Date: 2005-03-16
Speaker: WASSERMAN SCHULTZ (democrat)
Chamber: H

If the gentleman will yield on the debt. I want to just follow up with what you are saying about debt. If we can come on over to this chart. this talks about how the debt actually impacts families. Because debt. when you talk about trillions. one thing I noticed about this job that- we have that our constituents so graciously gave us. is that when you start talking about billions and trillions of dollars. peoples eyes start to glaze over. I have learned the difference between a billion and a trillion. and it is a lot of money. And what this debt means is a lot of money to the average family of four. Going up the scale. here with the everincreasing debt that- the Bush budgets have put on us. we are now going to reach. in 2004. the Bush budget raises the debt tax. which is basically what the debt costs every family of four in America. right now it is costing every family in America almost $4.400. You go up the scale with the Bush budget proposal. and we are not even talking about Social Security. we are talking about what we have got right here. right now. not even talking about privatizing Social Security. By 2015. each family of four would have $10.500 that they essentially would responsibility for in terms of a debt tax and how much the debt was going to cost them. That is where we have gone in this country. We are just going to keep adding and adding and weighing people down. What happens with our generation. on the front page of the South Florida Sun Sentinel the other day. I was flying up here. and the front page talked about "Generation Debt." Our generation is Generation Debt. because we are not the generation of savers. Our parents and our grandparents were the generation of savers. but we are not. So we are already shouldering a tremendous amount. way more than we should. in personal debt. On top of that. the President heaps this on top of us also. and it is just wrong. If you are going to talk about what we are doing here. you have to talk about jobs and technology and how that is going to affect our generation. The number one issue for young people right now. for our generation.. is finding a job. We supposedly have this fantastic reemergence of the economy. but job creation is still totally flat. The current unemployment rate for individuals 16 to 19 is 17 percent. And. more and more. those young people need a job. We are not just talking about a paper route anymore. we are talking about kids who are 16 to 19 years old who need to earn a salary to help pay the familys bills. If they do not have a job. then their family is falling down flat. And the Presidents budget contains absolutely no job growth stimulation proposals. it squanders $1.6 trillion on tax breaks to people who do not need them. Job training: We have no proposals for job training. In fact. the President cuts job training in his budget. He consolidates. it into a single block grant. and then cuts the funding for these programs. for job training. programs. by $146 million. He eliminates the Advanced Technology Program. and I am trying to speed along also. which funds research and emerging technologies. His budget slashes by nearly 60 percent the funds from the Manufacturing Extension Partnership Program. which is a program that helps small manufacturers with new technologies. And lastly. our generation cares about the Internet. There are so many opportunities in expanding access to high speed Internet. This President has proposed to slash broadband assistance guaranteed loans by $190 million. and he has called for the total elimination of broadband telecommunications grants. Are they thinking about our folks? They are clearly not. They have no interest in what is going to happen to the generation coming behind the one that already has theirs. That is what we have got to do. We have got to make sure we can refocus the attention that is paid to our generation because no one is thinking about us.