Roy Blunt: “Let me say in that regard, the President, I think yesterday, started right down the path that we all should anticipate…”

“Let me say in that regard, the President, I think yesterday, started right down the path that we all should anticipate in the fight to sunset the Tax Code. The President said, if we sunset the Tax Code, we would not have mortgage deductions anymore. Who says we would not have mortgage deductions anymore? The President takes a couple of hundred words, a couple thousand words, maybe, out of a 5.5 million word Tax Code and holds those up to the American people and says, now, to save this, we have to have all of this. The pressure to maintain the Tax Code is going to be right here in Washington. There is not a single thing in the Tax Code that somebody did not want in there. There is not a single thing in the Tax Code that some special interest did not want in there. The Tax Code is out of control. It is not a creature of the IRS. It is a creature of the Congress. But I think yesterday we saw exactly the reason that we need to go ahead and commit to slay the dragon of the Tax Code and then have the debate about a new system, because we saw the President get some response by just taking one appealing thing in a Tax Code that largely does not appeal to anybody and saying, you do not want to lose this. And if you slay the Tax Code without a new plan, you are going to lose this.”