Robert Ehrlich: “I am going to be joined by a number of our colleagues tonight on the majority side to talk about a couple of issues of…”

“I am going to be joined by a number of our colleagues tonight on the majority side to talk about a couple of issues of great importance to the American people. The gentleman from California [Mr. Cox] and I want to talk about an issue near and dear to our hearts, reform of estate taxation and the way we tax success in this country. We are going to talk about the balanced budget, and the hope for cutting the capital gains tax rate in this country. Mr. Speaker, what we are really talking about tonight is tax and spend: how we tax and why we spend so much in this country. There are really two issues, when we think about it. One is how we put the brakes on government, because the nature of government is to grow always, at every level of government: local, State, and Federal. That is pretty natural when we think about it, because it is the nature of elected officials to want to please their constituents. Unfortunately, that desire to please has given us an almost $6 trillion budget deficit in this country, an issue we will be talking about in greater detail in the course of the evening.”