On the recordJune 13, 2011
in 1964 President Johnson envisioned an America that ``rests on abundance and liberty for all.'' It was against LBJ's backdrop of the Great Society that we reignited a tradition of community. This was a little spillover of the 1960s and our flight to the Moon and all of that, but the Nation somehow came together, and we sensed that we were a community and that we had a mutual obligation to each other, and that is at the very least characteristic of the American people, more then than now. Programs such as VISTA, Peace Corps, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid were born in those few years, 1961 though 1964. Sadly, nearly 50 years after LBJ's war on poverty, we have witnessed vicious attempts to roll back government programs designed to give low- income Americans a hand up in life. I do not mean just low-income Americans but disabled Americans, very poor senior Americans who qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid--such a difficult journey they have. What we want to do is not to give people a hand up but simply to be a safety net. That is what he said this country owed its people. That is true about defense, and that is true about social policy. We have responsibility, all of us, to do that, to make sure nobody is left out. There is no question that we must reduce our deficit, and I have a whole series of ways that can be done in abundance, but we should not do so on the backs of working families still struggling under the weight of this recession.…
