[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 177 (Wednesday, November 1, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6953-S6954]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                               Tax Reform

  Mr. President, the other issue I wish to bring up in my remarks today 
is tax reform, because we all know that the House of Representatives 
will release the Ways and Means Committee's beginning bill for tax 
reform--something we have promised for a long time and that the country 
is anxiously awaiting.
  This will be the culmination of months--if not years--of hard work, 
of meetings, white papers, listening sessions, and the like so that we 
can deliver on our shared goal of a simpler, fairer tax system that 
boosts jobs and puts more money in the pockets of every American. Those 
are our goals.
  We know that many hard-working Americans have had a rough time in 
recent years. Sending their kids to college and securing retirement 
seems to be harder and increasingly out of reach for some of my 
constituents back in Texas and people around the country. I hear about 
their concerns and their anxieties--economic anxieties--every time I go 
home. It is not acceptable that 50 percent of Americans are finding 
themselves living from paycheck to paycheck and that a third of voters 
are one trip to the mechanic shop away from a household financial 
crisis.
  Last week, several of my colleagues and I sat down with the 
President--we were members of a bipartisan group of the Senate Finance 
Committee--and discussed our objectives in achieving meaningful and 
lasting changes to our Tax Code. The President agreed that we should 
cut taxes for hard-working Americans and that we should nearly double 
the standard deduction, which reduces the number of people who will 
have to itemize deductions on their tax return, thus, making compliance 
with the Tax Code much simpler and cheaper. We agreed that we would 
significantly increase the child tax credit and reduce taxes on 
businesses and job creators.
  This last objective--reducing taxes on businesses and job creators--
deserves a little bit more discussion.
  Ireland represents an interesting point of comparison for the United 
States. We have the highest tax rate in the world--35 percent for 
businesses that do business all around the globe. Ireland has a 
corporate rate of 12.5 percent. That is 35 percent to 12.5 percent. 
Because of that, it has become a haven for large American companies, 
especially in the high-tech sector.
  Ireland has since ended its so-called ``double Irish'' tax scheme, 
which allowed it to benefit from taxes on income that should have been 
taxed in the United States. In other words, there is some rivalry and 
competition when businesses do business worldwide as to where their 
profits will be taxed. We want to make sure that those profits are 
taxed in the United States and not in countries abroad, where we would 
enjoy no benefit from.
  This example illustrates what happens when we keep our tax rate so 
high. Sadly, companies leave. They go elsewhere, because they know that 
the difference between a 35-percent tax rate and a 12.5-percent tax 
rate in Ireland may be the difference between making a profit for your 
shareholders--whether it is the teachers retirement system or the 
firefighters pension fund--or ending up in the red and not making a 
profit at all. Savvy companies will leave, and they will go elsewhere. 
They know to create new entities and search the globe for better rates. 
It is really a matter of their competitiveness in a global economy.
  Of course, when they do this, it is legal. It is rational because 
they want the best deal they can get for their shareholders. They also 
want to make sure they can achieve a profit for their shareholders and 
not a loss, frankly, due to the differential in tax rates.
  When companies dodge U.S. taxes, it means we here in the United 
States miss out on revenue that we would otherwise reap. One thing is 
for sure. With $20 trillion in debt, we want to make sure that our Tax 
Code is fair and simple and is competitive and will help us grow our 
economy in a way that will help us pay down those deficits and that 
debt.
  Now, our Democratic friends have been known to demagogue this issue a 
little bit, saying: Who wants to cut these corporate tax rates 
overseas? Corporations shouldn't get a tax cut, even though they know 
what the facts are.
  Well, they should simply listen to people like Barack Obama. In 2011 
he was speaking to a joint session of Congress and called on 
Republicans and Democrats alike to lower the U.S. corporate tax rate 
because he knew--and he was right--that this was hurting our global 
competitiveness in a global economy and that companies, out of sheer 
self-interest, were keeping the profits they had earned overseas rather 
than bringing them back and suffering from double taxation, meaning 
that workers here in the United States didn't get the benefit of that 
infusion of extra cash in their paycheck, and the investment that 
should occur here in the United States was occurring overseas strictly 
because of our Tax Code.
  My colleague, the senior Senator from Oregon, described corporate 
inversions. That is what happens when an American company shifts its 
legal address to a foreign country, such as Ireland, for tax purposes. 
He called it a ``contagion'' that has affected the Tax Code with ``the 
chronic diseases of loopholes and inefficiency.'' He went on to call 
the Tax Code an ``anti-competitive mess.'' He is right.
  The senior Senators from Maryland and Ohio have also made similar 
statements in past years.
  We all realize that simplifying our Tax Code will reduce tax 
compliance costs, which currently run for small business owners at 
around $19 billion a year. Our Tax Code has simply gotten to be too 
complex and too convoluted for honest, law-abiding small business 
owners to do it on their own. So they have to hire somebody else to 
help them sort it out.
  The less money that a small business pays in tax compliance is the 
more they can spend on their employees or on expanding their business 
or on investing in new equipment or simply giving their workers a pay 
raise. Let's give them the relief that they need. Let's reduce the 
corporate rate, as President Obama and our colleagues on the other side 
used to argue for. With our proposals, we can also get moving on fixing 
the rest of the Tax Code to let the hard-working people of Texas and 
American families keep more of what they earn, improve their standard 
of living in the process, and to make our Tax Code more competitive in 
a global economy so that businesses that operate internationally will 
be incentivized to bring that money back here to the United States to 
make and manufacture products that are stamped ``Made in America'' and 
to improve the wages and quality of life and income of American 
workers. It just strikes me as a no-brainer, and that is exactly what 
we are going to set out to accomplish to.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Toomey). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, thank you.

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