Providing for Consideration of H. Con. Res. 99, Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2008

Floor Speech

PROVIDING FOR CONSIDERATION OF H. CON. RES. 99, CONCURRENT RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET FOR FISCAL YEAR 2008

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Mr. McGOVERN. Madam Speaker, I am proud to rise in support of this rule and in support of this budget resolution. It provides our families, seniors and children with economic security, health care, and nutrition.

Madam Speaker, 5.4 million more people live in poverty today than in the year 2000. That is over 35 million total, and 12.4 million are children. One in every eight Americans is hungry. One in eight does not know whether they will be able to put food on the table. Madam Speaker, every single Member of this Congress should be ashamed of these statistics. The United States is the only wealthy industrialized nation in the world that tolerates widespread hunger amongst its people, including its children.

The decision to tolerate hunger in America has serious costs for us as a Nation. We constantly hear that we are a Nation committed to leaving no child behind. But children who are hungry, who live in poverty, cannot keep up. They cannot develop and thrive. They cannot learn or play with energy and enthusiasm.

Hunger stunts the physical, mental and emotional growth of millions of our children. When these children become adults, they are more likely to have low earnings and low productivity in the workforce. Their poor health means more illness that requires large health care expenditures. Their early mortality robs our economy of their labor and consumption. They are more likely to engage in crime, which results in monetary and personal cost to their victims and to the taxpayers for the cost of our criminal justice system. And, sadly, they are also more likely to be victims, resulting in similar costs.

In other areas, we see the difficulties faced by our seniors, who are dehumanized and demoralized when they have to choose between utilities and food. Many need special diets and adequate nutrition for their medications to work effectively. But, unfortunately, hundreds of thousands lack adequate food. And when we fail to end hunger among our elderly, we choose to add to their immediate and long-term health care costs, even while we hasten their deaths.

These are some of the priorities addressed in the Democratic budget resolution.

This budget resolution recognizes the burden faced by families when they are forced to choose between rent, food, heat and medicine, and provides funding for children's health care and provides funding for programs like LIHEAP, Head Start and low-income housing.

I want to thank Chairman Spratt for holding a budget hearing on hunger and inviting Boston pediatrician Deborah Frank and South Carolina food banker Denise Holland to testify about the urgent need to address hunger in America. I only wish more of my colleagues attended that hearing.

We heard how food stamp benefits provide a first defense against hunger but are too meager to solve the problem, how food stamp benefits average just $1 per person per meal, how the minimum monthly benefit is stuck at the decades-old level of $10, and how the program is missing four in every 10 eligible people.

Madam Speaker, it is unconscionable that the programs proven to attack hunger in America are continually under attack. The Commodity Food Supplemental Program is continually zeroed out by the Bush administration. The Food Stamp Program is constantly derided, with fraud, waste and abuse cited, when, according to the GAO, it is running at the most productive levels in the history of the program.

It is unconscionable, Madam Speaker, that legal immigrants, people here legally with proper documentation, must wait 5 years for the food stamps they may need today, simply because they happen to be newcomers to our Nation. This is simply bad policy, and it needs to be fixed immediately. And it is unconscionable that children in need who receive breakfast and lunches during the school year are denied food during the summer months simply because school isn't in session.

The next farm bill needs to invest the additional Federal resources to improve these Federal anti-hunger programs. It should improve the food stamp benefit, open eligibility to vulnerable and underserved groups, and adequately fund and fully utilize USDA resources to support emergency food assistance and other commodity assistance programs that serve the needy.

This budget resolution, by providing a $20 billion reserve fund for the farm bill and by rejecting the President's arbitrary eligibility cuts to food stamps and the elimination of the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, not only makes a strong statement on the need to combat hunger in America, it actually takes concrete steps to do so.

This resolution deserves support for the economic and food security it provides all our people, but, and let me stress, it is only a beginning. Ending hunger is not and should not be a partisan issue. The moral and economic costs affect every community in America. There is not a single community in America that is hunger-free.

So I call upon my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to work together here in the Congress and in our communities to create the sustained and comprehensive investment necessary to end hunger and to make us a stronger Nation. One step in this path is to pass the budget resolution before us.

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