Political Quotes

“You have raised a couple of issues, and I would like to carry them a little further. You raised the tax issue, in the proposed budget, not the CR today that funded the government for another week but rather in the proposal for the next year and beyond. The Republicans propose to continue the Bush era tax cuts of 2001 for the super wealthy in America. Now that's about $700 billion added to the deficit. Not only that, that tax rate is 35 percent. They are proposing to lower that tax rate to 25 percent. So for the super wealthy in America, we are talking about millionaires, people whose annual income is $1 million and people whose annual income is $1 billion, to give them a lower tax rate. Are we talking shared sacrifice here? I think not. I want to turn to this chart which was handed to me by one of our colleagues who is actually on the President's deficit commission. She said the facts are pretty clear. Not pretty clear--they are crystal clear. She said between 1974 and 2009, there has been a shift in the wealth and the income of Americans. What has happened is that the rich have gotten really rich and everybody else has been treading water, not really going anywhere. So if you take a look at this, you'll see that over that 20-year period for those at the very bottom, they have seen their income go up by $200 a year. As you move on up, as you get to the top, those in the 80 percentile, they have seen better. They have about $100,000.…”