[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 9]
[House]
[Page 12019]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




          FIGHTING FOR THE WELL-BEING OF CHILDREN AND SENIORS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from New 
York (Mr. Towns) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. TOWNS. Mr. Speaker, this is a sad day in America. There are 
people who have to choose between paying their bills and eating a 
decent meal.
  All I hear is that we have a spending problem. ``We have a spending 
problem. We have a spending problem.''
  I want to be sure we do not try to solve our spending problem on the 
backs of the poor, on the backs of children and on the backs of our 
senior citizens. We have been cutting services for the poor, children 
and seniors for years. Go back and look at the record, and you will see 
that this is a fact. If you add up all of the money we are spending on 
children and seniors, it would not begin to make a dent in the Federal 
deficit.
  We spend less than 10 percent of the budget on children. That means 
we are not seriously investing in the future of this Nation. When we 
cut programs like WIC, we are literally taking the food out of the 
mouths of babies, so I say our priorities are certainly misguided or 
upside down. When we cut tens of millions of dollars from juvenile 
justice delinquency programs, then we'd better get ready to spend 
hundreds of millions of dollars on more prisons.
  When we look to save money by cutting Medicare and Social Security, 
we really do a disservice to the senior citizens in this country. 
Senior citizens have worked all of their lives putting a good portion 
of their paychecks into a system that paid for the well-being of their 
parents and grandparents.
  If the truth is to be told, today's seniors have paid more than $2.5 
trillion extra into Social Security so that it would be safe, and here 
we are talking about making cuts. When President Ronald Reagan signed 
the law to increase the payroll tax, it was to make sure Social 
Security would be there for future generations; but the government 
spent the money, and now we want to make seniors pay again. That is 
wrong.
  Our senior citizens have paid enormous sums of money into Medicare, 
and now people are talking about ending it as we know it. Certainly, 
rising health care costs are causing Medicare problems, but we can fix 
those problems without making it a voucher program.
  I call on my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to take a deep 
breath and to think clearly about what we're doing. Children and 
seniors are the most vulnerable citizens in our country. They are 
depending on us to use sound judgment and not be swayed by the 
political gamesmanship.
  I stand here this morning to tell you that I intend to fight for the 
well-being of our children and our senior citizens. Of course, we need 
to uncut, uncap and get some real balance into this discussion, 
recognizing the fact that our children and our seniors must be 
protected. Of course, every time I hear one of our Members talking 
about the fact that we need to cut Medicare, that we need to cut WIC, I 
think that we need to stop and take a real, real deep breath and 
recognize that, when we do that, we end up creating other things, and 
we do not save money.

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