Rosa DeLauro

Even more disturbing is the fact that USDA has documented many of the violations but taken virtually no action to permanently bar suppliers from participating in the program.

Now does not seem a good time to pull back on our commitments to international food aid.

Food safety is a very real matter of national security, and I hope that we are using our resources as wisely as possible.

In America today, almost 14 million children, one in every five, live below the federal poverty level.

We seem to make progress and then we kind of fall back.

What we will see is massive layoffs in education.

If we want to live in a world of numbers and statistics and refuse to look at the plight of the people behind those numbers and statistics, then we are going down the wrong road.

The numbers reflect people's lives. No job, no wages, no health care.

So there is a whole chain of people who benefit from that money that is going to food stamp recipients or from people who are going to spend it in the economy.

Isn't Mark Zandi the economist who says that, for every dollar spent on food stamps, there is $1.74 in GDP growth?

$80 billion I believe it was roughly, $70 billion or $80 billion for the AMT, which, by all accounts and by every economist who wrote about this, had not one shred of a stimulative effect.

Not one single vote from the minority, not one.

The beneficiaries of the estate tax are the richest 1 percent of the people in this Nation.

We all urge you to quickly pass the Healthy Families Act, the bill now before Congress that offers the best solution to this problem.

Working people need paid time off to recover from H1N1, to care for sick family members, to prevent spread of the virus.

I can recall very similar kinds of conversations when we were going through the Family and Medical Leave, that we were going to, really--that American business was going to go to hell in a hand basket, quite frankly.

We need to walk in the shoes of the millions of Americans who work hard every day to support their families.

Every year the seasonal flu and other illnesses strike millions of us, and every year the failure to let workers earn paid sick days puts the economic security of millions of families at risk.

What I think has crystallized the issue for all of us is the H1N1 crisis.

The argument that we cannot afford to institute paid sick days right now does not hold water.

Now is the time to protect our communities and put family values to work by adopting policies that guarantee a basic workplace standard of paid sick days.

Our failure to provide a minimum standard of paid sick days also is putting our public health at risk.

Establishing paid sick days is also about economic competitiveness, income security for families, and, as H1N1 has proved to us this past year, primarily the public health.

Passing the Healthy Families Act or emergency legislation that reflects its core principles would finally give American workers and their families the freedom to care for themselves or a sick relative when they need to.

I hope that we, in the Congress, can honor Senator Kennedy's legacy by finding the strength and the will to get this legislation passed for America's workers and families.