30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP 1/29/07
30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you for yielding, Mr. Meek.
You talked about our commitment, failed commitment, over the past several years of Republican rule in this House to our veterans, and I think of what message we send, Mr. Speaker and Members, to the young men and women who are coming back to this country who have fought for us in a war that they are beginning to understand, I think, has been so badly mismanaged and a war in which this Congress has so miserably overseen for the past 3, 4 years. But I also think about what message it sends to prospective young men and women who may want to join our Armed Forces, because we are so lucky in this country to have an all-volunteer military, and it is a blessing for each and every one of us who lives under this blanket of freedom that our volunteer military provides.
The message that we are sending them today, Mr. Meek and Mr. Speaker, is that, one, when we send them into battle, we are not going to do it in a way that protects them with the armor and equipment that they need, that we are not prepared to send them into a conflict that we have planned for in advance for success.
But, even given all that, that when they come back to this country, unconscionably, we are not going to make sure that they have the health care that they need, that they won't wait in lines for procedures that they need, that they won't have to pay exorbitant amounts of money
out of pocket for the drugs that they need to treat the injuries that they suffered on behalf of this Nation.
So for me, Mr. Speaker and Members, the issue of veterans really ties it all together for us because it talks about the values that we have as a Nation to those who have served. It talks about the misguided policies of this administration and the peril that we have put these young men and women in.
As 30-Somethings that get to stand here and as a very new member of this group, we all have friends and cousins and brothers and sisters who are fighting there, and we hear the stories firsthand from our generation or those just a few years younger than us as they come back, and the stories only get worse. We give credit to those who served, and we should give them the benefit of their service when they return here.
And I think you are very right, Mr. Meek, to point out that that was a very noticeable absence from the President's speech, to give credit to them not just in words, not just in Veterans Day and Memorial Day ceremonies, but in the acts and in the funding that this body is charged to provide for those men and women both when they are abroad serving for this country and here at home. And having watched the 30-Somethings do work on this floor, I know what great advocates you have been for those men and women who have served for us, Mr. Meek.
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, Mr. Meek was right on. The new class that was sent here to Washington was sent here to make sure that this place is returned to that hardworking family that you are talking about.
You know, we know the statistics, the terrible statistics of the number of military families that are on food stamps, the number of military families, ex-military families that have to come to the government for some assistance just to get by every day. I mean, these are amongst the legions of families across this country that are scraping to get by every day.
We have a growing economy. You know the story, Mr. Meek. We have a growing economy. Production is up. GDP is up. And wages are flat. Wages for regular, ordinary Americans are going nowhere while wages for CEOs and the folks at the very top of that economic scale are doing very well.
And none of us begrudge folks that have done well in business making a dollar. I mean, that is the genius of our American economy. But what it does is it leaves all of those people behind while a very few at the top are well off.
Here is where we come in, I think. I think we come in in that our job, not necessarily to completely level that playing field, but our job certainly is not to exacerbate the differences that already exist. And when President Bush goes to Illinois, if he spends a little time moving away from the motorcade and the Secret Service lines, he will find a society there in which there are deep divisions between those folks in the middle that are just trying to cling on to that middle class, and the folks that are doing very well.
Our job, you know frankly, is to not make that situation worse. And the tax breaks that this previous Congress gave away to a lot of those oil companies, to the deals that they cut with the drug companies to give them record profits off this health care system, have left a lot of people behind, have left millions of hardworking Americans struggling, producing more, working harder than ever, and not seeing a return for their dollar.
You know the costs of this war. I have heard you talk about it on this floor. But we are spending $8 billion a month in Iraq right now. And we need to start having a conversation about how we spend that money here in the United States of America, and how we use that money to retrain workers that have been laid off due to the globalization of our economy.
We need to talk about how to spend that money to get kids an education that they deserve, to get them out of school in 4 years, rather than what is all too often happening, that it takes 6, 8, 10 years for some students to get degrees. That is where we need to be investing.
That is the right thing for our economy. That is the right thing for our kids. And ultimately it is the right thing for our men and women that are fighting overseas. So I appreciate the focus that we are going to hopefully be able to add to the President's visit, to make sure that when he goes out there into the world that he sees all of America, that he does not just see the folks that have been the beneficiaries of the largesse of government in this Congress for all too long, the oil companies, the drug companies, the Fortune 500s, that he sees the rest of the folks that are struggling.
Now, he is going to get an opportunity, as you know, Mr. Speaker and Members, to do right by those folks, because hopefully we are going to get to his desk an increase in the minimum wage, we are going to get to his desk a decrease in the student loan rate. We are going to put on his desk for his signature a repeal of those massive tax breaks to the oil companies.
He is going to have a choice then, and I hope he listens to what happened on election day. I hope he listens to the legions of folks who sent us here, some of us for the first time and others back for another tour of duty in this Chamber. I hope that he listens to the folks that are asking this government to start sticking up for people that have had very little voice, very little voice except for some people standing here late at night trying to shed light on what has been really happening in this country, Mr. Meek.
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, I would just say, it is funny because there was kind of a low bar set. And I at some levels am pleased that I was not in the same shoes that Mr. Ryan and Mr. Meek were, that I did not have to go back to my constituency for the last several years and answer for what has happened here, because the answer is, not much.
You know, folks out there were struggling with these energy prices just going through the roof. Health care was becoming harder and harder to find, good health care at least. People were crying out for work on immigration. People were trying to get help bringing up their wages to a liveable wage, and they were not hearing anything. I mean, it was deafening silence from down here.
So I do not have as much comparative experience as you, Mr. Ryan and Mr. Meek, do. But walking around the district in Connecticut for the past several weekends it has been euphoric. And I used that word the last time I was down here with you.
It is really this sort of sense that, oh, my gosh, our government is working again. Our government is back to work again; and it used to be that that is what happened. It used to be that there would be a problem, you would go to your legislator, they would come down here and they would do something about it.
And people have come to expect inertia. That is what sort of was just the run of the mill down here in Washington, that you have a problem and then you have to wait about 5, 10 years, in order to get something to happen.
I felt the same thing, Mr. Ryan, that people you know, it is too bad frankly that people have come to be surprised by the fact that there could be immediate action. Because that is what they should get from their government, and they are getting it now.
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I will just key off of an important word there and that is investments. You know, how you balance the budget into the future is to make sure that you are doing the right things now to make sure that our economy is humming 10 years and 20 years from now. So when you talk about this investing in renewable and alternative energy sources, I mean, that is going to be our export. That is going to be what America can renew its economy around, is our ability to be the producer of all these new energy technologies.
When you talk about investing in education, making sure that kids are educated so that America, which right now grows as an economy because we have the best-trained, best-educated work force in the country, continues to be that beacon of economic development due to our work force. Those are the type of investments that have been long cast aside but now we are going to start making again so that we make sure that you know when we are long gone from here that we have left an economy and we have left a budget that makes sense.
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Mr. MURPHY. Just for brief comments, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, I think you are right. I think the American people, this process may be mystifying to them at some level, but they didn't send us here to just bring back the world. They understood that things needed to be put in order. They understood that there were going to have to be some difficult decisions made here; and, quite frankly, I think they realized that a lot of the decisions that were being made here over the past 12 years, in particular over the last few years, unfortunately, when this government decided to give, they were giving to the wrong people. And, in fact, they found the means to give out some favors, to give out some money. They just happened to be giving it to the people that didn't need anything more.
So we can start making those different decisions. But, before we do that, it is going to take a little while to sweep up the shop room floor. And that is what we are doing now.
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