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Floor Speech
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Mr. BENNET. I want to thank the Presiding Officer who has been such a champion on all these texts, the Senator from Nevada, and the Senator from New Hampshire as well, for bringing together people from both sides of the aisle to work on this. And you, Mr. Chairman, for your steadfast leadership over many, many years.
And I am not going to give everybody a long history lesson here, but you want to know why our politics are so messed up, what feels like we are having these incredible, disagreeable disagreements and divisions and all of this in our politics, I believe there is one fundamental reason for it, and I think that fundamental reason is that people in America have lost a sense of having economic mobility for themselves and their families.
You know, the whole idea of the American dream was that, if you work hard enough, that your kids were going to do better than you did and that your grandkids were going to do better than they did. And that has been lost. It is not irrecoverable, but there are so many families in Colorado, in Nevada, New Hampshire, Oregon, that are going through the same stuff that people all over America are going through, which is they are working harder than ever before and they are bringing less home.
And more of the benefit has been going, for years and years and years, to the people at the very top. That is the result of a real philosophical approach to how to run an economy, which is called trickle-down economics or supply side economics; it was something that Ronald Reagan led here. But I have to say this: There are Democrats and Republicans who supported those tendencies for a long time, and the result of that is that, today, the bottom half of Americans in our economy have less wealth than they did in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was President.
We are the first generation of Americans, the people in this Senate, that are actually leaving less opportunity, not more, to our kids and our grandkids. That has never happened before in American history. Half the people that are in their 30s today are earning less than their parents did.
And I heard my colleague from Rhode Island talking about housing in Rhode Island. You can say exactly the same thing in Colorado. There is not a single place in Colorado where people think they can afford housing--because they can't.
There is no workforce housing left, as you and I have discussed in the State of Colorado or the State of Oregon. And all of that is a preface to saying finally--finally--we have a bill in front of us that doesn't just cut taxes for the biggest corporations and the wealthiest people in the country, but actually cuts taxes for working people. And amazingly, as has been said, amazingly, it got 357 votes in the House. I know the chairman is fond of saying you couldn't get that kind of a majority vote for--what?
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Mr. BENNET. Apple pie. Or who is your favorite, you know, celebrity. And yet they were able to come together over there in the House of Representatives and pass a bill with 357 freaking votes.
So we are going to put this on the floor. There is a lot of debate going on right now about was this party for kids or that party--I assume everybody is for kids. I assume that everybody, given the opportunity to vote for a piece of legislation that has that number of votes, that does not just the important work this does for the child tax credit, but also does important work on the research and development tax credit that my colleague from New Hampshire has been such a leader on, that when we get it here, we will actually all vote for it.
And then I hope we come back next year and do the work we really need to do with the child tax credit, which is to once again show that we do not have to accept, as a permanent feature of our economy or a permanent feature of democracy, the disgraceful and immoral levels of childhood poverty we have in this country, that we know--because President Biden put it in place several years ago--that we have a tool, the child tax credit, that will actually lift half the American children out of poverty and give them a fighting chance to contribute to our democracy and to our economy.
This is one important step in that process. I urge everybody in this Chamber to vote yes this week on this bill because this will be your opportunity, before we go home, to demonstrate where we stand on behalf of the American people and their families.
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