Gilbert Gutknecht

Now, the other argument that we hear sometimes is from people who buy expensive machinery and, frankly, we have a lot of those people in my district. They are called farmers. Every so often they go out and buy a new tractor, and that new…

So in other words, a farmer that goes down to buy another tractor that today is $150,000, embedded in the cost of the tractor is maybe 22 percent tax or 25 percent tax. So in other words, if you take that out of the price of that tractor…

But some of our friends think that we have to have these people pay lots of taxes because that is a good thing. What we are sort of saying is, well, we have to pay a certain amount of taxes, but at the end of the day if they pay more in…

I want to come back to an issue that we have not talked about yet because I think it deserves to be talked about, and we hear about it from our friends on the left. That is called the alternative minimum tax, and frankly, it is interesting…

35 million Americans, and this is the point I want to make. Anybody who has ever been bit by the AMT will never forget this. One of the most beautiful things about what you are talking about, and I want to thank both of you, is that under…

I agree with you. If we can get people to just think in those terms, all of sudden they are going to be say, well, let us have this right now. Why have we waited. Why do we have this unbelievable system that I have to go down to my…

Another nice spring day in Minnesota or Georgia or Iowa. That is an amazing thing because many Americans dread the idea of April 15 coming around. They dread it for a lot of reasons. Not only the amount of money they have to spend, but…

It is almost unbelievable. If we could get Americans to just think about this, because we all pay the taxes. I mean Paul Harvey often says that businesses do not pay taxes; people do. If you could get people to just think about this, that…

A fan. Yes, that is it. The difference between a fan and a fanatic is that a fanatic cannot change their mind and will not change the subject. I have almost become a fanatic on this issue because this is something that, if you think it…

Would not have to keep a receipt, would not have to worry how much they paid the dentist, how much they paid the doctor, how much they gave to their church. All of those things would simply go away. I know a lot of people, and the…

Since 1986, and now we are going to do it again. And every time we talk about reforming the Tax Code, what, in effect, we do is we make it more complicated. Now, in some respects, I do have a vested interest, because my daughter and my…

The gentleman thinks that I ought to be taxed based on how I spend my money rather than whether I want to save it, invest it or spend it on different things.

This is really remarkable. In fact, I think that if the Founders knew that we had this tax system here in America today, Mr. Speaker, I think the Founders would be rolling in their graves. The idea that we have a Federal agency who keeps…

if I could just say, we have talked about capital, and we have talked about big business, and we have talked about investors and manufacturing, but I am told that when we talk about small business, it is where we really see the benefits…

let me just come back to that number. The gentleman said $6 trillion. Now, around this place, we throw around big numbers, but $6 trillion is a huge number. Can the gentleman put that in some kind of perspective?

I wonder if he would step back to podium, because I am not sure if my colleagues who have been listening in their offices really understand what we are talking about tonight. The gentleman is talking about getting rid of the income tax…

This is an idea we think we know about, but we do not really understand. That is, every time we buy a product, embedded in the cost of that product are the cost of taxes. We do not think about that, but it is there nonetheless. If we buy a…

And we have got to get people to think beyond the first thing that they see and they say, oh, my gosh, you mean I would have to pay a 23 percent sales tax on everything I buy? Well, stop and think about it. What would happen is at every…

And we are not talking about cutting the amount of revenue to the Federal Government; we are talking about creating that revenue in a new and more efficient way.

I hate to rise and oppose two of my good friends, but I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Sam Johnson), who has just given a speech; and I just want to contradict a couple of things he said. First of all, if the IBM company had given…

I want to agree in most part with what the chairman said about this issue. It probably is not the appropriate time to have a big debate about pension policy, but I come to a completely different conclusion. He said this amendment does not…

I can speak for over a quarter of a million Minnesota public employee union members who want to have access to health savings accounts. Will they all choose them? I do not know. But I have letters here from the Minneapolis Police Relief…

I cannot support the United States-Australia Free Trade Implementation Act due to the provisions related to pharmaceuticals that were included in this agreement. On July 25, 2003, 242 of my colleagues joined me in supporting my legislation…

As the House passes the FY2005 Energy and Water Development appropriations bill today, I would like to draw attention to the Lewis & Clark Rural Water project. While Minnesota has thousands of lakes, southwest Minnesota, in my district, is…

Members, I have been listening to this debate, and I would like to distill as best I can the arguments against this bill that we are debating today. The first one seems to be that it is not tough enough, that it does not include the…