[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 79 (Monday, June 2, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H4758-H4759]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              CHILD CREDIT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Chocola). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Emanuel) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. EMANUEL. Mr. Speaker, like my colleague from Illinois, I, too, 
have families that I represent. The gentleman spoke about a family who 
got a tax credit. I would like to talk about Renita Jackson-Keys, who 
works as a cook for the Chicago public schools. She earned $14,144 in 
2002, raising four children from the ages of 18, 15, 12, and 4, 
separated from her husband, but not divorced yet. She receives no child 
support.
  If the child tax credit provision expansion had included families 
like hers, she would have received an increase of about $182, but she 
was not a priority. Renita said she could have used a $182 increase to 
help pay for her $540 monthly mortgage.
  In the final hour, the demand for a large dividend tax and more 
corporate welfare pushed away the child credit from low-income workers 
like Renita and her children.
  Renita does not just work as a way to pass the time of her day while 
she waits for her dividend check; she works because that is a value 
that we hold up in America. Her four children see her go to work every 
day. Work defines who we are as Americans.
  I worked in a White House that doubled the size of the earned income 
tax credit, which was first passed by Ronald Reagan in 1986. In 1997, 
in the balanced budget amendment, we balanced the budget, cut taxes for 
working people and corporations and also in the capital gains area, we 
provided a $50 per child tax credit, and provided 10 million children 
health care, whose parents worked full time and did not have health 
care.
  We did it while balancing our budget, and we did it because those 
were our values, and they were the right values. They speak to who we 
are as Americans, trying to raise our children to know right from 
wrong, with the right set of values.
  Now we have a tax cut that takes the value of respecting families, 
respecting hard work, and turns it upside down and inverts it. Somehow, 
nobody ever seems to complain about a corporation that does not pay 
taxes. Yet, all of a sudden, there are some who claim the reason we did 
not include these children of working parents is because they do not 
pay taxes. Nobody seems to complain when corporations do not pay taxes.
  First of all, they do pay taxes. As a percentage of income, one of 
the largest pieces of their income is drawn from taxes for paying 
Social Security and Medicare. So they do pay taxes. They pay more 
taxes, in fact, than the corporations that are sitting in Bermuda pay.
  There is a sense about this: we did not just come here to be a vote, 
we came here to be a voice for those values. We have turned those 
values backwards. What is it about those corporations and these wealthy 
individuals that they somehow got more protection than these children 
of working parents?
  President Kennedy said, to govern is to choose. I think people the 
other week we were here made the wrong choice. Now Republicans are 
saying they did not know what was in the bill, that the child credit 
does not help working Americans. The Vice President was in the room. He 
has been talked about as the enforcer, about the man who was actually 
in the room, va-boom, va-boom. Corporations got taken care of, but a 
boom landed on the heads of our children. Somehow SUVs got covered for 
a tax credit.
  We have a depreciation deduction for investments in equipment and 
facilities. Yet through that depreciation, we have not found the time 
to appreciate our children. These 12 million children are Americans, 
too. Their parents, their mother or their father or both, are 
hardworking. They deserve the same type of respect that we have given 
to offshore companies, the same type of respect and appreciation we

[[Page H4759]]

have given to equipment and machinery, because they, too, represent our 
future.
  I did not support this last tax cut, and I did not support the tax 
cut of 2001. I have supported tax cuts in 1993 and 1997 when we 
balanced the budget. We did not make it an either/or choice.
  We can do right by our children; and in fact, when we balanced the 
budget, cut taxes for working families and middle-class families, and 
helped them go to college and pay for college, and gave health care to 
the uninsured children of working parents, we saw a decrease in our 
rolls of poverty. We saw a decrease in our welfare rolls.
  Those are our values that have been enshrined in this country. When 
we speak to those common set of values that define who we are, we can 
do right by this country, right by our children, and have those parents 
dream the American Dream for their children. We should not turn our 
backs.
  What happened here the other day is a shame. People now are pointing 
fingers. Rather than having pointed fingers, if they had the common 
decency to think of the children of America, of American families who 
also, like other families who will get that tax credit, these children 
deserve the tax credit. They deserve to be held up with the same type 
of respect that we have held up for corporations that needed to deduct 
for SUVs, corporations like Enron that needed to be taken care of, 
corporations that went overseas or deducted for their SUVs.
  These children deserve our care and protection. We have not provided 
them the health care. In fact, we withdrew the money from the States to 
provide health care for the children of working parents. We do not have 
a health care plan for the 45 million uninsured. We do not have an 
agenda for the $300 billion in unfunded assets.
  We have a higher education tax credit that will expire in 2005, just 
at a time college costs are going up at 10 percent annually. We have 
inflation in health care rising by 20 percent. Yet all we did was 
provide corporations a way to depreciate their interest or other forms 
of tax cuts, but we left 12 million children of working parents out.
  Those are not the values that my mother raised us to have, and those 
are not the values that hold us together as Americans. We can do 
better. We need to do better. We can put our children first and leave 
not one of them behind. When it comes to compassion, more than 
millionaires need compassion; our children need our compassion.

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