[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 136 (Friday, September 27, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Page S11503]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               TAX RELIEF

  Mr. COVERDELL. Mr. President, it is not going to be the subject I 
intended to address, but I could not help hearing some of the remarks 
from the other side about how onerous it would be if we were to allow 
the American family to keep more of what it earns in its checking 
account via tax relief. I am going to talk for just a second about it.
  An average family in my State gets to keep 47 percent of its gross 
income. In 1950 those people got to keep 80 percent. Now they can only 
keep 47 percent after they get finished paying their Federal tax bill, 
State, local, the cost of Federal regulations, and extra costs they pay 
in interest payments because of the national debt that has been drummed 
up by an ever-increasing and larger Federal Government here in 
Washington.
  Mr. President, 47 percent is what is left at the end of the day. I 
will say as long as I am here that any effort to bring relief to those 
average families and to allow more of their earnings to stay in their 
checking accounts is laudable and correct, because we have pushed the 
average family to the wall. That which we ask them to do, get the 
country up in the morning, feed it, house it, shelter it, take care of 
its health, is virtually impossible to do today with what is left in 
that checking account after some Government bureaucrat marches through 
it.
  It is not my purpose to discuss it here this afternoon. But lowering 
the economic pressure on the average family in our country would do 
more to end the stress and the anxiety and the behavioral problems in 
our middle-class families than any other thing we can do. You can track 
the stress in those families and track it day by day, month by month, 
year by year, as we ratcheted up the tax pressure on those families. 
You can see the effect it has had on them--smaller families, no savings 
in their savings accounts, lower SAT scores, more members of the family 
having to work just to keep up; in some of them, not only both parents 
working but both parents having two jobs.
  I am absolutely mind boggled that we would be arguing that it would 
be some evil and sinister thing to lower the tax pressure on the 
American family.

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