Concurrent Resolution on the Budget, Fiscal Year 2016--Conference Report--Continued-

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, a budget is a vision of the future, and it clearly appears the two sides have very different visions as to what our country should be and the direction in which we move.

At a time of unprecedented and grotesque income and wealth inequality, where 99 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent, my Republican colleagues say we need to give a massive tax break to the 5,000 wealthiest families in America--the top two-tenths of 1 percent--a $269 billion tax break over a 10-year period. That is not what the American people believe. What they believe is that at a time when the rich and large corporations are doing phenomenally well, when we have a large deficit, when we have massive unmet needs in this country, that maybe, just maybe it is time to ask the wealthy and large corporations to start paying their fair share of taxes, not give them more tax breaks. That is exactly what this Republican budget does.

At a time when the United States is the only major country on Earth that doesn't guarantee health care to all people and when 35 million Americans today have no health insurance and even more are underinsured, with large copayments and high premiums, the Republican budget unbelievably--unbelievably--simply throws 27 million Americans off of health insurance. What happens to them? What happens when the Affordable Care Act is ended--which is what their budget does--and 16 million people lose their health insurance? What happens when another 11 million people lose their health insurance because of the $440 billion cuts in Medicaid? What happens to 27 million Americans? How many of them will die? Clearly, many thousands will die. People who are sick will not be able to go to the doctor. People who are sick will get sicker and suffer. Twenty-seven million people thrown off of health insurance is beyond being unconscionable. Yet, that is what is in the Republican budget.

The Presiding Officer is a neighbor of mine in New Hampshire. I know that in New Hampshire--I have been there recently--and in Vermont, young people are wondering about how they are going to be able to afford to go to college and what kind of student debts they will incur when they leave college. Our charge is to work together to make sure that every young person in this country who has the ability and the desire and the willingness to go to college is able to go to college regardless of his or her income. That is what we need to do in a competitive global economy.

We used to have the highest percentage of college graduates in the world. Today, we are in 12th place. That is not where we should be if we want to compete globally in this difficult world economy.

What is the Republican solution? The Republican solution is to make a bad situation much worse, with a $90 billion cut over a 10-year period in mandatory Pell Grant funding--Pell grants being the major source of funding for low- and moderate-income young people in order to get help to go to college. This budget does exactly the opposite of what we should be doing.

We are the wealthiest country in the history of the world. The problem we are having is that almost all of that wealth is going to a handful of people at the top. Yet, today we have more people living in poverty than at almost any time in the modern history of America. We have seen some descriptions of that in the tragedy we recently observed in Baltimore in communities where 50 percent of the people are unemployed, where kids don't have enough to eat. Honestly, without being too rhetorical, I just don't understand how, when families are struggling to feed their kids, when everybody understands that hunger is a real problem in this country, anybody could vote for a budget that makes huge cuts in food stamps, in the WIC Program, and in other nutrition programs for families who are struggling to feed their families. That is not what this country is supposed to be about.

On top of all of that--on top of cutting health care, with 27 million people thrown off of health insurance; cutting education, making it harder for kids to go to college, harder for families to put their kids into Head Start; harder for poor families to feed their kids--my Republican colleagues say a major priority in this country is to give $269 billion in tax breaks to the top two-tenths of 1 percent. Does anybody--anybody outside of this Chamber think that makes any sense at all? Does anybody outside of here think those are American priorities? Billionaires do not need another tax break. They are doing just great. They are doing fine.

Then, to add insult to injury, the Republican budget allows to expire the additional benefits we put into the earned-income tax credit and the child tax credit. That, in effect, would mean a tax increase for over 10 million working families. We would be raising taxes on low-income workers while lowering taxes on billionaires. Those are not the priorities of the American people.

Madam President, I hope very much we will reject this budget.

I yield the floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source