Unless we reverse our current economic costs, our children will have, for the very first time in modern American history, a lower standard of living than their parents. It is the American dream in reverse. Kids are going to do worse than their parents unless we reverse current economic trends.
We can throw out a lot of numbers around here, a few hundred billion and a trillion. But the truth is that behind those numbers in my State of Vermont and all over this country, there are real people who are hurting terribly, and as Members of the Senate our job is to pay attention to those people and not just the well-paid lobbyists, representing the most powerful special interests in the world, who surround this Capitol every single day.
Last year I asked my constituents in Vermont to share some personal stories with me. I asked them basically: How are you doing in this recession? The stories I got back from Vermont, I am sure, are absolutely similar to the stories you would get in Delaware or anyone would get in Michigan or any other State in this country. I asked them: How are things going? Let me tell you as a result of the e-mail we sent out, we had more than 400 Vermonters responding to that e-mail, and what they had to say was poignant. Sometimes these stories were so powerful, it was almost hard to read more than a few at a time. The message I received from Vermont -- I suspect similar messages are coming from every State in this country -- is that people are finding it hard to get jobs. They are now working for lower wages than they used to earn. We are seeing older workers who have depleted their life's savings, and they are worried about how they are going to retire. What happens to them when they are unable to work anymore? Who is going to take care of them?
We hear from young adults in their twenties and thirties who are deeply in debt from college loans, and they don't know how they are going to pay off those loans. We hear from people of all ages, all walks of life, from every corner of Vermont, who have sent us their stories. Let me read a few of them, to make the point to put some flesh and blood behind the statistics we often throw out.
We have a letter from a 51-year-old woman from central Vermont. This is what she wrote:
"Dear Senator Sanders, Don't really know what to say, I could cry. My significant other was out of work for a year, now he works in another state. I've been out of work since April. Our mortgage company wants the house because we can't make the payments. I can't find a job to save my soul that will pay enough to make a difference. How bad does it have to get! My mother went through the Great Depression and here we go again. I figure that I'm going to lose everything soon! I'm a well educated person who can't see through the fog."
A gentleman in his mid-fifties from Orange County, VT, writes:
"After being unemployed three times since 1999 due to global trade agreements, I now find myself managing a hazardous waste transfer facility that pays about 25 percent than what I was making in 1999."
You hear that all of the time. Yes, many people, of course, are working, but many older workers today are dealing with the humiliation and the economic tragedy of now earning substantially less than they earned 10 or 20 years ago.
He continues:
"My wife's children have moved back in, unemployed. And we are saving very little for retirement. If things don't improve soon we will likely have to work until we die. We consider ourselves lucky that we are employed. Our children's friends tend to show up around meal time. They are skinny. We feed them. This is no recession, it's a modern day depression."
Are those the people we want to go after when we talk about deficit reduction? Are they not suffering enough already?
A woman in her late forties from Westminster, VT, writes:
"I am a single mom in Vermont, nearly 50. I patch together a full time job making $12 an hour and various painting jobs and still can't afford to get myself out of debt, or make necessary repairs on my home. No other jobs in sight, I apply all the time to no avail. Food and gas bills go up and up, but not my income. I have no retirement at all, can't afford to move, feeling stuck, tired, and hopeless."
''Stuck, tired and hopeless.'' I suspect that sentiment reflects how many millions of Americans are feeling today.
I have another letter from a 26-year-old man from Barre, VT. He writes:
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