Crash, Slash, and Trash

Floor Speech

Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Last year, John Carlson, a hedge fund manager, made about $5 billion and paid taxes at a lower rate than most Americans. Right now, the 400 richest Americans in our country control as much wealth as 150 million other Americans. We have a crisis, all right, in our country, and it's called a disappearing middle class. The rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and the middle going into poverty.

We have a jobs crisis in our country. And poverty has taken an entirely new face as a result of the financial crisis, the recession, and our Nation's slow economic recovery. In Skokie, Illinois, a solid middle class suburb, now 40 percent of the kids who go to school there qualify for a reduced or free lunch. And the food pantry is bulging now with new people waiting in line. I went to a mortgage foreclosure workshop in suburban Des Plaines, Illinois, and I felt like I was watching the American Dream slip through the fingers of hardworking Americans. More than one in five children is now called ``food insecure,'' meaning they go to bed hungry some nights.

And what have the Republicans decided to do? They decided to cut the programs that will help those people. That's how they want to reduce the deficit. They passed a bill called the Cut, Cap, and Balance bill. And it cuts, and it caps, and it balances. It cuts Medicare. It caps Medicaid. And it balances the budget on the backs of the seniors, the poor, and the WIC program, taking food out of the mouths of hungry children. There is something very wrong and very un-American with the Republican proposal that makes it easier to cut Medicare than to cut subsidies for oil and gas companies; easier to cut Social Security than to ask for one penny more for the billionaires, like John Carlson, and easier to cut subsidies for food for little children than to cut subsidies for corporate jets.

I heard from a woman who lives on $1,023 a month. That's her Social Security. And she doesn't have enough money to make it through the month and often goes hungry. Is this right in the richest country in the world? We can reduce our debt, but not on the backs of the middle class that are becoming poor and those who are already poor.

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