Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman and both my colleagues, though I respectfully disagree that this Congress has placed any priority on helping get people out of poverty. Indeed, when it comes to poverty in America, this Congress has largely been silent. I think the Congress itself is impoverished when it comes to ideas about how to lift people up into the middle class. We talk here so much about the middle class, and appropriately so, but there are millions of people out there who are struggling to just climb up that first or second rung of the economic ladder and work themselves into the middle class, and this Congress is doing little, constructively, to assist them. The need for real and meaningful change is particularly evident in my home State of Texas, where the State legislature has been so incredibly indifferent to this problem. There, one out of every four children is below the poverty level, and over one-third of all Texans live in the shadow of poverty, meaning that their income is less than twice the poverty threshold. The Corporation for Enterprise Development ranked Texas near the bottom among all States on key measures related to financial security. Now, here is what today's bipartisan bill does to respond to that, and it is really a story of the number one.…”