Gop's War on the Poor

Floor Speech

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Ms. MOORE. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to proudly represent all of the welfare queens in the United States of America, all those women who get up every day and struggle as mothers, often caretakers for elderly parents, who are juggling two and three minimum wage jobs, $7.25-an- hour jobs a day, and then being told that they are welfare cheats because they need food stamps, SNAP, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, in order to meet the basic food needs of their children.

I rise, Mr. Speaker, to decry your, Mr. Speaker, agenda and the agenda of the majority party to beat up on these poor, hard-working people because they are poor, people who find themselves in the predicament of having more month than money and need just a little bit of assistance to meet those basic nutritional needs.

We are sick and tired of people exaggerating and claiming that people are gaming the system to the tune of $65,000, $70,000 a year, and that they don't want to work. People want to work, but they are constantly in competition with foreign workers who earn $3 a day. We are in a postindustrial economy, and often people cannot find work and cannot find enough work to meet their needs.

Often people find work, but those jobs do not provide them, Mr. Speaker, with healthcare. But they are being told that they need to provide a urine specimen and have a drug test to get healthcare simply because they don't have an employer that is able to provide them or willing to provide them with healthcare.

Although the claims, Mr. Speaker, have been refuted time and again with facts and research that poor people have dignity, poor people love their children, but poor people are just not getting a fair shot despite all of this.

Republicans continue to perpetuate this propaganda and these talking points that impose even more obstacles on people who are poor. They continue to promote policies that are humiliating, like the ration or harvest boxes or peeing in a cup and eliminating basic rights of Americans because they are financially poor in the richest country on the planet. We are sick and tired, Mr. Speaker, of being sick and tired.

And why do we think this is happening, Mr. Speaker? We think this is happening, Mr. Speaker, because you yourself, Mr. Speaker, declared that we are going to pay for the $1.5 trillion tax cut that we just gave to the wealthiest Americans, corporations, shareholders, all over this planet, we are going to pay for them by cutting Medicaid. We are going to pay for them, Mr. Speaker, by cutting Medicare. We are going to pay for them by cutting Social Security. We are going to pay for them by cutting food stamps, thus the need to vilify people who are poor.

Mr. Speaker, how about if we really want to help people escape poverty and reduce dependency on the safety net, how about trying to raise the minimum wage so that people who are having trouble putting food on the table will actually earn enough money to be able to afford to pay for basic food needs?

If we really want to help people escape poverty, why don't we recognize that basic healthcare is a human right? And we should be trying to fortify the Affordable Care Act as opposed to 60, 70 attempts to repeal it.

Mr. Speaker, I urge Americans to wake up.

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