National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2009

Floor Speech

NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2009 -- (Senate - September 15, 2008)

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THE ECONOMY

Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, honest people may have differences of opinion as to what type of public policies to pursue to improve our economy, but there should not be a difference of opinion in terms of the state of the economy today, whether it is in Michigan, your State, whether Vermont, my State, or any of the other 48 States. The fact is that for tens and tens of millions of working families in this country, people are having and experiencing great difficulty. And within that context and the context of the Wall Street Journal reporting that today was a day when America's financial system was shaken to its core, and the Dow Jones average went down by some 500 points, I found it rather stunning, if I may use that word, to hear Senator McCain state that ``the fundamentals of our economy are strong.'' In saying that he is simply echoing what President Bush has been saying year after year after year, despite all of the evidence to the contrary. One does try to get a handle on understanding what world Senator McCain and President Bush are living in when they would suggest that ``the fundamentals of our economy are strong.'' Clearly, they have not been talking to working families around the United States of America.

My perception of the economy is if you get off of the country club circuit, you stop talking to the millionaires and the billionaires and the large campaign contributors, and you talk to ordinary working people, people who own small businesses, what you find, in fact, is that the middle class in our country is under more assault than has been the case since before the Great Depression.

The reality of American life today is that poverty is increasing. Over 5 million Americans have slipped out of the middle class into poverty. What we have all over America is families where mom and dad are both working and are now lining up outside emergency food shelves because the limited income they are earning is not providing enough money to provide the food they and their kids need. That does not suggest to me that the fundamentals of our economy are strong.

Since President Bush has been in office, over 7 million Americans have lost their health insurance, and the cost of health insurance has soared. Approximately 20,000 Americans die every single year because they can't gain access to medical care, to primary health care. We spend twice as much per capita on health care as any other nation, yet we are the only nation in the industrialized world that does not provide, by law, health care to all of its people. That does not suggest to me that ``the fundamentals of our economy are strong.''

Health care is perhaps the most basic need, maybe outside of food, outside of shelter, that people have, and 46 million Americans are without health insurance. I don't quite understand how Senator McCain believes in that regard that ``the fundamentals of our economy are strong.''

Since President Bush has been in office, median income for working-age Americans has gone down by over $2,000 after adjusting for inflation. Family income is going down. People are spending more for food. The cost of gas, of course, is now off the wall. College education costs are up. How does that sound like a situation in which ``the fundamentals of our economy are strong,'' according to Senator McCain.

I think the confusion in all of this is pretty easily understood. The truth is ``the fundamentals of our economy are strong'' if you are within the top 1 percent of our country. If you are a millionaire or billionaire, you know what, Senator McCain is right; the fundamentals of the economy are strong for those people.

If you are one of the 400 wealthiest people in our country, you collectively own $1.4 trillion of America--400 families, and your wealth has exploded in the last 8 years. In fact, in America today, the top one-tenth of 1 percent earn more income than do the bottom 50 percent. Within that context, certainly, if you are among the top one-tenth of 1 percent, we can understand why Senator McCain would suggest that ``the fundamentals of our economy are strong.''

What frightens me is that anyone who is so removed from the economic reality facing the American people clearly is not going to have a prescription on how to address the real problems facing ordinary Americans. If your diagnosis is wrong, if you are a physician and you make an incorrect diagnosis, your treatment is not going to work very well. If you are President of the United States, whether it is Bush or something that MCCAIN aspires to, clearly your actions are not going to be effective if you do not understand what is going on.

Let me, if I might, contrast what has been going on under President Bush compared to what was going on under President Clinton. I am not here to tell you that under President Clinton everything was rosy, there were no problems. That certainly was not the case, and I, personally, as an independent, had some strong disagreements with the Clinton administration on a number of issues, including trade. But it is important to understand, contrasting what Clinton accomplished for the middle class as opposed to what Bush did. In fact, MCCAIN's ideas are to follow economically the line of action that President Bush has established over the last 8 years.

During the Clinton administration, over 22 million new jobs were created. Were all of those jobs great-paying jobs? No, they were not. But 22 million jobs is a significant number of new jobs. Under the Bush administration, less than 6 million new jobs were created--22 million versus 6 million.

During the Clinton administration, 6 million Americans were lifted out of poverty. They went from poverty to the middle class. That is good. Under the Bush administration, the exact opposite occurred; 6 million Americans went from the middle class into poverty.

Under Clinton, median income went up. Under Bush, median income went down.

I am not quite clear how our colleague, Senator McCain, believes that ``the fundamentals of our economy are strong.'' The dynamic of what is going on in this country economically is that under the Bush-McCain economic policies, 99 percent of Americans have been net losers under President Bush's tax-and-spend policies. What we are seeing is a historical shift, a redistribution of wealth and income from the middle class to the very wealthy. We are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars going out of the pockets of the middle class, ending up in the pockets of the wealthiest 1 percent.

I sit on the Budget Committee. I have some sense of where this country is spending its money and where this country is not spending its money. I have very great concerns that 4 more years of Bush's policies, in which we continue to give huge tax breaks to the wealthiest 1 percent, while underfunding the needs of the middle class and working families, while ignoring our environment, while not investing in sustainable energy, while maintaining an absurd health care policy in which health care costs rise and in which more and more people are underinsured--I fear that 4 more years of those policies will create a situation from which the middle class of this country may never recover.

What the American dream has always been about is that parents work very hard--that was certainly the case within my family--to try to see their kids do better than they did. My parents never went to college. My parents never had much money. My parents never in a million years would have dreamed that their son would be a Senator. That is way outside their wildest dreams. They worked hard so my brother and I could have a better life economically than they did.

What I worry about--and it is not just me, it is economists all over this country who are now looking at our economy, the fact that we are shedding millions of good-paying, blue-collar jobs, that we are shedding millions of good-paying, white-collar jobs--what economists are now saying is that for the first time in the history of this country our kids, the young people, our grandchildren, if we do not reverse tack, will have a lower standard of living than their parents.

In other words, the American dream, which is what the middle class has been all about, is now turned upside down. There are large numbers of working people today who are earning less money than their parents did while living in less adequate housing than their parents did. It seems to me, if there is anything we have learned over the last 8 years--in which President Bush has given an incredible amount of tax breaks to people who do not need them, in which we have deregulated industry, where we have ignored global warming and investing in sustainable energy--it seems to me, if there is anything we have learned in the last 8 years, it is that this trickle-down economics of tax breaks for billionaires and cutting back on the needs of ordinary people is not the direction in which this country should be moving.

Please count me in as someone who does not believe, as Senator McCain does, that ``the fundamentals of this economy are strong.'' I think the middle class is being shaken right now. People are frightened, and we need a new course for this country.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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