[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 185 (Monday, November 13, 2017)]
[House]
[Pages H9166-H9168]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         REFORMING OUR TAX CODE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Mast). 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 once again and follow up on the gentleman from Texas and his 
remarks that I think hit the nail on the head with regard to what 
working class families out in the heartland, in the Deep South are 
facing every single day.
  I think it is important that every policy that we push here in the 
United States Congress is a policy that addresses some of those deep 
concerns that they all have.
  Sometimes I think that this town gets into a little bit of a bubble. 
Two separate political parties that talk to each other, talk at each 
other, talk within each other, but we are in the midst of deep change 
in the United States. We are in the midst of the kind of structural 
change we have not seen in our country in a long, long time.
  We have an economic system, a Tax Code, a trade regime, that has not, 
quite frankly, been up to task to meet the needs of working class 
families.
  We have a healthcare system that, even though many changes have been 
made, I think, to help people get coverage, to help them afford their 
healthcare, it is still not up to task with the deep needs of our 
country.
  We have an education system that is not quite up to speed.
  The deliberations in this body need to be a little bit deeper. I 
think we need to take a little bit of a step back.
  We have tax reform that is on the docket this week.
  We have a consistent dialogue with other nations with regard to how 
we are going to organize our trade relationships with other countries, 
whether it be in North America, whether it be with China or Europe or 
any other country.

                              {time}  2030

  Mr. Speaker, I will just say that after looking at the tax bill that 
has been presented in both the House and the Senate, the Congressional 
Budget Office has said that this tax bill will run a deficit and a 
long-term debt for our country to the tune of $1.7 trillion. So this 
tax reform that our friends on the other side are pushing has a $1.7 
trillion hole in it.
  What has to happen is that the United States Government, because the 
Republicans are going to pass a tax cut, which the majority will go to 
the wealthiest people in the country, and because there will be this 
hole in the budget now, this country--our taxpayers are going to have 
to go to China, go to Saudi Arabia, and we are going to say: Hey, can 
you loan us some money? We have got this big deficit. We have got this 
debt we are running up in the United States. Can you loan us like $1.7 
trillion? Because we are going to give that money back to the 
wealthiest people in the country, in the hopes that it stimulates the 
economy and grows jobs and wages. And, oh, by the way, we tried that in 
2001, and 2003, and it didn't work.
  To me, I think it is very difficult for us as a country to say we are 
going to give China more power over us. We are going to give China more 
say in the negotiations that we have with them, whether it is North 
Korea, whether it is them moving bases out into the South China Sea 
where they are actually building islands so that they can put bases on 
them and project more force in that area of the world.
  We are going to have less negotiating power with them as they 
continue to move into Africa and extract natural resources to feed 
their industrial machine. We are going to ask them for $1.7 trillion to 
give a tax cut that goes primarily to the biggest corporations in the 
country and the wealthiest people in the country.
  Now, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to most people. It sounds 
like a little bit of a scam. And the $1.7 trillion, which you have got 
to watch, we are borrowing it, and then we have to pay interest on the 
money that we are borrowing. So if interest rates go up, we are going 
to start paying more.
  Meanwhile, back here in the United States, we have got a number of 
challenges that we have got to deal with. We have got to rebuild our 
country. The President, while he was campaigning, said: We are going to 
do $1 trillion in infrastructure improvements in the United States. I 
am a builder. We are going to rebuild the country.
  It is now November, and we have not heard anything about an 
infrastructure bill or building roads and bridges and all the rest. In 
fact, we have had a President who campaigned--might see a little theme 
developing here--the President also campaigned and said: We are going 
to expand healthcare. We are going to expand Medicare. We are going to 
expand Medicaid. We are going to make it cheaper, accessible. It is 
going to be beautiful, and it will be easy to do. I can do it.
  And so goes life.
  The two bills, in both the House and the Senate, from the 
Republicans, as analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office--not as 
analyzed by Democrats--it was analyzed by the Congressional Budget 
Office, which is a neutral third party. They are kind of the umpire 
down here. They are the referee in

[[Page H9167]]

Washington. They just look at the numbers. Whatever party is in charge, 
they always don't like the Congressional Budget Office because they 
always tell you things you don't necessarily want to hear.
  So the Congressional Budget Office said, on both of those bills for 
healthcare, both the House and the Senate: 20-plus million people will 
lose their healthcare.
  So we had a campaign saying we are going to rebuild the country, and 
that hasn't happened; a campaign saying we are going to get people more 
healthcare, and that is not happening. Then, we had a campaign where 
our President was saying: We are going to be tough on China. We have 
got to be tough on them.
  There are all kinds of little quotes I can say from when he was in 
Ohio, or he was here, or he was there. He was going to be the tough-on-
China guy.
  As you can see from this chart, for good measure, this is a chart 
that outlines where Chinese trade, foreign trade, and automation have 
hurt our country, and who has been hurt the most. The red is the 
hardest hit; and then as it moves to more lighter colors, less so.
  So you can see in the industrial Midwest, in the Great Lakes States, 
in the South, up in New England, Pennsylvania, and some out West, they 
were devastated by trade. The President is in China this past week, and 
he says: I don't blame the Chinese. It is not their fault, but it is 
the United States' fault.
  Now, I will say that the United States has not done a great job of 
being as firm on China as I would have liked. I was one of the original 
cosponsors of the China Currency Manipulation Bill, with former 
Representative Duncan Hunter, the father of current Representative 
Duncan Hunter.
  So we have been on this for a long time. But this does not gloss over 
the fact that the Chinese intentionally steal our intellectual 
property. They intentionally skirt global trade rules.
  If we put tariffs up on Chinese steel tubing coming into the United 
States, the Chinese will ship it to another country, and then, from 
that country, send it to the United States to avoid the tariffs that we 
put on because their product, their final product, was cheaper than the 
raw material costs of a company like Wheatland Tube, in my 
congressional district, that is trying to sell the same thing; or 
Vallourec Star, in my district, that is trying to sell the same thing.
  So we would put tariffs on, and they would skirt the rules and come 
around through another country. So we play this constant game of trying 
to figure out where the Chinese steel is going to come in from. That is 
not our fault. That is not playing by the rules. That is not playing 
fair.
  Our President needs to recognize--I am all for being a diplomat--but 
when you are in the country, you need to be firm with the leaders of 
that country and tell them to stop hurting American businesses and 
putting American steelworkers out of work, especially when you 
campaigned on doing that just a year ago. We are seeing communities 
completely wiped out.

  So back to the tax cut, we are going to go to this same country, and 
we are going to borrow money from them. That doesn't make any sense at 
all.
  What Democrats are proposing, and what our side is proposing, is that 
the people in the country that really need a break are those people the 
gentleman from Texas was just talking about, the ones working swing 
shifts; the ones who take a shower after work; the ones who stand on 
their feet all day long, making minimum wage or maybe a little bit 
more. Those are the people we should be pushing a tax cut toward. Put a 
little money in their pocket; help them lift up the ladder.
  Here is why I think this makes sense: If you go back to the last time 
we did tax reform, 31 years ago, in the last 31 years, 96 percent of 
all income growth went to the top 10 percent of the wealthiest people 
in the United States. So over 30 years, 96 percent of that growth went 
to the top 10 percent. That is where all of the money went.
  We have seen it flatline wages across the middle class for 30 years. 
We know the story, unfortunately: communities gutted, manufacturing 
base eroded. So to say we are going to take this group that has made 
all of the income gains in the last 31 years, and we are going to give 
them a tax cut that we are going to finance by borrowing money from 
China, which is going to increase our national debt; so we are going to 
have to pay more on that; we are going to lose leverage in the world 
with China; and now they are our banker--even more so than they are 
right now.
  So what I am asking is for us, in this body, to take a time out, to 
stop the process, to reach across the aisle to Democrats, to say that 
we have got to figure out this disparity that has happened over the 
last 20 or 30 years between capital and between labor. All of the gains 
have been on the capital side, yet capital gets taxed at a lower rate 
than wages.
  Warren Buffett said it a million times that he pays a lower tax rate 
than his secretary pays. Now, is that fair? Is that right? It is not. 
Of course, it isn't.
  The argument is--because we have been adopting this system in one 
form or fashion or another for most of the last 30 years since 
Reaganomics--that has been the same time that all of this has happened. 
So we need a new way of doing this. This is not working for people. The 
Tax Code is an opportunity for us, I think, to ask those people who 
have been doing pretty well over the last 30 years, who make their 
money through capital gains, to pay the same level as the guy working 
the second shift at General Motors Lordstown. I think that is only 
fair. With that revenue, we can start rebuilding the country.
  Let me just say, lastly, that there is no evidence--and I know in 
Washington that most things aren't based on evidence--but there is no 
evidence that cutting taxes for the wealthiest people in the country 
somehow makes it down to improve wages for middle class people. There 
just isn't any evidence of that.
  George W. Bush, I was here for the second round of these tax cuts, 
but he cut, primarily, for the top 1 percent and threw some crumbs to 
the middle class folks. They got 300 bucks. That was supposed to create 
jobs, stimulate the economy, grow wages, and everything else. That was 
the slowest decade of growth in modern American history going back to 
the Great Depression.
  We had a more stable line of growth with the Bill Clinton budget in 
1993, in which we asked the wealthiest to pay a little bit more. We 
balanced the budget, reinvested back into the country, and created 20 
million new jobs. Every income group, from top to bottom, saw wages go 
up.

                              {time}  2045

  When he walked out of this Capitol and George W. Bush came in, I 
think there was a $5.6 trillion projected surplus. I hate to say it, 
but we were having the debate about what we were going to do with the 
surplus. You may remember Al Gore was campaigning saying: We ought to 
put that surplus in a lock box, and make sure we support Medicare and 
Social Security and extend the life of those programs.
  George Bush was saying that we want to give it back in a tax cut. So 
George Bush won, and it went back in a tax cut. The only benefit--
supposed benefit--is that at least we didn't necessarily borrow that 
money. We were projected to have that money come in, and then we gave 
it back in a tax cut as the country collectively--some of us weren't 
for that.
  But now we don't have a surplus we are going to give away. We have 
got to go borrow the money. So then we give that $5.6 trillion back--
again, primarily to the top 1 percent--and have a slow decade of 
growth. We ended up in two wars, put that on a credit card, too, then a 
complete economic collapse, and we are just trying to climb our way 
back.
  This is not the time to go borrow more money from China and give a 
tax cut to the wealthiest people in the country. It is just not the 
time to do that. We have got a lot of investments here at home that we 
need to make. We need to create an economic system that starts working 
for most people in the country which it is not now.
  We have jobs, but we have stagnant wages. We do have jobs, but wages 
are low. We do have jobs, but people are still losing their pensions. 
We do have jobs, but people still don't have the kind of healthcare 
that they need.
  We can do better than this. It starts, I think, now with our 
rejecting the Republican tax bill and saying to them:

[[Page H9168]]

Reach across the aisle, work with Democrats, and let's do something 
that is bipartisan here and something that makes this a revenue 
enhancer or, at the very least, revenue neutral by asking and 
increasing the rates on capital and not borrowing $1.7 trillion--if not 
more--with increased interest rates from China.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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