Mike Conaway: “You cannot talk about eliminating waste, fraud and abuse in Federal spending without kind of putting it in some context.…”

“You cannot talk about eliminating waste, fraud and abuse in Federal spending without kind of putting it in some context. During the 1950s, the Federal income tax amounted to about 2 percent of the family budget. At that point in time, Americans had continued to experience a growing standard of living as it has continued to grow. In the 1990s, however, the Federal income tax consumes about 25 percent of that same family of four's income. And I think most of us have run on platforms that have said that Americans are overtaxed. Tax levels at all levels when you begin to add Federal income taxes, State income taxes, local taxes, the sales taxes, the variety of taxes that we all pay from cradle to grave, they consume about 50 percent of a family's income. We will celebrate, sometime in April, May, June, the day keeps getting longer each year, a tax holiday in a sense that most average Americans will have worked through that part of the year in order just to pay their taxes. We will spend in this government on the order of $2.5 trillion in fiscal 2005 and 2006.”