Byron Dorgan: “One of the reasons we do not have a budget brought to the Senate on time--and today is the date it is supposed to be…”

“One of the reasons we do not have a budget brought to the Senate on time--and today is the date it is supposed to be here--is because, frankly, the proposal they would offer does not add up, and they know it. They are proposing very substantial tax cuts, the majority of which will go to the upper-income folks in this country, and you cannot balance the budget with the kind of tax cuts they propose, especially the kind of tax cuts that will go to upper-income folks. This morning, on NPR, a Republican commentator said something. I would like to read it to my friend from Illinois and my friend from California, because I think it is important. He is talking specifically about the capital gains tax cut, and the Citizens For Tax Justice provide a chart to show who gets what from the tax cuts offered by the majority party. The top 20 percent get nearly 80 percent of the tax cuts, the bottom 60 percent get about 8 percent of the tax cuts. But here is what Kevin Phillips had to say this morning. He said: It's time to put [this issue] on the table--the argument that because Congressmen and Senators want capital gains tax cuts as a payoff to their big contributors, that's a good reason to block it as a powerful beginning for reforming campaign finance. This is a Republican, Kevin Phillips, who says this morning: Think about it. The experts say that two-thirds of the benefit from the Senate Republican leadership's cap-gain cut proposal would go to the top 1% of Americans income-wise.…”