Sylvester Turner: “That point is certainly well taken. I think the benefits of paying down the debt maybe are not quite as obvious to the…”

“That point is certainly well taken. I think the benefits of paying down the debt maybe are not quite as obvious to the American people as we need to try to make it. Most of the people I talk to in my district are fiscally conservative folks that believe if you owe $5.7 trillion dollars, you ought to try to pay that down. They do not believe in owing money. Many folks do not realize in addition to paying down the debt, as the right thing to do, that we will get an interest dividend that the gentleman from Minnesota talked about. I really believe that the important thing for us to emphasize to the American people is that our Republican leadership, beginning tomorrow, is coming back with the same $1 trillion tax cut that they tried to pass last time and that the American people realized was just a ploy to try to show who could be for cutting taxes the most, and now they are breaking that big $1 trillion tax cut down into little pieces and trying to roll them out here on the floor, because it is harder to vote against a little tax cut than it was that $1 trillion one, hopefully forcing the Members of this House to vote for a tax cut. We are going to vote for a marriage penalty tax cut as Democrats, but we are going to do it in the context of a budget that reduces the national debt, that saves Social Security and provides the kind of tax relief that average working Americans need.”