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STATEMENT OF SENATOR EDWARD M. KENNEDY IN ADVANCE OF THE PRESIDENT’S BUDGET WILL THE GAP BETWEEN HIS WORDS AND DEEDS GROW EVEN BIGGER?


Washington, D.C.: Senator Kennedy issued the following statement in anticipation of the President’s Budget, expected on Monday: “Americans want to raise healthy families in safe neighborhoods, and give their children full lives. But today, they’re facing a perfect storm of soaring costs for health care, for home heating oil, forgasoline prices, and for college tuition, a prescription drug fiasco for their parents’ generation, and the shadow of globalization hanging over the workplace. What they see in Washington is a spreading culture of corruption that puts special interests first and people’s interests last. They see pharmaceutical companies’ and insurance companies’ dictation health policy, and 4,000 more Americans becoming uninsured every day. They see Big Oil dictating energy policy, and global warming relegated to the back burner. They endured a botched response to Hurricane Katrina when families in the Gulf Coast needed help the most. They see an endless war in Iraq that America never should have fought. We heard a lot of nice rhetoric on Tuesday, but the real test of the President’s commitment to progress is the budget he’ll release Monday. The gap between the President’s words and deeds has grown by leaps and bounds each year as he fails to live up to his promises, instead leaving ordinary Americans behind. America’s failure to guarantee the basic right to health care for all our citizens has been one of the great public policy failures in our history, and we must not allow that failure to continue in this new century. Our goal should be an America where no citizen of any age fears the cost of health care, and no employer stops creating jobs because of the high cost of providing health insurance. Sadly, it appears that the President’s budget will offer gimmicks, rather than solutions on this issue. To make this country more competitive, I agree with the President that we must increase our focus on math and science education, and I welcome his interest. But it takes more than State of the Union rhetoric to meet this challenge, and that’s where he falls short time and again. In his past two budgets, he called for absurd reductions in funding for math and science programs at the National Science Foundation. Last year he eliminated funding to support technology in the classroom. Unfortunately, his Administration continues to be the Administration of broken promises and nowhere is that truer than in education, where his No Child Left Behind Act has been starved for funds since he signed it into law in 2002. I hope the budget on Monday takes a different tact, but this seems unlikely. We must also ensure that globalization does not mean a “race to the bottom” for American workers. Since President Bush has been in office, his shortsighted economic policies and bad budgetingdecisions have accelerated a race to the bottom, protecting profits, while ignoring the plight of working families.” Below are fact sheets on Global Competition, Jobs, and Healthcare.