00:00And so now I'll just shift briefly to talk about the OBBA bill. I'm sure all of you are aware that the President signed the OBBA over the weekend and while we are still conducting a full analysis, we want to briefly just talk to you about some of the potential implications of this piece of legislation.
00:22Economists and analysts all agree that this bill essentially represents the largest upward transfer of wealth in our nation's history.
00:34This bill literally takes from the poor to give to the rich.
00:39You often hear me quote Matthew 6.21, where your heart is there, your treasure will be also.
00:45And that Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior, followed the tenets that when you do for the least of these, you do one.
00:52This is the opposite of what my faith requires and what my faith calls for.
01:03And the primary way in which, you know, this bill has found so-called savings, if you can even call them that, is through cutting health care for poor and working people.
01:17This bill is the deepest rollback of Medicaid in the history of our country.
01:23Our state could lose almost $50 billion over the next decade in Medicaid cuts alone.
01:29Roughly a million Chicagoans rely on Medicaid, half of which are children.
01:33On top of these cuts to health care, we will see devastating cuts to food programs.
01:41At a time in which one in five households in Chicago are food insecure, these cuts will cause even more hardship for those most in need.
01:51We have roughly 600,000 Chicagoans who rely on SNAP.
01:57And this bill is a direct assault on their ability to survive.
02:02I want to be clear, when we talk about community safety, it's no secret that poverty is a major driving factor in crime and violence.
02:12So these cuts not only continue to exacerbate neighborhoods that are riddled in poverty, this will put America at risk, particularly as we work to build public safety as a reality for people across this country.
02:31We are also seeing dramatic cuts to public education, changes to the student loan programs will make the dream of attending college unattainable for poor and working families, and will drive up the cost for middle class students.
02:45They've also snuck in another scam voucher program, which subsidizes private education for wealthy parents, the so-called qualified elementary and secondary education scholarship, could cost up to $51 billion a year.
03:04That's more than the federal government invests in public education for students with disabilities and high poverty schools combined.
03:11This is on top of the Trump administration freezing nearly $7 billion in federal education funding that had been allocated by Congress primarily to support after-school programs.
03:23And so what do all these cuts pay for?
03:27There are two main things.
03:29First, it's the largest upward transfer of wealth in our nation's history.
03:35Cutting food, health care, and education for poor and working Americans.
03:39It's how they are paying for a $1 trillion tax cut for the ultra-rich.
03:46This is an abomination.
03:49This is sinful.
03:51It's unholy.
03:54But it reminds me of a quote by Supreme Court Justice Brandeis when he said,
03:59We must make our choice.
04:00We may have a democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.
04:12This bill is a fundamental attack on our democracy and our way of life.
