Don Nickles: “on occasion it sounds as if we are redebating the budget. That is not what we are debating. We are debating a growth…”

“on occasion it sounds as if we are redebating the budget. That is not what we are debating. We are debating a growth package. The fact is, last year we did not have a budget. This year we do have a budget. This year we have a tax bill to help grow the economy. Some of my colleagues on the Democratic side offered a tax bill as well. It was $152 billion. This tax bill is $316 billion. It is not even $350 billion. I keep hearing it is $350 billion, but there is about $34 billion in spending. One of the amendments passed with 97 votes. It did not have my vote. My point is, it is a $316 billion tax cut over 10 years. Over those 10 years, we are going to have revenues of about $25 trillion, $26 trillion. We did load it upfront because we want to have as much economic impact as we possibly can. The economy is very soft, and we wanted to grow the economy. We did things to help encourage investments and jobs. We were taxing capital investment far too much. We tax dividends higher than any country in the world. That is absurd. Basically, we are cutting the dividend tax a little bit more than half. We did not do as well, in my opinion, as we did in the Senate. That is part of the compromise. We took part of the House provision. We are going to tax capital gains at 15 percent and tax dividends at 15 percent. I think there is common sense in taxing both at that level. I heard someone say there is nothing in here for low-income people. That is not true.”