[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 173 (Thursday, October 26, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6836-S6838]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                          Republican Tax Plan

  Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, I don't often come to the floor of the 
Senate to give a speech like the one I am going to give now, but today 
I plan to start sounding the alarm, both from the standpoint of the 
process and the substance of what is known about the Republican tax 
plan as of this afternoon.

[[Page S6837]]

  This morning, the House passed the budget so now it is on to tax. The 
debate, if the Republicans have their way, will happen at the speed of 
light. If they have their way, this all could be wrapped up before most 
Americans have even been able to put a dent in their holiday shopping.

  That is exactly what the majority of Republicans is counting on. The 
Republicans are rushing to drive the tax giveaway to the superwealthy 
and the powerful corporations and to do it so quickly that most of 
America will really have no idea what will be going on. Their hope is 
simple--to do it in a way so that nobody catches on. So this afternoon, 
as the ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee, I am going to look at 
this from a few different angles--first, as to the process and, then, 
as to the policy that is on offer from the Republicans as of right now.
  Right off the top, I am sure that Senators have heard that, here in 
the Senate and Congress, there is going to be a real debate that is 
going to play out in a careful and deliberate way and that there is 
going to be plenty of give and take. As of right now, my message to the 
American people is this: You have been fooled. Don't buy that. Here is 
what is going to happen. Anybody who expects a repeat of the kind of 
bipartisan, deliberate process that took place in 1986, when the 
Democrats and Ronald Reagan got together, is in line for some very 
disappointing times.
  Our former colleague Senator Bradley, who served on the Finance 
Committee with such distinction and was a key author of the 1986 reform 
bill, called a couple of days ago, and I explained to him what was 
going on. He was just incredulous. He could not believe that this was 
going to be the process--that it would all be over in a matter of weeks 
and that it would not even be like healthcare, with the debate moving 
in fits and starts and stretching out over months.
  If Republicans have their way, as my family used to say, this is 
going to be over lickety-split, and it is coming up quickly. The House 
plans to offer up a bill in about a week, and the Ways and Means 
Committee is going to jump into action. The Senate bill could come out 
in a matter of days later, and then it would be the Finance Committee's 
turn.
  As most people in the Senate know, there is a normal process for 
these debates in committee. You usually put out draft legislation. You 
refine your ideas. You update your work. You share with both sides of 
the aisle the ideas that would make sense--those that get both sides to 
say: Hey, bipartisanship is about taking each other's good ideas, and 
politics is about taking each other's bad ideas. In this case, it is 
not about trying to make any bipartisan efforts at all. The normal 
process involves exercising a little patience, giving the officials at 
the Joint Committee on Taxation and in the Congressional Budget Office 
time to really make sense of what the numbers mean.
  This is not Washington lingo. What do the numbers mean for middle-
class people--the folks who are really hurting now, who are walking on 
an economic tightrope in trying to pay bills? We ought to make sure 
that people who are knowledgeable about this have the time to really 
look at the numbers and give us some general sense of what this means, 
particularly for America's hard-working middle class. Yet for this 
partisan tax cut and a process that will be hyperpartisan--it is 
designed to be an off-ramp to partisanship only--the Republicans are 
just blowing right by those steps that constitute the normal process 
that I have described.
  The Congress is headed for a debate on legislation that has the 
potential to reshape our entire economy at a crucial time when we 
understand the challenge from global competition and change, but the 
Republicans, as of now, are not going to wait to see the facts and 
figures, never mind that the bill is going to affect every taxpayer in 
the country in one way or another. The Republicans have said that we 
are going to do some leaping without looking. They may not even have 
legislative hearings to examine the Republican tax cut bill and what 
the impact of it could be, which was what Senator Bradley was just 
stunned about because he and others worked for months with the Reagan 
administration in trying to do what was normal and, as of now, is not 
going the happen.
  What is even more ominous is that, if the bill clears the Finance 
Committee, the debate on the Senate floor will happen in a flash. That 
is because, since day one of this administration, the Republicans have 
said--and Leader McConnell has said this repeatedly--that they want to 
use the most partisan process around to move the tax cut. It is another 
round of what is called budget reconciliation.
  What this comes down to is a rejection of the kind of bipartisanship 
that has been proven to work on tax reform. Ronald Reagan worked hand 
in hand with Democrats on tax reform in 1986. The two sides brought 
forward their best ideas. They worked for months and months and, as 
Senator Bradley told me, for several years. There were dozens of 
hearings that dug into the specifics and carefully examined the 
issues. After the bill came out, the committee met over 18 days to 
debate and vote on the amendments. There was committee consideration--
what is called a markup--that lasted a total of more than 45 hours. 
Then the bill came to the floor of the Senate, and, as is fitting for a 
piece of legislation that can reshape the whole American economy, the 
debate took almost a month. That is the textbook of how you 
successfully write bipartisan tax reform legislation. By the way, that 
is the model by which our former colleague Dan Coats--now a member of 
the Trump administration--worked with me to produce a bipartisan 
Federal income tax reform bill.

  Yet we are not going to see any of that kind of work this time 
around. The road that the majority is taking us down in 2017 makes a 
mockery out of the bipartisan process that brought Ronald Reagan and 
the Democrats together. As of now, there will be 20 hours of debate--20 
hours. That is it--on a bill that will transform the bottom line for 
every American family and will affect the hopes and aspirations of our 
middle class, which will drive 70 percent of the economic activity in 
our country for years and years. Then the debate will be over, and it 
will be time to vote.
  What I am going to try to do here--and we will be talking often in 
the days ahead--is to lay out what this really means for hard-working 
middle-class people, because, so far, what we have seen is kind of one 
hand giveth and the other hand taketh away. The details for the top of 
the top, the megawealthy, are spelled out, but we do not see exactly 
how the middle class is not going to go into the hole. As of now, the 
numbers suggest, particularly if you have a couple of children and are 
in a place with high State and local taxes, that you really could fall 
behind. If we do not spell out what is actually at stake here and give 
the American people the opportunity to tune in and be heard, this 
process is just going to race by before anybody notices, and that is 
what the Republicans are counting on.
  The bottom line is that, when the middle class and the American 
people find out what is in the Republican tax plan as it is known 
today, the less they are going to like it. There have been sort of two 
versions of it. The first came out, I believe it was, late in the 
spring. It was a page long--shorter than the typical drug store 
receipt. We got a bit more information a few weeks ago, but in both 
instances, as I have described, it looks like the middle class is going 
to get hurt, and folks who are successful and those who are at the top 
of the top are, basically, going to get even more.
  We want all Americans to be successful. We want to give everybody the 
chance to get ahead, but we do not want tax breaks skewed to the very 
top. As of right now, the Republican tax plan is a feast for the very 
wealthy, and the middle class is on the menu. Even the President's top 
campaign adviser on taxes said that the Republicans have made $4 
trillion worth of promises in this tax proposal, perhaps even more, but 
because of budget rules, that pricetag has to come down to $1.5 
trillion for the bill to get through the Senate. That means that 
somebody has to pay for a whole lot of that $4 trillion of corporate 
goodies and handouts to the wealthy.
  The Republicans seem almost allergic to raising revenue by asking 
those at the top to pay their fair share. Every proposal that the 
Republicans have put forward to pay for this tax giveaway to the top 
has reached right into the pockets of the middle class. Take the 
elimination of the State and

[[Page S6838]]

local deduction. It will cause pain for millions of Americans across 
the country, not just in the West--in places like California and 
Oregon--and the Northeast but for those in scarlet red areas who voted 
for the President on election day--places like North Carolina, Georgia, 
Wisconsin, and Texas. Then there is the plan to double the standard 
deduction while simultaneously getting rid of personal and dependent 
exemptions.
  When you cut out all of the tax lingo--as I have said, one hand 
giveth and the other hand taketh away--what it means, based on the 
information that is out now, is that a family of six in Medford, OR, 
could see its taxes increase by thousands of dollars per year. That is 
a holiday surprise. My guess is that people are going to say that it is 
the nightmare before Christmas if this plan becomes law.
  Even more middle-class Americans who checked on the news over the 
last few days probably had the wind knocked out of them when they read 
that their 401(k)s may be on the ropes under the Republican plan. A few 
days ago, the President said: No, do not touch the 401(k). But it seems 
to me like Republicans just cannot help themselves. When the President 
was asked about it again, the new Trump position was that middle-class 
retirements are a bargaining chip to get this lopsided tax handout 
through the Congress.

  Let me repeat that last part. The President of the United States said 
that middle-class retirements are a bargaining chip in this crusade to 
cut taxes for the most fortunate. Nothing illustrates more clearly how 
this process has gone horribly wrong, and I want to make clear to the 
American people to watch the details. Watch the details because every 
time a new detail leaks out, the middle class loses.
  So my bottom line, colleagues, is real tax reform ought to be about 
putting more dollars back in middle-class pockets, but right now the 
majority is taking a different tack. It amounts to a hunt for ways to 
force the middle class to pay for the tax breaks for those at the top.
  This scheme will explode the deficit. It is a con job on the middle 
class. It is failed economic policy, but it could rocket in the 
Congress in the weeks ahead before the American people catch on.
  So my counsel is, everybody ought to strap in and get ready for what 
is coming. Every step of the way in the Finance Committee and here on 
the floor, I will continue working with my Democratic colleagues to 
fight for middle-class priorities and tax reform, and I hope we will 
have some from the other side of the aisle join us. We intend to keep 
sounding the alarm on a Republican plan that as of now gives trillions 
of dollars of handouts to those at the top while hiking taxes on 
millions of middle-class families.
  Now that the House has passed its budget, this is kicking off the 
debate, and the idea that we would have a bunch of fake promises to the 
middle class, very specific gifts to folks at the top, and somehow 
unicorn theories of growth that will justify this, while really 
creating deficits that hurt Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and 
our safety net--those are the issues the American people deserve to 
know more about. We are going to tell them a lot more about the details 
in the days ahead because we believe in tax reform that puts the 
middle-class first, doesn't give gifts to the people in the very top 1 
percent, doesn't clobber Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, and, 
as Bill Bradley said earlier this week in a conversation with me, is 
based on the kind of bipartisanship that a hugely important issue like 
tax reform warrants.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.