Rick Allen: “The Republican agenda is tax cuts, and then tax cuts and then tax cuts, all of them directed and weighted to the…”

“The Republican agenda is tax cuts, and then tax cuts and then tax cuts, all of them directed and weighted to the wealthiest people of the country. But other than that, there is not much of an agenda. We have learned a couple of things in the first 100 days of the George W. Bush administration. The first thing is that the word ``compassionate'' was a political slogan for use during the campaign. You cannot find any compassion in the President's budget. Once he gets to the point of putting down numbers, there is nothing compassionate about his particular brand of conservatism. Second, he came to Portland, Maine, in my district to pitch his tax cut. As he has done all across this country, he said that in effect the tax cut comes from leftover money. He says after we have funded our priorities, there is a huge surplus in this country and it should go back to the people because it is the people's money. In other words he basically was saying this money is not needed to run the programs that benefit people in their districts, in their States right now. That is not true. It is absolutely not true, and once you have the budget you can see that it is not true. The tax cuts do not come from leftover money. What he gives back to the American people in tax cuts, he takes from them in budget cuts.”