Paul Coverdell: “at the conclusion of my first year in the United States Senate, as we were approaching the new year, I was asked…”

“at the conclusion of my first year in the United States Senate, as we were approaching the new year, I was asked, ``Well, what was your greatest disappointment?'' I indicated at the time that my single greatest disappointment was the fact that we had been unable to defeat in this body the Nation's largest tax increase in its history; the largest tax increase in its history. And then, with all the business that we deal with here in the Senate, the pain of that loss began to ameliorate and we moved on to other activities and I did not think about it every day. And then, as we come upon tomorrow, April 15, when the bill comes due, all the memories of that 7-month battle renew themselves for me. Everybody is writing about the impact and the effect. None of it makes very good reading, Mr. President. I was reading an article by Alan Reynolds of the Hudson Institute that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on April 12. He goes back to that long, arduous battle over the fact that, well, this tax increase is not going to affect many Americans; just 1.2 percent, I believe, was the figure that kept being used, just a small number of Americans and, therefore, we should excuse the fact that we are imposing this economic burden on America because it did not affect very many people. This article says, if that were true, that would equate to 1.4 million Americans. But it goes on to say: This is much worse than misleading.…”