Frank Pallone: “I guess 3 months into President Bush's term. Not too long after that he imposed or got the Congress, primarily…”

“I guess 3 months into President Bush's term. Not too long after that he imposed or got the Congress, primarily Republicans, to pass this huge tax cut which primarily went to the wealthy individuals and corporate interests. That has now been around, I guess, for a little over a year approximately and the recession has only gotten worse. So why now are we talking about another major tax cut that essentially does the same thing, making permanent those tax cuts from a year ago and then coming up with this exclusion of tax on dividends which admittedly is being done in order to try to boost up the stock market and therefore again primarily benefits wealthy people. It is sort of like a failed policy has not worked, so why are you going to make it worse? But even beyond that, the idea, as you say, of having the majority of this stimulus package be directly linked to trying to boost the stock market is such a risky thing. We all know the stock market's volatility. It is not necessarily dependent on any one factor. So to suggest that dealing with dividends is somehow going to increase the indexes dramatically I just do not buy, and I think it is so speculative and it is so much easier to do the kinds of things that the Democrats have proposed.”