Charles Rangel: “Mr. Speaker, this gives us an opportunity to take a problem that we recognize as a serious problem of equity, and that…”

“Mr. Speaker, this gives us an opportunity to take a problem that we recognize as a serious problem of equity, and that is if two people filing separately can get a better tax break than someone that is married, then it is not the fair thing to do. Why have we not taken care of this a long time ago? Why did we not follow former Congresswoman Barbara Kennelly from Connecticut as she led the fight to do it? One of the reasons was that it is difficult to be equitable when you do not have the funds to do it. To talk about 3 or 4 years ago patching up something that the Tax Code was really unfair about and paying $100 billion in lost revenue was something unheard of. But now that the Clinton-Gore team's economic policy has clicked in and we find every day an increase in the revenue that we expect, it makes a lot of sense that we can come together, Republicans and Democrats, and see what we can do to repair an inequity in the law. That is the problem.”