"In 2002, I received a scholarship to Saint Bonaventure University, the first in my family to attend college. Upon graduation in 2006, I was admitted to the Dickinson School of Law at Penn State University, and graduated in 2009 with $150,000 of student loan debt."
Mr. President, $150,000. That is high. But there are people all over this country who have extremely high student loans, and they don't know how they are going to pay them off.
Then he continues:
"In Western New York I can find nothing better than a $10 an hour position stuffing envelopes. I live in a small studio apartment in Barre without cable or Internet. I have told my family I don't want them to visit because I am ashamed of my surroundings. My family always told me that an education was the ticket to success, but all my education seems to have done in this landscape is make it impossible to pull myself out of debt and begin a successful career."
On and on it goes. Over the last couple of weeks we have been focusing in my office on the crisis in dental care, the fact that in Vermont and all over this country millions of people cannot find a dentist.
I want to give you an idea. I am raising these issues today, and I am quoting from folks in Vermont. Again, these stories are not just from Vermont. In fact, Vermont is doing better in this recession than most States in this country are doing. So take what we are talking about here in Vermont and multiply it by several times for other States.
A gentleman writes to me within the last couple of weeks. He says: ''I can't afford health insurance, so dental work is definitely out.'' And he talks about how studies have linked bad dental care to heart problems and cancer, but he cannot get to a dentist.
The reason I raise this issue is to try to give us a better understanding of who some of the people are who will be impacted by the Draconian cuts the Republicans are talking about. Let us be clear. They are talking about throwing millions and millions of people off Medicaid.
Let me tell you what that means. Earlier this year, as you know, Arizona passed budget cuts that took patients off its transplant list. Remember reading about that? I think most of the country read about that. Essentially because of the financial reasons, what they said in Arizona is: Yes, you need a transplant; yes, you are not all that old, but I am sorry, we cannot afford it for you, and you are going to have to die. And people have died. In that State and in other States throughout this country hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people are being thrown off Medicaid.
So what does that mean? What does it mean if you are a low-income worker and you are getting your health insurance through Medicaid and you lose Medicaid? What happens when you develop a pain in your chest and you think you may be having a heart problem but you cannot get to a doctor? What happens? Have our Republican friends thought that through when they proposed $700 billion in cuts in Medicaid? What happens to the children by the millions who are thrown off Medicaid? We have 50 million people today who have no health insurance. If the Republican plan goes through, we are talking about tens of millions more. What happens to those people? As Americans are we content to see kids get sick because they cannot get to a doctor or people die because they don't get to a doctor on time? I don't think so.
I have learned and have been told throughout my
whole life that education is the key to success. We hear that on the floor of
this Senate every single day. Education, education. Kids have got to do well in high
school so they will be able to go to college. The reality right now is hundreds
of thousands of bright young people cannot afford to go to college because they
don't have the money, and we are losing their intellectual capabilities to make
us a stronger nation.
If the Republicans get their way, and make savage cuts in Pell grants, no one has any doubt that hundreds of thousands more young people will never be able to walk into a college or a university. That is not only a tragedy for the individuals, for the young people themselves, it is a tragedy for this Nation. Every day we are involved in fierce competition in the global economy, and we are not doing well in educational levels. We are seeing other countries graduate more of their students from college, and that gap is growing wider. If you cut back on Pell grants and other forms of college aid, it is clear that a bad situation will be made much worse.
Let's get even more basic, more basic than health care, more basic than education, and that comes to nutrition, whether people in larger and larger numbers in this country are going to go hungry. According to a 2009 study, there are over 5 million seniors who face the threat of hunger, almost 3 million who are at risk of going hungry and almost 1 million seniors who do go hungry because they cannot afford to buy food. In that context our Republican friends want to balance the budget on the backs of the hungry, cut back on food stamps, cut back on other nutrition programs. So what happens if you are 80 and food prices are going up and you don't have enough to eat? Well, apparently there are some people here in the Senate who don't worry about that, but I personally do not believe that is what America is about. I think the American people, by huge numbers, do not want to see hunger increase for our seniors or our children.
This is a lot of pain the Republicans are tossing out while at the same time they are vigorously protecting their wealthy and powerful friends. In my view, the President of the United States has to stand tall. He has to take the case to the American people and he has to hold the Republicans responsible if, in fact, the debt ceiling is not raised, and all of the repercussions that will occur if that happens.
I have given you just an inkling of what is going on in the real world, and I know all over this country, ordinary Americans, working-class people, have a lot more to say about what is going on in their lives. As we speak, people are fighting desperately to keep their homes from falling into foreclosure. They are struggling with 29 percent, 30 percent interest rates on their credit cards, which they are never able to pay off. Marriages have been postponed because the young people don't have the money to settle down, lives have been derailed, retirement savings have been raided to pay for college tuition or to keep businesses afloat or to simply put gas in the car at $3.80 a gallon in order to get to work. That is what is going on in the real world. That is what it means when we talk about the middle-class collapsing and poverty is increasing.
While all of that happens, it is important to note there is another economic reality taking place in this country. Poverty is increasing. We have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on Earth. We are seeing an increase in senior citizens who are going hungry, more and more families unable to send their kids to college. But there is another reality out there, and that is that the gap between the wealthiest people in this country and everybody else is growing wider and wider and has not been this wide since before the Great Depression of 1929 began. Let us be very clear, and there is nothing to be proud about, but the United States today has, by far, the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth.
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