Senate Floor Speech
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison
July 28, 1999 -- Page: S9332

MRS. HUTCHISON. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Wyoming for talking about the tax cuts and why we need them because we heard a lot of debate this morning about that very issue.

I think we are getting down to the core issue between how the Democrats on their side of the aisle would spend taxpayer money and how the Republicans would spend taxpayer money.

I think you can tell right off the bat what people are going to think about tax cuts by how they describe them. When they talk in terms of: How much is it going to cost us to give tax cuts to the American people, right away you know they believe the money you earn belongs to them.

We believe the money you earn belongs to you. We do not think we have a choice to take that money and go spend it on some program that you may or may not like. But if you had the choice of whether to spend $500 to take your children on a vacation or to make a car payment or to save for a downpayment on a home, or a program that may or may not affect you, most people would rather make the decisions themselves.

So let's talk about some of the issues that have been raised this morning.

First of all, if I heard `reckless' one time, I heard it 100 times this past weekend. Let's talk about `reckless.' We have $3 trillion estimated as our surplus. Let's talk about how we are going to spend that, and let's see if it seems reckless.

We are going to set aside 75 cents of every dollar of the surplus for paying down debt, for strengthening Social Security, for spending on Medicare, education, and other sources. That will be 75 cents on the dollar to pay down debt, strengthening Social Security, strengthening Medicare, and other spending items.

And 25 cents of every dollar is going to be given back to the people who earned it. So 75 percent to pay down debt; 25 percent given back to the people who earned it.

We are not a corporation. We do not have a choice of what to do with profits. We take just as much money as we are going to need to fund legitimate Government programs and services. That is what governments do. Anything left over goes right back to the people who earned it.

Right now, the people of our country are paying more in peacetime taxes than ever in our history. They deserve to have some of that money back. Many families have two income earners just to cover the taxes so they can keep their quality of life for themselves and their children. We want them to have the quality of life they choose, not by taking taxes from them but by letting them decide how they spend the money they earn.

I am reading a headline in the Washington Post that says: `Clintons Plan Appeal to Women on Tax Cut.' They make the argument that we are not going to do anything for Medicare, and if we do not strengthen Medicare it is going to hurt women the most because they live longer.

I agree with the premise that women live longer, and cutting Medicare so that it is not there for them would hurt women the most, but that is not what the Republican plan does. The Republican plan does set aside the money for Medicare.

I would ask the President, when he is talking about strengthening Medicare, why he chose to disregard his own Medicare trustees and the bipartisan plan they supported that would have strengthened Medicare on a bipartisan basis and would have given prescription drug help to those who need it that was agreed to by both sides of the aisle in Congress; and yet the President walked away from that Medicare reform. Today he is saying our plan does not help Medicare, when he had a chance to help Medicare and he walked away from it--a bipartisan effort of Congress to save Medicare.

I do not think the President can have it both ways.

Let me tell you what our tax plan does for the women of our country.

No. 1, we eliminate the marriage penalty tax. If a policeman marries a schoolteacher, they owe $1,000 more in taxes to the Federal Government because they got married. The highest priority the tax cut plan has is to eliminate that penalty. I would say that is very good for the women of our country because they are often the ones who are discriminated against with the marriage penalty tax. We are going to correct that with our tax cut plan. I think that is good for the women of our country.

No. 2, I have introduced a bill for the last 3 years that would allow women who leave the workplace and have children and decide to raise their children, either 6 years before they start school or even 18 years if they decide to, when they come back into the workforce they would be able to buy back into their pension plans as if they had not left.

You see, women are discriminated against in our country, in the pension system especially, because they are the ones who live the longest and they have the lowest pensions. They have the lowest pensions because women are the ones who have children and who stay home to raise them for at least part of the early years, and they never get to catch up under the present system.

I commend Senator Roth for making that a priority in the Senate tax cut bill, that we would stop discrimination in the pension plans of women in the workforce by allowing them to catch up.

So I think we have done a lot for women. We are setting aside the money to strengthen Medicare; $500 billion over 10 years for added spending on Medicare, education, defense. We need to have that cushion--$500 billion.

In addition to that, we set aside all of the Social Security surplus--every single penny. We fence it off for Social Security because that is the No. 1 concern, and it is the No. 1 stabilizing force for the elderly in our country. That is the first priority in our whole plan. Also, $2 trillion goes directly to Social Security reform and stabilization. That will be fenced off.

The other $1 trillion we want to divide among spending increases and tax cuts. We believe it is a balanced plan. We believe the American people deserve to have back in their pocketbooks the money they earn in order to make the decisions for their families. Also, we have been especially attentive to trying to bring equality for women back into the system.

It is the Republican Congress that gave women the right to contribute equally to IRAs. Before we had our tax cut plan 2 years ago, women who didn't work outside the home could only set aside $250 a year for their retirement security; whereas, if you worked outside the home, you could set aside $2,000 a year. That has gone away. We have equalized women who work outside the home and women who work inside the home with our IRA spousal opportunities.

Now we have to go back and help them on pensions, too. That is where the lion's share of the stability is for our retired people. It is in their retirement systems. That is where women have been hit the hardest because it is women, by and large, who have the children and who will stay home and raise them. I applaud the men who do this, and I appreciate them, but by and large, it is the women who do it. When they come back into the workforce, they are penalized by not being able to have the opportunity to buy back into their pension system so they will have stability when they retire.

Our bill does target women. It is a balanced bill. It saves Social Security. It contributes to more Medicare. It allows for added spending, and it gives tax cuts to the working people who earn this money. We don't own this money. The people who earn it own it. That is the difference I ask the people of our country to look at as we go through this debate.

Listen to how people talk about tax cuts. If they talk about what it costs the Federal Government, then they don't think your money belongs to you. If they talk about it in terms of how do we best give it back to the people who own it, then you know we are looking out for the hard-working American who owns the money and wants to do his or her fair share to contribute to government but isn't looking to finance a landslide.