On the recordApril 10, 2014
The gentleman speaks about the importance of fiscal discipline and fiscal responsibility, and we agree. The question we have is: Why do they exempt from the whole practice of fiscal discipline all of these what are called tax expenditures and tax preferences that have been put into the Tax Code many times by very powerful special interests? What does a tax preference mean? It means in many cases that, because somebody has well-heeled lobbyists, he is able to escape having to pay taxes on something that everybody else has to pay for. {time} 0930 What our Republican colleagues are saying is they don't want to take away any of those special interest preferences for the purpose of reducing the deficit. They would rather cut deeply into our kids' education. They would rather charge college students more interest on their loans. They would rather increase class sizes in K-12, which is what happens when you cut Title I and special education. They talk about opportunity, but the opportunities that they are protecting are those for the special interests who had their lobbyists do very well for them in Washington. Hey, hands off all of that. We don't want to touch that. But we are coming after everybody else, including, by the way, seniors on Medicare who will immediately see the reopening of the doughnut hole.…
