January 7, 2003

I want to see the details of it before making a final decision, but on first glance, I'm disappointed in the President's proposal. Eliminating the double taxation on dividends, while it may have some merit intellectually, would only affect about 10 percent of the taxpayers in this country and would cost us more than $300 billion - maybe as much as $600 billion. I don't think we can afford that right now, particularly when we need to stimulate the economy immediately. An elimination of the double taxation on dividends doesn't do anything immediately for anybody, even for those who pay that tax right now. What we do need is to get money in the hands of people who will actually spend it, and we need to do it in a way that's not going to add significantly to the deficit, so we don't end up crowding out capital for businesses, raising mortgage rates, raising car payments and raising student loan rates.

I think we ought to be doing things like extending unemployment benefits immediately for people, all the people who've lost their jobs, the 10,000 people in Connecticut whose employment was cut. We ought to be providing some real help to small businesses and mid-sized businesses, by increasing the expensing that they're allowed so they can buy new equipment and buy new technologies; that will put people back to work in those industries as well as increase their own productivity. Those are some of the ideas that we ought to be talking about. But we've got to be careful not to do too much, so that you add to the deficit, creating even more economic problems. We've been there in the past. Huge deficits are bad for the economy in our country. We need to stimulate growth immediately, and the best way to do that is to get money in the hands of average working people, not the top 10 percent of income earners who don't deserve it and frankly don't need it at this juncture.

Multimedia:
Listen to Dodd's statement