John Spratt: “we have three tax cut bills before us today, a large one coming up tomorrow, and here is the problem with doing business…”

“we have three tax cut bills before us today, a large one coming up tomorrow, and here is the problem with doing business that way, especially under suspension. When you break these tax cuts into so many small places, virtually fragments, we quickly lose the audit trail and do not appreciate in the aggregate how much they add up to. So let me try to reconstruct that audit trail on the back of this envelope right here and show you exactly what the summation of today and tomorrow will mean for the bottom line, i.e. the deficit. If we take the transportation bill which we passed this year, is $1.1 billion over 10 years, about a billion dollars over 5 years. The Energy Policy Act is about $6.9 billion in revenues lost over 5 years. The Katrina Tax Relief of 2005 has a $6.1 billion price tag. That is its revenue impact. The big bill tomorrow will be the Tax Extension Reconciliation Act, $56 billion in the House, $80 billion over 10 years. We have just done the Stealth Tax Relief Act extending for 1 year the AMT at its existing level of application. The cost of that for 1 year over 5 years is $31 billion. Then we have the Tax Revision Act of 2005 with small cuts in it which have not been scored, but it has a cost. Finally, we have the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005. The revenue effect of it over 5 years is $7 billion.…”