Don Nickles: “Let me go to that, and I appreciate the Senator's comments because I knew the bill's proponents would say my numbers…”

“Let me go to that, and I appreciate the Senator's comments because I knew the bill's proponents would say my numbers don't assume a volume adjustment. The administration, when they did their projection to come up with a $516 billion price tag for this bill, they did no volume adjustment. When the AGs came up with their price tag for the settlement, they didn't do a volume adjustment. And finally, we discovered that the White House changed the volume adjustment threshold in this legislation over the weekend. That bothers me a lot. That was changed Sunday or Monday night. And that bothers me a lot. Let me conclude. I know what my colleague is going to say. Let me take you through this a little bit further. The volume adjustments, the formula that passed out of the Commerce Committee says the industry payments will be reduced by the volume. If there is a reduction in sales, we will reduce the tax. Again, in calculating the costs of their own bills, both the $516 billion current dollar estimate and the $755 billion nominal dollar estimate, they didn't calculate the volume adjustment. Now, what happened Sunday and Monday night was a humongous tax increase that nobody knows about because the volume adjustment was triggered not when sales dropped below 100 percent of 1997; it is triggered when sales drop below 80 percent of 1997. So you get no volume reduction unless you reduce total consumption to below 80 percent where we are today.”