Political Quotes

“I would say it is concerning that this gets boiled down to some sort of an idea that we are just trying to protect the rich. What we are trying to do is to do something to help this economy to allow the private sector to create jobs and reduce this unemployment, which is maddeningly remaining at very high, unacceptable levels. Everybody, all the economists and others, tells us the economy will not come back until we have a lower unemployment rate. Raising taxes is not the way to lower unemployment, and we are talking about a significant increase to 39.6 percent on upper income taxpayers. These are small businesspeople. I met one gentleman who has 10 fast food restaurants and 200 employees. He told me with the health care bill and the stress he is seeing, he expects to be laying off 70 of those employees. We do not need to even be laying off 7. We need to be able to hire more, if we can, so we can have more people working. Then we have, in addition, a 2.9-percent increase on upper income people, a 2.9-percent additional tax for Medicare. That makes the total tax rate about 42.8 percent or 42.6 percent. Plus, my State of Alabama has a 5-percent income tax. That makes it 47 percent. Some have 10 percent income tax. Then we pay sales taxes. Then we pay property taxes, and other taxes, gasoline taxes and those things. So the idea that we can just continue to ratchet up taxes without consequence to the economy is not accurate.”