My vote in favor of the tax deal was the hardest I’ve cast as a senator. I didn’t like extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans—and I think President Obama punted on first down.
But I came to the Senate to represent middle-class Minnesota families— working men and women trying to make ends meet and build a better life for their kids. And this bill provides them with help they desperately need.
It stops families’ taxes from going up on Jan. 1. It restores unemployment benefits through 2011, preventing more than 100,000 Minnesotans from falling into the economic abyss as they look for work. The bill also gives many families a payroll tax break, earned income tax credit, child tax credit, and college tax credit, and it includes help for Minnesota’s wind, biodiesel, and ethanol industries.
But I want to be clear about why extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest was such a difficult pill to swallow.
It’s not just that the rich don’t need the help, or that cutting their taxes doesn’t help the economy. The problem is that these wasteful giveaways blow another huge hole in our deficit at a time when our budget is already dangerously out of balance.
I wanted a better deal—and I fought to let the tax cuts for the wealthy expire and use those funds to protect Social Security, create jobs, or bring down the deficit. Unfortunately, those amendments were defeated.
But for too many Minnesotans, disaster is staring them in the face. Allowing taxes to go up for middle-class families could be the straw that breaks their backs. And allowing unemployment benefits to expire would take food off people’s tables and force a lot more kids to spend Christmas in a homeless shelter or worse.
The only thing worse than the deal we got would have been no deal at all.
Senator Al Franken
Washington, D.C.
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