[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 8]
[House]
[Page 11678]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        CRASH, SLASH, AND TRASH

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
Illinois (Ms. Schakowsky) for 2 minutes.
  Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Last year, John Carlson, a hedge fund manager, made 
about $5 billion and paid taxes at a lower rate than most Americans. 
Right now, the 400 richest Americans in our country control as much 
wealth as 150 million other Americans. We have a crisis, all right, in 
our country, and it's called a disappearing middle class. The rich 
getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and the middle going into 
poverty.
  We have a jobs crisis in our country. And poverty has taken an 
entirely new face as a result of the financial crisis, the recession, 
and our Nation's slow economic recovery. In Skokie, Illinois, a solid 
middle class suburb, now 40 percent of the kids who go to school there 
qualify for a reduced or free lunch. And the food pantry is bulging now 
with new people waiting in line. I went to a mortgage foreclosure 
workshop in suburban Des Plaines, Illinois, and I felt like I was 
watching the American Dream slip through the fingers of hardworking 
Americans. More than one in five children is now called ``food 
insecure,'' meaning they go to bed hungry some nights.
  And what have the Republicans decided to do? They decided to cut the 
programs that will help those people. That's how they want to reduce 
the deficit. They passed a bill called the Cut, Cap, and Balance bill. 
And it cuts, and it caps, and it balances. It cuts Medicare. It caps 
Medicaid. And it balances the budget on the backs of the seniors, the 
poor, and the WIC program, taking food out of the mouths of hungry 
children. There is something very wrong and very un-American with the 
Republican proposal that makes it easier to cut Medicare than to cut 
subsidies for oil and gas companies; easier to cut Social Security than 
to ask for one penny more for the billionaires, like John Carlson, and 
easier to cut subsidies for food for little children than to cut 
subsidies for corporate jets.
  I heard from a woman who lives on $1,023 a month. That's her Social 
Security. And she doesn't have enough money to make it through the 
month and often goes hungry. Is this right in the richest country in 
the world? We can reduce our debt, but not on the backs of the middle 
class that are becoming poor and those who are already poor.

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