Newt Gingrich: “I am delighted to have a chance to speak on behalf of the Kyl substitute, because I think that the gentleman from…”

“I am delighted to have a chance to speak on behalf of the Kyl substitute, because I think that the gentleman from Arizona [Mr. Kyl] is making a point here that is central to what kind of America we want to be. It is an objective fact that the size of the government ultimately has to shape the size of the Tax Code. If we have a very large government, then we are going to take more money away from people. If government is too large, the space that is available for freedom shrinks. If a person goes to work and in the course of a year they earn, say, $25,000, but their governments, local, State, and Federal, take $10,000 of those dollars away from them, their choices, their control over their life, their ability to do things is diminished dramatically. One of the great reasons that we have a crisis in families is that as government has risen in size, as it has grown in expenditures, taxes on working Americans have gone up dramatically. When people worked under President Truman, as average Americans, they paid virtually no income tax. I think the average was 2 percent for an average family with three children. Virtually no income tax. The Social Security tax in that period was $52 a year for the entire year. Today we end up in a situation where we pay a lot of taxes. We pay a lot of Social Security taxes. And, by the way, when their employer matches the amount that they pay, that is money that they had to earn or they would not have hired them in the first place.”