May 17, 2001 Mr. CONRAD. Mr. President, first of all I thank the Senator from Texas for supporting the fundamental idea of moving up marriage penalty relief. I would just differentiate our proposals in this way. The proposal I am offering would give the full marriage penalty relief starting immediately. The Senator from Texas would provide the relief starting immediately but phase it in over an extended period of time; we would not get the full phase-in until 2008. That would just be on one of the provisions dealing with marriage penalty. As I understand it, she does not deal with the other provisions at all. In addition, there is a difference in the pay-for. The pay-for on our side is to ask those at the highest income levels, the highest tax brackets, to simply have their tax cut deferred for a number of years. We get to the same level over the period of the 10 years in tax rates, tax brackets. We ask the fewer than 1 percent of the people who are in the very top tax bracket and the approximately 2 percent of the people who are in the next tax bracket to defer additional reductions so we can provide marriage penalty relief starting immediately. The Senator from Texas has a totally different pay-for. She goes after student loan money; she goes after the education IRA money; she goes after the alternative minimum tax money. I do not think that is the way we want to pay for this. I don't think we want to pay for moving up marriage penalty relief by going after the student loan interest money. I don't think we want to pay for marriage penalty relief by going after the education IRA money that allows people to save for the education of their children. I don't think we want to go after the alternative minimum tax money that we already know is totally inadequate in this bill, and under this bill we are going to go from 1.5 million people being affected by the alternative minimum tax to nearly 40 million people, nearly 1 in every 4 taxpayers who think they are going to get a tax cut and are in for a big surprise: They are going to get a tax increase under this bill. I hope Members will look very carefully at the fundamental differences between what I am offering to speed up marriage penalty relief--do it immediately, do it now--versus what the Senator from Texas is proposing, which is to start now but to dribble it out until the year 2008.