[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 13]
[Senate]
[Pages 18025-18027]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             CHILD POVERTY

  Mr. CASEY. Mr. President, I rise this afternoon to talk about a set 
of issues we don't, frankly, spend enough time on that relate to our 
children. I have often said--and I think it is true throughout this 
Chamber when we talk

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about these issues--that we come to this because we are concerned about 
the future of this country when we talk about what happens to our 
children.
  I have always believed--and I think this is a prevailing point of 
view here in this Chamber and across the country--that every child is 
born with a light inside them, the light of the full measure of their 
potential. Some children don't need a lot of help along the way. They 
are born into circumstances or into families or born to parents or 
there are other factors that give them an advantage. They have a lot of 
ability, and they do not need much in the way of intervention from any 
part of our society, including the government. Some children are born 
with a bright light, but it may not burn as brightly or shine as 
brightly as some other kids, and they need a little extra help. Some of 
those kids, if they get help when they are very young, can thrive and 
succeed and grow without any further help or assistance.
  If we are serious about growing the economy, if we are serious about 
creating jobs and creating the kind of opportunity that we say we are 
concerned about and that we say is part of the fabric of being an 
American, then we have to be concerned about what happens to our kids.
  A lot of what I will talk about today can be summarized in maybe one 
line: As kids learn more now, they are going to earn more later. We 
know all the data shows that. The child who has access to early 
learning will earn more later in life. It also is essential that they 
have access to quality health care and the kind of security that comes 
when you have enough to eat--food security.
  If we want our children to learn more now and earn more later, we 
have to make the right investments. Unfortunately, that child or any 
child won't be able to learn more now and therefore earn more later if 
they live a life of poverty. Maybe some will get through, but that is 
very difficult. If we don't take action against child poverty, we have 
already erected barriers in their path.
  Today, as of 2014, the latest numbers for child poverty in the United 
States are 21.1 percent. That number is up substantially since the 
great recession--a couple of percentage points--and therefore there are 
millions more children living in poverty.
  In Pennsylvania, it is only a little lower--19.4 percent. No one here 
would try to make the case that is acceptable, that 21 percent of 
children living in poverty is something we can accept. We should all be 
not only outraged by it but take action and have a sense of urgency to 
combat it.
  There are a couple of things we can do. First of all, we have to know 
what is happening to children on a broad range of topics. That is why 
we have to rely upon public policy expertise. There is a whole group of 
folks out there in organizations. I am holding in my hand just one 
example. You can't see it from a distance, but this is a kind of one-
page summary by the Annie E. Casey Foundation--no relation to me but a 
great foundation that has tracked child well-being for years. They have 
four categories: economic well-being, education, health, and the fourth 
category is family and community.
  If you could see this up close, you would notice some categories. 
There are 16 altogether, with 4 indicators in 4 categories.
  If you look at the orange, wherever you see orange, that means the 
numbers are getting worse for children. If you see green, that means we 
are doing better. So it is a mixed report, with some numbers getting 
better over the last 5 years or 7 years or time increments such as 
that. But what has gotten worse since the great recession is that the 
number of children living in poverty has gone up. The number of 
children whose parents lack secure employment has gone up. 
Unfortunately, two other indicators of poverty--children in single-
parent families is up, meaning the number has worsened, and children 
living in high-poverty areas is worse.
  I won't go into those numbers today, but that is just an indication 
that childhood poverty has been a challenge for a long time. It got a 
lot worse after the great recession, when our economy began to collapse 
and folks across the country paid the price, and a lot of children have 
paid the price.
  So what do we do about it? One thing we do is to begin to see that at 
long last we can't just talk about reducing child poverty. We can't 
just nibble around the edges or hope a program here or a program there 
will help. We have to have a strategy. In order to have a strategy, we 
have to have a goal, and the goal ought to be that we reduce child 
poverty and take the same approach, frankly, the United Kingdom took a 
couple of years ago.
  I will walk through some of the background, but Senator Baldwin and 
Senator Brown and I introduced a bill just last week--the Child Poverty 
Reduction Act--to establish that kind of a target to reduce child 
poverty. Under the legislation, child poverty would be cut in half in 
10 years. So child poverty would be cut in half in a decade. The second 
goal would be to eliminate child poverty in 20 years. Deep poverty 
would be eliminated in 10 years--meaning the worst kind of poverty for 
our children and for our families.
  To meet these goals, we would give an assignment to an interagency 
working group to reduce child poverty, to develop a plan, and include 
recommendations to improve coordination and efficiency of existing 
programs and initiatives, because there are a lot of them--and we can 
get to those in a moment--along with recommendations for new 
legislation, new strategies, and new approaches to focus on child 
poverty.
  Here is what happened in the United Kingdom. In 1999, the UK 
established a national child poverty target and measured in U.S. terms 
the UK's child poverty target, and the policy changes made in 
conjunction with that effort reduced Britain's child poverty rate by 50 
percent in the first 10 years--a significant achievement. In 
comparison, between 2000 and 2013--a little more than a decade--in the 
United States, the child poverty rate increased by over 20 percent. So 
roughly in the same time period, as our poverty rate was going up for 
kids, the UK's poverty rate for children was going down. One of the 
reasons for that--not the only reason--is they set a target, and both 
sides came together--the labor party, the conservatives--and the 
country made it a goal. We haven't done that yet, and we need to focus 
on that kind of a goal.
  So one thing we need to do is to focus on a goal and have legislation 
to enact part of the strategy. Then, of course, we can't just stop 
there. We can't just assume having a target and working toward it is 
enough.
  One of the most powerful examples in my home State of Pennsylvania 
over the last couple of years of what it means to live in poverty--in 
this case, moms who were willing to tell their stories--is the effort 
undertaken by Witnesses to Hunger. That is what this photograph 
depicts--a child who was photographed by her mother. Other mothers were 
willing to take pictures of their children to tell the world about 
their own circumstances and to give us living proof of what it means to 
live in poverty, what it means to be a child living in poverty. That is 
Witnesses to Hunger.
  This all started at Drexel University, where they gave cameras to a 
group of moms who decided to open up their own lives, courageously and 
generously, and to tell us more about these challenges.
  The first picture after that is a picture of a young woman by the 
name of Monique who is on her way to her local WIC office--the Women, 
Infants, and Children Program--the office in this part of Philadelphia. 
Monique says: ``I love WIC because it supports me by helping me nurse 
my baby.'' That is a picture of her and her baby.
  The next picture is a picture of a group of classmates, and the mom's 
name is Shearine. Shearine's daughter joins her classmates in this 
photo. Here is what Shearine says about her circumstances and what she 
hopes for the future:

       My daughter and her classmates are symbols of change. They 
     have hope for a brighter

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     future and faith that the adults in their lives will work 
     together to make a change. We must do whatever it takes so 
     that they can grow up and be strong, educated adults.

  I think Shearine gave us all an assignment, not just speaking to 
herself. I think she gave us all an assignment that we have to make 
sure we are taking the steps necessary and essential to do all we can 
to give that bright future and to validate the faith those children 
have in us, whether we are going to meet our obligations to help those 
children--every single one of those children in that class picture.
  Finally, the last picture is of a young boy giving his mother Gale a 
great smile. In this photo, Gale captures her son's happiness as he 
holds up nutritious bananas. It is good to have that in the picture. 
When we talk about child poverty and hunger, it is not just some public 
policy issue, some issue for a think tank to analyze. Child poverty is 
depicted in some of these pictures, but it is also in our newspapers 
every day of the week and in our midst. I hope more of us will be 
summoned by our conscience to do something constructively about this 
issue.
  We have a lot to do in the next couple of months. We have child 
nutrition reauthorization, which is a great opportunity for us to, at 
long last, begin to take steps in the right direction.
  The Women, Infants, and Children Program I mentioned before is one of 
those. One reason I am so concerned about where we are in the WIC 
Program is that some children literally are caught in a nutrition gap. 
Because they are age 5, they may be caught in a gap where they are not 
getting school meals and they are not getting nutrition any other way. 
Some children can experience this nutrition gap almost 12 months, 
almost a year being caught because they turned 5. The time in this 
nutrition gap is a time when they are neither supported by WIC nor 
supported by a school meals program.
  We had the privilege recently of talking to a constituent from 
Western Pennsylvania. Her son is currently 4 years old. He will be 
enrolled in kindergarten in the fall of 2016. When he enrolls in 
school, he will get healthy meals, but in the next month when he turns 
5, he will be cut off from the opportunity to benefit from the WIC 
Program. This child loves yogurt, fruit and vegetables and whole grains 
provided by the WIC Program, but he will not benefit from that because 
of this glitch in the law. So I propose a new bill, the Wise Investment 
in our Children Act, the WIC Act, to close the nutrition gap by 
allowing States to increase the age limit for WIC to age 6.
  We also have to be concerned, at the same time focusing on making 
changes to the WIC Program, to focus on another support for our 
children and families, the Child and Adult Care Food Program, so-called 
CACFB, as a quality source of nutrition. For many children, the meals 
they eat in childcare programs are the most nutritious meals they will 
eat all week. In other words, absent the childcare setting, they will 
likely not have a nutritious meal in the course of a week. As working 
families shuttle between home, childcare, and work, little time remains 
for food shopping, healthy meal planning or sitting down to eat healthy 
meals. The Child and Adult Care Food Program provides healthy, 
nutritious meals to more than 3 million children each day who are 
either in Head Start, Early Head Start or childcare programs in both 
centers and family childcare homes.
  I introduced this bill as well to focus, improve, and strengthen this 
program. The Child and Adult Care Improvement Act would enhance several 
aspects of this program, including allowing childcare centers and homes 
the option of serving a third meal for children who are in care for 8 
or more hours a day.
  We have a lot to do, but we cannot get to the goal of reducing child 
poverty by 50 percent or reducing poverty overall in the near term in 
the next decade, unless we have a strategy, set a goal, and then begin 
to strengthen what works and improve the existing programs--whether it 
is WIC, the Child and Adult Care Food Program, the SNAP program--what 
used to be called food stamps. Whatever the program is, we have to 
strengthen and invest in it. We can't talk about all those lofty 
terms--like ``GDP growth, job growth, and growing economy'' and all the 
wonderful things that get discussed in this Chamber--without a strategy 
for our kids.
  We have a way to go, but I believe this commitment to our children is 
not just the right thing to do and it is not just something we ought to 
focus on as something consistent with what our conscience tells us, but 
it is in fact a great economic strategy for the country. If kids learn 
more now, they are going to earn more later. They can't learn more now 
if they don't have access to early learning, if they don't have access 
to healthy, nutritious foods, if they don't have access to quality 
health care, and if we don't protect them from people who would do them 
harm. If we do at least four of those things well--if we have early 
learning opportunities, opportunities to invest in food security 
strategies so they get healthy, nutritious foods, and we make sure they 
have quality health care in addition to early learning, we can move 
forward in a direction that gets us to the goal of making sure every 
child in this country has an opportunity to grow and to learn and to 
move in the future together. We can't do that if all we do in 
Washington is use phrases like ``job creation'' and ``economic growth'' 
without a strategy to get our kids there. We should make sure every 
child in this country has the same opportunity to learn and to grow. 
They can't do that if we as the adults don't give them that 
opportunity.
  So as we look at some of the real lives depicted in these 
photographs, I think Shearine gave us a very powerful message today, 
where she said: ``They,'' meaning the children in the picture of the 
classroom--``They have hope for a brighter future and faith that the 
adults in their lives will work together to make change.''
  Shearine is right. She has given me an assignment, she has given 99 
other Senators an assignment, and a lot of other adults across the 
country. I believe this is a mission worthy of a great nation, just 
like every other major undertaking we have confronted and dealt with 
over many generations of greatness in our country.
  When we talk about American exceptionalism and what it means to be an 
American, part of being an American is making sure every child has the 
same opportunity to learn and to grow. We can do this. We can do it in 
a bipartisan fashion. If the United Kingdom can reduce child poverty, 
the United States can do the same.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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