Sen. Franken's Floor Statement On The Nation's Budget Deficits
Wednesday, Jul 14 | Legislative Session: 111th Congress, 2nd Session (2010)
M. President, I rise today to discuss an incredibly important subject, our nation's budget deficits. The deficit for Fiscal Year 2009 was about 1.4 trillion dollars. The total national debt is now just under 13.2 trillion dollars. These numbers are staggering-and represent a tremendous threat to our nation.
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I've held these concerns for some time, as a matter of fact. In a New York Times op-ed way back in 1988, I expressed my alarm that we had gone from being the world's largest creditor nation to its largest debtor nation. I noted then that the accumulated trade and budget deficits of the Reagan years worked out to about $20,000 per family.
When President Bush left office, we were bleeding nearly 800,000 jobs in a single month. And we had already lost over 4.4 million jobs in his final year in office. Yet with the Recovery Act, President Obama was able to turn around the economy and immediately stem the growing losses. The number of jobs lost got smaller and smaller each month, and this year we had five straight months of growth, and we created 882,000 net jobs this year. Does anyone see a trendline here?
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Now, let's look at our tax policy. As recently as 1980, our top tax bracket for the wealthy was at 70%. And for the two decades prior to that, the wealthiest Americans had income tax rates of between 70 and 90 percent. Today, it's 35 percent. These declining rates on the wealthiest Americans mean that more tax revenue is coming from middle-income earners.
And this is during a period when the gap between those at the top and those in the middle class has grown substantially.
On top of that, we've allowed the estate tax to expire completely in 2010. This is a tax that affects less than one half of one percent of Americans. My colleagues across the aisle will argue that the estate tax punishes our nation's most productive members - the children of the extremely wealthy. And this gift to our most fortunate sons and daughters costs the rest of us $14 billion this year alone. That tab for that $14 billion in lost revenues from America's multi-millionaires and billionaires will be passed to all of our kids. And not just the $14 billion, but the interest on it as well.
Teddy Roosevelt said it best: "The man of great wealth owes a particular obligation to the state because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government."
Those who want to eliminate the estate tax, understandably, don't put the children of the incredibly wealthy in their campaign literature. Instead, they talk about family farms - as if family farms have been lost to the estate tax. Yet according to the New York Times, the American Farm Bureau Federation was unable to name one family farm lost because of the estate tax. And opponents of the tax insinuate that it's impossible to design a policy that continues to protect the family farms that might be even slightly affected.
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We face enormous economic problems: the short-term economic crisis and the long-term deficit. But we also face a seemingly intractable political problem. As long as this body refuses to face up to the simple facts about where our deficits came from and what we need to do to solve them -- as long as we turn a blind eye to the simple facts about what will get us out of this major downturn we will be unable to reach the solutions demanded by these problems and deserved by the American people.
Simply put, if we don't face facts, we can't do our jobs. And that would leave this country in serious trouble.
It's 35 39 minutes, and well worth your time to watch. I feel I've done a disservice to the Senator by not simply posting the whole speech, but for the sake readability, I chose some key points he made.
Here's the link to the full transcript.
http://franken.senate.gov/...
No, I don't have much to add.
I agree with everything Franken says.
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