Dan Coats: “the hour is late and the week has been long. We all need our rest. I want to take a few moments to speak in support of…”

“the hour is late and the week has been long. We all need our rest. I want to take a few moments to speak in support of the Gramm amendment, the amendment we discussed just before the discussion of the Kerry amendment. The reason I want to speak in favor of the Gramm amendment is that, as someone who has been an original sponsor and long-time proponent of the child tax credit, we were surprised--first of all, we were delighted when, first, the President, and then the Budget Committee endorsed the concept of the $500-per-child tax credit. It is long overdue. It is only a partial step in remedying an inequity that has existed for a long, long time, in terms of giving families the ability to provide for their children. Way back in the 1940s, Congress decided that raising families and raising children was a good thing. They provided a dependents exemption for that purpose. They did not index it for inflation. And over the years, because it was not indexed for inflation and because it was not raised by an act of Congress, the value of that particular exemption decreased--that is, the dependents exemption. Now, we finally doubled that exemption, and now index it, after the 1986 tax law. But it was still a third to a fourth of what it should have been if it had maintained pace with the cost of raising children. So families were squeezed and fell further and further behind other special interests that were granted benefits in the Tax Code.”