Jon Kyl: “I assure my colleague from the State of Delaware, for whom I have a tremendous amount of respect, that his inability to…”

“I assure my colleague from the State of Delaware, for whom I have a tremendous amount of respect, that his inability to persuade us has nothing to do with his lack of passion or eloquence. He has an abundance of both, and a lot of good faith and friendliness thrown in to boot. The problem is, he is wrong. That is the only problem. I would like to try to explain why I think that is so, with all good faith, to my friend. He started out by saying that the purpose of his amendment is to unite the Nation and then proceeded to offer an amendment which chose a very small minority of taxpayers on whom to raise taxes, and that is supposed to unite the Nation. With all due respect to my friend, I do not think that unites the Nation. That hearkens back to the old class warfare concept that there are some people who are so rich that we have to soak them a little bit more in order to be fair. In fact, that is implicit in the argument. We have a lot of people overseas sacrificing. These rich people must not be sacrificing enough so let us extract more money from them in the form of income taxes. That is the implicit argument. That is not a uniting argument. The interesting thing is that when it comes to the Tax Code of the United States, Americans are very egalitarian. Middle-income taxpayers support repeal of the death tax, for example, even though they know it would never help them.”