Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I rise this morning to talk about an issue that the American people expect us to take action on, and that is to provide another extension of the payroll tax cut we put into place in 2010. I want to provide a little bit of background by way of recent history. We started this debate a number of weeks ago when I proposed legislation which would do the following--this is a brief summary. But here is what I proposed: that we would not only continue the payroll tax cut for workers, but that we would enlarge it, make it a bigger cut. So instead of having the payroll tax cut for employees across the country that would amount to $1,000, as we did last year--that was the right thing to do last year as part of the larger bill--I thought we should go further and cut the payroll tax in half for workers across America. What we are talking about here is 160 million American workers. This is not some small matter. This is a major issue for the American people and for those 160 million families in America. That is what I proposed on the employee side; instead of cutting it to the level we did last year, we cut it even more--cut it in half. Then I added to that a provision for business so that you would have businesses across the United States, 98 percent of them, also get their payroll taxes cut in half as well. So you have employees and employers getting a cut of their payroll tax obligations in half.…”