The Budget

Floor Speech

THE BUDGET -- (Senate - March 06, 2008)

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, if one watches the Presidential campaign, one finds that virtually all of those who have run for President and those who remain in the campaign are talking about change, change, and change. While I think each of them may differ with the other as to exactly what they mean by change, what they are picking up is the very serious unhappiness of the American people in terms of the direction this country is going.

What people perceive and what the candidates are picking up on is that the middle class is shrinking. We have tens of millions of people who wake up in the morning, they go to the gas station, they are paying $3.20 for a gallon of gas. Home heating oil is soaring. In many cases, the wages of workers are going down. People are losing their health insurance. They are losing their pensions. They are seeing their jobs go to China and other low-wage countries. The people in our country do not feel good about the state of our economy. They want changes. They want to move this country in a different direction. Fundamentally, I believe, what they want is a new set of national priorities.

As my colleagues may know, this afternoon the Senate Budget Committee voted on and passed a new budget. This budget, appropriately enough, rejects President Bush's incredibly bad budget, which continues the process of providing huge tax breaks to people who don't need it and then cutting back on the needs of the middle class and working families in terms of massive cuts in Medicare, in Medicaid, eliminating completely the weatherization program, and cutting back significantly on LIHEAP at a time when the need for heating assistance is greater now than ever before. Altogether, it is a budget which puts money where we should not be putting money and cuts back on those programs which people desperately need.

Next week, as I understand it, the budget will be coming to the Senate floor. We will be debating the budget that was passed by the Budget Committee this afternoon. While I happen to believe the budget we passed was a good budget--certainly a major, major, major improvement over what President Bush gave us we can make significant improvements upon what we passed this afternoon. So I will be offering several amendments. The major one will essentially be asking the Senate to change the national priorities of this country and to begin responding to the millions of working families who know that something is wrong in America. They know that while poverty increases, while the middle class shrinks, the people on top have never had it so good. They know that ordinary people understand there is something strange when the wealthiest Nation in the history of the world cannot provide quality health care to all of its people; that our infrastructure is deteriorating before our very eyes; that we have the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world; that all over our country food shelves are being descended upon--not by unemployed people alone, not by disabled people, not by poor people but by people who are working 40 or 50 hours a week and can't afford with their wages to provide the nutrition their families need. People understand there is something deeply, deeply wrong in this country, and that we have to move in a new direction.

My amendment is very simple. It is going to give the Members of the Senate a very stark choice about whether we want change, about whether we want to move this country in a new direction. This is what it does. It couldn't be simpler. It says that at a time when the wealthiest people in this country have never had it so good since the 1920s in terms of a huge increase in their income, in terms of the fact that we now have by far the most unequal distribution of income and wealth of any major country, where the top 1 percent now earn more income than the bottom 50 percent, what we are saying is that it is time we rescind President Bush's tax breaks that go to people who make at least $1 million. That is the top three-tenths of 1 percent; 99.7 percent of the people would not be impacted by this amendment. It says: Let us rescind those tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, and when we do that, we will raise about $51 billion.

Now, what can we do with that $51 billion, and what does this amendment include? First, it says that since President Bush has been in office, we have had record-breaking deficits. We now have a $9 trillion national debt. We are fighting a war we are not paying for, but that our kids and our grandchildren will be paying for. So in this amendment, of the $51 billion we raise by rescinding tax breaks for millionaires, we are going to put $10 billion into deficit reduction. That leaves $41 billion.

This is what this amendment would do. It would provide $15 billion for special education. The Presiding Officer may remember that some years ago the Congress--the Government of the United States--made a commitment to school districts all over America and said: If you mainstream kids with disabilities, if you put them into public schools, if you treat them as every other kid, we will provide 40 percent of the cost of that special education. That is what the Government said. Unfortunately, the Government did not keep its word.

So what we see in Vermont--and I suspect in Colorado and all over the country--is the school districts are paying enormous sums of money out of local taxes, often regressive property taxes, to fund special education. All over America, what we are seeing is more and more kids, for whatever reason--and that is a long discussion we need to have--are having problems, are being seen as having special ed needs. It is an expensive proposition. We are saying, let's begin to keep our word to school districts all over America. Let's relieve the pressure of local property taxes. Let's put $15 billion into special education.

In addition, what this amendment would do is provide a $7 billion increase for Head Start. One of the great scandals in our Nation today is that we have the highest rate of childhood poverty--far higher than any other industrialized country; that working parents are finding it almost impossible to acquire quality, affordable child care; that Head Start openings are much greater than can be accommodated all over the country. We are saying Head Start is a program that works. It provides an opportunity for early childhood education for low-income kids.

Let's expand that program to make sure working families can take advantage of that program and let's put $7 billion into expanding Head Start.

We also, for the same reasons, put $2.2 billion into the child care and the development block grant program that will ensure every eligible family receives access to child care.

I know in my State--and, again, I suspect in most States in this country--people are being weighed down by very high local taxes, including regressive property taxes.

What this amendment does is provide $5 billion for school construction, modernization and repairs, to fix our crumbling schools. What this does is not only help local property taxes and not only help our school kids get modern buildings in which to learn, it also creates a lot of jobs as we rebuild one of the long neglected areas of our infrastructure, and that is our crumbling schools.

This amendment would also provide an additional $3 billion for LIHEAP, the Low-Income Heating Assistance Program. I just, this afternoon, spoke to the directors of various community action programs in the State of Vermont. In my State--and my State may be a little bit different than some because it gets pretty cold there. We have had 20 below zero weather in the last couple weeks. There is a real level of stress regarding the availability of LIHEAP because the cost of home heating fuels is soaring. There is just not that availability. There is not enough money in the LIHEAP fund. We would put $3 billion more into LIHEAP, which helps, by the way, not only low-income families and senior citizens in the wintertime in cold-weather States, but it helps other families in States where the weather gets to be 110 degrees.

As I mentioned earlier, in this great country, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, we must be embarrassed that we have large numbers of people who literally go hungry, who don't have enough food. That number is growing. I know Senator Harkin, among others, has called for a significant increase in the Food Stamp Program. That is exactly what we should be doing. This amendment would provide $5 billion for food stamps to make sure millions of families with kids have enough food to sustain them.

Lastly, this amendment would provide $3.8 billion to allow the special supplemental nutrition program for Women, Infants, and Children, the WIC Program, to provide nutritious food to over 4 million families. Kids whose mothers have good nutrition and good prenatal experience, obviously, will do better in life. We want to make sure the WIC Program has the resources they need.

So, ultimately, what this amendment is about is pretty simple: We say that in a time when millions of Americans, low- and moderate-income people, are in need, it is the obligation and the right of the U.S. Government to reach out and address those serious problems facing the middle-class and working families of our Nation. And at a time when the wealthiest people in this country have never had it so good and at the same time have been given huge tax breaks by the Bush administration, we say it is appropriate to rescind those tax breaks in order to help millions of people in need. That is what this amendment is about. It calls for a fundamental change in national priorities, and it moves this country in a very different and, I think, more moral direction. I look forward to the support of my colleagues for this amendment that we will offer as part of the budget debate.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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