Jobs
When I talk to families in Connecticut, what often matters most is increasing the number of good paying, secure jobs in our state. While our economy has rebounded from the Great Recession and the unemployment rate is down, far too many Connecticut families still have a hard time making ends meet. I believe strongly that no one working full time in America should be living in poverty. That’s why I’m working to pass legislation that helps workers and guarantees a living wage. I support raising the federal minimum wage to $15 dollars an hour and I’ve introduced legislation like the MOVE Act and the Schedules That Work Act that are specifically targeted at improving working conditions for hourly employees.
The biggest opportunity for job growth in our state is in the high tech field – Connecticut is still a high labor cost state, but our top performing education system and high quality of life make us an attractive landing spot for companies that require highly educated workers.
To understand this potential, just look at Alexion Pharmaceuticals, which started as a small research lab in New Haven and now is the flagship biotech employer in downtown New Haven. That’s why in the Senate, I have become the leading proponent of encouraging investment in small, beginning companies through a phenomenon called “angel investing” This is where one investor seeds a company with a small amount of startup money, often with fewer strings and conditions attached than funding from a bigger venture capital firm. I’ve introduced two bipartisan pieces of legislation with Republicans John Thune and Pat Toomey, the Angel Tax Credit Act and the Helping Angels Lead Our Startups (HALOS) Act – both will incentivize angel investors to put more money into startup companies.
Tax policy also can stimulate high tech jobs. For years, I have fought to make permanent a tax credit for research and development that has been used by hundreds of Connecticut companies to defray their tax obligations when they invest in research. In the budget passed at the end of 2015, this Research and Development Tax Credit was finally made a permanent part of our tax code, and it will result in tens of thousands of technology jobs being created around the country.
I fought for a seat on the Senate committee that oversees higher education funding because I want to make sure our federal dollars promote science and technology learning in elementary and secondary school. We need more kids who want to make a career in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields, and I’m fighting for more federal funding to go into teacher and program development in STEM.
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