Massachusetts
Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote this letter about why she is not celebrating the
end of this shutdown.
Senator
Warren was elected to the US Senate in November 2012. Then-candidate Warren was
a keynoter
at the 2012 Democratic National Committee in Charlotte. During her campaign for
US Senate last year, a video
of a speech she gave at a home in 2011 surfaced and went viral.
She
was the chair of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that was established with
the passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Senator
Warren earned her bachelor's from the University of Houston in 1970. She later
received her Juris Doctor from Rutgers and taught law at various universities
before teaching at Harvard Law School in 1992.
Senator
Warren along with her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, authored the 2003 book The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class
Parents Are Going Broke.
Letter
is via Huffington
Post.
I'm glad that the government shutdown
has ended, and I'm relieved that we didn't default on our debt.
But I want to be clear: I am NOT
celebrating tonight.
Yes, we prevented an economic
catastrophe that would have put a huge hole in our fragile economic recovery.
But the reason we were in this mess in the first place is that a reckless
faction in Congress took the government and the economy hostage for no good
purpose and to no productive end.
According to the S&P index, the
government shutdown had delivered a powerful blow to the U.S. economy. By their
estimates, $24 billion has been flushed down the drain for a completely
unnecessary political stunt.
$24 billion dollars. How many children
could have been back in Head Start classes? How many seniors could have had a
hot lunch through Meals on Wheels? How many scientists could have gotten their
research funded? How many bridges could have been repaired and trains upgraded?
The Republicans keep saying,
"Leave the sequester in place and cut all those budgets." They keep
trying to cut funding for the things that would help us build a future. But
they are ready to flush away $24 billion on a political stunt.
So I'm relieved, but I'm also pretty
angry.
We have serious problems that need to
be fixed, and we have hard choices to make about taxes and spending. I hope we
never see our country flush money away like this again. Not ever.
It's time for the hostage taking to
end. It's time for every one of us to say, "No more."
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