Don Nickles: “I have great respect for him as a friend and a colleague, but I would urge our colleagues to vote no on the amendment.…”

“I have great respect for him as a friend and a colleague, but I would urge our colleagues to vote no on the amendment. We have pay-go in the existing bill. We have pay-go basically for anything that is not in the assumption of the budget resolution. We assume $144 billion on the tax side. It may sound like a lot of money, but over that 5-year period of time, we are talking about $12 trillion of revenue. The amount of money that we are saving is a very small percentage. Now, why do we try to say, Well, you should not have to pay for that? Because almost all of that, with the exception of a little AMT, is present law. We don't have pay-go if you have a lot of spending bills that sunset. When those are reauthorized, you do not say, Oh, now you have to have pay-go. You have to raise taxes or cut spending to reauthorize the farm bill, for example. As a matter of fact, I have found about $1 trillion worth of entitlements over the next several years that are sunset or due to sunset, but they don't have pay-go when they are extended. We have a lot of tax cuts that are sunset that, when they are extended, would have to be paid for. So it really discriminates against taxes, makes it much more difficult to keep tax levels where they are today. Some people say: Additional tax cuts. I say, no, keep taxes where they are today.”