[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 3]
[Senate]
[Pages 3748-3749]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              THE TAX GAP

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, after reviewing the budget proposed by 
the other side of the aisle, one thing is clear: the people who wrote 
it were more interested in growing the size and scope of Washington 
spending than in growing the American family's budget. But Americans 
expect more from government than a $1.2 trillion tax hike and billions 
of dollars in new spending, especially in these difficult economic 
times.
  But even with a giant tax hike, the new spending in this budget isn't 
really accounted for. Democrats say they want to ``pay for'' massive 
spending by--among other gimmicks--closing what they like to refer to 
as the ``tax gap.'' This is the gap that exists between what people 
actually owe in taxes and what they pay.
  Well, we need only look back at last year to see that Congress hasn't 
been very successful in attempting to close the ``tax gap''. In 2007, 
Congress passed the Democrat budget resolution which promised to reduce 
the tax gap by $300 billion over 5 years. Unfortunately, this promise 
was never followed up on with actual legislation to make it law and no 
progress was made.
  In other words, Democrats are counting on a direct deposit from a job 
they never completed. That doesn't work in the family budget, and it 
shouldn't work in the Federal budget.
  While Congress did enact a few--a few--of the tax gap proposals 
included in the President's 2008 budget, those amounted to only a tiny 
fraction of the tax gap, hardly enough to rely upon for offsetting the 
billions of dollars in the new spending Democrats are proposing. As the 
ranking member of the Finance Committee reminded the Senate yesterday, 
the promises didn't come close to matching reality. During the first 
year of this Democrat majority the enacted tax-gap provisions amounted 
to two-tenths of 1 percent of the tax gap.
  Two-tenths of 1 percent; that is 99.8 percent short of the promised 
revenue. That is hundreds of billions of dollars short of the revenue 
they projected to pay for their new Washington spending.
  That is not even close, not even in the same ballpark.
  There are serious disagreements between the parties on taxes. The 
other side supports higher rates. We want to keep tax rates low. But we 
should all agree that people have a responsibility to pay what they 
lawfully owe.
  Over and over again the Democrat majority has failed to enact any 
sort of serious and substantial strategy for closing the tax gap. And 
as a result, their numbers simply don't add up. Faulty numbers don't 
pay the bills, and funds that aren't collected won't shrink the 
deficit.
  So if the budget written by our friends across the aisle is going to 
rely on these funds to balance the budget, we need to think again, or 
the family budget is going to shrink to make up for the red ink in 
Washington's budget.

[[Page 3749]]

  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The majority leader.

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