Ben Cardin: “let me urge my colleagues to support this motion and point out that this motion makes it clear that if we work together…”

“let me urge my colleagues to support this motion and point out that this motion makes it clear that if we work together, Democrats and Republicans, that we can get through a reconciliation bill that deals with expiring tax provisions that need to be dealt with, including the R&D tax credit and other provisions, but we need to do this in a financially responsible way. You cannot extend all of these tax provisions and fix the alternative minimum tax and not worry about the impact it is going to have on the Federal deficit. And I think that is a point Mr. Neal and others on this side of the aisle have been making. We are talking about trying to reduce the Federal deficit. The first thing you do is stop getting greater and deeper in debt. So last week we cut programs for our students. We cut programs in health care. We cut programs for those who are the most vulnerable, and we said we were doing it to help reduce the deficit. But, no, we are using every dollar of those dollars for tax cuts. That is not what we should be doing. We have lots of unmet needs, including rebuilding from Katrina and dealing with the financing of No Child Left Behind. So we have unmet needs. You cannot have these large tax cuts and try to deal with the unmet needs without further increasing the Federal deficit, and that is what this motion is about.…”