Chuck Grassley: “Senator Kennedy repeats the old demagogic saw about capital gains and dividends being only tax benefits for the wealthy.…”

“Senator Kennedy repeats the old demagogic saw about capital gains and dividends being only tax benefits for the wealthy. The facts are very different. I have two charts here which will show how wrong he is. One of these charts deals with capital gains. The other one deals with dividends. Dividends is the first one to which I make reference because, in the State of Massachusetts, you can't have all these wealthy people benefiting from the 15-percent dividend tax instead of what he would prefer, the 20-percent dividend tax. Don't forget, again, as I referred in my opening remarks, these are year 2003 figures, so it could be a lot more than that right now, but these are the most up-to-date Internal Revenue Service figures we have. In Massachusetts, we have 589,897 taxpayers who benefit from the 15- percent capital gains dividend. Don't tell me that all 589,000 of those are millionaires. Massachusetts may be a very wealthy State, but it doesn't have that many millionaires in it. So somewhere along the line, Senator Kennedy ought to wake up to the fact that there are a lot of middle-income and common folks in his State who are benefiting from the 15-percent tax on dividends instead of having a 33-percent increase in that tax and having it go back to 20 percent. My friend from Montana did make a correct judgment that this is not running out right now.…”