Timothy Roemer: “last week we debated the Personal Responsibility Act. Today we are debating the Tax Irresponsibility Act. This bill is…”

“last week we debated the Personal Responsibility Act. Today we are debating the Tax Irresponsibility Act. This bill is irresponsible for two reasons. First of all, this bill will cost over a 10-year period $700 billion; not million, billion dollars. Now, there is no free lunch, as we learned in the 1980's, and there is no free breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We have to pay for this. The Republicans have it half right, in that they pay for some of these new tax breaks, but then they respend the money. They do not put it to the deficit. Second, let us talk about fairness; not class warfare, but tax fairness. This bill repeals the corporate minimum tax. That simply states if you are a profitable company, you should pay some taxes. This bill gets rid of that and says to schoolchildren: ``We are going to take 50 cents from you out of that $1.10 lunch, and you are going to help pay for that tax break for the corporation.'' Let us get back to the days, in a bipartisan way, when the gentleman from Ohio, John Kasich, and Tim Penny worked together to reduce the deficit in a fair manner.”