[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 10]
[Senate]
[Pages 13918-13919]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          THE CHILD TAX CREDIT

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, today, the President visited with 
troops overseas to thank them. I want those troops to know we are 
paying attention to their families at home.
  Last week, as chairman of the Subcommittee on Children and Families, 
I held a hearing at Fort Campbell in Tennessee and Kentucky to look at 
the issues faced by military parents raising children. Senator 
Chambliss did the same in Georgia, and Senators Dodd and Ben Nelson 
will do the same in their respective home States of Connecticut and 
Nebraska.
  Later this month, we will have a joint hearing in Washington of the 
Subcommittee on Children and Families, which I chair, and the 
Subcommittee on Personnel of the Armed Services Committee, which 
Senator Chambliss chairs. Senators Dodd and Nelson are the ranking 
Democrats. That joint hearing is to focus on military families raising 
children.
  Our military has dropped from 3 million to 1.4 million, so we have 
fewer people in the Armed Services, but we have more missions; we have 
fewer soldiers; we have more women as a part of the military; we have 
more military

[[Page 13919]]

spouses working; we have longer deployments; we have more military 
children. As a result, we need to be thinking about the families at 
home as we think about the warriors overseas. I wanted the full Senate 
to know that four Senators and two subcommittees are addressing these 
issues.
  I think that makes it even more important that the leadership on the 
Republican and Democratic sides find a way to fix the problem that 
occurred with the child tax credit in the recently enacted Tax Bill.
  President Bush had recommended that we increase from $600 to $1,000 
the child tax credit to help parents raising children, including 
families that make $10,500 to $26,625. Refundability for these lower 
income families is to be increased from 10 to 15 percent in 2005 under 
the 2001 Tax Bill. The full Senate voted for that to be accelerated to 
2003 and 2004 when it passed its version of the Tax Bill. In the final 
version of the Tax Bill, those between $10,500 and $26,625 were left 
out. Some of those families left out of the Tax Bill are serving in our 
military.
  It was not the intention of the Senate to do that, I don't believe. I 
doubt if most Members of the House want that result. That is why on 
Tuesday I cosponsored Senator Grassley's bill to fix the problem, and I 
am prepared to vote for any reasonable proposal in the Senate that the 
leadership can negotiate in the next few days to make it clear that our 
Senate and our Congress put a priority on parents raising children.
  I thank the Chair.

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