Edolphus Towns: “This is a sad day in America. There are people who have to choose between paying their bills and eating a decent meal.…”

“This is a sad day in America. There are people who have to choose between paying their bills and eating a decent meal. All I hear is that we have a spending problem. ``We have a spending problem. We have a spending problem.'' I want to be sure we do not try to solve our spending problem on the backs of the poor, on the backs of children and on the backs of our senior citizens. We have been cutting services for the poor, children and seniors for years. Go back and look at the record, and you will see that this is a fact. If you add up all of the money we are spending on children and seniors, it would not begin to make a dent in the Federal deficit. We spend less than 10 percent of the budget on children. That means we are not seriously investing in the future of this Nation. When we cut programs like WIC, we are literally taking the food out of the mouths of babies, so I say our priorities are certainly misguided or upside down. When we cut tens of millions of dollars from juvenile justice delinquency programs, then we'd better get ready to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on more prisons. When we look to save money by cutting Medicare and Social Security, we really do a disservice to the senior citizens in this country. Senior citizens have worked all of their lives putting a good portion of their paychecks into a system that paid for the well-being of their parents and grandparents.…”