Bob Kerrey: “I want to make it clear again what we are doing here. We are trying to come up with an offset for $9 billion worth of…”

“I want to make it clear again what we are doing here. We are trying to come up with an offset for $9 billion worth of additional cost that the Senate bill has that the House bill does not. It is $9 billion worth of additional loss of revenue, $9 billion of loss of revenue that occurs as a consequence of changes that we are making in the tax law. Somebody will pay less taxes. That is essentially what this amounts to. Mr. President, we tried to ascertain who was going to benefit from these changes. I think it is very important as we look at our tax law that we ask ourselves--since the vast majority of our taxes come from middle-income Americans and there is a significant concern on their part as to whether or not they are paying their fair share, we tried to get some distributional analysis on this thing to find out who is going to benefit from the innocent spouse provisions, the burden of proof shifts, and the Tax Court. Not many Americans go to Tax Court. There is a provision in here as well that has to do with interest being accumulated. Unfortunately, Joint Tax was not able to give us a distributional analysis. So we are flying a little bit blind and not able to describe who is going to benefit from these provisions. The underlying issue for us, though, is we now have to find $9 billion.”