Burgess Owens: “today was a historic day; and I join my colleagues on the other side in celebrating the passage of the Senior Citizens'…”

“today was a historic day; and I join my colleagues on the other side in celebrating the passage of the Senior Citizens' Freedom to Work Act. It is a great achievement. We all should be quite proud of it. I congratulate my colleagues. It was a bipartisan achievement, and we should all celebrate it and also take the next step. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle said we should take steps to reduce the Social Security tax as soon as possible, so I hope that that is going to be somewhere in the proposed budget proposals and appropriations proposals, that we will begin to take back, roll back, the increase in the payroll taxes. The payroll taxes represent the largest increases in taxes over the last 2 decades. So we heard our colleagues on the Republican side say they think it ought to be rolled back. We want to endorse that wholeheartedly. Let us roll back the payroll tax and lower the taxes that people pay for Social Security. The immortal words of Thomas Jefferson kept ringing in my ears as I listened to the debate today, ``life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,'' the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In affirming the fact that we want to take care of our senior citizens, we say we want to have more life, longer life, and we are all in favor of that. Life is sacred; and all over the world I think there is no ideology, no political philosophy at this point and no religion that condones irreverence for life.…”