Bernie Sanders

Mr. SANDERS

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. SANDERS

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, there is a lot of concern all over this country about what is going on in Washington in terms of the possibility that the United States, for the first time in its history, may not pay its debts and what that means to the American economy, what it means to the world economy, and what it means to the international financial system. There is a great deal of concern about the possibility that on October 1, the U.S. Government may shut down because we have some rightwing extremists in the House who want to, among other things, abolish legislation passed 4 years ago--the Affordable Care Act--and throw something else in there. Before I get to those issues, I wish to speak about the reality of what is going on in the economy today. What I want to do is something that is not done often enough, and that is to ask where some of our rightwing colleagues are really coming from. What are their goals? Fine, they want to shut down the government on October 1. OK, so they don't want to, for the first time in the history of America, pay our bills. But what else do they want? What is this rightwing ideology which has taken over the House? That is an issue that we do not talk about as much as we should. I wish to begin my discussion by looking at the reality of what is going on in the American economy and why people are so angry and frustrated that the government is not responding to their needs--and they have every reason to be angry. The Census Bureau reported the other day a rather extraordinary fact, a very depressing fact; that is, in terms of median family income--what the typical American family right in the middle of our economy is experiencing--that family made less money last year than it did 24 years ago. Twenty-four years have come and gone, people have worked so hard, and after 24 years they are now earning less money as a family than they did back in 1989. Further, what the Census Bureau told us is the typical middle-class family has seen its income go down by more than $5,000 since 1999, after adjusting for inflation. So if people are angry in New Mexico and if they are angry in California, that is why. They are working hard and their income is going down. The average male worker made $283 less last year than he did 44 years ago. How is that for progress? Less money last year, male worker, than 44 years ago. The average female worker earned $1,700 less last year than she did in 2007--going down. A record-breaking 46.5 million Americans are now living in poverty. We have the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world, at almost 22 percent. A higher percentage of American kids live in poverty now than was the case in 1965. In other words, we are moving but we are moving in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, the people on top, the wealthiest people in this country, are doing phenomenally well. That is the major point that has to be made over and over. This is not an earthquake or a tsunami that has hit everybody, we are all in this together and everybody is struggling. Not the case. The wealthiest people are doing phenomenally well. Last week we learned that 95 percent of the new income generated in this country from 2009 to 2012 went to the top 1 percent. That is a phenomenal statistic. All of the new income generated--95 percent of it--went to the wealthiest 1 percent. Earlier this week Forbes Magazine reported that the wealthiest 400 Americans in this country are now worth a record-breaking $2 trillion. My colleagues can do the arithmetic. That is an extraordinary concentration of wealth in this country that we have not seen since before the Great Depression. The richest 400 Americans now own more wealth than the bottom half of America--over 150 million Americans. One family--and this is not what I learned in the history books when I was growing up about what America was supposed to be like--but one family, the Walton family, owner of Walmart, owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people. Corporate profits are at an all-time high while wages as a share of the economy are at a record low. Wall Street, whose greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior caused this massive economic downturn--their CEOs, their executives, are doing phenomenally well. In fact, CEOs on Wall Street are on track to make more money this year than they did in 2009. Believe me, they have recovered, they are doing great, while the middle class of this country is disappearing. That is an overview of the reality facing our country: The middle class is disappearing, poverty is at an all-time high, and the people on top are doing phenomenally well. Now I wish to go from that reality to speak about what rightwing extremism is really about, and it is much more than shutting down the government; it is much more than not paying the debts we owe and causing a major financial crisis. Let me suggest to my colleagues--and I think they already know--that if we delve into what some of our colleagues here in the Senate but mostly in the House believe, we will find what they believe is--forget the Affordable Care Act which they want to repeal; that is nickels and dimes--what they are really all about is repealing every significant piece of legislation passed in the last 80 years which protects the needs of the middle class, working families, the elderly, the kids, and lower income people. You name the piece of legislation, they either want to repeal it entirely or they want to make massive cuts in those programs. Let me name what those programs are. Social Security. Some of them believe Social Security is unconstitutional. It is not just that they want to cut Social Security; they don't believe in the concept of Social Security. The same thing with health care on the part of the Federal Government; Medicare, Medicaid. Why should the Federal Government be involved in those programs? That is not the role of the Federal Government. Let's abolish Medicare, abolish Medicaid. If a person is 70 years of age and they don't have a lot of money and no health insurance, which Medicare provides, what happens to them? My colleagues can tell me. What happens if you are 70 and you are diagnosed with cancer and you don't have health insurance? Everybody knows the end of the story. You die. Well, that is the way life goes because we are all in it for ourselves. We don't believe the government should provide health insurance to all people. If I am a multimillionaire and I get sick, my kids get sick, I have the best health care in the world. But if I am a struggling, middle- class person, working-class person, lower income person, hey, the government should not be involved in those areas. Minimum wage. Many of us believe, and the overwhelming majority of the American people believe, that the minimum wage today, at about $7.25 an hour, the Federal minimum wage, is too low. I wish to applaud the Governor and the legislature in California for raising their minimum wage to $10. But right now we are at about $7.25 for the Federal Government. Do people know what most of our colleagues here believe? It is not just that they are opposed to raising the minimum wage; they want to abolish the concept of the minimum wage. That is the fact. The American people don't know that. What does that mean? It means if a person is living in a high unemployment area where a lot of people are struggling for a few jobs and an employer says, The best I can pay is $3.50 an hour--that is what I can pay--I have to take that. People think I am kidding. I am not kidding. A majority of the Republicans, to the best of my knowledge, now believe in abolishing the concept of the minimum wage. Environmental protection. We have made some real progress in recent years--not enough, but we have made some progress. When we go to New York City, California, Los Angeles, the air is cleaner. We have cleaned up a lot of rivers. We have told companies they can't put their crap and their toxins into rivers and waterways; they can't put it up in the air so the kids breathe it. We have made some progress on that. Some of our Republican friends say, It is not that we are just opposed to this or that piece of legislation, let's abolish the EPA. Let's abolish the ability of the American people to protect their health. Let me quote something, and I can quote a lot of sources. I can quote many of the statements made by some of our colleagues, but I want to go to the platform of the 2012 Texas Republican Party. Why do I want to go there? Because, in fact, Texas is a large State. The Republican Party in Texas is very powerful. But, also, the ideas that come from Texas, to be fair to the State of Texas, end up spreading all over this country, especially in Republican circles. I wish to read some of the proposals in the 2012 Texas Republican Party platform. Texas, one of our largest States, controlled by Republicans right now: ``We support an immediate and orderly transition to a system of private pensions based on the concept of individual retirement accounts and gradually phasing out the Social Security tax.'' In English, what that means is they believe in the privatization of Social Security, and people, if they have the money, can invest on Wall Street and do what they want. That is the Texas Republican Party platform. What else do they say? I want veterans--and I speak as chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee--to listen to this one: ``We support the privatization of veterans health care.'' In other words, they would abolish the Veterans' Administration. We have some 6 million veterans today getting pretty good health care at the VA. Yet at the mainstream of rightwing extremism in this country is the Texas Republican Party that believes we should abolish the VA health care system. Furthermore, what they are saying is: ``We support abolishing all federal agencies whose activities are not specifically enumerated in the Constitution; including the Department of Education and the Department of Energy.'' Goodbye, Department of Education, goodbye, Federal aid to education, title I, and many other important programs that are supporting public education in America: Goodbye. ``We . . . oppose . . . mandatory kindergarten.'' Right now it is widely regarded that the United States has the worst early childhood education system of any major country on Earth. People can't find affordable early childhood education. Their proposal is to abolish mandatory kindergarten. I spoke about this earlier: ``We believe the Environmental Protection Agency should be abolished.'' No problem. If a company wants to put toxins into the rivers and the lakes and the air, go for it because we have no agency that is going to stop them. ``We recommend repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, with the goal of abolishing the I.R.S. and replacing it with a national sales tax collected by the States.'' In English, what that means is, what they want to do is move to regressive taxes, ending all forms of progressive taxation. So they want working people, middle-class people, to pay more in taxes, while the wealthy pay less. ``We favor abolishing the capital gains tax [and the estate tax],'' which, of course, falls most heavily on wealthy people. Here is what they say--and I have to give these guys credit, they are up front, they put this on paper--``We believe the Minimum Wage Law should be repealed.'' So there we go. People in America will now work for $3 or $4 an hour if that is what the circumstances require. I point out, as I said earlier, this is coming from the Texas Republican Party Platform, and I could have gone elsewhere. But the ideas that come from them end up filtering among rightwing circles all over America. Now, interestingly enough, at a time when the middle class is disappearing and the wealthy and large corporations are doing phenomenally well, it is important to hear what the CEOs of the largest Wall Street banks and corporations in this country--the Business Roundtable--have to say on the economy. Wall Street--bailed out by the middle class of this country--corporate America enjoying record- breaking profits. Earlier this year, the Business Roundtable--again, these are the CEOs of the major corporations in America. Without exception, these guys are making millions of dollars a year in income. They have wonderful retirement packages, health care benefits for them and their families. This is what they have to say. They came to Washington, and they called on Congress to raise the eligibility age of Social Security and Medicare to the age of 70--70. Wall Street billionaires, CEOs making huge amounts of money, with wonderful retirement packages--they now want Congress to raise the retirement age of Social Security and Medicare to age 70; they want to cut Social Security and veterans benefits, their COLAS; they want to raise taxes on working families and, obviously, it goes without saying, cut taxes for the largest corporations in America, at a time when one out of four of these corporations does not pay a nickel in taxes. That is the background: the middle class collapsing; the rich getting richer. Then we have a right wing in this country, fueled by people like the Koch brothers, and others, who are pushing a totally reactionary agenda. Let's talk about what that immediate agenda looks like in terms of the CR, the continuing resolution, that, in fact--and this is what is going to pass in the House, as I understand it--would lock in place sequestration for domestic programs, while providing a $20 billion boost to defense spending for the next 3 months. That is annualized, looking from the year's perspective. If we do that for a year, that sequestration level, according to the Congressional Budget Office, sequestration will lead to the loss of 900,000 jobs and cause a seven-tenths of 1 percent drop in the GDP. Real unemployment today is close to 14 percent. With sequestration for a year, it would result in the loss of some 900,000 jobs--at exactly a time that we do not need it. Many of the jobs lost will be government jobs, but that should come as no surprise because the extreme right wing really does not believe in the concept of government. So when we lose jobs in the teaching profession, when we lose police officers and firefighters and construction workers and VA nurses and VA doctors and scientists and engineers, that is no problem for some of these fellows. Sequestration--we should be clear--has already caused enormous pain for millions of Americans. As I mentioned earlier, this country is way behind our global competitors in terms of childcare, early childhood education. As a result of sequestration, more than 57,000 kids are losing access to Head Start and Early Head Start Programs. At a time when food insecurity is skyrocketing, and when millions and millions of parents are wondering how they are going to be able to feed their kids, what the sequestration does is it literally goes after some of the most vulnerable people in this country, who are elderly people, low income, living on minimal Social Security benefits, who cannot even leave their homes. They are served right now by the Meals on Wheels Program, and I want to thank all of the Meals on Wheels volunteers out there for doing a great job trying to help these seniors. Sequestration will continue major cuts, throwing thousands and thousands of seniors off the Meals on Wheels Program. We have a serious housing crisis in America. Sequestration will make it harder for over 100,000 families to get a variety of affordable housing programs. Everybody knows the cost of a college education is soaring. Working- class families cannot afford college today. Yet sequestration would result in 70,000 college students losing Federal work-study grants. That is the means by which they earn some money to help stay in college. Sequestration will result in cutting back on chemotherapy treatments to thousands of cancer patients because of a 2-percent cut to Medicare providers. The Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program--very important in the State of Vermont where it gets cold--massive cuts. Long-term unemployment checks--unemployment remains high--a 10- percent cut. That will be continued. So that is where we are right now. And it gets worse. It gets worse. If the Boehner CR is approved, programs that millions of Americans rely on will be cut even further. So everything I told you will get even worse. I think what we are looking at right now is not just the immediate pain of the continuing resolution or the threat not to pay our debts and destroy the credit rating of the United States of America. Those are enormous realities. But what we are looking at is a real effort to dismember the U.S. Government and wreak havoc on the lives of tens and tens and tens of millions of people. To my mind, what we have to do is exactly the opposite of what our rightwing friends are suggesting. They are suggesting that we should raise unemployment. They are suggesting that we should cut back on Federal funding for infrastructure. I believe we should be investing billions and billions of dollars in addressing our crumbling infrastructure--roads, bridges, water systems, wastewater plants, our rail system. When we do that, we make this country more productive and we create millions of jobs. I believe we have to invest significantly in energy efficiency and sustainable energy. When we do that, we not only protect the environment and combat global warming, but we also create jobs. I believe we have to rewrite our disastrous trade policies so that American jobs are not our No. 1 export. I believe, instead of further deregulation of Wall Street, Wall Street has to be effectively regulated so their greed and recklessness can no longer cause enormous problems for our economy. Instead of lowering taxes for the wealthiest people, I think it is high time they started paying their fair share of taxes. So what we are involved in here is a great debate, which goes beyond the continuing resolution. It goes beyond the shutdown of the government. It goes beyond whether the United States fails to pay its bills for the first time in history. I believe what we have is an ideology, a rightwing ideology which reflects, at most, the views of 15 percent of the American people. I think that is probably a generous perspective. I think the vast majority of the American people do not believe what rightwing extremism is doing, and it is high time we begin to stand and say to these people: If you are going to continue those efforts, you may not be back here in the U.S. Congress. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. SANDERS

Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. SANDERS

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, 5 years ago, as a result of the greed and the recklessness and the illegal behavior on Wall Street, this country was plunged into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. As a result, millions of people lost their homes, lost their jobs, and lost their life savings. And about 5 years ago we were looking at a situation where some 700,000 Americans a month were losing their jobs--an unbelievable number. The stock market plummeted. There was panic in the financial sector. The good news is that to a significant degree we have stabilized that situation. We are not losing hundreds of thousands of jobs a month. The stock market is, in fact, doing very well. But what is important to understand is that it is imperative we not accept the ``new normal'' for the economy as it is today because the reality is that today, while the situation is better than it was 5 years ago, for the middle class and for the working families of this country the economy is still in very bad shape. And I am not just talking about a 5-year period; I am talking about a generational situation. Mr. President, you may have seen that just yesterday the Census Bureau came out with some new and extremely disturbing statistics, and it tells us why so many Americans are frustrated and angry with what is going on in Washington and why so many people respond to pollsters and say: Yes, we believe the country is going in the wrong direction. What they are saying is true. They have every reason to be angry, every reason be frustrated. Of course, economically this country is moving, in a very significant way, in the wrong direction. This is what the Census Bureau reported yesterday: They said the typical middle-class family, the family right in the middle of American society, that median family income today is less than it was 24 years ago. Median family income today for that typical American family is less than it was 24 years ago. In 2002, typical middle-class families, that family right in the middle, made $51,017. Back in 1989, that family made $51,681. What does that mean? It means that 24 years later, after all of the effort and the hard work of people, today they are worse off than they were 24 years ago. Let's think about what that means. It means that despite the explosion of technology and all of the robotics, all of the cell phones and everything else that has made this economy more productive, the median family income today is worse than it was 24 years ago. I will give you an example of what that means. If during the period from 1989 through 2012 that typical American family had received just a 2-percent increase in their income--just 2 percent, a very modest increase--that family today, instead of making $51,000 a year, would be making $81,000 a year. That is a $30,000 gap. If over that 24-year period people had seen a modest--I am not taking about a huge increase--a modest increase in their income of 2 percent, which people certainly deserve, that family would make $81,000 a year. Today that family is making $51,000 a year--less than that family was making 24 years ago. This is what the Census Bureau also reported. They said the typical middle-class family has seen its income go down by more than $5,000 since 1999, after adjusting for inflation--$5,000. They told us the average male worker made $283 less last year than that same worker made 44 years ago. Do you want to know why people are angry? They see an explosion of technology, they see an explosion of productivity, and yet a male worker today is making less than a male worker--the average male worker--made 44 years ago. The average female worker earned $1,775 less than they did in 2007. A recordbreaking 46.5 million Americans lived in poverty last year. That is more people living in poverty than at any time in American history. Sixteen million children live in poverty. That is almost 22 percent of all kids in America. That is the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world. That is the future of America. Over one out of five kids in the country is living in poverty. A higher percentage of African Americans lived in poverty last year than was the case 15 years ago, and 9.1 percent of seniors lived in poverty last year, higher than in 2009. More American seniors were living in poverty last year than in 1972. Today, 48 million Americans are uninsured, no health insurance. That will change as a result of ObamaCare. But as of today, 48 million Americans are uninsured, 3 million more than in 2008. So when people call the Presiding Officer's office in Delaware or my office in Vermont and they say: You know what: we are hurting, they are telling the truth. What they are saying is Congress seems to deal with everything except the reality facing the middle class and working families of this country. People worry desperately not only for themselves, they worry more for their kids. What kind of education will their kids have? Will there be enough teachers in the classroom? Will their kids be able to afford to go to college or will young working families be able to find quality, affordable child care? What kind of job will their kids have when they get out of high school or they get out of college? Those are the questions that tens of millions of Americans are asking all over this country. Here in Washington, we are not giving them clear and straightforward answers. What makes this moment in American history unique is that while the great American middle class is disappearing and while the number of Americans living in poverty is at an alltime high, something else is going on in this society; that is, that the people on top, the top 1 percent, have never, ever had it so good. Last week we learned an astounding fact I want everybody to hear clearly; that is, between 2009 and 2012, the last years we have information on, 95 percent of all new income created in this country went to the top 1 percent--95 percent of all of the new income created in America went to the top 1 percent. The bottom 99 percent shared in 4 percent of the new income. So what we are seeing as a nation is the disappearance of the middle class, millions of families leaving the middle class and descending into poverty, struggling desperately to feed their families, to put gas in their car, to get to work, to survive on an $8-an-hour wage. You have that reality over here, and then you have another reality; that is, the people on top are doing better than at any time since before the Great Depression. Today, the top 1 percent own 38 percent of the Nation's financial wealth. Meanwhile, the bottom 60 percent, the majority of the American people together, own only 2.3 percent of the wealth in this country. When I was in school we used to--and I am sure all over this country-- study what we called an oligarchy. An oligarchy is a nation in which a handful of very wealthy people control the economy, control the politics of the nation. It does not matter about political parties because they own those parties as well. Guess what. What we used to look at in Latin America and laugh about or worry about has now come home to this country. In America today, we have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth. That gap between the very rich and everybody else is growing wider. I do not believe the American people feel that is what this great country should be about; that the top 1 percent owns 38 percent of the wealth, while the bottom 60 percent owns barely 2 percent of the wealth. That is not the dream of what this great country is about. Earlier this week Forbes magazine reported that the wealthiest 400 Americans in this country--400 people--are now worth a recordbreaking $2 trillion--400 people worth $2 trillion; in other words, the concentration of wealth is getting greater and greater and greater. The wealthiest 400 Americans now own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans, over 150 million Americans. We could probably squeeze 400 people into this room. If we did and they were the wealthiest people in this country, 400 people in this room would own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the American people. Just one family, one family in America, the Walton family, the owners of Walmart, are worth over $100 billion and own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people. One family owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans. While the middle class disappears, while children in this country go hungry, while veterans sleep out on the streets, corporate profits are now at an alltime high, while wages, as a share of the economy, are at a record low. Wall Street--the major financial institutions in this country whose greed and recklessness drove us into this economic downturn and the group of people the American middle class bailed out 5 years ago--is now doing phenomenally well. So Wall Street drives the country into a severe economic downturn. Wall Street is bailed out by the American middle class. Wall Street now is doing phenomenally well while the middle class is disappearing. You want to know why the American people are angry and disgusted and frustrated? That is why. In fact, the CEOs on Wall Street, the executives there, are on track to make more money this year than they did in 2009. That is the time in which Wall Street greed destroyed our economy. The American middle class is disappearing. Poverty is increasing. The gap between the rich and everyone else is growing wider and wider. That is the economic reality facing this country. The time is long overdue for this Congress and this President to start, in a very forceful, aggressive way, to address that issue. But where are we today? Are we having a major debate on the floor of the Senate as to how we are going to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure and create millions of jobs? I do not hear that debate. Are we having a debate on the floor of the Senate that says it is an outrage that working people throughout the country are trying to survive on a minimum wage of $7.25 and we need to raise that substantially so that when people work 40 hours a week they can actually take care of themselves and their families and not go deeper into debt? Are we having that debate? I do not hear that. Are we having a debate which says that not only should we not cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, but we should join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee health care to all of our people as a right of citizenship? I do not hear that debate; quite the contrary, this is the debate I hear. This is what I am hearing from my colleagues over in the House and the Republican leadership over there. What I am hearing them say is that while poverty is at an alltime high, while our childcare system, early childhood education is a disaster, what they want to do is continue sequestration and push for more across-the-board spending cuts to Head Start, while elderly people throughout the country who are fragile and hurting are dependent on the Meals On Wheels Program, they want to continue cuts in that program. They want to continue cuts in that program. While millions of families are wondering how they are going to send kids to college, they want to continue sequestration, making it harder for families to send their kids to college. They want to continue cuts to unemployment insurance and a number of other vital programs; in other words, instead of addressing the very serious problems facing the middle class and the working class of this country, what I am hearing from my Republican colleagues is let's make a bad situation even worse. Let me conclude by saying, instead of cutting the Head Start Program, we should be expanding the Head Start Program. Study after study makes it clear that the most important years of a human being's life are 0 to 3. Giving those little kids the intellectual and emotional nourishment they need so they will do well in school is perhaps the most important work we can do. We have to increase funding for Head Start, not cut funding for Head Start. It is a moral outrage in this country that anybody here talks about cutting back on the Meals On Wheels Program, which provides at least one nutritious meal per day to fragile and vulnerable citizens. We should not be cutting back on that program; we should be significantly expanding that program. I can tell you that in Vermont, if you talk to the people in my State, they will tell you we have significant problems with our bridges, significant problems with our roads, significant problems with rail, significant problems with wastewater and water plants. People want to invest in our crumbling infrastructure and make us a productive nation. When we do that, we can create jobs. Right now on the floor--I don't know if we are going to get to vote on it--there is a very modest bill brought forth by Senators Shaheen and Portman which talks about energy efficiency. In Vermont and throughout this country, people are paying higher fuel bills than they should, wasting enormous amounts of energy, and contributing to global warming through greenhouse gas emissions because we are not aggressive on energy efficiency, making our homes more efficient. We should be investing in energy efficiency and creating jobs doing this. The bottom line is we are in a pivotal moment in American history. The rich are getting richer, the middle class is disappearing, and poverty is at an alltime high. People are demanding that we create jobs and address the problems facing this country. Yet we have folks who want to make a bad situation worse by protecting the tax breaks that have been given to the wealthy and large corporations and then cut back on the needs of ordinary Americans. I hope the American people will stand and say enough is enough and that they will demand that, finally, Congress stands with the middle class of this country. I yield the floor.

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. SANDERS

Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, I wanted to use this opportunity to say a few words about the issue that is on everybody's minds; that is, Syria. I want to tell you that approximately 95 percent of the thousands of e-mails and phone calls my office has received are against U.S. military intervention in the bloody and chaotic civil war in Syria. The truth is the numbers in Vermont may be higher than the national average in terms of opposition to this war. But there is probably no State in this country where U.S. military intervention in this bloody and complicated civil war in Syria is being supported. It is an interesting phenomenon. We have a very divided Nation politically, but on this issue it appears the vast majority of Democrats, Republicans, Independents, the vast majority of progressives--I am a progressive--conservatives, moderates, have all come together to express deep concern about the United States being involved in the third military intervention in the Middle East in 12 years. Let me tell you why I believe the American people feel so strongly against military involvement in Syria. Clearly, it has much to do with the fact that the United States has already been at war for 12 years. There are kids in this country who are halfway through primary school who have never known an America that has not been at war. What the American people also understand is these wars have been enormously costly in many ways. Not only have these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost us the lives of some 4,600 brave American men and women who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, but as chairman of the Veterans Affairs' Committee I can tell you that today we have tens of thousands of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan who are dealing with traumatic brain injury, who are dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder, problems they are going to be carrying with them for the rest of their lives. The human cost of those wars has been enormous. But it is not only the human cost, it is the financial cost as well. Today, at a time when working families are struggling to keep their heads above water economically, we are throwing thousands and thousands of little kids who desperately need preschool education off of Head Start. We should be expanding Head Start. But because of sequestration we are throwing them off of Head Start. We are denying nutrition programs, the Meals on Wheels Programs, that go to some of the most vulnerable and fragile seniors in this country. We are throwing them off basic nutrition programs. We are forcing massive cuts through furloughs on tens of thousands of Federal employees, including members of the Vermont National Guard. At the end of the day, by the time we take care of the last servicemember who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, those wars will have cost us at least $3 trillion. But it is not only the human cost of those wars that troubles the American people. It is not only the financial cost of these wars that troubles the American people. It is the deep sense that exists across the political spectrum that foreign policy and going to war are a lot more complicated and unpredictable and have unintended consequences, far more so than many of our leaders in past years have believed. Afghanistan is a small country that in 2001 virtually had no army when the United States invaded it; no army against the most powerful military force in the history of the world. What is the problem? Twelve years later we are still in Afghanistan. All of us remember President George W. Bush standing on an aircraft carrier telling us that in Iraq the mission was accomplished. Mission accomplished. Well, it didn't turn out quite that way. Thousands of deaths later for American servicemembers, tens of thousands of deaths later for the people of Iraq, peace and democracy in that country has not yet been accomplished. It is a lot more complicated than people thought it would be. Today people worry what are the long-term implications and what are the unforeseen consequences of the United States being involved in a horrendous, bloody, and complicated war in Syria. All of us know Asad is a ruthless dictator who has exploited his people terribly and used chemical weapons against them. But not every American knows that some 20 to 25 percent of the opposition to Asad turns out to be Islamic fundamentalists, some of them affiliated with Al Qaeda. What are the long-term implications and unintended consequences of being involved in a war in that area? I know the President has been very clear about saying he is talking about strikes that are very targeted, very minimal. But once you break the egg, once you get involved, we have to bear and will bear a certain amount of responsibility for what happens during the war and even after the war if Asad is overthrown. This is why the American people are extremely concerned about the United States unilaterally going into Syria without the support of the international community and without the support of the United Nations. Having said all of that, in my mind there is another reason, a deeper reason, as to why there is so much opposition to the President's proposal and the proposal that came out of the Foreign Relations Committee, which was more open-ended and spoke about regime change. That has everything to do with the fact that the favorability rating of the Congress is today somewhere between 8 and 15 percent. The vast majority of the American people don't know. They don't care who controls the Senate, whether it is the Democrats. They don't know who controls the House, the Republicans. By and large, the American people have given up believing that the Congress and the White House are listening to their needs, which are very serious at this moment, or are interested or capable of responding to their needs. What the American people are saying, and they are saying it very loudly, is we have a Congress and a White House which continues to ignore the enormous crises facing the middle class and working families of our country. What they are saying is: Yes, Mr. President, we agree with you, what Asad is doing in Syria is unspeakable; that he is gassing his own kids is beyond belief. We understand that. We want the international community to address that. But what they are also saying is: Mr. President, Members of Congress, think about our children, the kids in West Virginia, the kids in California, the kids in Detroit, the kids in Vermont. What about our kids? What kind of future are they going to have in an economy in which the middle class continues to disappear and poverty remains at an almost all-time high for the last 60 years? Today real unemployment in this country is not 7.4 percent, the official unemployment rate. Real unemployment is close to 14 percent. Youth unemployment is a tragedy. Kids are graduating high school, going out and looking for jobs, and they want to get a sense of independence. There are no jobs for them. Youth unemployment in this country is close to 20 percent. For minorities, the number is considerably higher. Black youth unemployment in this country is close to 40 percent. Parents are worried that their kids are graduating from high school and there are no jobs available to them. Before I came to Washington the other day, I talked to a physician in the State of Vermont who said: Bernie, do you know what. In Vermont, beautiful Vermont, rural Vermont, we are facing a heroin epidemic. Kids are shooting up heroin in Vermont, not to mention the rest of the country, because they don't see much of a future facing them. Parents are worried that their kids are graduating college, often deeply in debt, and that either they can't find a job or the jobs they do obtain often do not require a college degree. The fact is most of the new jobs being created in this country are part-time jobs with minimal benefits, and they are often low-wage jobs. What the Department of Labor is telling us is that, in fact, most of the new jobs we see coming down the pike for our kids do not require a college degree. They are low-wage jobs. The people are saying from one end of this country, yes, we are concerned about Syria, but we are also concerned about Los Angeles, Detroit, and St. Johnsbury, VT. Please, Mr. President, create jobs for the working families of this country. What they are begging the Congress to do is to address the needs our people face. What they understand, and I think this has a lot to do with why there is so much opposition to getting involved in this war in Syria, is that the Congress has virtually done nothing to improve the economy for working families, and they worry very much that if all of our time, energy, and resources are devoted to Syria, we are never going to address the serious problems facing the working families of this country. Tens of millions of our fellow Americans today are working longer hours for lower wages, and many of them are earning wages that are simply too low to support a family. We have been happy to hear in Michigan, for example, the automobile industry is doing better; more people are being hired. That is the good news. Do you know what the bad news is. The new jobs in the automobile industry are barely more than 50 percent in pay of what the old jobs were. All over this country the new jobs that are being created are not paying what the jobs in this country used to pay. We have millions of people working for a disgracefully low minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. People are saying: Mr. President, Members of Congress, yes, we are worried about Syria, but why don't you work to make sure every person who has a job in this country can earn a wage which enables him or her to take care of their family? The media doesn't pay a lot of attention to it, Congress doesn't pay a lot of attention, but the American people also understand it is not only high unemployment and low wages, something else is going on in this country. They know that while the middle class is disappearing and 46 million Americans are living in poverty, they understand the people on top today, the people whose lobbyists surround this institution, the people who make huge campaign contributions to the political parties, are doing very well. They are doing extraordinarily well. Corporate profits are at an all-time high. The people on Wall Street, whose greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior caused the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, well, guess what. They are doing phenomenally well. They are making record-breaking profits. The rich are doing well and corporate America is doing well. They are making all kinds of campaign contributions. The American people are looking around and saying, What are you doing for us? What are you doing to protect the seniors and their Social Security? What are you doing to protect the children of this country, to make sure they get a decent education? What are you doing to make sure the United States joins the rest of the industrialized world so all of our people have health care as a right? One of the reasons I think there is so much lack of support for this war is the American people feel it is high time for us to pay attention to their needs. We have recently heard, and the news is being updated almost momentarily, that Russia, for whatever reasons, has decided finally to play a positive role in this crisis. They are urging Syria to allow the international community to take possession of their chemical weapons. We believe that France right now is prepared to go to the Security Council with a resolution similar to what the Russians are talking about. I can't tell you how honest the Russians are being in this effort, what their ulterior plans may be. But I think now is the opportunity to work with Russia, to work with China, to work with the Security Council and the United Nations. It would be an extraordinary victory, in my view, for the people of Syria, who are going through horror after horror right now, for the entire world, and for the future of the world, if we could take those terrible chemical weapons out of Asad's hands and destroy them. I would hope very much the President and our Secretary of State will be working with the international community to make that happen. Let me conclude. I think we are in a very interesting and, in fact, momentous moment in the history of the United States of America. The people are coming together to say we have enormous crises in our own country and if we don't get our act together, we are going to see the decline of a once-great Nation. We are going to see, for the first time in the modern history of our country, our children having a lower standard of living than we do. I would hope the lesson we learned of this entire episode is the American people do not want us unilaterally getting involved in another war in the Middle East. I would hope also the lesson we learned is the American people are saying very loudly and clearly this country faces enormous crises: economically, global warming, health care, education, income and wealth inequality, and they want us to start addressing those needs. I hope that out of this very difficult moment the silver lining is we learn something from what the American people want and we begin to do what they say. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Manchin.) The clerk will call the roll.

Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. SANDERS

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on August 1, 2013, at 9:30 a.m. in SD-226 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, to conduct an executive business meeting.

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Oversight, Federal Rights, and Agency Action, be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on August 1, 2013, at 2 p.m., in room SD-226 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, to conduct a hearing entitled ``Justice Delayed: The Human Cost of Regulatory Paralysis.''

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs' Subcommittee on Financial and Contracting Oversight be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on August 1, 2013, at 10:30 a.m., to conduct a hearing entitled ``Mismanagement of POW/MIA Accounting.''

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on August 1, 2013, at 9:30 a.m., in room 366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on August 1, 2013, at 10:15 a.m.

Mr. SANDERS

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I rise today to congratulate hundreds and hundreds of young people throughout the country who are standing up for justice, who are putting a spotlight on one of the major economic crises facing this country. Today--this week and in recent weeks--we have had young people in New York City, in Chicago, in Washington, DC, in St. Louis, in Kansas City, in Detroit, in Flint, MI, and other areas around this country who are fast-food workers--the people who work at Burger King and McDonald's and Popeye's; the ones who give us the hamburgers and the french fries--saying that workers all over this country cannot make it on $7.25 an hour, $7.50 an hour. Often they are unable even to get 40 hours of work and, in most cases, they get no or very limited benefits. So all over the country these workers, often young people, are walking out of their establishments, their fast-food places, and are educating consumers about the economic injustice taking place in these fast-food establishments. What they are saying is that we need to raise the minimum wage in this country; that American workers cannot exist on $7.25 an hour, which is the national minimum wage now, or $8 an hour or $9 an hour. My own view is, at the very least, we should be raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour. Just do the arithmetic, with somebody making $7.25 an hour, and if they are lucky enough to be getting 40 hours a week-- and many workers are not. I was in Detroit a couple of months ago talking to fast-food workers, and what they are saying is they get 20 hours a week in one place to make a living and then they have to work at another place. One young man I talked to is working at three separate locations, having to travel, in order to cobble together what, in fact, is by far less than a livable income. So just do the arithmetic. If you make $7.25 an hour, and if you are lucky enough to be working 40 hours a week, you are making about $15,000 a year. Then, of course, your Social Security taxes are coming out of that and your Medicare taxes are coming out of that, and maybe some local taxes. You can't survive on $14,000 or $15,000 a year. The point is these fast-food workers are educating the Nation about the fact that hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people are working hard every single day and are falling further and further behind economically. We have to stand with them and we have to raise the minimum wage in this country. While workers at fast-food establishments and other places such as Walmart are earning the minimum wage, I should mention that the CEOs of these large corporations are, in many cases, making exorbitant compensation packages. The CEO of Burger King, a corporation with over 191,000 mostly low-wage workers gave its CEO Bernardo Hees a 61-percent pay raise last year, boosting his total compensation to $6.5 million in 2012. Well, if a millionaire can get a 65-percent pay raise, maybe it is time to get a pay raise for the workers who are making $7.25 an hour. Last year, McDonald's, a corporation with over 850,000 mostly low- wage employees, more than tripled the compensation of its CEO Don Thompson. In 2011, Mr. Thompson received a mere, paltry $4.1 million. But last year, because of his significant raise, the CEO of McDonald's received $13.8 million. Well, if Mr. Thompson can make $13.8 million as the head of McDonald's, surely the workers at McDonald's can make at least $10 an hour, not $7.25 an hour, not $8 an hour. David Novak, the CEO of Yum! Brands--the owners of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Long John Silvers--was paid $11.3 million last year and received over $44 million in stock options. Well, if this company has enough money to give this gentleman $44 million in stock options, maybe we can end starvation wages at Yum! foods. In terms of the minimum wage, since 1968, the real value of the Federal minimum wage has fallen by close to 30 percent. The purchasing power of the minimum wage has gone down by some 30 percent since 1968. If the minimum wage had kept up with inflation since 1968, it would be worth approximately $10.56 per hour today. The issue our young people working at these fast-food places are highlighting goes beyond the fast-food industry. The reality is that many of the new jobs being created in America today are low-wage jobs. I think we all recognize, even some of my Republican colleagues understand, we have made significant economic gains since the collapse of the economy at the end of President Bush's tenure in 2008 when we were losing 700,000 jobs a month--an unsustainable reality, 700,000 jobs a month. Now we are gaining jobs, and that is a good thing, but not enough jobs. Unemployment remains much too high. Real unemployment today is close to 14 percent. But in the midst of understanding the job creation process in this country, we need to know that nearly two- thirds of the jobs gained since 2009 are low-wage jobs that pay less than $13.80 an hour. So the good news is we are now creating some jobs--not enough jobs; unemployment remains much too high--but we cannot lose track of the fact that most of the new jobs being created are not paying working people a living wage. While most of the new jobs being created are low- wage jobs, we should remember that nearly two-thirds of the jobs lost during the Wall Street recession were middle-class jobs that paid up to $21 an hour. So the economic trend is not good. The Wall Street crash resulted in mass unemployment, and though we are gaining new jobs, many of the jobs we are gaining are low-wage jobs. Yet the jobs we have lost are higher wage jobs. Also, while we discuss the state of the economy, let us never ever forget that middle-class families have seen their incomes go down by nearly $5,000 since 1999, after adjusting for inflation. Opponents, and there are many--the entire fast-food industry and all the big-money interests, the guys who make millions and millions of dollars a year, the people who have unbelievable pensions, who have all kinds of benefits, the CEOs--are working very hard to tell us in Congress not to raise the minimum wage, which is $7.25. Among many other arguments they say: Well, if you raise the minimum wage, it is going to be a job killer. It will kill jobs. Let me say this on a personal basis. I represent the State of Vermont. The State of Vermont has the third highest minimum wage in the country; it is $8.60 an hour. Meanwhile, with an $8.60-an-hour minimum wage, I am happy to say that the State of Vermont has the fourth lowest unemployment rate in the United States at 4.4 percent. And to be very honest, I have not bumped into many employers who tell me: I would be hiring more people if we lowered the minimum wage in Vermont. It does not happen. I think that is a bogus argument. The State of Washington, if my memory is correct, has the highest minimum wage in the country. Their unemployment rate is lower than the national average. There is another point I would like to make that needs to be made over and over. We talk a lot in this country about welfare reform. I think that in general, when people use that expression, what they are talking about is lower income people who may be breaking the law and taking advantage of programs for which they are not quite eligible. Let me say a word about the need for welfare reform but in a somewhat different tone, and let me say that the biggest welfare recipient in this country happens to be the wealthiest family in the United States of America; that is, the Walton family, who owns Walmart, a family that is worth $100 billion--more wealth, by the way, than the bottom 40 percent of the American people. The wealthiest family in America is the largest welfare recipient in America. How is that? Well, the reason they are so wealthy, the reason that family is worth $100 billion is they make huge profits because they pay their workers starvation wages. But in order to keep their workers going, the taxpayers of this country--through Medicaid, through nutrition programs, through affordable housing--give assistance to Walmart so that their workers can keep coming to work. So somebody who works at Walmart for $7.25 or $8 an hour, more often than not their children are on Medicaid paid for by the taxpayers of this country. They and their kids are on food stamps paid for by the taxpayers of this country. Many of their employees live in affordable housing subsidized by the taxpayers of this country. So the Walton family becomes the wealthiest family in this country while working-class and middle-class taxpayers provide assistance to their workers so they can continue going to work. Let me make the very radical suggestion that maybe the wealthiest family in America might want to pay their employees a living wage so that the taxpayers of this country do not have to subsidize them. I would conclude by telling those young people in major cities around this country that many of us respect and appreciate the courage they are showing. It is not easy to walk out of a job when you don't have any money, because your employer may say: You are out of here; you are fired. But these young people have the courage to stand and say: No. We are human beings. We live in the greatest country on Earth. We have to earn a living wage. We can't make it on starvation wages. So I thank those young people for standing for justice not only for themselves but for all Americans, and I hope that Members of Congress listen carefully to what they are saying and that we go forward as soon as possible in passing a minimum wage that will provide dignity for millions of workers. Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SANDERS

Mr. SANDERS. I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, I have a lot of affection for my friend from Iowa Senator Harkin and Senator Durbin from Illinois, but I must respectfully disagree with them and rise in opposition to the bill. I ask for support for an amendment I am offering which is being cosponsored by a number of Senators. I wish to thank Senator Leahy, Senator Wyden, Senator Whitehouse, Senator Gillibrand, Senator Blumenthal, Senator Schatz, Senator Murphy, and Senator Hirono for their support for this amendment. I also wish to thank the largest educational organization in America, the National Educational Association, for their support of this amendment, and I thank the American Federation of Teachers for their support of this amendment. The truth is that if the bill on the floor is passed without amendment, it would be a disaster for the young people of our country who are looking forward to going to college and for the parents who are helping them pay their bills. The job of the Congress, it seems to me, is to improve upon the dismal situation we face today in terms of student indebtedness and college affordability. These are major crises in this country. Millions of kids leaving school are deeply in debt and parents are borrowing at high interest rates to send their kids to college. We have a crisis. This bill makes a bad situation worse, not better. I ask my colleagues to support the amendment I have offered which would provide a 2-year sunset to this bill--an approach which would prevent student interest rates from soaring and allow us the time, through the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, to deal with the issue of student indebtedness in a constructive long-term manner. This issue is too important not to go through a hearing process, not to go through a committee process. I hope we will pass my amendment, supported by eight other Senators, which will sunset this bill in 2 years and allow us to take advantage of the relatively low interest rates now and prevent student interest rates from soaring into the future. The very sad truth of the matter is that in a number of ways, our government--Congress, the White House--is failing young Americans today, at all ages. We have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on Earth. Almost 22 percent of our kids live in poverty. I think every working American understands that our childcare system is a disaster. If a person is a working-class mom or dad in Vermont, or I suspect any other place in this country, it is hard to get the quality childcare they need, so that many kids today, because of inadequate childcare from zero to 3 and 4, enter kindergarten or first grade already years behind where they should be intellectually and emotionally. We are failing our young children. We are failing our teenage young people as well. Today, the unemployment rate for high school graduates is close to 20 percent. That is the official rate. For real unemployment, counting those who have given up looking for work and those who are working part time when they want to work full time, it is even higher than that. What does that mean for millions of kids who graduate high school, can't get a job their first year out of school, their second year out of school, and their third year out of school? What does this mean for their entire lives? We are not dealing with that issue. I had passed an amendment as part of the immigration bill to provide 400,000 jobs over a 2-year period for young people. That is a start. We have to go a lot further than that. By and large, we are failing working-class, middle-class young people today who are desperately searching for jobs. For minority youth--for African-American youth--if my colleagues can believe this, the official unemployment rate for ages 16 to 19 is over 43 percent--over 43 percent, African-American young people, unable to find jobs. That is unacceptable. Our goal must be to make sure the youth of this country, if they graduate high school and they want to go out into the workforce, are able to get decent jobs or if they choose to go to college, to be able to afford to go to college, and to make sure our young people do not end up on street corners doing drugs--not in jail, not in self- destructive activity. That is our job, to make sure those who have the ability and capability are able to go to college and others are able to get meaningful work. Frankly, we are failing in both of those areas. When we do that, we fail not only the young people of this country but the future of this country because the future by definition is with our young people. All of us know we live in a highly competitive global economy. If this country is going to succeed economically, we need the best educated workforce in the world. Unfortunately, compared to much of the industrialized world, we are doing very little to make that happen. In June, the OECD--the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development--released its annual snapshot on the state of education in developed nations. The report showed the United States is losing ground to other nations that have made sustained commitments to funding higher education opportunities. We are losing ground, and the legislation on the floor today, which will result over a period of years in a strong likelihood that interest rates for student loans will go up, making it harder for moderate and low-income kids to go to college, will only accelerate those losses. The United States once led the world in college graduates. Thirty, forty years ago, we led the world in the percentage of our people who were college graduates. In fact, as a result, today those people between age 55 and 64 in the United States still lead their peers in other nations in the percentage with college degrees--about 41 percent. So if a person is between 55 and 64, compared to the rest of the world, that age group has the highest percentage of people who are college graduates. Tragically, over the years, we have lost substantial ground. In 2008--and this is a very sad story indeed, something that should concern every Member of Congress and every American--the same percentage of Americans aged 25 to 34--the same percentage of that younger group--has a degree compared to the older group of 55 to 64. What does that mean? What it means is that for the last 30 years, every President, every Governor, every Member of Congress, virtually every parent in America has said to our young people: The world is changing. Technology is exploding. A high school degree no longer will do it if you are going to make it into the middle class. That is what everybody has said for the last 30 years. But 30 years later, nothing has changed. The percentage of Americans who have a college degree today is no higher than it was 30 years ago. The result is that other countries have significantly surpassed us in terms of the percentage of their younger people who now have college degrees. In terms of the percentage of college graduates, we lag behind Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Ireland, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. In other words, where we were once first in the world in terms of percentage of college graduates, we are now 15th in the world. How do we compete in a global economy if we have descended from first to fifteenth in the world in terms of people with college degrees? That is why on the immigration bill we have people coming to the floor and saying: Americans are not educated. They cannot do these high-tech jobs. We need people from all over the world to come in to do that work. Well, I do not agree with that, but that is the argument out there: Our people do not have the education. Does anyone believe in any serious way the bill on the floor today is beginning--beginning--to address the issue of making it easier for kids in this country to go to college? The answer is nobody does because, according to CBO projections, interest rates are going to go up, and, in fact, it is going to be harder for families to send their kids to college. I will get into that in a moment. The other very important point to be made--and I think a lot of people do not understand this--according to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. Government is making huge profits--huge profits--from college loans. In fact, according to the CBO, the estimate is that the U.S. Government will make about $184 billion in profits over the next 10 years. So what do we have? We have a middle class which is disappearing. We have poverty at a level as high as it has been in the last 60 years. We have millions and millions of families struggling to be able to send their kids to college. My parents did not go to college. My brother and I were the first in our family to go to college. Millions of families are in the same boat. What is the U.S. Government doing now? We are helping to balance the budget not by asking multinational corporations--that make billions of dollars a year in profit and pay nothing in Federal income taxes--to pay their fair share of taxes; no, that is not what we are doing. We are saying to working-class and middle-class families: Oh, you want to send your kids to college? You want to borrow money from the government? Well, over the next 10 years we are going to make $184 billion in profits off of you. Let me go on record as saying I think that is a very counterproductive idea. It is a dumb idea. We have to get out of the business of making profits off of struggling families who want nothing more than to be able to send their kids to college. Let's be very clear about what the legislation on the Senate floor would do. According to CBO--and I fully agree; I do not know what interest rates are going to be tomorrow, next year. You do not. Nobody does. And the CBO is by no means infallible. But the CBO and most economists believe we are leaving this period where interest rates have been historically low. Are they absolutely right? I do not know. Could they be wrong? Quite possibly. But that is what the CBO is estimating. This is what the CBO says. The CBO says the 10-year Treasury note on which this entire legislation is based is now at 1.8 percent. In 2014 it will be at 2.57 percent; in 2015 it will be at 3.35 percent; in 2016 it will be at 4.24 percent; in 2017 it will be at 4.95 percent; in 2018 it will be at 5.2 percent. Everybody has to understand that what this legislation is about is basing student loans on a variable interest rate. Interest rates go up; student loans go up. So let's look at what will happen with student loans under this legislation. The good news is that because interest rates are low now, for the next few years the interest rate for the subsidized Stafford loans will be, in 2013, 3.8 percent; in 2014, 4.6 percent; in 2015, 5.4 percent; in 2016, 6.2 percent; in 2017, 7 percent, in 2018, 7.2 percent. That is for undergraduates. For the graduate Stafford loans, under this proposal on the floor today, in 2015, 6.9 percent; in 2016, 7.8 percent; in 2017, 8.5 percent; in 2018, 8.8 percent. For the PLUS loans--those are for parents who are helping their kids--in 2015, 7.9 percent; in 2016, 8.8 percent; in 2017, 9.5 percent; in 2018, 9.8 percent. Now, does anybody really believe that at a time when families and young people are having an enormously difficult time paying for college that these interest rates make any sense whatsoever? They do not. They are going to put an increased burden on working families and young people. Today, the average student graduating from a 4-year college leaves school $27,000 in debt. If you are paying interest rates of 7 percent or 8.5 percent for graduate school, there is no doubt in my mind that indebtedness will rise. Furthermore, not only is it a question of families and young people struggling with enormous debt--on my Web site I asked Vermonters and people all over the country to tell me what the impact would be on their lives of student indebtedness. We heard just enormously painful stories from people who said: You know what. My husband and I wanted to have a baby. We cannot have a baby right now because we do not have the funds. We are paying off our student debt. We heard from people who are going into professions they really did not want to go into because they just have to make a whole lot of money to pay off their debt rather than doing what was the love of their life, what they studied to do. So what we have is a bad situation which, if the CBO is correct, will only make that situation worse. My amendment is not my preferred option. My preferred option would be to do what a majority of the Members in the Senate voted to do, which is to freeze interest rates for another year at 3.4 percent while we come up with a long-term solution. My Republican colleagues, as they do on virtually every piece of major legislation, chose to filibuster that bill, and we needed 60 votes. I think we only got 51. A majority spoke for the American people, for the young people, for working families, but we could not get the 60 votes. That was my preferred option. But this approach, at least, and what my amendment would do is to say, OK, between 2013 and 2014 we will keep interest rates fairly low-- not as low as I would want it--4.6 percent for undergraduate Stafford loans, 6.1 percent for graduate Stafford loans, and 7.1 percent for the PLUS program. It is not ideal by any means, but it is a lot better than what will likely take place in years to come. So we take the best of this bill and sunset it at the end of 2 years. So if people say there is no option to going forward as opposed to 6.8 percent, I say: Sorry, you are wrong. There is an option. That is what we have done. We have a 2-year sunset on this bill that would be at least a reasonable compromise to give us the opportunity to take a hard look at the higher education bill and figure out two issues: how we create low-interest loans over a long period of time and, second of all, how we, in fact, make college more affordable than it currently is. Let me be a little bit political, as I finish my remarks, and say this: I respect everybody's point of view, and there are different points of view here. But I think what a lot of Americans are asking themselves--they say: Well, let's see. We just had elections in November, and we were told elections matter. We had a candidate for President of the United States, Barack Obama, who won a very decisive victory, who ran on the platform of saying: Hey, I am going to stand up for the middle class. I am going to stand up for working families. We had an election in which Democrats, Independents, retained control of the Senate. Now there are 54 votes in the Democratic caucus, and almost without exception Democratic candidates--I ran--Independents stand for working families, stand for the middle class. So what I do not understand is, when we have a Democratic President, a Democratically-controlled Senate, why we are producing a bill which is basically a Republican bill--very close to what the House Republicans passed. As most people know, the House Republicans are perhaps the most conservative majority in the House that we have seen maybe ever--the most conservative body. They say: This is a pretty good bill. We will accept it. Well, if the most rightwing Congress in American history thinks this is a pretty good bill, I would hope that many Democrats would say maybe there is something wrong with this bill; maybe we can do something better than that. The other point I would make, as I did a moment ago--and people have to understand this--a majority of the Members of the Senate voted to keep interest rates at 3.4 percent for another year. Fifty-one Members voted for that. Most people assume that 51 out of 100 is a majority. But we were unable to pass that legislation because of a Republican filibuster. What we have seen on virtually every single important piece of legislation is that the majority does not rule in the Senate. We need to have a supermajority of 60 votes. The result is legislation like this, which could well end up raising interest rates for students and their families to an absolutely unacceptable level. So let me conclude by saying we have a huge crisis in this country. The crisis is that today hundreds of thousands of bright young people who have graduated from high school are now saying--now saying--I would love to go to college. I can do it. I would like to be a professional. I would like to be a doctor. I would like to be a nurse. I would like to do one of many professions. I would love to do it. I am smart enough to do it. I have the drive to do it. I just come from a family that does not have the money to send me to college. So for those hundreds of thousands of young people whose dream it was to go to college, this legislation only makes that situation worse because it will make college even more unaffordable. Let's be clear: This is a loss not only to those families and to those young people; it is a loss to our country. A couple months ago I had the Ambassador from Denmark come to the State of Vermont to do some town meetings with me. The Presiding Officer may or may not know the cost of college education in Denmark in terms of out-of-pocket costs. It is zero. It is zero. It is not just Denmark, there are a number of countries around the world that have the intelligence to understand that the most important thing they can do is invest in their young people. So they say to their young people: You do well in school, regardless of your income, and you are going to be able to go to the best colleges we have. Not only the best colleges but graduate school, medical school, law school, and your cost will be zero. You know what. I think that is pretty smart. I think investing in our young people is investing in the future of our country. That is what some countries do. They make college education free in terms of out-of- pocket cost. Other countries do not go that far. I live an hour away from the Canadian border. They heavily subsidize college. So we are seeing many American kids now going off to fine colleges and universities in Canada, where even for people from the United States college costs are less than they are in the United States. In terms of what we are demanding of young people and parents in out- of-pocket expenses, there is no country in the industrialized world that asks more than we do. The result is that we have seen virtually no gain in the last 30 years in terms of the percentage of our people graduating from college. We have a crisis. It is a crisis which impacts millions of young people: those who have given up on the dream of college and those who are graduating from college deeply in debt. It impacts our entire Nation. It is insane to me that we are conceding to other countries around the world and saying: OK, you are graduating large numbers of people. You are allowing them to go to college. But we in this great country, we cannot do that. It makes no sense to me at all. It is bad for the future of this country, bad for our economy, bad for millions of families. The legislation on the floor today only makes a bad situation worse. It is based on variable interest rates. It is, according to the CBO, likely that those interest rates will rise. In 2018, we are talking about subsidized Stafford loans at 7.25; graduate rates, 8.8; PLUS loans, 9.8. Can anybody really come to the floor and tell me this is where we want to go as a country? So we have a bad situation which we have to address, not make it worse. Once again, I wish to thank all of the Senators who have cosponsored this legislation: Senators Leahy, Wyden, Whitehouse, Gillibrand, Blumenthal, Schatz, Murphy, and Hirono. I want to thank the NEA, the largest educational organization in the country, for their support, and the American Federation of Teachers for their support. Let's stand tall today for the working families of this country who believe in the American dream, and that dream is significantly about the desire of our young people to do better than we have done. That was the dream my parents had. It is the dream that millions of families have had. An important part of that dream is to work hard as a parent to enable my kid to get a college degree. We are failing millions of families right now. This legislation will make a bad situation worse. We can do better. We can do better. Let's stand with the working families of our country today. Let's reject the underlying amendment, and let's pass the Sanders amendment. With that, I ask unanimous consent the time during quorum calls be charged equally.

Mr. SANDERS. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I want to thank Senators Leahy, Wyden, Brown, Whitehouse, Gillibrand, Merkley, Blumenthal, Schatz, Murphy, and Hirono for supporting this amendment. I also wish to thank the NEA and the AFT, the two largest teachers organizations in the country, for supporting this amendment. This amendment is very simple. It sunsets this legislation after 2 years, takes advantage of current, relatively low interest rates, and gives us the time to reauthorize the Higher Education Act and come up with sensible long-term solutions to the crisis of student indebtedness and college affordability. According to the CBO, by the year 2018, under this legislation undergraduate Stafford loans will be 7.25 percent, graduate Stafford loans will be 8.8 percent, and parent loans will be 9.7 percent. We have a crisis right now in student indebtedness. We need to solve that crisis, not make it worse. I ask for support of this amendment.

Mr. SANDERS. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, I call up my amendment which is at the desk.

Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, will my friend from Illinois yield?

Mr. SANDERS

Mr. SANDERS. I ask unanimous consent that the time be equally divided.

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. SANDERS. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I rise this morning in strong opposition to the legislation which I assume is coming to the floor today which, if passed, would be a disaster for the young people of our country who are looking forward to going to college and for their parents who are helping them pay their bills. Our job is to improve the dismal situation in terms of college affordability and the indebtedness of young people in this country, to improve that situation, to make it better, not to make it worse, and that is exactly what this proposed legislation would do. I ask for support from my colleagues for an amendment I have filed that would provide a 2-year sunset to this bill, an approach that would prevent student interest rates from soaring and allow us the time, through the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, to deal with this problem through a constructive long-term solution. This issue is too important to be rushed through this body without hearings, without listening to the people who will be affected by this bill--the millions of young people who wish to go to college, who do not want to leave school in deep debt, and their parents as well. We should be listening to them, not rushing this bill through today. I thank Senators Leahy, Whitehouse, Gillibrand, and Schatz for their cosponsorship of this amendment. I look forward to widespread support from my colleagues. Let's be honest about something we do not talk about enough; that is, in many ways our government is selling out the young people of our country. When we do that, when we ignore the needs of the young people of our country, in many ways we are selling out the future of the United States of America because the young people are the future. If we do not turn this around, I fear very much that we will continue on the downward spiral we have seen for the last several decades, a spiral in which the rich get richer, Wall Street and the multinational corporations continue to enjoy recordbreaking profits, while the middle class continues to disappear and poverty remains catastrophically high. If we pass the legislation on the floor today without improving it, we will simply be taking one more step in the wrong direction. Before I get into the gist of what this legislation is about and what my amendment will do, let me say a few words about where we are today with regard to the young people in our country. At this moment the United States has, by far, the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on Earth--almost 22 percent. In many parts of this country we are seeing a lack of social mobility, where people who are poor, who grow up poor, stay poor. That is not what this country is supposed to be about. At this moment the childcare situation in this country is beyond disgraceful. Millions of working families are unable to find affordable quality childcare, and many of our young people enter kindergarten and first grade years behind where they should be, both intellectually and emotionally. At this moment the unemployment rate for high school graduates is close to 20 percent. That is the official rate. The real rate, including those who are working part time and those who have given up looking for work, is actually much higher. If you can believe this--and this is a statistic that should frighten us all; it should make us all ashamed--the official unemployment rate for Black youth age 16 to 19 is 43.6 percent. I share the concerns many people have recently expressed about the tragic death in Florida of Trayvon Martin. But let's not forget that there are tens of thousands of other young African-American kids all over this country who are worried about where they are going to go with their lives. As the Bureau of Justice Statistics informs us, one out of three African-American men can expect to go to prison during his lifetime. What a horrible waste of human potential. Our goal must be to see that these young people are ending up in college or in decent jobs--not in jail, not dying from drug overdoses, not involved in petty crime or self-destructive activities. This legislation will simply make it harder for those kids and for all kids to get the higher education they need in order to succeed in life. Right now, today, hundreds of thousands of young people in this country who have the ability to go to college are looking at the cost of college, the indebtedness they will incur, and they are saying: No, I am not going to go to college. What does that say about the future of this country? This legislation, which over a period of years will drive interest rates even higher than they are today, will make it harder for the average kid, the working-class kid to get to college. All of us know we live in a very competitive global economy. If we are going to succeed as a nation in this competitive economy, we need the best educated workforce in the world. Unfortunately, compared to the rest of the world, we are doing virtually nothing to make that happen. In June the OECD--the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development--released its annual snapshot on the state of education in developed nations. The report showed that the United States is losing ground to other countries that have made sustained commitments in funding higher education opportunities. We are losing ground, and the legislation on the floor today--again, over a period of years raising interest rates extremely high--will make that bad situation even worse. The United States once led the world in college graduates. As a result, interestingly enough, older Americans--those between age 55 and 64--still lead their peers in other nations around the world in the percentage with college degrees, which is 41 percent. But, according to a very thoughtful report from CNN, this number over the years has flatlined. In 2008--and this is a very sad story indeed--the same percentage of Americans age 25 to 34 and age 55 to 64 were college graduates. In other words, in that 30-year period we made no progress at all. During that period, as we all know, with the explosion of technology, what we have said to our young people is, you desperately need a college education. Yet, in terms of percentage of our people with college degrees, we are exactly where we were 30 years ago. Meanwhile, other countries all over the world have significantly surpassed us in terms of the number of people in those countries who are college graduates. In fact, right now, where once we were first in the world in terms of the percentage of our people who are college graduates, today we are 15th in the world. Many people do not understand that today the U.S. Government is making huge profits off of higher education and the loans we are providing to our young people and to their parents. In fact, the estimate is that we will make about $184 billion in profits over the next 10 years. To my mind, making huge profits off of young people and their families who want nothing more than to fulfill the American dream of being able to go to college or graduate school and get out and earn a decent wage and make it into the middle class is obscene. We should not be profiteering off working families who are trying to send their kids to college. Yet, with the current legislation that will be on the floor, over a 10-year period we will be making $184 billion in profit. Some people say: We have a deficit. We need to go forward with deficit reduction. This will help us to the tune of $184 billion in a 10-year period. I say: If you want to do deficit reduction, don't take it out on working families, low-income families who are struggling to send their kids to college when one out of four major corporations in this country--many of which make billions of dollars a year in profit--is paying zero in taxes. If you want to do deficit reduction, ask those multinational corporations to start paying their fair share of taxes, not working families who are struggling. Let's be clear about what this legislation that I expect will be on the floor shortly will do. It provides a variable interest rate. Let's look at what the CBO is telling us about where we may be going with interest rates in the coming years. What the CBO tells us is that in 2013 a 10-year Treasury note, on which this formula is based, is 1.81 percent; in 2014 it will be 2.57 percent; 2015, 3.35 percent; 2016, 4.24 percent; 2017, 4.95 percent. Those are CBO projections. Based on the formula in this bill, here is what Americans will be paying for student loans. The good news is that because interest rates are low now, in 2013 it will be 3.86 percent for subsidized Stafford undergraduate loans; in 2014, 4.62 percent; 2015, 5.40 percent; 2016, 6.29 percent; 2017, 7 percent, according to CBO. Under the graduate Stafford Loan Program, we are going to go from 5.4 percent to 6.1 percent, to 6.9 percent. In 2016, we will be at 7.8 percent and in 2017 we will be at 8.55 percent. By the way, all of those figures are below the cap in the bill. What about the parents who are helping their students through the PLUS Loan Program? In 2013 it starts at 6.3 percent; 2014, 7 percent; 2015, 7.8 percent; 2016, 8.7 percent; 2017, 9.4 percent. In other words, people will get up here and say that initially interest rates will be low--because interest rates are low--but they are not telling us that in years to come interest rates are going to go up to unsustainable levels. My amendment says: OK. Interest rates are low today. Let's take advantage of that fact, and let's sunset this bill in 2 years, where we can then have interest rates that are reasonably low--not as low as I would like them--and will not be prohibitive. Then, through the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, we can sit down and deal with two issues: No. 1, how are we, on a long-term basis, going to provide affordable loans, scholarships, and grants to the people of this country who need to advance their education? No. 2, how are we going to deal with the entire issue of college affordability? College in the United States costs much more than it does in virtually every other country on Earth. We have over $1 trillion in debt in terms of college loans. College loans have tripled since 2004. Young people are graduating from college with $27,000 in debt. That is average. Some students have more debt. I have talked to dentists who went to dental school and are now over $200,000 in debt from their dental school bills. We have a crisis right now, and it is a crisis which not only impacts the lives of millions of people and families in our country, it impacts our whole Nation economically in terms of whether we are going to have a well-educated workforce to compete in the global economy. The legislation that is on the floor only makes a bad situation worse. The result of it will be more student debt than we currently have. The result of that legislation will be more young people who say: I don't want to get out of college and have a $50,000 debt, so I am not going to go to college. I guess I will never make it to the middle class and never be able to contribute to the country I love in a way that I thought was possible. We have to do better than this legislation. The last point I wish to make is a political point: elections matter. The Presiding Officer recently ran for office. I ran for office in November. President Obama ran for office. When we run for office, we tell the American people what we believe and what we are going to fight for. The end result of those elections is that Barack Obama won a decisive victory. He is the President of the United States. What he campaigned on is: I am going stand up for the middle-class. The other guys aren't going to do it, so I am going to do it. What I ran on--as well as many of my colleagues--was: We are going to stand up for the middle class. The results came in, and you know what. Barack Obama won. We have a Democratic President. As of today, the Senate has 54 Democrats. My question is: Why, with a Democratic President and a strong Democratic majority in the Senate, are we looking at legislation which is virtually the same as the legislation passed by an extremely conservative Republican House of Representatives? How does that happen? What are we telling our constituents who voted for us? We said we were going to stand for the middle class. If we are going to stand for the middle class, we are standing for the affordability of college. We need to stand up for working-class kids so they can have the opportunity to be the first in their family--as I was in my family--to be able to go to college. We are talking to African-American kids and saying: You know what. There are alternatives to crime and jail. You too can go to college. Those are the people we are supposed to be talking to. I fear very much that the legislation that is coming to the floor will not do that. In fact, it will make people say: What is the difference? What is the difference between the House and the Senate? I ask that my colleagues support my amendment. It will give us the time to come up with a long-term solution to a very serious problem. I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.