Political Quotes

“Madam President, Senator Hatch has long been a leader on a lot of these tax provisions, particularly in research and development. I thank him for his leadership. I think Senator Hatch has clearly outlined the gravity of the economic consequences of a continuing failure to finish time-sensitive legislative tax business. There is a chart I will put up that shows where we are on these categories of expiring tax provisions. Said another way, here are the categories of tax hikes that congressional inaction will put in place. I have used this chart before, so I think Members will be familiar. In fact, several months ago, I used it. The congressional Democratic leadership paid no attention to the seriousness of these issues then. Unfortunately, the to-do list is exactly the same today as it was several months ago. If we go down through the chart, Members can see that we have had partisan votes on extender packages negotiated between the bicameral Democratic leadership but no effort to reach out to the Republican side to find bipartisan common ground. On this year's alternative minimum tax patch, as Senator Hatch noted, inaction on the AMT will force a ``gotcha'' tax hike on millions of middle-income families when they start to file their tax returns 6 weeks from now. On death tax reform, the House passed a permanent reform almost 1 year ago, but it has languished in the Senate during that period.…”