The House has just passed the
Temporary Tax Relief Act of 2007, H.R. 3996 by a vote of
216-193, which would provide millions of middle-class families with tax cuts and help grow our economy without increasing the national debt. The Temporary Tax Relief Act will provide immediate tax relief for working families by preventing 23 million middle class families from paying higher taxes this April. The legislation also closes unfair tax loopholes that benefit Wall Street millionaires and cost middle class taxpayers billions. The Republican Party had an opportunity to offer a substitute, but declined to do so, having decried the
PAYGO rules instituted during this Congress which would have prevented new deficit spending.
| Speaker Pelosi: "It enables us as Members of Congress to plant a flag for fiscal responsibility, to plant a flag for the middle class in our country... When we talk about fiscal responsibility, unfortunately, it always seems necessary after listening to my Republican colleagues to set the record straight. The Democratic Party is the party of fiscal responsibility. When president Clinton was president, his four final budgets were in surplus. He left office with our budget on a trajectory of $5.6 trillion in surplus. Sadly, the Bush Administration reversed that, taking us to over $3 trillion in deficit, a swing -- now we are about a swing of about $10 trillion, a swing that is greater than anyone has ever seen in history in terms of fiscal irresponsibility." |
| Rep. Chris Van Hollen (MD-08): "Today we gather to fix two big problems left behind by the Republican Congress under President Bush. One is a huge middle class tax increase that they left hanging over the heads of the American people, a tsunami that if we don't act today will crash down on 24 million American taxpayers. The Republican Congress under President Bush could have addressed this problem. They chose not to, it just was not a priority for them. They instead spent their time providing tax increases that went to the very wealthiest Americans, and left the rest of the country holding the bag of $9 trillion debt, a debt that cost the American taxpayer $3,300 each year to pay the service on that debt..." |
| Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (OH-11): "I thank my chairman for giving me this opportunity to be heard. You know, my friend from New York, I tried to feel what he was saying to me, and it was emotional and everything, but it did not speak to the issue that we are talking about. I went to law school and I wanted to be a civil rights lawyer. And I thought that if I was a great civil rights lawyer I could really help the people of America, the people that lived in my community. But I should have been a tax lawyer, because had I been a tax lawyer then I would have understood how I could help middle class families by fixing the AMT." |
| Rep. Artur Davis (AL-07): "This bill is not burden-free. This is who bears the burden: 36,000 - 50,000 individuals who took the deduction of carried interest, less than .02% of the tax paying population. And what was the combined income in the last tax year, Mr. Speaker? $935 billion. That is who will bear the burden. When Mr. Van Hollen and I came to the Congress, here is who bore the burden every time they brought tax bills to the floor: college students who were pushed into paying higher loans, families on Medicaid who were pushed into paying higher premiums, people who were pushed into having their benefits taken away and needed them, and soldiers who lost the earned the income tax credit for some of their families. Under this majority, the people who bear the burden when we have to make difficult choices will not be the people who are working and sustaining this country day in and day out. Yes, someone will bear the burden, a very small narrow category of the super-rich." |