[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 80 (Tuesday, June 3, 2003)]
[House]
[Page H4855]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       INJUSTICES OF THE TAX BILL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Maine (Mr. Allen) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. ALLEN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak again about the 
injustice of President Bush's latest tax cut bill. It is really amazing 
what he has done to families with children earning between $10,000 and 
$26,625. They are not treated like American families who earn larger 
sums than that.
  I want to quote from the editorial today in the Bangor Daily News in 
my State of Maine. The editorial reads, ``On the day President Bush 
signed his latest tax cut bill, astute observers noticed that the 
increase from $600 to $1,000 in the package's child tax credit would 
not apply to children of the working poor. Families with incomes under 
$26,625 will remain at $600. By leaving those children at the lower 
level, did the tax cut crafters really mean to imply they were worth 
only three-fifths of richer kids? Did someone have an awful sense of 
symbolism or are they trying to tell the public something?''
  Three-fifths. If families earned between $10,000 and $26,600 a year, 
they get three-fifths of the tax cut, the child tax credit earned by 
people earning over $26,000 a year.
  Now, just coincidentally perhaps, that is the way slaves were counted 
in the Constitution. When the Constitution was written, slaves were to 
be counted as three-fifths of a person, and today, under the Bush tax 
cut, children and families earning between $10,000 and $26,000 a year 
count for three-fifths of what children and families earning over 
$26,000 a year.
  It is an embarrassment. It is shameful. It is yet one more example, 
if any were needed, that this administration is on a relentless quest 
to treat the very wealthy in this country differently, in fact, to 
transfer as much money as they can from middle-income America to the 
richest people in the country.
  It would have been easy to correct this problem, very, very easy. Let 
me give my colleagues one example.
  The cost of the deleted low-income child tax provision is $3.5 
billion. It is 1 percent of the official cost of $350 billion for the 
final bill, and it could have been easily made up by reducing the top 
income rate by 0.1 percent for 3 years, because for each 0.1 percentage 
rate that the top rate is reduced, the cost is $1.3 billion. That is 
all it would take, 0.1 percent less to the top rate. This is all it 
would have taken, and people with incomes over $1 million a year on 
average would get, instead of a tax cut of $93,500 a year, they would 
get an average tax cut of $88,000.
  In other words, for a reduction in their tax cut of $5,500, we could 
have reached 12 million children. We could have reached all of those 
children in families between $10,000 and $26,000 and given them just 
the same tax cut that go to families earning more.

                              {time}  1945

  It is unbelievable, it is appalling that once again the 
administration has taken this approach.
  I would just say that it is obvious from this example and others that 
this is not a tax cut designed to increase economic growth. Its primary 
purpose, given the huge deficits, given the fact that every dollar of 
the tax cut is borrowed, borrowed from our children and grandchildren, 
it is obvious once again the whole motive here is to drain the Federal 
Government of revenues so that we will not have the funds to fund 
education the way we have in the past, so that we will cut veterans 
benefits, as reflected in the President's budget, and so there will not 
be sufficient funds to maintain Social Security and Medicare in the way 
in which they have been funded in the past.
  This administration and the Republicans in Congress are engaged in a 
determined effort to reduce the size of the Federal Government at the 
same time that they are increasing the wealth of the wealthiest people 
in this country. It is embarrassing, it is shameful, it should stop.

                          ____________________