On the recordApril 24, 2013
Mr. President, I also agree we should not invade Canada. I live right near there. It would be terrible. What we are hearing and what we have heard now for a number of months is a discussion about deficit reduction, about how we proceed and how we address the fact that this country has a $16.6 trillion national debt. That is a serious issue. I think as we contemplate how we address this issue, we have to put it into a broader context as to what is going on in the United States. What is the best way forward in terms of deficit reduction at a time when the United States has by far the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth. In other words, we cannot talk about how we proceed with deficit reduction, we cannot say it is OK to cut Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid or nutrition programs when the middle class of this country is disappearing, poverty is extremely high, while at the same time the wealthiest people and the largest corporations are doing phenomenally well. Any serious discussion about deficit reduction has to include those issues. Let me bore you for a moment with some interesting statistics. This, in fact, came out just yesterday from the Pew Research Center. What they said is that all the new wealth generated in this country from 2009 to 2011 went to the top 7 percent of the American households.…





