But this is an important point that we don't talk about enough. You know, we always lump everybody together.

there are a lot of--as Senator Harkin has said so aptly, people are hurting all over this country.

So I am not sure, Mr. Chairman, what world people are living in when they think, hey, you are 68, 69. You can go out and get a job. You don't need Social Security. It is really quite incomprehensible to me.

In other words, being poor is kind of a death sentence, isn't it, in some respects?

these attacks on Social Security are part of that same effort by Wall Street and some other special interests now, who apparently are extremely unhappy that we have a Federal program that has worked enormously successfully for the last 75…

Most Americans don't realize that someone with a salary of $300,000 or even $30 million a year pays no more in Social Security taxes than someone earning roughly $107,000.

there has been a war going on for many years against the middle class of this country, and that is why the middle class is disappearing.

It is especially hard to ask people to save when they can barely pay their bills today.

If we raise the retirement age even farther, it doesn't mean that they will be able to work any longer.

Right now, we have some of our colleagues who want to give $700 billion in tax breaks to the top 2 percent and want to repeal the estate tax, which will provide $1 trillion in tax breaks to the top 3/10 of 1 percent.

Today I am pleased our hearing is focusing in part on S. 3612, a bill I introduced with Senator Leahy to expand the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park.

It is highly unlikely that this work will be done absent the checkoff framework that the Propane Education and Research Act provides.

For the past 12 years, the Propane Education and Research Council has diligently pursued a multidisciplinary program...

one of the major reasons the middle class of this country is in decline and why the working class is being decimated and why real wages are going down for millions of American workers who are working longer hours for low wages is that for…

I am going to be talking about a very serious crisis of offshoring, but before I do, I want to say a word about the budget. I am glad to hear my Republican colleagues being so very concerned about our budget deficit. My question is, where…

If we do not want to do that, do not send them off to war.

Let us not forget that when Agent Orange was first used, our friends at Dow, Monsanto, and all of those companies, they said this was benign; there is not a problem.

I think we have put the Secretary in a very difficult position and I think he has done the right thing.

That is the moral responsibility that we have, which I think is what we are talking about today.

What we are talking about today is the ongoing cost of war.

[VA has] just restarted a long term study of Vietnam veterans and Agent Orange. It is a study that continued up until about 2000, and then for lack of emphasis, it lost priority. [VA has] just restarted [its] effort to begin that study…

I happen to think you are doing a great job but you are not God.

Personally, I believe no veteran should ever, ever be denied timely access to the VA health care system.

I think most people understand that the United States today is in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. What I want to do is take a very few minutes to talk about how we got to where we are today…

Almost all of the new income created has gone to the top 1 percent.