Don Nickles: “we heard the minority leader say there are 72 million people who do not get anything out of the bill; they do not get a…”

“we heard the minority leader say there are 72 million people who do not get anything out of the bill; they do not get a rate reduction because we do not reduce the 15-percent bracket. There are different ways of cutting taxes. The way we have done it is to put in a significant percentage of income. People were saying 15 percent. We said we are going to tax that at 10 percent. The net result is we cut everybody's individual taxes. If they make up to $12,000 as an individual, they get a tax cut of $300. If it is a couple, they get a tax cut of $600. That boils down to an across-the-board cut, if you want to look at that, for people who are in the 10-percent bracket; if they are married, it is a 10-percent tax cut. You can do that one of two ways. You could say let's reduce the 15-percent bracket to 13.5 percent. I have suggested that. It might make that simpler policy. That way we can say we reduced every bracket a similar amount. But the other brackets we reduced by 1 point. I suggested 1.5 points. In other words, reduce the 15-percent bracket 10 percent so we can say we reduced every bracket by the same amount. I will be happy to reduce upper brackets by 10 percent. We do not do that, certainly not retroactively. For people to assume we are not helping the lower or middle income is not factually correct. The rate reduction we have in the bill reported out of the Finance Committee exceeds 1 percent. It exceeds what we have done in every other bracket.”