Burgess Owens: “Mr. Chairman, I hope the taxpayers are listening very carefully. Taxpayers are angry and they have good reason to be…”

“Mr. Chairman, I hope the taxpayers are listening very carefully. Taxpayers are angry and they have good reason to be angry. We are paying too much taxes. Taxes should be lowered for families and individuals, while we raise taxes for corporations. Families and individuals are paying something like 44 percent of the tax burden. Corporations are only paying 11 percent, but that is a discussion for another time. The other way we deal with the way our money is being handled is by streamlining and downsizing and cutting out waste in Government. Here is a concrete example of extreme waste in Government. We cannot talk about concrete figures because they will not give them to us, but there is general agreement. Nobody ever challenges the figure, but the overall intelligence budget is about $28 billion, no less than $28 billion. We are talking today about one portion of it which deals with information gathering activities related to the military which everybody agrees is no less than $16 billion. In previous amendments we have called for a 10-percent cut in the overall intelligence budget, and that would have been $2.8 billion, or a 10-percent cut for 1 year. And then we said over a 7-year period of course that adds up to much more. This is a reasonable amendment, very reasonable.”