Source: United States Senator for Vermont – Bernie Sanders
WASHINGTON, April 4 – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today gave remarks on the floor of the Senate calling out Trump’s absurd budget that guts programs working class families rely on to pay for tax cuts for the rich.
Sanders’ remarks, as prepared for delivery, are below and can be watched HERE:
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.
M. President, 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.
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.
M. President, in America today, 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 child care, to take care of their health care.
M. President, real wages for the average American worker have been stagnant for the last 50 years despite a huge increase in worker productivity. And today, all across this country, you have workers working for $11, $12, $13 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. It makes life more difficult for millions of working families.
M. President, at a time when 22 percent of our seniors are trying to survive on less than $15,000 a year – and that’s really quite shocking. It’s something we don’t talk about. It’s 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 health care, when seniors need to keep their homes warmer. So how does this budget help seniors? What does it do for seniors?
Well, it makes a bad situation much worse. This legislation will make it much harder for seniors to receive the care they desperately need in nursing homes.
In Vermont, we have a major nursing home crisis. Nursing homes are shutting down and it’s harder for people to get into nursing homes. Well, when you cut Medicaid by $880 billion, you’re going to make it 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.
And 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, closing down Social Security offices all over the country, and 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.
M. President, we right now, embarrassingly, have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on Earth. It’s a little bit embarrassing: We’re the richest country on the face of the Earth, we have more income and wealth inequality than any other country, we’re seeing a 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 children off of the health care they have. That’s 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 depend 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.
And, by the way, it would make devastating cuts to education in working class communities.
M. President, 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 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. A significant number of people who are struggling with cancer end up going bankrupt because they cannot afford the outrageous cost of the hospital care that they have received. So what does this budget do to address our broken and dysfunctional health care system?
Well, 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 they currently have. Right now we have 85 million Americans who are uninsured or under-insured. That number would soar.
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 to a doctor when they should because they can’t afford to. This budget would make that situation much, much worse.
And 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 in to a doctor when they need. By cutting Medicaid, this legislation would make it harder for people to access community health centers because community health centers are highly dependent on Medicaid for their funding.
M. President, 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 it’s a “hoax” originating in China. But that is not what 99.5 percent of the scientists who study the issue believe. And as we look around and see year after year becoming warmer, when we see the terrible flooding, 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 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, hard to believe, but it makes a bad situation even worse by opening up vast swaths of public lands to Big Oil companies so that 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.
It seems to me, M. President, 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 campaigns around here, maybe, just maybe, we should represent the needs of our constituents, the working families of this country.
One of the ways we could do it is by raising the minimum wage to a living wage. I know that is a very radical idea around here. Imagine that. We raise the minimum wage which today is, at the federal level, $7.25 an hour. So we’re going to be offering an amendment to raise the minimum wage to a living wage: $17 an hour.
And 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 child care, we should make it easier and more affordable.
And maybe, instead of cutting Medicaid by $880 billion, we should do what virtually every other major nation on Earth does. And that is to understand that health care is a human right, that every man, woman and child is entitled to health care as a human being, and that 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 that 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 for the top one percent.
I’m going to vote against this proposal. That’s for sure.
I wish my Republican friends the best of luck when they go home – if they dare to hold town hall meetings – and explain to their constituents why they think, at a time of massive income and wealth inequality, it’s a great idea to give tax breaks to billionaires and cut Medicaid, education, and other programs that working class families desperately need.