Date: 2003-06-10
Speaker: LORETTA SANCHEZ (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: Cali

fornia. Mr. Speaker. I rise today to talk aboiut that sleight of hand that happened In the last few days when the Republicans put together the newest tax cut for the American people. At the time. they decided to eliminate the child tax credit for 12 million children here in the United States. because. of course. they had to find a way to pay for their tax cut for dividend earnings. One would say. so what? It is just 12 million children that we are not going to give the tax credit to their families for. But it was 12 million children of lowincome families. That means that if they made somewhere between $10.000 and $26.000 as a family they would not get that child tax credit. People tell me all the time there is no possibility. They just cannot make $10.000 a year because $10.000 a year. they cannot live on that. Darn right. They cannot live on $10.000 a year. Let us look at what it takes to live when they are making minimum wage. minimum wage in Orange County. California. where I live. Let us say they live in Santa Ana and they are making minimum wage. and there are a lot of people who make minimum wage out there. Why? We have got Disneyland. we have got tourist attractions there. We have got the maids who make the bed when they come and stay in Anaheim. The dishwashers. the people who serve. We have the gardeners who are cleaning up everything. the janitors. They all make minimum wage. and they make no benefits. most of them. So minimum wage. and in California it is higher than the rest of the Nation. Our minimum wage is $6.15 an hour. Multiply that if they are going to work for 2.040 hours a week. That is working every week. That comes to less than $13.000 a year. But by the time just their payroll taxes get pulled out of that paycheck. they are taking home about $11.000. And let us say that they are a family of three. that they have got a child. that they go home to live in their onebedroom rented apartment in Santa Ana. California. where the average rent is $950 a month. When they do all the math. they figure out that earning minimum wage means they can barely pay their apartment rent. That is not their utilities. It is not health care. It is not clothes for them or their children. It is not school books or supplies. It is not transportation to get to.their Job. and it is not food. It is not medicine. So. yes. it is very difficult to live on minimum wage where I live. but a lot of people do it. They are working hard every single day. I remember about a year ago we unionized our janitors there. and they had a contract that would pay $6.40 an hour. And the workers came to put in their bid of whether they were going to accept that contract or not. $6.40 an hour for cleaning toilets. cleaning toilet after toilet after toilet in a highrise all night long every floor. Who do the Members think cleans those buildings? And they were voting- on this. $6.40 an hour. That was the contract. One holiday a year and 5 sick days a year. There was this guy. this older gentleman who was crying as he put in his "yes" vote. and he said to me "You know. Congresswoman. I have been a janitor here for 7 years. This is the first time that I will get a raise." People live and they work very hard for these wages. So I hear the other side say it does not matter. we should not give people this tax credit. We need to give people that tax credit. What about the 200.000 families that are in our military. some of them stationed in Iraq. having put their lives on the line who are not eligible for the child tax credit because the other side decided that they needed to give rich people more money? When we first discovered it and we started to talk about it. some said. oh. my God. we did not know. How could that happen? Someone just slipped it in. Nobody slipped it in. The White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said it was a very wellknown fact what they were doing and the White House knew about it. Let us pass the DeLauro bill. We have got to get money to the families who really need it.