Matt Rutherford's Solo Sail

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. It is my understanding there are no further speakers
on the Republican side. If somebody comes, I will, of course, yield the 4 minutes.

The latest report is that there are no further speakers until we move on to the judicial nomination.

I wished to use the time remaining to respond to two of the points that have been made. Before I do that, let me just say that as I have kept track during the debate, the minority party has discussed debt, bureaucracy, Presidential appointments, punishment of success, ObamaCare, jobs, fuel prices, picking winners and losers, campaign contributions, out-of-control spending, equal opportunity, and massive new tax increases.

The subject at hand is actually much smaller than this; that is, the indisputable fact that at the very high end of the American income spectrum, people are paying lower tax rates than regular American families--whether it is Warren Buffett's self-proclaimed example of paying only 11 percent in total taxes or the average of all the 400 highest income earners in the country being only 18.2 percent. These are people earning--in the case of the 400--over one-quarter of a billion dollars each in 1 year and paying the rate equivalent to what a single Rhode Island truckdriver pays. That is the issue.

We should have a progressive Tax Code. One of the speakers said we do have a progressive Tax Code and that the income tax generates 31.2 percent of the total income tax revenue from high-income folks versus 14.2 percent from the middle as their rate. But it is worth focusing on the fact that when my Republican colleagues talk about taxes and they focus on income taxes, they leave out the payroll taxes, which virtually every American pays or a great number of Americans--more pay payroll taxes than income tax, I believe.

If we look at all those taxes and put them together, we find that the top 1 percent of Americans do indeed pay 28.3 percent of the taxes. One percent pays 28.3 percent of the taxes. That sounds pretty progressive, until we realize the top 1 percent in America controls more than one-third of the Nation's wealth; the top 1 percent holds more than one-third of the Nation's wealth but pays only 28 percent of the taxes. That is not progressive, if we are measuring in what we are usually taxing, which is income and wealth, not just the existence of a human being on the planet.

If we go to 5 percent, then the top 5 percent pays 44.7 percent of all our taxes, which again is a lot. It is progressive but not when we consider that 5 percent owns or controls more than 60 percent of the Nation's wealth. We are a country in which more than half the wealth of the country--more than 60 percent of it is concentrated in the hands of one-twentieth of the population, the top 5 percent. So for them to pay a higher rate makes a lot of logical sense. What we find is that they actually pay a lower rate all too often.

The other point I wish to address is the argument that this will take money from the pockets of small businesses. If we look at the Office of Taxation and Treasury's definition of a small business and look at how many would be affected by this bill, it would be 3.3 percent; nearly 97 percent of small businesses would have zero effect from this bill. Of the 3.3 percent that would be affected, it is hard to know how many of those are high-income individuals who incorporated themselves for tax purposes but don't fit the ordinary definition of a small business.

When we look at the fact that Americans across the country have spent the last week sitting down going through their receipts, filing their tax returns, sitting at the kitchen table trying to make sense of it all and get it filed on time, for a great number of those folks, what they know from Warren Buffett and others is that the people making one-quarter of a billion dollars a year are paying lower rates than they are, and it is not right. It is not just me saying that is not right; it is Ronald Reagan saying that is not right. He said it was ``crazy''--his word--that a millionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a busdriver pays.

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