people in the world—and winning. And winning.
Then I got a letter that comes not from Vermont, it comes from rural Pennsylvania:
I am 55 years old and worse off than my adult children. I have worked since age 16. I don't live from paycheck to paycheck, I live day to day. I can only afford to fill my gas tank on my payday. Thereafter I put $5, $10, whatever that I can. I cannot afford to buy the food items that I would. I am riding around daily, to and from work, with a quarter of a tank of gas. This is very scary. I can see myself working until the day that I die.
Trust me, the gentleman is talking about getting older, worrying about working until the day he dies. We are already seeing this. You go to grocery stores in Vermont and you see old people, who should be sitting home with their grandchildren. Do you know what they are doing? They are packing groceries. Then we have some geniuses on this deficit reduction commission, people who made their money on Wall Street, they have a brilliant idea: Let's raise the Social Security age to 68, 69 years old so that people like this will have to work, in fact, to the day they die.
He continues. This is not from Vermont. This is from Pennsylvania:
I do not have savings, no credit cards and my only resources are through my employment. I have to drive to work as there are no buses from my residence to work. I don't know how much longer I can do this. I am concerned as gas prices climb daily. I am just tired. The harder that I work the harder it gets. I work 12 to 14 hours daily and it just doesn't help.
I am not saying every person in America is experiencing these stories. They are not. A lot of people are doing fine. They have good jobs. Their kids are doing well. They are taking care of their parents. A lot of people are doing just fine. But we would be fools and dishonest not to understand the reality of what is going on in this country. It breaks my heart, and I know it breaks the hearts of millions of people in this country, to see what is going on in this great Nation of ours: that so many people are hurting, that so many parents— I don't know if I have that letter or if it is in another booklet. I will never forget one letter I received, and that is these people—my parents never went to college. My father never graduated high school. They wanted their kids to get an education; that is what they wanted—and we did. It was very important, and how proud my mother was of that.
We get letters from people who say: You know, I dreamed that my kid, my daughter, would go to college, and she is not going to go to college now. She is not going to go to college.
It is just painful to even talk about and think about, the direction in which this country is moving. So I want to now take a break from reading these letters. Actually, the truth is, when these letters came in a year ago I could not read more than a half dozen at a time. They took too much out of me. They take something out of you to hear people you know, good people, honest people—I hear from some of my colleagues here that people are lazy. My God, people work so hard in the State of Vermont. We have I don't know how many thousands of people are not working just two or three jobs, they work four jobs. It is all over this country. Whatever you say about the United States of America, the people of our country are not lazy. That is one thing you can say about them.
In fact, according to all of the bloodless statistics, our people today work longer hours than do the people of any other major country on Earth. Did you know that? I don't know that a lot of Americans know that. It used to be Japan. The Japanese are a very hardworking people. Now it turns out that our people work harder, longer hours than do the people of any other country in the industrialized world.
When you think about that, when I think about the books that I read when I was in elementary school—I remember there were pictures up there. I don't know if you remember these pictures. There were pictures where workers were demonstrating, and they said: We want a 40-hour workweek. Do you remember seeing those pictures? We want a 40-hour workweek. That was back in the early 1900s.
Today, 100 years later, people still want a 40-hour workweek because they are forced to work 50 or 60 hours a week. They are working two jobs. They are working three jobs.
What I want to do now, before I get back to why I am on the Senate floor today, and why I have been here for a few hours—which is to say the agreement negotiated by the President and the Republican leadership is not a good agreement. It is an agreement that we can improve upon. It is an agreement the American people can improve upon. But what I am asking the American people to do is to stand up, let your Senators, let your Congressman know how you feel.
Do you really believe millionaires and billionaires who have done phenomenally well in recent years need an extended tax cut at a time when their taxes have been lowered substantially in recent years? Do we really need to give tax breaks to the rich in order to drive up the national debt so our kids and grandchildren will pay higher taxes in order to pay off that national debt caused by tax breaks for the rich?
If you do not believe that, if you do not think that is right, let the President of the United States know about it. Let your Senator know about it. Let your Congressman know about it. We need a handful, seven or eight Members of the Senate to hear from their people, to say: Wait a minute. Don't hold my kids hostage. Don't force them to pay higher taxes in order to give tax breaks to the very rich.
If the American people stand up and by the millions let their Senators and Congressmen and the President know, we can win this thing. We can win this battle. It is not too late yet. That is what I hope will happen.
When we talk about why things go on the way they are here in Washington, and why so many people back home— whether they are Democrats, Republicans, Independent—whether they are conservatives, progressives, moderates, whatever they are—there is a huge feeling of anger and frustration and, in fact, disgust at what goes on here in Washington.
I have just read some letters from people. You can multiply those letters by 1 million. People are saying: Don't you hear us? Don't you know what is going on in our lives? Don't you know the worries we have for our kids, for our parents? Aren't you listening to us?
In many ways I am afraid the Senate is not listening to them, nor is the House, nor is our Government. What worries me so much about this growing concentration of wealth and income in this country is that when the rich get richer, they don't just simply put their money under the mattress. They don't simply go out and buy yachts and planes and 18 homes and all the things rich people do. They do that, but they do something else.
They say: I am not rich enough. I need to be richer. What motivates some of these people is greed and greed and more greed. There is no end to it. So what they do is they do things like hire lobbyists—who are all over Capitol Hill. These lobbyists, sometimes former leaders of the Republican Party, former leaders of the Democratic Party, former hotshot lawyers, bright people, their job is to make sure the legislation we pass—such as this major tax bill—that this legislation benefits not ordinary Americans, not the people whose letters I have just read, not those people, but the wealthiest people in this country and the largest corporations.
I want to just mention something. A very good friend of mine and I do a radio show every Friday afternoon—I am afraid I missed it today—Tom Hartman. Tom is the author of a number of wonderful books.
In his latest book, which is called "Rebooting the American Dream, 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country," Tom writes and he talks about lobbying, which is an issue we have to deal with in this country. He says, on page 104:
Given how lucrative lobbying is as an investment, it has become a huge business.
In other words, what he is talking about is, if you have a good lobbyist and the lobbyist changes a few words in a bill, your company or you as an individual can end up with huge amounts of money just by changing a few words. In this case, language that we are working on now is whether we extend the Bush tax breaks for the top 2 percent, for many millionaires and billionaires. Some lobbyists, representing the rich and the powerful, are determined to keep that language in there.
