[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 21 (Tuesday, February 6, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H489-H494]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         POVERTY AND INEQUALITY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Ms. Hageman). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 9, 2023, the gentleman from California (Mr. 
DeSaulnier) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the 
minority leader.


                             General Leave

  Mr. DeSAULNIER. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all 
Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their 
remarks and include extraneous material on this Special Order.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the 
gentleman from California?
  There was no objection.
  Mr. DeSAULNIER. Madam Speaker, 6 years ago, I held a Special Order on 
a subject matter that I think is extremely important to this country 
and the developed world, the issue of growing inequality. It has been 4 
years since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and it is more relevant now 
than ever because, unfortunately, it has gotten worse.
  The concentration of wealth in the United States of America is not 
fair, it is not American, and it is driving multiple social and 
behavioral health issues that more and more research points to and 
verifies.
  The pandemic has laid bare the deep disparities that exist in the 
United States and worsened the gap between the richest and poorest 
Americans, and it has helped eviscerate in many ways the American 
middle class.
  The President has tried his very best and, in the 2 years that 
Democrats had control of both Houses and the President was in the White 
House, we did much to begin to change this rising tide of inequality. 
Rising inequality incurs costs that harm us all, but not just those at 
the bottom of the income distribution; it hurts America.
  Next to me is a statistical diagram of the Gini quotient that is 
accepted by economists around the world as the best statistical 
measurement for inequality. As you can see, just since 1993, it has 
steadily gone up with the pandemic at the end.
  I am pleased to have a couple of my colleagues and friends to be here 
to speak on this. I yield to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Cohen) 
to make a few comments.
  Mr. COHEN. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I am 
pleased to join you because this is such an important topic and a topic 
that I have been talking about for a long time.
  The income inequality in our country has grown and grown, and the tax 
cuts of Donald Trump, which I voted against, contributed to it 
greatly--tax cuts that gave the wealthy much more money, corporations 
and individuals, and did not help the poor and didn't really help the 
middle class much.
  My district is in Memphis, Shelby County and Tipton County, just 
north of Memphis. Because of that, I am no stranger to high levels of 
poverty and inequality.
  According to the 2023 Poverty Fact Sheet by the University of 
Memphis, 21.4 percent of Memphians live in poverty. The overall poverty 
rate for Black and Latino Memphians is almost double that of White and 
Caucasian residents; roughly 27 percent for Black and Latino residents, 
compared to 10 percent of Whites.
  The child poverty rate is 32.7, a number that has been declining in 
recent years due to the child tax credits, but still far too high, and 
we don't know how much the child tax credits will be available to 
people this coming year.
  In 2022, the child poverty rate in African-American and Latino 
communities was three times that of White families, 30 percent to 10. 
What hope does that give young African-American and Latino children?
  The root causes of poverty often come down to access and opportunity. 
Childhood poverty is directly related to the financial status of the 
children's parents.

  Many young adults in Memphis have parents and grandparents who are 
prohibited from buying houses in certain areas, redlining, which is 
still a practice in Memphis, and has been highlighted recently when one 
of the banks in Memphis was charged with such and pled guilty to such, 
I believe. That has restricted access to home loans and mortgage 
protections, as well.
  Because of redlining, many families did not have the opportunity to 
buy desirable houses. These policies were legal until 1968, so it is 
not ancient history.
  The impact of redlining continues as many families were unable to 
build generational wealth.
  Now, poor families need access to services like citywide internet, 
subsidized childcare, and supportive mortgage rates.
  And we tried to do some of those things, but unfortunately, it has 
not been a bipartisan effort. It has mostly been an effort by 
Democrats.
  Tennessee is nationally ranked as a low-tax State, but that is not 
the case for the poorest families. The taxes are regressive. It is a 
sales tax-dependent State that taxes the poor in the most regressive 
manner.
  The poorest 20 percent of Tennessee residents pay a significantly 
higher percentage of their income in State and local taxes than any 
other group in the State.
  Low-income families are paying high amounts of taxes, while at the 
same time receiving lower levels of access to services and 
opportunities for economic mobility. Tennessee remains one of the 10 
remaining States that have not expanded Medicaid. That is truly 
sorrowful and immoral.
  If Tennessee were to expand, as 40 other States and the District of 
Columbia have, lower earning workers would have access to affordable 
healthcare, and their families would worry less about the impacts of 
seeking treatment for an illness.
  A billion-plus dollars a year have been turned down by our State 
legislature because they don't care about taking care of the poor.
  Matthew 25 talks about healing. I saw people that were naked, and I 
clothed them. I saw people that were hungry, and I fed them. I saw 
people who were sick, and I healed them.
  Some people say they live by the Bible. If you want to know where my 
politics are just look to the Bible. Well, some of those people who 
speak it the most don't know Matthew 25.
  Measures combating childhood poverty and closing the income/wealth 
gap among diverse groups are vital in my district, enough to make more 
progress on the issue.
  I will continue advocating for the child tax credit, which Ms. 
DeLauro has championed, encouraging Tennessee to expand Medicaid, 
seeking additional funds for education and job training, and supporting 
other policies to help those in need.
  Madam Speaker, I thank Mr. DeSaulnier for having the moral courage 
and the will to bring this Special Order to the people that are 
watching. It is an important issue, and it pains me to see our country 
becoming more and more divided.
  Mr. DeSAULNIER. Mr. Speaker, I will now yield to the gentlewoman from 
Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro), who was someone who spoke at my first effort 
at this, the very esteemed ranking member of the Appropriations 
Committee.
  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,

[[Page H490]]

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.

                              {time}  1930

  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.
  Mr. DeSAULNIER. Mr. Speaker, some people on the other side accuse us 
of socialism. The gentlewoman and I learned our rosary in our Catholic 
and Christian upbringing. It was about the social contract of St. 
Matthew, and in the Bible it says: To those who much is given, much is 
expected.
  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.
  Mr. DeSAULNIER. You can have individual responsibility in this 
country, and you can have social responsibility. That is when we have 
been the most successful.
  When Eisenhower was President, when the middle class was strong and 
the union movement was strong, people got the GI Bill, and he 
implemented in his own way what Franklin Roosevelt put together. That 
is when this economy was the best. It was growing at over 6 percent GDP 
year over year, and it was benefiting everybody.
  I tell you, one of the things that brought me to this was when I was 
a Republican restaurant owner, you would read in the trade journals 
about disposable income. This is our friend Bob Reich's argument and 
Stiglitz' argument: If you don't have disposable income, it hurts 
everybody.
  Unfortunately, now people in places like the Roosevelt Institute, our 
friends, say that, no, more and more the top 1 percent is just selling 
to themselves and gaining themselves off.
  As Thomas Piketty has said, the inevitability in Western history, 
when you get to this level of inequality, is social disruption and 
civil distress. If we don't fix it here, we will have more of what 
happened a few years ago outside this Chamber.
  Ms. DeLAURO. Amen. I thank my colleague.
  Mr. DeSAULNIER. Madam Speaker, I am going to go through my 
presentation, but I do want to thank my two colleagues. There may be 
one or two others on the way.
  I will start by talking about poverty in America. I am going to date 
myself again. Michael Harrington, ``The Other America,'' talked about 
poverty over 50 years ago about how people in rural America were 
suffering, but we had the optics of how well people were doing in 
places where we are fortunate enough where many of us live, but it was 
rural America that Michael Harrington talked about. Again, he was 
talking about the social contract in the Gospel of Matthew.
  Nearly 40 million people, or 11 percent of the U.S. population, lived 
in poverty in 2021. One in three Americans live in a household making 
$55,000 or less, and while many of them are technically above the 
official poverty line, they are still struggling to make ends meet, 
that $400 in unexpected expense.
  In 2019, the U.S. child poverty rate was double that of our peer 
nations including Germany, Canada, and South Korea. The relief we 
delivered to families during the pandemic made a massive impact on 
people's lives, including the leadership of Ms. DeLauro. The expanded 
child tax credit, which she mentioned, robust unemployment insurance, 
and emergency rental assistance all helped to keep families afloat 
during unprecedented economic hardship in an international pandemic.
  Now we are coming out of it, and those funds are going away. They did 
their intended purpose, but now we are at a tipping point.

[[Page H491]]

  The expanded child tax credit alone led to a stunning reduction in 
child poverty. This effort, spearheaded by my good friend Ms. DeLauro, 
kept 5.3 million people above the poverty line. Between 2020 and 2021, 
the child poverty rate plunged to 4.5 percentage points. As Ms. DeLauro 
said, they weren't spending this on anything but trying to survive--
provide shelter, transportation, and get to work--for their family and 
their kids.
  After House Republicans allowed the child tax credit to expire, the 
poverty rate for children more than doubled, from the historic low of 
5.2 percent in 2021 to 12.4 percent the next year. If the child tax 
credit had been sustained at the levels from the pandemic, 3 million 
additional American children would have been kept out of poverty. I 
wonder what they are doing this evening.
  According to the analysis of the Center for Budget and Policy 
Priorities, with the child tax credit in 2021, in 6 months we reduced 
child poverty by almost half.
  Mr. Speaker, we know how to do this. We know what works. We just have 
to invest and prioritize, lifting up the most vulnerable people amongst 
us. What will they do? The vast majority will work and be honorable and 
take that money for a very high return on investment for all of us.
  Wealth distribution. As you can see in this chart, data from the 
Congressional Budget Office shows that from 1989 to 2019, the total 
wealth held by families in the top 10 percent increased by 240 percent, 
from about $24 trillion to $82 trillion, while the wealth held by 
families in other percentiles increased far more slowly or even 
remained flat.
  Wealth is skewed to the top of the wealth distribution in the United 
States of America. Families in the top 10 percent of distribution have 
held more than two-thirds of all wealth, and families in the bottom 
half of the distribution held only 2 percent of total wealth.
  I, like most Americans, want people to be compensated for their 
creativity, for their innovation and hard work, but this distribution 
punishes 90 percent of the American public and even higher when you get 
deeper into the numbers.
  The total wealth held by American families tripled from 1989 to 2019, 
but the growth was far from uniform for everyone. Over those three 
decades, 30 years, families in the top 10 percent saw their share of 
wealth increase by around 30 percent.
  For families in the bottom half of the wealth distribution, their 
share declined from 4 percent to just 2 percent. Even before the 
pandemic started, which we know has worsened this, the concentration of 
wealth among those at the very top has gotten significantly worse.
  This is not about class warfare. This is about fighting for all of 
us. This has been true in our history. When we went through the gilded 
age, a similar thing happened. We had the Depression and two World 
Wars. Who fought those wars? Who fought to try to get back so that they 
could take care of their families? Not the wealthiest, but most 
Americans who are going out and working hard to get a paycheck.
  As Ms. DeLauro said, unfortunately, history is repeating itself, and 
my fear is coming out of the pandemic, even with our growth, even with 
what the President has done, with unemployment at historic lows and 
wages coming up, it is not enough. We have to change this, and it 
should be on a bipartisan, analytical basis in this House and in this 
Congress.
  What we have done has had real impacts on those who were left out. It 
is not just that those at the top are better off than everyone else, as 
the richest among us are able to concentrate their wealth. They lock 
away their money in investments that research shows never gets spent in 
the economy. Middle-income people spend their money. They consume. They 
go to restaurants. That is better for everybody. With wealthier people, 
as researched by Stiglitz and others, that wealth is generally retained 
in that group of people, and it is even more so. It is becoming more 
concentrated as they spend money amongst themselves and leave everyone 
else out.
  As inequality increases, it becomes more difficult for those not born 
into privilege to climb the ladder and build a better life, further 
enriching and growing inequality. This country is supposed to be merit 
and hard work and equality of opportunity. We are doing the opposite 
right now in this country, and it is because of policies here.

  Let's talk about worker compensation. This is not worker compensation 
as when you get injured, although that should be better, this is wages 
versus capital. In Lincoln's first address to Congress before the Civil 
War when he was trying to hold the country together, he famously said: 
Wages--labor, in his word--and capital must always be equal and 
balanced in the United States for if capital ever becomes dominant, we 
have lost democracy.
  Despite working harder, despite being more educated, despite being 
more productive, the wages of most American workers have grown 
exceptionally slowly compared to the growth in productivity compared to 
the CEO compensation. For the last 40 years, the gap between 
productivity and worker compensation--wages--has increased 
significantly. Americans are working in a more productive fashion. They 
are working more productively versus their international competitors, 
but they are not seeing their wages go up, and their disposable income 
sacrifice is even more.
  A typical worker's wage growth has lagged far behind gains in 
productivity over that time. The idea that if you worked harder and 
were more productive, individual merit and responsibility is not borne 
out in the research and the numbers.
  If we look at this graph, we can see productivity has grown by nearly 
62 percent over the last 40 years, but the average hourly pay of the 
typical worker grew by only 17 percent. This gap makes the difference 
between people being compensated fairly in their wages versus people 
who have the good fortune to be able to invest in capital, and this is 
what Lincoln was talking about.
  Put simply, workers are more productive than ever before but are not 
properly compensated for it. Until the late 1970s, workers' 
compensation--wages--climbed together with productivity, but then it 
began to change and diverge. It diverges when we abandon the policies 
that prioritize spreading the benefits of growth to workers, to all 
Americans, wealthy and middle-income, instead of what we are doing now. 
It benefited from a strong labor movement.
  President Eisenhower once famously said: Only a fool would try to 
keep an American worker from joining a labor union. President 
Eisenhower said that.

                              {time}  1945

  CEO pay: Another contributor to rising inequality is rising CEO pay. 
This is an ongoing issue, but it is something we have really seen 
balloon over the last 3 years. While so many hardworking Americans have 
struggled to make ends meet during the pandemic, some CEOs are making 
more money than ever.
  The average top CEO compensation in 2022 was $25.2 million, and it 
continues to increase even as low-income Americans and middle-income 
Americans are forced to make do with wages that, year after year, 
afford them less in terms of purchasing power.
  In 2022, CEOs were paid 344 times as much as a typical worker. The 
ratio of CEO to typical compensation was 344 to 1. In 1989, that ratio 
was 59 to 1. In the fifties and sixties, it was even lower. In 1965, it 
was 21 to 1.
  I have introduced the CEO Accountability and Responsibility Act, 
which would increase corporate taxes on companies with extreme 
disparities between their CEO and their workers' pay.
  We need bold proposals like this one to help put an end to runaway 
corporate greed and restore the balance of power back to workers--a 
balance, as Lincoln said.
  Stock buybacks: Over the last 40 years, tax laws, regulatory changes, 
court decisions, and new corporate behaviors have led to shareholder-
first corporations--that is the corporate veil they hide behind--where 
CEOs and managers focus on share price and investors, directing 
corporate funds to shareholder payouts.
  Corporate profits or even corporate debt may have once funded 
innovative new projects in research and development, new hires, worker 
wages, or, like the Germans do, reinvested in continuous training back 
in the community

[[Page H492]]

colleges and apprenticeship programs for a lifetime of learning for 
workers and craftsmen.
  In the 1960s and 1970s, 40 cents was invested for every dollar a 
company earned or borrowed. Since the 1980s, less than 10 cents of each 
borrowed dollar is invested that way.
  Instead, executives are using the profits to pay themselves and their 
wealthy shareholders. Over the past 30 years, payouts to wealthy 
shareholders have averaged 90 percent of all corporate profits. We need 
Robin Hood.
  This has led to skyrocketing use of stock buybacks, when companies 
purchase back their own stock from shareholders in an open market and 
reabsorb the ownership that was previously sold to other investors.
  The use of stock buybacks was essentially banned except under rare 
circumstances until Ronald Reagan and his Securities and Exchange 
Commission in 1982, a strategy for companies to artificially raise 
their open market stock prices and boost earnings per share.
  In 1982, during the Reagan administration, the Securities and 
Exchange Commission passed a rule that deregulated buybacks, allowing 
companies to buy their own stock without being charged with stock 
manipulation, and incentivizing them, as Ms. DeLauro said, to avoid 
taxes.
  Where did those taxes go? Not to all of us but back to the top 1 
percent and their investors. Again, Lincoln: Wages and capital should 
be balanced.
  The increased stock prices do not reflect an actual improvement in 
the processes of the company and may serve as a cover for financial 
difficulties in the long run.
  This is why I think Republicans and Democrats should be concerned--
perhaps for different reasons and motivations--but the underlying rot 
in our economy is a problem, as exemplified by Thomas Piketty and as he 
illustrated in his detailed history of other economies when this 
happened around the world.
  Stock buybacks are just an excuse for companies to reward 
stockholders and increase dividends while avoiding employee wages and 
compensation and investments back into their companies.
  In an investigation of 449 companies listed on the S&P from 2003 to 
2012, companies used 54 percent of earnings to buy back their own stock 
and 37 percent on dividends of those earnings.
  The increased use of stock buybacks by corporations is a way that 
companies pad their profits and their mediocre corporate management and 
support their executives at the expense of all of us and their workers.
  Over the last 5 years, the top 20 S&P 500 companies spent a 
staggering $1.24 trillion buying back their own shares.
  Last year, Chevron, which is headquartered in my district, said it 
would triple its budget for stock buybacks from $75 billion, and Meta, 
the parent of Facebook, which is near my district in the bay area, 
unveiled a $40 billion buyback.
  The Brookings Institute looked at the actions of 22 iconic American 
corporations that alone employ over 7 million frontline workers, 
including the world's most popular brands in retail, delivery, and 
entertainment sectors like Amazon, Disney, FedEx, Home Depot, and 
Hilton.
  In the first 2 years of the pandemic, they earned even more. In that 
time period, company shareholders at these companies grew $1.5 trillion 
richer while workers got less than 2 percent of the benefit.
  $1.5 trillion and 2 percent of the benefit for their workforce 
doesn't sound like what Lincoln wanted. They spent nearly 40 percent of 
their profit on stock buybacks.
  Rising shareholder payouts are linked with declining employee 
compensation and increased income inequality. Gains of stock buybacks 
are also concentrated amongst the already uber-wealthy. Around 58 
percent of American households own stock. That is good. About 93 
percent of households' stock market wealth is held by the top 10 
percent.
  While our investment in good, strong pensions and retirement--I am 
proud to be the ranking member on the Subcommittee on Health, 
Employment, Labor, and Pensions of the Education and the Workforce 
Committee. Those investments in everybody's pensions are good. They 
benefit everybody.
  The problem is, most of those investments are going to the wealthiest 
among us, and it creates risk for all of us when this stops and is not 
handled appropriately for everyone's benefit.

  An analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies showed that the 
richest 10 percent of U.S. households own roughly $42.7 trillion in 
stock market wealth, and the richest 1 percent own $25 trillion.
  The bottom half of households own less than half a trillion dollars. 
The top 1 percent owns $25 trillion in the stock market, just 1 percent 
of stock market wealth. Sad.
  Corporations are spending more and more of their net incomes on 
buybacks rather than innovation and capital improvements and 
compensating their workers well for more productivity and, ultimately, 
more innovation and more disposable income for people like myself when 
I was in the restaurant business to go out and support those other 
jobs.
  Corporations are spending more and more of their net income for 
buybacks in recent years to enrich their executives and their 
shareholders. It comes at a real cost for their employees who have 
decidedly not seen the same kind of increases in their take-home pay, 
their disposable income, or their ability to go out and consume and 
take care of their kids.
  Labor unions and strikes: Workers across industries are fed up with 
lagging wages and the benefits that are disproportionately given to the 
top 1 percent.
  This year, more workers are recognizing their collective bargaining 
power and are walking off the job or threatening to do so to fight for 
their rights. In Hollywood, in auto factories, in food service across 
the country, workers are fighting for fair compensation, safe 
workplaces, and job security.
  Public approval for labor unions in this country has skyrocketed to 
over 60 percent. Americans are waking up to these disparities, the 
unfairness, and the lack of us supporting the American Dream for 
everybody and rewarding hard work and responsibility.
  There is outside influence of the uber-wealthy in elections right 
here in this House. It has been a big issue in the United States and 
has drastically expanded since the 5-4 Supreme Court decision on 
Citizens United, allowing for independent expenditures.
  The Citizens United decision enabled corporations and other outside 
groups to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections.
  It opened the door to unlimited donations to super-PACs, which 
function as a surrogate to campaigns despite being banned from 
coordinating directly with them.
  These numbers have skyrocketed. The impacts have been far-reaching 
and continue to get worse every election cycle.
  Billionaires alone provided 15 percent of all Federal midterm 
election financing in 2022, according to a Brennan Center analysis. 
Just 21 of the biggest donor families, 21 families, each spent at least 
$15 million in one election cycle, or a total of $783 million in that 
cycle.
  Do you see the connection between our policy and how people get here 
and stay here?
  The effective deregulation of campaign money and the expansion of 
dark money groups that don't have to disclose their donors are 
destructive to democracy, clearly.
  Citizens United has helped reinforce the view that our government 
primarily serves the interests of the rich, all of our government, all 
three branches all too often, and that there is no need for most 
citizens to participate in democracy.
  Those are the economic and social concerns that I have and what we 
are under. It doesn't sound good.
  Now, there is more and more research on the connection to you as 
individuals in this country, to the people who despair, the so-called 
diseases and deaths of despair that are all too frequent in rural areas 
in the Midwest and the South regionally, but they are all across the 
country, including in the bay area, which I represent.
  Behavioral health, substance abuse, and opioid addictions have been 
well recorded by research and writing. This, to me, is where the 
tragedy of tragedies is far beyond policy. It is the reality of how 
Americans have to live,

[[Page H493]]

that $400, the despair, the anxiety, and the distrust in this 
institution.
  As my friend and colleague Elijah Cummings used to say all the time, 
we are better than this, Republicans and Democrats.
  Let's talk about health consequences of inequality. It is important 
to look at the effect it has on health, physically and mentally, and on 
the fabric of our society. Economic inequality is a cause of poor 
health. As one English researcher said 20 years ago, inequality in a 
society is in lockstep with individual suffering.
  As the gap between the richest and the poorest Americans gets larger, 
the health discrepancies between these groups increase as well, and 
they are getting exponentially worse.

  As health declines, it has adverse effects on quality of life, our 
economy, our workforce productivity, and our healthcare costs.
  Life expectancy in the United States has been declining for decades. 
A lot of this is directly attributable to these diseases of despair.
  It has only worsened since the beginning of the pandemic. I thought 
we would come together, but instead, it has gotten worse.
  There are stark differences in the average life expectancies of 
Americans at the bottom of the income distribution and those at the 
top. The health of the wealthiest Americans has remained relatively 
stagnant, while that of the poorest Americans has fallen significantly.
  In spite of the ACA, we are still spending the most as a percentage 
of GDP on quality healthcare. Unfortunately, if you are wealthy, even 
with the ACA, you are going to get better healthcare in a caste system 
of healthcare, which will cause your own life expectancy to go down.
  This is a regional problem, and there are differences in regional 
problems as exemplified in an extensive study by the Kaiser Foundation.
  There is a strong relationship to the level of income inequality and 
the percentage of population that suffers from mental health issues, so 
it is physical health and mental health. The prevalence of anxiety 
disorders, impulse control disorders, and even severe mental health 
illnesses are correlated to inequality.
  Chronic stress or lack of social support increases the risk of ill 
health, both physical and mental. The CDC has recently highlighted the 
concerning trend--not concerning trend, the outrage of the mental 
health of high school students, our kids, which was worsened by the 
COVID-19 pandemic.

                              {time}  2000

  In 2021, more than 4 in 10 students felt persistently sad or hopeless 
and depressed. More than 1 in 5 seriously considered attempting 
suicide, particularly for young women, as the CDC and the Surgeon 
General has pointed out to us.
  This is a crisis, Mr. Speaker. For all of us who are fortunate to 
have kids, we should be extremely sensitive to what we are giving as a 
legacy and the tragedy that we are committing to the future of this 
country and young people, irrespective of where they live or which 
party their families and parents are registered to.
  We should be doing a lot more to support mental health and behavioral 
health in this country, and that includes making mental health care 
more affordable and more accessible.
  Since the ACA imparity, there has been a 300 percent increase in 
people seeking out behavioral health. There has been a similar decrease 
in the number of young people going into the field because of the 
exorbitant cost of getting a degree.
  Talk about supply and demand.
  Social support and social networks are important for psychological 
well-being. Both are individuals in this country, and there is a very 
tied connection.
  These are important determinants of population health, and they 
deteriorate in unequal societies.
  Aggressively targeting income inequality will lead to better health 
outcomes for more Americans.
  The same research by English experts years ago said that, again, 
there was a correlation between both, but they also said the remedy was 
not just more services. The biggest, most effective remedy is dealing 
with the societal tax and regulatory impact of this concentration of 
wealth and continuing to reward it.
  So let's talk about global income inequality, because America, as bad 
as we are, and we have led on this unfortunately, it is an economic 
toll across the country and the developed world.
  The rest of the developed world, as you have heard me say, creates 
more safety nets, but it is still a problem in a global economy.
  The economic toll of the pandemic has been highly unequal. A report 
from March of 2020 to the end of 2020, global billionaire wealth--
global, not the U.S., the previous numbers were in the U.S.--has 
increased by almost $4 trillion.
  By contrast, global workers combined earnings fell by $3.7 trillion.
  Individuals owning more than 100,000 in assets make up 13 percent of 
the global population, but they own 85.2 percent of the global wealth.
  Globalism did not raise all boats, as we were promised. Our rising 
tide, as Jack Kennedy said many years ago, in this economy globally and 
in the United States, turns out has only raised those with the very 
biggest yachts.
  Having said all that, wealth concentration in the U.S. is worse.
  Statistics show the top 1 percent of the United States holds 40 
percent of the national wealth, a far greater share than in other 
developed countries. In other industrialized nations, the richest 1 
percent own 27 percent. Pretty bad, but not as bad as 40 percent.
  U.S. median wealth is lower than in many other countries. The United 
States has more wealth than any other nation. The wealthiest country in 
the history of the world, but the top-heavy distribution of wealth 
leaves typical American adults with far less wealth than their 
counterparts in other individual countries.
  Changes to tax policy that benefit the rich and large corporations 
are the key driver, as Ms. DeLauro said, in rising inequality. Our 
actions here, particularly under the last administration, not only 
increased the deficit dramatically but they increased the lopsidedness 
of fairness in the American economy and politics.
  According to the Institute for Policy Studies analysis by data 
collected by a known, wonderful economist, Emmanuel Saez, a neighbor 
who teaches at the University of California at Stanford, the share of 
U.S. taxes paid by the top 1 percent was just slightly higher in 2018 
than in 1962, despite the more than tripling of their share of the 
Nation's wealth.
  By contrast, the bottom 50 percent saw their share of U.S. wealth 
drop by more than half during this period. The top marginal rate in 
1962 was 91 percent compared to 37 percent in 2018.
  Our policies have made things worse.
  I have always believed that that expression in the Bible, to those 
who are given much, much is expected, that used to be what the Greatest 
Generation and their CEOs believed; great companies like Motorola, 
General Motors, and Ford.
  In those days, as Ford said when they founded the Model T, he wanted 
his workers to be able to afford his car. That was the magic of an 
America that was a free market/mixed-market economy that benefited 
everybody, and the wealthy lived, appropriately, very well, but not 
with obscene concentrations of wealth.
  I often think that you can't take it with you. What are you going to 
take with you? Hopefully, a guilty conscience when you realize that 
when this country needed you, what did you do? You just kept making 
more and more for yourself but not realizing how important it was for 
the rest of the country and what would happen to future generations.
  Mr. Speaker, I will close with a quote by Louis Brandeis. Lincoln 
spoke in 1841, at the beginning of what would become the Civil War. 
Brandeis was a brilliant jurist who said--and similarly when we were 
struggling with disparities of wealth and making sure every American 
felt that they were part of this, they were part of something, even if 
it was a simple thing; a Frank Capra, a simple thing, that you are part 
of something bigger than yourself. That you are a Harry Bailey being 
responsible for the homeowners who came in and borrowed money from your 
savings and loan.

[[Page H494]]

  Louis Brandeis said: ``We can have democracy in this country or we 
can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we 
can't have both.''

  It is our decision, Members of Congress, if at this moment, 
Republicans and Democrats could start looking at this and realizing, as 
I did when I was a small successful restaurant owner in the Bay area, I 
looked every day at those journals for point-of-sale retailers, and I 
realized that the working people who came into my restaurant couldn't 
go out to eat. It is one of the first things people stop when they 
can't afford extras, when they have to worry about paying their 
mortgage, or paying for their car, or getting their kids to childcare, 
if they can afford that.
  Those are the moments that we are confronting.
  Jack Kennedy said at his first inaugural speech out here on the east 
steps in his ``Ask Not'' speech--one of my favorite quotes--he said: 
Few generations get to defend freedom at its ultimate moment of threat. 
He said: I don't despair of this, I don't shrink from this, I embrace 
it.
  He said: The fight we put to this--I am paraphrasing--will bring 
light to the world.
  That is the challenge we have, whether you are a conservative 
Republican who believes in the Chicago School of thought, which I 
believe caused all these problems, trickle down doesn't work. It works 
sometimes but sometimes it doesn't work.
  We have a problem with the American economy. It is affecting our 
physical health, our life expectancy, and our mental health.
  To paraphrase Brandeis, we can have a democracy or we can have 
opportunity; opportunity that is rich for anybody.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________