By Mandilee Hecht

mhecht@cherryroad.com

United States Vice President JD Vance delivered a speech at Vantage Plastics in Bay City on Friday, March 14, following a tour of the plastic manufacturing facility. Vantage has locations at 1415 West Cedar St. in Standish, and 4675 Wilder Road, Bay City.

Kelly Loeffler, administrator of the US Small Business Administration recognized Paul Aultman.

Aultman spoke with the Independent after the visit.

“We were honored to host JD Vance at our Wilder Road facility to emphasize the importance of a strong manufacturing presence not only in Arenac and Bay counties but the entire state of Michigan and the nation,” Aultman said.

“Michigan is number six nationwide for manufacturing employment, with almost 600,000 workers, according to the National Association of Manufacturers. We need national and state policies to promote a strong manufacturing sector,” Aultman said.

The majority of Loeffler and Vance’s speeches during the March 14 visit are as follows:

Loeffler:

“Thank you, good afternoon. I’m Kelly Loeffler, Administrator of the US Small Business Administration. I’m so thrilled to join so many hard working Michiganders to talk about how President Trump is bringing American manufacturing back.”

“I couldn’t be more honored to do so alongside a true champion for blue collar America, Vice President JD Vance.”

“I also want to recognize Paul Aultman. He’s the president of Vantage Plastics and one of the millions of small business owners who have used the SBA to supercharge their growth. Let’s give a hand to Paul.”

“I’m so proud that this administration is a force multiplier for job creation and American industry. And it is clear that the age, the golden era of manufacturing in America, is not behind us, it’s in front of us.”

“And so I am so proud that the SBA stands with President Trump and Vice President Vance to build a future where the American workers and business lead the world by making Main Street great again.”

“Now I am incredibly humbled and have the honor to introduce our nation’s 50th and greatest vice president who’s helping lead the charge to bring this golden age of manufacturing in America back. So please join me. Welcome to the stage vice president JD Vance and his incredible wife, Usha Vance, thank you.” – Kelly Loeffler

Vance:

“Hey guys. Well, thank you. It’s great to be back in Michigan. You know, I’ve missed it a little bit. We haven’t spent so much time in Michigan since the election, but it’s good to be back in God’s country. And I got to tell you, every opportunity I get to get the hell out of Washington, DC. That is a good day. That is a good day.

I want to thank Kelly Loeffler for that incredibly kind introduction. You know, Kelly is doing a great job at the Small Business Administration.

You all would be shocked if you realized how much fraud we found even at the Small Business Administration, I’m talking about like dead people getting loans from the SBA. We don’t want dead people getting loans from the SBA. We want American workers and American businesses getting loans for the Small Business Administration and Kelly is doing a great job making sure that we do exactly that.

I want to say thank you to Paul. It’s great to be here at Vantage Plastics, a great American company with great American workers. So thank you to Paul Aultman, and thank you to the entire team here at Vantage Plastics. It’s great to be here. It’s great to be with American workers. And again, like I said, it’s great to be out of the bubble in Washington, DC.

We’ve got to rebuild American manufacturing and support great companies like Vantage Plastics, because we want those people to get off the streets and back to work. It’d be good for them, and it’d be good for everybody else too.

Now y’all don’t hold against me. Of course, you know that I’m from that state, just one state south, but we know, we know in the we know in the industrial Midwest that companies like Vantage give Great Lakes States the reputation that we know it is the powerhouse of American industry, and that makes it the powerhouse of world industry.

I’m grateful for the good paying jobs this company brings to the area, and for the incredible job this business does, generating economic opportunity in this region of our country.

And I really do believe that America’s success depends on the success of companies like Vantage Plastics. I don’t mean that in some abstract, poetic sounding sense. I mean it literally.

If we do not protect our nation’s manufacturers, we lose a fundamental part of who we are as a people, making things, building things, working with our hands is America’s heritage, and that heritage is alive and well in this facility.

Now, our frontier spirit would have done us little good in conquering the continent if we couldn’t manufacture the railway track, the steamboats, the dynamite and everything else needed to do so, American industry, American workers, famously won the Second World War.

American industry took us to the moon and enabled the silicon revolution that created the most precise and sophisticated jobs imaginable in any field demanding mechanical expertise on the scale of nanometers, which is so small you can’t even see it.

But over the years, I hate to say we have squandered that heritage in the United States of America, not Advantage Plastics, thank God. But all across our country, between the 1990s and the election of Donald Trump, the first time back in 2016 this country lost 5 million good manufacturing jobs, and we saw over 90,000 American factories, great American factories, shut their doors.

And as I know, I don’t have to tell anyone here today, when we lose the ability to make our own stuff, we abandoned a way of life, one that has sustained towns like Bay City and countless other communities, from Middletown Ohio to a ton of communities all across the Midwest.

Being able to make things is good because it creates self sufficiency as a nation, and it creates self sufficiency in our people. And more importantly, manufacturing jobs are good for our workers, and we know this. You all know this. They pay a premium of 10% compared to wages in other fields and other roles.

They often come with the good benefits and the good job creation that drives the kind of economic opportunity that we want to see in our country. When we deindustrialize, when we lose those good jobs that allow us to support families, those are the kinds of things that we lose, and I think that we need a president, and thank God we have a president that thinks We’re going to bring it back, and we are.

Last November, America reelected a president with a simple goal, to power our nation’s industrial comeback and once again, make the US the world’s manufacturing superpower. And that is exactly what President Trump has sought out to do.

Now I have to be honest with you, the road ahead of us is long, but we are already, in just seven short weeks, starting to see early indications of the President’s vision becoming our shared American reality.

This February, the President’s first full month in office, America gained 10,000 American manufacturing jobs. Now compare that to last year, when under the Biden administration, we were losing an average of about 10,000 manufacturing jobs per month. That’s over 100,000 jobs and manufacturing lost in a single year under Joe Biden.

And we got to ask ourselves, what has driven the turnaround? Well, first of all, President Trump has been clear about his plan, about our administration’s plan. Our goal is to make it easier and more affordable, to make things again in the United States of America.

If you invest in America, in American jobs and American workers and in American businesses, you’re going to be rewarded. We’re going to cut your taxes, we’re going to slash regulations, and we’re going to reduce the cost of energy.

To build things right here in this country that all of us love, but if you try to undercut us and build outside of our borders, the President Trump’s administration has got nothing for you. If you want to be rewarded, build in America, if you want to be penalized, build outside of America. It’s as simple as that.

From auto companies and chip makers to paper and electrical product manufacturers, companies from all over the world have announced new plants and big expansions of existing plants in the United States of America.

We’ve seen car factories say two years ago, two months ago, that they were going to ship American jobs off to Mexico, and seven weeks ago, they started singing a different tune.

Now part of our comeback means unleashing America’s energy and making it cheaper and making it more affordable for American businesses and workers to do what they need to do. So day one in office, President Trump ended the green new scam and ended Biden’s war on American energy.

And of course, we’re already seeing the results. Gasoline, its price for consumers is finally starting to come down. Last month, it went up by 30 excuse me, last, last term, it went up about 35% under Joe Biden’s leadership, and we’ve already seen it fall to significant lows. Again, that’s just in second seven weeks.

In this first month, President Trump declared a National Energy emergency and established the National Energy dominance Council. He’s reopened 625 million acres offshore for drilling, and ended Biden’s disastrous ban on liquefied natural gas exports, which risks ending 90,000 American jobs and costing $250 billion for our country over the long run, it’s over. We stopped it.

Now, in doing so, the president paved the way to approve two new massive projects in the United States. And I got to say, it’s kind of funny to see some of our Democrat governors in various parts. I won’t mention which states exactly, coming to the Oval Office and begging for economic development under Trump’s leadership that they knew they would never get under Biden’s leadership.

And I got to tell you, I carry a word from the President of the United States that we don’t care – Democrat, Republican or Independent. We want to build, build, baby, build. That is, that is the slogan, and that is the motto of the Trump administration, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

And most importantly, given where we stand here, Vantage, the Trump Administration is working hard to slash regulations left and right. And I think Paul, you’d admit the regulations. We got to get that stuff out of here. We got to make it easier to build stuff in our own country. We can’t have people telling our great builders that if they want to start a factory or if they want to expand a factory, they’re not allowed to, and that is the biggest thing I think the Trump administration is working on when it comes to renewing American manufacturing.

This Wednesday, as a matter of fact, the administration announced a historic regulatory rollback at the EPA, which will provide relief from all sorts of heavy handed rules. These include the greenhouse gas reporting program, which cost us factories and power plants hundreds of millions of dollars, and that money is now going to be reinvested in American workers.

We remember the Clean Power Plan 2.0 which is imperiled America’s grid by creating impossible restrictions on coal and natural gas plants that account for 60% of our power, you can’t tell people to build an America while at the same time destroying American energy.

That’s what Joe Biden did. What Donald Trump is doing is saying, build an America, and we’re going to help you. We’re going to make it more possible, and we’re going and we’re going to make it more affordable.

But, you know, I think it’s, it’s really simple here, and I have to say, you know, I’m thrilled, of course, to have everybody here, thrilled to have Paul hosting us, but I’m especially thrilled to have my lovely wife here behind me. And I think she’s doing a great job as Second Lady of the United States, and I’m so proud to have her by my side.

And so now we have an American media that says, How dare Donald Trump stand up for the American worker. I think I speak for the American worker when I say, Thank God for President Trump for finally standing up for the American workers, enough is enough for 40 years, the people of this country, the businesses, the workers, everybody, have been neglected.

They have been ignored, and they have had a leadership that refuses to stand up for them, and that changed just seven short weeks ago. And that basic change, that basic idea that the purpose of the American presidency is to fight for the American people, will guide our policy for the next four years.

And I have to say, Yes, this is not always easy, and it doesn’t happen overnight. We came into office again with the largest peacetime deficits in American history, $2 trillion we’ve never seen deficits like that, ever, and certainly not outside of a time of war. We ought to ask ourselves, What did Joe Biden buy with all of our borrowed money? And the answer is not a damn thing.

So we have got to take this country in a different direction, and that is what President Trump’s equity Trump’s economic policies aim to do. We are done selling out the American worker. We are done over regulating American businesses. We are going to be guided by a very simple principle, build in this country, we cut your taxes, we reduce your regulation, we reduce your energy costs.

Build in this country, make American manufacturing great again, and we are going to fight for you, and the President will too.

So let me conclude again by saying thank you. Thanks to Paul for hosting. Thank you to your incredible facility and for what you do every single day.

But as a kid who grew up in a working class family, let me just say this, that when I was growing up in Middletown, Ohio, everybody who worked hard seemed to be able to find a good job, and something changed. I don’t know when I was a teenager, or maybe a little bit later, but when that great steel mill that supported the town, was the life blood of the town that I grew up in, when it went from 10,000 jobs to 2000 jobs, the American working people started to get destroyed in the process.

We can’t keep doing that. We can’t keep running the same exact playbook over and over again, expecting different results. We’ve got to run a different playbook, and seven weeks ago, President Trump started to run that different playbook.

We’re not going to borrow from future generations to buy stuff that the Communist Chinese make for us. We’re not going to put people on welfare instead of giving them good middle class American jobs. We’re not going to drive housing through the roof.

We’re going to make it affordable again, to afford an American home. That is what we’re trying to do. And yes, my friends, it’s not going to happen overnight. We’re not going to be able to fix everything that Joe Biden broke.

But I think after seven weeks, the progress is pretty good. Egg prices are lower than they were when we took office. That’s good. We got gasoline is much lower than it was when we took office. We’ve got inflation at the lowest level that we’ve seen in many years for the American people. So we’re making very, very good progress, but we know that seven weeks is not enough.

What we need to really rebuild American manufacturing, to really invest in the American worker, is not just seven weeks of solid progress, it is four years of President Trump fighting for the American people every single day.

And so let me say, this is not going to be my last stop in Michigan, by any means, but as I leave here to go back to Washington, I feel invigorated. I feel invigorated by what you’re building at this facility. I feel invigorated by the incredible opportunities that this plant, this facility, provides to American workers. I feel invigorated by the fact that you guys are dedicated to your communities, that you’re working hard every single day, you’re playing by the rules, and you’re providing a good life for your families.

And I feel invigorated that we finally have a president who is turning his back on 40 years of failed policy in Washington DC, and is getting back to investing in and fighting for the American worker. God bless you guys. Thank you all. Thank you for having me.” – JD Vance