Roy Blunt: “I am in opposition to the substitute because I am for the underlying bill and I am for the things it has done for our…”

“I am in opposition to the substitute because I am for the underlying bill and I am for the things it has done for our economy. One of the great changes that this bill showed in what happens in the Federal Government is a belief that people are better at solving economic problems than government is. When the tax structure that we are voting today to extend was put in place, the determination was made that we were in a difficult economic time, and the way to get out of that difficult economic time was to trust the people, not to come up with some big complicated government program, but to trust the people to let them keep more of their money, to put some minor incentives in the Tax Code to do whatever they wanted to do sooner, rather than later, but no incentive in the Tax Code to do a specific thing. The incentive was to trust the American people to see what we could do to get the economy growing again and going again, and that is what has happened. But this is no time for that to stop. This is no time to say we should put the brakes on this economy, just because the unemployment rate is lower than the average of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. It is still 5 percent. We should want it to be lower than that. Just because income to the Federal Government increased last year at a rate three times the projection, the highest increase in Federal Government ever without a tax increase, how did that happen? It happened because the economy was working.…”