EATON — The Preble County Development Partnership celebrated 10 years of collaboration last month during a special evening with its investors and state and local officials. U.S. Congressman Warren Davidson spoke during the special evening, highlighting some of the business and workforce-relevant topics he sees in his work in Congress.
“It’s an honor to represent our district in Congress,” Davidson told those in attendance at the PCDP’s investor celebration held Wednesday, Dec. 14. “It’s important work you’re doing. And it’s important that the work (State Rep.) Rodney Creech does in Columbus, or the work I do in D.C., reinforces the work you’re doing rather than hindering it.”
One topic Davidson discussed was “benefit cliffs.”
“One of the bill ideas that I have right now that doesn’t have an easy path to passage, came from when I was on the Workforce Policy Board,” Davidson said. “We had a social worker who explained to me that ‘well, I went into social work because I want to help people. But unfortunately, it seems like all I do is administer programs. We’re literally prevented by statute from telling people about other programs.’
“Benefits cliff” refers to the sudden and often unexpected decrease in public benefits that can occur with a small increase in earnings. When income increases, families sometimes lose some or all economic support.
“Benefit cliffs, a lot of you employers have run into them and some of you, maybe you ran into one when you were working your way to where you are right now. People make a little bit more money, and then lose their eligibility. And for that reason, some people turn down jobs, some people turned down promotions or raises to avoid running into that.”
Davidson also touched briefly on inflation and President Biden’s Build Back Better Plan.
“There are some ideas in there that I think are interesting, you know, and I’m open to hearing more about — say for example, childcare. Is that a barrier to people participating in the workforce?” he said.
“The number one question that people have asked for a long time, you know, it’s been about workforce,” Davidson said. “Yeah, there are a lot of other factors, but here in Ohio and western Ohio in particular, normally gets great marks because our workforce, once you get people at work — they’re smart, capable, driven, have great work ethic, great values, people who are invested. But the challenge is, we’ve only got about 62 percent of our 18 to 65-year-olds participating in the workforce. Labor force participation is not going well.”
“In 2009, we had about 67 percent participating and really all through those seven or eight years, the participation rate continued to go down,” Davidson said. “Of course, there was a recession, and it went still steadily down — not dropped down like in 2020 — steadily down. And then it did come up under the Trump administration to about 63 and a half percent.
“If you go back to January 2020, some of the best economy we had had in some say forever, but certainly a generation or two. A phenomenal economy,” he continued. “It was only 63 and a half percent of our workforce. So, we still have a tremendous amount of upside, if we can get people to work.”
“The other way that we grow the economy is productivity,” Davidson said. “Productivity is hard to model and certainly doesn’t normally come because Congress passed a bill, but mostly comes from the private sector innovating. There are people who’ve had hearings that really want Congress to pass anything that regulates the amount of automation somebody can adopt. I think that’s crazy, personally. That would be a way the federal government could get in the way.”
“In the making of public policy right now, I think one of the biggest things we have to do is get more freedom, less government, and we have to protect the value of our money,” Davidson said.
The Preble County Development Partnership Inc. (PCDP) was formed in 2010 to address important growth and development issues and to assist in the creation of jobs and opportunities for everyone in Preble County.
