Poverty and Inequality
Floor Speech
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Ms. DeLAURO. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman so very much for yielding. I so appreciate what he is accomplishing here this evening as to shine a light on the issue of poverty in this Nation. You know, we have searched and searched and searched over decades for what the antidote is to poverty and, particularly, child poverty.
I am often reminded--this might sound a little nerdy, but the Nobel laureate in economics, Joseph Stiglitz--and this is a paraphrase of what he said--that inequality is not the result of globalization or modernization, but it is the result of policy choices.
This body that we are blessed to serve in deals with policy choices, which means that we can have a profound effect on poverty, child poverty, and reducing that in our Nation.
I suppose I will just reflect and pick up a little on what Congressman Cohen said. The House passed a tax bill last week that would continue to exacerbate child poverty in the United States--public policy choices.
Madam Speaker, I say thank you to Mr. DeSaulnier for bringing us together tonight. As I stated last week, in good conscience, I couldn't vote for a deal that was so lopsidedly benefiting big corporations while failing to ensure a substantial tax cut to middle- and working-class families.
It was deeply inequitable. We have seen the greatest rise in inequality, and we have seen corporations make super profits at the expense of the consumer. For me, it was a mockery of who representative government works for.
Who are we here to support?
The bill delivers massive tax cuts for big corporations, and it denies middle-class families economic security that they had, and we were successful with, in the American Rescue Plan.
We were successful in having a child tax credit, and to be truthful, I started out wanting to make it permanent. I was told that it was too expensive; that it should be for 5 years. They said: No, it can't be for 5 years. What about 3 years? No, it can't be 3 years. I said: 1 year? I was asked: Will you take 1 year? Of course, with the expanded child tax credit, you received $3,000 for kids 6 to 17; $3,600 for 6 years and under, monthly benefits for a family, so I said yes.
Then I was also told, at that time: Rosa, once it is out there, it is not going to go away. It went away. It expired. We had a chance last week to redress that balance and bring it back, and in my view that was a missed opportunity.
Once again, it is their taking away, pulling the rug out from under working families, middle-class families, vulnerable families, and driving them into poverty, once again, because we had reduced the poverty rate.
That is what the bill did. Now, it has gone from 5.2 percent to 12.4 percent. Hunger has risen, and it went down when we had the child tax credit. The tax credit was the largest middle-class tax cut in history.
We got billions of dollars in tax relief for the wealthy and, the way I put it, pennies for the poor. That is what it is about.
If you want to talk about cost benefit, the child tax credit returns $8 for every dollar spent. Child poverty in the United States costs us a trillion dollars every year, and we would return 84 cents on the dollar to the taxpayer with the child tax credit.
You know, it is a vast giveaway to billionaires and corporations. Just a couple of examples. DISH Network, FedEx, Salesforce, T-Mobile, these corporations pay no Federal income tax under the Trump tax law.
Think about it for a second. Netflix will have a negative tax rate in 2024 and 2025 because of this tax bill. That means that they get money back. They pay no taxes. On top of that, in November 2023 they announced they would raise prices on subscribers, adding an extra $24 to $36 to what subscribers have to pay each year to maintain service. Yet, these same families will not see a child tax credit like they did under the American Rescue Plan.
It is absurd. Think about what people are telling you, my colleague in California and my colleague in Tennessee. Families today are living paycheck to paycheck. If something goes wrong, they can't make a $400 payment. That is what is going on in their lives. They are struggling to put food on the table, to pay their healthcare bills, to be able to get childcare. Groceries have skyrocketed. It is all there. Childcare has skyrocketed.
Corporate profits, though, were $3 trillion in 2023. They are not living paycheck to paycheck. They are going to take that money and buy back stock, which is what they have done in the past with this thing. It is our families that are bearing the brunt of inflation and high interest rates.
The child tax credit is the answer to child poverty in this country. It is a successful tool that lifted millions out of poverty literally overnight.
What has happened happened. We move forward, and we will continue to make the fight for a permanent child tax credit in this country because we know how successful it was. We know what it did for families. To the naysayers who said, one, we couldn't raise it to $3,000 or $3,600 and that we could never get it monthly, well, so be it, we did it, and it succeeded. There were those who said that people are going to dog it, they are not going to go to work, they are going to buy drugs with it.
There is data from the Columbia School of Social Policy that said people went to work because they could afford childcare, and they were able to use this money for essentials, necessities, to buy those groceries, and maybe for their kid they could send them on a class trip which they weren't able to do because they couldn't afford it in the past.
It is the best thing that we can do to improve the economic well- being and security of American families today. Let's bring back the largest middle class tax cut in the history of this country.
Mr. Speaker, we need to continue to shine the light that it is our public policy decisions that create inequity and inequality. Let's turn that around and deal with the policies that do turn that around. I can't thank the gentleman enough for putting together this Special Order.
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Ms. DeLAURO. Our Catholicism is rich with social justice, and I look at ``In God We Trust,'' and this body really needs to carry out social justice in a way that it doesn't do these days.
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Ms. DeLAURO. Amen. I thank my colleague.
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