Military Construction and Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MARKEY. Madam President, I thank the Senator from Hawaii for her eloquent statement on this very important issue, and I thank the Senator from Massachusetts Senator Warren for once again, as usual, putting her finger right on the heart of a huge issue in our country.

We have seniors, veterans, and SSI recipients across our country who will receive zero this year in terms of an increase in their benefits that they have so rightly earned by their service to our country. What Senator Warren is essentially saying is, Who really built this country? Who made this great country the place that we live in today? The truth is grandma and grandpa built this country. Grandma and grandpa got up every single day, went to work, built this incredible economy, and now that they are in retirement, grandma and grandpa are being told for the next year they don't get a raise. They don't get anything. They don't get a cost-of-living adjustment. They don't get any increase at all. They built this country. The veterans who are seniors, they protected this country. The veterans who are disabled, they built this country, they protected this country.

What Senator Warren has done so accurately is essentially point out that there was a big loophole in our laws, and that loophole is a corporate compensation loophole that allows unlimited corporate deductions for executive performance pay.

What have we learned over the last 20 years in America? The rich are getting richer, but the people at the bottom are not. All this bill says, quite simply, is, Let's have the raise go to the seniors for 1 year. Let's have the raise go to grandma and grandpa. Let's give them a reward for the incredible benefits that have been flowing disproportionately to the upper 1 percentile. Let's give them the 3.9-percent raise. Let's give them the kind of comfort and thanks they deserve for all of their hard work.

What happens too often in Congress is that grandma and grandpa just get forgotten. There is a constant debate over whether grandma and grandpa are getting too much in Medicare, too much in Medicaid, and too much in Social Security benefits. ``We must solve that problem,'' say too many people here and around the country.

No, grandma and grandpa are not the problem. By their hard work every single day for their entire lives, by getting up, going to work, and creating these great families who make us the greatest country on the planet, they are the ones who created this incredible wealth that we have in our society.

I think we all owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Senator Warren because she has found a quite brilliant way to frame this debate on the Senate floor and for our country because it really does force us to all step back and ask the question of who contributed the most to our country over the last generation--a small handful of people at the top or everyone in the country who got up every single day who are the people we now call grandma and grandpa. I don't think we should be shortchanging them. I think Senator Warren's bill is the right way to solve that problem in order to make sure they get what they deserve. I thank Senator Warren for her great leadership on this issue.

I yield to the Senator from Montana.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source