Setting Forth the Congressional Budget for the United States Government

Floor Speech

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Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, as the new chairman of the Budget Committee, I wanted to take a few moments to talk about the $1.9 trillion budget resolution that I hope will be passed late tomorrow night.

I think sometimes our friends in the media make the political process much more complicated than it is. Real politics in a democracy is not that complicated. What it is about is assessing the problems facing the Nation and coming up with solutions to those problems.

One of the great tragedies that has occurred, in my view, in recent years is that for working-class people, middle-class people, lower- income people, these are folks who in a variety of ways are hurting and have hurt for many, many years. Wages in this country have been stagnant for decades. Young people are finding it increasingly difficult to go to college. Ninety million Americans are uninsured or underinsured. We have a political system which is significantly corrupt because big money can buy elections. And people look around them and they say: Who cares about me? Who is worried about me or my parents or my kids?

When that happens--when that kind of political alienation happens-- people can become prone to conspiracy theories and all kinds of big lies and everything else. Here is the simple truth, not complicated. Right now in this year 2021, we face more crises than this country has faced certainly since the Great Depression and maybe going back to the Civil War, when the very existence of this country was at stake.

As we speak right now, whether it is in the State of Georgia or my State of Vermont and all over this country, there are tens of millions of working families who have lost their jobs, lost their incomes, and they are worried tonight as to how they are going to be able to feed their families. They are worried about the back rent they owe.

We have a moratorium on evictions, but that moratorium some day is going to end. People say: How am I going to pay thousands of dollars in back rent? I am going to be evicted. I am going to be out on the street.

People are in the midst of this terrible, terrible pandemic, where we have lost over 400,000 lives--well over 400,000 lives. There are over 90 million people who are uninsured or underinsured and are having difficulty affording going to the doctor, and on and on it goes.

Kids. I have seven grandchildren. Kids all over this country have had their education disrupted.

As a result of the pandemic, people have become isolated from their friends and their families. Mental illness is soaring with increased numbers of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation.

This country faces just terrible, terrible problems. I think we can agree that the year 2020 was the worst year in so many ways in our lifetime, maybe in the history of this country. And now, right now, it is absolutely imperative that the Congress of the United States understands that reality and keeps faith with the American people.

One of the reasons, by the way--and I say this to the Presiding Officer today, who is from Georgia and recently won his election--it is doubly important that we keep faith with the American people is because promises were made in this election in Georgia, which was not just a Senate race. It was more of a national race. President Biden was involved. Majority Leader Schumer was involved. I was involved. A lot of leading Democrats were involved.

We said to the people in Georgia and we said to the people in America: If we gain the majority, we are going to significantly improve lives for working people all over this country. Those are promises made that must be kept.

I want to just spend a few moments to talk about what is in this bill. We throw out numbers--$1.9 trillion. Who knows what $1.9 trillion is? It is such an unfathomable number. It is such a huge number. What does it mean? Who knows? Who understands that?

I want you to understand what is in this bill. For a start, what I believe and I know you believe is that when people are hurting, when they owe back rent, when they can't afford to feed their kids, when they can't afford to go to the doctor, we need to get cash into the pockets of those people as soon as we possibly can.

I was one of the people here a month ago when a whole lot of people were talking about it. I said we need direct payments. We need to get cash into the hands of people. I fought very hard. We ended up with just $600 in the last bill. It wasn't enough. It is a start, but not enough. We said our goal was $2,000. And in this bill, there will be an additional $1,400 for every working-class man, woman, and child.

So if you are an individual, a single person making $75,000 or less, when we pass this legislation you are going to get a check for $1,400. If you are a couple earning less than $150,000, and let's just say you have two kids, each person in the family, the husband, the wife, and the two kids get $1,400 apiece. That is $5,600.

Let me tell you something. For a struggling working-class family, that $5,600 is going to mean an enormous amount. It will allow people to pay the rent, allow people to pay off their debts, allow people to go to the doctor. That is what this legislation is about.

We made a promise. Some of us made that promise--I did--that we would make sure that in working-class families, each individual gets $2,000 and we will keep that promise: $600 then, $1,400 now.

As a result of this pandemic, we have seen a horrific increase in unemployment. Unemployment is soaring all over this country. Millions of workers have lost their jobs. They have no income coming in. The extended unemployment benefits that were previously passed are going to expire in mid-March. What this legislation does--very importantly--if you are unemployed right now and you are worried you are going to lose your employment, when we pass this legislation, your unemployment is going to be extended through the end of September. And on top of the normal unemployment benefits you get from your State--and they vary State to State--you are going to get an additional $400 a week. We will not turn our backs on the millions of unemployed workers in this country.

Included in the legislation that we are fighting for is the need to raise the minimum wage in this country from the starvation wage that currently exists of $7.25 an hour to a living wage of $15 an hour. Now, we understand that restaurants and small businesses are hurting, and in this legislation, there will be a significant amount of money to make sure that small businesses will be able to afford that wage increase.

You know, when we talk about the economy, the media very often focuses on the stock market. That is important. We can focus on unemployment--terribly important. Yet what we don't focus on enough is that half of our workers in this country are living paycheck to paycheck. They have nothing in the bank, and they have to live off the paychecks they make. If they have an automobile problem--the car breaks down--or somebody in the family gets sick, they are in deep financial trouble. It seems to me that, in the richest country in the history of the world, it is not too much to demand that, if you work 40 hours a week, you don't live in poverty. Fifteen bucks an hour is not going to make anybody rich, but I have seen workers and talked to workers all over this country who are trying to raise their kids on $10, $12 an hour, and you can't do it. So $15 an hour is an important start in making sure that all working people in this country can live with dignity.

This legislation will expand the child tax credit from $2,000 to $3,000 and to $3,600 for families with kids under the age of 6. Now, what is not talked about very much in America--not by politicians, not by the media--is the fact that we have one of the highest rates of childhood poverty of almost any major country on Earth, and that is a terrible, terrible thing. You know, politicians give speeches of ``the future of this country is with our children,'' so forth and so on, but they have millions of kids living in poverty. Millions of families can't afford to send their kids to decent quality childcare. So expanding the child tax credit will go a very long way to reducing child poverty in America, and that is something that we must do.

It is no great secret that, as a result of the pandemic, our revenues going into State and local governments are in significant decline. The result of that is that, in the last year, well over a million State and local employees have been laid off. We are talking about teachers. We are talking about firemen. We are talking about police officers and other municipal and State employees. When you have those layoffs, not only is that a crisis unto itself for those workers, it means that State and local governments cannot provide the services that need to be provided in the midst of this terrible crisis. So this legislation would provide $350 billion to State and local governments, many of which are facing bankruptcy.

Now, obviously, the crisis that we are facing today is not only an economic crisis, it is clearly a health crisis. The good news is that, in a relatively short period of time, at least two manufacturers in this country--and more, I think, are coming on board--have introduced and created vaccines, which are now being distributed. That is the good news. The bad news is that we need to significantly increase the production of those vaccines. We don't have enough. Even more importantly, we have to do a heck of a lot better job in distributing those vaccines and getting those vaccines into the arms of people, and this legislation will provide billions and billions of dollars to do just that.

At a time when we are looking at the highest level of hunger in this country in decades, many billions of dollars are going to make sure that our children and our families do not go hungry. Clearly, one of the major crises facing this country is that schools in every State are either not open or they are open with irregular hours. Kids are trying to get an education online. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but our goal is to make sure that we can reopen schools and expand after-school and childcare programs for working families and do it in a way that is safe. We want parents to feel good and know that the facilities they are sending their children to are safe, and we have a whole lot of money in this bill to do just that.

In this bill, in order to protect workers, there is a sizable sum of money to prevent the pensions of millions of workers and retirees from being slashed by 30, 40, or even 65 percent. A number of years ago, in the middle of night, in some big omnibus bill, language was put in that would destroy the promises made to millions of workers in terms of the pensions that they were guaranteed, and we rectify that in this bill.

Right now, in America, as I mentioned earlier, some 90 million of our people are either uninsured or underinsured, which speaks to the need, in my view, of major healthcare reform. My own view is that we need to put in a Medicare for All, single-payer program so that we are no spending twice as much per capita on healthcare as any other country on Earth despite so many people being uninsured or underinsured. Well, Medicare for All is not in this bill, but what is in this bill is a significant amount of money to expand healthcare, and we are still looking at the best ways to do that. One of the ways will probably be by expanding Medicaid and also investing significantly in community health centers and the National Health Service Corps. We have a crisis in terms of the number of doctors and nurses that we need, and the National Health Service Corps is a program which will forgive debt for doctors and nurses if they practice in underserved areas.

I know sometimes we get consumed by numbers. It is going to be $2.1 trillion, $1.9 trillion, $1.7 trillion. That is not the issue. The issue is whether we are prepared to address the crises facing the American people. Will this bill solve all of the problems that we face? No, it will not. Will it go a long way to addressing many of the crises and easing the anxiety of so many working families? Yes, it will, but this should not be the end of the process. As soon as we pass this, we are going to come back with another major piece of legislation, and that will deal with some of the long-term structural problems our country faces in terms of a crumbling infrastructure and in terms of the need to deal with the existential threat of climate change. We need to create millions of good-paying jobs. That is something that this Congress has got to address. Too many of our people are unemployed, and too many of our people are underemployed. This we will be dealing with in the next COVID reconciliation bill.

Now, there has been some discussion on--and the media seems fixated on--the issue of partisanship. Oh, my God. We are being so partisan here. Let me remind everybody that, under the Trump administration, massive tax breaks were passed that went to the top 1 percent and large corporations. Eighty-three percent of the benefits in the Trump tax plan went to the 1 percent and large corporations. Do you know how bipartisan that bill was that passed in reconciliation? There was not one Democrat who voted for that bill. It was voted just with Republican votes.

Then, outrageously, as part of the reconciliation, the Republicans came forward and said: Hey, we think it is a brilliant idea to repeal the Affordable Care Act and throw up to 32 million people off the healthcare that they have. I don't know what people are thinking about when they propose to throw tens of millions of people off the healthcare that they have, but that was their idea to repeal the Affordable Care Act. By one vote by the late John McCain, that did not happen, but not one Democrat voted for that bill.

My point is that it is one thing for my Republican friends here to be talking about the need for bipartisanship, which all of us support, but the reality is they used exactly the same process to pass or at least try to pass major, major pieces of legislation.

So all that I want to say is that we are living in an unprecedented moment in American history. Again, it is quite likely that this Congress today and President Biden are facing more serious crises than any President--certainly, since FDR and maybe going back to Abraham Lincoln--has faced. We have a healthcare crisis. We have a pandemic. We have an economic meltdown. We have an education crisis. We have an infrastructure crisis. We have a criminal justice crisis. We have an immigration crisis. You name it, we got it. Either we are going to have the courage to address those problems or we are not, and I think now is the time to do it. We certainly look forward to the support from our Republican colleagues, but what is most important is that, at a time of massive pain and anxiety, this Congress acts boldly on behalf of working families.

For too long, we have seen the Congress give tax breaks to billionaires. We have seen lobbyists work to get hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare for people who don't need it. We have seen a tax system in which major corporations like Amazon--maybe the most profitable corporation in America or one of the most profitable corporations and owned by the wealthiest guy in America--pay zero in Federal taxes, and, right now, the very rich have an effective tax rate which is lower than that of working families.

So I know it may sound like a radical idea, but the time is now for the U.S. Congress to begin to represent the vast majority of the people--the working class of this country, the middle class of this country, and lower income people--who are struggling. Let us work together. Let us crush this terrible pandemic. Let us get our kids back to school. Let us reopen our economy. Let us create a government that works for all of us and not just the very few.

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