[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 186 (Tuesday, November 14, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7188-S7189]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                          Republican Tax Bill

  Now, Mr. President, Senator McConnell always comes down and says: I 
hope the Democrats will join us in the tax reform bill. Mr. Leader, Mr. 
Republican leader, we want to join you, but that doesn't mean you write 
a bill behind closed doors and then say support it.
  The way we have done tax reform successfully in the past--I was there 
in 1986--is Democrats and Republicans sat down together and came up 
with a bill that maybe a few in each party wouldn't support, but the 
mainstreams of both parties would. It avoids the secrecy. It also 
avoids one or two Members saying: Unless I get this, I am not going to 
be for the bill--which pulls the bill in many different directions.
  So, Mr. Leader, yes, Democrats do want to join this, but it is 
totally disingenuous, not honest of you, to say that without letting us 
sit at the table, without letting us see the bill. So let's knock it 
off. You want to do a bill with just Republicans, fine. You tried it 
with healthcare. You are trying it with tax reform. It is a lose-lose. 
You will either not pass the bill or you will pass the bill that was 
enshrouded in secrecy that will have so many problems every Republican 
who votes for it will regret it.
  Yesterday's markup in the Finance Committee indicated the same thing. 
The markup of the Republican tax bill wasn't the actual bill. It was 
``a preliminary draft.'' How do we know it wasn't the real bill? Well, 
today the Finance Committee has notified us that instead of continuing 
the markup as usual, the committee will recess after a morning session 
because the Republicans are not ready with their replacement bill--the 
real one.
  This is crazy. The President, who doesn't know what is in the bill--
we all know that--has set an arbitrary deadline, and to meet that 
deadline, our Republican colleagues are sacrificing the integrity of 
the process and the quality of the bill.
  We are 2 days into a markup, halfway, and Democrats haven't even seen 
a real bill yet. In their desperate rush to get this bill through 
Congress, Republicans started by marking up a bill that is not even the 
one they intended to pass. It is a bait and switch. It is the perfect 
example of the problem with rushing a bill of this magnitude through 
Congress.
  Republicans can't keep up with their own reckless, breakneck pace, 
and they are going to have to delay the markup. This same problem is 
going to repeat itself over and over again on issues of greater 
complexity and consequence.
  What happens when Republicans realize their new international tax 
regime encourages scores of new tax savings and avoidance schemes? What 
happens if the independent analysts say their new loophole for 
passthrough businesses doesn't have enough guardrails? What happens if 
the House and Senate are unable to reconcile their disparate approaches 
to slashing State and local deductions?
  In the New York Times this morning--I commend all my Republican 
colleagues to read it--they identified new potential problems in this 
Republican tax bill, problems the writers hadn't thought about, but 
corporate lawyers by the dozens, by the scores, by the hundreds will 
find a way to walk through these loopholes, even though our Republican 
colleagues didn't intend those loopholes to exist. You can be sure that 
for every 1 of these loopholes, these misadventures, the Times 
identified, there are 5 or 10 more lurking in the print, in the fine 
print. The only question is whether our Republican colleagues find them 
now or find them out later when it is too late after the bill passes.
  Instead of rushing through a bill of such enormous complexity, 
sunlight is the great fermenter of this type of legislation. If it lies 
out there for a little while, people come in and say: This is wrong or 
that is wrong. Those will be individuals, those will be pundits, those 
will be the companies our Republican friends are trying to help. They 
will say: Wait a minute; this doesn't quite work because no one has had 
a chance to really see it, examine it, and let it stew.
  Now we are asked for other significant changes. What happens if, as 
we have seen, every few days President Trump tweets, asking the 
Republicans to change their bill, and this time they repeal the 
individual mandate and drop the top rate, as he asked them to do 
yesterday? Each of these decisions has enormous, drastic consequences 
for American families and American industries.
  President Trump's crazy idea to repeal the individual mandate as a 
part of this bill, according to CBO, would boot 13 million people from 
the health insurance rolls and cause premiums to skyrocket, all to pay 
for a bigger tax cut at the top bracket--the wealthiest people in 
America. What a toxic idea. Are any Republicans going to go home and 
campaign on that? We are going to get rid of the individual mandate, 
kick 13 million people off healthcare, and raise premiums so we can 
lower the top rate when no one--no one but the hard right--is clamoring 
for it?
  Income distribution is a problem in America. We all admit that we 
have different solutions for it. So be it. But I haven't heard, as I 
did in the 1980s, 1990s, or even the early 2000s, a clamoring to lower 
the top rate, even among those who pay it. They know they are doing 
well. Wealth has gone way up in America, and it has gone to the top. 
That is not what we need. It is a toxic idea. Yet Republicans may have 
to consider adding it to the bill to placate a restless and uninformed 
President, who, we all know, knows very little of what is in this bill. 
He just tweets. Somehow our Republican colleagues, instead of ignoring 
the tweets, pay attention to too many of them.
  Yesterday, the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation said that they 
would not be able to properly analyze the effects of the Republican tax 
bill in the time they have planned for it. So we are not even having 
the JCT--nonpartisan, respected for decades--analyze the bill before we 
are going to vote on it in the committee and maybe on the floor.
  Again, the Republican leadership in the House and Senate will ask 
their Members to vote on a major bill without knowing the consequences. 
In no world is this proper legislative procedure. No party has ever 
done this before--Democrats, Republicans, Whigs, Anti-Federalists, 
Democratic-Republicans, Federalists. We have never seen this before. It 
is so wrong.
  We see so many things that ail this country, and I have to say a lot 
of them stem from the top--from the President. Yet our Republican 
colleagues are still fearful of ignoring him, of not listening to ideas 
they know are ludicrous.
  The rush is because my Republican friends, fearful of the President 
and his self-imposed deadline, are trying to hide a bill that would 
transfer even more wealth to the superwealthy while raising taxes on 
millions of middle-class Americans.
  According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, of all taxpayers making 
less than $200,000 a year, 13 million would see a tax hike in 2019, and 
20 million would see a tax hike by 2027. Both Leader McConnell and 
Speaker Ryan said that they would not raise middle-class taxes. They 
had to back off. For working Americans who do get a tax cut, the 
average is so small compared to what folks at the top are getting. 
Americans making $40,000 to $50,000 a year get an average cut of $480, 
while folks making over $1 million will get a tax cut of $50,000--100 
times more than what working families get. They can say: Well, that is 
because the wealthy are richer. But that is not what we need in America 
right now. The wealthy are getting wealthier. They are doing fine, even 
under the present

[[Page S7189]]

tax regime. Middle-class people's median income has been going down 
over the last decade. It is harder for middle-class people to average--
it shouldn't be OK for them to get $500 and the wealthy to get $50,000. 
We ought to be directing the tax cuts at the middle class.
  Republicans--Trump's organization--had an ad on TV. They said that 
wealthy people's tax rates remain the same, while the middle class gets 
a cut. That is false advertising because, when we compare apples to 
apples, the wealthy get a much larger cut than the middle-class people.
  We have known for weeks that the longer this bill is in effect, the 
worse it gets for the middle class. To stay within deficit numbers, the 
JCT confirmed that under the revised House bill, entire middle-income 
groups will see a tax hike, on average, just a few years down the road. 
Speaker Ryan and other Republicans say that those tax hikes will not 
happen because future Congresses will extend certain tax breaks in 
perpetuity. If that is true, all the deficit hawks ought to pay 
attention. There is a gigantic hidden cost to the bill if we are going 
to make these tax cuts temporary in this bill and then make them 
permanent.
  The scores this week will say that these bills blow a $1.5 trillion 
hole in the deficit over the next decade. That is bad enough. But if a 
bunch of breaks, deductions, and expansions that are now temporary are 
made permanent, as the Speaker says they will be, the real cost will be 
hundreds of billions, if not trillions, more. All of my Republican 
friends who care about the deficit should be wary of this gain.
  We do need permanence. We need corporate America in particular to be 
relying on a permanent change. But you can't do a permanent change 
without blowing a hole in the deficit, so you do a temporary change. 
There is a simple solution, which, if Democrats and Republicans work 
together, we could do: Close corporate loopholes, lower the top rate, 
keep the corporate reduction deficit-neutral and permanent. My guess is 
most corporate leaders would prefer that. They would prefer less of a 
tax decrease and more permanence because you can't build a factory or 
make a major investment if you know that the decrease is going to 
vanish.
  We shouldn't be rushing through such an ill-conceived, backward 
bill--breaking the fine traditions of this body, busting the deficit, 
breaking the backs of millions of middle-class families, making the 
funding of defense far more difficult when there is so much agreement 
between our two parties on tax reform. On healthcare, it is hard to 
agree; the visions are diametrically opposed. But on tax reform, that 
is not true. Our Republican friends are just bollixing this up. Somehow 
they had in their heads that they had to do it through reconciliation. 
They had to do it without Democrats, and the result is a very poor 
product that most Americans already don't like and even more will not 
like as they learn more about it.
  We all want to reduce the burden on small businesses. We all want to 
encourage companies to locate jobs here. We could put together a bill 
that does those things. This bill doesn't.
  If Republicans turn their backs on this deeply flawed approach, my 
commitment to so many of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle--
who I know are squirming about this bill--is that we will come together 
and put a good bill together that a majority of both parties can 
support--both parties. That is how it ought to be done.