[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 15]
[House]
[Page 20236]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           POVERTY IN AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Sanders) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Speaker, there is not a lot that I can add to what 
my colleagues have said about the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, about 
the hundreds of lives that have been lost and the billions of dollars 
in property damage that has been experienced. But perhaps in the midst 
of this horror, there might be a silver lining. And if there is a 
silver lining, it might be that we begin to take a hard look at some of 
the realities of America, realities that are very rarely talked about 
here on the floor of the House or in the media.
  Clearly, one of the realities that we did observe in New Orleans is 
that there were thousands and thousands of people there who could not 
flee the flood because they did not have money, they did not have a 
car, and they had no place to go. And some of them died because they 
are poor.
  But poverty exists well beyond New Orleans. The fact of the matter is 
that millions of Americans today live in abject, humiliating poverty. 
And, tragically, in the last 5 years alone, since President Bush has 
been in office, the number of poor people in America has grown by 5 
million.

                              {time}  1630

  So not only are we not addressing the problem of poverty; it is 
becoming significantly worse. And at a time when a lot of my colleagues 
talk repeatedly about family values, some 17 percent of the children in 
America live in poverty, which is by far the highest rate of childhood 
poverty in the industrialized world. Some of the other industrialized 
countries have poverty rates of 3, 4 percent. We are over 17 percent.
  So if there is a silver lining in Hurricane Katrina, it may be, it 
may be, it might be that we refocus on the needs of ordinary Americans, 
and we make fundamental changes in the priorities that have been 
established in this country in the last 5 years.
  Mr. Speaker, it is not just that poverty in America is increasing; it 
is that the middle class in this country is shrinking. We all know 
about the explosion in technology. We all know that worker productivity 
in America is rapidly rising; but in the midst of that, what we are 
seeing is that real wages, inflation accounted for wages, for millions 
and millions of workers is going down. People are working two jobs, 
they are working three jobs, and yet they are further behind 
economically than they were 20 or 30 years ago.
  Mr. Speaker, in America when we talk about priorities, when we talk 
about our kids, we have got to ask ourselves about our educational 
system and why it is that throughout this country, in Vermont and 
virtually every other State in America, our child care situation in 
America is an absolute disaster. Every psychologist will tell you that 
the most important years of a person's life are the first few years, 
and yet in America today we have kids being warehoused in America in 
facilities where there are inexperienced, underpaid teachers and people 
who are minding the children. We have millions of other Americans today 
who would like to go to college, but cannot afford the $35,000 or 
$40,000 a year that it costs.
  To my mind we are wasting huge amounts of intellectual capital by not 
making college available for all Americans. It is a national disgrace 
that for the first time in recent years, fewer low-income kids are 
going to college than used to be the case.
  Mr. Speaker, while the middle class is shrinking, poverty is 
increasing. While some 46 million Americans have no health insurance, 
while the average American today is paying the highest prices in the 
world for prescription drugs, there is another reality taking place in 
America, and that is that the wealthiest people in our country have 
never had it so good.
  What we are seeing today in America is the widest gap between the 
rich and the poor of any industrialized nation on Earth, and it is 
wider in America today than at any time since the 1930s.
  Mr. Speaker, to my mind a great nation is measured not by the number 
of billionaires it has, not by the number of nuclear weapons that it 
has, but in fact how we treat the least amongst us, the elderly, the 
sick and the poor. By that definition, we are not doing very well at 
all.
  Mr. Speaker, while average Americans were struggling last year just 
to keep their heads above water economically, maybe to make a few bucks 
more than inflation was taking away from them, the CEOs of the Forbes 
largest 500 corporations in America saw a 54 percent increase in their 
compensation; 54 percent for the CEOs of the largest corporations, 
while millions of Americans are seeing a decline in their standard of 
living.
  Mr. Speaker, in the midst of the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, in 
the midst of a period when we are going to be spending tens of millions 
of dollars rebuilding the gulf coast, at a time when we are spending 
$300 billion in Iraq, our Republican friends and the President of the 
United States want to repeal the estate tax and provide hundreds of 
billions of dollars more in tax breaks for the wealthiest 2 percent who 
are the only people who will benefit from the repeal of the estate tax 
and half of those benefits are going to the richest one-tenth of 1 
percent.
  Yes, we can cut Medicaid by $50 billion. Yes, we can underfund the 
Veterans Administration so the veterans go on waiting lists all over 
America. Yes, we can have children sleeping out on the street. There is 
no money to take care of those needs, but apparently we have hundreds 
of millions to give to the wealthiest 2 percent, which will drive up 
our deficit, drive up our national debt and leave all of that to our 
children.
  I would hope that common sense will prevail and that the President 
and Republican leadership, at a time of a record-breaking national 
debt, record-breaking deficits, will not give huge tax breaks for 
people who do not need them. Instead, let us move forward to lowering 
our deficit. Instead, let us pay attention to the middle class and low-
income Americans who need help.
  So once again, Mr. Speaker, if there is any silver lining in the 
disaster and the horror of Hurricane Katrina, it might be that today we 
begin reevaluating our priorities.

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