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Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I just heard about this legislative idea a few minutes ago. So I really have very little information about it.

But what I can tell you is, we already know what the bottom line is. The amendment offered by the Senator from Louisiana will hurt honest taxpayers and will help wealthy tax cheats. That is the bottom line.

Now, I am all for seafood inspections. We have got loads of seafood in our part of the world. But I want to take just a minute to talk about the reasons that Members of this body ought to oppose the legislation.

First--and the Congressional Budget Office has made this point--this amendment uses the fake offset of cutting IRS funding. The cut in IRS funding included in this amendment doesn't pay for an increase in seafood inspections; it increases the deficit. And the reason I say that is because that is what the Congressional Budget Office says about these ideas.

The Congressional Budget Office are the folks that we put in place to give us objective, nonpolitical analyses of various important ideas. The Congressional Budget Office are the people that we use on the Finance Committee regularly, and the Congressional Budget Office has said that every dollar cut from the IRS budget reduces revenue by $2. And that increases the deficit.

Second, this has given a big pass to wealthy tax cheats. People need to know that the reason there is a focus on IRS enforcement is because the wealthy tax cheats have the lawyers and accountants, and they have all kinds of ways to get around the rules. The working families that we represent--the folks in Michigan, the automobile workers--pay taxes with every single paycheck. We know what kind of financing they have because they pay with every check. It is the wealthy tax cheats that we have to deal with.

And I just say to my friend, the kind of person that he has given a pass to is--we recently found almost a thousand millionaires who didn't even file a tax return. Not one of the scams--they didn't even file a tax return, almost a thousand millionaires. The Federal Government lost more than $30 billion just on that.

So the Senate ought to be focusing on making sure that we have tough IRS enforcement, that we have the funding to improve services for all taxpayers--all of them--and, particularly, ending the free ride, once and for all, for wealthy tax cheats.

And the service has gone up. We have seen reduction in waiting times for calls from 28 minutes to 3 minutes.

I wish I had time to have a more extended exchange with my colleague. We are, right now, in our caucus meeting having debates on important issues.

But I would just say, in the future, if my colleague could even give us 15- or 20-minutes' notice, we could maybe have a more extended discussion.

The people who get help here are wealthy tax cheats. The people who are hurt here are honest taxpayers.

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