Charles Rangel: “when the President recommended relief for the marriage penalty, everybody in the House understood and agreed that we…”

“when the President recommended relief for the marriage penalty, everybody in the House understood and agreed that we should do it. Then the President asked the Republican leaders to please come over to see which areas of the budget they could agree to. If they were serious about taking care of that, they would have raised that issue. Probably the President would have said that they can take care of this problem with one-third of the amount of money that they intended; but they are not really concerned just with the penalty, they are concerned with a substantial tax cut. If the Republicans were serious, they would have said, let us go to our Democratic colleagues. And we would have said, being the politicians that we are, we do not think the President was as generous as he should have been. We would have increased the amount. We would have given more benefits, even to people who had no penalty. But do Members know what we would have done? We would have said, let us have a budget first. Let us see what we are going to do with Medicare. Let us see what we are going to do with social security and paying down the national debt. Then we would have come in with a generous bill that is our substitute to take care of the penalty, and not just to reward those who are already fortunate in the high-income brackets that have no marriage penalty. We will have an opportunity to do this, but it is really strange.…”