Congressional Progressive Caucus: The People's Budget

Floor Speech

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Mr. ELLISON. Let me thank the gentlewoman for yielding, the
Congresswoman from New Jersey, Bonnie Watson Coleman.

As I said earlier today, Bonnie Watson Coleman may have just got
sworn in as a Member of Congress a few months ago, but she is no
stranger to fighting for people.

That was on full display when she spoke at a rollout of our
Progressive Caucus budget where she talked about how you can look at
any aspect of the Progressive Caucus budget and you will find the same
thing in every place: prioritizing people, making sure people can get
their needs met in this government, making sure that workers can get
access to a job, making sure that people who are sick but who are
working can actually get a sick day so that they don't bring that
sickness back to their workplace and don't have to abandon their
children that might be sick, too.

You pointed out, Congresswoman Watson Coleman, the fact is that job
creation should be the primary metric of any budget. How are we doing
putting people back to work in good jobs? How are we helping take care
of them while they are on the job? If they are sick, can they take time
off? How are we educating people? You focused on the key elements of
the Progressive Caucus budget, and I was proud to hear you do it.

The fact is this is our fifth budget that we have put out. It is a
budget that is about working people. That is why we call it the
people's budget. We urge people to check out the people's budget online
at the Congressional Progressive Caucus Web site.

Let me name a few things about the Progressive Caucus budget that are
important to highlight. It creates 8.4 million good-paying jobs by
2018.

Now, you just take the Republican budget that was put out yesterday.
It was interesting to me that none of my Republican colleagues wanted
to tout how many jobs their budget would create, how many jobs the
economists--after looking at the Republican budget proposed--would
create because that is not what they consider to be a priority;
but it is a priority to the Progressive Caucus budget. Our priority is
8.4 million good-paying jobs investing in America, making sure
Americans are working again.

Now, you might correctly ask: How are you going to get all these
jobs? One way we are going to get the jobs is we are going to invest
$820 billion to repair America's rapidly aging roads and bridges and
upgrade our energy systems to address climate change, keep our
communities safe, and prepare for the next generation to thrive in our
society and workforce.

I would like to share with the Speaker that I come from a town--
Minneapolis, Minnesota--where, 6 years ago, the I-35 bridge fell into
the Mississippi River because we had not taken care of it. We had not
done adequate maintenance on this bridge.

Thirteen people died when that bridge fell. They were Black. They
were White. They were wealthy. They were low income. They were born in
America. They were born abroad. They were America. That is who lost
their lives on that bridge, and 100 more people got injured.

This Progressive Caucus investment in infrastructure repair is not
just a job creator and a productivity increaser; it is public safety to
have decent, safe infrastructure. I am very proud of that.

We also provide $945 million to help States and municipalities hire
police, firefighters, health care workers, teachers, librarians, and
other public employees.

Mr. Speaker, I have got to tell you, I met with my chiefs of police
in the Fifth Congressional District about a week ago. Of course, all of
us here tonight represent more than one city.

I met with the chiefs of police--I am very proud to represent a city
where law enforcement is dedicated--and they were asking me: What's
going on with the Byrne grants? What's going on with the JAG grants?
What's going on with the COPS grants? These things that have helped us
be a better police department have shrunk. Our ability to protect the
public is weakened by our limited resources.

Well, we are going to do something about that. We are going to rehire
teachers. So if you have got a teacher with 30 second graders in the
classroom trying to keep up with all of them, we can hire a teacher's
aide who might be able to actually help that teacher do what that
teacher does most effectively.

We put $1.9 trillion in America's future by investing in the working
families. This restores and enhances funding for vital programs that
Americans rely on, like SNAP, like food, nutrition, so that young
people can be in the classroom and can be fully fed and ready to learn.

So these are just a few things about the Progressive Caucus budget.
But I wonder if the gentlewoman from New Jersey or the gentlewoman from
Michigan will yield to a question.

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Mr. ELLISON. I thank the gentlelady for yielding.

I was really intrigued by the things that you were saying about the
Progressive Caucus budget because I have always believed that you know
someone's treasure by how they prioritize their expenses.

You can look at a family's budget, and if you see a lot of money
being spent on television and movies and candy, you know that they care
a lot about that. And if you see people spend a lot of money on books
and education, you know they care about that.

What does it mean if you have the budget of a nation where the
biggest amounts of the budget are spent on helping rich people get
richer and cutting health and safety regulations? What does that mean
at a time when income inequality is at its height since the Great
Depression?

My problem with the Republican budget is that they have been acting
like rich people don't have enough money and poor people have too much
for 40 years. What it has brought us is massive income inequality. And
their answer to that is to do it some more.

It has hurt this economy to prioritize the well-to-do over everyone
else. It doesn't even help rich people very much because rich people
own stores and factories and stuff like that. If regular folks,
ordinary people don't have any money, how can they even help boost the
consumer demand?

This economy that we have, it is important to point out that the
United States is a country of tremendous resources. This is still the
richest country in the world. Not only is America the richest country
in the world but America itself has never been richer.

If you look at per capita income and you scale it on a graph and
compare it over time, you are looking at a steadily rising line. Yet
the American budget, our governmental expenditures as a proportion of
it, we have seen one of the lowest proportions of government spending
relative to GDP in a great many years.

The fact of the matter is, the reason the proportion of government
expenditure to GDP has been going down is because America has been
giving away the resources that it needs to take care of the needs of
its people. I am talking about lifesaving research in medicine. I am
talking about dealing with issues of climate. I am talking about
infrastructure investment.

One of the things that the Progressive Caucus budget does to try to
recapture some of the money that the government is due and owed is we
end corporate inversion and deferral.

What is corporate inversion? Corporate inversion is where the company
does not actually physically move anywhere, but they sell themselves to
a foreign corporation with a lower tax rate or no tax rate, thereby
escaping the payment of moneys in taxes as an American corporation but
not really moving anything. In fact, they might even increase their
physical footprint in the country that they are in.

We have had that happen in my own community. And before I went to
criticize the company that did it, I had to deal with the fact that it
is legal to do.

How are you going to blame a corporation for trying to get money when
it is legal to do? Well, I say, rather than blame the company, I will
blame Congress, you know? So we went and did something about it. We
went to the Progressive Caucus budget and we ended inversions. You
can't do that anymore.

We are also in this process of deferral, this idea that corporate
profits don't have to be paid as long as they are deferred and kept
overseas. We end this process. We end deferrals. I think that these two
things alone will bring money back to the United States Government so
we can invest in roads and bridges and infrastructure, so we can make
sure that no 5-year-old kid is leaving a shelter and going to a public
school in the morning, so we can make sure that there is enough SNAP,
that kids have a decent meal to eat, and that our seniors can actually
hope to one day be able to beat Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and all of
these kinds of diseases. These things take public investment to solve
these kinds of medical problems.

So the Progressive Caucus budget, I am very proud to be a part of it
because it is a budget that looks at the needs of the American people
and does something about it.

Let me just talk about the education side of it. We have universal
pre-K. Now, it doesn't matter if you are a conservative economist or if
you are a liberal economist; they all agree that the best return on
investment is educating little kids. You educate those little guys and
it will keep them out of trouble. It will put them on a path to college
or some form of higher education. And they will not become a government
expense; they will be a government asset. They will not be an
expenditure on the taxpayer; they will be paying taxes.

Yet the Progressive Caucus doesn't just know that, we actually do
something about it by funding universal pre-K. I am so happy about that
because, you know, those little guys are so cute, and we definitely
want to see those bright-eyed little children maximize their talents.
They are actually really smart. And if you put them in an educational
environment, an academic environment where they can do more than just
learn how to count--they can maybe even learn how to use a computer--
you never know what tremendous benefits they will bring to our society.
And we move from there.

In K-12 education, we help fund municipal and local public employees
who need that kind of help. We have placed $95 billion in that, where
we can, again, put a teacher or a teacher's aide back into the
classroom. Ever since the recession in 2008, local governments have
been shedding public employees, including teachers.

Now, what does this mean? To the average teacher, the average teacher
used to have a classroom of 28 kids, 19 kids. Well, those classes are
bigger because you have got fewer teachers. You used to be able to have
a little budget to decorate the classroom, to put inspiring messages
and notes and pictures up there.

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Mr. ELLISON. That is right.

If I could just say, putting workers back on the job who are
firefighters, librarians, police officers, teachers, these are very
important to the quality of life.

I would like to refer to these people as everyday heroes. They may
not wear big letters on their chest. But when I think about the people
other than my parents who helped inspire me, it was probably a teacher,
probably a cop who saw me hanging on the corner and said, Hey, man, we
know you are smart. You can do better than what you are doing.

You know what I mean? All of these people are the everyday heroes
that make neighborhoods run every single day. So I just think it is
important for the Progressive Caucus to say, We are going to prioritize
rehiring these people who have been let go in the course of this
recession.

We have seen private sector employment increase every single month.
But you know what? We have also seen public sector employment actually
go down.

One of the things I would also like to get your take on, if you
wouldn't mind sharing your views on this issue, is restoring and
enhancing emergency unemployment compensation. As you know, back on
December 26, 2013, the long-term unemployed were just cast adrift by
the Republican majority. These are people who were working but just
couldn't find a job soon enough. Some people tried to imply that they
were lazy and just didn't want a job, so we had to kick them off
unemployment so they would actually look for a job.
I wonder what your thoughts are about this.

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Mr. ELLISON. That's right. I thank the gentlelady for yielding back
to me.

Mr. Speaker, I just want to point out that, again, the Progressive
Caucus budget is in dramatic contrast to the Republican budget. Take
the Republican budget, for example. The Republican budget calls for
repealing the Affordable Care Act. This is a piece of legislation that
has extended health care access to literally millions and millions and
millions of people. The Republicans want to snatch health care access
out of people who now, for the first time in their life, have acquired
it; and they are doing it by saying: Oh, we want you to have freedom,
and we think ObamaCare infringes on your freedom, so now be free to be
sick with no access to health care other than an emergency room.

That is their idea of freedom, I suppose.

They want to partially privatize Medicare. Is that what we need is
privatization of Medicare?

A few years ago, the Republicans wanted to privatize Social Security.
They wanted to say: We are going to take all the money you saved, and
we are going to put it in some Wall Street account. Of course, they
will be administered for a ``reasonable fee''--I put that in quotes--
but don't worry about it. Everything will be fine.

Then we see stock market prices fall and plummet. They go up and they
go down. But when you are talking about something like Social Security,
Medicare, and Medicaid, these have to be stable and reliable, and they
want to privatize it as they have proposed to other important programs.

They want to turn Medicaid and food stamps into block grants for
States. What does that mean? In some States, maybe the Governor will do
the right thing. I am pretty confident in Minnesota our Governor would
do the right thing. Our unemployment is at a record low. In our State,
our wages have been climbing. We actually have a surplus in the State
of Minnesota. Our next-door neighbor, Wisconsin, is run by Scott
Walker. They have a big, ugly deficit, which is embarrassing, given
that he is supposed to be this fiscal conservative. But facts don't
seem to bother some people.

My point is that the Republicans want to block grant these programs.
If you block grant it in Minnesota, it will be less money. Whenever
there is a budget pinch, they will use that money for other things
other than the intended purpose. But if you send it to a State like
Wisconsin with a Governor like Scott Walker, the people who are
intended to benefit from that money may never ever see it at all. And
so this is a very important program not to block grant these programs.

Tax reforms that lower rates and eliminate any taxation on profits
reported abroad--come on. As a matter of fact, if just cutting taxes to
the bone and cutting taxes for rich people as much as we possibly can
would be good for the economy, wouldn't we have avoided the recession
of 2008? We should have more jobs than we could possibly imagine with
these guys. We should have never had any recession, and every American
should be paid, I don't know, $100,000 a year if just cutting taxes was
good for the economy. Cutting taxes is good for some people, but it is
not good for the economy overall. The evidence is all around us. The
Republicans want to turn the rest of the world into a tax haven for
multinationals.

Now, the President has been trying to set the record straight. He has
been trying to signal what an economy where there is shared prosperity
should look like. But the fact is that, if you look at the Republican
budget and you contrast it with other proposals, it certainly fails the
test of being good for the American people. The Progressive Caucus
budget, on the other hand, passes the test. We do programs that
actually help the American people: universal pre-K, robust support for
title I, and debt-free college to ensure every child gets a quality
education. When you contrast their budget and you look at our budget,
it is clear which one the American people find to be most meritorious.

So we ask people to look at the Progressive Caucus budget. We ask
people to read it; share it with your friends; offer your views on it.
We ask people to just support the budget that they think makes a lot of sense.

Probably we will be debating the budgets next week. Probably we will
have a vote. We think it is important for Americans to tune in to this
debate. Because if you are an American person and you are busy, you are
trying to raise kids, you are trying get to work on time, and you are
trying to earn a living, you don't have time to be plugged in to
politics like some of us who do this our whole lives. You are busy. But
you are smart and you know what is going on.

I am going to ask Americans to actually slow down and say: Hey, look,
what is going on in this budget? What does the Republican budget look
like? They want to cut taxes. They don't want overseas corporations to
return those profits and pay taxes on that. The Progressive Caucus
wants to let the little kids go to school, let the teenagers and the
young adults go to school. They want to train our workforce, and they
want to invest in our Nation's infrastructure.

I guarantee this is what the people in this country want to see.
Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentlewoman for upholding the
Progressive Caucus message, and I wish you very great success in the
people's budget.

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