[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 1]
[House]
[Page 906]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                 NEW BILL TRANSFORMS SYSTEM OF TAXATION

  (Mr. FATTAH asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. FATTAH. Mr. Speaker, I give notice to the House today that I have 
offered a piece of legislation that would have the Department of the 
Treasury analyze a proposal to transform our system of taxation and to 
move us away from this very complicated, burdensome form of taxation 
that now raises the revenues necessary for governmental purposes, to a 
transaction fee in which we would utilize the great power of our 
economy to tap into economic resources in a way in which we could 
transform our country, respond to the needs of all of our people in a 
responsible way, but to do it without the necessity to pry into the 
private lives of our citizens or to audit their financial behavior.
  This proposal as we present it would have the Treasury prepare a 
study of this idea. It is offered after a great deal of research and 
effort. We hope that it will find in the workings of the House the kind 
of urgency that should be there, given our failure to respond to this 
problem in any real way for a very, very long time. It is the 90th 
birthday of the income tax in our country. It started at 2 pages, it is 
now tens of thousands of pages. Today we can begin not just to curse 
the darkness but, as has been said, light a candle.

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