Page:Congressional Record - 2010-12-10.pdf/45

December 10, 2010 taxes, et cetera. I have to say that this is the toughest year financially that I have ever experienced in my 41 years on this Earth. I have what used to be considered a decent job. I work hard, pinch my pennies, but the pennies have all but dried up. I am thankful that my employer understands that many of us cannot afford to drive to work 5 days a week. Instead, I work 3 15-hour days. I have taken odd jobs to try to make ends meet. This winter, after keeping the heat just high enough to keep my pipes from bursting—

One of the problems you have, when you live in a rural State and it gets cold, your pipes can burst, and then you have to spend a fortune getting them repaired.

She continues:

What happens in Vermont, if you have a home, in the wintertime, and you don't have a whole lot of money, you kind of close off rooms in the house because you can't afford to heat the whole house. So people live in a smaller area.

She continues:

That is the story from one person in Vermont. But that is the story for millions and millions of Americans.

Another story. And the reason I am reading these stories—and I appreciate my staff bringing this booklet down here—is this puts flesh and blood and real life into the statistics. The statistics are frightening enough, but this tells us what happens when the middle class of this country collapses. It tells us what happens when people lose decent-paying jobs. It tells us what happens when the government does not provide the kind of basic support system that it should for people in need.

Here is another letter:

Mr. President, this is the United States of America and people are talking, in my State of Vermont and all over the country, about struggling to put food on the table. What comes to my mind now—and I don't know if you saw them, Mr. President—are some articles in the paper that talked about because of the bailing out of Wall Street, and the fact that Wall Street is now again profitable, these executives there are now making more money than they made before the bailout, and they go into restaurants and they pay thousands of dollars for a bottle of wine, pay hundreds and hundreds of dollars for some fancy dinner. Yet in my State and all over this country there are people who are wondering where their next meal is coming from.

She continues:

Let me pick up on that point. We don't deal with property taxes here—I did when I was a mayor—but if we are not adequately funding education, if we do not adequately help cities and towns all over this country in terms of fire protection and in terms of police protection and housing, a lot of that burden falls on the very regressive property tax, which in my State of Vermont is very high. And you find it referred to time and time again that property taxes are going up. Property taxes are going up.

She writes:

Imagine: She doesn't go to church on Sundays because the gasoline is too expensive to drive there.

Does anybody in this Congress know what a dented can store is? Do you know that many people buy their groceries and they get them cheaper because the cans are dented? Most Members of the Senate and the House, most Governors do not get their meals from dented cans, but huge numbers of Americans do.

She then concludes:

By the way, the letters that I received, when I asked for letters, came not just from the State of Vermont— most came from Vermont but some came from other areas. I will read another from Vermont and then one from rural Pennsylvania.

This one from Vermont:

Let me pull away from the letter. That is not an unusual wage in the State of Vermont. That is not an unusual wage all over America. That is what people earn, $10 an hour, times 40 hours. He doesn't get 40 hours. He makes $350 a week. Ten times 40, 400, times 50, $21,000 a year. Shock of all shocks, that is reality. That is what people are trying to live on. Those are the people that we should be helping, not the CEOs on Wall Street who will get $1 million a year in a tax break if this deal goes through. Not the people who are in the top three-tenths of 1 percent, who our Republican friends want to help by repealing the estate tax, which will cost us $1 trillion in 10 years. Maybe we should concentrate on helping people who are trying to get by eating food from dented cans or people who can't afford to drive to church on Sunday because they can't afford the price of a gallon of gas. Maybe we should remember who sent us here and who made this country.

She writes:

Stowe, VT, is a beautiful town. I hope everybody comes to visit us up there. There is great skiing, but it is a resort town. Big time in the winter. We are doing better in the summer, but it is a resort town. Resorts get more business in the winter than summer and less time elsewhere.

So what she is talking about is that it is off season up there and she is only getting 20 hours a week of work at $10 an hour.

She writes:

I am sorry, this is a man, not a woman.

This is a 50-year-old guy, making $10 an hour, 20 or 30 hours a week, and his choice is either walking 8 miles to and from his job in Stowe or else not heating his home. And this happens in Vermont all of the time. It is quite unbelievable. He says:

I don't know about other parts of the country. I am sure it is the same. But if you go to a grocery store, there is often a bin out there in front where people buy food and they drop a can of peas or a can of corn or something into it. Here is a guy who is now faced with the reality of having to walk 8 miles to and from work and he is upset at himself that he does not have the money to buy food for his neighbors who he thinks are even worse off than he is. That is the good people of Vermont and America. They are all over this country, good and decent people who do worry about their neighbors.

Then you have the lobbyists here representing the largest corporations in the world where the CEOs make tens of millions of dollars a year and their job is to squeeze the middle class and these families harder and harder, cut back on their benefits in order to give tax breaks to the richest people in this country. What a difference in attitude: A poor man faced with the choice of either walking 8 miles to and from his job or losing his heat, worried about his neighbors, and you have the lobbyists here worrying about the richest