Senate Floor Speech
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison
July 14, 2000 -- Page: S6792

MRS. HUTCHISON. Mr. President, Senator Brownback and I are going to make statements about the bill. This is my bill. I have been working on marriage penalty relief for the last 4 years.

Senator Ashcroft, Senator Abraham, Senator Grams of Minnesota, Senator Brownback, and I, along with my colleague, Senator Gramm, have all made this a very high priority in our legislative agenda. We have made this a high priority because we believe it is un-American to make people choose between love and money. That is what the marriage penalty does.

In America, if you make $30,000 and you are a schoolteacher and you marry a policeman who makes $30,000, all of a sudden, you owe more in taxes. I thought it was interesting; the Senator from Massachusetts just said we have spent a trillion dollars by giving death tax relief. We spent a trillion dollars, and what do we have to show for it?

I have to ask the question: Whose money is it? Is letting people keep more of the money they earn in their pocketbooks and to decide how they want to spend it wrong? I think we should let people keep their money. I don't consider it spending a trillion dollars, allowing people to keep the money they earn. I think it is the reverse.

I believe we should not be spending other people's money, when we are running a huge surplus and don't need it in the Federal Government for new programs. I believe the American people can make better decisions about how they spend the money they earn than we can here in Washington.

So when you are talking about tax relief, you are not talking about spending money. It is not the Government's money. It belongs to the people who earn it. Government, by the consent of the governed, will take some money for the good of everyone--for national defense, for clearly Federal issues that cannot be done by people individually, for our security. But it becomes confiscatory when a couple making $30,000 apiece has to pay $1,000 more in taxes just because they get married. That is what we are trying to eliminate today.

When the distinguished Senator from Massachusetts says we have done nothing for the average family, I just ask him if a policeman and a schoolteacher constitute an average family. I think they do, and I think they deserve the $1,000, or $1,400, more they are paying in taxes to make the downpayment on their first home. That is help for the American family. That is help for the average family. A young couple who make $30,000 each and get married may not be able to save for a downpayment if they are having to pay $1,400 more in taxes just because they got married.

So tax relief is not spending money. Spending money that other people earn is spending money--their money. I think there is a huge difference.

The bill we have before us today would double the standard deduction so that if you get married, you don't get penalized. Today, if two single working people get married, they will pay approximately $1,100 more in taxes because of the standard deduction. We want to double the standard deduction because we don't think it should be different for two working singles or a married couple, both working. So we want the standard deduction to be $8,800, exactly double the standard deduction.

Secondly, we want people in the 15-percent bracket and the 28-percent bracket not to be punished because the got married and were pushed into a higher tax bracket. We do this by widening each bracket for married couples so that it is exactly double the bracket size of a single taxpayer. So in the 15-percent bracket, if you are single or married, it will not make any difference because you will not go into the next bracket if we can pass marriage penalty relief because, of course, that is the problem. When a schoolteacher, who makes $26,000 and is in the 15-percent bracket, marries a policeman who makes $26,000 and is in the 15-percent bracket, they go into the 28-percent bracket, and that is why they pay more in taxes. We want them to be able to stay in the 15-percent bracket, each of them making $26,000 a year. That is exactly what our bill does.

Our bill increases the earned-income tax credit because we know that people--especially people coming off welfare--need to be able to have an earned-income tax credit to make sure they do better working than being on welfare. The Senate bill increases the earned-income tax credit parameters by $2,500. That is higher than the House version of the bill by $500. We think that is right. We want the people at the lowest end of the spectrum to know it really does make a difference that you work. We want it to be a benefit.

Another important aspect of our bill is preserving essential tax credits for families. Important tax credits such as the $500 per child tax credit, the adoption tax credit, the HOPE scholarship credit for families who want to send their children to college, the credit for expenses related to child care--they would all remain intact, regardless of the alternative minimum tax. Many families are finding that, with the alternative minimum tax, they lose the basic deduction that everyone else gets. The $500 per child tax credit should apply, regardless of whether a person is in the alternative minimum tax category.

We are trying to have a balanced approach for people who have a real problem. Just prior to this debate I, and several other Senators met with some of the couples that are affected by this bill. We had a couple from San Antonio, TX, Noe and Connie Garcia. He works for an insurance company; she is a Government employee. When they did their taxes last year, they estimated that they paid over $1,000 more in taxes because they are married.

We had a very young couple, Hubert and Min Joo Kim, come to visit with us today. They live in Maryland. She is a teacher; he is an engineer. They have been married for 2 years, and they have a 1-year-old daughter named Isabelle, who is absolutely a precious child. But they are losing the ability to do some of the things they would like to do for Isabelle because they are paying a marriage tax penalty.

Earlier this year I met with Kervin and Marsha Johnson live in Washington, DC. Kervin is a D.C. police officer. His wife is a Federal employee. They were married last July. This year, they paid almost a $1,000 more in taxes because they chose to get married.

Mr. President, these are just a few of the 21 million American couples who are suffering from the marriage penalty tax. This is not just tax relief, this is a tax correction. This is correcting an inequity that I don't believe Congress ever intended. Congress did not intend to say: If you are a policeman and you make $30,000 a year, and you marry a schoolteacher who makes $30,000 a year, we want you to pay $1,400 more in taxes. I don't believe Congress ever intended that to happen.

I think it is time for Congress to correct this inequity. If we pass this, next year the vast majority of couples will get immediate tax relief as we increase the standard deduction. Beginning the year after next, we start the phased-in increase of the tax brackets.

We are going to be debating this bill today, and we are going to start voting on some amendments Monday night.

When we passed marriage tax penalty relief once before, the President vetoed the bill. He said he didn't like some of the other tax cuts that were in the bill. The President said in his State of the Union Message that he favored tax relief for American families. He has said he favors marriage tax penalty relief. He said: Send me those bills individually because then I can pick and choose. So we sent him individually the elimination of the earnings test on Social Security recipients. He signed that bill. Today, because Congress acted and the President signed the bill, a person who receives Social Security benefits can work as much or as little as he or she wants to work. There will be no penalty. There will be no earnings test. We have opened the doors to hundreds of thousands of our senior citizens who would like to earn extra income.

Today we passed the elimination of the death tax. It is going to the President because we believe the American dream does not have fences. We believe the American dream is, if you come to America, you will have the freedom to succeed, and it will not be dependent on who your grandfather was. It will be dependent on you. If you want to work hard and give your children a better chance than you had, we want you to be able to keep the fruits of your labors and give your children that chance.

We have passed that. We have sent it to the President. We hope the President will sign that bill. Now we have marriage penalty relief. This is the marriage penalty relief for middle-income people who do not have the ability to make the choice not to get married because they want to start a family, and they want their children to grow up in a healthy, wholesome atmosphere. They don't have that choice because our tax code punishes them for doing so.

We are going to correct this inequity. We are going to pass marriage penalty relief. We are going to do what the President asked us to do; that is, send him the bill by itself. I hope he will sign it so we can give marriage penalty relief to hard-working American families.

I will close and ask that we hear from Senator Brownback from Kansas, who has been the lead cosponsor of marriage penalty relief. We have worked for years side by side, along with Senator Abraham, Senator Ashcroft, Senator Grams, and my colleague, Senator Gramm, to see this come to a successful conclusion.

I hope we can give the middle-income people of our country--people in the 15-percent bracket, the people in the 28-percent bracket, and people who get earned-income tax credits--more of the relief they deserve because I reject the argument that tax relief is spending money. Tax relief is spending money only if you think the Government has a right to the money you earned, and I don't think the Government does. I think the people who earn the money are entitled to that money. Tax relief is not spending money because the Government doesn't own the money that is earned by the hard-working people of this country. We want them to keep more of it. That is the bottom line in this debate.