[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 172 (Wednesday, October 25, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6787-S6789]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                               Tax Reform

  Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, yesterday in the middle of the day, the 
Presiding Officer and I and the Senator from Texas and others had a 
chance to meet with the President and talk about tax relief. It seemed 
to me very clear that the President and those of us who are advocating 
tax cuts right now are on the same wavelength, which is, let's have tax 
cuts for hard-working families, and let's do the other things we need 
to do in the Tax Code to ensure that those very same families have 
better jobs.
  As I said on the floor of the Senate last week, there are two ways to 
increase take-home pay. One is to start taking less out of the 
paychecks people are getting now, and another one is to give them an 
even better paycheck in the future. We need to look at both of those 
ways to increase the opportunity for working families and working 
individuals.
  We are now into the eighth year of almost no economic growth. If 
there is no economic growth, there is very little incentive for your 
job to be a better paying job than it was the previous year no matter 
what has happened to your other costs, and we clearly see that 
happening.
  We are into the first year of this new administration. We are looking 
at 3 percent annual growth after 8 years in which growth didn't exceed 
2 percent. Anytime you begin to talk like an economist, people begin to 
wonder: Well, what does that have to do with me? Let me just say that 
for taxpayers generally, for working families generally, the more 
growth you have, one, the more revenue that comes in that takes care of 
problems like the deficit. The way you take care of those problems--the 
best way--is to grow the economy. Two, people are much more focused on 
keeping the workforce they have, getting the best of the workforce that 
is coming on board as their workforce moves on for retirement or 
relocates or does other things.
  Three percent economic growth is not good enough. The post-World War 
II average--that is more than seven decades now of average--is, I 
think, almost 3\1/2\ percent. There are very few economic problems in 
our country that wouldn't be made substantially better, including our 
own Federal deficit, if we see growth exceed or even get to the 70-year 
average. There is no reason to believe that can't happen.
  Yesterday, the President was talking about the two ways to 
immediately relieve pressures on families. One is more take-home pay, 
and two is a better job that also increases take-home pay. But the 
first step we can achieve immediately by the kind of tax relief we 
need.
  There have been 8 years of stagnant wages. Half of the families in 
the country are living paycheck to paycheck. Very few families can face 
an emergency that is even $500 without having to restructure what they 
are doing and how they are doing it. We can do a better job at this. We 
need more jobs. We need higher wages. And the two principal goals of 
this tax bill should be to do exactly that--create more wages now, more 
take-home pay now, and create an environment in which we are going to 
be more competitive. Simplifying the Tax Code is one way to meet that 
first impact, having a tax code that people understand better, that 
they think is fairer.
  A tax code where people think they are being treated fairly is much 
more likely to be complied with than a tax code where people see that 
somebody else who makes the same amount of money as they make is paying 
a lot less taxes than they are paying. The American tax system is 
probably the greatest voluntary compliance. Sure, there are laws that 
require people to comply, but most people are never impacted by those 
laws. They know they could be, but the American people have shown a 
willingness to pay their fair share if they know that their fair share 
is, in fact, their fair share. A simpler tax system, a more easily 
understood tax system, a system that has fewer than the seven different 
tax brackets that people pay today are things we can and should 
achieve.

  Doubling the standard deduction helps a lot when people look at the 
$12,000 deduction they have now. For a couple, as they look at that 
deduction and realize that deduction, that standard deduction, has 
doubled, suddenly, if you are a couple filing jointly, you are not 
paying any taxes on the first $24,000 you earn. If you are a single 
individual, you are not paying any taxes on the first $12,000 you earn. 
Keeping enough of the family-benefiting exemptions helps make the 
family do what the family would like to do. What if they would like to 
give to their church and charity? There is no discussion saying we 
wouldn't keep the standard charitable deduction as a deduction. There 
is no discussion that we wouldn't keep home mortgage as a deduction so 
we are encouraging homeownership or looking at how to make the child 
tax credit bigger rather than smaller.
  Many of the early analyses of what this Tax Code would do say that 
for a family of four, they would pay more than they are paying now up 
to certain income level. Generally, that will turn out not to be the 
case--certainly, at the middle-income levels and below if you factor in 
the child tax credit, which hasn't been determined yet.
  Our tax-writing committee will be looking at that child tax credit as 
an important addition to the individual exemptions because it costs 
money to raise kids. The Congress surely should understand that, 
appreciate that, and factor that into the deductions. Just like we are 
doubling the deduction for individual earners, we also have to look at 
what that child tax credit should look like.
  Tax policies that benefit homeownership, tax policies that encourage 
contributing to charities and community activities and church and 
synagogue and mosque--your religious activities--all would continue to 
be a part of this Tax Code.
  Also, when talking about sending kids to school, one way to not have 
student debt is to encourage families to have ways to better prepare 
for what they, in most cases, would hope would be a goal or an 
expenditure their family would make. We can do things like expanding 
the Pell grants for poor families, but for families who don't qualify 
for that, we can do things that allow the deduction early on for 
putting money in a fund that prepares people to go to school.
  Keeping well-paying jobs at home and encouraging more jobs to come 
here is also an important part of the goal. You can't have the highest 
corporate rate in the world and expect that you are going to be as 
competitive as you would be with other countries. A corporate rate of 
35 percent, in 1986, was fairly near the middle when that rate was 
arrived at with President Reagan and others working on it the last time 
we did a tax rewrite, and right in the middle is about where we should 
be. However, now the situation is we see that right in the middle is no

[[Page S6788]]

longer 35 percent; it is about 20 percent. Ireland just revised its 15 
percent rate to 8 percent. Great Britain is reducing their rate to a 
little less than 20 percent. They have been, I think, a little more 
than 20 percent. We need to be sure the products we make here and the 
jobs that are created here--that there is a competitive ability to sell 
that same product anywhere in the world, with the advantage, obviously, 
of being made by our great workforce but also an advantage where our 
tax system doesn't work us out of the marketplace, doesn't make us less 
competitive.
  A territorial tax system will be one of the things we are going to 
hear talked about a lot. For most of us, that doesn't seem to have any 
impact. We earn our money here, we pay our taxes here, but we also want 
to be sure that if American companies sell products somewhere else and 
earn money there, that they can, should, and would bring that money 
back to the United States to reinvest it in the kinds of things that 
create jobs here.
  I think this doesn't have to be all that complicated. We need to 
understand what the core principles are. We need to get to those core 
principles. We need to get this done this year so people are planning, 
in the first months of next year, on how to take advantage of a new, 
simpler, fairer, and more competitive Tax Code. This needs to be job 
one of this Congress for the next few weeks. We need to get that done 
so job one for the country, beginning at the end of this debate, is 
what we can do to create more and better jobs and create more take-home 
pay for hard-working families.
  I am joined by some of my colleagues who are going to talk about this 
same topic, I hope, and others. We need to be focused. I can tell, with 
the President's comments yesterday, he is focused on this. We are 
focused on this. This is a job we need to get done.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Ernst). The Senator from Alaska.
  Mr. SULLIVAN. Madam President, I wanted to reinforce and underscore 
some of the comments made by my colleague from Oklahoma, Senator 
Lankford, on what is happening in the Senate right now. It is actually 
really important for the American people to understand what is going 
on. Maybe we would finally get the press, who sit up there above your 
chair, Madam President, to write about this topic.
  Right now, we are debating a very well-qualified district court judge 
nominee--a Federal district court judge nominee from Oklahoma. Senator 
Lankford was down here, and he obviously knows the nominee, Scott Palk. 
He is so qualified that the vote for cloture to move forward on this 
nominee--who, by the way, was nominated by President Trump for a 
Federal district court position but was previously nominated by 
President Obama with fairly bipartisan support--was 79 to 18. That is 
really strong bipartisan support. It just happened about an hour ago on 
the Senate floor.
  So what are we doing? Well, we are still going to be debating for 30 
hours. We are not really debating the nominee because he is well 
qualified. That is what we are doing in the Senate, supposedly. Anyone 
watching, you know we are not debating him because he is very well 
qualified, but we are still going to burn 30 hours. Why is this? Well, 
this raises a much broader issue of the tactics that are happening on 
the Senate floor right now. The minority leader and his colleagues will 
not come down and explain what they are up to.
  I gave a speech on this a couple of weeks ago, and I just asked: Come 
on down. Let the American people understand why we are spending all 
this time on nominees who are very well qualified and have enormous 
bipartisan support. Why are we being required to go an additional 30 
hours? Those are the rules, but normally there would be unanimous 
consent to move forward. What is happening now hasn't been explained, 
but it definitely hurts the American people, whether you are a Democrat 
or Republican. What is happening now is, every single nominee from the 
Trump administration, whether Federal judge or Assistant Secretary for 
Health and Human Services, is being delayed. Here are the numbers. 
Eight years ago, President Obama had about 66 percent of his nominees 
confirmed at this period in the fall of his first term. People were 
working through them. If you didn't like the nominee, you would just 
vote against them, but you wouldn't say we are going to burn half the 
week of the Senate to debate somebody who is not even controversial. 
This judge, when we finally get through the 30 hours, is going to pass 
with 80 Senate votes, but we are burning through it anyway. President 
Obama, 8 years ago, had 66 percent confirmed. The number for President 
Trump 8 years later is 33 percent. Imagine our friends in the media--
the New York Times--if Republicans were doing this to President Obama 
during his first few months in office. There would be front-page 
stories every day. The Republican Party is trying to undermine the new 
President--delaying, delaying, delaying. You don't hear a peep from our 
national press. They don't write about it.
  It is a problem because we have work to do in this country. I have 
asked the minority leader to just come down and tell the American 
people why you are doing this. We have had numerous judges, very 
noncontroversial, very bipartisan, where we essentially spent the whole 
week ``debating'' them. We are not debating this judge, but we are 
going to spend 30 hours on him.
  Why are they doing that? And why are my colleagues on the other side 
of the aisle agreeing to it? I asked them to come on down and explain 
it to the American people, the people watching on TV or in the Gallery. 
Why are you doing this? Does it help the country? Whether you are a 
Democrat or Republican, it doesn't help the country. That is the whole 
point, but nobody wants to come down and explain their delay tactics. 
The press will not write about it because some of them like it, I 
think.
  Here is the truth. When we are spending all this time all week on 
this judge who will get voted on--and he will pass because he is very 
well qualified. Senator Lankford laid out his resume. He was previously 
nominated by President Obama. We are going to vote for him after this 
30-hour period, and he will pass with a strong bipartisan vote. What is 
the challenge? What happens to the other issues we need to address in 
this country--in this body? We can't get to them, if we wanted to turn 
to other issues to start moving them.
  My colleague from New Hampshire was just on the floor. She talked 
about all the things we have to do. I agree with her 100 percent: tax 
reform, healthcare, budget--we never do the budget here anymore--
National Defense Authorization Act, growing the economy, as my friend 
from Missouri talked about, infrastructure, immigration, and the 
Dreamer issue. We have so much to do, let alone getting Trump 
administration officials confirmed and judges confirmed. That is a big 
list, but because we are spending 30 hours on a debate, which really 
isn't a debate on the judge, and we can't get consent from the other 
side to actually work on these other issues, this is what we are doing. 
We are just burning time.
  The minority leader will not come down and explain it. I don't know 
if he can explain it, but that is what we are doing. Again, if the shoe 
were on the other foot, the press would be going crazy. Right now, they 
just let it happen. My view is, it would be great if one of my 
colleagues from the other side of the aisle would come down and say: 
Here is why we are wasting all of this time. Just let us know.
  As Senator Lankford mentioned, this judge was nominated by the 
President in May. Now we are going to spend most of the week 
``debating'' him, when that is not what is going on. It is just a delay 
tactic. My view is, we should just say: OK. You want to play ball like 
that? We will stay here 24/7 and keep the Senate open 7 days a week. 
Let's get to work. Let's stay here until Christmas. See if the minority 
leader and his team keep doing that, keep delaying. I think we should 
call their bluff.
  Right now, the delay tactics--which nobody on the other side wants to 
explain--in my view, are not defensible, and they are not helping the 
country. Whether you are a Democrat or Republican, you want to seat the 
government. You want to get good people working for the American 
people. Right now, that is not happening.
  I just wish the other side would either explain it or stop doing it. 
Let's get to work for this Nation.

[[Page S6789]]

  Thank you.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina.
  Mr. TILLIS. Madam President, I fully associate myself with the 
comments just made by the Senator from the great State of Alaska. We 
have to get to work here.