Date: 1997-07-16
Speaker: BOB SCHAFFER (republican)
Chamber: H
State: Colorado

Mr. Speaker. I thank the gentleman for yielding to me. This chart on my right is one I have used on the floor here on a number of occasions. I usually use it in a way that pokes fun at this whole notion of the Treasury Department inflating the actual income of the American family so that our tax cuts for middleclass families somehow appear to be tax cuts for the rich. That is the claim that the Democrats frequently make here on the floor. It is the claim we see coming out of the White House. So I made this chart really to show the absurdity. I think. of this family economic income definition that they use. And I made this look like one of those cheesy getrichquick ads. or getrichquick schemes. And it simply says that we can learn the amazing secrets of the White House and get rich quick if we call the Treasury Department now. and the number. and this really is the Treasury Departments phone number. 2026220120. And I tell folks that operators are standing by. . Well. the reason I ask people to do this is because when I tell people back home how .the Treasury Department has manipulated the numbers to make a $45.000 a year family. a family earning $45.000 a year all of a sudden become rich. in the rich category. people do not believe it. I walk them through the numbers and I ask them to call this number to find out how the Federal Government. the Democrats. the liberals here in Washington. believe that an average family gets rich quick overnight only when we talk about tax relief here on the floor of the House. The gentleman from South Dakota mentioned the biggest way they do this. and let me just kind of walk everybody through this for a moment. If we take an average family making. let us say. for example. $45.000 a year. this is their gross income. This is before they take out all of their payroll taxes and other sorts of deductions that they have on tlfeir paycheck. And they add to Lhis something called imputed rent. that the gentleman from South Dakota mentioned. Now. imputed rent is not anything that we receive. It is not cash we have. It is not really income tax. What imputed rent is is the rent that an individual could receive if they moved out of their house and rented their home to someone else. Now. the Treasury Department really did not consider where an individual might live. whether in a tent. in the park. or whether they would move into the Treasury Department offices. I do not know where they would go. but they assume that the rent that the individuals could earn on their homes is part of their income. So we can see for a family of $45.000 that imputed rent can be as high as $12.000 a year annually added to their rent. So we can see how we are taking an average family. that really is the object of our tax relief package. and slowly moving them up over the $75.000. $76.000. $77.000 range. because in addition to imputed rent. the Treasury Department also adds things like the benefits that an individual may receive at work. $600 for the parking space that they may have in the parking lot outside of their office building is also added to imputed rent. They include several other things. They assume. as the gentleman from South Dakota mentioned. that we are Just simply not reporting all of our income. that as Americans we somehow lie every year when we report our income to the Federal Government and comply with the tax law. So they just throw in a few thousand dollars to the family economic income to further bump the income up fof the purposes of this debate here on the floor. They also add the income that a child might earn in a summer job or the job that they may have after school. They figure that that has some kind of value to the average family. So they throw that in. There are several other things. The anticipated income that an individual may receive on capital gains. Not for the capital gains that an individual achieves in one year. but for those assets that they might have and sell some year off in the future. They bring that to today and throw that into the family economic income. This is how they bump the family income up so that they say the average American family is in fact rich. And since the average American family are the beneficiaries of our tax package. that is how they make the wild claim that our tax relief package is tax cuts for the rich. Well. this is a bunch of baloney over here. this chart to the right. But I do urge people to call the Treasury Department at 2026220120 and ask them for the rundown on this calculation. It is called family economic income. That is the dirty little secret of the Democrats here in Washington. And I urge Americans to find out all about it and ask how it might apply to them. I would point out that the fact of the matter is that American families have been overtaxed for too long. Back in 1950. this was the tax bite out of the American family budget. Six percent of our family budgets went to taxes in 1950. This is when my parents were starting out and trying to make a go of it as a brandnew family. Well. over here on the right we can see that in 1994. the Federal tax burden on the family budget was 23 percent. Now. that is just the Federal. burden. We also pay State taxes and we pay local taxes and all sorts of other taxes that go along with that. In 1995. the total tax burden was 39 percent. Almost 40 percent of a familys annual budget is confiscated in taxes of one sort or another. This is what we really care about here in Washington as a Republican Party. and it is the object of our tax plan. and this is what we are trying to address. We are trying to get back to the days of 1950. when the tax burden was much. much less. much. much friendlier. and much more oriented toward liberty and freedom in our great country.