Seniors and Veterans Emergency Benefits Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. MARKEY. Thank you, Madam President, very much.
I am very proud to be a cosponsor of the SAVE Benefits Act. I think we owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Senator Warren, my colleague from Massachusetts, for the legislation she has introduced because she is going to make sure the Social Security benefits for seniors, for veterans, and for those who are disabled will be protected, and I applaud her for the enormously innovative way she has framed this debate for our Nation.
The Social Security Administration has recently determined that seniors will not receive an increase in their benefits for the next year. That means approximately 70 million American seniors, veterans, and the disabled will not receive any increase in their benefits, including the 1.4 million people in Massachusetts who are dependent upon these benefits. That is completely unacceptable. What Senator Warren has done is to say that for these seniors, for many of them, Social Security is their sole basis for having any income at all, and for most seniors it is the majority of their income in their retirement. Those seniors depend on these benefits to pay for food, rent, medicine, and the electricity bill. In their world, prices for food, clothing, and medicine are not going down, they are going up. These are the necessities of life, and our seniors should not have to choose between eating and heating.
We have a simple question to ask ourselves: Who contributed most to our country over the last generation? Is it a small handful of CEOs who are now paid exorbitant salaries or is it every American who got up every morning to build us into this incredible country we now live in? I think it was grandma and grandpa. Those are the people who got up every day. Those are the people who built this great country. Right now we are being told that their standard of living is going to stay the same or go down. There will be no increase for them.
Well, unfortunately CEOs in America make about 273 times what the average American worker makes. Last year America's CEOs saw their pay increase by about $635,000 to an average of $16 million. A family in the top 1 percent has a net worth 288 times higher than the typical family. That is unacceptable and it must change.
Shouldn't our seniors--shouldn't grandma and grandpa who built this country receive an additional benefit from the economy which they created--this incredible wealth which they created in our country. When do they get their raise? They got up every morning.
My father worked for the Hood Milk Company. He got up every morning. He worked as hard as a human being can work, and so have hundreds of millions of Americans. They built this country with their hard work. They deserve a Social Security raise. They deserve a wage if they now have disabilities. If they are veterans, they not only got up and worked every single day, but they also saved our country, many of them overseas protecting us against our enemies. So that is what Senator Warren's very wise piece of legislation focuses on. We know grandma and grandpa deserve a raise. We know the system that has been created allows those in the upper 1 percentile to continue to receive per year, on average, $685,000 in raises--up to an average of $16 million for salary. And we are saying to people who did the work: You don't get a raise at all.
I think for their sacrifice, for their hard work every single day, they deserve something. They built the greatest country in the history of the world. So let's give our seniors the 3.9-percent raise that Senator Warren has proposed. Let's give them the kind of comfort they deserve for a lifetime of hard work, and let's thank Senator Warren for reminding all of us of the obligation we have to those great Americans, so we don't forget them when it comes time at the end of the year to hand out bonuses. They deserve bonuses in the same way we know CEOs across our country, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, are going to receive every year. We shouldn't turn our backs on those seniors.
Thank you, Senator Warren, for all your great work.
Madam President, I yield back.
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