Continuing Extension Act Of 2010 - Motion To Proceed - Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. SANDERS. I thank my friend for yielding.

Madam President, the Senator from Oklahoma and the Senators who spoke before him are obviously right. This country has a record-breaking deficit, a huge national debt, and it is an issue that has to be dealt with. The debate is, how do we deal with it? Let me very briefly mention some of the factors--not all, but some of the factors, some of the policies that got us into the national debt situation we are in right now. Six years ago or so, President Bush decided to take us to war in Iraq. That war was misguided. It was a mistake. But in terms of the issue of tonight, that war was not paid for and will end up costing this country some $2 or $3 trillion. Many of my friends on the other side who now decry the national debt voted for that war without worrying about how it was going to be paid for.

During the Bush era, despite the growing gap between the very wealthiest people and everybody else, our Republican friends, who then controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House, decided that the very richest people, millionaires and billionaires, needed huge tax breaks, hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks. That is what they wanted. I didn't want it. I didn't vote for it.

During the Bush era, we passed a Medicare Part D prescription drug bill, a huge bill written by the insurance companies. We could have had a much better bill, if we negotiated prices with the pharmaceutical industry. We chose not to do that. A prescription drug Part D bill, unpaid for. That is what they voted for.

After the bailout, after the collapse of Wall Street, President Bush and others came together and said: We ought to bail them out. Unpaid for. I brought an amendment on the floor to pay for that. It fell. Unpaid for.

Ironically, within the next couple of weeks or months--I am not sure which--many of our friends are going to come back to the floor and say: We need to loosen up the estate tax. We need to give massive tax breaks to the wealthiest three-tenths of 1 percent of the population, the very richest people in the country. Estimates are it is going to cost $350 billion over 10 years, giving it to the richest people.

My point is, if we are going to deal seriously with our national debt and our deficit--enormous problems--let's be honest and let us get our priorities right.

In terms of today's debate, let us not on the one hand say we are going to give massive tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires by loosening up on the estate tax, but today we cannot regard as an emergency situation extending unemployment compensation to people who are in desperate economic trouble.

Since December of 2007, over 8 million Americans have lost their jobs. Sixteen-and-a-half percent of the American workforce is today either unemployed or underemployed. Here is the important point. Over 6 million Americans have been out of work for more than 6 months, the highest on record. What we are experiencing now is not only unacceptably high unemployment but a level of long-term unemployment this country has never seen before. In other words, people are losing their jobs, but they are not getting them back, not in 2 weeks, not in 4 weeks. Month after month people are wondering how they are going to get a job, how they will feed their family, how they will take care of basic needs. That is what we are talking about today.

When we talk about deficit reduction and dealing with the national debt, in my view we don't do that by denying unemployment benefits to families in desperate need. I think we take into consideration the reality that the top 1 percent of this country now earns more income than the bottom 50 percent. And those very same people, the top 1 percent, over the last number of years have been given huge amounts in tax breaks. We take into consideration the fact that as a nation, we are spending a very significant and growing amount of money on the military. There is study after study which indicates there are significant amounts of money that can be saved, if we take a hard look at military spending, including a number of weapons systems that are not designed to fight international terrorism but to continue the effort in the Cold War which no longer exists.

It seems to me we have two issues we have to address. No. 1, how do we create the jobs this country desperately needs? How do we protect the most vulnerable people? And simultaneously, how do we address the deficit crisis and our national debt?

I suggest now is the time to rethink the priorities that have existed for a number of years. Now is the time to ask the wealthiest people to start paying their fair share of taxes. Now is the time to take a hard look at all of our Federal agencies for waste and fraud and abuse but also including the military.

The issue is not whether we deal with the national debt and our deficit. The question is, how we do it, and how we do it in a way that protects the middle class and some of the most vulnerable people in society.

I yield the floor.

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