Page:Congressional Record - 2010-12-10.pdf/29

December 10, 2010 blocks away from where I am speaking right now, a very large homeless shelter. It is in small towns in Vermont where people tell me that for the first time they are seeing more and more families with kids needing emergency shelter because they can't afford housing. In Vermont, a lot of people have low-wage jobs making 10 bucks an hour, and it is hard to find a decent apartment or pay a mortgage on $10 an hour. That is true certainly all over this country. Homelessness is going up.

During the Bush years, nearly 8 million Americans lost their health insurance. One of the issues I will talk about in a little while is health care. It is related to everything. We are the only country in the industrialized world that does not guarantee health care to all people as a right of citizenship. According to Harvard University, 45,000 Americans will die this year because they lack health insurance and are not getting to a doctor when they should.

During the Bush administration, 5 million manufacturing jobs disappeared, as companies shut down plants in the United States and moved to China, Mexico, Vietnam, and other low-wage countries. As I mentioned earlier, it is profoundly important to understand what is going on in America. In 2000, we had over 17,000 manufacturing jobs in this country. By 2008, we had less than 12,000. That is 17,000 to 12,000 in 8 years. That is the loss of 5 million manufacturing jobs—a 29-percent reduction—and the fewest number of manufacturing jobs since the beginning of World War II.

Under President Bush, our trade deficit with China more than tripled and the overall trade deficit nearly doubled.

Again, the point I am making now in the context of this agreement is that we need agreements now that do not give tax breaks to millionaires or billionaires, that do not lower the tax rates or the estate tax, which is applicable only to the top three-tenths of 1 percent. We need an agreement that rebuilds our infrastructure, rebuilds our manufacturing base, and creates the millions of good-paying jobs the American people desperately want.

Again, I think the point has to be made—and I have to make it over and over—that when you look at the economy, it is one thing to say everybody is hurting. You know, sometimes that happens. A terrible hurricane comes through and knocks down everybody's home. Well, the hurricane that has hit America for the last 10, 20 years has not impacted everybody; it has impacted the working class, it has impacted the middle class. The people on top are doing better than they ever were. Our friends on Wall Street whose greed and illegal behavior caused this recession are now making more money than they ever did, after being bailed out by the middle class of this country.

During the Bush years, the wealthiest 400 Americans saw their incomes more than double. Do you really think that after seeing a doubling of their incomes under the Bush years, these people are in desperate need of another million-dollar-a-year tax break? In 2007, the 400 top income earners in this country made an average of $345 million in 1 year. That is a pretty piece of change. That is the average, $345 million. In terms of wealth, as opposed to income, the wealthiest 400 Americans saw an increase in their wealth of some $400 billion during the Bush years. Imagine that. During an 8-year period, the top 400 wealthiest people each saw an increase, on average, of $1 billion apiece. Together, these 400 families have a collective net of $1.27 trillion. Does anybody in America really believe these guys need another tax break so that our kids and our grandchildren can pay more in taxes because the national debt has gone up? I do not think most Americans believe that. That is why, in my view, most Americans are not supporting this agreement.

Let me also say that when we look at what is going on around the rest of the world, what we have to appreciate is that in the United States today—again, this is not something we can be proud of; it is something we have to address— we have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any other country on Earth.

I remember talking not so long ago to somebody from Scandinavia. I think it was Finland. He was saying: Of course, we have rich people in our country, but there is a level at which they would become embarrassed.

America now has a situation where the CEOs of large corporations make 300 times more than their workers. In many other countries, everybody wants to be rich, but there is a limit. You can't become a billionaire stepping over children sleeping on the street. That is not what this country is supposed to be about. Enough should be enough.

The top 1 percent today earns 23.5 percent of all income. In the 1970s, that number was 8 percent. In the 1990s, it was approximately 16 percent. Now it is 23.5 percent. So the people on top are getting a bigger and bigger chunk of all income. Furthermore, it is not only the top 1 percent, there are economists who ask: You think the top 1 percent are doing well? It is really the top one-tenth of 1 percent. If you can believe this, the top one-tenth of 1 percent— and I don't know how many people that is, you can do the arithmetic, 300 million into one-tenth of 1 percent—took in 11 percent of total income, according to the latest data. One-tenth of 1 percent earned 11 percent of all income in America.

In the 1970s, the top 1 percent only made something like 8 percent of total income. In the 1980s it rose to 10 to 14 percent. In the late 1990s, it was 15 percent to 19 percent. In 2005 it passed 21 percent. And in 2010, the top 1 percent receive 23 percent of all the income earned in this country.

People should be mindful of this fact: The last time that type of income disparity took place was in 1928. I think we all know what happened in 1929. That is the point Senator LANDRIEU was making a while back. What she understands, quite correctly, is if working people, the vast majority of the people, don't have the income to spend money to buy products and goods and services, we can't create the jobs. If all of the money or a big chunk of the money ends up with a few people on top, there is a limit to how many limousines you can have and how many homes you can have and how many yachts you can have. So when we hit a situation where so few have so much, it is not only a moral issue, it is also an economic issue.

A strong and growing middle class goes out, spends money, and creates jobs. Grossly unequal distribution of income and wealth creates more economic shrinkage and loss of jobs because people just don't have the disposable income to go out and buy and create jobs.

To add insult to injury in terms of this agreement negotiated by the President and Republicans, while the very wealthiest people became much wealthier and the deficit soared—and under President Bush the national debt almost doubled—what else happened? The tax rates for the very rich went down. The rich got richer; tax rates went down. This was a result not only of the tax breaks for the rich initiated during the Bush administration but also, quite frankly, tax policy that took place before President Bush. The result is that from 1992 to 2007, from the latest statistics we have, the effective Federal tax rate—what people really pay—for the top 400 income earners was cut almost in half. So these cry babies, these multimillionaires and billionaires, these people who are making out like bandits, they are crying and crying and crying, but the effective tax rate for the top 400 income earners was cut almost in half from 1992 to 2007.

The point that needs to be made is, when is enough enough? That is the essence of what we are talking about. Greed, in my view, is like a sickness. It is like an addiction. We know people who are on heroin. They can't stop. They destroy their lives. They need more and more heroin. There are people who can't stop smoking. They have problems with nicotine. They get addicted to cigarettes. It costs them their health. People have problems with food. We all have our share of addictions. But I would hope that these people who are worth hundreds of millions of dollars will look around them and say: There is something more important in life than the richest people becoming richer when we have the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world. Maybe they will understand that they are Americans, part of a great nation which is in trouble today. Maybe they have to go back to