Capitol Words a project of the Sunlight Foundation

Rep. Barbara Lee

As the founder of the Congressional Out of Poverty Caucus, I rise again today to remind this body about the crisis of poverty in America, which really should prick the conscience of every Democrat and Republican. As we begin to consider legislation for this year and budgets for the fiscal year 2013, we must do more to help millions of Americans living in poverty.

We must do more for the millions of Americans who are looking very hard for a job and working hard every day to move up the ladder of opportunity, really trying to remove these very difficult barriers.

We must not balance our budgets on the backs of the most vulnerable, the poor, and low-income individuals, and we cannot allow any budget cuts or authorize new spending on programs that will increase poverty or increase income inequality in America.

We also must commit to taking bold steps to reducing the devastating impact of poverty in America, and that is by creating jobs. It's inexcusable and immoral to fail to take the strongest possible action to bring immediate help to those Americans in need.

We cannot continue down the path that leads to increasing poverty, inequality, and income disparities which focus more and more wealth in the hands of the few and leave millions of Americans behind. With nearly 50 million Americans in poverty and half of all Americans in low-income households, we cannot wait. We must act now.

Mr. Speaker, poverty doesn't just hurt families and the children who grow up in families trapped by poverty, but it costs our Nation hundreds of billions of dollars in lost productivity and slows the Nation's economic growth. We must act to strengthen funding for programs that not only prevent hunger, homelessness, crime, and maintain access to education, but we all must create initiatives to demand goods and services which boost our economy. That means that small businesses across America need customers, and they need customers right now.

So we must extend the expiring unemployment benefits. We can't abandon the millions of job seekers before they find a good job. We should also immediately add an additional 14 weeks of tier I unemployment benefits for the millions of Americans who have completely exhausted their benefits after 99 weeks. Far too many Americans have exhausted all of their unemployment benefits and are still unable to work. We must not abandon these 99ers.

To achieve these ends, we must ensure that we protect the efficient and effective programs we already have in place and provide strong investments that spur immediate job growth. And we have the resources to do this if we commit ourselves to increasing fairness in taxation to ensure that the wealthiest Americans pay their fair share and enact a reasonable Tax Code that includes financial transactions which will not only raise vital revenue but set some limits to the wild, out-of-control speculation and vulture capitalism that nearly brought down this entire economy.

Also, we must take a bold approach in how we allocate the large savings from our defense budgets as we bring our troops home from abroad.

I'm confident that the President will speak to the moral and economic crises of income inequality and will not forget the long-term unemployed, the poor, our seniors, our students, and the middle class in his State of the Union speech tonight.

I hope the Republicans and Democrats in this body take heed and tomorrow pass the American Jobs Act for the good of the country.