Barbara Boxer: “I think it is important to simplify what is going on with these two proposals, the Republican proposal and the…”

“I think it is important to simplify what is going on with these two proposals, the Republican proposal and the Democratic proposal. So I am going to attempt to do that. We have two packages of tax cuts. The Democratic package gives everyone a tax break on their income tax for the first $250,000 of income. So everybody gets that tax break. The main difference is that under the Republican plan, they give more to incomes above $250,000, where we say everybody gets a tax break up to $250,000, and after that we go back to the tax rates of Bill Clinton when we created 23 million jobs, balanced the budget, and created a surplus. Now, in order to do this, the Republicans don't do some of the things we do for the middle class, which is an extension of the tuition tax credit and a generous child tax credit. So that is the difference. Their package costs $50 billion more. If we figure we do this over 10 years, we can do the math. That comes to $500 billion. But let's just take it to 1 year. The $50 billion cost of their package, if we didn't go that way and supported the Democratic package, we could use that to either reduce the deficit or to soften the sequester. We have people running all over television saying we are ruining the country with this sequestration. The Republicans came up and supported that idea of automatic spending cuts. We can take the $50 billion if the upper income would pay their fair share and cut the automatic spending cuts in half.…”