For immediate release                                                                                                  Contact: Ira Cohen

January 20, 2015                                                                                                               773-533-7520

Statement of Congressman Danny K. Davis on President Obama's State of the Union Outline of a Plan to Bring Fairness to Our Tax System

Tonight President Obama laid out a plan to return our tax system to fairness, to one which works for the great mass of Americans not just for the 1% and the special interests. Putting our values back into our tax code will also help return our economy to sustainability and our neighborhoods to livability.

The extraordinary growth of inequality in recent years was, and remains, inextricably entwined with the Great Recession.  Massive inequality and the injustices which flow from the great imbalances which now infect our economic relations has rightfully been the focus of a great and largely positive grass roots national and international discussion. We have seen graphic proof of the failure of the policies austerity, of trickle-down economics, of deregulation, of corporate greed now threatening to return large sections of the world economy to crisis.

Our own economy, while growing, is not growing at a rate or a manner which will return our economy to full health in the reasonable future. That discussion has helped to spur, to highlight and to elevate the need for urgent public policy changes. 

The President's State of the Union Message has helped to bring much needed light to a still too dark place: the crisis which still grips so many of our neighborhoods, so many of our towns and villages, so many of our people who need and deserve the opportunity to share in all that our nation's potential has to offer.   Repair of our tax code alone will not solve all of our economic problems.  But it is a critical, necessary part of the solution.

I look forward to working with the President to move the national discussion forward and stir the Congress to move from paralysis and obstructionism to action and to adopt these tax proposals which many of us in the Congress have been advocating along with making the necessary public investments in education, infrastructure, research, health, raising the minimum wage, and protecting our pension system.

Congressman Davis is a Member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee