the Bible, whatever they believe in, and understand there is virtue in sharing, in reaching out; that you can't get it all.
I think this is an issue we have to stay on and stay on and stay on. This greed, this reckless, uncontrollable greed is almost like a disease which is hurting this country terribly. How can anybody be proud to say they are a multimillionaire and are getting a huge tax break and one-quarter of the kids in this country are on food stamps? How can one be proud of that? I don't know.
It is not only income, it is wealth. The top 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. During the Bush years, the wealthiest 400 Americans saw their wealth increase by some $400 billion. How much is enough?
All of these things are related to the agreement the President and Republicans worked out because we are all concerned about the national debt and deficit. In terms of the Federal budget, when President Bush first took office, he inherited a $236 billion surplus in 2001 and a projected 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion. That is what Senator Landrieu was discussing. But then some things happened. We all know that 9/11 was not his fault, but what happened is, we went to war in Afghanistan. We went to war in Iraq. The war in Iraq was the fault of President Bush, something I certainly did not support, nor do I think most Americans supported. The war in Iraq, by the time our last veteran is taken care of, will probably end up costing us something like $3 trillion, adding enormously to our national debt.
So when we talk about Iraq, it is not only the terrible loss of life that our soldiers and the Iraqi people have experienced, let's not forget what it has done to the deficit and the national debt. We did not pay for the war in Iraq. We just put it on the credit card.
President Bush gave out $700 billion in tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. Where was the offset? There was none. He gave them tax breaks. That is it. It adds to the national debt.
The President and Republicans supported a $400 billion Medicare Part D prescription drug program. I have always believed we need a strong prescription drug program for seniors. But the program that was passed was written by the pharmaceutical industry, written by the insurance companies, and is nowhere near as cost-effective as it could be. As the President undoubtedly knows, we are not even negotiating prescription drug prices with the drug companies, a great expense and great cost to the American people, where drug prices are now much more expensive under Medicare Part D than they are in terms of what the Veterans' Administration or the Department of Defense purchases. So we passed that, unpaid for. Great idea. Just another $400 billion prescription drug program unpaid for.
Then we bailed out Wall Street. The original cost was $700 billion. A lot of that has been paid back, but there is expense there as well.
So we add all these things together, normal governmental growth, and it turns out that the Bush administration turned a $236-billion-a-year surplus into a $1.3-trillion-a-year deficit. More or less, that is where we are right now. In fact, the national debt nearly doubled under President Bush, going from $5.7 trillion to $10.6 trillion in 2009 and now we are at $13.7 trillion, borrowing huge sums of money from China and other countries in order to maintain our existence. That is where we are.
Have we been seeing in recent years some improvements in the economy? We sure have. There has been some job growth. Nowhere near enough. But we are surely not losing 700,000 jobs a year. We are seeing some growth. But we need to do much better.
That takes me back to an issue I feel strongly about and one on which I want to say a few words. In this agreement the President negotiated with Republicans, there is a substantial sum of money going into various types of business tax breaks. The theory, which has certainly some validity, is that these business tax breaks will create jobs. The problem is that right now, businesses, the large corporations at least, are sitting on a huge bundle of money already that they are not spending. The reason they are not investing that money is they perceive that working families don't have the money to buy their products and services.
In saying this, I am not alone. I think most economists agree there is a far more effective way we can create jobs rather than just a number of tax breaks going to businesses. I touched on this point before. I want to get into a little bit more detail.
For this I am indebted to a very fine book written by an old friend of mine, Arianna Huffington. The title of her book is "Third World America." She used that word because basically the theme of her book is, if we do not get our act together in terms of infrastructure, in terms of education, in terms of health care, that is where we are headed. We are headed in the direction of being a Third World nation.
She has an interesting chapter which deals with one very important part of what is going on in America, and that is the crumbling of our infrastructure. She writes:
From 1980 to 2005, the miles traveled by automobiles increased 94 percent—for trucks mileage increased 105 percent—yet there was only a 3.5 percent increase in highway lane miles.
More and more cars, more and more traveling. We are not building roads.
But you don't need these numbers to know that our roads are badly congested.
Anybody who lives around Washington knows our roads are congested. It takes hours to get to work sometimes.
You see it and experience it every day.
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers infrastructure report card—and this is where we should be investing, not tax breaks for the rich— Americans spend 4.2 billion hours a year stuck in traffic. Think about that, 4.2 billion hours a year stuck in traffic, at a cost of $78 billion a year. Think about all of the pollution, all of the greenhouse gas emissions, all of the frustration, all of the anxiety, all of the road rage. People are stuck on roads because our transportation system is totally inadequate, our roads, our public transportation.
She then makes another interesting point. When we talk about automobile accidents, what do we usually think? We think somebody is driving recklessly, maybe they are drunk. Those are serious issues. But she writes: In studying car crashes across the country, the Transportation Construction Coalition determined that badly maintained or managed roads are responsible for $217 billion a year in car crashes, far more than headline-grabbing, alcohol-related accidents or speed-related pileups.
In other words, if you want to know why we are seeing automobile crashes, the issue of bad roads is even more significant than drunk drivers or people who are reckless drivers. I can remember—I think everybody has the same story—I was driving on a road in Vermont, and, whoops, there was a huge pothole, and the car went into it. It cost a few hundred dollars to repair the car. So we are spending as a nation billions of dollars repairing our cars because our roads are not in good shape. When there is a traffic jam, people are emitting all kinds of greenhouse gas emissions. You are wasting gas. You are wasting money. If we invested in our transportation system, we could go a long way to addressing that.
When we talk about transportation— and, by the way, again, I bring this issue up because, in the bill agreed to by the President and the Republican leadership, to the best of my knowledge, not one penny—not one penny—is going into infrastructure, which, to me, does not make any sense at all.
Again, Arianna Huffington writes:
America's railway system is speeding down the tracks in reverse. It is one of the few technologies that has actually regressed over the past 80 years.
Regressed. I am not talking about China, where they are building all these high-speed rail lines. Our rail situation in terms of the amount of time it takes to go from location one to location two has actually gotten longer.
She writes:
Tom Vanderbilt of Slate.com—
Which is a very good Web site—
came across some pre-World War II train timetables and made a startling discovery. Many train rides in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s took less time than those journeys would take today.
Can you imagine that? In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, people were able to get on a train and get to their destination in less time than is the case today.
