John B. Breaux: “The bill the Finance Committee has brought to the floor is a tax cut piece of legislation which also raises significant…”

“The bill the Finance Committee has brought to the floor is a tax cut piece of legislation which also raises significant amounts of taxes on American citizens. Tax cuts are a wonderful thing to do, for those of us who are elected officials. It is great to say we have cut taxes by x billions of dollars, to send out a press release to our constituents back home saying we cut taxes by x billions of dollars. It is also important to read the fine print. The fine print in this legislation tells the rest of the story. And the rest of the story is that, among other provisions in the bill, there is a provision that increases taxes by $35 billion on American citizens. Tax cuts have to be done in one of two ways. You can cut taxes by increasing the size of the deficit and passing it on to the next generation. This bill does that. We have the largest deficit projections we have ever had in the history of our country. And now we are saying, on top of that, we want to make it larger. We are going to have a tax cut in order to make the deficit larger in the hopes that it may generate some jobs. That is one way to pay for the tax cut. The other way is to raise taxes in other areas. This bill does that, too.”