Taxpayers for Common Sense urged the Congress to defeat an $80 billion tax cut bill passed this weekend. Proponents said it would be paid for using budget surplus. Instead of tax cuts, TCS believes any surplus should be used to pay down the more than $5.5 trillion in national debt.

The House bill passed this weekend, by a vote of 229 to 195, is the worst kind of election year giveaway. Future generations still face a staggering national debt and the need for serious reforms in entitlement programs that grow out of control in the years ahead. Congress may squander this historic opportunity for common sense reforms to support a blatant example of politics as usual.

In 1998, for the first time in a generation, the United States Treasury reported a budget surplus. The Department of Treasury has reported a surplus of more than $70 billion.

The financial turnaround does not, however, change the fact that decades of wasteful spending have left the nation with a massive amount of debt. Furthermore, surplus or not, that debt grows every day as interest on it compounds. In the current fiscal year alone, the debt facing every American taxpayer has increased by $146,112,492,024.

What makes the tax cut legislation worse is that the $80 billion giveaway requires changing the budget act to allow Congress access to money that is not even in the Treasury yet. House Way and Means Chairman Bill Archer acknowledged the procedural requirement during the committee's consideration of the bill.

In addition to opposing this tax cut, TCS remains opposed to any congressional or Clinton Administration proposals that use any of the projected surplus for new program spending. The funding for new proposals should come from offsets of more wasteful, existing spending.

The tax cut legislation will now move to the Senate for its consideration.