Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I come for a few minutes on the floor. I am down here with Senator Wyden from Oregon, and I want to talk a little bit and probably in an informal way about a piece of legislation, a bipartisan piece of legislation on tax fairness and simplification. There is one thing I hear a lot about when I go back home and when I was running for office, when I was mayor, and serving in our city government--how do you simplify the process of taxes, making them fairer for the middle class. For all my time prior to serving in the Senate, I have thought about these ideas and ways we can move forward. When I was mayor, we simplified the business taxes for our small businesses, making it easier and simpler, lowering their tax burden, for our residents doing the same thing. Here I am in the Senate and I look at lots of legislation every day, as I know you do, Mr. President, and I know the Senator from Oregon does. We see all sorts of ideas created and put on the table, and one which intrigued me was the Wyden-Gregg bill, which is focused on simplifying the tax paperwork mill, I call it, that we are subjected to every single year as individuals; the mound of paper we have to fill out not only as an individual but as a small businessperson trying to go through the rules and regulations and what is a reasonable amount of taxation that we should pay; also, the complicated system in what is owed or hopefully refunded back to us because we overpaid the IRS.…”