[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 38 (Monday, March 5, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1328-S1329]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                          Republican Tax Bill

  Mr. President, on to another matter, the Republican tax bill. Over 
and over, we have heard the Republican mantra that their tax bill was 
aimed at giving working Americans a boost. Yet every analysis showed 
that when you looked at the actual policy, the lion's share of the tax 
cuts are going to corporations and the richest 1 percent. According to 
one study, 83 percent of the benefits from the Republican tax bill go 
to the top 1 percent of earners.
  Don't worry, our Republican friends say, that money will trickle down 
to workers, but trickle-down economics has never worked. It has failed 
time and again. Most of our Republican colleagues are even afraid to 
admit that the majority of the tax cuts go to the very wealthy. They 
simply say it is helping working people, but their mechanism of 
trickle-down is something they will not utter in public.
  Instead of giving workers major wage increases, hiring new workers, 
or investing in new equipment and research, the most popular use of the 
savings from the tax bill for corporations is corporate share buybacks. 
That is from the big corporations. Already, big corporations have 
announced more than $200 billion in share buybacks this year. We just 
started March, and already, corporations are on pace to spend over $1 
trillion this year buying back their own stock.
  The problem here is, share buybacks don't really help workers. They 
don't really help grow the economy. They are a quick way for a big 
corporation to take more of their stock off the market, raising the 
value of the shares. Who benefits? Well, corporate executives who own 
lots of these shares and wealthy shareholders who hold the vast 
preponderance of the shares.
  As one economist told Bloomberg, ``You're not going to get the macro-
economic benefit the administration thought it was going to get from 
its tax cuts. It's going to go to the areas that don't stimulate 
growth,'' namely, buybacks, dividends. An analysis by Just Capital, 
which the New York Times called ``one of the most detailed accountings 
to date'' of how companies are spending the windfall from tax reform, 
finds that ``just 6% of capital allocated so far is going to 
[employees], while 58% is going to shareholders in the form of 
dividends, share buy-backs, or retained earnings.'' That is 6 percent 
for the workers and nearly 60 percent to share buybacks and other 
corporate benefits.
  Today, the Joint Economic Committee, led by our wonderful ranking 
member, Senator Heinrich, pointed out that if you distributed the 
savings that went to just one big company--Berkshire Hathaway, which 
gained $29 billion as a result of the tax bill--you could give a $1,000 
bonus to 29 million Americans.
  This is amazing. That is the equivalent of every employee in Arizona, 
Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and 
West Virginia combined from just one company's worth of savings. The 
public is beginning to realize what is going on here. They see they are 
putting their children and grandchildren into deep debt, not to benefit 
themselves, the workers, preponderantly, but to benefit corporate 
leadership, owners of shares--the vast preponderance of whom are in the 
top 10 percent of American wealth.
  Corporations are not putting the vast preponderance of the money 
where they should be--raising the salaries of workers or increasing 
productivity of the company by investing in new machinery and new 
techniques. No; it is that quick hit, the stock buyback.
  It goes to show how beneficial tax reform could have been if it were 
aimed

[[Page S1329]]

at the middle class and those struggling to reach it. Instead, the 
Republicans made a conscious effort to give corporations and the 
wealthiest Americans the bulk of the tax cuts and promised it would 
trickle down to everyone else. Unfortunately, past is prologue, and 
corporate America will invest in what is best for corporate America, 
while working America is getting left behind.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator for Texas.