[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 1]
[House]
[Pages 483-484]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



          ELIMINATE MARRIAGE TAX PENALTY IN A RESPONSIBLE WAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Minge) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. MINGE. Mr. Speaker, we have returned here in the year 2000 to 
begin our work as the U.S. House of Representatives. One of the first 
bills that we will take up will come on, I expect, February 14. The 
purpose of this is to address a problem which has been a festering 
issue in our Tax Code; namely, the so-called marriage tax penalty.
  There has been widespread recognition that it simply is unfair and is 
inconsistent with public policy to have a Tax Code which places a 
burden on folks that choose to get married. Now, as we analyze the Tax 
Code, there is both a marriage bonus and a marriage tax penalty. It is 
a fairly complex issue as we work through it. And trying to root it out 
of the Tax Code is not necessarily easy nor is it inexpensive.
  The Committee on Ways and Means, I understand, has marked up this 
bill today and will be sending it to the floor for consideration by 
Valentine's Day. That certainly is an appropriate or a fitting tribute 
to marriage as an institution in our Nation, but I submit that this is 
premature in terms of consideration on the floor of the House in the 
sense that there is a fairly high price tag to the bill that is coming 
from the Ways and Means, and we still have not had any opportunity to 
formulate a budget for operations here in the year 2000.
  I would like to just briefly, for the benefit of my colleagues, point 
out some of the budget considerations that make this an awkward and 
inappropriate time here in February to take up the marriage tax penalty 
legislation.
  This pie chart shows the available surplus according to the last 
estimates or projections from the Congressional Budget Office. The 
total surplus over the next 10 years, if there is an absolute freeze on 
spending, is projected to be $1.8 trillion. Now, this is a happy state 
of affairs. It is a surplus without using the Social Security Trust 
Fund and the money that is accumulating there.
  Of this surplus, over $1 trillion would be used if we simply 
continued the programs that we have had, with the caps but with 
adjustments for inflation. So this leaves us with a more modest 
surplus, which is actually around $837 billion. And this again is over 
a 10-year period of time. It would be the green and the orange portions 
of this pie chart.
  Now, a portion of even that $837 billion is not necessarily as easily 
available as we would like to think, and that is because we have 
certain tax provisions which are set to expire. And if they are to be 
extended, and we have routinely extended these tax provisions for the 
benefit of taxpayers in our society; and if we consider the farm aid 
legislation, which is expected to be passed this year and succeeding 
years, as it has been in previous years, about $230 billion, or more 
than 25 percent of the $837 billion, would be used for those tax 
benefit pieces of legislation and for farm aid legislation. This leaves 
us with the green portion, about $607 billion.
  Even that has a certain duplicitous character to it because it fails 
to recognize that about $200 billion of the green portion is actually a 
surplus that is being generated in the Medicare trust fund.
  Now, we have all taken a fairly solemn pledge that we will not go 
into the Social Security Trust Fund to finance government expenditures 
or to finance tax reduction that Social Security has to be protected 
from that type of invasion. But I submit that if we are hearing from 
our hospitals and other health

[[Page 484]]

care providers at home, we are preparing ourselves to make a parallel 
commitment to the Medicare program. Medicare is financially more 
precarious than Social Security, and we certainly have thousands and 
thousands of health care providers around the country that have been 
sharing with us the struggle that they are going through with the 
cutbacks that have been made in financing Medicare.
  So I would submit that there are several hundred billion dollars 
there that is also unavailable. So what I would urge my colleagues to 
do is to make sure that we responsibly deal with the marriage tax 
penalty legislation so that we do not somehow handicap ourselves in 
developing a proper budget.

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