Recovery Rebates and Economic Stimulus for the American People Act of 2008 -- Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

RECOVERY REBATES AND ECONOMIC STIMULUS FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ACT OF 2008--MOTION TO PROCEED -- (Senate - February 04, 2008)

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Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, during the last several weeks and months, in fact, there has been increased discussion and comments about the state of our economy. As you know, last month our Nation actually shed some 17,000 jobs and many economists tell us we are now in a recession and that is certainly true for some parts of this country.

The House, the Senate, and the White House are wrestling with an economic stimulus package, and President Bush has presented his new budget. This week, the Director of the OMB and the Secretary of the Treasury will come before the Senate Budget Committee to discuss their views on the economy.

Let me begin by stating how dismayed I was by the budget President Bush has provided us today. Frankly, this budget is unconscionable and reflects priorities that are almost impossible to comprehend. While providing hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks for the wealthiest three-tenths of 1 percent of our population over the next decade, this President has proposed major cuts in health care, LIHEAP, weatherization, nutrition, housing programs, and other basic needs for moderate- and low-income people. This is a Robin Hood in reverse budget. This is a budget that takes from the poor and working families, those most in need, and gives to millionaires and billionaires, those least in need.

This proposed budget tells us how out of touch this President and his administration are with the needs of the American people.

Let me be very clear; as a Member of the Senate Budget Committee, I will do everything I can to make sure Bush's budget is rejected and that we bring forth a new budget that reflects the priorities of all our people and not just the wealthiest and most powerful.

Most Americans understand, for example, our health care system is disintegrating. Since George W. Bush has been President, 8.6 million Americans have lost their health insurance, and we now live in a country in which 47 million of our neighbors have no health insurance. We live at a time when health costs are soaring, when people are paying larger and larger deductibles and copayments. That is the reality of American health care today.

How does President Bush respond to this crisis in health care? His response is to slash funding for Medicare, slash funding for Medicaid, slash funding for rural health care programs, making a terrible situation even worse.

I understand it will be asking too much for this President to stand up to the insurance companies, to stand up to the drug companies and move us toward a national health care program which guarantees health care for all our people, something, by the way, which every other major country on Earth now has.

I understand that is something George W. Bush is not going to do. I understand that. But at the very least, at a time when some 17,000 Americans a year die because they lack health insurance, he should not be making a terrible situation even worse. He need not deny health care to even more Americans.

In the State of Vermont and through many parts of our country, Minnesota included, we have experienced extremely cold weather this winter. At the same time, as every American knows, the price of home heating oil has more than doubled, skyrocketed since President Bush has been in office. The result is the LIHEAP program, the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which keeps millions of seniors and low-income households warm in the winter, is stretched to the breaking point. That is the reality. Cold winter, price of home heating oil soaring, the program is stretched.

In State after State, because of soaring fuel prices, either fewer people are able to access LIHEAP or the amount of help they are getting has been significantly reduced. That is simply the arithmetic of the situation: lower payments, fewer people. Those are the choices States have with reduced LIHEAP budgets.

I know President Bush has no problem, no problem whatsoever, with the fact that his good pals at ExxonMobil have announced the largest profits in the history of the world for the third consecutive year, over $40 billion in profits in the year 2007. I am quite sure the President has no problem with that, and I understand that. He has no problem, apparently, with the fact that home heating oil prices are now at $3.30 a gallon. I am sure he has no problems with the fact that a few years ago, the former CEO of ExxonMobil, a gentleman named Lee Raymond, received a $400 million retirement package from that company. It is not a problem for the President of the United States. He is close to those people. As he once famously said: That is his base.

But despite the President's lack of concern about rising fuel costs, it is beyond comprehension that he would slash the LIHEAP program by $570 million, a 22-percent reduction from last year. The price of home heating oil is soaring, more and more people are losing their LIHEAP benefits, and the President's response in the midst of this crisis is to slash the program. That is pretty cruel. What is a low-income senior living on Social Security supposed to do when the weather gets below zero and she cannot heat her home? That is the story today, and you propose to make it even worse next year.

At a time when millions of low-income seniors are struggling to survive on inadequate Social Security benefits, this President in his budget wants to cut back on nutrition programs for low-income seniors, in addition to cutting back on low-income housing and senior citizen housing.

Hunger in the United States of America is increasing. Emergency food shelves are simply running out of groceries. There is no moral justification for the President of the United States to be cutting back on nutrition programs for low-income elderly Americans by proposing to completely eliminate the Commodity Supplemental Food Program which is providing assistance to well over 4,000 low-income senior citizens in the State of Vermont and hundreds of thousands nationally. With hunger going up, the President cuts back on an important nutritional program for low-income seniors.

I am a member of the Veterans' Committee, and I am proud that last year, against opposition from the White House, we substantially increased funding for the VA and are providing billions more so veterans can gain access to quality VA hospitals and clinics. That is what we accomplished. That was the right thing to do. And yet despite all of his rhetoric about how much he loves the troops and how much he respects the troops--last week, I might add, in his State of the Union Address, President Bush said:

We must keep faith with all who have risked life and limb so that we might live in freedom and peace.

That was the President's statement 1 week ago at the State of the Union Address. But today, after all that flowery rhetoric, the President has proposed in his budget a very sharp increase in health care fees from $250 to $750 for veterans who access VA health care facilities. And there is no question, no doubt about it but that these increased fees, if put into effect, would result in driving many veterans out of VA health care which, in fact, is precisely the goal of that proposal. He wants to take veterans out of VA health care, which is consistent with what the President did several years ago when he threw large numbers of so-called category 8 veterans, those without service-connected disabilities, out of VA health care.

The words tell us how much he loves our soldiers, but actions tell us he is prepared to raise fees for veterans health care, with the result of removing many veterans from the VA system.

I say to President Bush that at a time when tens of thousands of our soldiers have been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, please don't balance your budget on the backs of men and women who have put their lives on the line defending this country.

Since George W. Bush has been in office, we have seen recordbreaking deficits, and our national debt is now $9.2 trillion, $3 trillion more than when President Bush assumed office.

All of us in Congress want to move this country toward a balanced budget to make sure our kids and our grandchildren are not left with an enormous debt. But there are right ways to move toward a balanced budget and there are wrong ways to try to do that and, unfortunately, President Bush's budget moves us exactly in the wrong direction.

As many Americans know, since President Bush has been in the White House, the middle class has been decimated, poverty has increased, and the gap between the very wealthiest people in our society and everyone else has grown wider. In fact, the United States now has by far the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth.

Sadly, the gap between the upper-income people, the wealthiest people in our country, and the middle class is increasingly making our country look like a poor developing country. We have the same economic structure, in terms of distribution of wealth and income, that countries such as Brazil and Mexico have, rather than looking like other major industrialized countries in Europe, Scandinavia or in Canada.

I am aware a lot of facts and figures are thrown about on the floor of the Senate, but let me mention one fact I hope all Americans pay attention to, and that is that according to the latest statistics available, the wealthiest 300,000 Americans--that is men, women, and children--take in more income than the bottom 150 million Americans. In other words, the upper one-tenth of 1 percent, 300,000 people, take in more money than do the bottom 50 percent.

One-tenth of 1 percent. Fifty percent. And that is what is going on in the American economy today.

Tragically, that gap between the superrich and everybody else is growing wider and wider every single year. For those people who live in the bottom 90 percent of the population, the vast majority of our citizens, their average income was $33,000 way back in 1973. Today, despite all of the free trade agreements and globalization, despite all of the huge increases in technology, despite the significant growth in worker productivity, in inflation-accounted-for dollars, that $33,000 per year has declined to $29,000 a year, which is about a $75-a-week pay cut.

That is what is going on in the economy today, and has been going on over the last three decades: people on top, doing phenomenally well; people at the bottom, the situation is getting worse; people in the middle are getting squeezed, working longer hours for lower wages. And perhaps those trends tell us why in today's Washington Post a front-page story was headlined ``U.S. Concern Over Economy Is Highest In Year.'' That was the headline on the front page of the Washington Post today. The first line of that story tells us that ``The public views the national economy now more negatively than at any point in nearly 15 years.''

What is going on is that the American people are getting sick and tired--they are getting sick and tired--of paying $3.15 for a gallon of gas when ExxonMobil enjoys the highest profits in the history of the world. They are tired of paying outrageously high home heating costs. They are tired of losing their health insurance. They are tired of losing their pensions. They are tired of not being able to find affordable childcare for their kids. They are tired of seeing their kids come out of college $20,000 or $30,000 in debt and not able to find decent-paying jobs.

And not only are they tired, they are worried. They are worried that for the first time in the modern history of this great country--despite the fact that so many people are working so hard, they are worried that their kids will have a lower standard of living than they do. They are worried that the American dream, which is what this country has always been about--the dream which says that if parents work hard, their kids will do better than they do--they are worried that dream is being lost.

That is why there is so much deep concern about the economy. It is not just health care, it is not just the loss of pensions, it is not only outrageously high prices when you fill up your car, and it is not only home heating oil; it is the fact that when you go shopping, what you are doing is buying products made in China and Mexico that used to be made in the United States. Many American people understand that we are never going to have a great economy if we are not producing the products we need and the people throughout the world need.

The American people understand that there is something profoundly wrong when 20, 25 years ago the largest employer in the United States was General Motors--manufacturer of cars--that paid workers good wages, good benefits, and there was a strong union, and today the largest employer in the United States is Wal-Mart, with low wages, minimal benefits, and vehemently antiunion.

The American people are getting the point that people such as President Bush work tirelessly on behalf of the wealthy and the powerful. But who is standing up for the people who make our country go every day--for the cops and the firemen and the farmers and the people who work in factories and the nurses and the doctors? Who is standing up for those people? Maybe the time is now for us to begin standing up for those people.

In the midst of all of this, the President has brought forth a budget that punishes working people, punishes poor people, but says to the wealthiest people in this country, the people who have now had it so good since the late 1920s, and says to them: Hey, I--the President--am going to help you. In his budget the President wants to repeal the estate tax, which would provide $1 trillion in tax relief to the wealthiest three-tenths of 1 percent. Let me say that again. Over a 20-year period, $1 trillion in tax relief to the wealthiest three-tenths of 1 percent of our population.

That is what this budget, this Robin-Hood-in-reverse budget, is all about. If you are old and trying to survive on Social Security, and if you are going to go cold this winter and next winter, the President wants to cut back on the heating assistance you receive. If you are a low-income American, or perhaps an American without any health insurance right now, the President wants to cut back on Medicaid and Medicare. If you are an American who lives in a home that lacks insulation, and if you are putting money into your heating bill and that heat is going out your poorly insulated home, it is going out the window, going out the roof, you have a President who wants to completely eliminate the low-income weather assistance program. If you are a veteran who has put your life on the line defending this country, the President wants to make it harder for you to access VA health care by substantially increasing your fees. But if you are a billionaire, the President is all there for you. If you are one of the wealthiest families in America, in this budget the President has brought forth today, you are going to get huge tax breaks. Let me cite one example of how preposterous this scenario is.

One of the wealthiest families in America is the Walton family. The Walton family, as I think most people know, owns Wal-Mart. This one family is worth, it is estimated, a combined $82 billion. There are a number of sons and daughters, but combined they are worth about $82 billion--one family. Incredible as it may sound, under the President's proposal of completely eliminating the estate tax, that one family would receive over $30 billion in tax breaks.

So here we are. If you are old and can't afford to heat your home, we are going to cut the program that keeps you warm. If you are sick and you have no health insurance, we are going to cut the program that gives you access to a doctor. If you are living in a home where you are losing all kinds of heat through poor insulation, we are not going to help you. If you are a veteran who has served your country, we are going to raise fees for you to get into a VA hospital or a clinic. But if you are one of the wealthiest families in America, we are going to give you $30 billion in tax breaks.

I say this without glee, but President Bush will probably go down in history as one of the least popular Presidents this country has ever had. And you don't need to know anything more to understand why that is so. A President who would give hundreds of billions in tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires and then cut back on the needs of working families, senior citizens, and veterans is not a President who is representing the vast majority of our people. I will do everything that I can as a member of the Budget Committee to not only make sure President Bush's budget is not implemented, but I will work with my colleagues to fashion a budget that begins to address the real needs of the American people.

There is great disenchantment in this country about what is going on here in Washington, but I also note there is great hope out there. There is a belief that if we come together as a people, if we remember where we came from, if we are prepared to uphold the values that have made us a great country, if we are willing to stand up to the powerful special interests who have so much influence over what goes on in this institution--if we can do those things--not only can we once again create a great middle class, not only can we once again protect the most vulnerable people in our society, but perhaps, more importantly, we can once again give the American people a faith in their Government that they presently lack. That is something we must do.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

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