Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders today will deliver remarks on the floor of the Senate on the budget resolution and reconciliation instructions
Vermont Business Magazine His remarks, as prepared for delivery, are below: "Mr. President, as a former mayor, I understand how important physical infrastructure--roads, bridges, water systems, wastewater plants--are, and I am delighted that we are finally beginning to address our long-neglected physical infrastructure. That is enormously important.
"But I will tell you what is even more important, and that is to address the long neglected needs of the working families of this country - whether they are Black, White, Latino, Native American, or Asian American--needs that have been ignored for far too long.
"I understand that Senator McConnell and other Republican leaders are shocked by this bill. They are stunned. After decades of paying attention to the needs of the people on top; the wealthy campaign contributors and the lobbyists, this bill actually addresses the needs of working families.
"For a very, very long time, Congress has catered to the needs of those who have the money and the power, and we have turned our backs on tens of millions of fellow Americans who are struggling to put food on the table, take care of their kids, take care of their parents and pay for the healthcare and the prescription drugs that they desperately need. Well, that changes today.
"Further, above and beyond that we have not only ignored the economic crises facing working families, we have ignored the great existential threat of our time, and that is climate change. Read the IPCC report today, and see what’s going on with your own eyes. California: burning. Oregon: burning. Greece: burning. And drought and water shortages impacting countries all over the world. We have got to act now to save this planet. There is no choice.
"Mr. President, the gap between the very, very rich and everybody else is wider than it has been in 100 years.
"Today, we have two people who have more wealth than the bottom 40 percent, the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 92%, and since 2009, 45% of all new income has gone to the top 1%. And, incredibly, during the pandemic, billionaires in America have seen their wealth go up by $1.8 trillion while, at the same time, thousands of essential workers died providing the goods and services we needed.
"While some of our multi-billionaire friends are spending some of their billions flying off into outer space, today we are going to begin to address the crises facing working families right here, on the ground, on planet Earth.
"And that is why, Mr. President, as Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, I am introducing a $3.5 trillion Budget Resolution that we will soon be considering.
This is a Budget Resolution that will allow the Senate to move forward on a reconciliation bill that will be the most consequential piece of legislation for working people, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor since FDR and the New Deal of the 1930s.
"Mr. President, this is a Budget Resolution that will address the needs of working families because we understand that real wages for workers have not gone up in 50 years.
"During that time we have had an explosion of technology and an explosion of worker productivity, and yet, in real inflation accounted-for dollars, many workers today are not making a nickel more than they did 50 years ago.
"We are going forward on the reconciliation bill to address the needs of the working class because, in the richest country in the history of the world, it is unacceptable that half of our people are living paycheck to paycheck.
"We are going to go forward and pass this legislation because the time is long overdue for the U.S. Congress to make sure that we are creating the millions of good-paying jobs that the American people desperately need.
"Mr. President, I want to talk a little bit about the Budget Resolution we are introducing today and what is going to be in the reconciliation package because my friends here in the media are very concerned about process, which is fine, but the American people want to know: Hey, what is the Congress going to do for me? What is it going to do to improve my life, my children's lives, my parents' lives? What are we going to do to save the planet?
"For a start, we understand that it is absolutely imperative to end the obscenity of some of the wealthiest people in this country and the largest corporations, in a given year, not paying a nickel in Federal income taxes.
"What we have seen in the pandemic, what we have seen in recent years is the very, very wealthiest people becoming phenomenally richer.
"And there are studies that show that, in a given year, some of the very wealthiest people in this country-multibillionaires-are not paying a nickel in Federal income tax.
"At a time when corporate profits are soaring, we are seeing many major corporations, making billions a year, also not paying a nickel in Federal income tax. And we are also seeing the pharmaceutical industry, which is enormously profitable, which charges our people the highest prices in the world for the prescription drugs that we desperately need--we are seeing a situation where they can charge us anything they want because of the power of their lobbyists and their campaign contributions. And we are going to put an end to that as well because we are going to demand that Medicare start negotiating prescription drug costs with the pharmaceutical industry and we are going to use those savings to expand Medicare to include the dental, vision and hearing benefits that senior citizens have earned and deserve.
"So my Republican colleagues say: Well, they are going to be raising taxes.
"Yes, we are going to be raising taxes on billionaires and on large, profitable corporations, and we are going to demand that the pharmaceutical industry stop ripping us off. But we are adhering to President Biden's belief, which I share, that nobody earning less than $400,000 a year should pay a nickel more in taxes. We are going to do exactly what the American people want us to do and tell the billionaire class that they are going to have to start paying their fair share of taxes.
"What else are we going to do, and what are we going to use that money for? We are going to use that money to start protecting the needs of our children, working families, and the elderly.
"I think many Americans now see what public policy can mean in their lives because we are providing a $300-a-month check per child. The United States has the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on Earth. That is a disgrace, and it should be unacceptable to every Member of the Senate. Well, we are going to end that.
"I am very proud to say, Mr. President, as I know you know, that as a result of the American Rescue Plan that we passed under reconciliation a few months ago, we have reduced childhood poverty in America by 61 percent.
"Furthermore, in the United States of America, every person in this Chamber should be disgusted by the dysfunctionality of our childcare system. This is not 1950. Mom is going out to work. Dad is going out to work. And they demand quality, affordable childcare, which does not exist today.
"What we say and what our goal is, is that no working family in this country should be paying more than 7 percent of their income for childcare. On top of that, we are going to make pre-K education for 3-and 4-year-olds free. Yes, that is right--free. We are going to do what other industrialized countries do and understand that the most important investment we can make is in the little children.
"By the way, when we do that, we are going to allow well over a million women to go back to work because they no longer have to stay home because of lack of affordable childcare.
"It is a bit embarrassing that our great country is the only major country on Earth not to guarantee paid family and medical leave.
"Imagine that. Every other country in the world, virtually, does that. In America, I have met with women, low-income women, who give birth, and then they have to go back to work in a week or two because they don't have the money to stay home. We are going to end that. We are going to have, as a nation, guaranteed paid family and medical leave.
"We are going to address the reality that many of our younger people are unable to obtain the good-paying jobs that are out there because they lack the higher education.
"Now, I myself will go further than this bill is going to go. I think time is long overdue to make public colleges and universities tuition-free and cancel all student debt. That is not what is in this bill. But what is in this bill says that, at the very least, every American will have the right to get 2 years of community college, and they can use that to get the training they need, to get the good jobs. Maybe it is nursing. Maybe it is something else. But they will also get the credits they need so they can transfer into a 4-year school, making a big step forward in getting young people the ability to get the training they need and the education they need to obtain the good-paying jobs that are out there.
"Mr. President, I know that you are aware that right here in this country, right here on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, you have people sleeping out on the street, and they are sleeping out on the street in every State in this country. In fact, we have almost 600,000 people sleeping out on the streets of the wealthiest country in the history of the world. Well, this legislation will create millions of jobs in housing and in other areas because we are going to build the lower income and affordable housing that we need.
"It is not only homelessness. You have 18 million households spending 50 percent of their limited incomes on housing. We need to build low-income and affordable housing, and when we do that, we will create a heck of a lot of good-paying jobs.
"Just today, I talked to a gentleman whose wife is very, very ill and who is having a hard time affording the home healthcare that he is paying for.
"We are an aging society, and whether people have severe disabilities or whether they are just getting old, people would rather stay at home in many cases rather than be forced into nursing homes. What our legislation will do is significantly improve home healthcare in this country and make sure that those people who provide that important service, difficult service, are adequately compensated.
"I know that many of my Republican colleagues don't believe that climate change is real, don't believe that we should do anything about it, but they are dead wrong. And we cannot go home and look our children and grandchildren in the eye knowing what we know, knowing that in many ways, the climate crisis turns out to be worse than what scientists predicted it would be.
"Climate ordinarily changes over thousands of years, hundreds of years. We are seeing the change in climate with our own eyes year by year. It is frightening. And if people think that the forest fires in Oregon, California, Montana, and elsewhere are an aberration, that they are once-in-a-lifetime, you are wrong. Everything being equal, we will see worse in years to come.
"The truth is, what makes this crisis so difficult, we can't solve it alone. We are going to have to work with China and India and Europe. We have to bring the world together to save this planet for our kids and future generations.
"This legislation takes an important step forward. It doesn't go as far as it should, but it is a major step forward in transforming our energy system away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy.
"I know we will be hearing from my Republican colleagues who are very upset that this will be a partisan bill, which it will be, but let me remind them that they use the so-called reconciliation process recently in two areas--two areas.
"No. 1, they thought it important to go forward in a partisan way, without Democratic support, for the enormously important goal of giving massive tax breaks to billionaires and large corporations. That is how they used the reconciliation process.
"Well, we have a little different idea. We are going to use the reconciliation process and the 50 votes we have with the Vice President to protect the working families of this country, not the billionaire class.
"The other effort that they made in terms of reconciliation was to try--and they came within one vote of doing it; the late John McCain--they would have thrown up to 30 million Americans off of healthcare by ending the Affordable Care Act.
"So they have used reconciliation, and we will use it, except we are going to use it to protect ordinary Americans--the children, the elderly, the sick, and the poor--rather than just the very wealthy or the pharmaceutical industry.
"We are now in the midst of a debate over the physical infrastructure, the bipartisan bill--very important. We need to rebuild our roads and bridges, but more important is the need to address the crises facing working families all over this country. When we go forward and do that, when we protect our children and the elderly and the environment, we are going to create millions of good-paying jobs, put people to work rebuilding this country in a way that is long, long overdue."