Political Quotes

“I want to thank the two leaders that I joined, Senators Brown and Bennet, for championing this issue, not just for this Congress but for years. Before I came to Washington, these two men were standing up and talking about the moral core of our country. If you want to see how a nation is doing, don't look at the buildings we build or at how many billionaires we have. Just look at children. What is galling me right now is that we have come to the 1-yard line. We are at an inflection point in our country where we have to ask a question: Who are we? My friend Senator Bennet and I have been working with kids well before we came here. He rattled off data that should be repeated. I say this is a moral issue, but he has shown us it is an economic issue. We are the wealthiest Nation on the planet Earth, and of the top 41 countries, we are at 38 in poor kids. What he pointed out is that poverty costs all of us. It is a deep, self-inflicted wound in this society, because poverty costs this Nation over $1 trillion as measured by economists. But I would state that economists don't measure all the things that are important. Our GDP does not reflect well-being. It doesn't reflect how many antidepressants people take or how many child deaths there are. But the truth of our economy is that every dollar that we invest in getting children out of poverty returns $8 to this economy. So it is an economic issue, clearly.…”