The State of Our Economic Union

Floor Speech

Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, this evening, from the dais behind me, President Obama will deliver his annual State of the Union message; and while there are hopeful signs and a brightening of the economic outlook for the country as a whole, the President will almost certainly concentrate on the battles ahead.

Even as America struggles to shake off the effects of the worst downturn since the Great Depression, our economy and our society are being challenged by a yawning inequality gap that affects tens of millions of American families and threatens to erode the underpinnings of our social contract.

Last fall, economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty released an analysis of 2012 tax returns, and they found that the top 10 percent of American earners took more than half of the country's total income in 2012--the highest level ever recorded. The top 1 percent received more than 20 percent of the income earned by Americans, a level not seen since 1928, the year before the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. Top earners have also recovered more quickly over the last 3 years as their wages and investments have recouped value at a much brisker clip than those of the rest of Americans.

Inequality has also been a persistent political theme here and around the world, and it helped to launch the Occupy Wall Street movement. Last year, Pope Francis spoke out against what he termed an ``economy of exclusion'' while New York City's new mayor, Bill de Blasio, won the election by highlighting inequality there. President Obama, himself, made expanding opportunity a major theme in a speech in December, and he discussed the issue at length in his past two State of the Union addresses. I expect him to return to the theme tonight and in the coming months of the 113th Congress as we prepare to go to the polls in November.

There is a broadly held, national consensus that an overly high concentration of wealth spawns a host of economic social and political ills, but that agreement has not fostered a concerted strategy on expanding opportunity and closing the wealth gap. America has always rewarded hard work, and the possibility for a better life has been part of the attraction for generations of immigrants and others struggling to climb the economic ladder; but economic mobility, as a recent study from Harvard and Cal demonstrates, varies greatly within the United States, and while economic mobility has not changed significantly over time, it is consistently less prevalent in the United States than in most developed countries. We should never seek to punish success or to, as some describe it, soak the rich, but we must take steps to address the problem of growing inequality both in the short term and in the long term.

I believe there are three things that Congress and the President can do to give Americans and the middle class and those who aspire to join it the chance to move up:

First, we need to extend emergency unemployment assistance for those who are still looking for work and who cannot find a job on their own. The weekly litany of those who are losing benefits is disheartening, and we must not turn our backs on our fellow Americans;

Second, we need to raise the minimum wage nationwide, and it is shameful that it has been 5 years since the last increase. In fact, according to one study, the minimum wage today is actually worth $2 less than in 1968. Raising the minimum wage to just over $10, as I support, would push millions of hardworking Americans out of poverty and stimulate economic activity throughout the country;

These two steps can be part of a short-term solution that stops the bleeding, but real change requires giving American workers the education and training to compete domestically and internationally for the high-skilled, high-wage jobs that are the ticket to the middle class and beyond. Investing in education and building schools and curricula for the 21st century is a long-term project, but it is the one that has the greatest potential in terms of economic growth and increased opportunity while preserving the spirit of free enterprise and entrepreneurship that built this country.

Mr. Speaker, tonight the President will challenge us to join him in an effort to reinvigorate the American Dream for another generation. Let us join him in that sacred task.

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