Concurrent Resolution on the Budget, Fiscal Year 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, let me applaud Senator Enzi and his staff for their very hard work.

I certainly agree with Senator Enzi that we need a government that is accountable, that we need to get rid of waste in government, and that we need to get rid of duplicative programs. I don't think there is any debate on that. I look forward to working with Senator Enzi and others to make that happen. However, the Republican budget is far, far more than that.

Today, I rise in strong opposition to the motion to go to conference on the budget resolution.

The budget resolution the Senate passed on March 27 moves this country in exactly the wrong direction, and the House budget resolution, in many respects, is even worse. The Federal budget is more than just a long list of numbers, although God knows there is a long list of numbers in the budget. The Federal budget is about our national priorities and about our values. It is about how we assess the problems facing our country, of which there are many--and I am not sure Senator Enzi would disagree with me if I laid it out--and how we go forward in addressing the problems on which there is a fundamental divide. That is what the Senate is now dealing with. What are the problems facing our country and how do we move forward?

Let me begin by saying that despite the modest gains of the Affordable Care Act, there remain in this country 35 million Americans who have no health insurance. That means that when they get sick, they may not be able to go to the doctor or they may end up going to the emergency room at very high cost.

I have spoken with doctors all over this country who tell me that when people don't have health insurance, because they delay going to the doctor, sometimes by the time they go into the doctor's office, it is too late. The doctor says: Why didn't you come in here 6 months ago when you noticed your symptoms? And they say: I don't have any health insurance; I couldn't afford it. So we are losing tens of thousands of people every single year who die--die--or become much sicker than they should be because they don't have health insurance.

The United States remains the only major country on Earth that doesn't guarantee health care to all people. Thirty-five million Americans have no health insurance. What is the Republican solution to this problem? Well, it is a brilliant idea. They are going to end the Affordable Care Act and make $440 billion worth of cuts to Medicaid, which will result in 27 million Americans losing their health insurance on top of the 35 million we already have uninsured.

I know the newspapers are not particularly interested in it. We won't see it on network TV. That is the reality. They don't deny it. There are 16 million people covered by the Affordable Care Act who would lose their health insurance because this bill ends it. Then, a $440 billion cut to Medicaid, and another 11 million gone. Sixteen plus 11 is 27 million Americans. What is the idea? What happens to those people? How many of them die? How many of them suffer? It is not an issue for them. They are working on something. They have been working on something for about 15 years for health care. If it hasn't happened in 16 years, it isn't going to happen.

That is what is in this budget.

This budget denies over 2.3 million young adults the right to stay on their parents' health insurance plan until the age of 26. We used to have this absurd situation. My wife and I have health insurance to cover our kids, but when they turn 18, they are not on our plan. It is gone. Right now, young people are on the plan until they are 26. It is gone under this Republican budget.

We finally overcame a situation that is so vulgar it is hard to imagine that it existed in America, and that is that people who have serious illnesses such as cancer, heart disease or diabetes would walk into an insurance office and say: I need insurance. The insurance company would say: Oh, we can't cover you for your diabetes, your heart disease, your cancer because it is a preexisting condition and we don't want to pay out all of that money if it recurs.

Think about that, how crazy that is. What do people want insurance for? They want insurance to cover their needs. If I had breast cancer or colon cancer 5 years ago, sure, I want to make sure my insurance company covers that. It is a preexisting condition. Under the Affordable Care Act, we did away with that discrimination. That would come back. So all Americans who have serious health illnesses: Know that if what they put into this budget goes into effect, insurance companies can reject you.

Not only has this Republican budget ended the Affordable Care Act and made $440 billion in cuts to Medicaid, it would also increase prescription drug prices for 4 million seniors and persons with disabilities who are on Medicare Part D by reopening the doughnut hole. That means that at a time when senior poverty is increasing and so many seniors in Vermont--I speak to them all the time and I suspect it is the same in Wyoming or maybe not--are saying: I am living on $13,000, $14,000 a year; I have to heat my home in the winter--if you live in Vermont, you do--I have to buy food; I have to pay for medicine; I can't do it all. So we closed the so-called doughnut hole, which means that seniors would not have to pay out-of-pocket for their prescription drugs. The Republican budget reopens the hole. All over this country, seniors will be paying more for their prescription drugs.

The Republican budget not only undertakes a vast attack on health care in this country, which will decimate life for millions of people, but then on another issue of great consequence, education, it is equally bad.

A couple of months ago in my State of Vermont I held three townhall meetings at colleges and universities in the State to talk to young people about the cost of college and about student debt. In Vermont--and I suspect in the other 49 States as well--we have families who are struggling to afford to send their kids to college, and then we have others who are leaving college terribly deep in debt. Just yesterday, I was flying here from Burlington, VT, and I sat next to a woman who said her six kids went to college and graduate school, and all of them are deeply in debt.

So clearly, what a sensible budget does is two things. It says, first, how do we make college affordable so that young people will be able to get a higher education; and second of all, when they graduate, how do we lower student debt, which is today so oppressive?

The Republican budget does exactly the opposite. What the Republican budget does is cut $90 billion over 10 years in Pell grants. Pell grants are the major Federal program making it possible for low-income and working-class families to get grants to go to college. This would increase the cost of college education to more than 8 million Americans. Think about it. Our job is to lower the cost of college; this budget increases it.

At a time when working-class families in Vermont and all over this country are having a hard time finding good quality, affordable preschool childcare, the Republican budget makes significant cuts in Head Start which means that 110,000 fewer children would be able to enroll in that program. Under the Republican budget, 1.9 million fewer students would receive the academic health they need to succeed in school by cutting about $12 billion in cuts to the title I education program. Dropout rates in low-income communities all over this country for high school kids are atrocious. The Republican budget cuts significantly the funding that we put into public schools in low-income communities.

At a time when the middle class is disappearing and we have more people living in poverty today than at almost any time in modern American history, today there are millions of families who are struggling to put food on the table. I know maybe on Capitol Hill people don't know that, but that is a reality. People are making 9 or 10 bucks an hour. They have a few kids. They are having a very difficult time affording food--basic nutrition. We have an estimated 40 million people that are what they call ``food insecure.'' That means people who on any given week, any given month, depending on what is happening, have a hard time feeding their families. The Republican budget would make massive cuts in nutrition programs in this country by, among other things, cutting $10 billion to the Women, Infants and Children Program over the next decade.

I honestly have a hard time hearing people talk about family values and how much they love families and children, and you have a program which has done a really good job in terms of prenatal care for pregnant woman, making sure they get the health care and the nutrition they need, making sure their babies get the care they need. Who really thinks we should cut these programs? What kind of Nation are we or what kind of Senate are we that people would vote to cut these programs--not to mention massive cuts in the food stamp program.

But in the midst of all of these devastating cuts in health care, education, and nutrition that impacts working families, the Republican budget does something else which is quite incredible. And I suspect that people who are listening are saying: Bernie Sanders is being partisan; he is not telling the truth; it really can't be this bad. One of the problems we have is convincing people this is reality. This is reality. This is the Republican budget. I know the media doesn't write about it much, but that is what it is. In addition to making cuts to health care, nutrition, education, other programs, what else do they do?

At a time when the wealthiest 400 Americans--400 Americans--paid a tax rate of 16.7 percent in 2012, at a time when hedge fund managers pay a lower effective tax rate than working families, truckdrivers, and nurses, what the Republican budget does based on an amendment they did abolishes the estate tax. The estate tax provides a $269 billion tax break. For whom? For the middle class? Good. Low-income people? That is great. Not so. This repeal of the estate tax applies to the wealthiest--not 1 percent, but the top two-tenths of 1 percent. Republicans passed a tax proposal which impacts the top two-tenths of 1 percent and leaves nothing for 99.8 percent of Americans. Cut education, cut health care, cut nutrition, and give the tax breaks to billionaires. By repealing the estate tax, the average tax breaks for multimillionaires and billionaires would be about $3 million.

When you go around Vermont and you go around America, do people say: Hey, what we really need, what our major priority is, is not to feed the hungry, not to make college affordable, not to create jobs, but to give a tax break to billionaires? That is in their budget.

Not only do they give a huge tax break to the wealthy--what else do they do? They raise taxes on low-income and working families--folks who do not make a whole lot of campaign contributions. What the Republican budget does is increase taxes by not extending the benefits we put into the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit. It allows those additional benefits to expire, which means that low-income and moderate-income families will pay more in taxes.

In fact, we estimate that tax hike for low-income and middle-income families will be about $900 apiece for more than 13 million families. Raise taxes to low- and moderate-income families and lower taxes for billionaires. Anybody believe those are the priorities that should be in a budget for the American people?

I will have more to say about this budget later. But the Republican budget does not address the significant problems facing America: how we create the millions of jobs we need, how we raise the minimum wage to a living wage, how we address pay equity so women workers don't make 78 cents on the dollar compared to men, how we rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. It doesn't address any of those issues. But what it does is make a bad situation worse. I would hope that my colleagues would have the courage to stand up to Wall Street, to stand up to the big money interests, and start defending the working families of this country and vote no on this resolution.

With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, let me just pick up on a couple of the points my friend from Wyoming, Senator Enzi, made. The Republicans often say, and Senator Enzi said it now, that Democrats cut $714 billion from Medicare. To the best of my knowledge, not one penny involved in those cuts cut any benefits to the American people.

What the Affordable Care Act attempted to do--and maybe we made some progress, as Senator Enzi pointed out, last night with the so-called doc fix--is to make Medicare more efficient. What is wrong with that? What is wrong with saving money? What the American people want us to do is make programs more efficient. In fact, Senator Enzi was talking about that a moment ago. He is right. But the idea, the implication, that those cuts resulted in benefit cuts is not accurate.

Furthermore, what some of that money--those savings--went to is filling, plugging the doughnut hole so that seniors would not have to pay money out of their own pockets for prescription drugs.

So if you could save money in a bureaucracy--and God knows the U.S. health care system is the most wasteful and bureaucratic of any in the world--if we can make the system more efficient, save money, put that money into helping seniors afford prescription drugs, what is the problem with that? I do not think so.

Senator Enzi talked about the IRS and people having difficulty making connections, which is clearly not right. He is right. He also mentioned, quite correctly, that for every dollar we invest in various parts of the IRS which do audits, we can make--what was that, $4 to $6? I think that is a pretty good investment. Most business people would say: All right, I can get $4 to $6 for every dollar that I invest. Let's do it.

I look forward to working with Senator Enzi and other Republicans to, in fact, do just that. We can argue about the Tax Code, and we will. But I think we don't argue that when people owe it, they should pay it. Right. We should change it if we do not like it.

So if we can invest a dollar into the IRS and get $6 to $4 back, I think that is a pretty good investment. Senator Enzi was right in saying that last night we passed a pretty good piece of legislation. Not perfect by any means. I had some serious concerns about it. I voted for it. One of the reasons I voted for it is it extended for another 2 years a program that I worked very hard on--that is, the Federally Qualified Community Health Center Program which is playing a huge role in providing health care and dental care and low-cost prescriptions drugs and mental health counseling to many millions of Americans in all of our 50 States. We got a significant increase. I fought very hard for a significant increase in that program as part of the Affordable Care Act that was going to expire.

As a result of yesterday's legislation, in addition to the doc fix, we have extended--and I see Senator Blunt here, who has been active in that as well--we were able to extend for another 2 years funding for the Community Health Center Program, something that I think was important.

Senator Enzi was right. I think that is a step forward. But that should not be confused with the budget. The Republican budget is an unmitigated disaster--tax breaks for billionaires, cuts in programs that Americans desperately need, raising taxes for low-income working families.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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