community. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve visited all 64 counties to hear from Coloradans and local public health officials about the challenges they have faced. Coloradans know what their community needs. It has been my honor to be their voice in Washington. What has been the toughest part of your job? If I had to sum up what I have heard in my town halls with Coloradans over the last decade it would be this: people are working really hard, but they cannot afford some combination of health care, affordable housing, childcare, and higher education. They worry they can’t save for the future and their children will have less opportunity than they had. That’s because for the last 50 years, we have had an economy that has worked really well for the top 10 percent, and not very well for the rest of America. For over a decade we’ve had a federal government that is utterly dysfunctional. It’s our moral imperative to get past the partisan gridlock in Washington and build an economy that provides opportunity for everyone, not just those at the top. While I’ve been frustrated with Washington’s dysfunction and inaction to tackle some of the biggest challenges of our time— such as economic inequality, climate change, and the growing threat of China—Coloradans have kept me motivated and focused on making change. For example, I’ve worked closely with Robert Sakata and Bruce Talbott, two Colorado growers, to ensure the Farm Bill we work on in the Senate Agriculture Committee reflects the needs of growers across our state. It’s really important to me that the work we do in Washington is rooted in Colorado. What has been the highlight of your career? In America today, most people cannot afford a middle-class life. That hurts everyone—but perhaps no one more than our children. In America today, there are 10 million children living in poverty. To me, that is unacceptable. That’s why for many years, I’ve been pushing to expand the Child Tax Credit to provide a measure of economic security to middle-class and low-income families. I first introduced the American Family Act in 2017 with Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). The American Family Act boosts the Child Tax Credit to $3,000 per child for children age 6 and older—and $3,600 per child for children under age 6—and delivers the credit monthly to help families meet their expenses throughout the year. For the first time, the bill makes the credit fully refundable so that it no longer excludes an estimated 27 million low-income children, including 350,000 Colorado children, who have been left out of the credit’s full value. I was thrilled that President Biden included the expansion of the Child Tax Credit, based on my bill, in the American Rescue Plan, which was signed into law earlier this year. It will cut child poverty nearly in half in one year and provide economic security to millions of families. We need to make the tax credit expansion permanent to creating lasting change for America’s children and families. What challenges lie ahead for agriculture? Over 11 years on the Agriculture Committee, we’ve been able to pass a lot of bipartisan legislation that has been good for the West and for the country. It’s been one of the most gratifying parts of my job, but it’s also left me with two enduring lessons for our work going forward.
First, climate change is a threat to our Western economy and way of life, and if we’re going to tackle it in a serious way, growers, farmers, and ranchers have to be part of the solution. I’ve traversed Colorado to learn how the agricultural community is adapting to conditions that are growing hotter and drier each year. Wherever I go, I see people collaborating and using their ingenuity to face this incredible challenge. I strongly believe that producers, farmers, and ranchers across Colorado are already doing the work needed to inform climate policy at a national level. Second, as a country, we have to start treating America’s natural landscape—our forests and our watersheds—as infrastructure. Congress needs to appreciate that in Colorado and across the West, our forests are as essential to the economy as the Lincoln Tunnel is to New York. If Congress took that view, I doubt we’d be in the mess we’re in…a situation where, as a country, we’ve spent $67.3 billion in the last five years on wildfire response and recovery, rather than investing in forest restoration and wildfire mitigation. That's why I reintroduced the Outdoor Restoration Partnership Act, which would create a $60 billion fund to support forest and watershed restoration projects across the West, with $20 billion of that going directly to locally led projects on forest health, invasive species removal, and watershed clean-up. Is the trajectory of your political career how you envisioned it back in 2009? I arrived in the Senate in early 2009 during the depths of the Great
Harvesting potatoes (Bennet holding shovel) (August 2020)
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Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com
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