[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 159 (Wednesday, October 4, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6308-S6313]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                               Tax Reform

  Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I am not aware of any Missouri 
constituents, for whom I work, who wouldn't like to see a tax code that 
was simpler, fairer, that did more to create jobs, that was better for 
individuals, and one that they understood. I don't have anybody come up 
to me and say: What can we do to complicate the Tax Code further, or 
what can we do to make us less competitive, or how much more of my 
money would you like to have to do what you think the government ought 
to do? I don't have anybody say that to me.
  We are now at a time when we have the tools available. We have the 
focus available that will allow us to move in the right direction. For 
almost a decade now, hard-working families and hard-working individuals 
have had to deal with a below-average economy and with below-average 
wage growth in that below-average economy. Surely, we don't want that 
to be the new normal.
  I kept hearing the last 3 or 4 years that 2 percent growth is what we 
should expect now. The growth since World War II has averaged 3.4 
percent for over 70 years. Suddenly, we were told: No, 2 percent is the 
best we can do.
  I understand that, even counting the Great Depression, growth in the 
entire 20th century was over 3 percent. What do we need to do to get 
our economy growing in a way that creates better opportunities and 
better jobs?
  Why would it create better jobs? Because you have people who are 
looking for workers who are more eager to pay and keep a workforce in a 
growing economy than you do in an economy that is not growing. You have 
people who understand they can compete better if they have a workforce 
that is the workforce they want rather than the workforce they just 
happen to get and that there is competition for that workforce. So our 
goal here in tax reduction and tax reform should be to help families 
and individuals keep more of their hard-earned money, to empower people 
to invest in their own

[[Page S6309]]

future in ways that we currently are not encouraging or just simply not 
allowing because we don't let them take enough of their money home from 
work that they make at work, and to make it easier for families to see 
a pathway toward success and not to penalize people when they make the 
right decisions.
  The tradition has always been this: If you want more of something, 
you don't tax it. You don't regulate it. You encourage it.
  We need a tax code that encourages more success, that encourages 
higher take-home pay and better jobs. Most people don't realize that 
the individual income tax is still the biggest source of Federal money. 
More than half of all Federal taxes collected come from the income tax.
  One of our goals should be how do we get more taxpayers and not how 
do we make more from the taxpayers we have. Perhaps the greatest 
voluntary compliance in the history of the world is how Americans have 
complied with the income tax system.
  The more Americans think the system is fair and understandable and 
everybody else is being treated the same way they are being treated, 
they are much more likely to comply with that system than a system 
where they hear: Well, some company made a lot of profit, but because 
of the complexity of the Tax Code, they paid zero taxes, or this 
neighbor has figured out that and that neighbor has figured out that, 
and because of the Tax Code, you work just as hard as they did, but the 
Federal Government somehow got a lot of your money because you hadn't 
set up your tax planning in the right way.
  Tax planning doesn't need to be that difficult. Right now the Tax 
Code has seven individual rates. We are proposing three individual 
rates, which maybe could go to four, but that would still be barely 
half the number we have, even if it got to four. There are seven 
individual rates, and there are more than 100 deductions, credits, and 
exclusions that people use when they fill out their tax form. American 
people collectively pay billions and billions of dollars just to figure 
out how much of their money the Federal Government is going to get.
  Most people would like to have the certainty of a postcard form that 
you fill out, but instead they see this system that has gotten 
increasingly complex, often not indexed for inflation. So you start 
with something that you think is only going to apply to a few people, 
and, before you know it, it applies to a whole lot of people.
  I think that when the alternative minimum tax was added to the Tax 
Code, there had been 155 wealthy individuals who hadn't paid any income 
tax. So the Federal Government decided, and Congress decided, that we 
are going to put the alternative minimal tax in to be sure those 155 
people, who are clearly wealthy people, are going to pay income tax. No 
matter how much they have gamed the tax system, they are still going to 
pay an alternative minimum tax. This was just a few years ago.
  By 2015, the 155 had gone to 4.4 million people who paid the 
alternative minimum tax. It is unbelievably successful if you are 
trying to collect people's money in a way they don't understand. It is 
not very successful if all you were trying to do was to prevent 155 
wealthy people a couple of decades ago from being able to not pay any 
tax at all. They took a shot at 155 people and wound up hitting 5 
million.
  That is unacceptable. That is not what the Tax Code is supposed to 
do. We need to work hard to simplify that. There are 14 pages of 
instructions that tell you or, more likely, your tax preparer how to 
comply with the alternative minimum tax guidelines.
  I don't have the one page with me, but I was handed the one page of 
instructions for the Tax Code from 1913. By the way, the estimate was 
that not only not many people would pay it, but nobody would ever pay 
it because you didn't pay anything unless you made at least $3,000, 
which in 1913 was a lot of money. But it was one page of instructions. 
Now we have 1 page of index to the 100 pages of instructions, and 14 of 
those pages are just for the alternative minimum tax. When you fill the 
form out, there are 64 different lines that you use to calculate now 
how almost 5 million people are impacted by a part of the Tax Code that 
was designed for 155 people.

  We can do a better job. We can do a better job of being sure that 
hard-working families get to take home more of the money they have 
earned with that hard work. We can also do a better job with the rest 
of the Tax Code to make sure we are creating the kind of opportunity 
for us to compete as a country, for us to compete as a nation, for us 
to be more fairly aligned with the other countries in the world that we 
compete with, and to make sure those hard-working families have better 
jobs with more take-home pay to start with.
  If you are working hard for a living--and Americans do; we are a 
working country--the best of all circumstances is that you have a 
better job than you used to have and less money comes out of every 
dollar you make than used to come out of every dollar you make, and 
that needs to be our goal. Whatever we do on the individual side needs 
to be focused on that. Whatever we do on the job-creating side needs to 
be focused on that. If we do that, we will not have the people we work 
for come in complaining: What have you done? The Tax Code is too simple 
now. It is too easy to fill out my tax form. I am walking out on Friday 
with more money than I used to walk away with, and, oh, by the way, 
they tell me there is a better job about to develop that I can apply 
for.
  That is what we ought to do. I hope we keep focused on that and get 
this tax bill passed this year.
  I think the Senator from Georgia has come to talk about this same 
topic, along with Senator Barrasso from Wyoming.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Georgia.
  Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Missouri. I make 
the point that I have enjoyed the last 19 years serving with him in the 
Congress of the United States. He was elected 2 years before me to the 
House of Representatives. I came a little bit later, but I preceded him 
in the Senate in 2004. He has been great to work with.
  The Show Me State of Missouri is an awful lot like my State of 
Georgia. They are proud of their country. They are proud to be 
Americans. They are proud of the chance to have an opportunity to make 
an honest living and want to be a part of a country that continues to 
grow and have prosperity for the future.
  We had a hearing in the Finance Committee yesterday where there was 
an interesting study I had not seen before. It had been done by a 
Harvard student, who I assume was correct. Ninety percent of the people 
born in the 1940s ended up making more than their parents did when they 
went to work. But only about 40 percent of the people born in the 1980s 
will end up making more than their parents did, meaning that as we have 
gone along the way since World War II, we have taken more and more away 
from the opportunity in the earning level and more money has gone to 
different places, like taxation.
  Personally, I think the Finance Committee and the leadership of the 
Big 6, so to speak, have done us a great favor to open the debate on 
tax reform in America. Unlike some of the debates we have had recently, 
this debate is open-ended. We are starting with a framework, not an 
absolute dictate but a framework. We are talking about an opportunity 
we have to see if we can lower the burden of taxes on the American 
people, while incentivizing the American people to work more, to make 
more, and to earn more.
  There are two ways to increase revenue to the government. First, you 
can increase the rate of taxation. But then you are not necessarily 
taking in any more money. You might incentivize somebody to go 
somewhere else. The other way is to improve the opportunity to make 
money and the atmosphere in which people make money so they invest 
their time and effort and they grow their revenue, which grows the 
revenue of the United States of America.
  The proposal in the framework before us has any number of outlines 
and any number of targets. The four things I want to focus on are 
these. One is the middle class. I have gotten tired of hearing this 
reference to dividing us as Americans by class. We are all Americans. 
Regardless of our station in life, we are all important. The code ought

[[Page S6310]]

to be important to every single person who is an American and, if they 
can come to this country, to improve their life, raise their children, 
and live a good life.
  I am not into a class society. I am into an opportunity society. If 
you take a look at this proposal, for those people you put in the 
middle class today, it proposes lower rates, less brackets, and more 
opportunity to gain wealth in the future through work, through 
investment, and through earnings.
  Second, this framework encourages job creation. I know that people 
are always demonizing the rich. Most people who are rich are people 
providing people who aren't rich with jobs. I don't think it is bad to 
provide people with jobs. I think it is good to provide them with jobs. 
We need a Tax Code that incentivizes the creation of jobs.
  The focus on the passthrough rate, which is talked about by the Big 
6, may lower the passthrough rate to 25 percent. It is a job-creating 
proposal that works.
  I have run a sub-S corporation. I have been a partner in limited 
partnerships. I have known people who have had sole proprietorships. I 
have known people who have had independent operations. They all pay 
their taxes at the regular, ordinary tax rate on the individual. They 
don't pay at the corporate rate. They pay at what is called the 
passthrough rate, where the profits at the end of the year of the 
partnership or the LLC or the sub-S corporation flow in a K-1 to the 
individual and are taxed at the ordinary income tax rate; whereas, 
corporations in C-corps, or stock-held companies, pay a top rate of 35 
percent.
  That rate is being proposed to go to 25 percent conceptually. If that 
goes to 20 percent and the 25 percent rate is applied to passthroughs, 
we will have a good environment in which companies can form 
investments, form new companies, make investments of those companies, 
build opportunity, and, in turn, build jobs. So it motivates America to 
create more jobs. With jobs come income. With income comes money. With 
money comes investment. At the end of that comes profit, which ends up 
being taxed, which is revenue to our country, and it increases.
  We also need to recognize that we are not as competitive as we used 
to be, in large measure because of the code we have, not because we are 
not competitive people. America is the most competitive environment in 
the world in which to do business. Americans by themselves were 
explorers to get here. Americans by themselves are investors and 
inventors. Americans by themselves are risk-takers. We want to improve 
in every competitive opportunity we have, but the current code we have 
suppresses competitiveness.
  This proposal by the Big 6 takes us to a territorial tax system. We 
are one of the few countries in the world that taxes the old-fashioned 
way. The territorial system is the way in which most of the world 
competes, and we are the biggest competitor within the rest of the 
world. It is time we put an end to a company making a dollar in Delhi, 
India, on a product they made there and sold there, pays the Indian 
tax, and then brings it back into America and has to pay the 
differential on the American tax as well. It is time we did what the 
territorial tax does, which is to tax the money where it is earned; 
therefore, you will never have to do repatriation again, and you will 
never have to talk about offshore tax havens again because the Tax Code 
will not induce those things to happen. Instead, people will pay the 
tax where it is earned, bring the money back here to hire people, 
invest, build new products, and then take them overseas and sell them. 
There is nothing more important than going to the territorial tax 
system. I am excited about this.
  Have you ever thought about this?
  If you were the president of a major American corporation and it was 
coming to the end of the year and you were getting ready to have your 
stockholders' meeting for the year and you were looking at ways to show 
how the stock could grow and how, next year, you were going to improve 
the profits of the company and, in turn, the net of the company and, in 
turn, the dividends to the stockholders--right now, if you have a home 
office in America, that is your principal office, and you are taxed at 
35 percent in America. If you have a competitive company that is in 
Ireland and it is taxed at 12\1/2\, it just might cross your mind: If I 
move my headquarters from America to Ireland, I could take my 
stockholders and put 18 percent or 20 percent--or whatever the 
differential is--on the bottom line for them. When your Tax Code causes 
people to think about things like that, you are predicting a future for 
a country that is not as bright, as rich, or as important as it should 
be.
  Lastly, everybody thinks I am a city slicker because I am from 
Atlanta, but I did grow up working on a farm in Fitzgerald, GA, and 
Ocilla, GA. I love farmers and I love farms. I know one of the 
proposals of the Big 6 is to do away with the remainder of the estate 
tax that is still with us. A few years ago, we exempted all estates at 
$5 million or less from the estate tax. Now it is $5.49 million because 
the index has been used on inflation. The tax rate used to be 55 
percent, and it is now 40. Yet, in my State of Georgia, with the 
effective application of the income tax, the tax is about 46 percent. 
So, for round figures and argumentative figures, for someone who dies 
in our State, after the first $5 million, he pays a tax closer to 50 
percent.
  A lot of people say that is rich people taking a benefit of the Tax 
Code. I don't call being dead in order to collect a tax benefit a good 
idea. I do not think that that is a benefit to me at all because the 
estate tax is on somebody's estate who passes away, who pays that tax 
for the people who would inherit the assets. Those are normally the 
children or the spouses or maybe the employees with whom they work in 
their companies.
  Have you ever thought about this?
  If somebody were taxing you at 50 percent or close thereto and you 
file your first estate tax return after you are dead, then if this were 
the value of your estate, you would be telling the government: OK, you 
get this half, while my children, my wife, my family get the other 
half. A year later, when you go back to the well--or a generation 
later--those kids who inherited the business will have to go back and 
pay taxes, and a quarter of it will be gone. So, in two generations, 
you took an asset that was worth a lot and reduced it to 25 percent of 
what it was worth. You are incentivizing people to liquidate something 
that was paying taxes on an ongoing basis and pay a onetime exit in 
terms of an estate tax. That is backward thinking.
  What we should do is take those things people have worked for and 
striven for and tried their best to build and have an incentive for 
them to take that and leave it to their heirs and leave that company in 
a tax-paying mode or that farm in a tax-paying mode so America benefits 
and they benefit as well. Just because you are not taxing something 
does not mean you are not taking advantage of your company or the 
benefit of that item. By abolishing the estate tax, you will actually 
put more money, over time, in the Treasury of the United States of 
America in taxes than you ever will by taxing the one-time 50 percent.
  So as we enter this debate--and I have been joined on the floor by a 
number of my colleagues who, I know, want to talk--let's talk about 
what benefits the American people, what incentivizes innovation and 
competition, what puts more money in the pockets of middle-class 
Americans today but also creates more people in the middle and upper 
classes in the future, not because we gave them anything except an 
opportunity, a fair place to compete, and that competitive drive that 
only people in the United States of America have, possess, and will 
always use to the benefit of our country.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming.
  Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, it is always such a privilege to come to 
the floor and hear Senator Isakson, of Georgia, speak, as he speaks so 
eloquently. He comes here and makes perfect points. He was talking 
about the tax system looking to the future. What we have is a tax 
system that looks backward, regrettably. A number of years ago, we had 
a Treasury Secretary named Bill Simon, who said: ``The Nation should 
have a tax code that looks like someone designed it on purpose.'' That 
is what we are trying to do now--have a Tax Code that looks like it was 
designed on purpose.

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  The person who really understood this was Ronald Reagan. As we take a 
look at tax proposals, it is not about taxes; it is about much more--
about a better life for the American people. Ronald Reagan said that 
tax reform is the door to a bigger future and, I would add, to a 
brighter future. He said it was the door to a future as big and hopeful 
and full of heart as the American dream. That is what we are talking 
about here today, a bright, big future, as big and bright as the 
American dream. That is what we are aiming at with this plan, a big and 
hopeful future for all Americans.
  It all starts with increasing the amount of money Americans get to 
keep in their pockets as a result of their hard-earned paycheck 
dollars. That is the most important thing. That is what families are 
concerned about. That is what I hear about every weekend in Wyoming. 
Under the outline the Republicans have proposed, every working man and 
woman in this country will be better off. That is our goal, to make 
everyone better off and to make the country better off, more 
prosperous, with a strong, healthy economy. That is what we are hearing 
about today on the floor and what we heard about from the Senator from 
Georgia.
  When we cut the amount of money people have to pay in taxes, it is 
essentially like giving them a raise. That is what this is about, 
giving people a raise. We want working people to keep more of their 
hard-earned money. One of the ways you can do that, which is very 
popular, is by doubling the standard deduction. It is easy math to do. 
The current standard deduction is around $12,000 for a couple who files 
jointly. The Republican proposal doubles it to $24,000. That means the 
first $24,000 of a couple's income will not be taxed at all.
  Beyond that, we are going to reduce the number of tax brackets. 
People will like that. It is so complicated, the system we have now. We 
will move people into lower brackets. Isn't that what we are trying to 
do? Yes, it is. If you used to be in a bracket and paid 25 percent, 
there is a pretty good chance that a significant amount of your income 
is going to be moved down to the 12-percent range. For most people, 
that is like getting a big raise when they take a look at their 
paychecks at the end of the week. That is what Republican tax relief 
looks like.
  The second thing we want to do is to actually make it a lot simpler. 
We talked about lowering the number of brackets, making it simpler for 
everyone who does their taxes. The instructions you get now from the 
IRS for the 1040 tax form are 106-pages long, and that is if you just 
limit yourself to the instructions. Remember that there are 15 
different worksheets to fill out just so you can fill out your 1040 
form. When more people take the standard deduction, they can save a lot 
of time and not have to go to the 15 worksheets and the 106 pages of 
instructions. They get that standard deduction, which has now doubled, 
making it a lot easier, with a lot less time having to be spent on 
taxes.
  What else are we going to do?
  We want to cut out a lot of the loopholes and complicated rules so 
most people will be able to just fill out a form on a single page. 
Think of the hours that is going to save families--the millions and 
millions of hours--when you multiply it across the country. Plus, think 
of the stress people will not have to be living under in their 
wondering if they actually followed the instructions properly. When you 
call the IRS help line, you get different answers from different people 
with whom you talk. It is hard to get a single answer because the 
complicated system makes it hard to get the answer right. So you end up 
with the expense of hiring lawyers, tax accountants, and people who can 
help you navigate a complicated system.
  People are looking for simpler lives, more free time, and more money 
of their own they can keep, not complicated government forms so the 
government takes more of their money. There is a lot of room for us to 
improve the simplicity of the tax system and the actual challenges that 
come from filling out the forms.
  The third thing we want to do with the plan, of course, is to get the 
economy growing faster so it is a strong and healthy economy, with more 
prosperity and higher take-home pay in the paychecks. With that, you 
will actually get an economy that creates more jobs and has more people 
working, which is a big part of tax reform. It is a direct benefit for 
American families. When you cut taxes on small businesses, they can 
afford to hire more people or they can use the extra money to pay their 
workers more. There is a lot that can be done to reach that level of 
prosperity--in individual paychecks as well as in having more people in 
the workforce.
  Under the outline the Republicans released last week, the top rate 
for most small businesses is going to drop from almost 40 percent down 
to 25 percent, allowing the businesses to pass on those savings to 
their customers and the savings to their employees. Larger businesses 
are going to get a tax break too. The idea is to lower taxes for 
everyone.
  When you take a look at it from a business owner's standpoint, 70 
percent of the cost of corporate taxes actually does not get paid by a 
corporation; it gets paid by the people who work for those businesses. 
If we cut taxes, more of that money is going to go to the workers. You 
will have higher wages, better benefits, and more jobs, and businesses 
will actually be able to lower their prices. Every time there is a tax 
increase, a business has to raise the cost of a product to be able to 
collect that tax and send it to the government. I would rather have 
that money go into the pockets of the people who are shopping in the 
store or using that business rather than into the pocket of the Federal 
Government.
  Senator Isakson was talking about something called repatriation and 
the amount of money businesses are taxed that do some business 
overseas. If we can cut the taxes they pay on the money they earn 
overseas, it means those businesses can bring back that money to the 
United States and spend it here. How much is it? Right now, about $2.6 
trillion is sitting overseas because those businesses get taxed twice--
once on the business done overseas and then once on the business done 
when they bring those profits back to the United States. When we get 
that money back, that is going to help grow the economy here as well. 
It makes sure the American Tax Code ought to be helping American 
businesses and the American economy, not helping foreign countries. We 
need to get that money back and put it to work in the United States.
  Those are all of the things the Republicans are proposing. It means 
more money in the pockets of American workers, and it means simpler 
taxes and more jobs for American workers. Isn't that what we are 
looking for? Isn't that what prosperity means for America? Isn't that 
what a healthy economy means--job growth and the sort of things that 
happen when we get the kind of tax reform we have proposed?
  I want to address one other thing I have heard over the past couple 
of days as our plan has come out. I have heard some Members on the 
other side of the aisle say that under the Republican plan, certain 
people will win more than others. Under the Republican plan, the goal 
is for everyone to win. The American economy will win. When we have a 
growing economy, people keep more of their hard-earned money. That is 
the goal. That is why the President and the Republicans in Congress 
wanted to take up tax relief right now in the first place. We need to 
do this to help all American families.
  This gets back to Ronald Reagan, in that tax reform--tax reductions, 
tax relief--means a big and hopeful future for all Americans. That 
should be the goal. It should be the goal of every Member of the U.S. 
Senate. It should be the goal of every American. We want to make taxes 
fairer and simpler and lower for everyone.
  There are too many people in Washington right now who want to use 
America's tax laws to punish or reward one group of Americans or 
another. Too many people in Washington want to use this debate over tax 
reform to stir up conflict and resentment. We hear it already in the 
Democrats' talking points. There are some Democrats in this Senate who 
think that is good politics. Well, it is terrible policy and terrible 
for the direction of our country and economy.

  The tax plan the Republicans have released this last week does 
nothing to

[[Page S6312]]

change who bears the burden of taxes in the country. People who are 
fortunate and have high incomes will pay their fair share; people who 
make less will pay less. That is how the Tax Code is spread today. 
Nothing in this plan changes that.
  We have a lot of work ahead of us. We have to figure out the exact 
income levels for each of the tax brackets and the size of some of the 
tax credits families get. These are all important details. That is the 
kind of debate we are going to be having--the markup on the budget and 
the mathematics of the tax bill coming through committee.
  I am so grateful to Senator Hatch and members of the Finance 
Committee for all of the hard work they will be putting into this over 
the next several weeks.
  I will refer back to the quote of the Treasury Secretary, Bill Simon, 
who said: ``The nation should have a tax code that looks like someone 
designed it on purpose.'' This is our chance. We need to make sure we 
take full advantage of it.
  Thank you, Mr. President.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Dakota.
  Mr. ROUNDS. Mr. President, today I rise to speak about our country's 
need for tax reform. As our previous speakers have indicated, this is a 
critical time in our country, and we have an opportunity to make some 
good decisions that will impact our Nation for literally generations to 
come.
  Reforming our Tax Code is a top priority not only for myself but for 
many of my colleagues and the President. We are committed to delivering 
tax reform that will provide more jobs, bigger paychecks, and a fairer 
tax system for the American people.
  Over the 8 years of the previous administration, economic growth 
averaged a paltry 1.5 percent annually, which is about half of the 
post-World War II average. This anemic growth has led to stagnant wages 
and, according to the Joint Economic Committee, has cost families an 
average of $8,600 in income on an annual basis. It is no wonder that 
half of the American public says they are living paycheck to paycheck. 
This is simply not acceptable.
  Even more concerning, the Congressional Budget Office is projecting 
economic growth to remain under 2 percent over the next 10 years if we 
do not act. If that happens, let me just share with you the real 
concern. If we allow economic growth to stay under 2 percent, then we 
will literally bring in revenue based upon the size of our economy. If 
we allow economic growth to move at a paltry 2 percent or less, then we 
won't have the revenue to pay our bills.
  Today, right now, we are looking at trillion-dollar deficits. Yet, if 
we take a look at where the dollars are going, they go basically--
looking at our entire budget, about 28 percent of the money that we 
spend today is found within the 12 appropriations bills that make up 
the defense and the nondefense discretionary side of the budget. All of 
the remaining items, making up 72 percent, are in areas of mandatory 
payments--Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and interest on the 
debt. If we don't do anything and if we continue on this same path, 
with the type of growth we have, then we can expect that within 9 years 
now, by the year 2026, our country's 250th birthday, 99 percent of all 
of the revenue we take in will go into Medicare, Medicaid, Social 
Security, and interest on the debt. That means there will be only 1 
percent remaining for defense of our country, roads, bridges, research, 
education, and all of those other items that many people really want to 
see and that help us to move ahead as a country.
  We have to make changes now that will allow our country's economy to 
grow and prosper the way it used to. The way we believe we do that is 
by changing our Tax Code, changing the regulatory environment in the 
United States, and sending the message back to the businesses that this 
is the place where they want to do business. They don't have to leave 
our shores in order to actually make a profit and be able to keep that 
profit.
  It is our intention to deliver policies that will jolt our economy, 
allow hard-working families to keep more of their paychecks, and 
provide financial opportunities to lower and middle-class families. Tax 
reform is a vital component of this.
  Our current overly complicated Tax Code is more than 70,000 pages in 
length. It takes Americans more than 8.1 billion hours each year to 
file their taxes. A fairer, simpler Tax Code will grow the economy, 
increase wages for American families, improve American competitiveness 
overseas, and provide much needed certainty for our business community.
  It has been 30 years since our Tax Code was last reformed. The rest 
of the industrialized world has learned from America what it takes to 
be competitive. They have seen what our tax rates have become. They 
have lowered their tax rates. They are now inviting businesses to their 
shores rather than to ours. Businesses that can go anyplace in the 
world they want to are not choosing America as their location anymore. 
We have to change that because when they come back, they bring good-
paying jobs with them. They keep the profits here, which are reinvested 
within our borders rather than overseas, and that adds to a growing 
economy here, which allows us more revenue through even lower tax 
rates.
  The average corporate rate in the United States today is 39 percent, 
compared to 25 percent by our foreign competitors. This puts American 
businesses at a disadvantage right out of the gate. We must reform the 
tax rate to one that incentivizes businesses to remain here in America 
and keep good-paying jobs from going overseas. Doing so will unleash 
the full potential of this American economy.
  One thing we can all agree on is that taxes are too high and that the 
tax rate, no matter who you are, should be lowered. Allowing all 
American families to keep more of their hard-earned dollars by taking 
them out of the hands of Washington and putting them back into their 
pocketbooks will result in a more prosperous America. That means more 
people investing in America long term. When our economy is healthy, 
every American will feel the positive effects.
  I am encouraged by the ongoing discussions and progress being made to 
alleviate the tax burden on American businesses and American families, 
and I will continue to work with anyone serious about lowering taxes 
and reforming the code to provide a much needed boost to our sluggish 
economy. The American people deserve better than the uncertain growth 
and burdens still lingering from the previous administration.
  Thank you, Mr. President.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina.
  Mr. TILLIS. Thank you, Mr. President.
  I appreciate the opportunity to speak today. Like last week, I didn't 
plan on speaking on this subject, so my staff is probably wondering 
once again what their boss is going to say. But I was thinking that 
maybe we could translate a little bit of what we are trying to do with 
tax reform, because we talk about tax rates, exemptions, exceptions, 
and simplification--all this stuff that is important because it gets 
baked into the bill--but we don't spend a lot of time explaining why we 
are trying to do what we are doing.
  The last time we had real, meaningful, impactful tax reform was back 
in 1986. That is when Republicans and Democrats came together and 
decided that the stagnant economy that I grew up in--I graduated from 
high school in 1978. I didn't immediately go to college. I moved away 
from home when I was 17 years old, and I was working. It was an economy 
that was not unlike today's. In many respects, it may have been a 
little bit worse. The environment was the same. Iran was behaving 
badly, and Russia was behaving badly. We had sort of the same sort of 
global environment that we have today. We had the threats that we have 
to confront every single day, and we had the threat to the future of a 
generation. I mean, literally, people had no earthly idea, if they were 
getting an education, whether they would be able to get a job because 
the job-creation numbers when I was 26 years old were terrible. People 
were worried about whether they could pay for college.
  So why are we doing tax reform? We are doing tax reform because it is 
time for the American economy to grow back to what it is capable of 
doing, what it has done in the past.

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  We need tax reform so we can create economic expansion that lets us 
pay down our debt, which many people in the military say is the single 
greatest threat to our national security.
  We need tax reform and we need to grow the economy because we owe it 
to this generation to have the same opportunities that I did.
  It can be done, but we have to do it probably through reconciliation 
because right now, even though many of the proposals that we are 
putting forward--the tax rate and the kinds of policies we are putting 
forward have been supported by our colleagues and many of my friends on 
the other side of the aisle. For some reason, they don't make sense 
anymore. They made sense back in 1986 when Democrats and Republicans 
joined together to do tax reform. If you were in your midtwenties then, 
you saw prosperity unlike anything we have seen right up to today. That 
was the last time we saw great growth in our economy. We need to get 
back to providing those same sorts of opportunities.
  People will tell you that we are not giving a cut to the little guy 
or the working man. Well, one thing you don't see when you see the 
percentage rates that we are talking about on individual tax rates that 
we are targeting is that there will be tens of thousands of people who 
will pay zero taxes. There is a actually a zero tax bracket. There are 
people who, because of the exceptions and exemptions that we are 
proposing, will actually fall below having a Federal tax liability. We 
need to talk about that.
  We need to recognize that we have to provide relief to the entire 
spectrum, from the businesses that hire people and create jobs to the 
working families and the people who don't make enough where we can take 
any more away from them because they need it to pay their bills. They 
need to pay their electric bills, their utility bills, their school 
tuition, and all the other things that working families are struggling 
to do today, just as I was struggling to do back in 1986.
  So I hope this Congress will deliver on the promise we made last year 
to cut taxes, to get this economy moving again, and to provide the same 
opportunities for the generation going to school and the people who 
aren't in school, who are struggling to make a living--the same 
opportunities that I got when I was that 26-year-old back in 1986. We 
can do it. I know we can do it because we have done it before. It is a 
promise we made and a promise we need to keep.
  Thank you, Mr. President.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Pennsylvania.