Every Child Achieves Act of 2015--Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, as someone who travels around this country, I am always amazed by the huge disconnect that exists between what we do here in Congress and what the American people want us to do. The simple truth, as poll after poll has shown, is that Congress is way out of touch as to where the American people are. Let me give a few examples before I get to the thrust of my remarks.

Many of my Republican colleagues are still talking about cutting Social Security--a disastrous idea--but according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, by a 3-to-1 margin the American people want us to expand Social Security benefits, not cut them. How out of touch can one be?

About 2 weeks ago, the same poll told us that while there is virtually no Republican in the Senate who is prepared to support raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, what the American people want by a pretty solid majority is not to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour but to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour--something that is occurring now in Los Angeles, Seattle, and other places around the country.

Tragically, this Congress is way out of touch with the American people on issue after issue, and it is high time we started to get our act together and to respond to the needs--the pressing needs--of the American people.

Between 1985 and 2013, there was a huge redistribution of wealth in America. I know my Republican colleagues get very nervous when people talk about wealth distribution. Well, guess what, over the last 30 years we have had a huge degree of distribution of wealth in America. Unfortunately, that redistribution went in the wrong direction. That redistribution, to the tune of trillions of dollars, went from the pockets of the middle-class and working families of our country into the hands of the top one-tenth of 1 percent. So if we want to understand economics in the last 30 years, the middle class shrank and one-tenth of 1 percent doubled the percentage of wealth they own.

Today the United States has more wealth and income inequality than any other major industrialized country on Earth. The top one-tenth of 1 percent now owns 22 percent of all the wealth in this country, while the bottom 90 percent owns 22.8 percent. In other words, the top one-tenth of 1 percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, and the trend is toward more and more wealth and income inequality. That is the economic reality we are looking at now.

But let me talk for a moment about another reality which saddens me very much and which we cannot continue to ignore.

We are the wealthiest country in the history of the world. Yet we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major industrialized nation on Earth, with almost 20 percent of our kids living in poverty.

In recent years we have seen a proliferation of millionaires and billionaires in this country. Yet over 50 percent of the children in our public schools are so low-income that they are eligible for the free or reduced-price School Lunch Program.

As a result of the collapse of the American middle class over the last 40 years, men and women in this country are working longer and longer hours in order to cobble together enough income to sustain their families. Yet while over 85 percent of male workers are working more than 40 hours a week and over 66 percent of working women are working more than 40 hours a week, we have a dysfunctional childcare system which denies millions of working families the ability to secure high-quality and affordable childcare.

Last week I spoke to a woman who lives right here in Washington, DC, and she told me that to get her 1-year-old child into quality daycare here in the Nation's Capital, she and her husband are spending close to $30,000 a year for one child. DC childcare is probably more expensive than other parts of the country, but millions of parents are struggling with childcare bills of $15,000, $20,000 or $25,000 a year when their income is $30,000, $40,000 or $50,000 a year. If you have two young kids, I don't know how you manage.

The truth of the matter is that while working families are desperately trying to find quality childcare at an affordable cost, we are turning our backs on those families. The result is that millions of children in this country are not receiving the quality childcare or early education they need when the psychologists tell us that ages 0 to 4 are the most important years of a human being's life in terms of intellectual and emotional development.

What sense is it that we ignore the needs of millions of working families and their children? What sense is it to tell working moms and dads that they cannot get the quality and affordable childcare they need? What sense is it to send many children into kindergarten and first grade already far, far behind where they should be intellectually because they had inadequate childcare?

This is not what a great country is supposed to be about. When we talk about the future of America, we cannot be talking about turning our backs on the children of this country. That is why we should be doing in this country what nations all over the world have done, and that is to invest in our kids and move toward a universal pre-K education system for all of our children.

I am glad that the Elementary and Secondary Educating Act is on the floor right now for debate. I want to thank Senator Murray and Senator Alexander for their hard work on this important bill. In Vermont and around this country--and I have had town meetings on this issue in Vermont where hundreds of teachers, parents, and kids come out--they understand that No Child Left Behind has failed, and what we are doing now begins to address that failure and move us in a very different direction.

When we talk about the needs of young people--something we very rarely do--we should understand that it is not just that we have a dysfunctional childcare and pre-K system which must be significantly improved, it is not just that No Child Left Behind must be reformed, and it is not just that a college education is now unaffordable for millions of working-class and low-income families. All of those are terribly important issues that we must address. But I hope very much there is another issue that we will finally start to pay attention to. This country, this Senate, and the House of Representatives must come to grips with the fact that today in America we have a horrendous, horrendous level of youth unemployment in this country. This is an issue that gets virtually no discussion at all. This is an issue of crisis proportions that we are not addressing. For the future of this country, not to mention for the future lives of millions of our young people, we cannot continue to sweep the issue of youth unemployment under the rug.

Last month the Economic Policy Institute released a new study about the level of youth unemployment in this country. What they found should concern every Member of the Congress and, in fact, every person in our country. The Economic Policy Institute analyzed census data on unemployment among young people who are jobless--who have no jobs--those who are working part time when they want to work full time, and those who have given up looking for work altogether. This is what they found. From April 2014 to March 2015--a 1-year period--the average real unemployment rate for young, White high school graduates between the ages of 17 and 20 was 33.8 percent. The jobless rate for Hispanics in the same age group was 36.1 percent. Unbelievably, the average real unemployment rate for Black high school graduates and those who dropped out of high school was 51.3 percent.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the EPI's findings.

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Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, today in our country over 5 1/2 million young people have either dropped out of high school or have graduated high school and do not have jobs. It is no great secret to anyone that without work, without education, and without hope people get into trouble. They get into destructive activity or self-destructive activity. The result of all of that is that, tragically, here in the United States today we have more people in jail than any other country on Earth. We have more people in jail than in the authoritarian Communist country of China, with a population over three times our population. Today the United States represents 4 percent of the world's population. Yet we have 22 percent of the world's prisoners. Incredibly, over 3 percent of our country's population is under some form of correctional control. According to the NAACP, from 1980 to 2012, the number of people incarcerated in America quadrupled from roughly 500,000 to over 2 million people.

A study published in the journal Crime & Delinquency found--this is really quite unbelievable and quite tragic--that almost half of Black males in the United States are arrested by the age of 23. If current trends continue, one in four Black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime. This is an unspeakable tragedy. It is something we cannot continue to ignore. But this crisis is not just the destruction of human life. It is also very, very costly to the taxpayers of our country. Locking people up in jail is a very expensive proposition.

In America we now spend nearly $200 billion on public safety, including $70 billion a year on correctional facilities. It is beyond comprehension that we as a nation have not focused attention on the fact that millions of young people are unable to find work and begin their adult lives in a productive way. We cannot continue to turn our backs on this national tragedy.

Let me be very clear. I think I speak for the vast majority of people in this country and I hope the majority of Members in the Senate. It makes a lot more sense for us to be investing in jobs and in education than to be spending billions of dollars on jails and incarceration. We have to start creating the situation where our kids can leave school and lead productive lives and not have them arrested and incarcerated.

I have introduced legislation along with Representative John Conyers in the House that would provide $5.5 billion in immediate funding to States and cities throughout this country to employ 1 million young Americans between the ages of 16 and 24 and to provide job training opportunities to young adults.

Some people may say $5.5 billion is a lot of money. It is. But it is a lot less expensive to provide jobs and education to our young people than to lock them up and to destroy their lives.

As we debate ESEA--again, I want to thank Senator Murray and Senator Alexander for their important work--I want this issue to be on the table. I intend to offer an amendment that says that in this country we are going to put our young people to work and we are going to get them an education rather than lock them up.

I yield the floor.

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