Mark Udall: “I cannot support this conference report. As I noted before, this conference report--like the House-passed bill--is only…”

“I cannot support this conference report. As I noted before, this conference report--like the House-passed bill--is only part of a brew based on the Republican leadership's budget recipe. Last year, they put the first ingredients into the mixing bowl in the form of a bill to cut more than $50 billion over five years from Medicaid, student loans, and many other programs of great importance to millions of Americans. Then, with the original version of this bill, they added a compound of a few good things tainted by such unwholesome provisions as the premature extension of preferential rates for dividends and capital gains. The result was a full-bodied one-two punch that might have been intoxicating to some but was sure to leave us all with a bad budgetary headache and stick future generations with paying the tab. So, when it originally came to the House floor, I voted against it but held out some hope that a conference with the Senate would result in a bill that deserved enactment. Unfortunately, that did not occur and instead we have before us a conference report that perhaps is a little better than the House-passed bill but shares its basic flaws. The centerpiece of the conference report, like that of the House- passed bill, is an extension of the reduced tax rates on capital gains and dividends, even though those rates are not scheduled to change until 2008.…”