Child Tax Credit

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President.

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, we are all here today--I want to say on this floor how much I love my colleagues from New Jersey and from Ohio who are here with me today on the floor to celebrate this incredibly important milestone.

I love you for your commitment to the country and for your commitment to our kids.

I want to wish your brother well because I know that he is recovering from his stroke, and you are still taking time to be here on the floor to make sure that people who need it the most hear about this tax credit. I want to thank you for that.

I have heard the Senator from Ohio, just like the Senator from New Jersey, talk about the lives of real people in their States. I have sat in the chair where the Presiding Officer is, listening to Senator Brown talk about families in Ashtabula or Zanesville or Dayton or Cleveland or Cincinnati or Toledo and what the policies that we pass in this body either--you know, the difference they make or very often the difference they don't make to real people at home, to the people you work for and represent in Newark.

I think about a mom, I say to my colleague from Colorado, the Presiding Officer, a mom in Rifle, CO, who was in an early childhood center there, and she was so happy to be there. The other moms were happy to be there, too, because until they had that early childhood center, they had to drive 30 miles to Glenwood Canyon to get to Glenwood Springs to put their kid in daycare so they could work, and now they could actually have it in their community. What she said to me was this: I work so I can have health insurance. Every single dollar I make goes to pay for this early childhood center so I can work.

It is that triangle that so many Americans are caught in because we have had an economy that for 50 years has worked really well for the top 10 percent and not for anybody else in America. For too long, it seemed like Washington wasn't paying any attention to that. I mean, what was our solution to that? To spend $5.6 trillion on two wars in the Middle East that lasted for 20 years? To come to this floor to cut taxes not for working people, not for the people who needed it, but for the wealthiest people in the country at a time when our income inequality was higher than it was at any time since before the Great Depression? It made no sense.

It was like if the mayor of Denver--who the Presiding Officer used to be, so let's just imagine that for a second--it is as if the mayor of Denver said to the people of Denver: We are going to borrow more money than we have ever borrowed.

I would say, as a concerned citizen of Denver, to the mayor: That worries me. I would like to know what you are spending it on. Are you spending it on parks?

Nope.

Mental health services? We certainly need those.

Nope.

Homeless?

Nope.

Our roads and our bridges?

No

Schools?

No.

You are borrowing all this money. What are you spending it on?

The mayor would have said: Well, I am going to give the money we are borrowing to the two richest neighborhoods in Denver and expect that somehow it is going to trickle down to everybody else.

That sounds crazy, but that was the Bush tax policy. That is the Trump tax policy, sixty-five percent of that bill for what he called the middle class going to the top 5 percent in America. That is why this is such a new day.

I have said on this floor before that it is long past time that we started treating America's children like they are our children and that we wouldn't accept the conditions so many kids live in unless we thought they were someone else's children.

This country, as the Senator from New Jersey has said before, is 38 out of 41 industrialized countries in terms of childhood poverty. In other words, we have the 38th worst childhood poverty in the industrialized world. Only three countries are worse than we are. The poorest population in America? Our children. And we have some of the lowest economic mobility of any country in the industrialized world. We tell ourselves we are the land of opportunity, but we haven't looked like that for a very long time, and the policies that have been passed here haven't helped. That is where the child tax credit comes into being.

We increased it to $3,000, $3,600 for kids under the age of 6. We made it fully refundable so the poorest kids, the millions of poor kids who have never benefited from the tax credit before because their parents made too little money, now have the benefit of it, and it is going to be paid out starting tomorrow on a monthly basis. So when families are making decisions about how to pay the rent, put a little food on the table, buy a few hours of daycare so that they can stay at work and earn a living, they will be able to do it. So they can work, as the Senator from Ohio so eloquently said, with dignity.

In my view, this should be just the beginning of creating an economy that, when it grows, grows for everybody, not just for the people at the very top. It strengthens our democracy by giving everybody a sense that they have a real stake in the economy and that their kids are going to be able to live a brighter life than the life they live. That is what it is supposed to be in America.

I am grateful to stand here today with my two colleagues and with the Presiding Officer to say that finally, finally, with this President, we are treating America's children like they are America's children, and we don't have to accept chronic childhood poverty as a chronic feature of our economy or our democracy. We can have an ambition that is greater than that for our country and for our children, and we can say to our kids: You are important to us. In some ways, you are all that matter to us, and the position we put you in to be able to get an education and contribute to society and help lead the country, participate in our economy, in our democracy, that is our priority, and that is what we care about.

I think that is President Biden's priority, and he has reflected it incredibly well in this policy.

I will turn it over to the Senator from Ohio just by saying that now we have to do the very hard and important work of making this a permanent part of our Tax Code so that we cut childhood poverty permanently in half in this country. I would like us to end childhood poverty in the United States. I think that would be a very worthy aspiration for all of us to have.

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I just was so inspired by--I am only going to be 1 minute--something Senator Brown said in his remarks about his staff that I also want to mention Charlie Anderson, who is no longer with me because he quit me to go work for the administration. But if it hadn't been for him, I would be very surprised if we would all be here today. So I wanted to say thank you to Charlie for never giving up on this and for holding me accountable as we did the work together.

I also am not going to address the issue about junior versus senior Senators from Colorado, just to observe what a wonderful delegation it is we have from the State of Colorado.

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