 It's so nice to see your bright and shining faces on this really frigidly cold day today. I hope you enjoyed your meal. As always, we thank the Bull for a delightful service. And also Prevea for being our sponsor this month. So thank you very much. My name is Lynn Podian and I'm the chair of the Business Advocacy Group. If any of you have an interest in joining our Business Advocacy Group, we meet next Friday. We meet next Friday at 7.30 in the morning. We're always looking to have new people join us. And what we do is we plan these first Friday forums. We look at the national concerns, the state concerns, and the county concerns about how things will be affecting your business. So if you'd like to join us, feel free to do that. John Rogers is a touchstone for you and you can reach out to him and find out more information. On your table, you'll find this lovely piece of paper here that will give you some information on the upcoming events for the chamber. We have our first Friday forum, which is of course today's immigration reform. Next month in March, we're actually gonna be doing a double header on transportation and we'll have state elected officials. In April, we'll be touching on early childhood learning. Both are going to be really good lineups. Just give yourselves a second to look over the rest of the concerns that we have, business owner success strategy roundtables coming up next week. And we've got our focal point on Wednesday, February 19th with networking to win. Chamber gala, just so anybody who doesn't know does know now is sold out. If you were like myself and forgot to put it on your schedule to get your tickets, well, you gotta be on a waiting list. I'm thinking it's about 200 strong right now? No, maybe not. But I'm hoping that we could all get a place around the table for the gala this year. But unfortunately, we are gonna be on a waiting list at this point. So if you would all give a warm welcome to our speaker today is Kurt Bauer. He's the president and CEO of the Wisconsin Manufacturers Commerce. I'm gonna give you a little heads up on his history. He'll love this. I'll go back through his life story for you. In 1993, he began his trade association career as a staff writer and media assistant for the Wisconsin Bankers Association. In 96, he was promoted to head WBA's government relations program. And in 2002, he was selected to be the president CEO of the Phoenix-based Arizona Bankers Association. In 2004, he returned to WBA to become a president and CEO. And in 2011, he became just the fifth head of Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the state chamber of commerce and largest business trade group. Founded in 1911, WMC represents 3,500 employers of all sizes and from every sector of the economy. Kurt Bauer. It's a delight to be here. Lynn read the bio and says that I was in Arizona on days like this. I wish I never left, but my wife particularly wishes we'd never left. But actually, I'll take a beautiful sunny day like this as opposed to 20 degrees in overcast. So it's actually quite beautiful out there. And it was a lovely drive from Madison over here. So I appreciate being included. I was asked to talk a little bit about immigration reform. And I'm gonna take a little bit of license. And I told John, I'd probably talk about, and actually, I think John, you asked me to talk a little bit about our future Wisconsin project. And in the process, I thought I'd expand the topic just a little bit and talk about two of the biggest economic issues that we see at WMC. I've been at WMC for three years now. And it's a steep learning curve. It's a big association. We have 3,500 members, all sectors of the economy. And part of the job here is to go around and meet with local chambers of commerce, business leaders and learn about the issues that impact them, not only now, but in the future. And it became very clear to me that Wisconsin really has two major challenges in the future. The first is workforce, which relates to immigration reform and energy. And that's one that I think is the most underreported economic story in the state. And I'll get to that in a moment, because a lot of people are surprised to hear that because in the United States right now we have an energy boom. So what could be the problem there? I'll get to that. So I wanna talk about first workforce and immigration reform. And I divide this topic really into two categories. The practical and the political. The practical is the need. The political is a little bit of the fear. The chamber community, the business community is often accused of being a center right and aligned with Republicans. On this one, we sometimes get a little cross-wise with Republicans, particularly the Tea Party, because we see the need and we recognize the fear, but we think that the need outstrips the fear. Let's talk a little bit about that need. We have done a lot of work with the UW-Madison Applied Population Lab. And they did a report analyzing population trends in Wisconsin from 2010 to 2040. Right now we have just under six million of Wisconsinites, 5.7 to be precise. We are anticipating by 2040 to have about a million more, 808,914 to be exact. That's a 14% growth. So you look at that and you say, well that's pretty healthy growth. It's not quite what you see in the Sun Belt, but for the upper Midwest that's not so bad. But 91%, 91% will be above 65 years of age. That's outside of the working age population. Only 0.4, 0.4, not 4%, 0.4% will be working age population which is calculated at 18 to 64. Then we looked at a Georgetown study that analyzed data from around the country and that translates into, so in 2010 we have 2.8 roughly, I rounded these numbers just for ease, 2.8 million Wisconsin jobs total in the state. By 2020 we'll have 3.1 million jobs, at least we hope so. But, there's another bot here, 317,000 new jobs at the end of 10 years, but just 15,000 new workers at the end of 30 years. Bottom line is that this is a crisis. We often talk about it being a shortage now and a crisis later. It frankly is probably a crisis right now for Wisconsin. And John was kind enough to send over some information from the Sheboygan County Economic Development Corporation. I'm not gonna go through that data, but you're not immune. Nobody in Wisconsin is immune, not even Milwaukee, our most populous county. In fact, maybe the more populous counties are going to be the hardest hit. And this is not just a problem unique to Wisconsin. This is the upper Midwest. This is actually most of the country. And right now Europe is going through it. They're probably about 10 years ahead of us. They're a bit of the Canary in the coal mine. They've had historically low birth rates for quite some time and you see that they're very aggressively seeking immigration. I've got a friend of mine who is a dual American Italian citizenship. He worked in the Philippines for the last 10 years. He married a Filipino. And while he was not able to come back to the United States because he couldn't get a visa for his wife, he was able to move to the EU. He was able to move to Italy. So what the plan is is that she will immigrate to Italy, she'll become an Italian citizen and then they'll come to the United States. But that shows you that the Italians in much of Europe is very receptive to immigration from around the country or around the world because they need the workers. So this is a crisis now or a shortage now crisis later. What does it mean? Frankly, it threatens economic contraction. It also erodes the tax base. So think of those numbers again. A massive expansion of the over 65 year old population and think about the healthcare needs and the social service needs that are probably gonna go along with that. At the same time, we're gonna have a shrinking of the tax base to pay for all of that. I kinda likened it a little bit to North Dakota and the problems that they were having prior to the energy boom that they're experiencing right now. Their economy was contracting. Small towns were really disappearing. Downtowns were being shuttered. And I was thinking about that while I was driving through Sheboygan Falls coming over here, one of the prettiest downtowns in all of Wisconsin. You think about businesses going out because it's just not the demand for the services. You also think about it from a business perspective and all of you are from different businesses. We tend to think a little bit, maybe too biased in terms of manufacturing. It's in our name. We were founded as the Manufacturers Association merged with the State Chamber in 1976 and about 51% of our members are still manufacturers. 20% of the Wisconsin economy is manufacturers. It really is the bedrock of Wisconsin's economy that all other sectors of the economy benefit from. So what does it mean to a manufacturer? Well, what do you do? You can automate, but there's only so much you can automate and businesses are automating. Todd Teske just recently left as chair of our board of directors as the head of Briggs and Stratton and he was telling me that they've been forced to automate dramatically over the last few years and they've got plans to do more of it. But you're still always going to have a human element in not only manufacturing but in most other types of work as well. You can move part or all of your operations to where the workers are. Of course, all that in the 80s and 90s we lost jobs to globalization. What I often think is ironic is that now we have this opportunity for reshoring because the costs of doing business overseas have increased. Labor has gone up in China. There's less currency manipulation. Still some, but they're less. And of course the transportation costs now with the energy boom in the United States has made us very competitive. So we are primed right now to really have a renaissance in manufacturing but we can't find the workers now and it's only gonna get worse. So businesses will have to decide. Can they automate? Will they move part or all of their operations to where the workers are? And the third option is really to contract. They cannot bid for projects. We already see that happening right now. And another part, maybe they decide that they can't run two or three shifts. Maybe they can only run one. And we're seeing that now too. I was just down in Beloit not too long ago and a small manufacturing operation was looking to start a second shift and they needed 12 workers and they found seven and they just couldn't find the other ones. And as a result, they weren't able to start that other shift which means they weren't able to bid for other projects which affects the profitability of the entire company and of course those seven people they did found, they still weren't able to hire them because they couldn't find the remainder of the shift. So obviously you can see how this impacts and it's all by and large pretty darn negative. So what do we do about it? It's a big question. Well, we can try and increase birth rates and that's a little difficult. I often think of Wisconsin, maybe we need more blizzards. When the lights go out and no one can go anywhere. You always say if nine months later you get the blizzard babies. We can fight to keep what we've got and of course we're a state that's known for a brain drain. Young people graduate from our universities and private colleges which are among the best in the country and our tech colleges or some tech colleges are outstanding. So they get their degrees, taxpayers subsidize oftentimes and then they end up going someplace else. We can try and fight to keep them here. We can encourage delayed retirements, 65, that's still relatively young. I think about my grandfather at 64 when he died. He was an old man. My dad is 85 and he seems very vibrant. He doesn't wanna work but you get the point is that I do think that the world has changed and the vast majority of us will probably work beyond 65 because our life expectancy is going to be longer. As it is, you see people who retire at 65 or 64, 65 and then they end up starting a second career doing something consulting or whatever it is. I think that will probably have to be an imperative going forward. We can have migration, people moving into Wisconsin from other places, that's part of our history. I'm from Beloit, Racine, Milwaukee, all moved African-Americans from the deep South to work in factories in those locations as part of the Great Migration and of course then immigration which is also part of our history and again part of my history as well. My grandparents came from Germany to work in factories in Milwaukee before they ended up working at Fairbanks Mores in Beloit. So all of those are options and they all have to be on the table for us but there's a common denominator for all of them. If we want to have people move to Wisconsin, if we want to have people stay in Wisconsin, if we wanna encourage people to get married and start a family here in Wisconsin and feel secure enough in their position that they can have not just one child but maybe multiple children, we've gotta have a strong Wisconsin economy. We've got to make sure that we have great quality of life. We've gotta have good schools, we've gotta have good recreation options, urban centers, arts and entertainment and if we don't do all of that we're gonna find ourselves in a real dire straits. So let's talk a little bit now about the fear of immigration and that's frankly just as American as the melting pot is. If you look back at American history, whoever has come here really wasn't all that excited about other people coming over here and if you know the movie with Lena Caprio, The Gangs of New York, that really dramatized that. You saw the Anglo Protestants didn't want the Irish Catholics coming over and that's what the big fight was in New York. Well that's again, part of our history here in the United States and the people who are here are always suspicious about what will happen to American society with a new group coming in. That's certainly I think the argument that we're hearing from the Tea Party. We've had some interesting experimentations with policies that you've probably heard about the self deportation. I think Alabama has that, I think it originated in Kansas and it's basically a matter of that the laws are so restrictive if you are an undocumented immigrant you get pulled over for speeding you could find yourself targeted for deportation and with your family still anchored in that community. I think it's a pretty scary and maybe a bit too aggressive a policy. Yeah it's interesting too with the Republicans. This is really a no win situation for them politically. They're damned if they do and they're damned if they don't. They're damned if they do because the Tea Party element doesn't want it they're damned if they don't because if you look at the demographics of this country it is shifting. Whites will not be the majority in this country very much longer and if the Republicans want to be anything other than a party of white men they're going to have to reach out. So I kind of look at it this way. I think it's the right political option long term and I certainly think practically it's the right option for the United States economically. So you look at the GOP as having a war with itself a little bit. You've got right now Speaker Boehner has indicated that he was in favor of immigration reform. There's a caveat to that because now it looks like the world has changed a little bit and I'll talk about that in a moment. You've got our own Paul Ryan, the congressman from the first congressional district chair of the budget committee and the vice presidential nominee and the last presidential election. You've got Bill O'Reilly from Fox News very influential in the conservative movement. The Wall Street Journal editorial board very much in favor of immigration reform and of course the US chamber which is allied with us. We don't have a formal governance relationship just like the Sheboygan chamber. They work with us but there's no formal relationship. We're not obliged to take their policies any more than the Sheboygan chamber is obliged to take our positions but they see it the same way we do. They look at the demographic data. Against you have the Rush Limbaugh's of the world, the Tea Party, Karl Rove, National Review, a very influential conservative magazine and here in Wisconsin you have somebody like Vicki McKenna who is a very influential talk radio host. She does a show in Milwaukee in the morning, Madison in the afternoon that is also broadcasting La Crosse and Eau Claire. So she gets around the state actually more than somebody like a Charlie Sykes who is at the largest radio station, WTMJ. And she'll often, we get along very well with Vicki and I like her personally, she actually went to Bloch College again in my hometown but she'll deride our position as we just want cheap labor and maybe that's true with some but I guess from my perspective I just say, well we may not want cheap labor, we just need labor in order to have the economy continue to grow. So you look at some of the issues that is holding back reform. One I would say that the Democrats on the one hand want immigration reform and maybe they don't want immigration reform because it's been a very effective wedge issue for them. They were able to use that in the last election and you saw Ron me got a pathetic percentage of the Latino vote as a result of his positions. During the primary he talked about subscribing to that self deportation policy which really alienates the Latino population. So you've got border security, the conservative right wants the border security, you've got immigration law enforcement, bottom line is that you've got the president saying I've got a pen and a phone and this is the current spat. Boehner and Ryan had been saying that they wanted to push something through. Now Boehner is saying that we don't trust the president to actually do, to honor a deal because he's not currently listening to Congress, he's going off on his own and an example of that would be the executive action he took on the Dreamers which are the children of illegal immigrants who were born here and therefore they're US citizens and the executive action he took there. Worker verification and a visa entry system, amnesty, legal status for undocumented immigrants, is it fair or unfair to do that? Is it the right thing to do? Do you want to send them back home? Do you want to put them at the end of the line? What are the economic implications of doing so? What are the political backlash of doing so? I guess from our perspective at WMC, all of that stuff is very complicated. What we look at this and say, we've got a problem, we've got to solve it and there are multiple avenues to solve it and one of them has to be immigration reform and some of the things I think can be worked out. We want, you don't even have to call it immigration reform per se, you can call it a guest worker program. Right now, we have multiple instances where we are educating foreigners, the best and brightest of the world at our great universities here in Wisconsin and around the country and when their student visa expires, we don't grant them a working visa despite the fact that they're highly educated in some of the most in-demand areas, the STEM areas, the science, technology, engineering and mathematics and what we're doing is we're sending them off back to their home country or wherever into the waiting arms of America's competitors. It doesn't make any sense at all but on the lower end, we also need, we need lesser skilled workers and you may have heard this but many of the crops in the Yakima Valley in Washington State where apples and peaches and nectarines are growing right near cherries, much of the crop was not harvested this year because they couldn't get the workers that they normally get because, well, a variety of reasons. One of them is that Mexico's economy is actually doing quite well so when we look at immigration in the future, it probably will be Latino but it may not be Mexican. It may come from other parts of Latin America or South America. So we think that this is something that needs to be solved and we think the sooner the better and frankly, I think that the politics will work itself out. I think that the Republicans are wrong that Latinos are somehow genetically bred to be Democrats. I think that's ridiculous. I think that politically it works out that if they want a future they're going to have to embrace the Latino community and I think if we're gonna want a strong economy with a vibrant workforce, we're going to have to embrace immigration reform. So just briefly on energy then. So you've probably heard a lot about the energy boom that is taking place in the United States and it's fantastic. It really has made us very competitive and we're hoping that the president approves a Keystone XL pipeline now that the final regulatory hurdle has finally been passed and they've indicated that there are no environmental concerns with this. We hope they approve it. I have my doubts on whether or not he will at least before the midterm elections in November. But here in Wisconsin, 70%, roughly 70% of our energy comes from coal and if you've been following this issue, the EPA basically placed a moratorium on building new coal fire plants in the United States and this summer we fully anticipate that they will place new restrictions on carbon emissions that will probably take offline older coal fire plants here in Wisconsin and throughout the upper Midwest. That's gonna raise energy costs and we don't have any alternatives. Now you may be thinking, well, hey, we've got the Marcellus and the Botkin shale deposits, both of which produce oil and natural gas. But the problem is that we don't have the pipeline infrastructure to get that from there to here. We'll have to build it. Rape payers pay for that, that infrastructure. So that'll be expensive and it'll take some time. Plus you'll have to convert existing coal fire plants to natural gas. That'll be expensive. Rape payers will have to pay for it. That'll drive up costs. And of course, if everyone is forced around the country to switch from coal to gas, the price will go up along with demand. That's just classical economics 101. So the bottom line is that this is a real threat to Wisconsin's economy. We need cheap, reliable energy. That is the foundation. Along with workforce, energy is the foundation of an advanced economy. And right now, both of them are threatened in the state of Wisconsin and it's something that we are all very concerned about at WMC. So that leads us to the future Wisconsin project that we just put together and we're just in the beginning phases of it. It is a plan to put together a 20 year vision, the economic strategic plan if you will, for the state of Wisconsin. We don't really have anything like that right now. We tend to be guilty of thinking short term. Businesses tend to think quarterly to quarterly if they're stock. Businesses just sometimes month to month, maybe year to year. Maybe they have a five year strategic plan, but we just typically don't tend to think longer term. So this is an exercise for us to do that, to take a look at the demographic data and some of the other challenges that we have and see whether or not we like where we're going to be in 20 years. And if we don't, what can we do together to change it? And we're going to be partnering with this initiative with the Tech Colleges, the UW System and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, which I think is the perfect partnership. So you've got the private sector represented by WMC, academia and government working together to try and address these problems, identify the problems, put together a plan to solve these problems and then execute that plan together. And we're going to focus on six areas that we call competitive quality indicators. Talent retention, which is that workforce component. Business competitiveness, which is basically how competitive are we as compared to other states and frankly globally because we're operating in a global economy. Global engagement because the demographic trends that I talked about for us are just the opposite for Asia, the wealth and population is going to grow in Asia. China and India in particular. And we in the United States and Wisconsin need to think globally. We need to think about the opportunities that presents for us. We need to export, we need to take advantage of those relationships. Government efficiency, we frankly want a very lean efficient government that does what we need it to do and does it as cost effectively as possible. Quality of life, we do have a very high quality of life in Wisconsin, we want to maintain that. And of course we want to encourage an entrepreneurial spirit. We have two great research universities, three if you include the Medical College of Wisconsin and a lot of great innovations and patents come out of there but we haven't done a very good job of commercializing those ideas and creating new jobs as a result of that. So that's just one idea of how we can maybe foster that entrepreneurism that helps create jobs and new ideas and makes Wisconsin a vibrant and fun place to live. So I will stop there and if you have questions I'd be happy to answer them. The discussion about minimum wage and whether that should go up or not with the immigration discussion. It seems to me that there is a synergy there. Well, I look at this, we typically have the same position that most businesses have on minimum wage. We really don't think it's a good idea to raise it. We think that it's discriminatory to young people in particular. There was a Forbes article last week that came out that said that 0.8% of people over 21, excuse me, over 23 receive the minimum wage which tells you that it really is a entry level or supplemental wage for the vast majority of Americans out there. So I think that there's a disinformation a little bit, I was just with the president last week. I had a chance to meet him at Waukesha engine and he pushed this issue and I don't always agree with the president's policies and I applauded politely when he did most of his talk but on that one I disagreed. I just don't think that the data backs that up. I think that that's really a campaign issue but you also look at it from this perspective. It is rather interesting right now. We call it the workforce paradox. We know we have historically high unemployment in the United States and in Wisconsin. We're lower in Wisconsin than we are at the national level. About 6.3%. Senators, 6.3% unemployment in Wisconsin? Something like that. I didn't mean to put you on the spot. I think it's 6.3%. It's about a full percentage point better than the national average but we still have jobs that are going unfilled particularly in southeastern Wisconsin and the industrial corridor. About 13,000 we estimate. So frankly from my perspective, I think we do, it would be a lot smarter to work with our tech college partners to have people bypass those minimum wage jobs and have them get right into those high-paying factory jobs that pay 30% above the median. That are family sustaining careers, not just jobs. So I look at it a little bit differently. And I honestly, I don't think it matters all that much with immigration reform. I really don't. Yes, sir? I'm going to call the number here in this country. Do you know how many legal immigrants there are in the state of Wisconsin? I do not. I'm sure somebody has estimated that number but I apologize. I didn't come prepared with that. I'm sure there are some people that just show up. Oh, right, the staggered. It's your number. I don't have that but the average factory worker, and I apologize that I'm being so manufacturing specific, but the average factory worker is in their late 50s right now and will be retiring in the next 10 years or so. And that means we've got to have a pipeline of workers to replace those workers. And of course, we also know the need is very high in healthcare and tech as well. Other sectors, I'm sure, but right now it's most acute in manufacturing healthcare and tech. Yeah, tech. Yes, ma'am? I have not seen a study that shows that we're making a lot of progress, but it's baby steps. One thing that I thought was very interesting is I mentioned I was with the president last week at Waukesha Engine and I could have given his speech. I was standing next to the head of the Waukesha Business Alliance, the Waukesha Chamber. And I think everybody in the chamber community has recognized that there's been this shortage of workers, particularly for manufacturing. And sometimes I fuss with the president that he has emphasized a four-year degree over and over again and he didn't talk about that. He actually talked about the need to get on a career path that makes sense. And he said that a four-year degree is maybe not the right thing for every student, which is something that we have been saying. We talk about return on investment. And I remember I had a chance to go to China with former UW-Madison Chancellor Ward and in a dinner at Shanghai, I asked him what responsibility does the university system have to tell an incoming freshman who's chose political science. I can pick on political science because I have a degree in political science, but what's the return on investment going to be? So you're gonna spend four years of this university, potentially rack up, I think 35,000 is the average debt for a UW system graduate. And what's going to be the return? What's the demand going to be like for jobs after that? And what I often tell people is that I've yet to hear a factory owner, a plant manager, or really anybody say, you know what I really need? More political science majors. Well, we need to tell people this. And frankly, teachers, parents, counselors, they need to be informed so that they can inform young people. And young people listen to these role models. What the jobs are going to be like in the future? That's part of this Future Wisconsin project. I think we do a manufacturing month in October. I think we need to turn that into a career month because it's not just manufacturing, it's all sectors. And I think what we need to do is hire people to put together an accurate, as accurate as you can, forecast on what the career, or what the job market's gonna be like four years hence so that young people in high school, frankly, they need to make these decisions. Maybe a little bit earlier in junior high so they can start determining what is going to be the right career for them. We shouldn't set people up to fail and tell them that they really need to get a four-year degree. And they're really not passionate about it, but they do it because of peer pressure. Their parents want them to do it. And they go, and they dutifully get the degree. And then they find there aren't a lot of job prospects, at least not here. So they're forced to go someplace else, which we don't want. Or they go back to the tech college system. And I think we had the governor at our business day program yesterday, and I can't remember the statistic, but he said it's a very high percentage of people who are at tech colleges who have four-year degrees and have not been able to find the kind of careers that they were hoping or told, promised that they were gonna be able to find. So the tech colleges are a shining star in our education system and that we need to steer more young people in that direction. Look, if you get a two-year degree or a two-year certification at a tech college, that's not to say that you can never go and get your bachelors of science or a bachelor of arts. We have plenty of examples of people who got a two-year degree, started earning and decided that, okay, now I'm ready to go and do something else. It's probably a smarter pathway than the opposite, which is getting the four-year degree, incurring all that debt, and then trying to, and then your earning power is delayed because you've gotta pay off the debt and you're not earning all that much and you're living in your parents' basement and you're upset. As far as people who kind of choose not to work, who are capable, but how does the effect of being able to receive like government assistance, food stamps and whatnot, balance against that person's decision? I happen to see a lot of people who will tell me, wow, I get a job and I'm ready to go and qualify for these things. Is that, do I just see a large percentage of people work? Or what are you, how many are there? I hear that anecdotally from our members. We just surveyed on that. We do twice a year, we do an economic survey of our membership and we asked specifically that question and only about 4% of our members said that that was really a problem, which surprised me. It was lower than I thought it would be because I do hear it more often anecdotally out there, but I think it is a concern. And you saw the CBO estimates that 2 million people would be better off or will leave the workforce because of the Affordable Care Act because frankly they're penalized for working. I do think that we've got a problem in this country in Wisconsin, we're losing the culture of work. Wisconsin has always been known for a very strong German-Norwegian work ethic and we're losing that a little bit. I hear it's stronger with the millennials, so maybe there's hope there, but I do hear that the work ethic is not what it used to be. The soft skills aren't what they used to be. People are surprised that they have to show up for work every day, that they can't just take a day off when they want to or leave when they have a doctor's appointment. It seems to me that there's a lot of people right now that don't understand what employers' expectations of them are. And maybe, I don't know, you start peeling back this workforce issue and you start dealing with a lot of different issues and it must be something in our culture that we have to address. Well, I mean I think I see, most people will go through the natures towards the most common denominator often. So when someone does have food and shelter provided by taxpayers, it's a reasonable choice to say, well, why not just stay home then and take that. And the problem that I see is that when I explore this with people while they're on a witness stand, they're telling me that they have friends that they live within this building and they're all getting food stamps. They're all, you know, and so where is the, I feel that there's a gap with who's supposed to be screaming these people and allowing them to have these benefits when I look at it go. How do you qualify? I don't get this. I think it's a great point. You know, Paul Ryan often says, if you pay people not to work, don't be surprised if they don't. And we had a speaker yesterday again, we had our big business day in Madison event about a thousand people from around the state and we bring in a bunch of speakers and one of the speakers talking about the minimum wage but I think it relates to this as well. He said, look, if I'm, 21 years old, I'm making $7 and it's $7.25 an hour which is right now the minimum wage in Wisconsin and I get an increase to $15 an hour which is what SEIU wants for the fast food workers, you know, more realistically probably $10 an hour. I haven't improved my skills. I just get this, you know, I get this mandate. I was saying earlier, it's basically an employment tax. I didn't improve my skills. I'm now making $10 an hour and, you know, I sit around and I don't go to school to bed of myself. I don't go to the technical college. I don't go to the UW system. What message are we saying? And what does that say about our future competitiveness as a country? We need people who are going to be aggressive, who improve their skills because we're competing against a very aggressive world. Again, I've been to China. I see, I mean, it's unbelievable what's happening there. What's happening in China and the growth is like nothing that's ever happened in the industrialized world. And those young people are very hungry, they're very aggressive, they're getting educated. One thing that they haven't been able to do like we have is innovate, but they're working on that because they know that that's a deficiency and they can't steal everything or by now they probably have stole everything. So, I mean, now they're gonna have to innovate themselves. And we've got to compete against them. And, you know, you also think they've got an advantage because China's population is our population with a one in front of it. We're 300 million, 340 million, I don't know. 300 million-ish. They're 1.3 billion. They've got a numerical advantage to say the least, although they've got their own problems. Yes, ma'am. I agree with you that, because I've been there and I've created them and every sports bar in New England, New York, Utah, Texas, Shanghai, China, you find a bachelor's game, you find a pre-made packer game, and I'm telling you, in another university, Minnesota, whatever, are you going to one of these bars and there's maybe one or two. You go in, when the packers are playing, there are a lot of these constant people. They have left and it's sad. They are wonderfully educated, fun, hardworking people and they want jobs back here. They come back here and then they leave again. What do we have in Wisconsin that's going to keep them here? That is a good question and it goes back to, I think, an economy and a quality of life that is very competitive. We need it, the governor was kind enough to remember that three years ago, he quoted me yesterday, three years ago at an event like this, I said that whoever solves this problem first in the Upper Midwest wins and it's gotta be Wisconsin because we have similar quality of life and similar advantages and disadvantages. So whoever solves this first wins. So we need a vibrant economy that draws people in, migrants, immigrants, keeps people here and encourages families to, or people to feel comfortable, secure enough in their position that they're willing to start a family. Right now, young people are delaying those decisions because they don't feel secure enough. Somebody's probably not gonna ask the love of their life to marry them if they're working two part-time jobs, despite the fact that they've got a degree and they may have a very strong work ethic and they may be trying everything in their power. We've gotta create that opportunity. We need upward mobility. We need opportunity for them and if we can do that, we'll have a fighting chance. I think it's gonna be very challenging for us no matter what but I'm with you. I, as I said, I went to China with former UW Chancellor, David Maward and I'm also on the Wisconsin Alumni Association Board and we had a reception in Shanghai and it was packed with young people and I'm sure many of those people maybe wanted to go back to China but many of them were not Chinese and they went over there. We'd like to keep them here but we've gotta create the opportunities. Part of that too is urban centers. Milwaukee is a diamond in the rough but it's not achieving its full potential and if it's not achieving its full potential neither is Wisconsin. I'm worried about Madison falling into that rut. I mean, one of the reasons why will often compare us to Illinois because it's a great comparison. Illinois is a basket case. I mean, they're almost a lost cause. Minnesota, on the other hand, it has a strong economy that their unemployment rate is actually lower than ours and one of the things that people ask is why is Minnesota doing better than us? I think it's because they've got the Twin Cities. The Twin Cities are a destination. When I graduated from college, a lot of my friends, they went to Chicago, if they stayed in the Midwest, they went to Chicago or the Twin Cities. We need to make Milwaukee that and I think we're capable of it. Milwaukee's a great place and there's a lot of opportunities in Milwaukee but it goes back to this future Wisconsin initiative. We've gotta put together some sort of a plan. It's not just gonna happen. You have this thing. So, they really would like that they love this area. It's just, you know, the tech innovation, the support for, you know, innovation, for technology, startups and that big stuff just doesn't seem to exist in this country. How we do it on time? It's 107? Okay. In order to grow that sector of the economy, tech, biotech, science, you need three things. You need highly skilled people. You need money, frankly. And frankly, you need some sort of catalyst or innovation, right, to start something out. Well, we've got two of the three really. We've got those major research universities I mentioned earlier. UW-Madison, UW-Milwaukee and to some extent the Medical College of Wisconsin, a smaller scale but still they've got a research component and they come up with some pretty interesting things. And of course they attract young researchers. The problem is of course those young researchers get offered jobs someplace else or if they do end up commercializing and innovation here in Wisconsin, oftentimes the money will come from someplace else and they're drawn to where that money was. So we're low on the money side. We've got two of the three, we need more money. And frankly then we need other things that are gonna keep young people here, the anchored here. And that I think goes back to the quality of life from a young person's perspective. And quality of life means different things to different people. I've got a member up in Ashland that he's a huge manufacturer and I asked him about how he's able to track workers and he said, well I track people who wanna hunt and fish and Ashland's a great place to do that. Well that's great. So he's got his niche. But people who tend to be in the research side like art and entertainment options. And this is one of the reasons why the Milwaukee Chamber is so desperate to keep the bucks. Because they think that that'll hurt them on that retention of young people that it'll hurt the city. So it's a simple formula, but it gets a little bit more complicated. You've gotta try and keep those young people because the incomes are here, you've gotta make it a fun place to live. The other thing is that a lot of the innovations that come out of the UWs are hard to commercialize because the practical application won't be known for several years. It just isn't that easy. It takes a long time to get that done and to suddenly start making money. Or not. Well thank you very much. I enjoyed spending a little time with you and I hope everyone has a great weekend.