John W. Olver: “my amendment is one of those that proposes to add $500 million or nearly that sum of money, in my case exactly $500…”

“my amendment is one of those that proposes to add $500 million or nearly that sum of money, in my case exactly $500 million, to this legislation for Amtrak and would bring their total funding to $1.4 billion. The amendment does this by reducing the size of the tax cut for those earning more than $1 million of taxable income by less than 3 percent, from an average of $88,000 to an average of $85,500 or about $2,500 on average, which represents less than 3 percent of the size of that tax reduction. The chairman has already reserved a point of order, and I would like to just point out that I would have supported the amendment being offered by the gentleman from New York, who is the chairman of the Railroads Subcommittee of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, had it not been for the way the offsets come. So here we are with a substantial number of people, and it probably comes to all of those 220 Members, both Republicans and Democrats, a good smattering of both parties, who sent a letter to appropriators asking for support for requests of $1.8 billion for Amtrak; and the gentleman from New York (Mr. Quinn) and I in two different ways have offsets that neither he could support mine nor could I support his, but it goes to show that there is a substantial number of people who really do believe in the concept of a national passenger rail system, and that is not what we are going to have in the direction that we are going.”