Political Quotes

“I thank leaders Reid, McConnell, and Chairman Baucus for discussing tax extender provisions this afternoon. I want to reinforce a couple of points I raised earlier this year when the Finance Committee held a hearing on tax extenders. My first point is that the explosion of temporary tax provisions in recent years has been a very notable and problematic trend. The number of temporary tax provisions has grown from 42 in 1998 to 154 in 2011. Not many people can be found that will say that Congress should continue dealing with tax extenders in a business-as-usual manner. And we should not continue doing business as usual when it comes to extenders. Recently, Congress has allowed important temporary tax incentives such as the research and development credit to expire. Then, after the business decisions have already been made, Congress has retroactively extended the tax provisions. If a provision is worthy of being in the tax code, then optimally it should be permanent. For instance, the R and D credit is an extremely worthy provision, and it should be an enhanced and permanent tax incentive. That is what Chairman Baucus and I have proposed in a bill we introduced in September 2011. My second point is that tax incentives play a very important role in businesses' planning of their affairs, making investments, and creating jobs. And these job creators don't want bad certainty they don't want to hear that their taxes are going up.…”