Richard Gephardt: “I rise to ask Members to vote against the tax bill offered by the Committee on Ways and Means and to vote for the…”

“I rise to ask Members to vote against the tax bill offered by the Committee on Ways and Means and to vote for the substitute offered by the gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel). I arrive at that position for a number of reasons. First, I think that it is wrong to be taking up a tax bill without a budget. In fact, without even spending a moment deciding what the budget will say. By assigning 900 and some odd billion dollars to a tax cut that this bill encompasses, we are making decisions that will make it difficult, or different at least, to make other decisions that we might want to make in the budget, how much debt we are going to pay down, how much we are going to assign to defense or education or health care or all the other functions that are in the budget. So the cart is in front of the horse, and we should be waiting for this tax bill until we have considered the budget. A second reason that I urge Members to look at the Democratic alternative is because the forecasts that are the premise of the context for this tax cut bill so often are wrong. In fact, CBO recently said that they are always wrong.”