Political Quotes

“I hope that folks paying attention to this tax reform debate pick up on what Senator Coats has just described. When the alternative minimum tax was first debated, the country was talking about 155 people. These were the so-called wealthy folks. They were paying no taxes at all. What Senator Coats has just described is, next year, what started as a program to try to make sure that 155 people didn't end up getting a sweetheart deal, now we are going to see 34 million people crushed by this inequitable kind of tax, a kind of bureaucratic water torture. We have about the same numbers in Oregon that Senator Coats has in Indiana. In 2008, 44,000 Oregon taxpayers had to pay the alternative minimum tax. Without some kind of extension or, as Senator Coats and I essentially want to do, abolishment of the alternative minimum tax, that is going to rise to close to 400,000 next year. The people who are getting hammered by this alternative minimum tax certainly don't fit that small class of the so-called freeloading wealthy folks who are figuring out ways to pay nothing. For example, a woman earns $65,000 in 2010, say she manages a health club, she has three kids, she has to file her taxes independent of her husband because they are in the middle of a divorce. As someone who is married, filing separately, she would have been hit by the AMT in 2010, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.…”