[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 198 (Tuesday, December 5, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7850-S7851]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          REPUBLICAN TAX BILL

  Mr. CARPER. Next, Mr. President, I have a couple of charts here. I 
don't know whether the Presiding Officer can see them from where he is 
sitting. I can barely see them from right here.
  The first chart we are going to take a look at deals with the--on 
this side over here, we have median household income for Americans 
since 1987. Over on this side, we have corporate profits in the 
billions of dollars.
  When we come back here to 1987, we look at the orange line here, and 
that is median household income in 2016 dollars. The median household 
income in 1987 was just a shade over $50,000. All of these years later, 
in 2017, it is just a little bit higher. It has gone up a little bit 
but not a whole lot--maybe close to $60,000, but I don't know that it 
is any higher than that. It has gone up a little bit, really, over the 
last few years.
  The green line here on our chart is corporate profits. When we go 
back to 1987, corporate profits were equal to about--it looks like 
$30,000 billion, and if I am not mistaken, that would be maybe $30 
trillion. I hope I have that right. That was 1987. If you look at what 
has happened, it has gone up and down. This is during the great 
recession when we fell off the cliff and almost fell off the world. In 
2007, 2008, we started to climb back out of it. Today, the corporate 
profits have roughly doubled in this country since 1987--roughly 
doubled--while median household income is growing a tiny bit but 
actually not that much.
  Let's look at the next chart, and then I will not speak from the 
charts. I guess the lesson here again is that corporate profits have 
gone up rather nicely. There were some ups and downs because of the 
great recession, but they are on an uptick now.
  This is a look at the national deficit and debt. I know the Presiding 
Officer has a great concern about this.
  I came to the House I guess in 1983. I had been State treasurer for a 
State

[[Page S7851]]

that had the worst deficit in the country. The State of Delaware tied 
with Puerto Rico. We were a mess.
  Finally, Pete du Pont, a Republican, did a wonderful job for 8 years 
as Governor. I had the opportunity to serve with him in the State 
treasury and later on to become the Governor of the State of Delaware, 
when we went to a triple A credit rating for the first time in State 
history.
  I came here in 1983 as a Congressman who was concerned about debts 
and deficits. My sense is that here in the Senate and the House, we 
don't have a lot of deficit hawks these days. If we do, their voices 
are not heard very loudly. We are on a course that is unsustainable in 
terms of our accumulation of more debt.
  This is an interesting chart because it goes back to really the 
beginning of World War II, the war my dad was in and my uncle served 
in. There is a lot of red ink here, and it shows the deficit as a 
percentage of gross domestic product, and it reached about 30 percent 
right in the middle of World War II. After the war, we have the green 
down here where we actually had some surpluses in the late 1940s and 
the early 1950s. We actually had a surplus in 1968. Then we went from 
1968 to about 1998 and never balanced the budget, all of those years at 
one time. The last 4 years of the Clinton administration, we balanced 
our budget four times. It was a bipartisan deal.
  The chairman of the House Budget Committee, if I am not mistaken, was 
a Republican from Ohio, John Kasich, who is now the Governor of Ohio. 
John and I came to the House together in 1983. He came as a deficit 
hawk as well. He and the Clinton administration obviously did a nice 
job to help to balance four budgets. We haven't done so well since 
then. Since then, we have shown, right from here up to the present, 
which would be right around there, one deficit after the other--
deficits that peaked out over the last year of George W. Bush's 
administration, when we were again falling into the great recession, 
and we have spent a lot of money in stimulus to try to get us out of 
recession.
  The debt dropped from about $1.4 trillion per year down to about one-
third that much, and now it is starting to go up again. The debt last 
year--the year that ended on September 30--the deficit had bounced back 
up to $666 billion again in 1 year--a lot of money. The prospect going 
forward is not encouraging; it is actually discouraging.
  The tax cut bill that was passed in this Chamber just a few days 
ago--last Saturday morning, in the middle of the night--called for tax 
breaks, some for individuals for a while, some for corporations that 
tend to be more permanent in nature. But for me, maybe the most 
troubling aspect of the tax bill that was enacted last Saturday 
morning, aside from the way it was pushed through, is the idea that we 
got, right here on the Senate floor, I think sometime around the middle 
of the evening last Friday night, a 400-page amendment, over 400 pages 
that we had never read, never seen, with scribbling on the side of the 
pages. The idea was that somehow we were supposed to read that and 
understand it and then vote it up or down in an amendment in like 4 or 
5 hours. Good luck. That just doesn't happen. That would be the triumph 
of man's hope over experience.
  I always ask these four questions when people ask about what we 
should do in tax reform. I say, No. 1, it ought to be fair. What we 
have actually passed is something where most of the benefits, the 
lion's share, go to people who are, frankly, very wealthy. Folks who 
are lower and lower middle income may realize some benefits in the 
first few years following the implementation of the new tax cut, but 
over time--say, by 2025--families with incomes up to $75,000 per family 
are going to be realizing not a net gain from the tax cut but actually 
a net loss, which is not good.

  I always ask: Is it fair? I think it is not fair when you look at the 
numbers and see how middle-income folks fare and those who happen to be 
wealthier fare.
  The second question I always ask is this: Will it foster economic 
growth or diminish it? I focus a lot of my time and energy on economic 
growth, job creation, and job preservation. Senators, Presidents, and 
Governors don't create jobs. We create a nurturing environment for job 
creation, job preservation, and workforce, transportation 
infrastructure, protection of intellectual property rights, public 
safety, access to water and wastewater. There are a lot of things that 
contribute to economic growth and so forth. Tax policy is important. 
Commonsense regulation is important as well.
  But my second question is this: Does the tax reform bill that we 
passed foster economic growth? Not really. To a modest extent, some, 
but not really. One of the things it does is it suggests uncertainty 
and the lack of predictability going forth, which I don't think 
businesses really care for.
  One area where we, frankly, decided not to spend any money this time 
is the area where we could actually get the biggest bang for our buck 
in terms of growing GDP. We have a transportation infrastructure that 
is woefully inadequate these days, in terrible shape--roads, highways, 
bridges, rail, ports, and airports. We have many broad areas in the 
country that don't have access to the internet.
  We just passed a tax bill that is going to increase the deficit by 
$1.5 trillion. Unfortunately, none of that goes to pay for or to make 
investments in things that would grow GDP by a lot and would provide 
employment opportunities--not just for a couple hundred thousand people 
but for millions of people, over the next decade or so. None of that is 
there.
  The third question I always look at in terms of tax reform is this: 
Does it simplify the Tax Code or make it more complex? The new 
provision that was adopted is going to increase by this much the 
thickness of the Tax Code, or by about another 15 or 20 percent--not 
making it simpler or easier to understand, but actually more difficult.
  The last piece I consider is this: What is the effect on the deficit? 
Pumping up the deficit by another $1.5 trillion is making the situation 
even worse.
  We are going to go to conference now, the House and Senate. My hope 
is that it will be more bipartisan than what we saw here in the Senate. 
It needs to be. I quoted last week and I quoted again today an old 
African-American proverb: If you want to go fast, travel alone. If you 
want to go far, travel together. Our Republican friends, at least on 
this side of the Congress, for the most part have chosen to go fast and 
to go alone. That is unfortunate. The last time we did tax reform, we 
did it together. It took 3 years, but it was a more lasting and, I 
think, a better outcome.

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