Phil Gingrey: “it is a pleasure to take this hour designated by the Speaker, by the leadership, we refer to it as the leadership hour…”

“it is a pleasure to take this hour designated by the Speaker, by the leadership, we refer to it as the leadership hour, and to take an opportunity to talk about things that are important to this majority, are important, indeed, to the American people and that is what we are going to do during this hour. We are going to talk about the Medicare part D prescription drug benefit. But I want to digress for just a minute, Mr. Speaker. Our colleagues on the other side of the aisle just spent the better part of an hour talking about the budget. During the course of that colloquy, we heard the word ``hypocrisy'' used a number of times. I want to address this just for a moment, because the hypocrisy, of course, is to suggest that the tax cuts that this administration and this Republican majority have enacted and just today continued those tax cuts, refused to let the other side of the aisle in this body raise taxes on the American people. They spent a good deal of time talking about the fact that the rich get the biggest tax break. Well, the hypocrisy of that argument, Mr. Speaker, is that the rich, if you call someone with an adjusted gross income of $75,000 a year rich, then so be it. But these are the people that are paying most of the taxes. These are the people that are paying at the 39.6 marginal rate, the highest rate. So for them in any across- the-board tax cut, and indeed that is exactly what this is, every taxpayer saves money.…”