Confirmation of Adewale O. Adeyemo

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, thank you very much for being a part of this effort, and I want to thank my colleague from Ohio for his extraordinary leadership from the very beginning on both of these bills. He led on the EITC bill, and I was very grateful to have the chance to be with him on that, and I on the child tax credit, and he was my partner from the very beginning on that, as was Senator Booker and Senator Harris, before she became Vice President Harris.

I have only been here for 11 years, Mr. President, and you have been here a shorter time than that, and I never thought this day would come. I never thought we would see this day.

Before I came to the Senate, I was the superintendent of the Denver Public Schools. That is a large urban district in Colorado. Most of the kids are kids of color and most of the kids are kids living in poverty, and parents are working two and three jobs, many of them. No matter what they do, they can't get their kids out of poverty. No matter what they do, no matter how hard they work, they are not paid enough to get their kids out of poverty.

Over the last 11 years, I have had the great privilege of traveling the State of Colorado, and it is a diverse State. Politically, it is a diverse State. We have urban areas and rural areas, and we have got some of the most dynamic economies and business environments in the country, and therefore on the planet. And yet, if I had to summarize those townhalls, it is really easy. It is people who are coming and saying: Michael, we are working really hard, but no matter what we do we can't afford housing, healthcare, higher education or early childhood education. We can't save. We think our kids are going to live a more diminished life than the life that we would, and we are already living less of a good life than our parents did.

And that is the anecdotal reflection of an economy that, for the last 50 years, has worked really well for the top 10 percent of Americans but has not worked for the bottom 90 percent. The bottom 90 percent is all of America, and their wages have been flat. We have seen income inequality grow through two recessions, the great recession and now the COVID recession, and the gaps between more affluent families and poorer families have only grown as a result.

And everywhere I went this year--I went to all 64 counties of Colorado during COVID--I heard the same thing: Give us a little bit of hope.

That is what the American Rescue Plan is going to do. It is going to give people just a little bit of hope, make it a little bit easier for people to buy groceries for their families or to pay the rent at the end of the month, pay their mortgage, set up a savings fund for their kids' college education.

That might sound like an obvious thing for us to want to do, but Washington, for years, has done exactly the opposite of what we are doing in this plan. Washington has passed one regressive tax cut after another saying they were cutting taxes for the middle class. That was a complete smokescreen. Since 2000, they have cut--listen to this--$5 trillion of taxes. Almost all of that has gone to the wealthiest people in the country, when we have got the worst income inequality that we have had since 1928. It doesn't make any sense.

Can you imagine if the mayor of Atlanta went to his citizens and said: We are going to borrow a bunch of money from the Chinese. We are going to borrow more money than we ever have before. And you say: Well, that kind of worries me. What are you going to use that money for? Are you building infrastructure and roads and bridges? No. Are you going to invest in our schools? No. Our sewers? No. Mental health, something we need desperately across this country? No. Healthcare? No.

What are you doing with the money? You are borrowing $5 trillion, what are you doing with the money?

We are going to give it to the two wealthiest neighborhoods in Atlanta and hope that somehow it is going to trickle down to everybody else. That is how you write a bill, which is the Trump tax bill, where 42 percent of the benefit of that bill--it was a $2 trillion bill--42 percent went to the top 5 percent of Americans, to the people who needed it least.

This is exactly the opposite of that. Sixty percent of our bill--I am not going to give you a lot of numbers, but 60 percent of our bill, the majority of our bill, goes to people making $50,000 or less. And as my colleagues have said, we are cutting childhood poverty in half this year as a result of what we are doing, and 90 percent of American children are going to benefit from what we are doing. That is about as broad-based as you can get. It is progressive in the sense that the greatest benefit is going to the poorest kids because the credit means the most to the people making the least, but if you are making u to $150,000 as a couple, you are going to have a benefit for your kids. You will get the full tax credit for your kids.

So let me describe it a little bit, and then I will talk about the earned income tax credit, and then I am going to take over for the Presiding Officer, and I look forward to hearing what he has to say.

Most families under this change to the law are going to receive $250 a month per child. That is $300 a month for kids under the age of 6. It is fully refundable. What does that mean? Well, there was a view about this tax credit before that said that you had to make a certain amount of money before you could be eligible for the tax credit because there was a theory that, you know, if you got the tax credit, you wouldn't work.

That is not the problem. People are killing themselves. They are not getting paid. And so we say that you get the tax credit from dollar zero, which means, finally, millions of America's poorest children who have been completely overlooked--not just overlooked, ignored--are going to get the tax credit. So millions and millions and millions of children who were too poor to benefit from what was going on here while we were cutting taxes for the richest people in America are now going to benefit from this tax credit, and it will make the biggest difference for them.

We are the wealthiest country in human history, and yet we have one of the largest, if not the largest, childhood poverty rates in America. As my colleague from New Jersey, Senator Booker, said--I lost my train of thought--wait until I get it back. I am so excited about what we are doing, I can't believe it.

As Senator Booker said, the largest group of poor people in America are children. In other words, children have the highest percentage poverty rates in our country. How can that be? How can we accept that as a permanent state of things? Well, we are not. Because of Joe Biden's bill, we are cutting it in half. And we are saying, in the richest country in the world, it is unacceptable for us to have one of the highest poverty rates. Other countries have cut their poverty rates by half, why can't we? Well, today we are.

We also have some of the worst economic mobility rates in the industrialized world as well, meaning it is hard to move up on the economic ladder. We used to say we are the land of opportunity. Unfortunately, there are a lot of other countries where people are able to get ahead by working hard. We want that to be our country again, and we want to give poor children a chance here. There is not a single child who chooses to be born poor.

The Senator from New Jersey quoted James Baldwin. He is one of my favorite authors, too, about how expensive it is to be poor.

The other thing that we have done in America is we have made it incredibly hard to be poor, incredibly hard to be poor. And that is one of the interesting things about this bill. In countries that have child benefits like this child benefit, they actually have a higher percentage of people in the workforce than we do. And why is that? It makes total sense. It makes total sense because if you have got a little bit of breathing room at the end of every month, you can fix a car that breaks down, and you can stay on your job. If you can afford to pay for a little bit of childcare for a few hours in the afternoon, maybe that lets you stay on the job.

For working moms in particular, I think it is going to really create the opportunity for them to earn income over the long haul because it will be easier for them to stay in their jobs than not.

As I mentioned, nationwide over 90 percent of children are going to benefit. So, over many nights, late nights often, on this floor, I have come here with one complaint or another about how we have turned our back on America's children. I have come here and I have said over and over again that we are treating America's children like they are someone else's children, not like they are America's children. And you know what? In this bill, we treated America's children like they are America's children, like they really matter to us, like we believe in their future and the future of our country; that they are filled with promise. No matter how poor they are, no matter what ZIP Code they live in, rural or urban, they matter to us. They are visible to us, and we are going to make them a priority.

This is the biggest reduction in childhood poverty in the history of our country, and we need to make it permanent. Today, 40 of us sent a letter to President Biden saying that we are going to work with him to find a way to make this permanent.

My goal is to end childhood poverty in this country. That is where I really want to be because then I will know we really are not going to hold some child's economic circumstances against them, but we are going to give every child in America the chance to run the footrace with each other. But 50 percent is pretty good. It is the best thing we have seen out of Washington in generations.

I want to just mention a few words also about the other bill that Senator Brown led on the earned income tax credit, which triples that credit for low-income workers who don't have kids. So these are workers who don't have kids, who won't benefit from what we are doing in the child tax credit but will benefit from what we are doing on the earned income tax credit.

Believe it or not, until now, until we passed this bill, Washington, DC, was actually taxing people into poverty. In other words, people were working; they were earning a living; and then they had to pay their taxes. And then they were in poverty because we were tripling the tax credit from about $500 to $1,500. That no longer will be true.

We also bring the minimum age down from 25 down to 17, and we lift the cap for seniors so more people can benefit from this tax credit. In fact, 17 million people in this country are going to benefit from this change. There are 300,000 workers in my home State of Colorado. And these changes are going to transform lives. They are going to give folks a chance to breathe.

Just like all of you, I want an economy that when the economy grows, it grows for everybody. It doesn't grow just for the people at the very top. That is the economy we have had for the last 50 years. Such an economy is a threat to democracy. You cannot have a democracy if you don't have an economy where everybody feels like they get ahead. It won't work. It has never worked in human history, and I think it would be unreasonable for us to expect it would work here.

It has created a lot of uncertainty and, in many places, a lot of anger about whether the American Dream still exists for most Americans. I believe we will be able to dream again here, and we are going to need, as I said, an economy that works for everybody. That means investing in our infrastructure. That means having an approach, you know, to the competition from the Chinese Government that doesn't just leave us and our industries as collateral damage but creates thriving supply chains here, high-paying jobs here, and making sure that we own auto manufacturing here and other kind of manufacturing.

It means having an education system that can prepare people to do the jobs of the 21st century. That is work we still have to do. It means making sure that every single high school kid or every single kid that graduates from high school graduates knowing they can earn not just a minimum wage but a living wage the day they walk out of their high school. That is what we need to do.

But, in the meantime, this tax cut for working people and for low- income people means that people are going to be able to put food on the table, save a little bit of money, get through this pandemic, make their lives a little bit better, and give their kids a little bit more hope.

I am really grateful. I am really grateful that we elected a President and a Vice President who is not treating America's children like they are someone else's children but treating them like they are our children. That is not only the right thing to do for them. That is the essential thing to do if this democracy is going to survive.

I want to thank the Presiding Officer for all his efforts on this bill as well since you joined the Senate. I am going to stop there, and I will come replace you.

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