[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 91 (Wednesday, June 19, 1996)]
[House]
[Page H6627]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       THE SHRINKING MIDDLE CLASS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Washington [Mr. Metcalf] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. METCALF. Mr. Speaker, there is a rising tide of despair and 
growing resentment all across this Nation. The American dream is being 
snuffed out for more and more American families.
  This is directly related to the decline of the middle class. The rich 
are getting richer, but the middle class is being assaulted today by 
the flight of family wage jobs overseas, by high taxes, by the 
disparity of income between the rich and the middle class. The middle 
class has shrunk, as many families no longer have the income to buy a 
home, save money for their children's education or prepare for their 
retirement.
  The number of millionaires is dramatically increasing. That is great, 
unless at the same time more people fall out of the middle class to 
become the working poor, descending into poverty.
  Many say that the Republican Party is the party of the rich. I say 
this Republican Congress is the party with the duty to resurrect the 
middle class.
  My dad quit school and went to work at age 16 on his first job for $1 
a day. That was the pay, $1 a day on his first job. Just 10 years 
later, he made enough working in a mill in Marysville to support a 
family, built his own house and, 2 years after that, to build his own 
small commercial fishing boat. And all that was paid for at that time.
  Today with both husband and wife working, many families cannot get 
ahead. They are caught in a cycle of what we have to call the working 
poor. We must ask ourselves, what is happening to America? What is 
happening to the American dream? What is the cause? Is it the flood of 
immigrants who are desperate, who will work for anything, pennies, just 
to get to live in America? Is it the giant multinational cartels of 
this era? Is the Government wasteful and inefficient? Is it the former 
Congresses who voted us $5 trillion of debt? Is it the interest on that 
debt that now costs hundreds of billions of dollars each year just to 
pay the interest, hundreds of billions of dollars each year?
  I believe this Congress has no more important duty than to find out 
what went wrong, to report to the American people exactly what went 
wrong and the steps American must take to fix it.

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