Tax and Appropriations

I think we had a lot of very important things that we wanted to get done and what the election did was it took away the high motivation for obstructionism that I think existed prior to the election. As a result, we were able to sit down at the table and agree on some things and move forward. The 9/11 bill, as you know, just got 70% of the votes that were cast...

...this bill, the President of the United States believes, and I believe, will have a positive effect on the economy and I think we need that. And unlike some of my colleagues whose views I share but have reached a different conclusion, I will vote for this bill. I don't want to see middle income working people in America get a tax increase...

"I simply do not believe the deep debt that comes from Republicans upper income and estate tax cut is worth their minimal impact on job creation. Those cuts, in my view, harm our long-term prosperity with little short-term gain in return."

Clearly in the United States Senate, there need to be a bipartisan agreement in order to move forward. Harry Reid didn't have the votes to move forward without Republicans and so, discussion was essential. And frankly, Chris, desirable. We want to have a bipartisan agreement on this issue. We passed a bill of course over to the Senate which incorporated what we thought was the priority in making sure there was unemployment insurance available and secondly, that middle income taxpayers did not get any increase in their taxes on January 1st. That has not moved in the Senate as you know...

We obviously have passed a bill which I think reflected what the Democrats believed was appropriate and that is a cut in middle income tax rates and make sure they don't go up in January. I think the overwhelming majority of the American public supported that policy, including Republicans, 52% in a CBS news poll shows that they supported that policy...

One, we need to grow jobs. We need to have more jobs for our people. We need to grow our economy. The second was, we are very concerned about the deficit. I agree with both of those conclusions in this election. I think we need to do both of those. In the short term in order to grow the economy we have to invest in the economy and we need not take money out of the pockets of consumers...