Political Quotes

“Members may not recognize this fellow in the fedora standing in the shadows, but they ought to be aware of what he is doing. He is a caricature of America's leading tax shelter hustlers. This bill is his bill. By restricting amendments, by assuring that we cannot deal with the leading causes of injustice in our tax system today, Republicans have protected the tax shelter hustlers. Only yesterday, the Secretary of the Treasury, Larry Summers, told the Senate Finance Committee that failure to address this issue of tax shelters "in a meaningful way puts the fairness and efficacy of our tax system at risk." He has also said that the most serious compliance problem we have in the American tax system today is the failure to deal with tax shelter hustlers. This bill in particular, like the Committee on Ways and Means, in general does absolutely nothing to stop the tax shelter hustlers that are robbing the Treasury of upwards of $10 billion a year. Only this week we learned that the tax shelter problem has gotten so serious that one insurance company after another is moving to Bermuda. It is so bad that even some of the insurance companies that remain in this country are saying, our competitors are gaining an unfair advantage through their tax shelters. It is wrong, and that is why the substitute that the gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel) has proposed incorporates a bill that I wrote concerning abusive tax shelters.”