John Sarbanes: “In January of 2001, when this administration first came in, we were projecting out, over the 10-year time period, a…”

“In January of 2001, when this administration first came in, we were projecting out, over the 10-year time period, a surplus of $5.6 trillion. At the time, President Bush, and his Republican supporters, said: Well, we are going to run this huge surplus. We should do a tax cut because we don't want to be taking taxes just to build up a surplus. Well, a lot of people said: Don't be so sure about that. Let's not rush into it. Why don't we pay down the debt some more? We are finally doing that. No, no, they wanted to do this big tax cut because we had a projected surplus. Well, they did their tax cut. They rammed that through here. Now we are projecting big deficits, and they want to do another big tax cut, even though they are projecting big deficits. Whatever the fiscal situation is--big surpluses or big deficits--it makes no difference; they are bound and determined to do tax cuts for very wealthy people. As I understand it, analysis of the President's tax proposal shows that almost 50 percent of the benefits of that tax cut go to the top 1 percent of the population. Almost 75 percent of it goes to the top 5 percent of the population. So there is this absolutely zealous drive for big tax cuts for very wealthy people regardless of the Nation's fiscal situation and regardless of the fact that this proposal is going to drive us deeper into deficit and deeper into debt. Isn't that the situation?”