Political Quotes

“I get tired of saying this, but it has to be said. I realize that the other side's desire is to bring the IRS down to nothing. It is a constitutional question. We have the power to collect taxes. One would argue that we must have a department that collects taxes. They may not always be the department--the agency--we want them to be. Both sides, whether one believes it or not, were outraged that something wrong might have been done, but to suggest and paint with a broad brush the whole IRS and say that everyone there at the senior level is not worthy of a bonus or not worthy of our respect is really to do a disservice to public service employees. These folks do a job. They do a job on a daily basis. Are there problems with the IRS? There have always been problems at the IRS. Has the IRS been an agency that is loved by the American public? No, because we as Americans would love somehow to do everything we need to do, but have taxes that are either very low or nonexistent. That is not a knock on us. We would all rather pay less taxes than we pay, but we continuously just spend time knocking and knocking. If you measure the time that we have spent on this bill so far and you measure how much of that time has been allocated to the IRS and to bringing it down, not to helping it in any way, not to coming up with any solutions--the whole argument has been they did something wrong, we are going to punish them. We are not talking about children.…”