Political Quotes

“I will be closing the Senate very shortly, but before I do I want to say a few words about a topic that came up today. Obviously, I was pleased that a majority of the Senate, indeed a bipartisan majority of the Senate, has just voted to eliminate an unfortunate gimmick in the Tax Code that allows people who make north of a quarter of a billion dollars a year to pay lower tax rates than a Providence, RI truckdriver pays if he is single. I think that is pretty hard to justify, frankly. I think a lot of Americans spent last week preparing their taxes and having heard from Warren Buffett who 1 year paid an 11-percent all-in Federal tax rate, a rate obviously higher than his secretary paid, something Mr. Buffett himself has complained about, there is a pretty wide sense that the American Tax Code serves special interests and people who have phenomenal amounts of wealth much better than it serves regular middle-class taxpayers. That is particularly true if you avoid doing what my Republican colleagues have done, which is focus on the most progressive part of the Tax Code, the income tax part, and ignore the most regressive part of the Tax Code which hits the working families the hardest, which is payroll taxes. Almost everything they will say about the American Tax Code conveniently omits the taxes that most Americans pay--more Americans pay than the income tax, frankly. But we had a good discussion on that subject.…”