Mark Souder: “In an earlier bill where I was talking about the veterans health care parts of this bill as we paid tribute to Cold War…”

“In an earlier bill where I was talking about the veterans health care parts of this bill as we paid tribute to Cold War veterans, Chairman Andrews and I had a follow-up discussion about two of the details which shows the difficulty of this bill. He believes that the partial fix that was done this afternoon on TRICARE was not needed and that it was duplicative. We believed it was absolutely needed. Members who read the same bill can come to different conclusions. Now, my friend from New Jersey actually wrote much of the bill, he is a very detailed guy, and I appreciate his knowledge. But we feel that we needed the TRICARE fix. On the question of the second home, I said $30,000 and used an example of $200,000. By not going to $230,000, I have missed the tax portion. And he also agrees that it depends on what your income is. If it is $80,00 or above, the example I gave of somebody who had a mobile home whose lot is now worth $230,000 and if they have a job as a teacher and work at a gas station they will have $80,000 in income, which means they will now have taxes on a home that they never thought were taxes. So there were disagreements. You can look at the same question, but clearly it is a tax increase on veterans.”