[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 109 (Friday, June 30, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H6684-H6685]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                        WHY AMERICANS ARE ANGRY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Vermont [Mr. Sanders] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SANDERS. Madam Speaker, I want to just briefly this afternoon 
touch on two issues: One, maybe offer some explanation as to why the 
American people are so angry. We keep reading in the media about the 
angry white male, but I think it is not only the angry white male. A 
whole lot of people of all colors and ages are angry, and also on the 
floor of this House we hear a lot about class struggle. Class struggle. 
Let me say a word about that also if I might.

[[Page H6685]]

  Madam Speaker, I think that the average American is in fact angry, 
and I believe that that average American has every reason in the world 
to be angry. What concerns me is very often our anger is taken out 
against the wrong opponent. But let us focus on why we should be angry.
  Madam Speaker, in 1973, the United States reached a high point of its 
economic life with regard to the wages and benefits that middle-income 
and working people reached. Since that time, approximately 80 pecent of 
the American working people have seen either a decline in their 
standard of living or economic stagnation. That means after 20 years of 
hard work, those people have gone nowhere economically.
  Furthermore, what we are seeing is that the American worker, in order 
to compensate for the decline in his or her standard of living, is 
working longer hours. We are making lower wages. We are working longer 
hours. When you want to know why Americans are stressed out, why they 
are angry, why they are furious, we should understand that the average 
American today is working an extra 160 hours a year more in order to 
compensate for our falling standard of living.
  Now, if middle-income people and middle-aged people should be 
worried, they are working longer hours, they are making less money, 
what about the younger people? And that is where the economy in the 
United States today looks extremely frightening.
  The real wages of high school dropouts, that means people who did not 
graduate high school, plummeted 22 percent between 1973 and 1993.
  For high school graduates who are entering into the job market, there 
has also been a precipitous decline in those wages. So what is going on 
is that as the standard of living of American workers declined in 
general, for the young workers it is becoming even worse.
  But, Madam Speaker, we talk about increase in poverty in America, 
decline of the standard of living of American workers, the shrinking of 
the middle-class, the fact that 80 percent of our people are going 
nowhere economically except perhaps down. Is the economic crisis 
impacting all people? And the answer of course is no, it is not.
  One of the very scary and unfair and unjust aspects of the American 
economy right now is that in many ways we are becoming two nations. The 
New York Times a few months ago reported that the wealthiest 1 percent 
of our population now owns 40 percent of the wealth of America. The 
richest 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent.
  The gap between the rich and the poor is growing wider, and in fact 
it is today wider and we have a more unfair distribution of wealth than 
any other industrialized nation on Earth. For the richest people, these 
times are great times and we can understand why the columnists, who 
themselves make millions of dollars, or the owners of the TV stations 
are talking about a booming economy.
                              {time}  1445

  It is booming, if you are making a whole lot of money. It is not 
booming if you are a middle-income or working-class person.
  What I am also concerned about is that the nature of the new jobs 
that are being created are not only low-wage jobs, they are often part-
time jobs. What we are seeing now is a proliferation of part-time jobs 
because companies would rather pay two workers at 20 hours a week 
without benefits than one worker 40 hours a week with benefits.
  I wonder how many Americans know who the largest private employer is 
right now. People say, ``Well, maybe it is General Electric, maybe it 
is General Motors, IBM.'' Wrong. The largest private employer today is 
Manpower, Incorporated, which is a temporary agency.
  Very briefly, let me make some recommendations as to what we might 
want to do to address this very serious economic problem. No. 1, we 
have got to raise the minimum wage. Workers in America cannot continue 
to work for $4.25 an hour. That is why so many of our working people 
are living in poverty.
  No. 2, we need, in fact, a massive jobs training, jobs program, to 
rebuild this country. In my State of Vermont, all over America, there 
is an enormous amount of work to be done. Let us put people back to 
work at decent wages and rebuild this country.


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