So we’re offering a tax credit to employers so they will make up the difference in terms of the loss of salary when somebody is bravely serving our country overseas.
You’re not really serving our soldiers when they come home, they’re not getting the health care that they need. So we are proposing that we fully fund veterans’ health care. With one out of six, it’s estimated, of our soldiers who come home who have some kind of mental or psychological problem -- that’s natural, given what they’ve been through -- we’re proposing that mental health services be added to veterans’ benefits. And we’re making sure that those who come home get adequate health care, and their families do as well.
Furthermore, you’re not protecting our citizens when you’re not adequately keeping our homeland secure.
SCHUMER: And we are proposing a large and comprehensive program to deal with homeland security, to make sure that nuclear weapons -- God forbid -- the worst damage we could face; it pales before anything else we’re talking about here today, unfortunately, someone explodes a nuclear weapons here in our country, God forbid.
We’re not doing close to enough. We’re not buying enough, taking over -- confiscating or purchasing enough of these nuclear weapons that could end up in rogue hands overseas. We’re not doing enough to prevent nuclear weapons from being slipped into this country.
We’re going to be focusing on that. Americans know that. They can understand that security begins here at home.
We’re not helping our first responders and we’re not backing up our truck security and our rail security and all the things that we know need to be done.
And then I’d like to make two other points, just things near and dear to me in these proposals that Dick and Debbie alluded to.
One is tuition deductibility.
Bottom line is, as Debbie said, people struggle to go to college. We don’t want any American kids to not go to the college they deserve to go to because they can’t afford it. And we’re going to continue to make a greater and greater proportion of tuition deductible.
And one other point, and that is trade with China.
This administration has treated China and all its unfairnesses -- you can be a total free trader and you know that the Chinese are not playing by the rules. And as a result, we are losing jobs. A study just came out today that showed it again.
We are going to force this administrative, legislatively, if need be, to make China play for once and for all.
So I want to thank our leaders. And I look forward to working on this program, which I think, as a senator, as a Democrat and as somebody in the DSCC, is going to really help our incumbents and our candidates come the next election.
DORGAN: Let me just summarize briefly.
The agenda offered by the Democratic Leader Senator Reid and our caucus is simple. It is putting America’s security first.
But second, it is saying it’s time to start taking care of things here at home.
We have the largest budget deficit in the history of our country, the largest trade deficit in the history of our country. We have massive numbers of American jobs moving offshore. We have an administration that says the outsourcing of American jobs is a good thing. We all know better than that.
These policies aren’t the policies of the American promise. And that’s why we need to change. The American people expect of us to do the right thing and to be responsible and to have the nerve and the will to make tough choices and the right choices.
And that’s the agenda that Senator Reid and our caucus offer this country today.
REID: A few bookkeeping matters before questions.
First of all, staff has worked on this for more than two months and they’ll be available when we leave here to answer any questions you have about specifics of the legislation.
The other thing I want to talk about just briefly is that we are now -- we are launching as of today, democrats.gov. This is new. We have never had anything like this before. This site will be the online home of the Senate Democratic Caucus.
One of the elements that we have in this, and there are a lot of things. All of the legislation will be there. Everything we say on the Senate floor, what we’ve said here, that will be all on the web site.
But also, it’ll allow some interaction with people who are interested in what’s going on. And, for example, we have something called a citizen cosponsor. They, by logging in here, can cosponsor this legislation that we’re introducing here today. This allows them to show their support for the Democratic agenda.
So anyway, this is available and we also will be happy to answer any questions about that.
QUESTION: Senator Reid, two questions on Social Security. First, do you intend pretty much to play defense and not bring counterproposals to whatever the White House brings on that?
And the second question is, Mr. Thomas yesterday floated this idea of adjusting Social Security for gender and race, based on, for example, age. What do you think of that?
REID: First of all, the president has been talking about Social Security for a long time. The rubber’s going to meet the road very soon, because he’s going to have to put something in writing. And when that comes forward, we’ll be happy to take a look at it.
We have said that if he wants to do something to help in the out- years -- and Senator Durbin outlined that -- we’ll be happy to take a look at that.
But this isn’t a crisis, so why should we be lurching forward?
And Chairman Thomas said that this is dead on arrival. And, of course, he’s been taken to the woodshed a couple times since then by his superiors at the White House. So he’s now backtracking, saying that not only do we need to take a look at race and gender, which to me is a foolish -- foolish isn’t a strong enough description of that.
And also what he’s come up with today, which is really a dandy, value-added tax -- pay for Social Security with a value-added tax. That would really be nice that we would develop the European system: not only do we have an income tax, but we have a value-added tax.
Again, as I described, foolish, dead on arrival is not good enough to explain that.
QUESTION: Senator Reid, Republicans like to tie in national security with immigration reform. Immigration reform doesn’t appear here as one of your top 10 priorities.
REID: Everyone knows that we have worked very hard on all kinds of immigration. We’ve talked about doing something to help children who are here by no fault of their own to get an education with the DREAM Act. We like that.
But in direct answer to your question, the reason we didn’t push forward in immigration in this package of bills -- first of all, we only have 10; but secondly, the reason we didn’t do it is we hope there is some merit to the fact that Senator Kennedy and McCain are working on a bipartisan piece of legislation.
