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Madam President, let me say a few words about where we are as a nation, what this budget resolution does, and why I am strongly opposed to it. As you may know, we have more income and wealth inequality in our country today than we have ever had in the history of America. Three people on top own more wealth than the bottom half of American society. The top one percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. CEOs now make about 300 times more than their workers. In other words, the very rich are becoming much richer, and working families are struggling.
So what does this budget resolution do to address this very serious crisis? Does it help working people? Does it help low-income people? No, not really. It actually makes income and wealth inequality much worse by providing massive tax breaks to the billionaires and the richest people in this country, driving up the national debt and making those on top very, very happy. In America today—the richest country in the history of the world—we have 60 percent of our people living paycheck to paycheck, struggling every week to put food on the table, to pay the rent, to deal with childcare, to take care of healthcare.
Real wages— real inflation-accounted-for wages—for the average American worker have been stagnant for the last 50 years. This is despite the huge increase in worker productivity. Today, all across this country, you have workers working for 11, 12, 13 bucks an hour—working for starvation wages. Some of them are actually sleeping in their cars. Now, how does this budget resolution address the crises facing working families? Well, at a time when many workers are struggling to find affordable housing, what this budget will do is cut back on housing programs, making it harder for working people to get decent housing. It will cut funding for low-income and affordable housing. So it makes life more difficult for millions of working families.
This is a time when 22 percent of our seniors are trying to survive on less than $15,000 a year. That is really quite shocking. It is something we don’t talk about. It is something that we don’t deal with here in Congress. Can you imagine a senior citizen trying to survive on $15,000 a year when seniors need additional healthcare, when seniors need to keep their homes warmer? There are all kinds of issues trying to get by on $15,000 a year. Twenty-two percent of seniors are in that position. Half of seniors are trying to get by on $30,000 a year or less. So how does this legislation—this budget—help seniors? What does it do for seniors? Well, it makes a bad situation much worse.
This legislation—this budget— will make it much harder for seniors to receive the care they desperately need in nursing homes. In Vermont—and, I expect, in most states in this country—we have a major nursing home crisis. Nursing homes are shutting down. It is harder and harder for people to get into nursing homes. Well, when you cut Medicaid by $880 billion, you are going to make it much, much harder for seniors to access nursing homes, because two out of three seniors are dependent upon Medicaid to get into nursing homes. This legislation would also cut back on nutrition programs for seniors at a time when many seniors are having a hard time affording the food that they need.
Maybe worst of all, at a moment when Mr. Musk and his billionaire friends are laying off thousands of workers at the Social Security Administration and closing down Social Security offices all over the country – making it harder for people with disabilities and older people to get the benefits that they have paid into for their whole lives – this bill does nothing to address that crisis. We, right now, embarrassingly, have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on Earth. It is a little bit embarrassing for the richest country on the face of the Earth. We have more income and wealth inequality than any other country.
We are seeing significant growth in the number of billionaires we have, but in terms of our kids, we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major nation. Now, how would this budget impact our children? Well, it would make a bad situation even worse by throwing millions of kids off the health care that they have. That is what happens when you cut Medicaid by hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars. This budget would cut nutrition programs that one out of every five children depends upon. Amazingly, sadly, in America, a lot of kids go to school hungry, and this legislation would cut nutrition programs.
Furthermore, for working families, this legislation would do nothing to address the outrageously high cost of child care in America. By the way, it would make devastating cuts to education, I think, significantly in working-class communities. It is no secret to anybody that our current health care system is far and away the most expensive in the world. We spend about twice as much per capita on health care as almost any other nation. Most Americans understand and deal with the reality every day that our health care system is dysfunctional. It takes forever to get a deal with the insurance companies and get your claims processed.It is extremely cruel that a significant number of people who are struggling with cancer end up going bankrupt because they cannot afford the outrageous costs of the hospital care that they have received.
So what does this budget do to address our broken and dysfunctional health care system? Well, it is hard to believe, but it makes a terrible situation even worse. By cutting Medicaid by up to $880 billion, this legislation could force as many as 36 million Americans off the health care that they currently have. Now, right now, we have got 85 million Americans who are uninsured or underinsured. That number would soar. So you have low-income, working people who don’t have a lot of money. What happens when they get sick? We lose 60,000 people a year right now, despite Medicaid, who don’t go through a doctor when they should because they can’t afford to. This budget would make that situation much, much worse.
At a time when we have a massive crisis in primary health care—not enough doctors, not enough nurses, not enough mental health counselors, not enough primary care facilities where people can get into a doctor when they need to—by cutting Medicaid, this legislation would make access to community health centers, which is something I have worked on for a very long time—it would make it harder for people to access community health centers because community health centers are highly dependent on Medicaid for their funding.
Virtually every scientist who has studied the issue has made it clear that climate change is an existential threat to our planet. I understand that the current President of the United States thinks that it is a hoax originating in China, but that is not what 99.5 percent of the scientists who have studied the issue believe. As we look around and see year after year it is becoming warmer—and over the last 10 years, the warmest on record—and we see the terrible flooding and drought and extreme weather disturbances taking place in our country and all over the world, the American people understand that climate change is all too real, and it is having devastating impacts on our lives.
So what does this legislation do to address the extraordinary crisis that we face in terms of climate change? Well, it is hard to believe, but it makes a bad situation even worse by
opening up vast swaths of public land to big oil companies so they can ‘‘drill, baby, drill,’’ and it opens up public lands to more and more oil companies. Brilliant. We face an existential threat, and this legislation makes that threat even worse. Well, it seems to me that, instead of passing this absurd budget proposal, we should move in exactly the opposite direction that this proposal takes us. Instead of making life more difficult for
the working class of our country, instead of rewarding the billionaire campaign contributors who fund many, many campaigns around here, maybe, just maybe, we should represent the needs of our constituents—the working families of this country.
One of the ways that we could do it is by raising the minimum wage to a living wage. I know that is, around here, a very radical idea. Imagine that—that we raise the minimum wage—which is, today, at the federal level, $7.25 an hour. So we are going to be offering an amendment to raise the minimum wage to a living wage of $17 an hour. Maybe, instead of making it harder for working families to find affordable housing, maybe, just maybe, we should build millions of units of low-income, affordable housing. Maybe, just maybe, instead of making it harder for families to access childcare, we should make it easier and more affordable. Instead of cutting Medicaid by $880 billion—maybe instead of doing that—we should do what virtually every other major nation on Earth does, and that is understand that healthcare is a human right—that every man, woman, and child is entitled to health care as a human being. We can do that by passing a Medicare for All, single-payer program.
The function of a health care system should not be to make the insurance companies and the drug companies much wealthier. It should be to provide quality health care in a cost effective way to all of our people. So there you go. What we have is a budget proposal in front of us which makes bad situations much worse and does virtually nothing to protect the needs of working families, but what it does do, of course, is reward wealthy campaign contributors by providing over $1 trillion in tax breaks to the top one percent. You know, I am going to vote against this proposal. That is for sure.
I wish my Republican friends the best of luck when they go home—if they dare to hold town meetings—and explain to their constituents why they think, at a time of massive income and wealth inequality, it is a great idea to give tax breaks to billionaires and cut Medicaid and education and other programs that working families desperately need. I do
wish them the very best of luck as they go forward in that way.
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