Political Quotes

“a lot of our colleagues on the other side have come to the floor today and have talked about why they don't like our tax reform bill. Many of those arguments have been focused on who benefits from it. Of course, as is usually the case when you start talking about any kind of an attempt to reduce taxes on the American people so they can keep more of what they earn, keep more dollars in their pockets so they can decide how to spend it rather than send it to Washington, DC, Democrats complain that it is tax cuts for the rich. Well, again, I want to point out--and this, of course, is based upon the Joint Committee on Taxation, which was just alluded to--where they find the benefits of the tax relief goal. As you can see from this chart, these represent different income groups. The highest percentage tax cuts actually go to those in the lower and middle-income groups. If you look at who benefits from this, every income group gets a significant tax cut, but middle-income Americans do particularly well percentagewise under this tax reform proposal. So the argument, again, that this is somehow simply a tax cut for the rich just doesn't pass the smell test. It doesn't comport with reality. Clearly, the numbers tell a very different story. The other point I wish to make is that if we look at what we tried to accomplish in the design of this tax bill, we see that we tried to maintain the existing progressivity in the tax bill.…”