Motion to Discharge

Floor Speech

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Mr. KAINE. Madam President, I rise with my colleagues on Build Back Better, and I just want to emphasize two points that really matter to me.

First, Build Back Better is absolutely critical to combine with the infrastructure bill. If we make an infrastructure investment that will be the biggest since the Interstate Highway System, who is going to build it? Who is going to build it?

Open the paper. You can't hire schoolbus drivers. You can't hire truckers. We have a tight labor market right now. What Build Back Better does is massive investments in the American workforce, beginning with the workforce of tomorrow--our children--all the way up through community college, workforce development, and immigration reforms that will expand the Nation's workforce.

If we invest in infrastructure but don't think about making sure that we have the workforce to do it, what a missed opportunity. The Build Back Better plan has amazing investments in our workforce--the workforce we need right now and the workforce we will need for decades.

The second thing about Build Back Better that I particularly appreciate is what it does for children.

If we pass Build Back Better, we will have done for American children what Social Security has done for American seniors.

Let me just point something out.

Pre-Social Security, you would work your whole life; you would educate your kids; you would be the PTA president or the Little League coach or the Sunday school teacher. You would retire, and 50 percent of people would retire and then go below the poverty level. That was what being a senior citizen was in the United States before Social Security.

FDR basically said: We want you to have a dignified retirement because you have worked, and you have earned it.

So Social Security, once passed and implemented, dropped the senior poverty rate from 50 percent to 10 percent. There has never been a program that has been as successful in doing exactly what it was designed to do as Social Security.

Build Back Better can do the same thing for kids. We are a nation that has tolerated, for decades, a youth poverty level dramatically higher than the adult poverty level. What does that say about a society? Yet we have sort of acted like: Well, I guess that is the law of nature. I guess we can't do anything about it. I guess kids are just going to be a lot poorer than adults.

We don't have to tolerate it. We can do something about it with the combined impact of the child tax credit, the childcare tax credit, the funding for childcare, universal pre-K, paid parent and family leave, and free community college. If you put those things together, we will do for children what Social Security did for adults, and we will no longer be a nation that tolerates an unacceptably high children's poverty rate and says: Well, there is nothing we can do about it.

We can do something about it, and we will do something about it. That is why I so strongly support, with my colleagues, Build Back Better.

I yield back.
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