 of the day. Our special thanks to our series sponsors which are AT&T, SIGNA, and Noyle Johnson Insurance. We are so glad that they help us offer this type of information to our businesses throughout the state. We've collected your questions during registration, so we will get to all of those, but we also encourage you to use the chat function and add to the conversation. When you do that, there's a drop down there so that you can send that question to attendees and panelists rather than just panelists. That way everybody can see your question and add on and we can start having a vibrant chat box, so that would be helpful. Today, we welcome the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Executive Vice President and Chief Policy Officer, Neal Bradley. Neal has spent two decades working directly with congressional committee chairs and other high-ranking policy makers to achieve solutions. At the U.S. Chamber, Neal is responsible for aligning the organization's overall policy priorities and advocacy efforts. So I'm going to pass the Zoom mic over to Neal and have you start. Well, thanks Betsy. It's great to be with you all again. I think it was last November when we had an opportunity to get together and, you know, I don't know whether like a month feels like a day or a day feels like a year anymore. I think time has just kind of become discombobulated, but the pace of things and how much they've changed since the last time we got together really does give us a lot to talk about. From the makeup of the federal government, obviously a new administration and a new Congress, a new COVID relief package, and an economy that today looks a lot different than it looked in November and certainly looked a year ago when we entered lockdowns and kind of began this crazy year of 2020. I want to start with the most recent action and talk a little bit about the COVID package. I'd love to talk about some of the other things that we expect kind of post COVID with respect to federal policy and then talk a little bit about where from the US Chamber's perspective we see the national economy and some opportunity and some challenges. So let's start with this COVID package. It is an eye-popping, almost unbelievable headline number, $1.9 trillion. This is the fifth of the COVID, major COVID-related packages that's been enacted into the law in just a year. And interestingly, this is the first one that became more partisan. So it was passed on a party line basis in the House and in the Senate. It's also one that looks a little bit differently in terms of its constitutional parts to it, the things that make it up, than maybe some of the prior packages. And so this particular package is really focused on things that Congress couldn't come to an agreement on in some of those earlier packages. So it has a lot less relief, for example, for businesses and even small businesses, although some important things that I want to come back in a second and talk about, and much more focus on state and local governments and individual assistance. In fact, the bulk of this bill, leaving aside about $160 billion that's used to turbocharge vaccinations, everything from, I suspect this may be important in Vermont, mobile rule vaccination clinics. As we have more supply coming online, max vaccination centers that you see across the country don't work everywhere. And so you need other tools to be able to reach people in more rural areas. And this provides a lot of funding to help with that, to supporting the National Guard, which has been effectively deployed in a lot of places to help with vaccinations. And we know that we're going to even need more utilization of those type of resources when supply really accelerates over the next six weeks as we fully anticipate. But it also included a lot of money for government that had been a point of contention in the past. There's about $350 billion that is split between state and local governments. Before we joined, I looked at the current estimate for Vermont share. It's just over $1 billion in fairly unrestricted assistance. This became a big point of contention in D.C. because one of the things that we've seen over the last year is just as we've had a K-shaped economic recovery, some businesses doing quite well, other businesses suffering, some states are actually doing just fine. I talked to our counterparts, Betsy, in California at the end of last week. They're sitting on something like a $15 billion surplus on top of which they're going to get $26 billion out of this bill. And so you compare that to other states like Hawaii and Louisiana, which are really in budget crunches just because of the nature of their economy and how they fund their government. And so a lot of what's coming out of this bill is how the various states are going to put that money to use. They can use it for everything from direct COVID response to replenishing revenue that dried up or that came in lower than estimates as a result of the pandemic to launching their own small business programs to help small businesses. They can also use it for broadband and water and wastewater infrastructure. And so I suspect in state capitals kind of all across the country over the next year there's really going to be real fights about how to utilize those monies there. Other major components are individual assistance. Last spring as part of the CARES Act, there were stimulus checks that went out to every family earning as a family, jointly less than $150,000 as an individual less than $75,000. There were $600 checks as part of the December package. Now there's an additional $1,400 checks for those who qualify, $75,000, $150,000. There's also a lot of tax provisions, a real bump up in the child tax credit, including refundability for low income families as part of this and expansion of the earned income tax credit for low income workers that's a part of this. And all of that really designed to help individuals who are suffering as part of the pandemic. And that's over and above what was done on unemployment assistance, an extension of the federal unemployment benefits through the first week in September, including the additional $300 supplement on top of what an individual otherwise qualifies for under their state unemployment program. And so that means about one in four nationally unemployed individuals will actually collect more from unemployment assistance than they collected in earnings in their prior job. So a lot of assistance flowing out of this. Let's talk about what it means for business for a second. If some of the prior programs were really focused on things like the paycheck protection program and the employee retention tax credit, the big new centerpiece of this bill is a provision directly targeted to the restaurant industry. So $28 billion just for grants for restaurants. It's not for the national chains. It can be for franchisees, but it's not for publicly traded companies with lots of locations. In fact, you can't have more than 20 locations. And it's not alone. It's actually a direct grant. And if for anyone who's listening in today who's in the restaurant industry, or the bar industry, or in catering, or you have a tasting room, you really want to pay attention to this because the amount of the grant is essentially your 2019 gross receipts minus your 2020 gross receipts. So just think about how much revenue you foregone in 2020 because of the pandemic. And that amount up to $5 million per location, $10 million overall, is what you can receive in a grant. And the first tranche is targeted to restaurants and establishments with less than $500,000 in receipts. And so it's once this gets stood up by the Small Business Administration, which by the way is probably at least a month or more away because they have to create the infrastructure for this. But it really is going to make a meaningful difference in helping a lot of restaurants survive. The PPP is largely unchanged. There's some small changes for large nonprofits, but largely it looks the same. The other big change is something that I'm a big fan of and I kind of preach everywhere I go, and that's the employee retention tax credit. The employee retention tax credit essentially says if you have 500 or fewer workers and the calendar quarter that's applicable, we're in the first calendar quarter of 2021. If your receipts are 20% or more below what they were in 2019, then you can get up to $7,000 per employee as a refundable tax credit paid to you to help you offset those losses. And so it's a pretty generous program, $7,000 per employee per quarter in any quarter in which your gross receipts are off by 20% or more. And you can take that and take a PPP loan. You can take that and take the benefits under that restaurant provision that I just talked about. And this bill extends that program through the end of the calendar year. So if you think about this, if your business is off 20% consistently over the course of this year, that's up to $28,000 per employee that the government's going to send you a check for, which obviously can make a real meaningful difference for a lot of small businesses. So if that's kind of the COVID package, everyone wants to know kind of, well, what's next? That sounds good, but is there something else on the horizon? I think at the moment the only realistic thing that's on the horizon is an extension of the PPP deadline. The current PPP program expires on March 31st. I'm really confident that over the next week and a half, Congress will clear an extension that will extend the deadline to the beginning of June. So an additional two months for businesses to apply, either for an original PPP loan or a second draw loan. That's really going to be important for that second draw loan for businesses who maybe haven't quite been able to get to that yet or they haven't exhausted their first PPP. And that'll be an important benefit. But beyond that, I think we're kind of nearing the end of the COVID packages. Of course, that doesn't mean we're nearing the end of major legislation. So now that the pandemic relief bill is behind, everyone's asking, well, what's next on Capitol Hill? What will Congress turn its attention to? I think most likely in the near term is actually a China issue that's going to draw a lot of bipartisan interest. We know about the economic and national security threats that China poses to the United States. We've seen some of the vulnerabilities, including in this pandemic, but also in everything from circuit boards, which are in short supply and slowing up the manufacturing of automobiles here in the U.S. of concern about our exposure of our supply chain in places like China. And there's going to be a major initiative probably starting in the Senate to address some of these economic and national security vulnerabilities. It won't try to totally reset the U.S.-China relationship, but it will point to these critical areas and say, what do we need to do to make sure that we're making things here in the United States or in allied countries so that we're less vulnerable to some of those dangers? After that, infrastructure is high on the priority list. I feel bad every time I do one of these, and I mentioned infrastructure, everyone was like, yeah, that's what we hear all the time. It kind of feels like Lucy in the football, if you will. I do think this time is a little different, and I know everyone says that every time, but let me give you a little bit of reason to think that this is different. When we turned the calendar and started this new year, we launched an initiative along with lots of other chambers and business organizations, and frankly, labor and environmental groups. And we said there's a lot of things that, particularly between labor and environmental groups in the business community, we might disagree with on specifics, but we're all coming together to join a call to get a major infrastructure pill enacted into law by the 4th of July. We called it build by the 4th of July. And I got to tell you, when we first started talking about this publicly in January, people laughed. They were like, really, the 4th of July? Are you serious about this? Have you seen how well Congress is functioning? Well, lo and behold, the Senate Infrastructure Committee, their chairman, Senator Carper from Delaware, has announced that they intend to have a bill, in fact, two bills through by Memorial Day. Not to be outdone, the House Infrastructure Committee said, well, we're going to get it done earlier than that in May. You know you've kind of hit a button when you read, we have all these, we call them rags in DC. It's basically all these Politico and now Punchbowl and all these other things that report on the comings and goings of Washington. They trade and rumor. But you know you've gotten somewhere when they just reported as conventional wisdom. And they started reporting that conventional wisdom is the infrastructure bill by the 4th of July. That still may be a little bit ambitious, but I think we'll be on track to get something enacted by the 4th of July. Everyone wants to know how big it's going to be and what's going to be in it. You know, those are things I don't, we don't know yet. I like to say it's going to be bigger than a lot of people on the right would prefer and it's going to be smaller than a lot of people on the left are going to prefer. And you know somewhere in the middle that's probably about right in terms of the infrastructure that we need and what we can afford to finance. Beyond infrastructure, I think immigration and workforce issues are going to be paramount. Later this week the house is going to move forward on a bill to protect the dreamers, permanent resolution there, and also an ag workers bill. These are the first of two of potentially many immigration related provisions to finally kind of get our immigration policy right sized. Of course the real danger here is that gets tied up in what we're seeing on the southern border right now. And you know if there's anything that can derail that politics can quickly seep into immigration it can become difficult to get things done. I think it's also important to spend a moment talking about the environment in which we're operating in. You know it's a 50-50 Senate. I mean you all have Bernie Sanders. I'm not, we're not far from West Virginia. We have Joe Manchin. Either those two have to agree and every other Democrat has to agree to do something on a party line basis or you have to have bipartisan support. And you know there are limits to what you can do purely on a party basis and frankly there's lots of opportunities if members from both sides will seize it for maybe some more bipartisan cooperation. It's not just the Senate that's closely divided in the House based on the election results and now some people who've left to go into the administration. If four members of the Democratic majority vote with Republicans, the Republican side, the minority actually prevails on a particular question if everyone is there and voting. So it's not hard to lose four votes on any given topic. From our perspective this ought to be the reason for kind of setting the extremes of the far left and the extremes of the far right aside and focusing on what people who are interested in governing can do. Of course you all know well the pressure that both the far right and the far left put on members. And I think the real testament as to whether we're going to get immigration and infrastructure and lots of other things across the finish line is if those who are willing to come together and support it's something that's more bipartisan nature. Whether they prevail or whether the elements at both extremes prevail. I could give you examples right now that would lead you to both conclusions. I don't know which one's going to be right but if I were watching something you know over the next six months that's the thing that I would in particular watch as to as to how productive of a Congress this could be and how much of these national priorities we might be able to address and finally get done. Let me turn quickly and talk a little bit about this the state of the economy. Man what a difference a year makes. You've probably seen some of the stories the New York Times had a great one over the weekend about these I think they had 17 reasons that the economy is poised for explosion. Goldman Sachs just came out this morning with new economic estimates. They think we're going to get 8% growth and we can get 3.5% national unemployment by the end of next year. That might be true. You're also seeing lots of people concerned about inflation. One of the reasons is over the course of this past year Americans accumulated $1.8 trillion in savings over and above baseline and you know part of that's because of the three rounds of stimulus checks that I just mentioned and the new tax credits and you know frankly that you know if you were going to Disney World last year you probably didn't and you maybe didn't take another big trip you probably saved that money. Well that money is just itching to kind of get out and explode onto the scene when the economy is fully reopened and it really could turbo charge growth. It also could if it gets too kind of out of whack lead to inflation. There are some things that are going to keep that in check. We still have 10 million Americans over 10 million Americans who are unemployed that far surpasses any moment in time even during the great recession. But interestingly we have 6.8 million open jobs in the United States. Of course the problem is is if you take the list of sectors where we have open jobs and you take the list of sectors where the 10 plus million Americans were formerly employed there are not a lot of overlap there. You know the professional business services healthcare are areas that are looking to hire construction warehousing services. Think Amazon, Walmart and then it's restaurants and leisure and hospitality where people were displaced. A lot of those jobs will come back but they won't all come back and so one of the real things that we have to manage if we want to maximize kind of the economic growth over over the next year is really helping those people quickly get the skills to transition into the jobs that are open. I do think in fact we're already beginning to hear from certain sectors of the economy who sound a lot like they sounded a year ago January meaning that their number one problem was an inability to find skilled workers. I think that's going to grow over the course of the next year and if we can figure out how to manage that we're going to be able to get this growth trajectory on the right path. That and avoiding any unnecessary policy mistakes and I think we're poised really for a breakout year and then hopefully can get the trend line in an area that's sustainable. You know if you go back 10 years ago to the Great Recession the problem wasn't that the recession didn't end quickly enough. The actual recession itself ended actually fairly quickly. The problem was is that we had a decade of stagnant growth following. We couldn't break out a 2% economic growth. That's just not enough. You know the post-World War II average is over three and a half percent. That's what all of us expect. That's the kind of growth that kind of fuels the whole concept of American exceptionalism and each generation being better than the year before. If we get this right we can be back on a growth trajectory of 3% plus growth which will really be replaced kind of the lost decade that we experienced after the Great Recession. So I know that was a lot to throw out there. Hopefully there's some nuggets there that folks in the audience will want to explore further. I'd love to take questions about any of those things or any of the other experiences that we're seeing in Washington going on right now but let me pause there. Betsy and turn it back to you. Sure. There's a lot to unpack there. Mr. Bradley there is a lot. I think we should sort of go back over some of those things. I'm looking at some of the questions people have. I'm most interested in some of the details around PPP and EIDL and eligibility of various things but I think what I'd love to do is to sort of pull up a little bit and you know since we last saw you since you last talked to Vermont businesses there's been a change in the administration and certainly the 1.9 trillion dollar COVID relief bill is you know getting that through has been a big big win in the beginning months here for the Biden administration but I'm just a little bit curious you know we're an advocacy organization here you're an advocacy organization you're considered really a powerhouse lobbying group in in DC with the U.S. Chamber and working with all the partners on behalf of businesses. I'm curious if you can talk a little bit about sort of how your team manages a change in administration regardless of who it's from and who it's to and then more specifically how you see working with the Biden administration as the U.S. Chamber on behalf of businesses what do you see what's the prognosis out there yeah you know we've been around 112 years now we've never we we we do engage in politics on the congressional level we've never engaged in politics at the presidential level because it's one or the other is going to win and we have to work with whoever wins and we have a pretty good track record of finding ways to work together irrespective of the administration's party or kind of how they got there it's also true that with every single administration we found areas of agreement and we found areas of total disagreement where we fought we sued I mean we've gone to we've you know we've gone to the mattresses for our members you know if you will and so there's this kind of misconception that the business agenda maybe it's I think it's a conception here in Washington you know that certain things belong to each party our view is you know free enterprise business job creation is not the exclusive providence of either party in fact we want we want people in both parties like competing to figure out how they can do the most to create a more vibrant economy and more job creation and if they're focused on those things we're going to figure out ways to work with them you know this this administration we know a lot of these folks I mean you know the president was obviously vice president for eight years a lot of the people who are around him in the administration were around in the Obama administration some of them go back to the Clinton administration so a lot of the folks that they brought from the hill are people we've worked with for a long time on Capitol Hill and so it was a fairly easy transition in terms of of knowing folks even the folks that we we didn't really have a relationship with we've been able to kind of quickly establish a relationship with so the new secretary of commerce Gina Ramondo was the governor of Rhode Island in all honesty we didn't do a lot with the governor of Rhode Island but she was one of the first to outreach after after being nominated it turns out her deputy we worked with a lot in the Clinton and the Obama administrations but we quickly found that we had a lot of our members at the US chamber had actually worked with her when she was governor and so there's kind of a natural reporter I will say everyone wants to compare the Trump administration to the Biden administration and leaving it I won't jump into the comparison on policy I will jump in the comparison on process and you know I do think and and you know even allies of the of the Trump administration say this process was not the strong suit right but it was not the you know the the government across administrations of both parties has generally operated in this what they call the interagency process and you know there there is a path the policy takes from you know the bowels of government up through a stakeholder consultation and then through the White House and then ultimately if no one else can decide it gets it gets to the president Trump didn't he had no care for that he kind of like things going straight to him and you know no process we're very much back to a process that we're very familiar with where there's a lot of stakeholder consultation not a lot not always agreement but consultation I will give you an interesting perhaps the area that's been the most sensitive to navigate is around anything COVID the Biden administration very much wants that there's kind of the pre-January 20th approach approach to COVID and the post-January 20th approach to COVID but that's not really always true and so you're you're on Friday evening in fact we were having a discussion with the folks at HHS they're going to launch a massive messaging campaign as more vaccines come online to get hesitant individuals kind of vaccinated and as they were briefing us we asked we're like so is this the same platform that the Trump administration was using and you can tell they were like and we're like no we don't mean that in a good or a bad way we're just curious is are the same people who are working on it then oh yeah yeah it's the same yeah and you're like okay yeah but you can tell that there's there's some sensitivity around some of those things sometimes well great um let's delve into some of these questions and see if we can we can work through them you know you had touched on the PPP a little bit and the extension of that there's um you know some some rules that have been changed some people are worried about drawing that down but then there's also the EIDL loans that came out sort of first if you will and we have a question here from Bernie Carr that uh you know is there a possibility of forgiveness for these larger EIDL loans those are 30-year loans though so what do you what do you have you heard anything about that yeah um I don't see I don't think there's a lot of likelihood of loan forgiveness there you know it's um they are 30-year loans they're very low interest rate that's just not then kind of a focus of attention legislators of either party maybe maybe we'll see some forbearance but there was already forbearance at the front end like I think it's well over a year before any initial payment on the on the idle one so maybe an extension of the forbearance until you know we're kind of you know the economy really has fully turned the corner but I don't see forgiveness in the corners there's a question in the chat from Emma Spett who asked about companies that were founded in 2020 and so they don't have any tax returns in 2019 we've certainly seen that at the state level we were successful in getting $340 million of the COVID relief funds to two business businesses for business grants and we're now working on correcting that at the state level to to work on those new businesses have you heard about that at the federal level have they taken that into consideration for new businesses a little bit so a lot of these programs in particular well let's start with PPP PPP is a February 15th 2020 if you didn't exist before then there's really no way to qualify now that was true for a while for some of these other programs including for example the employee retention tax credit as part of this $1.9 trillion package though they've expanded that the formula looks a little different there's a different cap on it so you know the 28,000 per employee actually won't be that but if you started after February 15th 2020 you can still gain a pretty substantial benefit I think it's up to $50,000 through the employee retention tax credit even the restaurant program there are some rules again not as generous as the up to $5 million if you existed in 2019 to 2020 but there are some benefits to for that that are targeted to a new business starts to kind of help them as well so there's good news on that front not PPP but these other programs there are some some limited benefits there let's sort of switch to workforce you mentioned this in your opening comments about pre-pandemic we had a workforce problem and and of course we have a workforce problem with the pandemic and then if we have anything like three and a half percent or or even that other number that you threw out that was just like eye-popping an eight percent growth rate if we have anything like that coming out of this and into recovery you know the big question for Vermont is you know where do we find those workers we have a aging population and a declining workforce participation rate so it's incredibly important that we we find enough people to go to work and what we're finding our numbers just came out today and our unemployment rate now has returned to 3.2 percent which is pretty pretty great that's incredible when you look at the numbers what's what's happening is our workforce participation is going down so 3.2 percent is the unemployment number but it only takes as you know takes into account people who are looking for work a whole lot of people are not looking for work and then when I see some of the incentives in this latest COVID package I worry that some of these incentives have been for unemployment the additional $300 are extended to September during last year I completely understood it we were trying to keep people at home trying to keep people safe but as people get vaccinated we need them to return to work can you help me understand the thinking as Congress was passing that was that conversation about getting people back into the workforce part of that conversation it was I don't I don't believe they reached the right resolution they did reach a little bit of a middle ground and this it's a little interesting how they got to this I mentioned the Joe mansion Bernie Sanders and you know both those guys have to agree if they're going to do it on a party on a party line basis one of the biggest points of contention was on the level of unemployment benefits and the bill that came out of the house the bill that Senator Schumer put on the floor was $400 and additional weekly benefits Rob Portman a Republican from Ohio who was frankly instrumental in pulling together that package last December that kind of brought both sides together proposed taking it back to 300 and cutting it off I believe in June to to see where the economy was and decide then whether it should be extended Joe mansion signed on to the Portman amendment and I'll forgive if people weren't watching c-span too diligently yes during during the week that this was considered you probably have more important things to do but the Senate had its longest recorded vote in Senate history it was something like 11 hours and 50 minutes that this recorded vote now all the votes that actually been taken in about the first 20 minutes and then they left the vote open because Senator Schumer Bernie Sanders others were working Joe mansion to get him to pull his support for the Rob Portman amendment and ultimately Portman or excuse me mansion ended up splitting the difference the the Democratic leadership gave in on the $300 versus the 400 mansion gave in on the length of an extension and that's how we ended up at September that's how the sausage got made but the but the impact of that sausage I think you're exactly right I very much worry that if you add in the unemployment the child tax credit the you know the earned income tax credit which by the way you can claim now based on your 2019 work rather than 2020 work that you've created a lot of reasons for people just to hesitate to get back into the workforce when we need them what proponents will tell you is well that's going to come to an end and they know that and people want to get in the workforce the reality that we know from practices is that the longer someone is unemployed the harder it is for them to get back into the workforce and the harder it is for them to to get back in with the skills that they had skills deteriorate jobs change you know and so the the real danger is that we'll have people who will have been out of the workforce for a year and a half and once that happens it gets really hard to get people back and I think that's our our concern we know that the big answer to increased workforce and increased amount of people in that in that age group in many other states is immigration and that's why we're supportive of bringing new americans of you know finding me if being able to create an immigration policy that works you know so we're supportive of that but at the end of the day we're very close we're right on the border with canada and that's not really where our immigration challenges are and it's a lot further from our southern border to get to vermont so in many states where a better immigration policy or even existing immigration policy is helping load up the workforce it's it's a it's a long drive from there to here and and so you know we are concerned about you know getting every person that we can who's already here in vermont back into the workforce whether that's the mature worker or uh we work with veterans populations very various different folks to get them into the workforce but this has a potential disincentive through september just as we're trying to get the economy to grow and recover because we can't do it without our employees that's right that's right and you know speaking of immigration there's um they say that there's never any new ideas that feels largely true but occasionally there are new ideas and occasionally they catch hold and one of them is actually an immigration and it was included in the proposal that the president put forward um back in january which is to do in addition to all the other immigration programs which are largely either tied to family or a specific employer the employer brain it has a pilot program for basically location based immigration where vermont could decide we're facing a shortage of workers we want people to come to vermont we got lots of employers who will compete to hire them um and uh the deal is is that they're coming and they're staying for you remember if it's three years or four years but a period of time where they commit to remaining to living and working there in the location based and um this was an idea that came out of this crazy think tank in dc um that they came and briefed us on it um almost two years ago i was like that is really intriguing there are lots of places and it's just caught on and now it's a real life proposal and if we could get something like that and act it it could make a real difference because you're not trying to find large employers who can pay all those thousands of dollars to sponsor an immigrant you're just saying we got work we need people and we can do it and i think that's a great idea we'll look at thank you right i had not known about that and maybe that's something that we can look into and uh encourage our senators uh senator lehi and senator sanders sounds like that would be right up their alley and maybe that's something that we could work on with them so thank you um i'm gonna i had a question uh here uh by uh david stagliano from td bank about the economic impact payments and who is eligible uh i don't know if you know that off the top of our your head i think we can put a link in the chat so that that is answered um so the general rule is uh if you're if you fire if you're a single taxpayer and you file an individual return rather than a joint return uh it's seventy five thousand dollars in income and below gets you the full fourteen hundred dollars phases out really quickly after seventy five thousand dollars for a single taxpayer if you filed jointly um it's a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and again phases out really quickly um the head of the household is um somewhere in between those but i'm not sure exactly where head of household falls um i'm gonna switch a little bit to vaccinations um i know that you folks are doing some work to encourage employers to help and and frankly i'm a little envious when i attend calls and learn what some employers in other states are doing to help get their uh employees vaccinated in vermont we've chosen to do um almost exclusively age banding so only based on your age and i think that is done with all the right intentions to make sure that we save as many lives and the elderly population is is certainly more susceptible but of course those folks are not necessarily in the workforce and so we're eager and anxious and it's moving along quickly and and that's good but i'm curious what the u.s chamber is doing i know that you have some messaging going out what are you encouraging employers to do uh as far as vaccinations go for their employees yeah our view is that every employer can do something um and that every employer ought to be making a plan to do that uh in some states if you're a if you're a very large employer and you have you know 5000 people at a facility um you should be working with your state public health officials and we're trying to help streamline this through the federal government uh to offer vaccinations to your employees and their family and maybe to employees in the surrounding area because chances are you probably actually have a health clinic on site you probably actually already offer the regular flu vaccine on site and it really makes sense to use that that infrastructure but obviously most employers don't have 5000 people and um you know even if you have you know 50 people or 25 people um people need to you know employees need to know and need help navigating the information when is it available uh in your community and where can they go and get it and I think you know helping as employers to gather that information and make sure your employees have it um and then if you're able giving them giving you know if someone can't go get it on the on the weekend uh or you know outside of normal work hours in and and I'll just speak for the US chambers for said it's worth it to give them a couple hours off to get them vaccinated uh so that they're getting it and that we're moving forward and I think employers can do that as well um by the way if you have fewer than 500 employees the federal government will reimburse you for the time off that you give your employees to go get that vaccination now you may decide the paperwork hassle is it worth the money um but but depending on the number of employees you have it it might be worth it um and I think those little incentive structures and just that information can help make a big difference obviously today the problem is is demand exceeds supply in terms of the vaccine in the vaccine we're not that far away from where supply may exceed demand um you know it could be if we were doing this a month from now we may be in the case that we're what we're really talking about is trying to get people who are vaccine hesitant to go get vaccinated and I think that is going to be the real challenge that we're going to face you heard the president on Thursday night say by May 1st he wants it to be available regardless of age bands or anything else to every adult beginning on May 1st when we reach that point we should buy that nationwide given the supply trajectory that we're on then it's going to be really about getting those people who don't want to get it um helping them get vaccinated and this is going to be a real problem there's a story out last night um the house of representatives congress house 435 people they've had access to the vaccine since january um they're doing all these crazy remote things because people can't you know come in they're fear of getting COVID they've had quite a few members who've caught it 25 of the house 100 people uh haven't been vaccinated yet because they're choosing not to um if that replicates itself in other places we are not going to hit that herd immunity level that we need to get to and we run the risk of these variants that you read about in the paper um takeover and once we end up with a variant that doesn't that the vaccine doesn't work against which has not happened yet but the longer it goes the more likely you are to get some like that the the more way we may be going back around this loop again and so i think anything employers can do to help with that's important too we're trying to get that message out i um trying to make sure that employers are at least messaging you should you know to the point that you know when your turn comes please get that and that's probably preferable to any kind of employee mandate which is something that has been much discussed but so far in vermont employers are really looking at more of the um encouragement and communication and helping people have that time to to go get that or to recover from that one other thing if i can just take 30 seconds we've actually done some message testing the thing the message that we're in addition to the convenience of what employees can expect from their employer the things that works the best is the employer the owners the manager the ceo just saying hey i got my stride i hope you'll get yours too right like it doesn't have to be a mandate but like there's something that triggers when you know that your boss got it and you see them and they look just fine and you know everything's going great and they're resuming their normal activity so if nothing else the you know business owners who are listening today when you get yours just make sure that the people around you know you did it's a great idea thank you and i'm looking forward to getting mine i'm just not in the quite yet in the right age band but looking forward to it i'm gonna i'm gonna turn our attention to a couple of really big issues here in vermont i think they're pretty big issues at the federal level and probably all over the country um for us the big twin big issues for us our child care and broadband so i'll take one of these at a time um and you know in vermont uh we have been advocating for improvements to child care infrastructure and it remains a priority for businesses for child facilities child care advocates for policy leaders of all different persuasions there doesn't seem to be any disagreement that we need more and more affordable child care options and certainly with the pandemic that that shined a huge light on that um but so far the proposals that are being floated in vermont tap out about three to five hundred million dollars um and that is quite quite a lot when you look at our um our overall budget and when you put that in context it's very hard to imagine that there's some tax increase or some cut that we could make to afford that that's not going to happen so we look to the federal government to help with that and certainly seeing that in uh this latest package i'm curious if if that conversation about helping child care in rural areas uh goes beyond just this package uh and what the u.s chamber what your perspective is on this issue yeah you know there's obviously money in these packages but let's be honest most of the money in these packages is focused on um helping child care centers stay afloat because like a lot of small businesses they're hurting or or to reopen or deal with pandemic specific uh costs um i do think it and i do hope it will lead to a broader conversation about how we sustain affordable child care in a post pandemic world um and you know i think there's a a decent chance that that becomes a big part of the conversation as we head into the summer and into the fall i don't know exactly you know how much that's going to look like or exactly how it's going to be distributed i think those are all kind of questions that have to be ferreted out but i do think that this is a moment exposed because of the pandemic about a need that existed pre-pandemic but also when you're talking about workers i mean women women mothers uh disproportionately have been pushed out of the workforce because of a lack of child care and in many parts of the country schools not being up i know you guys have your schools open but lots of parts of country don't and a lot of women have just been displaced out of the workforce and getting them back means that we're going to have to address those issues so i'm hopeful that that ultimately we will but but we don't see a plan yet that i think meets the needs that we have and then i think the same thing on on broadband so again there's nobody that disagrees we need better broadband everywhere it's often on how do we fund that and again huge price tag in vermont i'm sure it's a huge price tag in every state and a lot of the dollars that are coming through the covid relief packages are you know for pandemic relief we we invested some of that in sort of short-term solutions to get us through you know broadband hub areas and for schools and libraries and various things during during the pandemic but you know at the end of the day we still have thousands of households without um access to broadband or even quality broadband and do you see that an ongoing issue as well i do and here's one where i actually think we will see in fact we've already seen resources so i mentioned at the top the billion dollars that vermont just over that vermont's going to get out of this package um you can use that for anything related to broadband it doesn't have to be covid relief it doesn't have to be temporary you could if you have a broadband deployment plan for rural areas you can use this billion dollars to go help fund that an infrastructure bill is also going to include more money for broadband there's just no way that you know we used to say roads bridges and transit well not it's really roads bridges transit and broadband and then the question is this what how far does it go beyond that so you know i think that there there are resources that are now available and there's going to be even more resources from the federal level for broadband connectivity well that's that's great um i i think that's what we're looking for is really thinking about the the broadband pieces um when when we think about all the telemedicine that has been delivered the school lessons that have been delivered um our virtual policy series being delivered it is through broadband and we just you know we we have mountains and various things here that often make it difficult so i think and i think going back to your workforce issues right so i don't know if i mentioned this when we were together in november or maybe that's i mentioned it to you off separately offline i was talking to a reporter um more of a columnist who ready to cover stuff and um this is last fall uh and i said oh where are you working out of and he admitted and we used to live in the same neighborhood uh in dc he admitted that he and his family had relocated to vermont because your schools were open and it was a better environment and he was doing the work for the same employer of the same column this work from vermont because because he could do it there um i don't know if he's come back every night i suspect he hasn't but we're finding that they're buying houses and they're staying so that's that's good um we think that's helpful for the economy it doesn't help our workforce issue but it does help our economy so i've got one last question and then i'm just gonna see if you have any last comments before before we close out um so when we look at these packages they're incredibly helpful to individuals they're incredibly helpful to businesses and now to governments to stay afloat but it is increasing our our national debt quite a bit and i know that once upon a time was an issue it doesn't seem to be discussed or talked about at all and i'm i'm curious about your take on sort of that increasing national debt uh sort of the looming prospect of inflation and what you think that might do to the value of the us dollar long term um question before we it's a good one and i think it's one where we have to admit that what we thought we do may generally be true but may not work in exactly the ways that we thought it worked i mean you know there's this great chart that i saw this morning you know the national debt essentially more than doubling and interest rates as a share of GDP that the government pays falling by more than half how in the world does that happen um you know a lot more debt and a lot lower net interest payments but that's exactly what's happened that doesn't mean that the laws of finance or economics have been permanently suspended they do mean that the the points at which you hit breaks may be different than what we thought um to me what is most disconcerting isn't the run up in debt for the pandemic relief it isn't even this extra 1.8 trillion and kind of one time savings and how that dissipates and how that works through because you know even the the fed chairman said at the end of last week it's it's transitory yeah it's going to have a bump but then it goes back to trend the thing that is worrisome is that a year ago january pre-covid and pre any of these expenses the federal government was on pace to run a trillion dollar deficit and we thought that that was a really good economy you know generational low unemployment we cannot run trillion dollar deficits in really good economies and that's the thing that's going to buy us and so as we come out of this um we shouldn't focus on what we're doing to get out of it but we should focus on what we do on an ongoing basis in a post-covid world because if we're still on that trillion dollar trend line then things are going to blow up I don't know exactly when but but the laws of finance again haven't been repealed and so at some point it's going to catch up with us and we better be ahead of it because if it does catch up with us that's when things get scary and scary quick so for the next couple of months the top two things on your agenda you can only pick two what are those top two things on your agenda um infrastructure and workforce great well neil thank you so much for for joining us again we really appreciate getting your perspective on federal legislation and how it impacts businesses so thank you thank you for being here and being part of thank you for your partnership um we love working with you uh and the whole team there at the vermont chamber and um i hope it warms up there soon hopefully it will so folks that wraps up today's event of our virtual policy series thank you all for attending today and a big thank you to the u.s chamber of commerce and to neil bradley for taking the time to join us next monday at three p.m please join us our guests will be representative howl colston and senator keisha rom they're going to discuss the policy work in vermont that promotes racial equity supports diverse populations in our state and grows our economy really important conversations please join us thank you and have a great afternoon