Senators Trent Lott and Phil Gramm Talk Republican Tax Cuts
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Let's talk taxes, shall we? We've been talking about tax cuts all morning. A little while ago, we heard from Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt for the minority point of view on tax cuts. They are offering their counterproposals. Not along ago, while we were enjoying that sight from Southampton, England, Trent Lott and Phil Gramm, on the other side of the aisle, were talking their version of tax cuts. Let's take a listen.</s>SEN. TRENT LOTT (R-MS), MAJORITY LEADER: I believe the president has sent us a very good proposal that would be helpful to all Americans by reducing the income tax rates across the board and reducing the number of brackets. It will affect working Americans at all levels. We have a tax surplus coming into Washington. This not about trying to find a way to spend it. What we're trying to do is allow the people to keep more of their hard-earned money and spend it in the ways that they deem fit for their families and in their local economies. Now the Democrats have an approach, too. They want less or no tax cuts, and they also want to spend more. And that is traditional. That's what they've always suggested. As a matter of fact, the proposal that they are representing would only use 20 percent of the tax surplus to actually allow the people to keep that amount of money for themselves. And yet, they would significantly increase spending above the levels which were already very high over the last two or three years. So there's a clear debate here. I believe the American people approve of what President Bush has suggested in the tax relief package. And we're going to work very hard to make it a broadly supported package with bipartisan support in the Senate. Now let me call on Senator Gramm to comment on that.</s>SEN. PHIL GRAMM (R), TEXAS: Well, thank you, Senator Lott. I guess we all learned as children the old saying, "Look at what people do; don't just listen to what they say." So in listening to the Democrat leaders of Congress today, I propose that we go back and look at what they've done. In working with Bill Clinton from August of last year until President Bush took office this year, in a six-month period, they managed to set a new record in the history of free government on this planet by adding $561 billion to projected spending over the next 10 years. At that rate, at the rate they added new spending programs in the last six months, in another 12 months they would have spent the entire Bush tax cut. So whereas they want to hold this out as meeting their priorities and also paying down debt versus letting working people keep the money that, after all, they paid in taxes, in reality this is increasingly a debate about whether you want government to spend this money for you in Washington or whether you would rather spend it yourself in your own hometown on your own family, investing in your own future. They say, and I quote Daschle, "Whatever we don't need, we ought to return." The problem is, they seem to need an awful lot. When they define what they need, they propose that they spend twice as much as is given back in tax cuts. And one of the things, in talking about the Bush program that I don't think people have taken into account yet, is it is it not as if the Bush program is imposing a stranglehold on the purse strings of the American government. In the Bush budget proposal, which will be released when we come back into session, the president will propose adding roughly $1 trillion $64 billion to government spending over the next 10 years. When you add the $561 billion that the Democrats and Clinton have added over the next 10 years, that's $1.6 trillion of new spending. If that number sounds familiar, that's the size of the tax cut. In reality, the Bush proposal, far from, quote, "shortchanging government," basically divides the non-Social Security surplus, while keeping a slight cushion, divides it roughly equally between spending and tax cuts. I think that sounds more reasonable than the Daschle approach, which is: Whatever we don't need, we'll give back.</s>O'BRIEN: There you have it: tax cuts, Republican-style. We have heard the volleys, Democrat and Republican. And one thing they can all agree on are the words of Trent Lott: "It is a clear debate." The question is: Where does it head from here? Stay tuned and we will keep you posted as the debate progresses and the discussion continues.