Roy Blunt: “when the Senator from West Virginia talked about the 40 percent that can come out of your hard work, the 2 days a week…”

“when the Senator from West Virginia talked about the 40 percent that can come out of your hard work, the 2 days a week of a regular 5-day workweek--and many families are wishing they could get back to a 5-day workweek because they have really been stagnant in terms of the opportunities for their families for a long time. It is a good way to think about how hard families work just so the government can get more of their money. This is a discussion about how the government can take less of your money. For everybody listening who wonders, ``Well, if the government is going to take less money--I thought the government already had a deficit''--we need to work on that. One way to work on that and the best way to work on that is to have more taxpayers--not higher tax rates but more taxpayers. We are looking at some tax changes here that would allow more taxpayers to share the burden, hopefully paying taxes, as I said earlier this afternoon, on a bigger paycheck to start with. You can take less money out of that paycheck, and the government gets more money because we have more people paying those taxes and more growth. The 70-year average on growth since World War II is 3.4 percent. Every year, the economy was that much bigger than the year before. That ought to be achievable. For 70 years, we achieved that. We should be able to get back to that again if we do the right things. But for the last 8 to 9 years, that growth has been less than 2 percent.…”