Senate Floor Speech
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison
July 13, 1999 -- Page: S8310

MRS. HUTCHISON. Mr. President, I thank Senator Brownback.

Senator Ashcroft from Missouri, Senator Brownback, I, and many others have been talking about the marriage penalty tax for two sessions, and even a session before that.

We were stunned when we discovered 44 percent of married couples in the middle-income brackets--in the $40,000 to $60,000 range--were paying a penalty just for the privilege of being married.

We have introduced legislation to cut the marriage tax penalty. In fact, both the House and Senate have tax cut plans that we will be discussing over the next few months to try to determine what we can give back to the hard-working Americans who have been sending their money to Washington to fund our Government.

When we start talking about how we are going to give people their money back, I think we have to step back and talk about the basic argument, which is: What do we do with the surplus? And are tax cuts the right way to spend the surplus?

I will quote from a Ft. Worth Star-Telegram opinion piece by one of the editorial writers on that newspaper, Bill Thompson, from June 30, 1999.

He says there is only one question to ask about the budget surplus, and that is:

How should we go about giving the money back to its rightful owners?

And the rightful owners, surely even the biggest nitwit in Washington can understand, are the taxpayers of the United States of America.

The federal government is not a private business that can do whatever it wants to with unexpected profits.

Because, in fact, we are more of a co-op. We are not a business that is trying to make a profit and then decide what to do with the profits.

. . . [T]here should be no discussion about the fate of the money. . . .

If there is money left over, we give it back to the people who own that money. We in Washington, DC. do not own that money. The people who earned it own it. It is time we start giving them back the money they have earned.

We are doing what we should be doing. We are cutting back Government spending, so people can keep more of the money they earn. If we do not give it back to them, we will be abusing the power we have to tax the people. We are talking about giving the money back to the people who earn it, and the first place we ought to look is to people who are married who pay more taxes just because they are married. If they were each single they would be paying lower taxes, but because they got married the average is $1,400 in the marriage penalty tax. That is unconscionable.

Since 1969, we have seen the marriage tax penalty get worse and worse and worse. It was not meant to be that way. Congress did not intend to tax married people more. But because more women have gone into the workforce to make ends meet and to do better for their families, the Tax Code has gotten skewed and the deductions have become unfair. So today we are saying the first priority should be to eliminate the tax that is more on married people than it would be if they were single.

I yield the remainder of my time to Senator Ashcroft, who is working with me on this very important issue. We will give the taxes that people are paying to the Government back to them because it does not belong to us. It belongs to the people who earn it. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the article by Bill Thompson be printed in the Record.

There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:

Nothing will get the politicians' juices flowing like an avalanche of money. Put large piles of cash in front of a herd of politicians, and the ensuing stampede will crush everything in its path.

Nowhere is this truer than in Washington, D.C., where the latest predictions of burgeoning federal budget surpluses have the president, Congress and everyone in between all but trampling one another in their fervor to dive into those irresistible mountains of money.

Not surprisingly, all the official and semiofficial public pronouncements, all the expert analyses and all the wide-eyed speculation about the fate of the extra money seem to arrive at the same conclusion: The politicians will spend it.

In fact, the only question that anyone who's anyone seems to be asking about this `windfall' revenue is: How should we spend it?

Well, call me naive or simple-minded or just plain dumb--many readers do so on a regular basis, after all--but in my humble opinion the deep-thinkers are asking the wrong question. The only legitimate question that anybody should be asking about the federal budget surplus is: How should we go about giving the money back to its rightful owners?

And the rightful owners, surely even the biggest nitwit in Washington can understand, are the taxpayers of the United States of America.

The federal government is not a private business that can do whatever it wants to with unexpected profits. It's not even one of those publicly traded corporations that can choose among options such as reinvesting in the company sharing the profits with employees or distributing the money to stockholders by means of increased dividends.

Government collects money from citizens in the form of taxes and fees for the purpose of providing designated services to those very same citizens. If for some reason the government should happen to collect more money than it needs to provide the designated services, there should be no discussion about the fate of the money: It goes back to the taxpayers who worked it over in the first place.

For politicians and bureaucrats to suggest that they are so much as considering any other use of a budget surplus should be looked upon as the worst sort of fiscal malfeasance.

True enough, the idea of using some of the budget surplus to bail out fiscally endangered programs such as Social Security and Medicare sounds tempting. But there's a problem--two problems, actually.

Problem No. 1 is that these breathtaking estimates of budget surpluses totaling trillions of dollars over the next 15 years are just that--estimates. An unexpected downturn in the nation's economy could blow the projections sky high and leave the taxpayers with mind-boggling financial commitments to those programs--and no money to meet them.

Problem No. 2: The commitment of future budget surpluses to these expensive entitlements is a phony solution that distracts attention from the desperate need for fundamental reforms to programs whose escalating costs simply must be brought under control sooner or later.

President Clinton's proposal to dedicate a portion of any budget surplus to pay down the national debt seems reasonable enough at firs glance. But consider this: How can Clinton brag about cutting up Washington's credit card when his plan to pay off the card's outstanding balance hinges on projected income?

We should be paying off the debt with actual revenue that would be available for debt reduction if the government would cut expenses instead of constantly seeking new ways to spend the taxpayers' money.

No, this raging debate about how to spend the surplus is the wrong debate. The only question that politicians need to debate is whether to give the money back to the taxpayers in the form of a reduction in income tax rates, or through some sort of tax credit that enables taxpayers to deduct their share of the surplus from their tax bills.

The money belongs to the people. It should be returned to the people.