Political Quotes

On the recordApril 19, 2012
--that control the estate of these rich folks, the firefighters, ambulances that will come pick them up, they don't pay the same tax rates as those people. And 70,000 of the millionaires in the country didn't pay a dime in income tax, and enjoying all of those benefits--police, fire. It's truly amazing to me that we are still not at the point in this country where we are willing to consider redoing our complicated Tax Code. It's just ridiculous that it's not working. And we can't even pass a bill in this Congress which mandates that common people pay at a rate that is not in excess of those that the millionaires enjoy. That's just an issue of fairness. It's not fair. It's not right. I would suggest to you, Congressman and Congresswoman, that perhaps the reason why we're seeing this kind of favorable treatment afforded to millionaires by this Congress is because almost half of the incoming freshmen, I understand, are millionaires. I think the figure is about 43 percent. And if someone can correct me on that, I'd stand corrected. But my information is 43 percent of the Tea Party freshmen are millionaires, and so they benefit from these laws, these trickle-down economics laws, and they've been enjoying them since 1980. That's when voodoo economics, as George Herbert Walker Bush called it, trickle-down economics, voodoo economics, or whatever you want to call it, it has not worked. But we still have proposals today to make it work.…
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Hank Johnson
Democratic · Georgia

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