[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 18]
[House]
[Pages 24495-24496]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         TRICKLE-DOWN ECONOMICS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, the Republicans have attempted to remake 
themselves as fiscal conservatives despite the fact that, with George 
Bush in the White House and the Republicans in charge of the House and 
the Senate, that the debt of the United States of America has increased 
by 62 percent, over $8 trillion. They are borrowing $1.4 billion a day 
to run the government. They are borrowing every penny of the Social 
Security surplus and spending it on other things, including tax cuts 
for the wealthy.
  Now they want to cut. What do they want to cut? Students loans, 
Medicare, Medicaid, foster care, and other programs that are important 
to struggling American families, under the guise of fiscal 
responsibility.
  Now they want to do $50 billion of cuts, but they also want to do $70 
billion of tax cuts for the wealthiest among us. They want to make 
permanent the cuts in capital gains taxes. They want to reward wealth, 
not work; and they want to make permanent the cuts in dividend taxes. 
In order to facilitate that, they want to cut these other programs.
  They want to benefit approximately 1 percent of the society, those 
who earn over $300,000 a year and have estates worth more than $6 
million. But one thing we have got to give them is they are relentless 
and consistent and they are successful. Last year, the IRS says that 99 
percent of the people in America saw their real incomes decline. 
Everybody who earned less than $300,000 after inflation saw a decline. 
Up to $1.3

[[Page 24496]]

million, they did okay. Over $1.3 million, they did phenomenonally 
well. Now the President's Tax Commission says that is exactly what the 
future should be. That is trickle down. We want more for the wealth, 
not for those who work.
  Their proposals are extraordinary. They would say that dividends 
should be free of tax. So if one is someone who is lucky enough to be 
born into a wealthy family, they inherit millions of dollars and they 
invest it in dividend-paying stocks, they would never pay a penny in 
Federal taxes because they are a wealth creator, they are a job 
generator, they are trickling down on the rest of America. Is that not 
nice of them? But they would not contribute to the society.
  And then we have stocks. Well, on stocks they want to say 75 percent 
of the gain should be tax-free, again benefiting, for the most part, 
the same people. But the funny thing they are doing here is they want 
to talk about wealth creators and entrepreneurs, but they stick it to 
the small business people.
  If one has a small business, they build it up and they sell it for a 
million bucks, guess what? Their tax rate is 33 percent under the 
President's new proposal. But if they have been speculating in the 
stock market, they would only have to pay at 8 percent. If they had 
been happy enough or lucky enough to inherit money and clip dividend 
coupons, they would have paid 0 percent. But, no, if they built up 
their small business, they are going to pay 33 percent; and those 
suckers who work for a living, they will pay on every penny of income. 
Somebody who earns $25,000 a year will pay a tax rate at about three 
times the person who invests in stocks and realizes capital gains.
  This is their vision of the world: trickle down economics, trickling 
on the majority of America and last year trickling on 99 percent of the 
people in America. It is working well, they say, and we should do more 
of the same. And, ironically, they want to borrow money to perpetuate 
this. They are going to take all the Social Security surplus and spend 
it in part to finance these long-term tax cuts for the wealthiest among 
us.
  They should be ashamed, and trickle-down economics does not work.

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