State of U.S. Economy
STATE OF U.S. ECONOMY -- (House of Representatives - July 26, 2005)
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Ms. LINDA T. SÁNCHEZ of California. Mr. Speaker, I believe that this chart really tells a great picture. We look at these blue bars. We start on one side and we see people who make the least amount of money, and we go across the way to people who are very rich and making lots of money. And the blue bars are during Clinton's time, and what they say about ``a high tide raises all boats,'' we can see that. See the blue. They all grow up.
The red represents the Bush years. The one under, the negative growth, are the poor people, the people who make the least amount of money. And the big red bar on the other end, those are the people who make the most money on an annual basis. Look at that. So that is what Bush has done. He has rewarded those who make the most money by increasing what they are making, and those households that make less money actually are losing ground.
But we do not have to look at a chart like that. We can see it every day. What is the biggest disparity that we have between those who have great jobs and those who have minimum-wage jobs? One of the major things is education, for example. Those who have a better education, they are probably, probably, going to make more money.
So what has Bush done during these years? If we look at this budget that he proposed this year, cutting moneys to community colleges, a place where people who have lost their jobs can go and get new skills, get retrained, the money is not there anymore. Places for immigrants who want to learn English at night, for example, cannot get into those classes anymore. The Republicans are trying to cut the student loan program, a way in which people, people who do not have money, are able to go and finance an education. I know because I had student loans, Pell grants. Those are the out, and scholarships that we give to people who want to go get a higher education, he managed to raise it by only $100. Think about that. Tuition going crazy at colleges and universities. Anybody who has got teenage kids and is looking at this can see the trend: $100, that is the increase that the President says is going to fix everything.
But the biggest disparity that has happened from this President is the fact that he put in a signature package called No Child Left Behind where he was going to look and measure how our kids were doing in our kindergarten through 12th-grade system, and if they were not doing well, if they were below the level where they should be, we were going to tutor them, get more people in to help them, take extra care of these kids so we can bring them up to the average where they were supposed to be. Guess what? Nine billion dollars short. In other words, he passed the program, but he forgot to fund it. And then people wonder what is wrong with education?
We are not investing in one of the most important things we have to do, and that is to get our people up, to make them scientists and mathematicians. Go to the universities. Go to the universities and look and see who is teaching our math and science classes. They are foreigners. And then take a look at who is in the class. They, too, are foreigners. And it used to be that these foreigners stayed in the United States, and they became Americans, and they helped us to make the new, new things and the new industries and the new technology, but now our very own companies are getting them and sending them back to India or China or wherever they come from, and they are competing against us.
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