Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2012

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Chairman, I want to tell you about a young woman, a young woman named Sarah. She actually lives in a shoreline community in Connecticut in Representative DeLauro's district. She has got four kids. She was playing by the rules, did everything that we asked. She had a good job in purchasing, and last year she got laid off.

She got laid off, like thousands of other Connecticut residents. She has four kids ages 7 to 15. Since that day, she has been confronted every day with a decision. She's got about enough money to put one meal on the table for her kids. They'll get one meal while they're at school. And so she makes the decision: Does she put breakfast on the table to make sure that they have food in their bellies when they show up to school or does she put dinner on the table when they come back. That's her daily challenge every single day. Now, she gets a little bit of help from a food bank, from a soup kitchen around the corner from her--a soup kitchen that likely gets money from The Emergency Food Assistance Program, one of the programs that is cut 25 percent under the President's proposed budget. That's her daily reality.

Let me tell you a story about another American. His name is Tony. He lost his job last year as well. He was the CEO of a big oil company. On his way out he got about a $1.6 million salary payout and a $17 million pension payout. He might be spending part of his summer on his yacht that he's nicknamed ``Bob.'' He might be sailing in the J.P. Morgan Asset Management Round the Isle Race, like he was a summer ago as one of his oil rigs collapsed in the Gulf. His struggle is that he's only been able to raise about $1.6 billion for his new oil exploration venture around the world.

Franklin Roosevelt said, The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide for those who have little.

I have listened to my friends on the Republican side try to create a choice here today; that because our children later on are going to have to pay back the debts that this country owes, that we have to sacrifice the lives of kids who are living today. That's a false choice. The two are not mutually exclusive. The fact is we are making choices in the budget right now. We are making choices to give more and more money to the defense budget, which is already over-bloated, and cutting 25 percent from The Emergency Food Assistance Program. We are handing another $40 billion subsidy to the oil industry. And we're cutting back funding for the Commodity Supplemental Food Program. As the Republican budget calls for, we are further cutting taxes for the richest 1 or 2 percent of Americans while we underfund the WIC program that gets badly needed nutrition to kids like Sarah's kids.

In my district, the story is the same. We've got 17 percent of households in my district who have reported going hungry. At the Friendly Hands Food Bank in Torrington they've had a 40 percent increase this year. New Britain's municipal food pantry has seen a hundred new families come through the doors this year. And they are watching with horror as we try to create some false choice between feeding kids today and protecting this country's fiscal situation down the line.

When I meet Republicans and Democrats in my district, regardless of their political persuasion, they want this body to start working together to solve the biggest problems in this country. But I have news for my Republican friends. They want us to solve Sarah's problem, not Tony's problem.

This budget, this bill, is a travesty, and I urge a ``no'' vote.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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