Senate Floor Speech
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison
February 7, 2001 -- Page: S1102

MRS. HUTCHISON. Mr. President, I am very pleased to be working with my colleague, Senator Thomas, today, and all of this week, to talk about the tax cuts we have tried to provide for hard-working American families.

We have been trying to give tax relief to working Americans for the last 3 years, but we had a President who did not agree with us. Every time we sent him a tax relief bill, it got vetoed.

But today we have a President who agrees with us that hard-working Americans deserve to keep more of the money they earn. Because we believe it is their money, not ours, we want them to have the choices.

So we do have a proposal that Congress and the President are going to work together, hopefully, on a very bipartisan basis, to produce for the American people something they can realize, not something that is so complicated and minuscule and fractionated that nobody is ever going to know they got a tax cut. What we want is real tax relief for hard-working Americans.

It is pretty simple. The basic part of this tax relief plan would replace the current five-rate tax structure--which is 15 percent, 28 percent, 31 percent, 36 percent, and 39.6 percent--with four lower tax brackets: 10 percent, not 15 percent, would be the lower bracket; then 15 percent; then 25 percent; and then 33 percent.

That is the bulk of the tax relief plan that we will send to President Bush if we can get the support of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle.

For a couple with two children, making $35,000 they will have their taxes eliminated. For a couple with two children, making $50,000, their taxes will be cut by 50 percent. For a couple with two children, making $75,000 their taxes will be cut by 25 percent.

This is tax relief that people will be able to experience. We also hope that people will feel so good that they will buy the car they have been waiting to buy or that they will know then that they will be able to make the downpayment on the house they have been saving for--something that will spur the economy because there is no question our economy is not growing right now. It is stagnant.

But we think it can be revived if there is consumer confidence. Consumer confidence would come if people feel good about their jobs and their prospects and if they have more money in their pockets. So this is a very important staple of the tax cut plan.

The part that I have been working on personally for so many years is the marriage penalty tax cut. Why, in America, would we have to ask people to choose between love and money? The fact is, most couples in America, indeed, have to pay an average of $1,400 more in taxes just because they got married.

Who does this hit the hardest? It hits the policeman and the schoolteacher who get married and all of a sudden find they have $1,000 more that they owe to Uncle Sam--$1,000 they could certainly use. So we want to help married couples not have to pay any penalty whatsoever.

Why should you pay a penalty just because you got married? It does not make sense. So we want to eliminate the marriage tax penalty. In fact, I am going to be working with others to make the marriage penalty tax cut part of our tax plan significant. We believe we should double the standard deduction, that you should not have to pay more in a standard deduction because you are married than you would if you had two single income-earning people. So we are going to try to change that.

We are going to encourage charitable contributions by allowing people who have saved and put money in their IRAs through the years--if they find out they do not need that money because they are doing OK, and their kids are doing OK--to give some of that money to charity if they want. But there is a big bar to doing that today, and that is the tax consequence. You cannot just take the money out and give it to the charity; You have to pay the taxes.

So we want to eliminate that tax, if it is going to go straight to charity. This will encourage people to do things that will enhance our communities, and that is to give to the charity of their choice.

We want to try to help parents by doubling the child tax credit. President Bush has made this a priority. He wants to make sure that we have a $1,000 per child tax credit rather than the $500 per child tax credit that we are working toward today because we know it costs a lot of money to raise a family. Children grow. They grow out of their clothes; they eat a lot; they need to be healthy; and they need to be well fed and well dressed.

The occupant of the Chair is smiling because he has nine children. He knows. He has been there. He has fed and clothed them. He knows this is something that parents need the help to do.

Mr. President, I am very pleased to be here and be a part of the group that is talking about the Bush tax cuts. We are talking about the Bush tax cuts for hard-working American families. We are talking about Congress working with the President on a bipartisan basis for a lot of reasons to let people keep more of the money they earn. That is the bottom line.

We want people to be able to keep the money they earn because we believe it belongs to them, not to us. We believe families, especially, should get the break they so badly need.

We are being taxed at a higher rate today than ever in peacetime. I am very pleased that we have this tax relief plan. We know it is going to pass. That is what pleases me. Before, when we had been working on tax cuts, we had a President who would threaten to veto them every time we sent them to him. Today, we have a tax cut plan with a President who says he is going to sign it.

So we feel very good about that. We are going to be talking about it and hope the people of this country realize we are going to do something significant for every taxpaying American. Those in the lowest brackets will get the most relief; those in the upper brackets will get the least relief, but they will get some relief. We think it is fair to target it to middle-income and low-income people. We want them to get the most benefit. They are the ones who pay the most per capita, per income dollar. We want to relieve that, but we want every working American who pays taxes to get relief.

Mr. President, I am very proud to be here with my colleague, Senator Pete Domenici. Senator Domenici is, of course, the person who heads our Budget Committee. He knows, in the final analysis, it is his committee that is going to give us a budget that is balanced, that pays down the debt, that takes care of the increases in spending that we know we are going to need in places such as education, national defense, Medicare reform, prescription drug benefits and options, and give back to hard-working Americans some of their tax money.

I cannot think of anyone that I would trust to be able to do that than my colleague from New Mexico. I will now turn the floor over to him.