Gilbert Gutknecht: “There is a connecting point there that I want to expand upon, and that is, once we do this, they will have no choice…”

“There is a connecting point there that I want to expand upon, and that is, once we do this, they will have no choice because all of the sudden the rest of the world will turn to America and say, look, if we can invest there and not be taxed, we are going to invest even more of our resources in the United States. All of the sudden, Europe, the former Soviet Union, Iraq, anywhere else in the world, they are going to have to adopt tax policies similar to ours, where we say to people, you can earn as much as you want, you can invest as much as you want, you can risk as much as you want. We are only going to tax you on your consumption. Now I want to come back, though, to a question that sometimes our liberal friends say, and the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Linder) sort of touched on this a few minutes ago, and that is, wait a second, poor people spend more of their disposable income on things that they need, and therefore, they will have to pay a lot more taxes than somebody who makes $1 million a year and only has to spend 100,000 of it on the things that they want or need just to live and so forth. How do you respond to that?”