M. President, I was presiding this Monday when one of my friends on the other side of the aisle was speaking on the floor on a very important topic. He said, "We need to do everything to see that the deficit does not increase." Now, less than a week later, he is going to vote to increase the deficit by $700 billion. That's an impressive reversal, don't you think? Now, many of my colleagues on the other side ran for reelection this fall saying that the deficit is a cancer. We owe it to our children and our grandchildren to cut the deficit. Well, congratulations. Because one of your first votes back you're going to vote to put over $9,300 more debt on the head of every child in America.
And what is that for? To give an average tax cut of a $100,000 to Americans making over $1 million a year.
Now my friends on the other side of the aisle have been saying to us, "Haven't you learned the lesson of the election?" I don't recall permanent tax cuts for millionaires being on any ballot. In fact, let's take a look at the exit polls conducted by Edison Research, the exclusive provider of the National Election Exit Polls for all of the major TV networks and the Associated Press. And in their poll, they found that roughly sixty percent of Americans wanted to end tax cuts for those making over $250,000. And more recently, a Quinnipiac poll said that only 35 percent of Americans wanted the Bush tax cuts extended for those with incomes over $250,000.
And, of course the American people feel this way. They know what's been happening over the last twenty years in this country.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, during the past 20 years, 56 percent of all income growth went to the top one percent of households. Even more unbelievable-a third of all income growth went to just the top tenth of one percent. The wealthy have done extremely well for themselves over the past twenty years. Unfortunately, this is while the middle class has done decidedly worse.
When you adjust for inflation, the median household income actually declined over the last decade. During those years, while the rich were getting richer, the rest of working America was struggling to keep up. We've been growing apart. And the American people know this. And now, working Americans are forced to listen to the Republicans as they demand "Everyone needs to share the pain. We're all in this together."
The IRS published a study analyzing the tax returns of the wealthiest 400 Americans. Together, in 2007, they brought in nearly $138 billion dollars. Want to take a guess at what their average effective tax rate was? Just over 16 and a half percent. Is that really sharing the pain? Are they really sharing in the pain just like everybody else?
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