Political Quotes

“I want to thank my colleague from Ohio, Senator Brown, for his remarkable leadership in getting us to this point with the child tax credit and with the earned income tax credit for childless families which, thanks to his leadership, we have been able to triple. But I think we are here today on a really, really momentous matter. When I think back to the days when I was the superintendent of schools in Denver, most of the kids in my city were kids of color and most were living in poverty, and many of their families were working two or three jobs. And no matter what they did, they couldn't get their kids out of poverty. Today, now, I travel the State of Colorado, a State that has got very rural areas and very urban areas. If I had to summarize the last 10 years of my townhalls--10 or 11 years--it is very easy to do it. No matter what county I am in, people say: We are killing ourselves, and no matter what we do, we can't afford some combination of housing, healthcare, higher education, early childhood education--if there is any childhood education. We can't save. We feel like our kids are going to live a more diminished life than the life we lived. That is the anecdotal reflection of an economy that, for 50 years in this country, has worked really well for the top 10 percent of Americans and not for anybody else. The result of that is, today, the United States is 38th out of 41 industrialized countries, in terms of childhood poverty.…”