Joe Cunningham: “this bill is, as my colleagues on the other side say, about now and the future, but I think we see it a little bit…”

“this bill is, as my colleagues on the other side say, about now and the future, but I think we see it a little bit differently. It is an honest debate, and I would tell my friends that my colleagues on the other side, I believe, feel that if we give tax relief money to people, it just goes down a rat hole; that it does not work; that it is just gone; that it adds to the debt and the deficit. I do not believe that is true. When we give money to a family, maybe they go out to the store and they buy books or they buy a double egg, double cheese, double fry burger at McDonald's and they pay taxes on that. They pay local, they pay State and they pay Federal taxes, and that money comes back to our coffers for more money to spend. That is called tax relief. It is not all President Clinton's fault. We are in Congress, we spend money and we make the rules. But right after President Clinton left, we were in a slight recession. We gave tax relief and we had one of the fastest recoveries ever, and we had 9/11. My friend from New York knows the devastation that was in New York City. We spent billions of dollars to fix it. We lost a lot of revenue because a lot of people not only lost their lives but lost jobs there. Guess what, now that those jobs are coming back, that revenue is coming here. It means more money to spend. We are tying to give them, the same families, more money to spend to come here.”