Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

STATEMENTS ON INTRODUCED BILLS AND JOINT RESOLUTIONS -- (Senate - March 08, 2007)

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By Mr. SANDERS:

S. 818. A bill to expand the middle class, reduce the gap between the rich and the poor, keep our promises to veterans, lower the poverty rate, and reduce the Federal deficit by repealing tax breaks for the wealthiest one percent and eliminating unnecessary Cold War era defense spending, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Finance.

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, in several weeks, the Senate will begin its deliberations on the fiscal year 2008 budget resolution. It is my strong belief that the Senate must pass a budget that will expand the shrinking middle class, that will reduce the enormous and growing gap between the wealthy and the poor, that will keep our promises to our Nation's veterans, that will reduce our recordbreaking national debt and lower the poverty rate. That is what this Senate should be focusing on.

Simply stated, in my opinion, the way for us to move in that direction is to repeal the President's tax breaks that have been given to the wealthiest 1 percent, the people who need it the least and, in addition, for us to take a hard look at the Pentagon, take a hard look at the waste and the fraud and the unnecessary weapons systems that are existing in the Pentagon right now. We don't need weapons systems that were designed to fight the Soviet Union; we need an approach to fight al-Qaida.

I think we can find billions of dollars in savings when we look at the military budget as well. The bill I am introducing today, the National Priorities Act, will in fact accomplish these goals.

A budget is more than a long list of numbers.

A budget is a statement about our values, our priorities, and the time is long overdue for the United States Congress to get its priorities right, to begin to stand up for the middle class and working families of this country, rather than multinational corporations and the wealthiest people who, year after year after year, have so much power over this institution.

Let me do what is too rarely done on the floor of this Senate, and that is take a hard and cold look at the reality facing the American middle class and working families of this country.

As a member of the Budget Committee, every week we have somebody from the President's administration coming before us, and they tell us the economy is doing great; it is marvelous. The people of Vermont and the middle class of this country don't believe it because every single day they are seeing an economy which is forcing them, in many instances, to work longer hours for lower wages, an economy in which they wonder how their kids are going to get decent-paying jobs, an economy which suggests that for the first time in the modern history of our country, our children, if we do not change our direction, could have a lower standard of living than we do.

What the American dream has been about is that our parents worked hard so that we could have a better life than they did, and that is what we want for our kids. But unless we make fundamental changes in the way this economy is working, the likelihood is that our kids, despite a huge increase in worker productivity, despite technology, will have a lower standard of living than we do, and we must not allow that to happen.

Since President Bush has been in office, more than 5 million Americans have slipped into poverty. We are seeing an increase in the rate of poverty in the United States, including 1 million more children. Not only does the United States have the highest rate of poverty of any major country on Earth, we also, shamefully, have the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world.

I know there is a whole lot of talk about moral values on the floors of the Senate and the House. To my mind, having the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world is not a moral value. It is a disgrace. It is a shame. It is time we in this country paid attention to the children rather than the wealthiest people.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the childhood poverty rate is nearly 18 percent. Other studies suggest that it might be higher.

Some people say: Well, that's the way it goes. Well, that is not the way it goes among other major countries in the world. In Germany, the childhood poverty rate is 9 percent; in France, it is less than 8 percent; in Sweden, it is less than 7 percent; in Norway, 4.2 percent; in Finland, 3.4 percent. If other countries can have childhood poverty rates of less than 5 percent, so can the United States of America.

Just one example. Our allies in Great Britain made a commitment to end childhood poverty and they have reduced the childhood poverty rate by over 20 percent since 1999. At the same time, child poverty in the United States increased by 12 percent. If we make the commitment, we can do that.

Let's take a look at our health care situation. The costs of health care, as everybody in this country knows, are soaring. The number of people without health insurance has risen to a record high of 46.4 million in the year 2005. That is an increase of almost 7 million more Americans lacking health insurance since President Bush took office.

While the President continues to cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires, the lack of health insurance kills many more Americans each year than September 11 and Katrina combined. In fact, the National Academy of Sciences estimates that 18,000 Americans die each year because they lack health insurance.

In my view, the United States of America must join the rest of the industrialized world. We must guarantee health care to all of our people as a right of citizenship. While I know some people say we can't afford to do it, I would argue that at a time when we are spending more than twice as much per capita on health care as any major nation on Earth, we can do that. We can provide quality health care to every man, woman, and child as a right of citizenship without spending a nickel more than we are presently spending. But to do that, we must be honest. We are going to have to take on the insurance companies. We are going to have to take on the drug companies. We are going to have to take on the multinational corporations that benefit out of our health care system and say that when we spend money for health care, it should go to health care not for profiteering.

Health care is not just a human rights issue, it is not just a moral issue, it is an economic issue as well. Small businesses cannot survive if they are forced to pay huge increases in health care premiums each and every year. That is true in the State of Vermont. That is true all over America. More and more small businesses are simply saying: We can't do it; we can't provide health insurance to our workers--which is one of the reasons the number of uninsured is going up.

In addition to the health care crisis, there is an area within health care that I want to focus a lot of attention on, and that is the crisis in dental care. In rural America, in rural Vermont it is becoming very difficult for people to find a dentist. The Surgeon General has reported that tooth decay has become the single most common chronic childhood disease, five times more common than asthma and seven times more common than hay fever.

I will be introducing legislation to address the dental crisis in this country. I do not want to see kids in schools have teeth rotting in their mouths. We can do better than that.

In terms of education, millions of middle-class American families are finding it increasingly difficult to afford the escalating cost of a college education with average tuition and other costs increasing by more than $4,300 at a 4-year public university and over $8,000 at a 4-year private college since 2001.

We all understand that young people are not going to make it into the middle class unless they get a college education. We all understand that our Nation is not going to be economically competitive if our young people do not get the best college education they possibly can. Yet all over our country, middle-class families are saying: How am I going to be able to afford to send my kids to college? And young people are graduating college on average about $20,000 in debt. If they are lower income, they may come out of college $30,000, $40,000 in debt.

If we are serious in what we say about the importance of education, we have to make college education affordable to every family in this country. We don't want to lose the intellectual capital of millions of young people who are sitting there wondering: Can I afford to go to college? Do I want to come out of college deeply in debt?

Last year, 35 million Americans in our country, the richest country in the history of the world, struggled to put food on the table--struggled to put food on the table. The Agriculture Department recently reported that the number of the poorest, hungriest Americans keeps going up.

What is going on in this great country when more and more of our fellow Americans are going hungry and are struggling to put food on the table? This should not be happening in America. But it is not only hunger, we have an affordable crisis in housing as well. Today millions of working Americans are paying 50 to 60 percent of their limited incomes to put a roof over their heads, and we have families in the United States of America--families--who are sleeping in their cars, children who are sleeping in cars, and we have people, as we all know, who continue to sleep out on the streets of cities and towns all over America.

Last year, there were 1.2 million home foreclosures in this country, an increase of 42 percent since 2005.

When we talk about the needs of the middle class, it is not just affordable housing. The issue of energy is a prominent issue that must be addressed. The cost of energy has risen rapidly. Since President Bush has been in office, oil prices have more than doubled and gasoline prices have gone up by 70 percent since January of 2001, and gas prices are soaring as I speak. In rural States, such as my State of Vermont, such as Minnesota, workers get into their cars, they fill up their gas tanks, and suddenly they are finding that increased cost is coming right out of their paycheck. They are not making much more money. The cost of gas is going up.

In America today, the bottom line is that millions of American workers are working longer hours for lower wages. The median income for working-age families has declined 5 years in a row. Husbands are working long hours, wives are working long hours, kids in high school are working trying to make ends meet, and in many instances people are falling further and further behind.

Today, incredible as it may sound, the personal savings rate in America is below zero, and that has not happened since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In other words, all over this country, working people and people in the middle class are purchasing groceries and other basic necessities with their credit cards and are going, in the process, deeper and deeper in debt.

Over the past 6 years, when we talk about the economy and decent-paying jobs, we should recognize that as a nation, we have lost 3 million manufacturing jobs which often pay people good wages and good benefits. In my own small State of Vermont, we have lost 10,000 manufacturing jobs in the last 6 years, which is 20 percent of the manufacturing jobs in our small State.

The reality is that if somebody loses their manufacturing job and they are lucky enough to find another job, in most cases, that other job will pay substantially lower wages and have worse benefits than the manufacturing job they have lost.

Today, 3 million fewer American workers have pension coverage than when President Bush took office, and half of private sector American workers have no pension coverage whatsoever. I have long been involved in the struggle to make sure that workers have been able to retain the pensions that were promised to them by their employers. But we are seeing more and more workers who have enormous pension anxiety: Is the pension that was promised to me 20 years ago when I began to work in this company going to be there when I need it, when I retire? More and more workers are finding that will not be the case.

One thing we do not often talk about is just how hard the people in our country are working. We kind of forget about that. But the fact is, the people, working people in this country, now work the longest hours of any people in the industrialized world. In my State of Vermont, it is absolutely not uncommon to see people who are working not one job, not two jobs, but on occasion working three jobs trying to cobble together an income, trying to cobble together some health care for their families. People are working 50 hours, 60 hours, 70 hours.

The New York Times reported a while back that the idea of the 2-week paid vacation is becoming something of history. So we have people who are working 51 weeks a year, and there are people working 52 weeks a year. That is what is going on in the middle class and working families of our country.

The reason I raise these issues is that it is terribly important to bring a dose of reality to the floor of the Senate.

When the President tells us the economy is doing great, the truth is that he is right, in one sense. The economy is not doing well for the middle class. It is not doing well for working families. Poverty is increasing. But the President is right when he says the economy is doing well for the wealthiest people in this country. That is true. The rich are getting richer, the middle class is shrinking, and poverty is increasing. That is the reality.

The reality is that the upper 1 percent of the families in America today, that 1 percent has not had it so good since the 1920s. According to Forbes magazine, the collective net worth of the wealthiest 400 Americans increased by $120 billion last year to $1.25 trillion. The 400 wealthiest Americans are worth $1.25 trillion.

Sadly, the United States today--and I know we don't talk about this too much, but it is important to bring it out on the table--the United States today has, by far, the most unequal distribution of wealth of any major country on Earth and the most unequal distribution of income of any major country on Earth, and that gap between the rich and everybody else is growing wider. Today, the wealthiest 13,000 families in America earn nearly as much income as the bottom 20 million, and the wealthiest 1 percent own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. Let me repeat that: 13,000 families earn almost as much income as the bottom 20 million, and the richest 1 percent own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. That trend is very dangerous for our country. It suggests we are moving in the direction of an oligarchy, where a small number of people have incredible wealth and, with that wealth, incredible power, at the same time as the vast majority of our people are struggling just to keep their heads above water. We as a nation can do a lot better than that.

According to a December 2006 report by the Congressional Budget Office, the average after-tax income of the wealthiest 1 percent of households rose from $722,000 in 2003 to $868,000 in 2004. After adjusting for inflation, that is a 1-year increase of nearly $146,000, or 20 percent. This represents the largest increase in 15 years measured both in percentage terms and in real dollars.

Now, what does that mean in English? What it means in English is that the wealthiest people in this country are doing phenomenally well, that is what it means, while a lot of other people are struggling very hard to keep their families afloat.

Why have I given this overview of the state of the economy? I have given this overview because I believe we need a budget that begins to address the realities I have just discussed. We need a budget that says to the middle class and working families and low-income Americans: We know you are hurting; we are on your side. At the same time, we need a budget that says to the very wealthiest people in this country: You know what, you are part of America, too. Your incomes are soaring. If you are a CEO of a large corporation, you are making 400 times what the worker in your company is making. You know what, we want you to be part of America, and you have to make some sacrifices so the people in this country don't go hungry and so working-class kids can get a college education. Join America. Don't be separate with your huge incomes.

The President has just, as you know, introduced his budget. He has told us that in his budget, the United States does not have enough money to meet the health care needs of this country. His response is to inadequately fund the Children's Health Insurance Program and to cut Medicare and Medicaid by $280 billion over the next decade.

The President has told us we don't have enough money to take care of our veterans, and we all have seen recently what has been going on at Walter Reed Hospital. The President has said that despite the fact that we have 22,000 wounded in Iraq and that we have veterans on waiting lists all over this country, we just don't have the money to take care of our veterans.

The President has told us we don't have enough money for childcare; we don't have enough money for dental care; we don't have enough money for special education; we don't have enough money to address the crisis in global warming; we don't have enough money to make sure qualified students have access to a quality education without going deeply into debt.

The President has told us we don't have enough money to fully fund Head Start, that we don't have enough money to expand the earned income tax credit.

That is what the President has told us.

The President, in his budget, has also told us something else. The President has said we don't have enough money for the needs of the middle class and working families, but we do have enough money to provide $70 billion in tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent and that we really don't have to take a hard look at the Pentagon and all the waste, the fraud, and the unnecessary weapons systems that are in that institution.

In my view, these upside-down priorities have to be changed, and that is the responsibility of this Senate. The bill I am introducing today will begin to turn our national priorities in a very different direction from that which the President is suggesting.

The National Priorities Act will repeal tax breaks for the wealthiest 1 percent in 2008 and eliminate $60 billion in waste, fraud, and abuse at the Pentagon and use that money to do the following. In other words, what we are doing is we are going to ask our wealthy friends who have received huge tax breaks to start paying a little bit more in taxes. We are going to ask the Pentagon to take a hard look at their huge budget and eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse. We are going to be raising about $130 billion to do that.

Now, let me tell you what we can do with that $130 billion. We can provide health care services for over 4 million Americans by increasing investments in federally qualified health centers and by raising funds substantially for the National Health Service Corps. In my State and all over America, federally qualified health centers are providing cost-effective quality health care to millions of people. By increasing funding and expanding these programs, putting more money into these programs, we can provide high-quality health care, dental care, mental health counseling, and low-cost prescription drugs, and we can do it in a cost-effective way. We can make a serious effort to provide primary health care to every man, woman, and child in this country. That is what we can do.

We can expand access to dental care. By providing $140 million more for workforce, capital, and equipment needed, we can address in a significant way the dental care crisis in this country.

We can provide health insurance to over 8 million children not covered by expanding the CHIP program, Children's Health Insurance Program, by over $15 billion. In my State of Vermont, almost all of our kids have health insurance. The rest of our country should move in that direction. It is not acceptable that children in America do not have health insurance. We can do that through this legislation.

We can address the crisis in terms of inadequate funding in the VA and make sure that all of our veterans get the health care they were promised, the health care they deserve. That is what this budget does.

We also, in this budget, ensure that working families with children have access to affordable childcare by increasing investments in the childcare development block grant by over $2 billion. It is a national outrage that all over this country working families cannot find good, quality affordable childcare. Single moms are going off to work, and they are worried. They worry deeply about the quality of care their children are receiving. It is a major crisis. This legislation provides the funds to address that crisis.

Head Start has been a successful program. This legislation provides the funding to allow every qualified child in America to receive early education, nutrition, and health services by fully funding the Head Start Program.

In my State of Vermont and, again, all over this country, higher and higher property taxes are causing very serious problems for middle-class families, splitting communities apart. This legislation will lower property taxes by keeping the Federal commitment to provide 40 percent of the cost of special education for about 7 million children with disabilities. Mainstreaming kids with disabilities is a good idea. It is the right thing to do. The Federal Government has not kept the promises it has made to school districts all over this country. We have to increase funding substantially for special education, not, as the President wants, cut funding for special education. This bill does that.

This bill provides an additional 330,000 students with Pell grants and increases its purchasing power for over 5.4 million other students by doubling the maximum Pell grant. In other words, we want our young people to be able to go to college. We do not want them to come out in debt. This legislation does that.

This legislation instills low-income high school students with the skills and opportunity they need to go to college by increasing the TRIO and GEAR UP education programs by 50 percent.

This legislation creates more than 200,000 jobs by increasing investments in renewable energy, energy-efficient appliances, public transportation, and high-speed rail. By making our environment cleaner, by attacking and reversing global warming, we can create hundreds of thousands of jobs. That is what this legislation does.

This legislation addresses the crisis in affordable housing by creating 180,000 jobs in constructing, preserving, and rehabilitating affordable housing rental units.

This legislation reduces taxes by $400 to $1,134 per year for 10 million American workers and families with children by expanding the earned-income tax credit.

This legislation reduces the deficit by $30 billion.

To be very honest, I do not expect this legislation to be passed tomorrow, probably not even the next day. What this legislation is doing, though, is providing the Congress with a blueprint, and it is a very simple blueprint. It says: Which side are you on? It says that when those people who come before us and say: Yes, we understand there is a health care crisis; we just can't afford to do anything about it; we understand there is a childcare crisis, there is a housing crisis, there is a crisis in terms of the affordability of higher education, but we just can't do anything about it. We just don't have the money. What this legislation does is say: Yes, we do have the money. We do have the money if we rescind the tax breaks that go to millionaires and billionaires, if we ask the Pentagon to preserve, to make sure we continue to have all the resources we need for our soldiers and the strongest military in the world but take a hard look at waste, fraud, abuse, and weapons systems we don't need. If you do those two things, we can come up with $130 billion. With that $130 billion, we can address the major problems facing our country, and we can lower our deficit.

I hope that my fellow colleagues will give serious thought to this legislation and that we can move it forward.

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