Ron Kind: “With all due respect to the chairman of the committee--and I do respect him, and he is a friend of mine--he knows as…”

“With all due respect to the chairman of the committee--and I do respect him, and he is a friend of mine--he knows as well as anyone that there is a big difference between permanency in the Tax Code and short-term measures to give us some time in order to find out what the appropriate permanent solution will be. That is, really, what we ought to be doing right now, is trying to find that permanent solution once and for all, but in a fiscally responsible manner. That is how we should be approaching this. Again, to the chairman's credit, the discussion draft he just released a few weeks ago calls for offsets to the Revenue Code in order to do comprehensive reform, so he belies his own argument from just a minute ago that tax cuts shouldn't be met with corresponding offsets. I mean, if that is true, then what have we been doing for the last 3 years in trying to do comprehensive reform while still paying for it, so we are not blowing a hole in future budget deficits?”