“America has a real skill set problem” – U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal (D – Massachusetts 1st Congressional District).
Written by Shaw Israel Izikson, The Berkshire Edge
Stockbridge — Business leaders from throughout Berkshire County gathered at the Norman Rockwell Museum on Thursday, April 9, for its annual Business Breakfast event.
Business leaders from multiple companies and organizations throughout Berkshire County attended the event, with U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal (D – Massachusetts 1st Congressional District) as the featured speaker.
When asked about the current state of business in Berkshire County, U.S. Rep. Neal told The Berkshire Edge that, “With President [Donald J.] Trump, it’s very hard to predict.”
“The arguments [about business] seem to change from hour to hour, never mind from day to day,” Neal said. “The chaotic nature of his decision-making has not been helpful to us. I think that, clearly, a conclusion to the hostilities in the Middle East would be very helpful. However, we must remember that, even with a ceasefire, the results will not be reflected in the economy for weeks or months. Gasoline prices are likely to remain high based upon what I think should have been a full-throttle debate in Congress about the incursion into Iran that didn’t happen.”
At the beginning of his speech, Neal noted his previous achievements in Berkshire County during the pandemic.
“We had the American Rescue Package, which kept many of these institutions going,” Neal said. “Everybody got a paycheck, and we kept a vibrancy to the American economy from the time the pandemic began until June of that year [2020]. America lost 22 million jobs, but those jobs were all back within the speed of which we got money into the pipeline.”
He said that one of the achievements he is proud of is the reopening of the hospital in North Adams.
“You can do those sorts of things when you have the gavel,” he said. “And my plan is to get that gavel back in the quick future, and not the near future.”
Inspired by a portrait of the late President Richard Nixon painted by Norman Rockwell at the museum, Neal discussed how people communicate with each other through social media.
“There is an article in today’s New York Times that talks about a different time when President Kennedy, in his debate with President Nixon, was caught off guard because one of the questions was ‘Do you approve of the way [President] Harry Truman described Nixon?’” Neal said. “All Truman did was use the word ‘hell.’ That’s a common word in the American lexicon today. The way we talk to each other in America, and the things that we say, social media highlights that conflict and amplifies it, because you can do it anonymously. There is no courage that comes with anonymity. My attitude has always been, look, I’ve got something to say, and I’m going to say it.”
Neal said that “there is great clutter to democracy, but that’s what sets us apart from totalitarian societies because we offer a guarantee of the First Amendment.”
“We find ourselves in a nation that is so divided that we seem to have disagreements on whether the sun rises or sets,” he said. “I think part of it is social media, but another part of it is ‘choose your side’ journalism. I think that people go to news sites that agree with them, rather than for some of us with some gray in our hair, which is what we used to look for, which is news and more news. Tell us the news. It seems as if everybody is their own reporter because they’ve got a phone and they record events.”
Neal also discussed the war in Iran.
“I don’t think we can avoid the conversation about the war,” he said. “I think you would think less of my presentation if I didn’t speak to that issue. There should have been a debate in Washington about Iran—what our engagement was to be, what the exit ramp was to look like, what the accomplishment was to be measured as. Instead, during the president’s State of the Union address, he spoke for 108 minutes and only devoted three minutes to Iran. We need to have this debate about the why, how, and what the exit ramp is going to be like for this war. I think anybody who says that this war was to be easy, was misled.”
Getting into a discussion of business issues, Taylor Williams, Strategy Leader from Guardian Life, told Neal that his company is seeing hiring challenges with the workforce in the local Berkshire County area.
“Is there anything being done at the federal level to help bolster the workforce to areas that are similar to the Berkshires?” Williams asked.
“I think that America has a real skill set problem,” Neal said in response. “There are six-and-a-half million jobs in America every day that go around unanswered. There are a lot of reasons that go into that, but the skill set problems that we have are apparent everywhere.”
Neal is the ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee, and he said that the current labor participation rates in America, which is how many people are in the workforce at any given time, is 61.3 percent.
“That is a low number,” he said. “Generally, it’s closer to 63 or 64 percent. There are a number of people who have dropped out of the workforce.”
Neal said that colleges, including the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and Berkshire Community College, can help people by giving them opportunities to improve their skill sets.
“I favor this whole idea about using community colleges as a retraining center for America,” Neal said. “Many of the retraining programs that we embrace didn’t work as well as we thought they would, but I think the community college setting would provide that opportunity. And the other challenge that we have is that the whole idea now of college is being questioned, even though, if you look across a lifetime of earnings, there’s a clear advantage for having gone to college. That is not to be dismissive of those who have no college jobs, because if you’re an electrician, if you’re a plumber, you’re really doing well.”
Kelly Binder, owner of Doctor Sax House in Lenox, asked Neal about digital health and the potential expansion of it in Berkshire County.
“So, in the ‘big bill,’ I won’t describe it as ‘beautiful,’ there are a trillion dollars of cuts to Medicaid and Medicare over the next 10 years, and we [the Democratic party] intend to reverse that if we win [Congress],” Neal said. “The emergency room is a bad place to get health care, and too many Americans end up in the emergency room over health care. Telehealth is one of the better achievements that came from the pandemic, but there are parts of it that don’t work for everybody, and we have to be mindful of it. So I think my Republican colleagues in Washington have a legitimate point, because they tend to represent red rural areas. They have a legitimate point about rural healthcare, but they won’t bake a bigger pie, and I am not apt to give them a slice of our pie here in Massachusetts. I’m all in on let’s build and construct a bigger pie for everybody.”
