"Gary Ackerman (D-Jamaica) is having a binge party with our federal tax dollars, but today we can stop him," declared Grant Lally. "April 15 is Ackerman's favorite day of the year, when overtaxed New Yorkers are forced to hand over too much of our hard earned money to the bloated federal bureaucracy that overregulates our lives."

"Today I will sign the 1996 Taxpayer Protection Pledge. By signing this pledge, I am making it perfectly clear that as your Congressman, I will never raise your taxes," Lally continued. "If Gary Ackerman had not voted to raise our taxes over a trillion dollars in the past ten years, I would have invited him to sign the pledge with me."

"Gary Ackerman has spent the past eighteen years raising taxes with Mario Cuomo in Albany and now with the big government liberals in Washington, casting the deciding vote in Congress for the largest tax increase in American history, 273 billion dollars," Lally continues. "Today in Congress there will be a vote on the Tax Limitation Amendment, which requires a two-thirds supermajority to raise taxes. This amendment can effectively end Ackerman's eighteen year career of casting deciding votes to tax the earnings, savings, and investments of hard working New Yorkers."

"The non-partisan National Taxpayers Union ranked Gary Ackerman as New York's biggest spender in the 104th Congress, voting to increase government spending by over 75 million dollars in 1995 alone. He has needed to do this so he can comfortably bounce 111 checks from the House bank and retire with a million dollar government pension," Lally continued.

"Even this year our carpet-bagging Congressman could have cut taxes and supported a balanced budget. Instead he sided with the extreme liberals in Congress, betraying the middle class," Lally continued.

"Today while Gary Ackerman parties with his big spending liberal friends in Washington, I will be here, in our Congressional district. I will be visiting with taxpayers at our post offices as we send Gary Ackerman's party money off to the federal government before the midnight deadline," Lally concludes. "Today is Gary Ackerman's eighteenth taxday party. And eighteen years of Gary Ackerman raising our taxes and lining his pockets is long enough."