William Tauzin

We do not have to penalize ourselves in a free trade global environment. What we ought to do is treat ourselves as well as we treat any foreign product, but we do not. We penalize ourselves at home, and then we penalize our products when…

The gentleman forgot a step. It is hard-earned money that they have already paid taxes on.

You spoke of the extraordinary person that Jackie Robinson was and what an extraordinary contribution he made to our country and to the more open society that we enjoy today. That legacy continues, as you know, in the beautiful performance…

I also commend him for even beginning this great national debate on whether or not we ought to replace an income tax in America with a fairer, flatter, more reasonable proposal for the country. I want to let him know that on April 15 a…

I would also assume that, if and when this independent study is completed, as we expect it will be, that we will have the full cooperation of the chairman of the committee in hastening the completion of this?

If you like everything on television to be pay per view, if you want to pay extra to see the Olympics every time you want to see any Olympic game, if you want to pay extra for baseball or for ER or for all the programs you enjoy on…

I rise in this brief minute to allow all of us collectively to share the joy and pride of all the LSU alumni across America with the extraordinary success of the LSU baseball program and the great success of Coach Skip Bertman, who has now…

Free markets make sense in America. We applaud them. We are pleased with them. My liberal friends who like gasoline taxes believe that the price of gasoline should be really high so Americans will not use it any more. That is their theory…

And I do not think there is anything wrong with your characterizing my idea. You can characterize my idea as you see it. When you go from characterizing my idea to attacking me personally----

And how we return here in reelection campaigns with the art of governing. There is a huge difference between those two activities, yet we confuse them. Our politics have gotten meaner. Negative campaigning is the way in which candidates…

I think part of the problem, too, is that we fail to separate the politics of how we get here.

What we recommend is to pull the IRS and the income tax out by its roots, to get rid of the whole mess, to throw away the inheritance and gift taxes along with it, and substitute a simple national retail sales tax at the end of every…

Guess what, too, after they have invested 12 years in that drug and $350 million, where do you think they get that money from? It goes into a much higher costing drug that Americans may need to save their lives or prolong their lives. If…

Of course it would. That is what we are trying to do in this reform. In short, we are trying to bring commonsense environmentalism to America. We are not trying at all to back away from our commitment to the environment. I believe, and I…

In fact, Mr. Speaker, not only are we not doing the right things, the law encourages landowners to do the wrong things, as the chairman of the committee pointed out. We heard the testimony of one landowner whose father left him this…

If I own a piece of property that I thought was mine and I want to enhance it for wildlife conservation, if there is an endangered species on it, I cannot even do that. The Government will not let me even enhance my property.

I thought of something else that really does not make any common sense. Under the law, the way it is written today, interpreted by the Supreme Court, if I own a piece of property that may harbor some endangered species and I want to alter…

You mean a biologist could nominate a species, and on the basis of his information could get listed and impact millions of Americans?

The letter I referred to, I will tell my friend, is a letter the President sent to the committee considering property rights legislation, one of the environmental reforms we have been fighting for on this House floor. The letter I referred…

The President said that when he vetoed this bill. When he vetoed this bill, he said I would rather have 133,000 out of work than sign legislation that has modest environmental reforms.

The last thing we ought to do is try to scare seniors today. They have enough to worry about. We all ought to be trying to calm these fears. We ought to be talking about our debate, of course, on how to resolve it; it ought to be a good…

The Democratic Party finally came with some alternative. They finally said this week, here is what we would do. What they would do would be to cut the spending, the bleeding in the program, by only $90 billion. What that does is that just…

Well, if the tactics at the committee were bad, the tactics on the floor are worse, to pretend this was some real demonstration by real senior citizens, when this was an organized lobby group planning to disrupt the meeting. To bring…

If the gentleman will let me emphasize that point, in the Medicare markup we adopted the lockbox amendment, which makes sure any savings the new Medicare reforms produce has to stay for Medicare purposes. It does not go for any other…

But let me tell you what the real option is, and the gentleman from Connecticut has pointed it out. The option is either fix this system, control costs, and create a better choice for Americans or else raise taxes dramatically to keep this…