[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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