[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 178 (Thursday, November 2, 2017)]
[House]
[Pages H8435-H8438]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               TAX REFORM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2017, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. 
Ryan) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to be 
here this evening on the floor of the United States House of 
Representatives and talk about a timely issue that is an issue that is 
most important to most of the American people, and that is the issue of 
the economy, globalization, automation, and all of the issues that are 
coming down on many communities across the United States.
  I want to take this opportunity to spend the next 30 minutes walking 
through for the American people a little bit about what has happened 
and talk very clearly about the differences in approach on how we deal 
with these issues, how the Republican Party is trying to deal with 
these issues, and how those of us on the Democratic side want to deal 
with these issues.
  I don't want to get into a discussion at all, Mr. Speaker, about who 
hates whom, and who is bad and who is good,

[[Page H8436]]

and who is this and who is that. I want to talk about the facts, I want 
to talk about the historical facts, and I want to talk about what is 
happening to average families across these United States.
  Clearly, given the volatility of the elections over the past 15 years 
or so, I would argue that most of those elections have been about the 
economy, and that most of those elections have been about wages, 
pensions, security, and stability for families.
  My district is from Akron, Ohio, over to Youngstown and points in 
between, right up against the Pennsylvania border. And what we have 
seen over the last 20 or 30 years--for a while you think that all of 
this is just happening to your community, and then you realize as you 
read and travel, you begin to see that, unfortunately, most communities 
are facing very similar circumstances as the ones that I represent.
  So here on this chart we have an outline of what has happened in 
communities with regard to foreign trade and automation. The red are 
the States that have been hardest hit. As it moves from red to brown to 
purple to blue, and then a lighter blue, red is the most down to the 
least affected by globalization and automation.
  You will see on this chart the industrial Midwest, you will see up in 
New England, you will see down South, you will see as you move more to 
the central part of the country and then up into the Northwest, the 
hardest hit are manufacturing States, and the hardest hit by 
globalization and automation are the Deep South.
  So the big question facing the United States of America today in 2017 
is: How do we fix this problem?
  These are States that have had significantly lower growth, and they 
have been hit hard with wages that have been stagnant for close to 30 
years. We have seen an erosion of their pensions.
  So what are we going to do about this?
  The topic today in Washington, D.C., is the issue of tax reform. So 
we talk about tax reform in the context of the last time we had tax 
reform, 31 years ago. Mr. Speaker, since then, we have seen that 96 
percent of income growth has gone to the wealthiest 10 percent of 
families in the United States. So in 30 years, 96 percent of income 
growth in the country--almost all of it--has gone to the top 10 
percent. So the average family is getting squeezed.
  When you look back at the elections going back to, I think, 2006--I 
thought 2004--2002 and 2004 were going to be elections about the 
economy, too, but after 9/11, that had an impact on what the national 
conversation was about with regard to our elections. But I would 
argue--and I have been here since 2003. I would argue that, in 2006, 
that election putting Democrats in was about the economy.
  I would say that 2008, during the Presidential election and, again, 
for Congress, was about the economy. We had a complete collapse. The 
American people didn't think the Democrats fixed things fast enough, so 
in 2010 they put the Republicans in Congress. In 2012 things were 
getting better, and the election went for President Barack Obama, 
thinking that he was moving things slightly in the right direction. But 
they thought he would probably be better than Mitt Romney, who would 
have let the auto industry collapse and who was perceived as being more 
in line with the financial institutions in the United States. So they 
voted for President Obama.
  Then in 2014, President Obama wasn't doing things fast enough, still 
the squeeze, and then obviously in 2016, America voted for President 
Trump, thinking that he was promising expansion of healthcare, opening 
up the coal mines and opening up the steel mills. He was going to get 
the economy back, he was going to do it. It was going to be beautiful, 
and he was going to do it with the waving of a magic wand. It was going 
to be easy. So all of those elections were about the economy.
  So we still have this squeeze happening in the United States. We 
still have 63 percent of American families who could not withstand a 
$500 catastrophe in their family with their car, with their health 
insurance, with someone's health in their family, or with an accident. 
$500 in an emergency would send 63 percent of the families in the 
United States spinning out of control.

  We see with pensions, for example, that the average person 65 years-
plus only has $60,000 in a 401(k), which means they can drop out $3,000 
a year--not a month, a year--out of their 401(k) for 20 years. Their 
average Social Security is a little over $1,000. Their pension isn't 
much. And all of this averages to about $25,000 a year. So you are 
squeezed with your pension. You have had stagnant wages. You don't have 
much of a savings. And most families can't withstand even a $500 
emergency.
  This constant squeeze over the last 30 years from globalization and 
automation has put many of the communities on the last chart behind the 
eight ball, unable to get and keep their nose above water for them and 
their families.
  So our job is to figure out what the heck are we going to do about 
that. So the Republicans today proposed a new program of tax cuts. Here 
is what their tax cuts look like. Remember, I said 96 percent of income 
growth over the last 31 years went to the top 10 percent. So the 
Republican plan--again, we are not mad at them. This is just what they 
think is going to work.
  Their idea is: Why don't we give a tax cut to people making more than 
$1 million a year? They will see a good chunk of the tax cut. The next 
group, people making between $500,000 and $1 million a year, will see 
the next part--the biggest chunk of the tax cut.
  So the people who are making all of the income gains over the last 30 
years, that huge concentration of wealth in the last 30 years, the 
Republicans think if we give them a tax cut, then they are going to 
take that tax cut, and it is going to trickle down to those red States 
that I had up here earlier in the industrial Midwest, in the South, 
moving into the central part of the country, and in the New England 
States that aren't really surrounded and based on finance. Let's give 
them a tax cut and hope it makes its way and trickles its way down to 
Youngstown, Ohio. That is their solution. That is what they think is 
going to work.
  So let's ask ourselves: Have we tried this before?
  We have. When I was early in my career, we tried this approach of 
supply-side economics. We are going to cut taxes for the wealthy. They 
are going to take that money. It is going to make its way back into the 
economy, and it is going to get wages up, secure pensions, and all the 
rest.
  So with the Republican plan, they have done things to do that. Not 
just cut taxes for the wealthy, they get rid of the alternative minimum 
tax, which means no matter how many loopholes you are able to take 
advantage of, there is a minimum you are going to have to pay. And if 
they get rid of that minimum tax, and if that minimum tax wasn't in 
place a few years back, President Trump would have reduced his tax 
burden by $30 million--just so we can wrap our heads around this stuff.
  Under the plan that they have now, the top 175,000 richest families 
in the country will see a $700 tax cut. That is their plan. We really 
can't afford it because we have got to borrow $1\1/2\ trillion to pay 
for all this stuff.
  So that is where we are. That is their solution. Huge challenges with 
the middle class, huge challenges with pensions, huge challenges with 
wages and retirement and cost of healthcare and education, and their 
plan is to cut the taxes for the wealthy and hope it helps everyone 
else. That is their plan.
  We have tried this before. When President Bush got in, there were two 
rounds of tax cuts that he passed in the early part of the first decade 
of this century. He gave most of the taxes, in the same way, to the top 
1 percent of earners. They got a huge chunk of what we called the Bush 
tax cuts.

                              {time}  1930

  That was their strategy back then.
  What happened in that decade following the Bush tax cuts?
  Well, we see that, after the Bush tax cuts, we had the slowest 
economic growth in the United States post-World War II, the slowest 
growth across the board in the United States. They cut taxes for the 
wealthiest in the hopes that it would somehow help the economy. They 
also deregulated the financial markets because that was going to help, 
too.
  So what happened was that we had very low growth: employment only 
increased by 0.3 percent, and the real

[[Page H8437]]

GDP only grew by 2.6 percent; wages were stagnant.
  As we all remember, in 2007 and 2008, things started to unravel in 
the economy, and we had a huge collapse in the housing market that was 
deregulated. We didn't have any cops on the beat watching what was 
going on.
  Stagnant growth ends in the collapse, and then Democrats came in and, 
quite frankly, fixed the problem, stemmed the tide, and did what we 
did. That is a whole other story.
  The whole idea that cutting taxes for the wealthy is really going to 
bump employment and really bump GDP growth is shown in recent economic 
history to not be true.
  Now, what do we have to compare this with?
  If we go back another decade to 1993, when President Bill Clinton got 
into office, he had a different strategy and the Democrats had a 
different strategy. We started to run up the deficits coming out of the 
eighties. We had to get our financial house in order.
  President Clinton came in and raised some taxes on the wealthiest 
people in the country, not because we don't like them, but the country 
needed revenue. We reinvested that money, balanced the budget, and what 
happened? A totally different strategy than our friends on the other 
side--right?--totally different. What we saw in the 1990s was 
employment at 2.4 percent, and we saw real GDP growth at 3.7 percent.
  The red is the Bush tax cut that we have already tried in the 
historical analysis of that, ending in a financial collapse and 
stagnant wages. What we saw with President Clinton's economic plan is 
real growth, and we saw an improvement in employment. Wages went up in 
every single bracket, from the poorest to the wealthiest. Everybody 
made more money. We had a balanced plan on how to do it.
  When we look at what happened with the Bill Clinton plan--oh, by the 
way, it ended the decade with a $5.6 trillion surplus. That is a $5.6 
trillion surplus that we had here in the United States that, when 
President Bush got in, he gave it all away in tax cuts. I just told you 
that story.
  What the Democrats are saying is kind of what President Trump was 
saying during the campaign. There has been this huge concentration of 
wealth at the top, and they have seen all the income gain.
  We have got debt and deficits to pay for. We have got to rebuild the 
United States. We have got to lay broadband in every corner of the 
country. We need a new energy grid. We need a resilient economy to 
prepare ourselves for the storms and the hurricanes and the ups and 
downs from climate change. We have got to reinvest back into our 
neighborhoods. We have thousands of blighted homes in communities all 
across the United States that need to come down.
  What we are saying is: Don't borrow $1.5 trillion from China and then 
take the money that you are borrowing from China, pay interest on it, 
and give it to primarily the top 1 percent of the wealthiest people in 
the United States. That doesn't make any sense.
  In good times, I don't know if that makes any sense, but certainly 
not when we are already running huge deficits, not when we have the 
baby boomers moving into our healthcare programs for the elderly, not 
when we have an opioid epidemic where we lost more people in 1 year, 
last year, than we lost in the entire Vietnam war. That doesn't make 
any sense.
  We have got to rebuild the country. We are competing with China. We 
have to make sure that our military is equipped, our students are 
educated, and that we are investing in research and development to 
develop wind and solar, the next generation of renewable energy, the 
next generation of jobs.
  And we are borrowing money from China to the tune of $1.5 trillion to 
give to the wealthiest people in the country? Does that make any sense?
  Mr. Speaker, it does not.
  This is the most irresponsible tax proposal I have seen. I will even 
say it is more irresponsible than the Bush tax credits. At least with 
the Bush tax credits, we had a $5.6 trillion surplus. Many of us were 
saying to put that into Medicare, put it into Social Security. In the 
Al Gore campaign, it became a joke: Put it in a lock box; don't touch 
it; save it for a rainy day.
  A few months later, 9/11 happened, and we could have used some of 
that for the next decade. We could have rebuilt the economy, moved the 
economy forward, reinvested it back into the United States. At least we 
had it coming.
  The economy was growing and President Bush said: Well, we will give 
it back in tax cuts primarily to the rich.
  Now we don't even have it. Now we are going to go out and borrow it 
and bring it in from China and say: Okay, China, we will owe you 
another $1.5 trillion because we don't owe you enough already. We are 
not going to give it to the middle class, who has not seen a pay raise 
for 30 years. We are going to give it to the top end.
  I just think this is very irresponsible for us as we are trying to 
get the economy to work for everybody and we have all of these 
challenges that we are trying get our arms around here in the United 
States that will take some public investment.
  I am not here to say that the government can solve all of our 
problems, because it can't. I am not saying that every solution is 
about writing a check from Uncle Sam and putting it into a program, 
because it is not. But what we do have to do is make some investments 
on the public side that are going to allow for growth.

  When you talk about things like broadband penetration to make sure 
that rural America or small towns or certain parts of our cities have 
access to high-speed broadband, high-speed internet access, you will 
see that, for every 10 percent penetration, you see, I think it is, 1, 
1.3, 1.4 percent growth in the GDP. It sounds like a pretty good 
investment.
  So let's figure out how we can do a public-private partnership with 
the telecommunications companies and the public to make sure that we 
have high-speed internet access all over the United States. Let's sit 
down with the power companies, the energy companies, and figure out how 
we redo our energy grid so that we can have a 21st century, efficient, 
secure energy grid.
  And, oh, by the way, ask all of these people who are underemployed 
today to help us build out this new America. Whether it is broadband or 
the energy grid, it is in the ground. These jobs can't be outsourced. 
The same with renewable energy. Many of the jobs related to renewable 
energy cannot be outsourced. These are the investments we need to make.
  Again, we are competing with China. This, my friends, is a very 
important point. When you look at what China is doing militarily with 
North Korea, not helping as much as we want them to, moving out, 
actually building islands in the South China Sea, further projecting 
their force, moving into Africa, already in Africa, establishing bases 
in Africa, building relationships, getting minerals and other resources 
out of Africa, moving ahead with battery-powered cars in China and 
here, moving and spending $360 billion on renewable energy initiatives 
by 2020, creating 13 million jobs, China is on the move.
  What are we doing? What does the Republican Party want to do? What 
does the Trump administration want to do, Mr. Speaker, while China is 
investing billions of dollars in renewable energy, creating 13 million 
new jobs? This genius idea is to go and borrow $1.5 trillion from them 
and take it and give it to the wealthiest people in the United States 
in the form of a tax cut that they don't need.
  We are going to further position ourselves behind them in the race 
for the green economy. This could mean jobs in places like Youngstown, 
Ohio, investments in places like Youngstown, Ohio, driving up wages in 
Youngstown, Ohio, increasing and securing pensions in these industrial 
States and in the South. That, to me, makes sense. That, to me, is a 
smart plan.
  So, Mr. Speaker, I am deeply frustrated with this tax cut. I think it 
is irresponsible. I don't think it makes economic sense. As we start to 
peel through it, other than the big picture of $1.5 trillion that we 
are going to borrow from the Chinese to pay for it, they are going to 
get rid of people's ability to deduct student loans. Medical 
emergencies will no longer be deductible.
  They are providing instability in the wind sector with the wind tax 
credit, which has about $50 billion in investments. About 50,000 jobs 
are at stake and 500 factories participating in this new economy.

[[Page H8438]]

  There is a way to do this. There is a way to be smart. We can't let 
our ideology determine our public policy if it doesn't make any sense. 
If we can have a balanced approach, we pay for the spending; and 
because of the situation we are in, we ask the wealthiest in the United 
States to help us pay for this because they have seen 96 percent of the 
income growth over the last 30 years.
  If we do it right and we do it smart, we will position the next 
generation of Americans to be in an economy that they can thrive in, 
that provides stability for them, security for them and their families, 
and it will also help us deal with the great challenge of our time: 
global climate change.
  Mr. Speaker, I hope that, as this process moves forward, we recognize 
that this tax cut bill is not the solution to the economic problems. It 
has gone against what the President of the United States campaigned on, 
and I believe it is the very betrayal of his campaign, a betrayal of 
what that campaign meant to so many people, and a betrayal of those 
very people whom he said he was going to help.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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