Byron Dorgan: “We cannot get a real Patients' Bill of Rights passed. How about a Medicare prescription drug benefit? Well, we are not…”

“We cannot get a real Patients' Bill of Rights passed. How about a Medicare prescription drug benefit? Well, we are not able to get that done either. We have been busy providing tax cuts, an estate tax repeal and a change in the marriage tax penalty. The head of OMB said yesterday that, under the recent tax proposals passed by the majority party, the top 1 percent of the income earners in this country will get more tax cuts than the bottom 80 percent combined. This explains why the upper income folks, those with the largest estates and the highest incomes, rally around these tax cut proposals. There should really be no difference between the parties on the estate tax. Those of us in the minority believe we ought to repeal the estate tax for family farms and small businesses and allow a reasonable accumulation of wealth for a family. We said if you have up to $4 million, you should pay no estate tax. For a family farmer or small business, you can have assets up to $8 million and pay no estate tax at all. But that wasn't good enough for the majority. The majority party said, we must also fight to eliminate the tax burden on the estates of the Donald Trumps of America who will die with half a billion or a billion or several billion dollars. At what price? What else could we do with the money that the majority wants to use to relieve the tax burden on the wealthiest estates in America? Perhaps we could use it to reduce the Federal debt.…”