[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 1]
[House]
[Page 254]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           POVERTY IN AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
California (Ms. Lee) for 5 minutes.
  Ms. LEE of California. As the founder of the Congressional Out of 
Poverty Caucus, I rise again today to remind this body about the crisis 
of poverty in America, which really should prick the conscience of 
every Democrat and Republican. As we begin to consider legislation for 
this year and budgets for the fiscal year 2013, we must do more to help 
millions of Americans living in poverty.
  We must do more for the millions of Americans who are looking very 
hard for a job and working hard every day to move up the ladder of 
opportunity, really trying to remove these very difficult barriers.
  We must not balance our budgets on the backs of the most vulnerable, 
the poor, and low-income individuals, and we cannot allow any budget 
cuts or authorize new spending on programs that will increase poverty 
or increase income inequality in America.
  We also must commit to taking bold steps to reducing the devastating 
impact of poverty in America, and that is by creating jobs. It's 
inexcusable and immoral to fail to take the strongest possible action 
to bring immediate help to those Americans in need.
  We cannot continue down the path that leads to increasing poverty, 
inequality, and income disparities which focus more and more wealth in 
the hands of the few and leave millions of Americans behind. With 
nearly 50 million Americans in poverty and half of all Americans in 
low-income households, we cannot wait. We must act now.
  Mr. Speaker, poverty doesn't just hurt families and the children who 
grow up in families trapped by poverty, but it costs our Nation 
hundreds of billions of dollars in lost productivity and slows the 
Nation's economic growth. We must act to strengthen funding for 
programs that not only prevent hunger, homelessness, crime, and 
maintain access to education, but we all must create initiatives to 
demand goods and services which boost our economy. That means that 
small businesses across America need customers, and they need customers 
right now.
  So we must extend the expiring unemployment benefits. We can't 
abandon the millions of job seekers before they find a good job. We 
should also immediately add an additional 14 weeks of tier I 
unemployment benefits for the millions of Americans who have completely 
exhausted their benefits after 99 weeks. Far too many Americans have 
exhausted all of their unemployment benefits and are still unable to 
work. We must not abandon these 99ers.
  To achieve these ends, we must ensure that we protect the efficient 
and effective programs we already have in place and provide strong 
investments that spur immediate job growth. And we have the resources 
to do this if we commit ourselves to increasing fairness in taxation to 
ensure that the wealthiest Americans pay their fair share and enact a 
reasonable Tax Code that includes financial transactions which will not 
only raise vital revenue but set some limits to the wild, out-of-
control speculation and vulture capitalism that nearly brought down 
this entire economy.
  Also, we must take a bold approach in how we allocate the large 
savings from our defense budgets as we bring our troops home from 
abroad.
  I'm confident that the President will speak to the moral and economic 
crises of income inequality and will not forget the long-term 
unemployed, the poor, our seniors, our students, and the middle class 
in his State of the Union speech tonight.
  I hope the Republicans and Democrats in this body take heed and 
tomorrow pass the American Jobs Act for the good of the country.

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