Political Quotes

“I thank the Chair. Let me talk for a moment about the legislation. The legislation before us, as I said before, would both extend and expand the payroll tax cut that is in place right now. First of all, for employees, we cut it in half. So instead of paying a 6.2-percent payroll tax, the employee, the worker, would pay just 3.1 percent. That has a sizable impact on the economy when we do that-- 1,500 bucks in the pockets of the average worker in America. Approximately 160 million American workers are impacted and as many as 6.7 million in Pennsylvania. So we would not only keep in place the payroll tax cut for workers, but we want to expand it so it is fully cut in half. Secondly, I wish to speak for a moment about the employer side of this because that wasn't part of last year's effort. I introduced the payroll tax credit in early 2010 to encourage employers to hire and accelerate the pace of the recovery. A number of folks on both sides of the aisle have worked on this. The ideas of those kinds of tax credits in those kinds of bills we introduced form the foundation of what we are trying to do today. This legislation incorporates elements of my and others' earlier legislation to provide businesses with quarterly incentives to increase their payrolls. I wish to highlight a couple of elements of the legislation before us. First, this bill cuts payroll taxes in half for 98 percent of U.S. businesses. These businesses have taxable payrolls of $5 million or less.…”