Thomas Daschle: “if you look past the headlines and the hype connected to the conference agreement on the budget resolution, I think the…”

“if you look past the headlines and the hype connected to the conference agreement on the budget resolution, I think the American people can get a pretty good sense of who's looking out for whom in the Republican budget. Republican budget writers talked about putting tax money back into the hands of wage earners. Republican budget writers talked about their big tax cuts to fuel the Nation's economic engine. But the only engine this budget primes is the full-throttle expansion of incomes for the wealthiest Americans. The Republican budget does nothing to address the fact that middle-income families have been stuck in neutral for the past 20 years, while many low-income Americans are sliding into reverse. Republican budget priorities will only serve to drive deeper and wider the wedge between Americans at either end of the earnings scale. This country always had, and always will have, the rich, the poor, and the middle class. Like never before, however, these economic groups are pulling away from each other, and it's tearing at the social fabric of our Nation. Every year, families in the top 5 percent in terms of income now make, on average, the rough equivalent of what 16 low-wage families combined struggle to earn in a year. In the past two decades, America's top earners enjoyed an average 25-percent increase in cash income. Down at the bottom, the lowest wage workers actually felt a 7-percent drop in pay over the same period.”