Senate Journal: Page 1412: Tuesday, April 25, 1995

    wages.  The fact that unless we raise it in Washington next year, the
    minimum wage will reach a 40-year low.

         There are a lot of these things that are related one to the other.
    But it is perfectly clear that the economics are changing the face of
    American society. You can see it in the difference in income in rural
    America and urban America.  You can see it in the difference -- the
    aging process in rural America as compared with urban America.  And if
    we want to preserve the American Dream, we have got to find a way to
    solve this riddle.

         I was bom in the year after World War II at the dawn of the
    greatest explosion of opportunity in American history and in world
    history.  For 30 years after that, the American people, without regard
    to their income or region, grew and grew together.  That is, each income
    group over the next 30 years roughly doubled their income, except the
    poorest 20 percent of us that had an almost 2.5 times increase in their
    income.  So we were growing and growing together.

         For about the last 15 or 20 years, half of us have been stuck so
    that our country is growing, but we are growing apart even within the
    middle class.  When you put that beside the fact that we have more and
    more poor people who are not eldly -- which was the case when I was
    little, but now are largely young women their little children, often
    where there was either no marriage or the marriage is broken up so there
    is not a stable home and there is not an adequate level of education to
    ensure an income -- you have increasing poverty and increasing splits
    within the middle class.  That is the fundamental cause, I believe, of a
    lot of the problems that we face in America and a lot of the anxiety and
    frustration we see in this country.

         Every rich country faces this problem.  But in the United States,
    it is a paticular problem -- both because the inequality is greater and
    because it violates he American Dream.  I mean, this is a country where
    if you work hard and you play by the rules, you obey the law, you raise
    your children, you do your best to do everything youre supposed to do,
    you ought to have an opportunity for the free enterprise system to work
    for you.

         And so we face this challenge.  I have to tell you that I believe
    two things:  One, the future is far more hopeful than worrisome.  If you
    look at the resoources of this country, the assets of this country, and
    you compare them with any other country in the world, and you image what
    the world will be like 20 or 30 from now, youd have to be strongly
    bullish on America.  You have to believe in our promise.

         Secondly, I am convinced we cannot get there unless we develop a
    new way of talking about these issues, a new political discourse.
    Unless we move beyond the labeling that so often characterizes, and in
    fact mischaracterizes, the debate in  Washington, D.C.

         Now we are having this debate in ways that affect you, so you have
    to be a part of it, because one of the biggest parts of the debate is,

Iowa General Assembly

Index: Senate Journal (76th General Assembly: Session 1)

© 1995 Cornell College and League of Women Voters of Iowa

Comments? sjourn@legis.iowa.gov.

Last update: Sun Jan 14 23:40:00 CST 1996
URL: /DOCS/GA/76GA/Session.1/SJournal/01400/01412.html
jhf