Floor Statements

Madam President, I say to my friend that he is right when he said that I oppose the Lew nomination also. I oppose his nomination for different reasons than he does, and I will speak later on that issue.

From my perspective, at a time when the middle class is disappearing, when we have 46 million people living in poverty, when we have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income since the Great Depression, we need a Secretary of Treasury who is going to

stand up for working families and be prepared to take on Wall Street. He needs to be prepared to change our disastrous trade policies, be prepared to defend Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the safety net that is so important to tens of millions of Americans. That is my objection to Mr. Lew.

I agree with my friend from Alabama that deficit reduction is a serious issue. Where we disagree is that I don't believe we balance a budget on the backs of the elderly, the children, the sick, and the poor.

I ask my friend to take a look at the Cayman Islands and Bermuda. Take a look at all the corporations making record-breaking profits and stashing their money in the Cayman Islands. For what purpose? To avoid paying taxes to the U.S. Government.

The Senator and I have met with the parents of young men and women who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that is called patriotism. It is not called patriotism when corporations run to the Cayman Islands to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

I will.

I thank my friend from Alabama, and with that, I yield the floor.

I thank the Senator from Alabama for yielding. I also intend to vote against Jack Lew to be our next Secretary of the Treasury but, in fact, for very different reasons than my colleague from Alabama.

Let me begin by stating that I have had the opportunity to speak with Jack Lew in my office on several occasions. It is very clear to me that Jack Lew is a very intelligent person. He is a very serious man. I applaud his many years of public service to our country. Furthermore, I believe that this afternoon he will be confirmed by the Senate. But I have to say that he will not be confirmed with my vote. The reason for that is that at this particular moment in American history, we find ourselves in the most difficult economic moment since the Great Depression.

The reality is--and we do not talk about it too much, the media doesn't talk about it too much, but most people understand--the great middle class of this country is disappearing. Poverty is extraordinarily high. Over 46 million Americans are living in poverty. At the same time, while the middle class collapses and poverty is extraordinarily high, the wealthiest people in this country are doing phenomenally well and we are seeing recordbreaking profits for large corporations.

The question is--given the fact that the Secretary of the Treasury is one of the most important positions in our Government, having enormous powers unto himself in addition to being a key adviser to the President, the question is, Is the new Secretary of Treasury prepared to take on the increasingly powerful oligarchy that controls the economic and political life of our Nation and stand with the working families of America who are being battered and beaten up every single day? I do not believe by any stretch of the imagination that Jack Lew is that person.

This is the economic reality we are confronting today, and this is the economic reality we need a Secretary of Treasury to work with the American people to improve. We have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth, worse than at any time since before the Great Depression. Today the wealthiest 400 Americans own more wealth than the bottom half of America--150 million people. Four hundred to 150 million. Do I believe Jack Lew sees this as a serious problem he is going to address? I do not.

Today one family, the Walton family--one of the major welfare beneficiaries in America because they pay their workers such low wages and provide such poor benefits that many of their workers are on Medicaid, food stamps, assisted housing--that one family owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of American families. Do I believe Jack Lew is going to say: Wait a minute, that doesn't make sense, we have to change those policies. No, I do not.

Today the top 1 percent owns 38 percent of the wealth in America, which is incredible unto itself. But even more incredible is that the bottom 60 percent own less than 3 percent of the Nation's wealth. This is not only a moral issue, it is not only an economic issue because when you have that kind of wealth and income disparity, working families are not going to have the money to spend to buy goods and services to create jobs, it is also a political crisis because as a result of Citizens United, this 1 percent can now spend unlimited sums of money to elect those candidates who support their agenda and to create terror on the floor of the Senate on the part of any Member who is going to vote against their interests. Gee, should I vote to deal with the greed on Wall Street if Wall Street is going to pour millions of dollars against me in my reelection campaign?

Do I believe Jack Lew as Secretary of Treasury is going to begin to address the issues of income inequality and wealth inequality in this country? Not for a second do I believe he will do that.

While the wealthiest people are doing phenomenally well, the Federal Reserve reported last year that median

net worth for middle-class families dropped by nearly 40 percent from 2007 to 2010. Can you believe that? It dropped by 40 percent. That is the equivalent of wiping out 18 years of savings for the average middle-class family.

This is even more incredible, and it is absolutely important. I get tired of being one of the very few people up here who talk about it. I hope there will be some other Senators who will talk about what is, in fact, one of the major issues facing this country--income and wealth inequality.

In terms of income, here is a fact that is literally beyond comprehension. The last study on this subject showed that from 2009 through 2011, 100 percent of all new income went to the top 1 percent. All of the new income generated went to the top 1 percent, while the bottom 99 percent--those include some pretty wealthy people--actually saw a loss in their income. What that tells us is that it almost doesn't matter that economic growth now is obviously low. It is not as high as we want it, but it almost doesn't matter because all of the new income generated by this economic growth is going to go to the top 1 percent. Do I think this is an issue Jack Lew is going to address? No, unfortunately, I do not.

Real unemployment in this country is not what the papers report--7.8 or 7.9 percent. Real unemployment is over 14 percent if we count those people who have given up looking for work or who are working part time when they want to work full time--some 23 million people. Have I heard one word from Jack Lew about the need to come up with programs to put millions of people back to work immediately, including the young people whose unemployment rate is higher than that of the general public or people of color who are also economically suffering? I have not.

Millions of people are still underwater on their mortgages, and millions more have seen the American dream of home ownership turn into a nightmare of foreclosure.

The next Secretary of Treasury will be facing enormous challenges. Let me mention just a few. The next Secretary of Treasury will play a central role in regulating and overseeing Wall Street and large financial institutions. Let's never forget that as a result of the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior on Wall Street, millions of Americans lost their jobs, their homes, their life savings, and their ability to send their kids to college. That is all attributable to the greed and recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street.

We need a Secretary of Treasury who does not come from Wall Street but is prepared to stand up to the enormous power of Wall Street. We need a Treasury Secretary who will end the current business model of Wall Street, which is operating the largest gambling casino this world has ever seen, and demand that Wall Street start investing in a productive economy where businesses actually produce real goods and services and create jobs. Do I believe Jack Lew is going to be doing that? No, I do not.

In my view, we need a Secretary of the Treasury who will understand that when the largest banks in this country have become even larger, it is time to break them up. Do I believe Jack Lew will work to break up these huge financial conglomerates? No, I do not.

Today the 10 largest banks in America are bigger than they were before the financial crisis began. You may remember that we bailed out Wall Street because they were too big to fail; that if these banks went under, they would take a significant part of the American and world economies with them and the taxpayers of this country had to bail them out. Now we find that every single one of the top 10 financial institutions today is larger than they were when we bailed them out some years ago because they were too big to fail.

Today the six largest financial institutions in this country-- JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and MetLife--have assets equal to two-thirds of the GDP of this country--over $9.6 trillion. Six financial institutions have assets equal to two-thirds of the GDP of the United States of America. These six financial institutions issue two-thirds of all of the credit cards, half of all of the mortgages, control 95 percent of all derivatives, and hold nearly 40 percent of all bank deposits in this country.

Do I think this issue--this concern--is something Jack Lew will address? Not in a million years. While millions of Americans continue to struggle through the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, Wall Street is doing phenomenally well today. They caused the recession, we bailed them out, and now they are doing phenomenally well. Financial institutions made over $143 billion in profits in 2012. It was the most profitable year on record with the exception of 2006, just before the economic meltdown. Incredibly, the financial industry now makes almost half of all nonfarm corporate profits in the United States--up from about 10 percent in 1947.

As someone who has worked hard to elect Barack Obama on two occasions, I remain extremely concerned that virtually all of his key economic advisers have come from Wall Street, and Jack Lew is no exception to that.

Let me be clear. It is not just because Mr. Lew served as a chief operating officer at Citigroup during the financial crisis; it is not just because Citigroup awarded Mr. Lew a $940,000 bonus as he was leaving to join the State Department; it is not just because Citigroup received a total of $2.5 trillion in virtually zero-interest loans from the Fed or that the Treasury Department provided Citigroup with a bailout of more than $45 billion during Mr. Lew's tenure at Citigroup; I am opposed to Mr. Lew's nomination because of the views he now holds about Wall Street and the financial bailout.

On September 22, 2010, when I asked Mr. Lew at a Budget Committee hearing if he believed deregulation of Wall Street significantly caused the crisis--something that almost all economists agree with--here is what he said:

I don't believe that deregulation was the proximate cause.

I would defer to others who are more expert about the

industry to parse it better than that.

At his confirmation hearing at the end of this month, Jack Lew called the Glass-Steagall Act ``anachronistic,'' and said that the Dodd-Frank Act had ``effectively'' dealt with the issue of too big to fail. I could not disagree more.

In my view, we don't need another Treasury Secretary who thinks that the deregulation of Wall Street did not significantly contribute to the financial crisis. We need someone who will stand up to these huge financial institutions on behalf of the American people, small businesses, and working families and say enough is enough: Wall Street, you cannot continue to operate the way you are.

The next Treasury Secretary will be the lead negotiator for the President on how to reduce the deficit, an issue we are all concerned about. Here is the issue: Do we balance the budget by cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, nutrition, and programs that middle-income and working families depend upon? We could do it that way. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, will come up with that proposal, and it will mean huge suffering for tens and tens of millions of families who are already hurting. That is one way we could do deficit reduction.

First of all, I think that approach is way out of touch with what the American people want. The American people have been very clear: They do not want cuts in Social Security, they do not want to cut veterans programs, and they do not want to cut Medicare or Medicaid.

The American people have also been clear that at a time when the wealthiest people and largest corporations are doing phenomenally well, when their effective tax rates are the lowest in decades, when they enjoy huge loopholes that enable them to avoid paying their vast share in taxes, the American people say: Those guys have got to start paying their fair share.

All of us will remember a few years ago when Wall Street was on the verge of collapse because of their greed and recklessness. They came crawling to the Congress and the taxpayers of America and said: We are Americans; we love America; bail us out. Congress--against my vote-- bailed them out.

Now these same corporations that told us how much they love America are not only shipping our jobs to China and other countries, they are stashing their profits in the Cayman Islands,

Bermuda, and other tax havens and avoiding their responsibility as taxpayers. Offshore tax schemes have become so absurd that one five- story office building in the Cayman Islands is now the home to more than 18,000 corporations. Everybody knows what that is about. All that is is a mail drop for corporations. They don't exist there; they are just using that address as a means to avoid paying taxes to the United States and other countries.

Let me give a few examples of some of these large corporations and what they have done to avoid paying American taxes at a time when revenue today, as a percentage of GDP, is almost at the lowest it has been in decades. The choice is to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, or ask enormously profitable corporations to stop using loopholes to avoid paying taxes. I will give just a few examples, although I could give many examples.

In 2010, the Bank of America--one of the largest financial institutions in this country, an institution bailed out by the working families of this country when they were on the verge of collapse--set up more than 200 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands, which, by the way, has a corporate tax rate of zero, so they can avoid paying U.S. taxes. How is that? We bail them out, they run to the Cayman Islands, set up 200 separate subsidiaries in order to avoid paying taxes to America. It is time for Congress and it is time for the Secretary of Treasury to address that issue. In a million years do I think Jack Lew is prepared to do that? No, I don't. We need a Secretary of Treasury who will do that.

Not only did the Bank of America pay nothing in Federal income taxes, but in 2010 it received a rebate from the IRS worth $1.9 billion that year. They pay nothing in taxes, they are enormously profitable, they were bailed out by the American people, and then they get a rebate from the IRS for almost $2 billion. Then people say: We don't have enough revenue; we have to cut Social Security; we have to cut nutrition programs for hungry children. Yet when one of the largest financial institutions in the country gets a rebate and doesn't pay any taxes, at least for some of my colleagues, that is okay.

In 2010, JPMorgan Chase operated 83 separate subsidiaries incorporated in offshore tax havens to avoid paying some $4.9 billion in U.S. taxes. That same year Goldman Sachs operated 39 subsidiaries in offshore tax havens to avoid an estimated $3.3 billion in U.S. taxes. Citigroup--where Mr. Lew actually worked--has paid no Federal income taxes for the last 4 years after establishing 25 subsidiaries in offshore tax havens. On and on it goes.

Wall Street, which was bailed out by the American workers, caused the recession, is now enormously profitable. Its CEOs get huge compensation packages, but when it comes to paying their taxes, suddenly they love the Cayman Islands. My suggestion is that the next time these crooks destroy their banks and need to be bailed out, let them go to the Government of the Cayman Islands to get their bailout and not the taxpayers of the United States of America.

Let me conclude by talking about trade for a moment because the Secretary of the Treasury gets involved heavily in trade issues. Trade is not a sexy issue, but it is an enormously important issue. I think it is important for all of us to understand that our current, unfettered, free-trade policy has been an unmitigated disaster for the working people of this country. Last year our trade deficit was more than $540 billion. Permanent normal trade relations with China-- remember when that came up? Oh, my goodness, we are going to open up the Chinese market, we are going to create all kinds of jobs in the United States, we are going to sell all of our products to the large population in China. Well, not quite. Not quite. PNTR with China led to the loss of nearly 3 million American jobs, and the NAFTA agreement led to the loss of nearly 1 million American jobs as large multinationals continue to throw American workers out on the street and move to China, Mexico, and other countries where workers are paid pennies an hour.

In 2008, I supported then-Senator Barack Obama when he told the AFL- CIO in Philadelphia the following:

What I refuse to accept is that we have to sign trade deals

like the South Korea Agreement that are bad for workers. What

I oppose--and what I have always opposed--are trade deals

that put the interest of multinational corporations ahead of

the interests of American workers--like NAFTA, and CAFTA, and

permanent normal trade relations with China. And I'll also

oppose the Colombia Free Trade Agreement if President Bush

insists on sending it to Congress because the violence

against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very

labor protections that we have insisted be included in these

kind of agreements. So you can trust me when I say that

whatever trade deals we negotiate when I'm President will be

good for American workers, and they'll have strong labor and

environmental protections that we'll enforce.

That was Barack Obama, candidate for President in 2008. Unfortunately, President Obama signed those bad trade deals into law while Mr. Lew was the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. As a result, more American jobs have been lost and our trade deficits for all of those countries have gone up. In my view, we need a Secretary of Treasury who will work to fundamentally rewrite our trade policies to ensure that American jobs are no longer our No. 1 export. Do I believe Jack Lew will be that person? Not a chance.

I will conclude by simply saying this: This country faces the most difficult economic times since the Great Depression. Tens of millions of working families, seniors, and children are struggling every single day to keep their heads above water while the wealthiest people are doing phenomenally well and large multinational corporations are enjoying record-breaking profits.

Because of all the money Wall Street and these large profitable corporations have, they are investing in the political process, putting in huge amounts of money--hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars--to elect candidates who will represent their interests and not the interests of the average American.

Now is the time to have people in the Obama administration who are going to stand with the American people, stand with workers, stand with seniors, and have the courage to take on the big money interests that are causing so many problems for our Nation. In my view, Jack Lew is not that person and I will vote against him becoming our next Secretary of Treasury.

With that, I yield the floor.

I thank my colleague from Arkansas for yielding.

When we talk about sequestration, when we talk about deficit reduction, it is important to put that discussion in a broader context. The broader context needs to be, No. 1, what is the fairest way to move toward deficit reduction and what is the best approach in terms of economic policy making our country strong and creating jobs.

I fear very much the debate we are currently having has very little to do with financial issues. I believe it has a lot to do with ideology. It is all about economic winners and losers in our country. It is all about the power of big money. It is all about the soul of what America is supposed to be.

You may have noticed there was a poll done. I can't remember who did it, but it was consistent with all the other polls I have seen. They asked the American people: Are you concerned about deficit reduction? Do you think we should cut Social Security and Medicare? Overwhelmingly, Democrats said no, Republicans said no.

Yet here in the Congress, surrounded by lobbyists and campaign contributors who are very wealthy, that is where we are heading. We are heading toward a so-called chained CPI, which very few people outside the beltway understand. This will mean cuts, significant cuts in Social Security and in benefits for disabled veterans.

The American people say we think the wealthiest people in this country should help us with deficit reduction, protect the safety net.

In Congress, there is a fierce attack by the Republicans and some Democrats on the safety net. To a large degree, we are allowing large corporations, that are enjoying very low effective tax rates, to get away with what they are doing.

When we talk about who should help us with deficit reduction, we need to look at what is going on economically in the United States of America. We don't discuss this issue enough. We need more people coming down to the floor to talk about it. We have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth, and the gap between the very wealthy and everyone else is growing wider.

Today, the wealthiest 400 individuals in this country own more wealth than the bottom half of American people, 150 million people. You have 150 million here, you have 400 over there. Who do you think should pick up the burden of deficit reduction?

Should we go after children who are having a hard time getting the nutrition they need or seniors who can't afford prescription drugs? Yes, we could do that.

Is that a moral thing to do? No. Is that good economics? No.

Today, one family, the Walton family of Walmart, is probably the most major welfare beneficiary in America. So many of their low-paid employees are on Medicaid, food stamps or other Federal programs. This one family owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people.

Do you know what we did a couple months ago? We gave the Walton family a tax break by expanding the estate tax.

Today, the top 1 percent owns 38 percent of all financial wealth--1 percent owns 38 percent. The bottom 60 percent owns less than 3 percent of all wealth.

What do we think? Do we want to go after the bottom 60 percent, families

who are making $25,000, $30,000 a year, falling further and further behind? Do we want to take away the educational opportunities and the nutrition their kids can get? Yes, we may do it that way. Maybe it makes more sense to go after the top 1 percent who are doing phenomenally well.

Do you know what. The vast majority of Americans agree with that, but this Congress does not reflect the interests of the vast majority of the American people. It is not the American people who are funding the campaigns for Members of the Senate and the House. It is not the average American who has well-paid lobbyists all over this place.

As Warren Buffett has pointed out, the 400 richest Americans are now worth a record-breaking $1.7 trillion, more than 5 times what they were worth two decades ago.

While the wealthiest people are becoming even richer, the Federal Reserve reported last year that median net worth for middle-class families dropped by nearly 40 percent from 2007 to 2010, dropped by 40 percent. That is the equivalent of wiping out 18 years of savings for the average middle-class family.

Whom do we go after? Do we think it makes any economic or moral sense to go after a middle class which is disappearing or maybe do we ask the wealthiest people in this country--who are doing phenomenally well--to help us with deficit reduction?

As bad as wealth inequality is, the distribution of income, what people make every year is even worse. It is an amazing statistic, and I hope everybody pays attention to this.

The last study on the subject of income distribution showed that from 2009 to 2011, the last study we have, 100 percent of all new income went to the top 1 percent, while the bottom 99 percent actually saw a loss in their income. In a sense it doesn't matter, given that incredible imbalance in income, what kind of economic growth we have. All the gains are going to go to the top 1 percent.

I have some friends over in the House, our Republican friends, who are saying: No, no, no. We can't ask these people to help us more with deficit reduction. I think that is very wrong.

When we are talking about how to reduce the deficit--and we all want to do that--we need to understand we can't get blood out of a stone. We can't ask people who are earning less and in many cases working longer hours. We can't ask the 14 percent of Americans who are unemployed. If we add people who have given up looking for work and people who are working part-time, we cannot get blood out of a stone. As Willy Sutton the bank robber reminded us, you go where the money is. In this case, all the money and all the income gains are with the top 1 percent.

The other point that needs to be made is we need to ask the question of how we reached the place we are right now. No. 1, we need to ask who is best able to help us with deficit reduction. It is surely not the struggling middle class. It is surely not the disabled veterans and their families. It is surely not elderly people who can't afford prescription drugs. It is surely not kids who don't have enough to eat.

The second question we need to ask is how did we get to where we are today. Did this deficit just arrive yesterday?

I think we all remember that in the last year of the Clinton administration this country had a $236 billion surplus, a surplus. The economists were projecting that the surplus would expand, expand, and expand.

What happened from the year 2000 to 2013 so that we went from a very significant surplus to a very serious deficit? That needs to be understood when we talk about sequestration and deficit reduction. The answer is, as everybody knows, we went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. A strange thing happened. We forgot to pay for those two wars. When we go into two wars and we are taking care of all those veterans who have been hurt, that adds up to something like $3 trillion by the time we take care of the last veteran, as we must.

During the Bush administration, we gave huge tax breaks to the wealthiest people in this country, didn't offset it. That adds up. We passed the Medicare Part D prescription drug program, didn't pay for that. That adds up.

Most important, because of the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior on Wall Street, we were plunged into a major recession, high unemployment, businesses going under, less tax revenue coming into the Federal coffers.

I know my Republican friends say cut, cut, cut, cut benefits for disabled vets, cut Social Security, cut Medicaid, cut nutrition, cut Head Start. We could do it that way, but we should also understand that at 15.8 percent as compared to GDP, the percentage of GDP, our revenue is almost the lowest it has been in 60 years.

Yes, in the middle of a recession we are spending a lot of money making sure people don't go hungry, making sure people who lost their jobs have unemployment benefits, making sure people have affordable housing. It is true. What is also true is that at 15.8 percent, as a percentage of GDP, our revenue is less, almost less than it has been in 60 years.

Today, not only are we seeing a growing gap between the very wealthy and everybody else, it is important to take a look at large corporations. When we do, we find that corporate profits are at an alltime high, while corporate income tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is near a record low. Profits are soaring, and the effective tax rate is near a record low.

In 2011, corporate revenue as a percentage of GDP was just 1.2 percent lower than any other major country in the OECD, including Great Britain, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, et cetera. Corporate revenue as a percentage of GDP is 1.2 percent lower than any other major country in the OECD. In 2011, corporations paid 12 percent of their profits in taxes, the lowest since 1972.

We have a choice. Do we go after the elderly? Do we go after the sick? Do we go after the children? Do we go after the poor or maybe do we say that when corporate profits are at a record level and their effective tax rate is the lowest since 1972, maybe we say to corporate America, hey, help us with deficit reduction.

The last figures we have seen on this issue is that in 2005, one out of four major corporations paid no income tax at all while they collected over $1 trillion of revenue over that 1-year period.

Let me conclude by simply saying we are losing $100 billion a year from tax havens in the Cayman Islands and elsewhere. There are ways to do deficit reduction without hurting the most vulnerable people in this society.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, the Committee on Veterans' Affairs has adopted rules governing its procedures for the 113th Congress. Pursuant to Rule XXVI, paragraph 2, of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that a copy of the committee rules be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I submit to the record these essays written by Vermont High School students as part of the Third Annual ``What is the State of the Union?'' Essay contest conducted by my office. These 13 finalists were selected from over 300 entries.

Riley Forbes, Mt. Abraham Union High School (Finalist)

The most important issue for the government to solve today

is human rights.

Everybody deserves equal opportunities in life. The State

and Federal Government should help to make sure that everyone

is free from torture, has the right to adequate food,

clothing and housing, and has the right to health care. The

most significant issue for the government to solve today is

human rights.

Human rights are the basic rights that everyone who is

human has. Human rights are important for everyone in the

world to have. An important right is the right to have basic

items, adequate clothing, food and housing. The United

Nations has a right that gives everyone the basic items that

they need, (clothing, food and housing). Whereas the United

States does not have a right giving everyone basic supplies

that is needed to live. ``A man in India without access to

clean water dies of a treatable disease'' (Pinheiro).

Everyone deserves adequate clothing, food, water and housing,

but the problem is that these things are limited. There are

homeless shelters and water, but there may not be enough for

everyone. The Government should try to help provide people

with the basic needs that are needed to survive.

The government should act to protect all people from

torture. The United Nations and the United States believe

that people should have the right to be safe from torture. A

guard watches as a man is assaulted by an inmate in a jail

Texas (Pinheiro). This man gets assaulted and the guard does

nothing. The guard is watching; he should help to protect the

people and not let them suffer even though they are in jail.

The Government should pay attention and try to help people

feel free and safe from torture.

In order for everyone to get a long life, people need to

have their basic needs. The United Nations and the United

States do not have any kind of right that says that everyone

should have healthcare or be able to have health care.

Obamacare will allow more people health insurance that they

can afford (Marston). People who couldn't afford health care

before now have a health care that is more affordable. The

Government is helping to provide people the access to an

affordable health insurance.

The Government should help to support the people and their

rights.

Bibliography: Pinhiero, P.S. Choices Program On-line

Scholar Brown University, Real Lives Computer Game. Marston,

C. Class Notes. MAUHS: Bristol, VT. November 2012

Damon Fulcher, South Royalton High School (Finalist)

The state of the Union is the most difficult to decipher in

years. We, as a nation, are stuck in a time where the war in

Afghanistan is dwindling, and we're trying to climb out of an

abysmal fiscal pit. In a nation that has made its name for

moving forward, controversies over human rights like the

right to marry and the right to have an abortion are still as

prevalent as ever. However, all is not lost, and this great

nation will continue to forge on, despite these setbacks.

The land of the free still does not grant rights to every

group of people. Gay marriage is one of the most hotly

debated subjects in our country right now. Even though our

Constitution states that all men are created equal, we as a

nation do not always abide by this principle. Half of the

American population is brushing a group of people under the

rug, just because they have a different sexual orientation

than themselves. The most recent example of this is North

Carolina amending its state constitution to say that same-sex

couples do not have the right to marry. This act takes the

issue to a whole new level past legality. However, not all is

bad. Several more states have begun adding to the pool where

same-sex couples have the right to marry. The United States'

highest court is taking on a case concerning a California

proposition to ban gay marriage. This case will decide the

fate of the issue in the years to come. Unfortunately, the

most serious issue our country faces is not even marriage

equality.

The most pressing issue currently is the economy. The great

debate is whose taxes should be cut and whose taxes should be

raised. The nation is greatly divided along partisan lines in

this respect. These opinions are exemplified by our current

President Barack Obama and our Speaker of the House John

Boehner. One believes that taxes should be raised on the

wealthy and cut on the middle class and the other, vice

versa. This is the nation's problem. We simply need to get

over which party we are a part of and work toward a common

goal. There is guaranteed success if all of Congress works

together to move forward.

The current state of the Union is complex, containing many

positives and negatives. With the idea in mind that working

together is necessary for the betterment of this nation, the

President and Congress will move forward and fix the dilemmas

that this country faces.

Benjamin Gilbert, Milton High School (Finalist)

This country faces one of the most important stages of

change and development it has ever seen. The decisions we

make as a nation in the next few years will shape not only

the future of our own lives, but the lives of every citizen

of this world. We won't be able to do this unless we come

together. We are humans. It is in our nature to disagree. We

are a democracy. It is a democracy's nature to disagree.

Disagreement is a sign of a thriving democracy. It is also in

our nature to solve problems, to be civil, to be fair, and to

provide for a better tomorrow.

In the coming years, we need more doctors and researchers,

to finally find a cure for cancer. We need more books to

inspire. We

need more businesspeople to meet to the new age markets. We

need teachers, and lawyers. We need successful young people

to inherit this country. However, this will not be possible

with the rising costs of higher education. The cost of

sending a child to college is the highest it has ever been.

If we as a country decide not to act, we cannot hope to make

a better tomorrow for ourselves or for our children. In a

state of economic turmoil, cuts have to be made. The military

has been allowed to spend almost without limit. The funds

that will keep Americans safe and soldiers well equipped

should not be touched, but the endless spending must stop.

Anything that is not absolutely vital and necessary for the

safety, protection, and justice of the American people ought

to be reevaluated.

Since its foundation, America has been the birthplace for

equality. From George Washington fighting against the

oppression of a monarchy, to Martin Luther King working

towards a more civil existence, to Alice Paul screaming for

the right to vote. Each step has helped open the door to

equality. Each day we are tested, and each day we must answer

history's call to change. Gay men and women have been quieted

for centuries. But their time is here. No federal ban on love

will stop the dawn of equality that is breaking upon this

nation. This is not about Republicans or Democrats,

religions, or politics, but about American people who love

and cherish one another.

We have a broken system. Today, it is far too difficult to

receive mental healthcare. It is easier to get your hands on

an assault weapon than visit a doctor. We have seen in the

past decade that this inequality leads to a tragic and

horrific reality. Assault weapons are made for the military,

and should be reserved exclusively for that purpose. Most

importantly, those in need of mental healthcare should have

access to it. We must forget about the politics and money,

and focus on the lives of Americans who are in danger every

day.

I have high hopes for the future of this country. We are

all different. We are often very divided. However, we are

strongest when we stand together.

Liam Hayes, Vergennes Union High (Finalist)

Today our country is facing many problems that require the

attention of not only the leaders in Washington, but the

American people as well. As a teenager I believe the two most

important issues are unemployment and our education system. I

know that these issues are affecting our country, mainly in

its overall growth.

First, I feel that our unemployment rate is quite

unacceptable. However, in the past year it has been lowering

slowly by the month. Although it may seem like a substantial

amount, the area of the nation I live in continues to

struggle to find jobs for students graduating college and for

people retraining to new careers. I believe to continue this

progress over the coming years America needs to look at the

national picture of what jobs are there, what new jobs could

serve a need for products and industry and what skills these

new industries will require Americans to have.

Lastly, I think that when it comes to education in this

great nation, the statistics and rankings don't lie. In math,

science, and writing, the US is in the lower half when

compared to other nations. If you look at statistics,

compared to others, we are a more developed country. I am

sure there are many things that we can do as a country to

climb higher in the tables. I truly think that if there

wasn't a long summer break, and there were one or two week

breaks frequently throughout the course of the year to take

place of the large summer break. I think this would help

because the long summer break leaves ridiculous amounts of

time to forget everything you have learned in the school

year. I also think that Americans have requirements for a

second spoken language and to promote challenging classes

throughout our schooling experience. If education is truly

the key to our future, it needs to give us not only the

basics, but the skills to problem solve, create and be the

architects of America's new future.

Christie Kershaw, South Burlington High School (Finalist)

I believe our nation has shown much improvement over the

past year. Job growth rates have been increasing and

businesses have been getting back on their feet after an

economic low point. Even with these developments, there are

many more aspects that need to be addressed and improved. I

believe that as a country, the biggest issues we should be

focusing on are improving the state of our environment and

making college more affordable for students.

In my opinion, our government isn't taking the issue of

global climate change as seriously as it should be. We are no

longer able to turn our backs on this difficult issue because

we are already starting to see signs of its negative impacts

on us. With major droughts this summer in the Midwest and

powerful storms like Super storm Sandy, it's clear to see

that our climate is becoming more unpredictable and deadly,

and the root cause of this is from climate change. There

haven't been enough major moves put into effect by our

government to combat this issue and I believe that both

political parties should work closer together to come to an

agreement on how do this. There should be tighter regulations

on the amount of greenhouse gases factories can emit, higher

miles per gallon standards for new cars, and more money put

into the development of renewable energy sources.

In order to make advancements in the field of green energy

to slow down climate change, there must be scientists who are

able to do the work. But we may soon be seeing a decrease in

the number of these people because increasing costs for post-

secondary education make it difficult for those who want to

pursue a career in the sciences, or any other field, to do

so. In order to ensure that our country will have enough

highly educated citizens to help bring our nation closer to

solving our energy crisis, we need to make college more

affordable for everyone. Universities must lower their

tuition costs and have more scholarships and grants for a

wide range of students. If our government made loans easier

to get with lower interest rates, this would also help remedy

this problem. This particular issue is especially important

to me because, as I start my college career in less than a

year, I will be spending a lot of time worrying about how I

will be able to pay for my education. Many other students

feel the same way as me and some may have to postpone their

plans for higher education. A decrease in college-educated

citizens is not what our country needs right now.

These two issues of climate change and post-secondary

education affordability are to me the most important on the

list of many our country is facing. If both political parties

work together, they will be able to resolve these issues in

the near future.

Sonia Lowen, Champlain Valley Union High School (Finalist)

The United States of America is the most powerful nation in

the entire world but it's currently facing severe issues. The

financial crash of 2008 resulted in the most disastrous

economy since the 1930's Great Recession. Climate change is

creating extreme weather disasters and destroying nature. Not

to mention that there is more income inequality in present

day than ever before. These are only a select few because the

list of issues goes on. The good news is that solutions are

accessible but the bad news is that as long as corporate

lobbyists continue to corrupt legislators, they will never be

reached. The United States Congress needs to stop allowing

corporate corruption.

The American economy is beginning to show signs of recovery

but it still has a long way to go. Millions are out of a job

and the government has a $16 trillion debt hovering over

their heads. The end of this recession is not going to come

fast, but there are provisions that will begin to facilitate

it, such as raising taxes not only on the rich but on the

corporations as well. This will cause more of their money to

go towards helping the government rather than manipulating

it.

America is not the only place being affected by climate

change but that does not, in any way, constitute sitting back

and hoping someone else will fix it. The United States makes

up 2% of the world's population yet they use 25% of the

world's resources. The environment's safety is dependent on

Congress to create new laws that will further regulate

manufacturers to reduce harmful emissions. America's economy

and climate would prosper greatly if they invested time and

money into green energy. Unfortunately, automobile and other

corporate lobbyists refuse to let that happen because they

can make more money manufacturing oil-powered products.

Corporate lobbying has corrupted what the Constitution

deems as the most powerful branch of government. Much of the

legislation that is passed is beneficial to industries,

whereas much of the legislation that would be beneficial to

the general population is rejected. The corporations have

gained this unhealthy amount of power by guaranteeing members

of Congress a future job in the private sector in exchange

for legislation that will favor whichever industry and/or

corporation they represent. It is a gross injustice of

congressional power.

The United States of America is at a fork in the road: they

can either choose to take a step in the right direction and

work for the interests of the people, or they can take a leap

in the wrong direction and work in the interests of

corporations. The country's future prosperity will be a

result of that decision. It is crucial that the government

abolishes corporate lobbying and strives to serve the people

this nation was built for. This will not be easy, but it is

critical in the process of rebuilding America.

Alexandra McFarland, Woodstock Union High School (Finalist)

As we have seen throughout our country over the past few

years, climate change is greatly affecting weather patterns.

In 2011 Vermont was hit by Hurricane Irene which devastated

much of the state and resulted in destroyed roads and

homeless families. In 2012 Hurricane Sandy came ashore in New

Jersey and New York changing even more of our fellow

Americans' lives with massive destruction. Last year snowfall

here in the Green Mountains was nearly half of the annual

average. This year we have already seen two major snowstorms

and snow levels are already approaching and surpassing the

total snowfall of last year. We have to be concerned with

these extreme weather changes. Weird weather may now be

normal weather and scientists predict such patterns only

worsening in the future unless we take action.

Climate change is a great problem that the United States,

although on the surface has

attempted to tackle, needs to face head on. We need to once

again be world leaders. Our first step is to launch a

nationwide campaign, as there remains a huge portion of the

population who still believe climate change is simply a myth,

to help folks understand the complex science. Second, our

nation needs to support scientific research and publicize new

discoveries that could help to better our understanding of

the climate change crisis as well as create and implement new

green technologies to combat it. We need to establish a

national plan to reduce our energy use.

The 350 Initiative, started by environmental activist Bill

McKibben, is a great goal for our nation to strive toward.

Through awareness and education programs that will lead us to

conserve as well as the development of new and innovative

green technologies, we will reduce atmospheric carbon levels

to a more sustainable level of 350 parts per million by the

year 2050. Scientists have shown that 350 is a safe upper

limit for the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. The 350

plan puts a solid number that we can strive to achieve on a

concept that so often feels much too great to tackle.

As one of the largest economies and one of the largest

consumers of fossil fuels, we should be a leader in changing

the way people around the globe think about our climate. It's

not simply here for us to use at will. It's here for us to

take care of and preserve for generations to come. These are

feats that our country has the resources, the will power and

the ingenuity to tackle.

We will not sit back and watch as extreme weather washes

over our great nation. As we have in the past, we will face

our worst problems and we will overcome them.

Rachel Moore, South Royalton Middle/High School (Finalist)

My family is like most families in Vermont: middle-class

citizens. Both my parents work to pay taxes and to put meals

on the table for my two brothers and me. Sometimes barely

getting by is all we can do. Life is not what it used to be.

When it is time for taxes to be paid for, it is always the

hardest, but we skim by. Taxes are killers to lower and

middle class citizens. I think the government should address

this problem in full detail. It is time to be fair and to put

the money back into the economy. In my opinion, when the

President gives his State of the Union speech, he should

promise to raise taxes for the rich and lower them for the

poor.

Lower-class citizens pay taxes like everyone else. The

difference between them and higher classes is their income.

Lower-class citizens do not receive a lot of income.

Therefore they have a harder time supporting their families.

There is a reason why so many people are losing their homes.

And most of those people are lower-class citizens. When the

President makes his State of the Union address, he, in my

opinion, should promise to raise taxes on the rich and lower

them for the poor. It is not fair that lower-class people

work twice as hard to keep their home, and to pay for food,

when higher-class citizens do not have to work as hard and

they do not need to worry. Lower-class citizens are not the

only ones who suffer from taxes.

Middle-class citizens also suffer from taxes. They have to

work harder to support their families than the higher-class.

Being a part of the middle-class group, I have experienced

the effects taxes have on our lives. Sometimes skimming by is

all my family is capable of doing. I have sat at the table

watching my mom write out and pay all her bills. I frequently

wish that I were rich, so I could support all my family

members and to get them to a better state. But wishing has

not done much for me, so I gave up. But now I have turned my

head to the President and his colleagues. Maybe my plea can

be heard by them, to lower taxes on the poor and raise it on

the rich. I want to live an American dream, not just dream

it. The more you raise taxes on the lower-class, which is the

majority of Americans, the less money will go back into the

economy. Tax the people who can spare an extra dollar, not

the people who depend on that dollar for a meal.

In my opinion, taxes should be raised on the rich and

lowered for the poor. Lower and middle classes have a hard

time supporting their families because of taxes. What about

that American dream people talk so much about? How will

future generations be able to live that dream if they cannot

even buy a house? It is time to do something, so, in my

opinion, when the President makes his State of the Union

address he should promise to lower taxes on the poor and

raise them to the rich.

Derryk O'Grady, Milton High School (Finalist)

My fellow Americans, we need to remember the tragic events

that occurred in Newtown, Connecticut, change in gun control

laws must happen. Unfortunate events like this can separate

weak countries and divide them, but we are different. A

tragic incident like this makes us more aware and stronger.

As we move forward, we will use this as a learning experience

to make this country safer by decreasing the ability to own a

gun.

In addition to gun control, the following are other major

topics of concern. First, we are in major national debt.

Second, unemployment rates are reaching an unbearable high.

Third we need to use more green energy and save more of the

world's oil. Lastly, the cost of the education is incredibly

high and still increasing. We must find solutions to these

issues and I believe I can do it.

We need to better our international relationships. We need

to stop involving ourselves in wars. Wars are a heavy burden,

and over the past twelve years, we spent $3.7 trillion and by

the end, possibly $4.4 trillion. This money does not need to

be spent. We need to take care of our own business, impose

higher taxes on the wealthy, and save money from wars.

More jobs need to be created for our country. The national

unemployment rate is around 7.7%, and in 2010, we reached

9.8%. A steady decline has to continue to happen. The more

people in this country working, the more revenue we can

bring. This will help chip away at the debt because the more

people working making money, the more money they can spend.

This series of working, making money, and putting it back

into the economy is what we need to create a surplus.

America's oil dependency is on a slight decrease since

president Obama took office. We have limited the use of other

countries oil by depending more on ourselves and this saves

money. We need to find more ways of using renewable energy

such as wind power, solar power, and hydro power: fossil fuel

is not everlasting, while renewable energy is.

We tell high school students that they need to go to

college to reach success, but then we throw them in debt. The

prices for college are astronomically high and continue to

increase. The average price for an in-state student is

$22,000 a year. How many students can afford to spend

$88,000? The answer is easy: not many. We need to find a

standard price range for colleges to work with.

As we grow as a nation, I promise we will find answers. Our

nation can overcome any challenge. Nothing brings this

country down. We will keep fighting these battles until we

have reached our goals. Thank you, and may God bless you all.

Saleban Olow, Winooski High School (Finalist)

Dear President Obama, Senator Sanders, and Fellow

Americans, From the birth of America, to America today, the

driving force and the heart of America has always been the

American success story. The United States of America is a

country of opportunity and accomplishment. We believe in our

country and our government. We believe that we will

eventually succeed, overcoming any obstacles that we face.

Our government and the entrepreneurs creating jobs made our

country the best among the world, but new issues have

appeared from the unemployment rate to the cost of college

tuition to gun control. These are what we need to address.

Perhaps the biggest problem we face as a nation is the

current rate of unemployment. According to the ``Department

of Numbers,'' during the November of 2012, the unemployment

rate is down to 7.7 percent of people in the United States.

This means that over 12 million Americans are jobless,

including my mom. Many American families are losing their

jobs because companies obtain their jobs. Companies and

wealthy people are getting richer and those from the middle

class and poverty levels are falling toward and below the

poverty line. This is particularly true given the fact that

the dollar is not worth what it was in the past. As a result,

inflation is boosting up the price of all goods and services.

As unemployment has been rising, the cost of education is

increasing. Today, American colleges have imposed an

extraordinary increase in tuition. Additionally, there are

also issues such as gay rights, Social Security, illegal

immigration and the War on Terror.

In spite of these factors, many students in the United

States look for higher education after high school. They want

to go to college and have a good career. If the government's

influence results in increasing college costs, then students

like ``ME'' will not be able to afford college. The average

family cannot fully support their child's tuition costs. Our

parents' incomes are spent paying for college debt. While

many college graduates remain jobless, they still must face

debts of more than 90K dollars. For our newly hatching

generation, I believe that college tuition should be cheaper

for everyone no matter what economic level the family is.

Regarding another critical issue, each year thousands of

Americans lose their lives through gun related problems. Guns

are designed to kill people easily and many lives are lost

each year because the United States doesn't have strict gun

control laws. The deadly massacre shooting at a Connecticut

elementary school was heartbreaking. The outcome of this

tragedy resulted in the deaths of 20 children and 6 adults, a

painful scenario. Beautiful little kids between the ages of 4

and 9 years were slaughtered. It is my strong opinion that

the government should pass a gun law that would reduce gun

problems. President Obama and fellow lawmakers, I feel you

need to be creative and figure out a better way to ensure

young kids' safety. By choosing you, the United States is

going in the right direction for a better future.

In conclusion, the challenges that we face with

unemployment, college tuition and gun control are ones that

we must currently address. We must make significant changes

in order to progress. The success of our nation must be made

by building upon our society. As in the past, we can and

always will work hard and make America and the world a better

place.

God bless the United States of America.

Robert Pennypacker, St. Johnsbury Academy (Finalist)

This year's Tax Rate for the richest are the lowest this

Country has ever seen!

Today's tax rate means that person making $379,150 pays the

same tax as a person making seven million dollars. Thirty

years ago this was different. In 1981 there were 16 tax

brackets. Today there are six. The highest tax bracket for

today's federal income tax is 35% for a person making

$379,150 or more. That means you're taxing a small business

owner the same rate as a giant corporation president like

General Electric's Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt who has a

salary of 3.3 million dollars as of 2011.

If and when the tax rate increases for the rich like many

Americans want, it will not hurt the economy like the GOP is

stating. Last September, the Congressional Research Service

published a report countering Republican claims that lowering

top tax rates would lead, or had led, to higher economic

growth. ``Changes over the past 65 years in the top marginal

rate and the top capital gains tax rate do not appear

correlated with economic growth,'' the report concluded.

Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell responded by

having the report suppressed, but its findings were

incontrovertible. This shows that, with the rise in taxes for

the upper class, it will not affect the economy like many

Republicans are stating.

Also, we are at war with the Taliban and yet we still have

lower taxes than ever before. How are we paying to support

this war? Never before has the United States had lower taxes

during a war. In 1943, during WWII, the tax rate for a person

making $2,593,984 (adjusted for inflation) was 88%. In that

same year a person making $155,000 (adjusted for inflation)

was 38%. During the Vietnam War, in 1966, the tax rate for a

person making $629,530 (adjusted for inflation) was 70%.

Also, in that same year, a person making $83,104 (adjusted

for inflation) was 36%. Today's tax rate, as of 2011, for a

person making $379,150 is 35%. A person making 1.1 million

dollars tax rate pay the same 35%.

Should a person making $379,150 pay the same rate as multi-

millionaires? No they shouldn't. Why do we have the lowest

taxes ever in the United States and yet be in a war? The

United States should have taxes similar to years before. The

middle class should pay the same rate. The rates for the

middle class have stayed within the same percentage for the

last 70 years. Meanwhile the upper class has gone from a 90

percent tax rate in the 1940's and 50's to 70 percent from

1960's through 1981, and 50 percent in 1982 through 1986. Now

they have a 35 percent tax rate which is the same as a middle

class citizen. The United States should raise the taxes of

the rich.

Rebecca Potter, Brattleboro Union High School (Finalist)

Congress is dysfunctional because of priority

discrepancies. Some in our government seem to believe that

holds, filibusters, and less legal tactics of delay and

obstruction serve as necessary means to a greater GOP-

dominated end. Others argue that while disagreement is key in

a true democracy, so is compromise. Certain members of the

Senate, where unanimous consent remains relevant in the

scheduling and timing of legislation, stand by ``holding''

the Senate's progress on a bill or committee action. Others

point out that this is 2012, where a hold in Senate exists as

a euphemism for indefinite or permanent vetoes, often done in

secret. In both houses, many forget that the true party

holding the majority in Congress is the white, heterosexual,

wealthy men.

While Congress' dysfunction directly correlates with the

partisan gridlock we've been witnessing over the past four

years, this has more to do with flaws in the system itself

rather than the puppets within it. Sure, people are selfish

and want the connections voting a certain way or hiring a

specific set of hands will bring--but what ingenious economic

system provides the impetus for such action? Capitalism, at

the root of it all, enables members of Congress and the

wealthy holding the strings above them to exist as money-

motivated figures of power. The privatization of education,

healthcare, and human services creates the legislative

standstill we've got in Congress, which dedicates an absurd

amount of time to arguing over non-issues in a partisan lock.

This allows legislation that matters often gets nixed in

committee or shoved through without necessary debate.

Capitalist society has created a dysfunctional Congress,

and until we fix the system we will keep getting the same

results. The bandage for this infectious situation is

compromise in the Senate and House of Representatives--

impending compromise, I predict, what with a certain cliff

looming over our heads. Antibiotics for a more permanent

change would mean a re-evaluation of everything we've grown

up being told was ``American'': federalized elections,

spending limits on campaigns, socialized care for humans and

our unalienable rights (health, education, safety), and

public ownership of the land of the free.

Austin Price, Mt. Anthony Union High School (Finalist)

My fellow Americans, Our country is evolving and changing

in ways it has never before. We can either adjust or get left

in the past. America was once the greatest power in the world

and I believe we can get back to that, but we must take hold

and lead with force. Although we are on the path back, we

still need to focus on our military, economy, and civil

rights.

Our military is the backbone of our success as a nation.

With over nine hundred military bases internationally, we

need our military to be strong as ever to protect our trading

partners as well as us. The necessary changes that must be

made are to increase our presence in the countries that are

filled with enemies of the state and looking to do harm to

the United States and its citizens. We must increase the

spending budget for the military so that we will maintain our

internationally renowned army. We as a country have the

responsibility to not only protect our rights, but to protect

the civil rights of others who don't have the ability

themselves.

Further, we are in one of the greatest recessions since the

Great Depression; we face unprecedented challenges as a

nation to get back on top. If any country can come out of a

depression and be even stronger than before, it is America,

the home of the brave. Were the spending in any sector to

increase, then there would be a huge influx of jobs that were

created by all that new money. A higher tax rate for the

wealthiest of Americans will help this nation get out of the

greatest debt it has ever been in. It is time for everyone to

pay their fair share. Although the taxes do need to be

increased, increasing the taxes on small business owners will

only hurt our economy because they will hire fewer workers.

There is also a great civil rights issue that must be

addressed in our country. This is the marriage of

homosexuals. I am proud to say that the state I reside in has

done what few other states are brave enough to do by creating

civil unions. There are a shocking forty-one states that ban

same-sex marriage compared to only nine that allow it. I am

asking for an immediate legalization of same-sex marriage in

all states, similar to that of the desegregation laws of the

sixties and seventies.

If we as a nation are to be prosperous, we must grow and

adapt to the world around us. In order to reach our goals

their will have to be sacrifices made by every American. We

must make changes to the economy, military, and civil rights

in order to reach our lofty goals and reap the benefits of

our hard work.

Mr. President, I ask to have printed in the Record finalist essays written by Vermont High School students as part of the Third Annual ``What is the State of the Union?'' Essay contest conducted by my office. These 21 finalists were selected from over 300 entries.

The essays follow.

Sydney Alderman, Mt. Abraham Union High School (Finalist)

Today we often face the problem of excessive violence

between people, starvation, and economic problems. People

aren't all getting what they need and something needs to be

done. What would fix everything, broaden our universal

communications skills and get things done quicker would be to

unite globally. By working as an entire unit we can all

communicate and work toward the same goal we all crave:

peace. Uniting globally can solve conflicts causing violence,

starvation, and economic problems.

Uniting globally will benefit the people of the world

immensely. By uniting globally it would be much easier to

distribute the necessary resources to sustain everyone, such

as food, water, and energy. When everyone is on the same page

and communicating thoroughly between territories, you can

maintain fair trade and further discuss what laws and human

rights need to be established as well. When we're all united

for a common goal, let's assume peace amongst all people,

discussion is more productive and conclusive and proper

action can be taken at a faster pace. Actions such as

bringing food and water to those who have none, and also

getting the area with these conditions re-established for

suitable living conditions. Everyone benefits from a united

world.

The U.S. economy will be heavily benefitted by uniting

globally. When we unite globally, trade is faster and we can

simply work faster because communication is quicker and more

conclusive than when we're all thinking separately. Trade

will therefore be quicker and we can be more productive about

it with such open communication. It would be easier to

discuss the distribution of currency amongst countries and

people and how we can fix the current economic problems.

Uniting globally will solve the biggest problems of the

world. It will broaden the communication between territories

and will help us resolve conflicts causing famine, violence,

and economic problems universally. When we all band together

we can accomplish anything and finally bring a new era of

peace.

Tyler Bradley, South Burlington High School (Finalist)

Our country needs to invest in clean sustainable energy and

decrease our dependence for oil from other nations. Our

nation should be investing in wind and solar power. Wind is a

renewable source of energy, which will last forever. It does

not pollute our environment and is all natural. Solar energy

also provides us with clean energy, with no combustion. It

too is renewable and causes no greenhouse gases. Although

wind and solar, as energy sources, may prove to be expensive,

it is a small price to pay for the health and safety of our

environment. In contrast, we are eventually going to run out

of oil and the high cost of transporting oil and our

dependency on other nations needs to be eliminated.

We need to stop relying on foreign nations for our energy

supply. If foreign governments continue to control oil

profits they can use that money to fund terrorism mischief.

In addition, these energy rich countries can restrict the oil

supply and therefore make the United States a hostage to

their demands. We need to end this cycle and invest in more

sustainable energy sources.

We need Congress to work harder to obtain sustainable

energy tax incentives like the Investment Tax Credit and

Production Tax Credits. These credits will help reduce the

cost of wind and solar projects and in the long run help

reduce global warming. All across our earth we currently see

record heat waves, melting glaciers, rising sea levels and

extreme droughts and floods. The United States must lead the

world in reversing global warming, to preserve a safe planet

for our children and grandchildren.

Annie Arthur, Woodstock Union High School (Finalist)

To be a democracy, our country must be able to hear the

voices of every citizen individually and the population as a

whole. People all over the world are sacrificing their lives

for the hope of the right to vote. In the United States,

eligibility is simple. To vote, one must be a citizen of the

United States and be 18 or older. However, a country as great

as ours does not seem able to succeed in a very seemingly

simple task: vote freely. The State of our Union is teetering

on the edge.

In the 2012 Presidential Election, only 57.5% of the entire

eligible population cast their ballots. About 93 million

citizens did not participate in this most basic foundation of

democracy. How is the United States supposed to run as an

effective democracy if so many citizens remain silent in such

a crucial time to make their voices heard? Granted, part of

this lack of voting is caused by laziness, indifference or

belief that one vote will not change the outcome. However,

there are many citizens who want to vote but restrictions

imposed at the state level have either attempted or succeeded

to suppress participation in this election. In this recent

election there were laws passed to hinder voter participation

by making it difficult to register to vote, requiring voter

photo identifications, miscommunication of date and times,

and threatening voters with imprisonment for voter fraud.

Officials also succeeded in cutting early voting periods,

voting by mail, polling hours and number of locations. Even

though courts temporarily struck down many of these efforts,

there is no reason to believe that state officials will be

deterred from imposing more voting restrictions in the

future.

This national issue should not be determined at state

level. Restriction on voting is a federal problem and should

be addressed by federal powers. This is too important an

issue to leave to individual state governments as clearly

demonstrated by the blatant attempts to deny citizens their

right to vote. The solution is to simply create basic

standards on voting. The federal government could pass a bill

with minimum guidelines for states to follow on voting laws.

This legislation does not need to be a complex list of

restrictions; this bill would be freeing up voting laws by

listing only what needs to happen to achieve successful

voting. Each state would then have the freedom to expand on

these basic requirements. This bill could facilitate

registration, polling hours and ability to mail in votes. It

is an American's right to be able to vote. As the world's

greatest democracy, no political party should be able to

obstruct voting. The United States, a nation for the people,

of the people, by the people needs to set a better example as

the standard bearer of democracy.

Jeannine Bissonette, Champlain Valley Union High School (Finalist)

Ever since Woodrow Wilson was elected in 1913, it has been

a tradition for Presidents to address the nation with their

State of the Union report. As President Obama prepares to

present his State of the Union address, many politically

concerned citizens begin to ponder the thoughts of what will

be produced in the next four years.

With a current national unemployment rate of 7.9%, the

numbers appear to be much lower than the 10% that the United

States endured during October of 2009. Although these rates

suggest a recuperating recession, they have not yet reached a

level in which the nation can sit back comfortably. These

high unemployment rates understandably result in a greater

necessity for more families to reach out to social welfare

services such

as food stamps and local food shelves. According to a local

press interview with food shelf coordinator Mary Ann

Castimore, the Vergennes Congregational Church found

themselves serving a total of approximately fifty to sixty

new families. People are struggling to find and hold steady

jobs; feeding their families continues to be growing concern.

Corresponding with the current economy, the United States

could certainly do more to address the concerns of the young

people. With the lack of vacant positions in the working

world, young adults are learning quickly that it does not

matter so much what they've majored in, but what is

available. As a high school student of Vermont, I have become

increasingly aware of my school advisor's push for me to look

into which fields are in need of laborers, rather than those

that suit me best when determining an occupation. As the

pursuit for jobs lengthens, it is important that the

government restricts outsourcing jobs to other countries and

create said jobs within the nation. Instead of outsourcing

jobs, the United States should provide incentives to retain

these positions in America.

As the United States adapts to the most severe recession

since the Great Depression, the American citizens' fear of a

failing economy is justified. Major issues such as the

nearing fiscal cliff or changes in Social Security are

becoming more common parts of American conversation. As

January approaches, politicians in D.C. are running out to

time to make the decision of who will be taxed in the coming

years. By taxing Americans making over two hundred and fifty-

thousand dollars, more taxes can be gleaned by the federal

government. Additionally, more citizens being taxed results

in more equitable terms. As a federal insurance program,

Social Security is praised highly for the benefits it

provides the retired population. Since American citizens are

now living into their eighties, a shortage in Social Security

money has materialized. The inadequacy of funds has led to an

extended retirement age which is predicted to continue

increasing into the future. The United States must continue

to raise the retirement age in order for Social Security to

continue operating. It takes time and multiple strategies to

solve any major issue: there is no one perfect solution.

Jonah Blatt, Milton High School (Finalist)

Good Evening America,

There are several issues that need to be addressed here

tonight that will benefit our nation in one way or another.

First off, I'd like to touch on the topic of unemployment.

The unemployment rate has dropped significantly. The rate was

10% in November of 2009, which was the highest from January

1st 2009 to January 1st 2013. In the middle of that, the rate

bounced up and down between 9% and 9.5% from 2010 to 2011.

Now here we sit today on a continuous, steady decline all the

way down to 7.7%, and I assure you it is not over. Jobs were

being created at a rate of 151,000 per month in 2012 and we

look to raise that number this coming year. My new plan

allows workers who have lost their job to be placed on

temporary jobs as trainees for short periods to retain their

skills or gain new ones while still receiving benefits. This

was released on April 19th where the unemployment rate was

8.2% and now it is 7.7%. It's working, America.

Cannabis, or better known as marijuana has become a major

topic of discussion these days in America. Is it a medical

miracle or an addiction amongst many? The Office of National

Drug Control Policy and I have stated that we oppose the

legalization of marijuana and other drugs since legalization

would increase the availability and use of other illegal

drugs. Their legalization would bring more health and safety

risks closer to your homes. The legalization and selling of

marijuana could bring some positive to our attention. A

potential boost for the economy if it was sold and taxed

heavily. However in the end I strongly oppose the

legalization process and it should only remain available for

medical use only. The risks strongly outweigh the positives.

Over 50 years ago we created a strong, close relationship

with Israel. We have done joint military planning along with

military research and weapons development. We have

continuously assisted Israel with $3.1 billion in security

assistance and I will not be the president to stop that

trend. The only way for Israel to achieve peace with their

neighbors is to begin with a clear and strong commitment to

the security of Israel. They are also a big export consumer

to our economy. We must stand by our ally through these tough

times between them and the Palestinians. We will look to both

sides to find a common ground to install peace back into the

world between these rival nations. I am in support of

resumption of the aid to the Palestinian government with a

condition that the government renounce terrorism. Israel has

a right to defend themselves from these Palestinian rocket

attacks, but we will look to peace first in order to draw

this to an end. Israel is an important ally in all

perspectives. We must help them.

Thank you and good night America.

Allie Bull, Champlain Valley Union High School (Finalist)

The United States of America is known as the land of

profuse opportunity for all who come here. Throughout the

history of this country, there have been events to be proud

of and events that were not too glorious. As the world

prepares for the new year of 2013, it is a good idea to

reflect as we explore the state of this union, and gain

insight into how this country is running.

Congress is seemingly dysfunctional right now. The current

Congress has passed the least number of bills in history.

This statistic is shocking and embarrassing. The system of

checks and balances within our democracy is designed to

prevent an abuse of power. It is also a known fact that our

system takes longer to pass bills and get things done;

however, the current state of gridlock is not okay. The

nation is frustrated with the leaders and the lack of

compromise in Washington. Congress needs to become a leader

of the whole nation, and not individual leaders of each

political party. The wall between each party needs to be let

down and national issues need to be addressed. It is hard for

congressmen to make decisions that could affect reelection;

yet, the lack of progress being made is not making the

constituents any happier. It is better for these leaders to

leave the nation stronger and prosperous than when they

arrived, as opposed to an unchanged, struggling country.

In the shadow of the Sandy Hook Massacre, gun control

debates have resurfaced. This is a topic that needs to be

addressed, swiftly and promptly. Semi-automatic weapons are

completely and utterly unnecessary in the United States of

America. There is no reason that a person should need or

desire to own one. These weapons are killing machines and

should be banned. Americans have the right to bear arms, but

there is no need for weapons other than hunting weapons. Any

weapons that do remain legal in this country need to be

regulated and controlled with very thorough background

checks. However, the fact that semi-automatic weapons are

available isn't the only cause of these tragedies. Hollywood

portrays gun violence as exciting and desirable. That, in

combination with violent video games, leaves imprints in the

brains of impressionable young people (including the mentally

ill). Semi-automatic weapons should be banned, and violence

movies and games should be regulated. In this country there

is freedom of speech and expression, but the production of

these movies and games results in harm to other citizens. All

of these factors need to be addressed. Politicians who agree

with this stance need to step up and speak out despite the

possible damage to their reelection. The safety of the people

should be more important than reelection.

America is a bright and prosperous place. There are a few

issues dragging it down, but with the known strength of this

nation, these problems can be solved. The only way to fix big

problems is to lay down political barriers and work together,

hand-in-hand.

Emma Davitt, Champlain Valley Union High School (Finalist)

The current state of our Union is multifaceted, filled with

diverse opinions and numerous obstacles. Our Union faces an

interesting future ahead, either a prosperous and promising

future, or a destructive and deleterious future. It is up to

us, the people of the United States, to do everything we can

to ensure a brilliant future, to promise fortuitous and

successful lives for our succeeding generations.

We are currently coping with the most intense, severe

recession in our country since the Great Depression. 7.9% of

the people in the United States are out of work, struggling

to find jobs and earn a living. Detrimental taxes are

traumatizing families, college graduates' degrees are rarely

helping them secure jobs and, throughout these unfortunate

situations, many Americans are still focusing on abortions

and gay marriage rights. It is time for our nation to accept

individuality, embrace the freedom our country was founded

upon, and fix the major problems facing the people of the

United States of America.

The unemployment rate is uncomfortably high. In 2008, many

businesses closed, numerous workers were laid off and the

unemployment rate began to rise. As a result, jobs have

become more valuable, and at a time where few were

comfortable with their living situations and current bank

accounts, taxes rose. To address this situation, taxes must

be lowered for the lower and middle-class families while

returning the economy to a peaceful state, encouraging

businesses to grow and expand in the United States.

The economy is not only affecting the working class of our

nation, but also the children--the future. If children watch

their parents and older siblings with college degrees

struggle to find a job, what will make them want to go to

college? What will convince them that attending college is a

wonderful and beneficial experience? The young members of our

national community will one day be responsible for our

country and our only option to ensure a bright and promising

future is to nurture, teach and help this younger generation.

With this in mind, it should be of great importance to the

United States to make college education more affordable for

the young population. Through grants, aid and scholarships,

many more students will have the opportunities to attend

universities, and with an economy on the mend, we can look to

the future with great hope in the highly educated body that

will one day run the country.

Contemplating these issues, our Union has a lot to focus

on. We have run ourselves into a deep economic and

educational rut and it is our job to work together to climb

out of

it. The future of our country rests solely in the hands of

the upcoming generation, however, how can we have faith in

the subsequent decades if our current society struggles to

find jobs and attend college? The answer is rather simple,

the young people of our country have the chance to make

groundbreaking decisions and be amazing leaders, if given the

opportunities.

Taryn Druge, Champlain Valley Union High School (Finalist)

In an idealistic world we would work for a common good.

Countries wouldn't consider money, land, or rivalry. They

would only see how they could create peace and maintain it.

As Franklin D. Roosevelt said, ``A point has been reached

where the peoples of the Americas must take cognizance of

growing ill-will, of marked trends toward aggression, of

increasing armaments, of shortening tempers--a situation

which has in it many of the elements that lead to the tragedy

of general war . . . Peace is threatened by those who seek

selfish power.'' It is my opinion that, in this world, we are

not driven by the ambition for peace but instead by the

ambition for wealth and power. We, the U.S., are no

different, as much as we would love to believe otherwise and

see ourselves as the peace bearers of the world. We must open

our eyes to the truth. Wealth and power must be relevant in

our dealings with foreign nations because these are some of

the only factors that will drive negotiation.

An example of the struggle for wealth and power is the

United States relationship with China. Currently, the U.S. is

deeply uneasy about China, to whom we are deeply indebted,

for they are our greatest supplier of goods. It is

frightening to think that China's withdrawal could destroy

our entire economy, yet our withdrawal from China would

cripple them as well. Instead of the dependence creating

unity among our nations, it has created discomfort and

hostility. The power complex each country has creates the

belief that dependence upon one another weakens us. When

Thomas Jefferson said, ``Dependence begets subservience and

venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit

tools for the designs of ambition,'' Jefferson could never

foresee that U.S. dependence would extend overseas due to our

economies' desire to manufacture cheaper and thus more

profitable products.

China and the U.S are two great superpowers, and each is

just as self-destructive as the other. Without a strong and

desirable alliance with China, the U.S. becomes weakened to

possible foreign attacks and a collapse of the economy. The

U.S. is feeling out of balance right now: so many goods are

being manufactured overseas at the expense of U.S. jobs being

taken away. This balance could be found when the U.S comes to

the realization that we cannot completely isolate China, and,

at the same time, we must create a political environment that

nurtures U.S. businesses that manufacture products

domestically.

In an ideal world the bonds and alliances of countries

would surpass the separation of race, religion, class and

culture. We must work towards this ideal world, because in it

we will find a far better future we could not possibly

foresee today.

Mr. President, I ask to have printed in the Record winning essays written by Vermont High School students as part of the Third Annual ``What is the State of the Union?'' Essay contest conducted by my office.

The essays follow.

Caroline Braun, Champlain Valley Union High School (Winner)

There is no simple cure for the abundant issues plaguing

our nation. Not only are we recovering from a recession, but

we also are confronting challenges related to climate change,

healthcare, and education. While our efforts to address these

issues are noble, our failure to solve them reflects a more

concerning societal problem.

On December 14, 2012, twenty children and six faculty

members were fatally shot in Sandy Hook Elementary School in

Newtown, Connecticut. Not only did this devastating tragedy

leave close friends, family, and the local community in

shock, but also the nation. Though it is remarkable that our

country embraced the friends and families of those killed, we

only seem to value such a strong sense of community after a

crisis. The dramatic increase in violence in the past decade

raises new questions about our current societal values and

priorities: have we forgotten what's truly important in this

new age? While we enjoy the many luxuries that accompany

technology and contemporary life, has the lure of modern

convenience eclipsed our fundamental human need to take care

of and support each other, our families, and our communities?

Perhaps it is time we recalibrate who we are and who we

want to be as a country so that the fundamental values on

which our country was founded can once again flourish. How

can one pursue happiness without access to basic healthcare,

food, or the ability to spend time with the ones we love?

Certainly when our forefathers declared our right to bear

arms, their intent was not for corporations and special

interest groups to profit from its citizens being armed with

assault weapons intended for war. Instead of unbridled greed

and big business dominating our economy, it is imperative we

support small businesses so they can thrive once again.

Environmentally, we have yet to replace our dependence on oil

with renewable energy resources and reduce our effects on

climate change. And while we all agree educating our children

is a requisite investment in our future, teachers continue to

earn, on average, 12 percent less than other workers with

similar education and work experience.

As a world leader and role model for democracy and peace,

we need initiatives that not only connect people and

communities, but also ones that will act as catalysts for

change. Increasing awareness of issues related to social

justice will spark larger movements for societal change;

whether it is reducing community violence, practicing

business ethics, implementing renewable energy sources,

advocating for mental health care, or investing in our

teachers and schools. Instead of businesses and special

interest groups being the sole influence on policies and the

direction of our country, now is the time, once again, for

all citizens to be heard, cared for, and respected. Although

as a nation we have made and continue to make advances that

were inconceivable just a century ago, our penchant for the

new shouldn't trump our commitment to older values and

fundamental human rights.

Emily Ellsworth, Colchester High School (2nd Place)

Social mobility is essential to the development of the

American character. The ability to overcome class

distinctions and succeed economically through hard work

equates to opportunity. Yet current U.S. taxation policies

are harming the middle-class and widening the gaps of income

inequality, thus narrowing the window of opportunity for

Americans. Federally enforced legislation such as the Bush

Tax Cuts and the income

tax on capital gains provide a disproportionate amount of

benefits to the wealthiest Americans. This leaves a majority

of citizens possessing less means to increase their income,

obtain education for higher paying occupations and provisions

for the next generation.

It is necessary to consider the purchasing function and the

insurance function of wealth. The quality of a child's

education and neighborhood is dependent upon the volume of

wealth the parent has access to. Children also receive a very

different set of choices and opportunities upon entering the

adult world depending on their family's economic status. To

combat the further detriment to future generations, taxes

must be raised in areas which will inflict minimal harm, and

produce the most beneficial results. America is experiencing

the largest disproportion of wealth since 1928, and current

taxation policy not only aids in widening the income gap, but

harms the accumulation of government tax revenue.

The sale of stocks and bonds are called ``capital gains.''

Until the 1990's, the capital gains tax was at 28%. Today its

current level is 15% which enables less revenue gained from

any individuals whose main source of income comes from stocks

and bonds, such as wealthy businessmen. In 2006, for

instance, Warren Buffett paid 17.7 percent in taxes on the

$46 million he booked that year, while his secretary paid 30

percent of her $60,000 salary to the government. Simple

practices such as restoring tax rates to past levels are

essential to the aid of our country's recovery and to improve

the state of the Union.

Gena Chiola, Mount Abraham Union High School (3rd Place)

Today, we face problems concerning the environment, war and

conflict, as well as lack of resources. In these times, more

than ever before, the solution to these problems lies in

global communication. If we put our heads together, and help

each other, we can create a plan to reduce climate change. If

we increase our efforts to work out conflicts between

countries, through effective communication, less people will

lose their lives through unnecessary wars. Sharing of

resources can occur when we effectively communicate between

countries, which will reduce poverty worldwide. All it takes

is effective global communication to resolve global issues.

One major global problem is conflict between nations. There

will always be conflicts between people, it is part of being

human, but how we deal with these conflicts is what makes the

difference. Today, approximately 60 countries are involved in

a war. Millions of people die each year from these conflicts.

This fighting and killing is indeed a form of communication,

but it is not effective in solving world problems. We

accomplish nothing by killing people. We need to stop

thinking of ourselves as being separated by national

boundaries and focus on how to break down these walls. By

communicating and working towards the same common goal, we

will improve the planet. If we think globally, we will have

more of a chance of communicating globally, and resolving

conflicts through peaceful means, rather than war.

Enter Climate Change conundrum. Climate Change is the

increased temperature of the atmosphere due to human carbon

emissions. Our use of gasoline to run cars, and oil to heat

our homes contributes to the heating of the climate. We are

slowly destroying our environment, and creating an

increasingly dangerous habitat for all living thing. It is no

question that this is a dangerous issue that needs

addressing. And in order to address it, we must work

together. Bill Mckibben, of Vermont, helps us do this. He

organized 350.org, which is a global campaign to solve

climate change. The mission of 350.org is ``building a global

grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis.'' He

organizes global rallies and projects to bring the world

together in the face of this crisis. He helps us communicate

as a world to get the job done, since it can be done no other

way.

Earth's lack of resources needs to be addressed and solved

through global communication. 25,000 people die from hunger

every day. Other poverty induced diseases, like AIDs, cause

millions of deaths worldwide. However, by globally

communicating, we can reduce poverty. Global communication

can help us redistribute the resources. Some places are

brimming over with resources, such as fresh food, water, and

technology while others suffer. The U.S.A. has an abundance

of resources. If we use global communication to be at peace

with one another, we can share what we have, so that less

people suffer. If the United States were to share resources

with poverty stricken countries of Africa, people in Africa

would have happier lives, while people in the United States

would still have enough to live comfortably. This can all be

achieved through effective global communication.

Global communication is the answer. If we all put our

hearts and heads together, and forget our differences, we can

change the world for the better, which is always the ultimate

goal. Whether it's to prevent wars, bring the temperature of

the atmosphere down, or to redistribute resources, it's

undebatable that communication is what we need. Let us come

together, and work together and never forget the importance

of global communication.

Bibliography

Mckibben, B. 350.org. January, 2013, http://www.350.org/en/ mission

Poverty.com. January, 2013, http://poverty.com/ Wars in the World, January 2013, http:// www.warsintheworld.com/?page=static1258254223

Statistic Brain, World Poverty Statistics. January, 2013

http://www.statisticbrain.com/worldpoverty-statistics/ Henson, Robert. The Rough Guide to Climate Change: page 1-

10. New York, USA: Rough Guides Ltd, September 2006.

Mr. President, as incoming chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, one of my top priorities will be to evaluate and improve the training and employment programs afforded to our Nation's servicemembers and veterans.

Every day, far too many young veterans face the harsh realities of unemployment. These are brave men and women who have put their lives on the line defending our country who now struggle to find employment and provide for their families. The Putting Our Veterans Back to Work Act of 2013 will ensure we provide them with much needed support.

This legislation would reauthorize several of the transition, retraining, and employment services created by the VOW to Hire Heroes Act of 2011. That legislation is making a real impact in the lives of countless veterans by providing them with the training opportunities they need in order to secure meaningful employment.

Too often I hear from veterans that the government provides great resources for them to find training and employment opportunities, but they are not sure where to start in order to tap into those resources. Those Departments charged with helping to provide veterans with employment assistance must make certain that they are conducting appropriate outreach so that veterans know where to turn when they need help.

Assisting in this effort, the Putting Our Veterans Back to Work Act would also provide veterans with a new, unified, online employment portal for veterans seeking information regarding employment and job training resources. This online portal would make it easier for veterans to take advantage of the services and opportunities available to them.

At a time when 85 percent of law enforcement agencies were forced to reduce their budget, according to a 2011 survey by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, answering the Nation's public safety needs is also a priority. That is why this legislation would provide potential employers with additional grants for first responder hiring and re-hiring needs.

This legislation would also direct agency heads to favorably consider contractors that employ a significant number of veterans for all contracts over $25 million. This provision would ensure that contractors, who are doing their part to help veterans find good paying jobs, have a competitive advantage when doing business with the Federal government.

Finally, the Putting Our Veterans Back to Work Act would strengthen our commitment to protecting the employment rights of servicemembers and veterans. These commonsense provisions would build upon existing law by providing the government with additional tools to carry out its obligation to safeguard veterans' employment rights. This legislation would enable the Attorney General to investigate and file suit against a pattern or practice in violation of the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act and to issue limited civil investigative demands for relevant documentary material. It would also allow Federal agencies to suspend and debar contractors who repeatedly violate the employment and reemployment rights of members of the uniformed services. Finally, it would provide the Special Counsel with authority to subpoena attendance, testimony, and documents from Federal employees and agencies in order to carry out investigations related to USERRA.

Mr. President, there are a number of great training and employment programs available to veterans. This legislation would strengthen such programs and make certain that veterans have and maintain access to those programs. That is what our veterans are entitled to and that is what we must deliver.

Mr. President, I rise today to celebrate Ken Squier, of Stowe, VT, for his historic contribution to motor sports and to broadcasting, and for his deep and abiding commitment to the people of Vermont. On November 29, 2012, NASCAR presented Ken with the prestigious Buddy Shuman Award, given to ``an individual who has played a key role in the continued growth and success of Cup racing.''

Most Americans know Ken Squier as the ``Voice of the Daytona 500.'' In 1979, Squier convinced CBS Sports to broadcast the Daytona 500 in its entirety. This event was a seminal moment for stock car racing in the United States, later described by ESPN as ``NASCAR's most revolutionary event,'' the one that convinced the national networks

that NASCAR had a very wide following around the country.

When he was 14 years old, Ken Squier announced his first race at a small dirt track in northern Vermont--from the back of a logging truck.

In 1960, he opened Thunder Road SpeedBowl, a quarter-mile racetrack in Barre, VT. In summer, the track has hosted stock car races every Thursday night for the last 50 years. These events have become fixtures in the culture of northern Vermont.

As NASCAR developed a national following, Ken Squier became one of its most celebrated personalities. He pioneered the use of in-car cameras during broadcasts, putting viewers right next to the driver during the race. Ken's voice became inseparable from the sport, providing turn-by-turn coverage of all CBS-broadcast races for almost two decades. This included the sport's most prestigious event, the Daytona 500.

Ken Squier is not at all defined solely by his importance to racing. He has deep roots in northern Vermont. In 1969, he became president of Radio Vermont, Inc., a family business that is one of the only independent, family-run radio companies left in the United States. Radio Vermont's stations provide a variety of music, sports, and news; in particular, they focus on local events, the happenings that bind communities together and give them identity. Over the years, Ken has staunchly opposed corporate consolidation of the media because he believes, strongly, that radio stations should serve the community and provide vital conduits for local information. He has practiced what he preaches.

Radio Vermont's immense value to the communities it served was proven during the aftermath of Tropical Storm Irene in August 2011. Irene was the most destructive storm to hit Vermont in decades. Torrential rains and Vermont's mountainous terrain brought flooding on a vast scale, wiping out houses, businesses, and historic downtowns. Roads and bridges were washed away, cutting dozens of towns around Vermont off from the outside world. Ken and his staff, Eric Michaels, Lee Kittell, Tom Beardsley, meteorologist Roger Hill, and others kept the station on the air 24 hours a day in the weeks after the storm to ensure vital emergency information reached Vermonters in towns that had been cut off. With the State of Vermont's emergency communications equipment washed away, Radio Vermont proved that local radio stations are fundamentally important to their communities.

Ken Squier has helped change sports in America, but even more significantly, he has been a true exemplar of a good citizen. Vermont is, and will remain, deeply in his debt.

Mr. President, as we continue to debate how to prevent this so-called fiscal cliff and how to go forward in deficit reduction, my Republican friends, apparently, want the American people to believe that making the wealthiest people in this country pay a few dollars more in taxes would amount to some kind of terrible sacrifice, and they are vigorous and unanimous in opposing the President's initial proposal to do away with all of Bush's tax breaks for people making $250,000 a year or more. I guess their new proposal coming out of the House is that only people making $1 million a year or more would see their tax rates go up.

Let me say a word about hardship and a word about sacrifice and it is not about the problems of millionaires and billionaires who are doing phenomenally well and who are being asked to pay a few dollars more to help us deal with deficit reduction, at a time when their tax rates are at a historically low rate. Let me tell you about sacrifice, and let me tell you about on whom we should not be balancing the budget.

This morning, in the Veterans' Affairs Committee, I held a press conference, which included every major veterans organization in this country, representing millions and millions of veterans, people who have put their lives on the line to defend our country and many of whom have suffered as a result.

The organizations that were there with me to say no to the so-called chained CPI--which would cut benefits for disabled veterans, which would cut benefits for widows and kids who lost their husband or their father in Iraq or Afghanistan and would see a chained CPI cut back on their limited benefits--we had at this press conference the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Disabled American Veterans, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the Paralyzed Veterans of America, the Blinded Veterans Association, the Wounded Warrior Project, the Military Order of the Purple Heart, the National Military Family Association, the Vietnam Veterans of America, the National Guard Association, the National Association of Uniform Services, the Jewish War Veterans, the Military Officers Association of America, AMVETS, the Association of the United States Army, the Commissioned Officers Association of the U.S. Public Health Service, the Naval Enlisted Reserve Association, the United Spinal Association, VetsFirst.

What all of them said--and some of them made this statement far more poignantly than I can--is when we talk about sacrifice, they are there; they have already done it. Some of them have come back from our wars without arms or legs or maybe they have lost their eyesight. They have sacrificed, and it is morally absurd to be equating on one hand the sacrifice of a multimillionaire, asking him to pay a few dollars more in taxes, with asking people who have lost their limbs defending this country to make a sacrifice. That is not equivalent sacrifice.

Let me talk about this so-called chained CPI. I know there are some folks out there--and I think we have had Wall Street CEOs worth hundreds of millions of dollars, who were bailed out by the taxpayers of this country, who have the most extravagant retirement benefits imaginable--they have come to Washington, DC, to tell Congress we should cut Social Security

benefits for disabled veterans, raise taxes on low-income workers.

Let me tell you what this--what some call a tweak--would do. In terms of the chained CPI, more than 3.2 million disabled veterans receive disability compensation from the Veterans' Administration--3.2 million veterans. They would see a reduction--a significant reduction--in their benefits. Under the chained CPI, a disabled veteran who started receiving VA disability benefits at age 30 would have their benefits cut by more than $1,400 at age 45, $2,300 at age 55, and $3,200 at age 65.

Does anybody in their right mind think the American people want to see benefits cut for men and women who sacrificed, who lost limbs defending their country? Are we going to balance the budget on their backs?

I challenge anyone who supports a chained CPI to go to Walter Reed hospital, visit with the men and women who have lost their legs, lost their arms, lost their eyesight as a result of their service in Afghanistan or Iraq. Come Veterans Day and come Memorial Day, all the politicians go out and give speeches of how much we love our veterans. It is great to give a good speech on Memorial Day or Veterans Day but what about standing up for them now?

I know the Wall Street CEOs and the big money lobbyists are descending on Washington trying to protect the wealthy and the powerful. But maybe now is the time--not just Veterans Day, not just Memorial Day--that we stand with veterans, we stand with disabled veterans. They have sacrificed, and I think it is unseemly, I think it is immoral to be balancing the budget on their backs.

We have also made a commitment to the surviving spouses and children who have lost a loved one in battle by providing them with Dependency Indemnity Compensation benefits that average less than $17,000 a year. Do my colleagues truly think we should be cutting benefits for surviving spouses who lost their husband in Iraq or Afghanistan?

Further, we have made a promise to every American; that is, that above and beyond benefits for disabled vets, what we have said is a couple things: For those who are older, we have said Social Security will be there for them in their old age, in their time of need or if they become disabled, and we have said those benefits will also keep up with inflation.

Today, over 9 million veterans receive Social Security benefits as part of the tens of millions of Americans who receive Social Security, and more than 770,000 veterans receive Social Security disability benefits.

We are talking now about the ``Greatest generation,'' the people who saved this country in World War II. I just met last week--and it chokes me up every time I meet these guys--a fellow from Winooski, VT, who was in the Battle of the Bulge, that hugely important battle at the end of World War II to stop the Nazi advance. He was also at Normandy.

Do you truly want to balance the budget on his back?

We are talking about the brave men and women who served in Korea, Vietnam, and other conflicts as well.

Let us be clear what this chained CPI would do because I think there are some people--I guess if someone is a Wall Street CEO guy and is making millions of dollars a year and has a great retirement package, when we are talking about hundreds of dollars a year, that is what they use for lunch. They do not have to worry about keeping their house warm or buying food. That is not within their world view.

Under the chained CPI--we should all understand this is no small tweak; this is not some administrative issue--under the chained CPI, average seniors who retire at age 65 would see their Social Security benefits cut by about $650 a year when they reach age 75. Again, I understand if someone is a Wall Street CEO, if one is a millionaire, hey, $650 a year is not a lot of money. But let me tell you, if you are a senior citizen living in Vermont or Minnesota and you have to worry about heating your home, you have to worry about putting gas in your car, you have to worry about prescription drugs, $650 a year is a lot of money, if you are living on $15-, $16-, $18,000 a year of income, most of that coming from Social Security. So if you retire at age 65, it is about a $650 cut when you reach age 75, and it is more than $1,000 a year when you turn 85.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a chart which talks about annual cuts in Social Security benefits under the chained

What the chart shows is that at age 75 the cut would be $653, a 3.7-percent cut; at age 85 it would be $1,139, a 6.5-percent cut; and at age 95, it would be $1,1611, a 9.2-percent cut.

The rich are getting richer. We have growing wealth and income inequality in America. The wealthiest people in this country are paying the lowest effective tax rate in decades. We are going to balance the budget on the backs of seniors trying to get by on $15,000, $18,000 a year? Is that what this Congress stands for? I certainly hope not.

The fact of the matter is, the current formula for calculating COLAs is not too generous. And whenever I speak in Vermont, I say to seniors--and I speak to them quite often--there are some folks in Washington who think that your COLA--the formulation and how we reach a COLA for you--is too generous. Do you know what happens. They laugh. They invariably break out in laughter because they know that in the last 3 years, two out of those years they got zero COLA. They know this year they are going to get a 1.7-percent

COLA, which is one of the lowest COLA increases ever.

They also know the current formulation for a COLA does not fully take into account the escalating costs of prescription drugs and health care, which is where most seniors spend their money. They are not spending their money on flat-screen TVs or iPhones or iPads. They are spending their money heating their homes, buying food, paying for prescription drugs, and paying for health care. These costs are going up much faster than general inflation. I think what most economists would tell you is that the current formulation for determining COLAs with Social Security is inadequate, too low, rather than, as the advocates of the chained CPI would suggest, that they are too high.

Furthermore--this has not been widely discussed--moving to a chained CPI would also result in an across-the-board tax increase of more than $60 billion over the next 10 years that will disproportionately hurt low-income and middle-income families the most. In fact, two-thirds of the tax increase under a chained CPI would impact Americans earning less than $100,000 a year, and many would be impacted by losing the earned income tax credit and the childcare tax credit.

Maybe I am missing something, but I thought I heard from the White House and here on the floor of the Senate that we are not going to raise taxes for people earning less than $250,000 a year. Maybe I am wrong. But I thought I heard that many times. Well, if you vote for the chained CPI, in fact you are raising taxes on a whole lot of people, including low-income working families. Under the chained CPI, low- income workers would see their taxes go up by 14\1/2\ percent, mainly by cutting the earned income tax credit and the refundable childcare tax credit. So if we are going to keep faith with what we have said here, I say to my Democratic and Republican friends: No tax increases for workers making less than $250,000 a year. We better reject this chained CPI.

Furthermore, I must tell you that I am disappointed, because I thought I heard a few weeks ago my friends in the White House telling us that Social Security--telling us truthfully, correctly--has nothing to do with deficit reduction, because Social Security is funded by the payroll tax, and that Social Security should be off the table in terms of deficit reduction. I heard that many, many times. So I wonder how Social Security has suddenly gotten back on the table, including a chained CPI, with devastating cuts to seniors and disabled vets.

I think we should deal with Social Security. I think Senator Dick Durbin made a good point: Let's deal with it. Let's deal with it separately. Let's determine how, in a fair way, we can make Social Security solvent for the next 50 or 75 years without cutting benefits.

I have ideas on that, Senator Begich has ideas on that, Senator Harkin and others. And the Presiding Officer has been thinking about ways that we make Social Security solvent and strong for 75 years without cutting benefits. Let's have that discussion, but not as part of a deficit reduction bill when Social Security has had nothing to do with deficit reduction.

I do not often quote Ronald Reagan, but this is what Ronald Reagan said on October 7, 1984. He was absolutely right. Ronald Reagan:

Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit. Social

Security is totally funded by the payroll tax levied on

employer and employee. If you reduce the outgo of Social

Security, that money would not go into the general fund to

reduce the deficit, it would go into the Social Security

Trust Fund, so Social Security has nothing to do with

planning the budget or erasing or lowering the deficit.

October 7, 1984. Reagan was right. I have to tell you that when Barack Obama was campaigning for President in 2008, he told the AARP on September 6, 2008, that:

John McCain's campaign has suggested that the best answer

for the growing pressures on Social Security might be to cut

cost of living adjustments or raise the retirement age. Let

me be clear. I will do neither.

September 6, 2008, Barack Obama. One of the astounding things about Congress and the inside-the-beltway mentality is how out of touch it is with what the American people are thinking and what the American people are believing. Yesterday there was a poll in the Washington Post. I ask unanimous consent that that poll be printed at the conclusion of my remarks.

I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Udall of New Mexico.) The clerk will call the roll.

Madam President, I rise today to take note of the death of a remarkable resident from my State of Vermont, Dr. Marshall London. Dr. London was one of the most prominent citizens in Burlington, VT. A deeply beloved physician, he was also a lifelong progressive and a liberal.

A native of Vermont, he attended the University of Vermont, where in 1948 he served as the campus organizer for the Progressive Party nominee for President, Henry Wallace. He served as a flight surgeon in the US Air Force from 1961-1963. In the late 1960s, Marshall London and his family volunteered in support of Caesar Chavez's United Farm workers. He provided medical services to migrant workers in Delano, CA.

In 1970 he returned to his native Burlington with his wife and children. A lifelong supporter of universal health care, Dr. London was committed to serving the underserved and the elderly. Not only did he make house calls, but in addition to his medical bag he regularly carried plumbing and electrical tools to make home repairs for his patients. In the early 1990s, Dr. London, as President of the Jewish Community Council of Burlington, worked to resettle emigres from the former Soviet Union.

He never severed his ties to the UVM Medical School, where he continued to serve as a mentor and teacher at the Fletcher Allen Hospital, even after he retired in 1997.

In a time when corporate values have spread beyond business to such areas as education and health care, Marshall London serves an enduring example that there are other values which can guide human life. He was a caring physician, one who always charted his course by paying attention to those most in need, and always depending on an exemplary social conscience. He was dedicated to his family. And he did not restrict his life to work. Dr. London was an alto saxophone player in the Vermont Catamount Band and Burlington City Band. He was also an avid tennis player and skier. Like so many Vermonters--and he was a fifth-generation Vermonter--he was also a loyal Red Sox fan.

Dr. Marshall will be missed, though the example of his life and values will endure.

I ask that Dr. London's obituary be printed in the Record.

The obituary follows:

[From the Burlington Free Press,

Dec. 13, 2012]

Marshall G. London

Burlington.--Marshall G. London, a fifth generation

Burlingtonian, beloved family man and dedicated local

physician who made house calls an integral part of his

practice, died at home on Dec. 12, 2012. He was 83.

The grandson of a founding member of Burlington's first

synagogue, Ahavath Gerim, Marshall was a featured participant

in the recent Vermont Public Television documentary ``Little

Jerusalem.''

He took pride in his local roots and Jewish heritage, and

had an enduring passion for Jewish history, and a strong

commitment to Israel.

He was born and raised in Burlington's Old North End. He

graduated in 1951 from the University of Vermont, where he

was president of the Tau Epsilon Phi Fraternity. Always

staunchly liberal in his politics, Marshall was a campus

organizer of the 1948 presidential campaign for Progressive

Party candidate Henry Wallace.

He and Susanne (Sue) Abrams were married in 1953 and had

six children.

Marshall began his medical career with an internship at the

Mary Fletcher Hospital, followed by a residency at Mount Zion

Hospital in San Francisco, Calif. Subsequently, he served as

a flight surgeon in the U.S. Air Force in South Carolina.

From 1961 to 1963, he completed a rheumatology fellowship at

the Manchester Royal Infirmary in England, which included

clinic visits across Europe. With children in tow, the

London's camped in their VW bus from Lapland to Italy.

After returning to Burlington from England, they moved to

California, where Marshall joined a private practice in Los

Gatos. During this time, he volunteered in support of Cesar

Chavez's United Farm Workers, providing medical service to

migrant workers in Delano, Calif. In 1970, Marshall and his

family again returned to Burlington, where he opened a

private practice on Orchard Terrace.

A lifelong advocate of universal healthcare, he was

committed to providing for the underserved and the elderly,

and he volunteered as a mentor and teacher at the medical

school for many years. He made house calls equipped with his

medical bag, and sometimes with plumbing or electrical tools

to assist with all manner of repairs.

He retired in 1997, but continued, even in recent months,

attending Grand Rounds at the hospital and visiting former

patients in their homes.

An alto saxophone player in the Vermont Catamount Band and

Burlington City Band, he was also an avid tennis player,

skier, and loyal Red Sox fan.

He and Sue traveled frequently, visiting Israel and often

tent-camping in Newfoundland and Labrador. They made many

friends in their travels, and their 19th-century home bustles

year-round with family and friends old and new.

Like his parents and grandparents before him, Marshall was

a devoted member of the Ohavi Zedek Synagogue for many years.

He later joined Chabad of Vermont, where, closer to the

traditional roots of his grandfathers, he found new spiritual

and intellectual inspiration.

He is survived by his wife, Susanne; children, Rebecca and

Aaron Goldberg of Burlington, Saul and Georgette London of

Highland Park, N.J., Sara London and Dean Albarelli of

Northampton, Mass., Naomi London of Burlington, Daniel and

Andrea London of Evanston, Ill., and Rachel London and Matt

Bohner of Brooklyn, N.Y.; foster daughter, Linda and Jim

Nyema-Davies of Greensboro, N.C.; grandchildren and great-

grandchildren, Dinah and Joshua; Jesse and Emily; Tamar and

Isaac; Ilana and Jonny, and children, Maya, Nitzan and Yoav;

Tova and Shmuel and daughters, Bracha and Tehila; Amalia and

David, and son, Ruby; Ziva and Daniel, and son, Avromy; Jack,

Matan, Yonah, Liora, Cooper and Cali.

Mr. President, it is no great secret that the Congress has a very low favorable rating. Many people shake their heads and they wonder why this institution is so dysfunctional. There are a lot of reasons for that, but I suggest one of the reasons has to do with a lot of hypocrisy that we see in both bodies of Congress. I will give one example.

As all of us know, during the recent Presidential campaign, Republicans attacked Democrats over and over for voting to cut Medicare as part of the Affordable Care Act. They ran a significant part of their campaign on saying: Democrats have cut Medicare. We Republicans are here to protect Medicare.

In fact, this is exactly what Mitt Romney said on August 15, 2012.

My campaign has made it very clear: the President's cuts of

$716 billion to Medicare, those cuts are going to be restored

if I become President and Paul Ryan becomes Vice President.

The reality is that what we did under the Affordable Care Act resulted in zero cuts to benefits. We tried to make the system more efficient. But be that as it may, the Republicans posed as great champions of Medicare against those terrible Democrats who wanted to cut it. Meanwhile, Democrats went to town, taking on the Ryan budget which did make devastating cuts to Medicare and, in fact, wanted to voucherize that program. So we have Republicans beating Democrats for ostensibly--not accurately--trying to cut Medicare, Democrats attacking Republicans for, in fact--accurately--wanting to cut Medicare, and where are we today?

If we read the newspapers we hear and we know as a fact that Mr. Boehner, the Republican Speaker, has proposed devastating cuts in Medicare--a month after the election where the Republicans said they were going to defend Medicare. They want to raise the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67. Frankly, I am concerned there may be some Democrats--not a whole lot, I hope none, but some Democrats--who may end up going along with that disastrous proposal. That is hypocrisy. Everybody during the campaign is saying the other guy wants to cut Medicare. The day after the campaign, our Republican friends are talking about devastating cuts and maybe some Democrats are prepared to support that.

Raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 would be an unmitigated disaster. It would cut Medicare benefits by $162 billion over the next decade and would deny Medicare to over 5 million Americans who are 65 or 66 years old.

The American people, when asked how do you feel: We are looking at deficit reduction. Do you think it is a good idea to raise the Medicare age? The American people overwhelmingly say, no, that is a dumb idea, don't do it.

According to a November 28, 2012, ABC News Washington Post poll, 67 percent of the American people are opposed to raising the Medicare eligibility age, including 71 percent of Democrats and, I suggest to my Republican friends, 68 percent of Republicans, 62 percent of Independents.

While there may be division in the Senate or House, there is no division among the American people. They think it is a dumb idea and the American people are right. They are right for very obvious reasons.

Think about some woman who is 66 years of age, not feeling well. She goes into the doctor's office and she is diagnosed with a serious health care problem. There is no Medicare there for her. What does she do? She goes over to a private insurance company. What do you think the private insurance company is going to charge this person who is already ill? An outrageous rate she cannot afford. What happens to this senior, that person who is 65 or 66? Do they die? Do they go bankrupt? Do they go to their kids who do not have the money to help them stay alive? It is a disastrous idea.

Raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 would leave at least 435,000 seniors uninsured every year. Imagine being 66 and not having health insurance. Easy for folks around here in the Congress to laugh. Easy for wealthy people to laugh about it. It isn't so funny when you are living on $15,000 or $20,000 a year and have no health insurance. It would increase costs to businesses by $4.5 billion. It would, of course, increase out-of-pocket costs for seniors; the estimate is about $3.7 billion.

For the individual senior, the estimate is that for two-thirds of seniors age 65 to 66, they would pay an average of $2,200 more for health care. They are trying to live on $20,000, $25,000, $30,000 a year. Suddenly they are hit, on average--could be more, could be less-- $2,200 a year. On it goes.

It would increase premiums by about 3 percent for those enrolled in the

health care exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act because many 65- and 66-year-olds would be enrolled in the exchanges instead of Medicare. It would save the Federal Government $5.7 billion in 2014, but it would cost seniors, businesses and State and local governments $11.4 billion--double that, double what the Federal Government would save.

I hope all those folks who, before the election--Republicans and Democrats--were running around the country and in their own States saying: We are for the middle class; we are going to protect Medicare-- I hope they go back and read their preelection speeches and stick to what they said before the election.

That is one of the issues out there in terms of the so-called fiscal cliff or deficit reduction. Let me talk about another insidious one, in terms of raising the age of 65 to 67 on Medicare. That is a disaster, but it is pretty clear, everybody understands what it is about. There is now an underhanded way, an insidious way that some people are talking about doing deficit reduction, the so-called chained CPI, which nobody outside Washington, DC, has a clue as to what it is about.

What it would do is change the formulation in terms of how we determined COLAs for seniors, disabled vets, and others. The bottom line is, in my view and the view of many economists, we underestimate the inflationary cost of what seniors are spending because a lot of their spending goes into prescription drugs, health care, and that has gone up faster than general inflation. What the chained CPI says is: Oh, no. What we have now is too generous and we have to cut back. We have to make the COLA skimpier.

This is exactly what a chained CPI would do for people on Social Security. What it says is that somebody who was age 65 would see their benefits cut by $560 a year when they turn 75 and $1,000 a year when they turn 85. Again, I know we have CEOs from Wall Street who have huge salaries, who receive huge bonuses, who have the best care available in the world, they have great retirement programs--these guys who were bailed out by the working families of America when their greed nearly destroyed the financial system of the world--they are now coming to Capitol Hill and they are saying we have to cut Social Security and we have to cut Medicare and we have to cut Medicaid.

For those guys, when we talk about $560 a year for somebody who is 75, that is not a lot of money and $1 thousand when you are 85--what is a thousand bucks? Let me tell you, $1,000 is a lot of money when you are trying to survive on $18,000 or $20,000 a year. We must not allow that to take place.

There is something many people do not know; that is, the chained CPI would go beyond cutting benefits for seniors on Social Security. It would take a real devastating whack at disabled veterans. What about that? I want my Republican friends or any Democrats who support that to come to the floor of the Senate and tell the American people that when we send young men and women over to Afghanistan and Iraq and they got their arms blown off, they got their legs blown off, and we are now going to balance the budget on their backs by cutting benefits for disabled veterans--come to the floor of the Senate and tell the American people they support a chained CPI which would do exactly that.

We have some folks here saying, yes, people are making billions of dollars, we don't want to cut their taxes. But, yes, we will cut benefits for disabled vets who lost their arms and legs in Afghanistan. That is an obscenity and I hope very much we do not go in that direction.

When we talk about deficit reduction, we have to deal with it. It is a serious problem. There is a lot of discussion about the need to deal with $4 trillion over a 10-year period, and I support that. Let's talk about a way we can go forward without balancing the budget on the backs of the elderly, disabled vets, working families.

First of all, we have to understand and acknowledge that in the deficit reduction debates of 2010 and 2011, the Republicans won, basically, those negotiations. We have to be honest about that. Republicans acknowledge that. Some Democrats do. Republicans are tougher than Democrats, Democrats cave, Republicans stand tall.

We have to understand, despite the fact we have a growing inequality in this country, rich getting richer, middle class shrinking, after all the discussions about deficit reduction, the wealthiest people in this country have yet to pay one nickel more in taxes. But because the Democrats are not quite as tough as the Republicans, what has happened is that we have cut, in those two negotiations, $1.1 trillion in spending already. So if we are talking about a $4 trillion bill, understand that we have already cut $1.1 trillion, which leaves $2.9 trillion to be dealt with. I think the President is right, and I simply hope this time he sticks to his guns and does what he says.

What I am suggesting is that there are ways to do deficit reduction that are fair. The first point, in terms of $4 trillion over a 10-year period, we have already cut over $1 trillion in terms of spending--$1.1 trillion. No. 2, I think the President is right in suggesting we have to ask for significant revenue from the wealthiest people in this country--the top 2 percent--without asking for any tax increases for the bottom 98 percent. That would add $1.6 trillion in revenue, bringing us somewhere around $2.7 trillion, so we have a $1.3 trillion problem. Over a 10-year period, that is not a difficult problem to solve.

Let me throw out a few ideas, and I am sure other people have equally good ideas.

Before we cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, we might want to address the reality that this country is losing about $100 billion every single year from corporations and wealthy people who are stashing their money in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and other tax havens, and $100 billion is a heck of a lot of money.

At a time when gas and oil prices have soared recently, when we know major oil companies have in recent years paid nothing, in some cases-- despite being enormously profitable--in Federal taxes, we can and must end tax breaks and subsidies for oil, gas, and coal companies.

This country is now spending almost as much as the rest of the world combined in terms of defense. Our friends and allies in Europe provide health care for all their people. In many of these countries, college education is free. We are spending twice as much as part of our GDP as they spend on defense. I think it is time to take a hard look at defense spending, and I think we can make cuts there which will still leave us with the kind of military we need to defend ourselves.

Instead of raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67, instead of cutting benefits, we can make Medicare and Medicaid more efficient. I believe we can save at least $200 billion over a 10-year period by eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse and lowering prescription drug costs for seniors. For example, the Medicare Part D prescription drug program prohibited Medicare from negotiating with the pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices. The VA negotiates, and other government agencies negotiate. Medicare should be able to do that.

Fortunately, the war in Iraq is over. We are about to wind down in Afghanistan, and there are savings there.

So before I give the mic over to my colleague from Vermont, I wish to conclude by saying, yes, we go forward on deficit reduction, but there are ways to do it. At a time of growing wealth and income inequality in America, we can move forward and make significant reductions in our national debt, in our deficit, without doing it on the backs of the elderly, the children, the sick, and the poor.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that an article from the Washington Post on the subject of increasing the age for Medicare eligibility be printed in the Record.

[From the Washington Post, Dec. 11, 2012]

Raising Medicare Age Could Leave Hundreds of Thousands Uninsured

(By Greg Sargent)

It looks increasingly possible that lawmakers will reach a

fiscal cliff deal that includes a hike in the Medicare

eligibility age--a concession to those on the right who seem

determined to see very deep entitlement cuts, even if they

take benefits away from vulnerable seniors. One argument for

raising the eligibility age is that seniors who lose benefits

can get insurance through Medicaid or the Obamacare

exchanges.

But a new report to be released later today undercuts that

argument--and finds that up to half a million seniors could

lose insurance if the eligibility age is raised.

The report, by the Center for American Progress, points out

a key fact that's been mostly missing from the debate: The

hope of getting seniors who lose Medicare insured through

Obamacare could be seriously compromised by the Supreme Court

decision allowing states to opt out of the Medicaid

expansion. This would inflate the number of seniors who could

be left without insurance, because many would fall into the

category of lower-income senior that would be expected to

gain access to Medicaid through its expansion. (Jonathan Cohn

has written about this extensively.)

Here's how CAP reached its conclusion. The nonpartisan

Congressional Budget Office recently concluded that a rise in

the eligibility age could mean as many as 270,000 seniors are

left uninsured in 2021. But that's assuming Obamacare is

fully implemented in all states. The CAP report points out

that 10 states have publicly declared they will opt out of

the Medicaid expansion, and more are undecided.

The CAP study then totaled up how many seniors below the

poverty line live in states that may opt out of the Medicaid

expansion, using 2011 data. The total: Over 164,000. This

table shows how many of these seniors live in each of these

states:

Add these to the aforementioned 270,000 seniors, and you

get a total of approximately 435,000 seniors who could be

left without insurance annually by 2021. And this is a

conservative estimate--it's based on 2011 data, and the

population of seniors will grow significantly over the next

decade.

Now, it's very possible that many of these states will

ultimately drop their bluster and implement the Medicare

expansion. But Republican state lawmakers are also stalling

in setting up the exchanges and resisting the law in other

ways. With Obamacare implementation up in the air, it may be

too risky to raise the eligibility age and hope Obamacare can

pick up the slack.

``With opponents of the health care law still working to

block it at every turn, many more seniors would become

uninsured because they would have nowhere else to turn,''

CAP's president, Neera Tanden, tells me. ``As a result this

misguided proposal would undermine the promise of affordable

health care for all.''

On top of this, the report finds, raising the eligibility

age could also undermine a key goal of Obamacare by inflating

medical costs and health care spending, for a range of

reasons: Cost shifting, tampering with the health and age

levels in insurance pools, and an increased reliance on

private insurance, which isn't as good as Medicare at

controlling costs.

In my view, the speculation that Dems will ultimately agree

to raising the eligibility age has been a bit overheated--

it's not clear this is definitely on the table. But it's

certainly possible. After all, some on the right seem

determined not to accept any entitlement reform as ``real''

unless vulnerable beneficiaries are harmed, and Obama and

many Dems prefer a deal to going over the cliff. So anyone

who doesn't want to see this happen should be making noise

about it right about now. And there are a range of

alternative ways to cut Medicare spending without harming

beneficiaries.

I'll bring you a link to the report when it's available.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, it is not a tentative agreement; there is a unanimous consent order that we are going to vote at 2 o'clock.

Mr. President, I understand Senator Baucus and Senator Murray are on their way and wish 5 minutes each to speak relative to this amendment. I ask unanimous consent that between now and 1 o'clock, they be allocated 5 minutes each and that the amendment then still would be the pending amendment.

I ask unanimous consent that we now proceed to the amendment of Senator McCain and that when those two Senators arrive and are recognized, they be allowed to speak for 5 minutes each on the Udall amendment.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Webb be added as a cosponsor to Senator McCain's amendment that he is now going to offer.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Yes.

Somewhere in that vicinity.

Madam President, sometimes there is no end to arrogance. I find it literally beyond comprehension that we have folks from Wall Street who receive huge bailouts from the people of our country, from working families in this country, because of the greed and recklessness and illegal behavior that Wall Street did to drive us into this recession, and now these very same people are coming here to Congress to lecture us and the American people about how we have to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid while they enjoy huge salaries and retirement benefits.

Lloyd Blankfein is the CEO of Goldman Sachs. In 2006 and 2007 he was the highest paid executive on Wall Street, making over $125 million in total compensation. My understanding is that he has wealth of hundreds of millions of dollars. Goldman Sachs received a $278 million refund-- Goldman Sachs did--from the IRS in 2008 even though it made a profit of $2.3 billion. During the financial crisis, Goldman Sachs received a total of $814 billion in virtually zero interest loans from the Federal Reserve and a $10 billion bailout from the Treasury Department. This is the CEO of Goldman Sachs. Now, with his huge wealth, he is coming here to Washington to lecture the American people on how we have to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for tens of millions of Americans who are struggling now to keep their heads above water.

This is a statement Lloyd Blankfien recently made, I believe, on a TV show:

You're going to have to, undoubtedly, do something to lower

people's expectations, the entitlements, and what people

think they're going to get because they're not going to get

it. Social Security wasn't devised to be a system that

supported you for a 30 year retirement after a 25 year career

. . . So there will be certain things, like the retirement

age will have to be changed, maybe the benefits will have to

be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments will

have to be revised . . . But, in general, entitlements have

to be slowed down and contained.

This comes from a man worth hundreds of millions of dollars whose company, along with the rest of the companies on Wall Street, drove this country

into the recession it is in, which, by the way, contributed to the deficit we are in. He is coming to Capitol Hill to lecture us and lecture the working families in this country on how we have to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. I think arrogance has no end, that people from Wall Street can come down here and tell us that.

I think most Americans understand that the reason we are in the terrible recession we are in right now and the reason we went from a $236 billion surplus when Bill Clinton left office has everything in the world to do not with Social Security but with the fact that we went into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and forgot to pay for them; we gave huge tax breaks to people such as Mr. Blankfein and did not offset them; passed the Medicare Part D prescription drug program, not paid for; and as a result of the Wall Street recession, significantly less revenue is now coming into the Federal Government. That is why we went from a $236 billion surplus in 2001 to a $1 trillion deficit today.

The deficit is a serious issue and it has to be addressed, but it has to be addressed not in the way that Mr. Blankfein, Pete Peterson, and the other Wall Street billionaires want us to address the deficit but in a way that is fair to working people. Among other things, we have to protect Social Security, protect Medicare, protect Medicaid.

I was appreciative the other day when I read that the White House has said something that many of us have wanted them to say, which is that Social Security had nothing to do with the deficit; Social Security should be treated separately. I think that is a real step forward. Many of us signed a letter to that effect.

But what does worry me is this issue of chain CPI. I want everybody to understand what the chain CPI is about. Nobody outside of Capitol Hill knows what it is about. What it is about is reformulating how we determine COLAs. If this chain CPI passed, what it would mean is that if somebody was 65 now--this would go into effect immediately if it were passed--by the time they were 75, there would be a $560-a-year reduction in what they otherwise would have gotten in Social Security benefits through the COLAs. By the time they are 85, it would be $1,000 a year. We must defeat any and all efforts to oppose a chain CPI not only on Social Security beneficiaries, but it would also apply, if my colleagues can believe this, to disabled veterans. Mr. Blankfein and his other CEO friends on Wall Street really want us to balance the budget on the backs of the disabled vets? Well, this Senator surely is not going to support that.

There are ways to deal with deficit reduction that are fair. Everybody has to understand that we have already cut approximately $1 trillion in benefits. So when we talk about $4 trillion in deficit reduction, $1 trillion has already taken place.

Second of all, obviously, at a time when the wealthiest people are doing phenomenally well and we have growing wealth and income inequality in America, of course we have to repeal Bush's tax breaks for people making $250,000 a year or more. That is another $1 trillion. We have to appreciate the fact that one out of four corporations in America doesn't pay a nickel in taxes. We can bring in significant amounts of revenue through tax reform that asks corporations to start paying their fair share of taxes. We are losing $100 billion a year because corporations and the wealthy are stashing their money in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens, thus losing substantial revenue in the United States.

Defense spending has tripled since 1997. We are now spending almost as much as the rest of the world combined. Let's take a serious look at defense spending. If we do that, make some changes toward efficiency in Medicare and Medicaid, make them more efficient but not cut benefits, we can move toward serious deficit reduction without cutting Social Security, without cutting Medicare, and without cutting Medicaid.

We just had an election a few weeks ago--November 6--and what I think the American people said is that the time is now for the wealthy to start paying their fair share of taxes. We have seen poll after poll after poll, including from some very conservative people who are saying do not cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. I think it is time for the Senate and the Congress to start listening to the American people. Let's go forward with deficit reduction, but let's not do it on the backs of the elderly, the children, the sick, or the poor.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I think the American people and Members of Congress, now that the election is over, are paying a great deal of attention to the so-called fiscal cliff and to deficit reduction in general. As we discuss deficit reduction, which is clearly a major issue for our country, it is important for us to remember how we got to where we are today. Where we are today is approximately a $1 trillion deficit and a $16 trillion national debt. I hope everyone does remember that back in January 2001, when Bill Clinton left office and George Bush assumed the Presidency, at that moment in history this country had a $236 billion surplus and economists were projecting that surplus would grow and grow in the future.

The reason, to a very significant degree, that we are where we are today in terms of the deficit has everything to do with the fact that we went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we did not pay for those wars--which, by the way, by the time we take care of our last veteran, will cost us more than $3 trillion. When we do not pay for expensive wars, we add to the deficit.

When we give out a huge amount in tax breaks, as we did under the Bush administration, and a lot of those tax breaks went to the wealthiest people in this country--when we give tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires and we do not offset them, we also add to the deficit. When we pass a Medicare Part D prescription drug program written by the insurance companies--more expensive than it should be-- and we do not pay for that, we add to the deficit.

In the midst of this Wall Street-caused recession, one of the points many people have not seen is that today, at 15.2 percent of our GDP, revenue is the lowest it has been in 60 years. When workers lose their jobs and businesses go under, less revenue comes into the Federal Government, adding to our deficit crisis. That, to a significant degree, is why we are where we are today.

When we talk about deficit reduction and how we go forward, there is another reality we have to address; that is, the middle class of this country is disappearing. Not only is unemployment, in real terms, close to 15 percent, but median family income in the last 10 years has gone down by over $3,000.

Meanwhile, in the midst of all that, we have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth. We have the top 1 percent owning 42 percent of the wealth in America while the bottom 60 percent owns just 2.3 percent. In the last study we have seen on income distribution, between 2009 and 2010, 93 percent of all new income went to the top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent shared the remaining 7 percent. We are seeing a disappearing middle class-- people on top doing fantastically well and very high rates of poverty.

I say all that as a prelude to suggest how we should go forward in terms of deficit reduction. The main point I wish to make is it is absolutely wrong, it is immoral in my view, and it is bad economics to move forward on deficit reduction on the backs of the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor. What we as a Congress have to do is to make several points very clear.

There are a number of folks out there talking about cutting Social Security. Let's get the facts straight. Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit because it is independently funded by the payroll tax. Let me quote maybe an unlikely source on that issue; that is, on October 7, 1984, President Ronald Reagan said:

Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit. Social

Security is totally funded by the payroll tax levied on

employer and employee. If you reduce the outgo of Social

Security that money would not go into the general fund to

reduce the deficit. It would go into the Social Security

trust fund. So Social Security has nothing to do with

balancing a budget or erasing or lowering the deficit.

That ends the quote from President Ronald Reagan, October 7, 1984. I do not often agree with Ronald Reagan, but he was absolutely right.

I am very pleased that just a few days ago majority leader Harry Reid said pretty much the same thing: Don't mess with Social Security. It has nothing to do with deficit reduction. I hope very much that the Senate will agree that as we go forward on deficit reduction, Social Security should be off the table.

Many of us want to make sure Social Security is solvent for the next 75 years. How do we do it? I have ideas. Others have different ideas. But it is not part of deficit reduction.

In my view, at a time of great recession, when so many people are hurting, we must not cut Medicare. We must not cut Medicaid. There are ways to do deficit reduction which are fair. Let me suggest some of the ways we should do it.

The President has been very clear. This is what he campaigned on; that it makes no sense at all from an economic or moral perspective that we continue Bush's tax breaks for the top 2 percent, people who are making $250,000 a year or more. If we end those tax breaks, that is $1 trillion going to deficit reduction.

Right now, one out of four profitable corporations in this country, including corporations that make billions of dollars a year, is paying nothing in taxes. Some of them have actually gotten a rebate from the IRS. Before we talk about cutting Medicare, Medicaid or education, let's make sure we do away with the loopholes many large, profitable corporations are currently experiencing.

One of the particularly outrageous examples of tax avoidance that is taking place right now has to do with the tax havens that exist in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and in other countries. There are estimates that we are losing over $100 billion a year because corporations and wealthy individuals, instead of paying their Federal taxes to this country, are stashing their money in tax havens in other countries. That is wrong. That is an issue we must address.

Last, when we talk about deficit reduction, we have to remember we have tripled defense spending since 1997. We now spend as much money on defense--or almost as much--as the rest of the world combined. No one disagrees that there is enormous waste, bureaucracy, and unnecessary weapons systems in the Defense Department that we can eliminate while we maintain the strongest defense in the world.

Let me conclude by saying this: Yes, we have to go forward with deficit reduction but, no, we cannot and must not do it on the backs of the elderly, the children, the sick, and the poor. There are ways to do it that are fair which ask those people who are doing phenomenally well to start paying their fair share of taxes, and that is the position this Senate should take.

Thank you very much, Mr. President, and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I want to congratulate my colleague, Senator Harkin, for his remarks. I certainly agree with him. I want to amplify a point Senator Harkin made. There was a frightening story in the New York Times today. I don't know that people have digested it, but the headline is ``Life Spans Shrink for Least-Educated Whites in the U.S.''

Generally speaking, the trend for life expectancy in the United States, and all over the world, has been going up. The goal of a good society and a strong health care system is to see that people live longer, healthier, and happier lives, but as a result of the devastating attacks in a variety of ways on the working class of this country, over a period of years--not just starting yesterday--this is where we are. Let me quote from this article. I hope people hear this because this is shocking stuff. I quote:

The steepest declines were for white women without a high

school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and

2008.

Their life expectancy went down by 5 years. This is astronomical. Going back to the article, it says:

S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the

University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator

on the study, published last month in Health Affairs.

What happened is between 1990 and 2008--an 18-year period--life expectancy for white women without a high school diploma declined by 5 years.

The article states:

White men lacking a high school diploma lost 3 years of

life. Life expectancy for both blacks and Hispanics of the

same education level rose, the data showed. But Blacks

overall do not live as long as whites, while Hispanics live

longer than both whites and blacks.

So let's digest what that means. As chairman of the Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging, last year we held a hearing entitled ``Poverty as a Death Sentence.'' What that hearing pointed out is that people who are in the top 20 percent live, as I recall, about 6 years longer than people in the bottom 20 percent. But what new evidence is suggesting is that people without a high school degree--the least educated people in America and often the poorest people in America--we are now seeing a significant decline in the life expectancies of both men and women. This is moving in exactly the wrong direction.

The authors of the study are not exactly sure why this is taking place. Many low-income, uneducated people are using drugs, cutting short their lives. Lack of health care is certainly one of the reasons. More and more low-income people can't access health care, which is why it is so important that we defeat the Romney-Ryan effort to devastate, as Senator Harkin just said, Medicaid and throw millions and millions of people off health insurance. If life expectancy for low-income people is now going down, think of what it will mean if we throw millions more off Medicaid. It is a death sentence.

I also wish to say a word on the issue of Social Security, and I wish to thank the Presiding Officer and Senator Whitehouse and Senator Begich for joining me yesterday in releasing a letter which had 29 signatures on it from Members of the Senate, and that letter was pretty simple. What it said is that Social Security has not added a nickel to the deficit because Social Security, of course, is funded by the payroll tax. It said Social Security has a $2.7 trillion surplus and can pay out all the benefits to eligible Americans over the next 21 years. So it is absolutely wrong and bad public policy to be talking about cutting Social Security within the context of deficit reduction when Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit.

The reason we are in a deficit situation in a significant way--the reason we have gone a very long way in the wrong direction since January 2001 when Bill Clinton left office with a $236 billion surplus--has nothing to do with Social Security. It has everything to do with Bush and those people who voted for two wars and forgot to pay for them, thereby adding to the deficit; those people who gave huge tax breaks, much of it going to the richest people in this country, forgot to pay for it; passed the Medicare Part D prescription drug program and forgot to pay for it; and a recession caused by Wall Street which resulted in lower revenue coming into the Federal Government. Those are the reasons why we are in a deficit, not because of Social Security.

I understand Republicans want to cut Social Security. That is what they do. They are not very sympathetic to Social Security. They have opposed Social Security for years. They don't believe the government should be involved in retirement security. They want to balance the budget on the backs of the elderly, the sick, the children and the poor and give tax breaks to the rich. I understand that. More and more Americans understand that.

But I will tell my colleagues what I am concerned about. I am concerned about President Obama. Four years ago, the President was very clear on this issue. When the President was running for election against Senator McCain, this is what he told AARP and, ironically, he just spoke to AARP, I believe it was today. So 4 years ago, same venue. This is what he said 4 years ago:

John McCain's campaign has suggested that the best answer

for the growing pressures on Social Security might be to cut

cost-of-living adjustments or raise the retirement age. Let

me be clear: I will not do either.

Candidate Barack Obama said that 4 years ago. Barack Obama is in the White House now.

We have people such as billionaire Pete Peterson, who has been pushing deficit reduction on the backs of working people for years now. He has been spending huge amounts of money to make sure we do deficit reduction not by asking the wealthiest people in this country to pay their fair share but by balancing the budget on the backs of the elderly, the children, the sick, and the poor. These guys have come up with a strategy called the chained CPI.

Nobody in America outside Capitol Hill knows what the chained CPI is. It is a new formulation as to how we determine cost-of-living adjustments--COLAs--for seniors. What these economists have decided-- these rightwing economists--COLAs today are formulated in a way that are too generous--too generous for America's seniors and for disabled veterans. They want to reformulate how we come up with these COLAs. If they get their way--and I have a great deal of fear that unless some of us stop them, unless the American people stop them, they will, in fact, get their way--what this will mean is that if a person is 65 years of age today, by the time they are 75, they will lose about $560 a year in their benefits. If a person is 65 years of age today, in 20 years, when that person is 85, they will lose $1,000 a year.

Let me be very clear. I do not believe we should move to a deficit reduction on the backs of a senior citizen living on $14,000 or $15,000 a year and take $1,000 away from them and then get on the floor of the Senate and talk about how we have to give more tax breaks to billionaires. I think that is not only morally inexcusable, I think it is bad economics.

While we are talking about this so-called chained CPI which will cut benefits for seniors, we are also talking about cutting VA benefits for disabled veterans. So I want to hear all these tough guys here who think we should balance the budget on the backs of the elderly and the children, let them get up here and tell us why, when somebody fought in a war to defend the United States--maybe they lost their legs or their eyes or their arms--they want to cut their benefits and then they want to give tax breaks to billionaires.

The American people don't want to do that. So I think we have to get on the phones right now. We have to call our Senators and we have to call Members of the House and we have to call President Obama: Mr. President, 4 years ago you told us you weren't going to cut Social Security. Is that still your position? Four years ago, you came up with an idea that is, in fact,

exactly the right idea. You made the point that multimillionaires are contributing the same amount of money into the Social Security trust fund as somebody making $110,000, and 4 years ago you made the point that if we lift that cap--and we don't have to start at $110,000; we can go up to $250,000--if we lift that cap above $250,000, we could bring in enough revenue to fund Social Security for the next 75 years. That was your position, Mr. President, 4 years ago. Is that your position today? Are you going to stand up to the Republicans and the Wall Street folks who want us to cut Social Security?

That is where we are right now.

My last point I wish to make is on the much discussed remarks of Governor Romney from the video released recently that has gone all over the Internet. There is a lot that can be said about it, and I suspect everybody has said a lot. I just want to pick up on one point. I feel strongly about this point because I am the son of a working-class family--of a father who never made a lot of money but worked hard his entire life and of a mother who raised her kids as best she could. So I take this kind of personally.

This is what Mr. Romney said in connection with the famous 47 percent of the people who don't pay taxes, which is not true, of course. As we know, they pay Social Security taxes and gasoline taxes, Medicare taxes. But be that as it may, that is not the issue I want to get to.

This is what Mr. Romney said:

My job is not to worry about those people. I will never

convince them they should take personal responsibility and

care for their lives.

Let me repeat that.

I will never convince them they should take personal

responsibility and care for their lives.

He was talking about my parents. He was talking about the parents of millions of people who worked hard their whole lives who don't need advice from a multimillionaire who went to elite schools and had all the money and privileges his family could provide him. We don't need advice from him to families who have worked and struggled their whole lives to, in fact, take personal responsibility to make sure their kids did well. That is an incredibly arrogant statement from a guy surrounded by money, speaking to millionaires, who should not be making that statement.

People on Social Security, people on Medicare, in many cases, have worked their entire lives, have done the best they could to provide for their kids, have seen their kids go to college. Many of the people on Social Security, Medicare have fought in wars defending this country. They do not need advice from a multimillionaire about how they should take personal responsibility for their lives. That is an insulting remark and it would become Governor Romney to apologize for that remark.

With that, I yield the floor.