Highlights legislative priorities to advance workforce development opportunities, and advance next generation air transportation efforts
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), chairman of the Subcommittee on Aviation and Space, participated yesterday in a fireside chat with Uber’s Head of Federal Affairs, Danielle Burr, at the annual Uber Elevate Summit. There, he discussed his Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act, a bill he recently introduced that would expand elementary, secondary, and vocational education opportunities for students by providing a federal tax credit to encourage individuals and businesses to donate to nonprofit scholarship funds.
“I have introduced legislation that would create a federal tax credit, $10 billion a year, $100 billion over 10 years, for contributions to scholarship granting organizations,” Sen. Cruz said. “Half of it for K-12 education, half of it for vocational training, apprenticeships, workforce development, all designed to increase the resources, the competition, the choices and the innovation in education. So that is something that I am working very hard to build support for, empowering parents, empowering students and hopefully raising a whole new generation of young people who are inspired and want to change the world and want to create the next flying car or the next incredible innovation that transforms the world.”
Sen. Cruz then discussed his priorities as chairman to support and advance air transportation technology and commercialization opportunities for Uber and other U.S. companies.
“I am passionate about free enterprise,” Sen. Cruz continued. “The American free enterprise system has been the most amazing disrupter, and the most powerful cure for poverty that the world has ever seen. Now, to drive free enterprise you’ve got have disruption, you’ve got to have what the economist Joseph Schumpeter would call creative disruption. Uber does that for a living, in fact I invoke Uber all the time as an example of changing a means of a delivery of goods, of a delivery of service. […] That innovation, that’s what Uber is doing, and as Uber gets bigger I look forward to the next people taking you guys on. It’s that whole process of rethink, not only does it expand opportunities, but it also makes the bigger companies more innovative because they innovate or die. By the way, government power and statism is I think fundamentally incompatible with that spirit of innovation, that you’ve got to allow small businesses and entrepreneurs to direct capital to a need if that innovation is going to drive economic opportunity.”
Watch Sen. Cruz’s full remarks here.