Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010

Floor Speech

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Mr. WEINER. I thank the gentleman.

You know, it doesn't take a great deal of courage to come to the floor of the House and say I'm in favor of low taxes. Yes, I think we all want no taxes. We would all like to have no communal needs that we have. We would like to have no national defense.

We would like to have no concerns about clean water.

What we hear of the fight about in elections and, frankly, every single day on the floor is, Who do we stand for? Who are we defending?

On this side of the Chamber we believe that those people in the middle class and those struggling to make it, who each and every year for the past two decades have been getting pushed further and further down, need help.

On the other side of this Chamber are people who quite literally stood up all day today to say, I want to give tax cuts to people who make $1 million and $1 billion a year; and, wait for it, ladies and gentleman, we want to borrow the money from the Chinese to give it to them.

I want the wealthy to be as wealthy as they can be. I have no grudge against that. I want all of us to be that wealthy. But we should be a country that fights for those who really need the help. We should not be a country that says: You know what? If you're a billionaire, we want to give you a little bit more.

Who's going to pay the bill? Who is ultimately going to pay for this tax cut? It is going to be our children and our grandchildren. And to come to the floor and say, well, I want to help hardworking Americans, I have to tell you, when the top 1 percent in this country are making as much as the next 25 percent, I think I know who we want to help.

On this side, we want to help those middle class people and those struggling to make it, and my Republican friends all over this evening have been standing up for millionaires and billionaires. That is the fundamental choice that we have to make here.

I believe that this tax bill has fundamental flaws. If you believe that you should be borrowing from Social Security to pay for a payroll tax, you like this bill. But I know a lot of Americans don't believe that.

So I think what we should do, what we should do is make sure that we fix the estate portion of this, and then we should take a step back and say, you know what we should do? Let's stand up for the middle class. That is what the Democrats stand for.

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