[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 84 (Tuesday, June 10, 2003)]
[House]
[Page H5096]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[[Page H5096]]
      ELIMINATION OF THE CHILD TAX CREDIT FOR 12 MILLION CHILDREN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the order of the House of 
January 7, 2003, the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Loretta Sanchez) 
is recognized during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Ms. LORETTA SANCHEZ of California. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to talk 
about that sleight of hand that happened in the last few days when the 
Republicans put together the newest tax cut for the American people. At 
the time, they decided to eliminate the child tax credit for 12 million 
children here in the United States, because, of course, they had to 
find a way to pay for their tax cut for dividend earnings. One would 
say, so what? It is just 12 million children that we are not going to 
give the tax credit to their families for. But it was 12 million 
children of low-income families. That means that if they made somewhere 
between $10,000 and $26,000 as a family they would not get that child 
tax credit. People tell me all the time there is no possibility. They 
just cannot make $10,000 a year because $10,000 a year, they cannot 
live on that. Darn right. They cannot live on $10,000 a year.
  Let us look at what it takes to live when they are making minimum 
wage, minimum wage in Orange County, California, where I live. Let us 
say they live in Santa Ana and they are making minimum wage, and there 
are a lot of people who make minimum wage out there. Why? We have got 
Disneyland; we have got tourist attractions there. We have got the 
maids who make the bed when they come and stay in Anaheim. The 
dishwashers, the people who serve. We have the gardeners who are 
cleaning up everything, the janitors. They all make minimum wage; and 
they make no benefits, most of them.
  So minimum wage, and in California it is higher than the rest of the 
Nation. Our minimum wage is $6.15 an hour. Multiply that if they are 
going to work for 2,040 hours a week. That is working every week. That 
comes to less than $13,000 a year. But by the time just their payroll 
taxes get pulled out of that paycheck, they are taking home about 
$11,000. And let us say that they are a family of three, that they have 
got a child, that they go home to live in their one-bedroom rented 
apartment in Santa Ana, California, where the average rent is $950 a 
month. When they do all the math, they figure out that earning minimum 
wage means they can barely pay their apartment rent. That is not their 
utilities. It is not health care. It is not clothes for them or their 
children. It is not school books or supplies. It is not transportation 
to get to their job, and it is not food. It is not medicine. So, yes, 
it is very difficult to live on minimum wage where I live, but a lot of 
people do it. They are working hard every single day.
  I remember about a year ago we unionized our janitors there, and they 
had a contract that would pay $6.40 an hour. And the workers came to 
put in their bid of whether they were going to accept that contract or 
not, $6.40 an hour for cleaning toilets, cleaning toilet after toilet 
after toilet in a high-rise all night long every floor. Who do the 
Members think cleans those buildings? And they were voting on this, 
$6.40 an hour. That was the contract. One holiday a year and 5 sick 
days a year. There was this guy, this older gentleman who was crying as 
he put in his ``yes'' vote, and he said to me ``You know, 
Congresswoman, I have been a janitor here for 17 years. This is the 
first time that I will get a raise.''
  People live and they work very hard for these wages. So I hear the 
other side say it does not matter; we should not give people this tax 
credit. We need to give people that tax credit. What about the 200,000 
families that are in our military, some of them stationed in Iraq, 
having put their lives on the line who are not eligible for the child 
tax credit because the other side decided that they needed to give rich 
people more money? When we first discovered it and we started to talk 
about it, some said, oh, my God, we did not know. How could that 
happen? Someone just slipped it in. Nobody slipped it in. The White 
House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said it was a very well-known fact 
what they were doing and the White House knew about it.
  Let us pass the DeLauro bill. We have got to get money to the 
families who really need it.

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