[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 45 (Wednesday, April 16, 1997)]
[House]
[Page H1584]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
ISSUES OF IMPORTANCE
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Rogan). Under a previous order of the
House, the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Smith] is recognized for 5
minutes.
Mr. SMITH of Michigan. Mr. Speaker, just frustrated for the last
several days, when I have heard Members from the other side of the
aisle, the Democrats, suggest to the Republicans, why are you not doing
this, why are you not passing campaign finance reform? Why are you not
helping this group, or why are you not doing this for those people?
I would like to remind everybody, Mr. Speaker, that the Democrats
have controlled this Chamber for the last 40 years, ample opportunity,
ample time to deal with some of the problems that they are so ready now
to stand up and criticize Republicans for not moving faster.
I cannot help but think of the welfare reform so long overdue, where
the U.S. Government has in effect said to young women in this country,
if you get pregnant, we are going to do these things for you.
Can you imagine, Mr. Speaker, anybody going to their own young
daughter and saying, I want to talk about the possibility of you
getting pregnant and, if you get pregnant, we are going to increase
your allowance by $500? We are going to give you a food allowance.
We would never say something like that to our own kids. Yet as a
society, we have been saying that.
Nothing happened to change welfare until the last 2 years when
Republicans, for the first time in 40 years, gained a majority in this
House, in this chamber, and decided, look, enough is enough. We are
sending the wrong signals. If we want to get back to an America that
rewards those people that work hard, that save, that try, then we are
going to have to make some changes of where we have been going for the
last 40 years. That means changing a complicated tax system.
We now have a Tax Code where special interest lobbyists have been
coming in over these past 40 years and getting favoritism for their
particular clients. So now we have a Tax Code that is so complicated,
that is so unfair that everybody agrees that it needs changing. Yet it
has not been changed.
And now what we are saying on this side of the aisle, and we are
gaining support from the Democrats, is that we need to make some basic
changes in our tax code to make it flatter, to make it fairer.
I would like everybody to guess how many people now work for the IRS,
snooping around our different tax filings to see what they can find
out. Luckily this week we passed a bill to say, no more snooping for
IRS agents.
Sometimes we question what is happening with immigration. If you
compare the number of people hired for immigration, something around 14
or 16,000, I think, with the 115,000 IRS agents that we employ to go
over taxes, to do our auditing, saying that they have to have this kind
of power because they are afraid the American people might cheat if
they are not threatened with an audit, it has got to be our goal to get
rid of the IRS as we know it.
Mr. Speaker, I would urge all Members of this Chamber to look at what
has been accomplished over the last 40 years and what has not been
accomplished. And even though Republicans might not be passing as many
bills right now as we did 2 years ago, I think it needs to be clear
that we are for changing this Tax Code. We are for doing away with as
much of the death tax penalty as we can, to do away with that estate
tax or at least increase the exemption, to do away with our Tax Code
that discourages savings and investment.
We have the greatest penalty, Mr. Speaker, we have the greatest
penalty against businesses that decide to buy new tools and machinery.
So we penalize savings and we penalize investment. We need to change
that. We are moving steadily ahead to do some of the things that should
have been done much earlier than this session or last session.
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