competition that will define this century.

Thank you.