[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 72 (Thursday, April 27, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2569-S2570]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                        The President's Tax Plan

  Mr. President, yesterday the President released--and this is not as 
good news, unfortunately--a one-page outline of his plan to change the 
U.S. Tax Code. Even from the very limited details that were released, 
the President's priorities are clear: Give massive tax breaks to folks 
like himself--the very, very wealthy in America.
  The top rate would come down; taxes that disproportionately affect 
the very wealthy would go away, while middle-class and working families 
would be denied some of the most useful deductions. This isn't simply 
the Trump plan to lower taxes. It is the plan to lower the taxes of 
Trump and those with enormous wealth, similar to his.
  The prime beneficiaries of the Trump plan would be his Cabinet. 
Secretary Mnuchin, one of the architects of the plan, could not 
guarantee this morning that the middle class will not pay more under 
the Trump tax plan. If, on one sheet of paper, you can guarantee that 
corporations pay less and you can guarantee that the wealthiest 
Americans pay less but you can't guarantee that hard-working, middle-
class Americans pay less, you don't have a good recipe for changing our 
Tax Code. And, for the good of America, you are to go back to the 
drawing board.
  This proposal falls short, far short of the mark in several ways: 
First and foremost, it mostly benefits the very wealthy. In the Trump 
tax plan, corporations and the very wealthy get a huge tax break 
through lower rates and the elimination of things like the estate tax. 
In fact, the proposal the President put out yesterday is actually even 
more of a giveaway on the estate tax than his proposal in his campaign. 
In the campaign, President Trump promised to repeal the estate tax for 
estates up to $10 million, retaining it for the wealthiest of estates. 
This proposal would eliminate the tax completely, particularly on those 
multimillion- and even billion-dollar estates. The result would be that 
the 5,200 wealthiest families in America would each receive, on 
average, a $3 million windfall, and many would receive much, much more 
than that.
  Also, because the Trump plan lowers the tax rate on the so-called 
passthrough entities to 15 percent, wealthy businessmen, like President 
Trump, will be able to use passthrough entities to pay 15 percent in 
taxes while everyone else pays in the twenties and thirties. This has 
implications for something we don't need--the carried interest 
loophole. President Trump promised to get rid of this in his campaign. 
Instead of using the carried interest loophole under the President's 
bill, Wall Street funds could file their taxes at a new passthrough 
rate of 15 percent, which is even lower than the present tax on carried 
interest.
  Ironically, the President's tax plan would indeed get rid of the 
carried interest loophole only by making it lower than the present rate 
and making it permanent--a total, total reversal of what he pledged in 
his campaign.
  It all goes to show that those who stand to benefit most from this 
proposal are folks like the President and those at his level of wealth, 
while tens of millions of American middle-class, working families are 
hurt and could very well pay more.
  This brings me to my second point, which is that the Trump plan hurts 
middle-class and working Americans by eliminating their most popular 
and useful deductions. Take the elimination of the State and local tax 
deduction, for instance, which is used by so many middle-class families 
in my home State of New York. As it was cited in the Syracuse Post 
Standard: ``The loss of the deduction will cost New Yorkers an average 
of $4,500 per year for those who file itemized returns, totaling about 
$68 billion per

[[Page S2570]]

year that State residents will no longer be allowed to deduct from 
Federal returns.''
  I saw in Newsday this morning that a number of our Long Island 
Republican colleagues said they couldn't be for this. We hope they will 
stand up to anything that gets rid of State and local deductibility 
because, let me repeat, that is $4,500 a year that New Yorkers would no 
longer be able to deduct on average--massive tax cuts for the very 
wealthy, crumbs at best for everyone else.
  Third, the Republican plan is steeped in hypocrisy. Even without 
filling in the details, Trump's plan is already impossible to pay for. 
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that Trump's 
tax cuts will cost about $5.5 trillion over 10 years, as much as $7 
trillion. That is a huge amount of money in our economy.
  CRFB projects that ``no plausible amount of economic growth would be 
able to pay for the tax plan.'' The Republican plan would explode the 
deficit.
  For the last 8 years, all we heard from our Republican colleagues was 
that Obama was raising the deficit and we needed to cut programs that 
benefit the poor and the middle class; cut the entitlements, Social 
Security, Medicare because of the deficit. All of a sudden, now with a 
Republican President and a proposed tax cut for the wealthy, we are 
hearing from the other side of the aisle that deficits don't matter.
  Our Republican colleagues certainly believe the admonition that 
``consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.''
  Fourth, the Trump tax plan would explode the deficit and, thus, 
endanger Social Security and Medicare, which may well be the nefarious, 
ultimate goal of the hard right.
  Sadly, I know it can happen. I have seen it before with the Bush tax 
cuts. President Bush pushed a big tax break for the wealthy. It blew a 
hole in the deficit and racked up debt, and then he and his Republican 
colleagues tried to pursue deep cuts to the social safety net to 
balance the ledger.
  If Trump's tax plan were to pass, you can be sure, America, that a 
few years down the line--maybe even not that long--the deficit will be 
so large that our Republican colleagues will throw up their hands and 
say: We have no choice but to come after Social Security and Medicare 
and other important programs for the middle class as a way to address 
the deficit they created by showering tax breaks on the very rich.
  They will resume the cry they had in the Obama years: Cut the 
deficit--which seems to apply to the programs that help the middle 
class but never to the ones that benefit the wealthy.
  Just from the bare-bones skeleton the administration outlined 
yesterday, we can already surmise that this plan is not much more than 
a thinly veiled ruse to give away trillions to the wealthiest among us, 
starve the government of resources, balloon the deficit, and then cut 
Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare to make up the difference.
  This plan will roundly be rejected by taxpayers of all stripes. The 
American people are once again learning that what President Trump 
promised to working America in his campaign and what he is doing are 
totally at odds.