Thomas Daschle: “this debate today and tomorrow is not about whether to cut taxes but how to cut them. Democrats support a tax cut, but…”

“this debate today and tomorrow is not about whether to cut taxes but how to cut them. Democrats support a tax cut, but we want them to be the right kind. We want them to be fair, especially to working families. I congratulate Senator Roth and Senator Moynihan and the Members on both sides of the aisle for the bipartisan effort to improve the House bill. In many ways it is a substantial improvement of the bill passed by the House Ways and Means Committee. But in the view of many Democrats, problems still remain in the version that is now before us. Under both the House and the Senate plans, the top 1 percent of taxpayers, people making over $350,000 a year, receive more than the bottom 60 percent put together, people making under $50,000. This chart depicts very well what the circumstances are. In the Archer bill, 67 percent of all the benefits in the tax bill go to the highest 20 percent. In the Roth bill, 65 percent of all the benefits go to the top 20 percent. In the bill that we are presenting as an alternative today, 20 percent of the benefits go to the top 20 percent, but 75 percent of the benefits go to the middle 60 percent. So the distribution, the progressivity of the alternative plan that we are presenting today, is a significant improvement for working families across this country. The people who have yet to share fully in the economic recovery are in the bottom 60 percent, the bottom four quintiles of income distribution, not in the top 1 percent.”