Bernie Sanders

At a time when 20 percent of our kids are living in poverty, the President's budget triples the Child Care Tax Credit to $3,000 per child and makes an additional billion dollars' investment in Head Start exactly the right thing to do.

The top one percent own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent.

Our job is to protect the middle class. Let us get to work doing that.

In my view, on the other hand, if we are serious about rebuilding the disappearing middle class, reducing income and wealth inequality, and strengthening Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, we need a budget that creates millions of…

Some of my Republican colleagues are looking forward to either cutting Social Security or moving to the privatization of Social Security.

The wealthiest people and the largest corporations are doing phenomenally well.

Instead of having a record-breaking $1.4 trillion deficit, as we did when President Bush left office in January 2009, the Federal deficit has been cut by more than two-thirds.

I happen to believe not only that we should not cut Social Security, but we should expand benefits.

Many of my Republican colleagues believe that what is best for the country in the future is basically to cut, cut, cut, cut, cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, nutrition, et cetera, et cetera.

Many of my Republican friends are in favor of cutting Social Security, cutting Medicare, cutting Medicaid, cutting nutrition programs for kids, while providing huge tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires.

The United States today has more income and wealth inequality than at any time since the Great Depression.

Instead of losing 800,000 jobs a month, as we were during the final months of the Bush administration, we are now creating some 250,000 jobs a month and are seeing steady job growth over the last 58 months.

Now, I think the President's budget begins to address some of these issues.

At a time when almost all of the new income gains go to the top one percent and when corporate profits are at an all-time high, the President's effort to end egregious tax loopholes that benefit the wealthy and large corporations while…

I did not vote to go to that war in Iraq. I did not go to war in Iraq.

We need to substantially increase wages for low- and middle-income workers.

According to a November 2014 CBO report, the income of the wealthiest one percent of Americans has risen 200 percent since 1979 at the same time that their income tax rates have fallen.

The bottom line to me, Mr. Chairman, is when we put people to work, when we have the best educated workforce in the world, people will be paying more taxes.

We have got to move aggressively to expand benefits for our Social Security beneficiaries.

It is unacceptable to people throughout this country that millions of our young people cannot afford to go to college.

The United States has by far the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on earth.

Today, if you can believe it, the top one-tenth of one percent own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent.

I think that, frankly, that set of priorities does not make sense to me.

Is it not correct that if we did nothing more than restore the income and capital gains tax rates to where they were in 2000 for the wealthiest two percent of Americans earning $250,000 a year or more, that we could raise more than $200…

While we must continue to focus on the Federal deficit, we must also be aware that there are other deficits in our society that are causing horrendous pain for the vast majority of the American people.