[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 61 (Tuesday, April 17, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4552-S4553]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                TAX DAY

  Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, today is tax day, the day when most of us 
file for an extension so we can have another 3 months or so to work 
through the problems connected with our taxes. I wish to review the 
history of our tax system and the groundwork for an attempt to try to 
solve some of its serious problems.
  One of the reasons we file for an extension is because the Tax Code 
itself is impenetrable. There are few--or I would say if any--who 
understand it. I remember when I was a very junior Senator here on the 
floor talking about health care, when President Clinton's 
administration was pursuing that, and making the point on the floor 
that the law was absolutely beyond comprehension. I quoted James 
Madison, who said that the laws should be understandable, and that was 
part of his justification for the writing of the Constitution.
  Senator Moynihan, the Senator from New York, corrected me; that is, 
he disagreed with me. He stood up and said: Senator, we have long since 
passed the point where the laws are understandable. Look at the Tax 
Code; there is not a soul on the Earth who understands that, so do not 
make the fact that the health care bill is incomprehensible a 
justification for defeating it.
  I do not know how serious he was. Senator Moynihan was known for his 
sense of humor, but he was also known for his ability to go to the 
heart of the issue.
  Let me review the history of where we got our tax systems--and yes, 
the last word is plural because we have basically two Federal tax 
systems in this country. We have the payroll tax, and we have the 
income tax. Both were adopted during the period of the Great 
Depression.
  Stop and think about the conditions which existed at that time. We 
were in the worst economic contraction of our history. The American 
unemployment rate was running not only in double digits but as high as 
25 percent. Of the 75 percent who still had jobs, many of them had jobs 
that were not adequate to their needs. It was a devastating 
psychological time. The historians who talk of it say that many of 
those who were unemployed would get up in the morning, put on their 
suit and tie, put on their hat, and leave the house as if they were 
going to work because they did not want the neighbors to know they were 
unemployed. The stigma of unemployment was psychologically almost as 
devastating as the financial stigma of being unable to meet one's bills 
and pay one's mortgage.
  The second circumstance that was present at the time of the Great 
Depression was that we were in the center of the industrial age. All of 
us, as we went to school, remember being taught about the industrial 
revolution when we shifted from basically an agricultural economy to 
predominately an industrial economy, an economy of factories, an 
economy of mass--mass building, mass production, mass communications. 
Everything was industrialized.
  The third situation that applied in those days was that our economy 
was basically protected by two oceans. We were insulated from the rest 
of the world in a very real, physical, geographical sense.
  Stop and think about these three interacting with each other--serious 
economic contraction in the midst of the industrial age at a time when 
we were self-contained between two oceans. Ask yourself whether those 
three conditions exist today.
  We are in the midst of the longest running expansion in our history, 
not contraction. We are in the midst of this information age, not the 
industrial age. The focus of America, just as it shifted from 
agriculture to industry, has now shifted to the information age, and 
the richest man in America is not the one who owns the most land, as 
was true in the agricultural age, or the one who owns the biggest 
factory, as was true in the industrial age, but the one who has 
mastered the capacity of the digital code, which is true in the 
information age.
  Finally, we are clearly not confined to a land between two oceans. 
Money moves around the world, ideas move around the world, and concepts 
move around the world with the click of a mouse.
  We do not have anything like the economic circumstances that 
prevailed when we adopted our present tax system. Yet we continue to 
perpetuate those tax systems as if they still apply to our situation.
  The payroll tax penalizes the working poor. It is an effective tax 
rate of 15 percent on the waitress who works at minimum wage because 
7\1/2\ percent she has to pay and 7\1/2\ percent her employer pays that 
otherwise she would get in her paycheck. That is a very high, 
regressive tax. When it started out in the midst of the Great 
Depression, it was 1 percent or 2 percent, and now it has grown to a 
15-percent effective rate.
  While the payroll tax penalizes the working poor, the income tax 
discourages the productive rich. The more you produce, the more the 
Government comes in and says: We will take that away from you.
  I have said before in this Chamber, I was fortunate enough to be 
involved in building a business during what many newspapers called the 
decade of greed. Ronald Reagan was President, and the top tax rate was 
28 percent. We had basically a flat tax system. It had two tiers, 15 
percent and 28 percent, but it was moving us toward a simple system, a 
flat rate system. If I were running that same business today, the 
effective rate would be 43 percent, and the difference between 28 
percent and 43 percent on the earnings of that company would probably 
make the difference between the company surviving or not. It started 
out not in a garage but in a basement. It grew to 4,000 employees. 
Think of the tax revenue coming from those employees, think of the tax 
revenue coming from that successful business. Then ask yourself: Would 
it have been a good thing to have prevented that business from coming 
on board in the name of high tax rates?
  We need the tax revenue. We perhaps need more tax revenue than we are 
currently getting. I will grant that to my friends on the Democratic 
side. But I suggest to them a bargain. If we want to drive to a higher 
level of tax revenue, let's recognize we live in a very different world 
than we lived in in the 1930s, when we created our present tax system. 
Let's talk about eliminating

[[Page S4553]]

the payroll tax. Senator Moynihan was willing to do that. Let's talk 
about eliminating the present system of income tax and replacing it 
with a flat tax. Instead of saying we want to use the tax system to 
make economic decisions, using the tax system as the tiller to steer 
the economy, let's adopt the radical notion that the purpose of taxes 
is to raise money to run the Government, and then ask ourselves, how 
can we raise it in as simple a manner as possible, as efficient a 
manner as possible, as competitive a manner as possible, so that we 
recognize the reality in which we live--a tax system that is geared to 
an expanding economy rather than shrinking one, a tax system that is 
geared to the information age rather than the industrial age, and a tax 
system that is geared to a worldwide economy rather than one centered 
within our borders.
  I am already having conversations with some of my Democratic friends 
on this issue. I think tax day is the day to talk about it. We disagree 
as to whether the President's tax cuts should be extended. I voted for 
them. I think they probably should be. But I am willing to scrap the 
whole thing, if my friends across the aisle will make a deal with us 
whereby we say: Let's start with a clean sheet of paper and produce a 
tax system that is geared to the realities of the economic 
circumstances we face. I hope in this Congress we can move in that 
direction.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Wyoming is 
recognized.

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