Pete Stark: “I oppose this bill and suggest to my colleagues and the American people that it is unfair and unnecessary. The Congress…”

“I oppose this bill and suggest to my colleagues and the American people that it is unfair and unnecessary. The Congress is lying to the American people because this does not balance the budget. It cannot balance the budget until 2002 unless we make more cuts, and we are not going to make those cuts. We have not now and we will not then. If we did nothing, the budget would balance this year or next year by itself. Government, again led by the Republicans in Congress, is mucking up the economy by bringing forward an unnecessary bill. These unfair tax cuts, 75 percent of these tax cuts go to families with over $150,000 in income. Simmons, the beet king in Texas, gets $104 million individually. Sammon Enterprises in Texas gets $23 million, negotiated in the dead of night in the Republican leadership offices, where they probably got those two $500,000 campaign checks from the Amway Co., and they gave Amway $200 million in tax deductions for their Republican contributions. And in the secret of night it harms poor families who will have a $40 tax increase. And what my colleagues do not know is that it eliminates abortion for poor young women. That is buried in this bill. It hurts cancer victims. Unknown to any of us here, the tobacco settlement, which is not even agreed to yet, $50 billion of the money that should come out of the tobacco settlement is being credited because of the tobacco tax.”