[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 45 (Wednesday, March 10, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1449-S1451]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
American Rescue Plan Act of 2021
Mr. KAINE. Madam President, good afternoon. I rise today to talk
about
[[Page S1450]]
the American Rescue Plan and its effect on my economy.
It has been a tough year. It was a year ago tomorrow that I sent my
Senate staff home for a trial-run, 2-day telework in case we ever were
to need it, and they never came back. Until now, as people are starting
to get vaccinated, they are coming back personally to the office after
having worked, in a pretty amazing way, virtually for the year.
It was just about a year ago that I got coronavirus. It was just
about a year ago that I gave my wife coronavirus. It has been a long,
long year: more than 500,000 Americans dead, more than 10 million still
out of work. After sizable work by Congress in five bills in 2020 to
inject resources into the economy, we are still down 10 million jobs.
But today is a bright day. Just within the last few hours, the House
of Representatives passed the Senate bill that we sent to them Saturday
afternoon on the American Rescue Plan, building off the original House
proposal, and that bill is filled with things that will make a tangible
difference nearly immediately in the lives of so many Americans:
payment to everyday families, individuals, children; acceleration of
the vaccine deployment; resources so that we can open our schools and
our colleges and our childcare centers, which are all preconditions to
seeing the economy reopen.
In Virginia--just making this about my home Commonwealth--State and
local governments in Virginia will receive about $6.8 billion to cover
costs of COVID, revenues lost due to COVID, but also projects that can
help the economy accelerate so that we can climb out of the economic
catastrophe that has been COVID.
Eighty-four percent of Virginians--that is more than 7 million
people, 2 million of whom are children--will receive stimulus checks
because of the bill the Democrats got passed in the House and Senate.
Just think of that. Seven million Virginians will receive stimulus
checks. The average per filer--and many file jointly, so this will be
sort of a household average--would be nearly $3,000.
The child tax credit portion of the American Rescue Plan will provide
additional resources on top of those checks to 1.6 million Virginia
children, lifting 85,000 currently below the poverty level to above the
poverty level. Just in my State, 85,000 children below the poverty
level will no longer be there.
The expanded earned income tax credit in Virginia will affect nearly
420,000 adults, enabling them to work with more dignity, with less
financial stress, as they try to manage the challenges of their life in
this tough time.
Also, 250,000 adults whose unemployment benefits were in danger of
expiring are now protected through early September because of the bill.
Small businesses, which have suffered so much, will get a significant
uplift--just restaurants, with the $28 billion restaurant fund in the
American Rescue Plan. There are 15,000 restaurants in Virginia, all of
which have suffered because of COVID, because of social distancing
requirements, supply chain challenges, workers who have been out sick.
That $28 billion fund offers great hope for my restauranteurs.
For Virginia education, our local school systems--134 cities and
counties operate K-12 systems--will receive more than $2 billion to
deal with the costs of COVID, including expanded broadband so that
their students can have better access to online course curriculum,
including money that could be used for summer instruction, for example,
so that we can tackle learning gaps that occurred during the last year;
and $845 million for Virginia higher education institutions
And something that I am particularly excited about--I have a child
who is an early childhood worker. That is what he does. Forty percent
of Virginia childcare centers were closed for much of the year because
of the pandemic. Virginia will receive nearly $800 million in
additional childcare support so our childcare centers can be open,
which will not only be good for children but will enable their parents
to return to work more easily.
In the healthcare space, accelerations of vaccines, lower healthcare
premiums because of expanded subsidies for those who are purchasing
insurance, mental health expansion to deal with the significant
psychological and emotional traumas of the last year, housing, food,
transit, broadband, pension reform.
There is so much in this bill for Virginians. There is so much in
this bill for the residents of red States, blue States, in-between
States. Every ZIP code in the United States, every family in the United
States will see some impact that they can see, touch, and feel.
It is not often that you pass a bill where you can say this about
it--that the tangible results for virtually every American will be seen
so quickly.
I want to focus a little bit, having talked about the tangible
benefits in Virginia, just on the analysis of the bill nationally, and
I have a couple of charts I want to show.
Coincidentally, or maybe not coincidentally, the size of the American
Rescue Plan was pretty close to the size of the Trump tax cuts that
were done in December of 2017. The Trump tax cuts were about $1.9
trillion, and the American Rescue Plan ended up being at about $1.75
trillion. So they are pretty close.
And what these two plans demonstrate, if you look at the Trump tax
plan and you look at the American Rescue Plan, is that you will see how
very, very different the priorities of the two parties are. The
recovery plan passed in this body with every Democratic vote and no
Republican votes. The Trump tax plan passed in 2017 with every
Republican vote and no Democratic vote. I believe these two plans are
almost a perfect representation of the priorities of the two parties
right now in this body--not just in this body but all around the
country.
If you analyze the content of these two bills, which were nearly
identical in size, you can definitely understand a lot about the
priorities of the two parties. On the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the Trump
tax cuts, 54 percent of the $1.9 trillion benefit went to people making
more than $75,000 a year, 16 percent went to people making less than
$75,000 a year, 31 percent were tax cuts for businesses.
If you look at the American Rescue Plan, you see something very, very
different: 44 percent of the aid was aid to individuals, 21 percent was
pandemic and other policies that focus on getting us out of the
healthcare crisis, 9 percent is to our schools and universities, 18
percent for our State and local governments to try to forestall massive
layoffs of governmental employees, and then 8 percent are tax cuts to
individuals.
These are very different priority sets between the GOP's key
accomplishment with the 2017 tax cuts and now this accomplishment that
the Democrats have worked so hard to achieve in the American Rescue
Plan.
This tells you about priorities, but the next chart is probably my
favorite because I think it makes it even clearer. This is a chart that
shows the benefits of both the American Rescue Plan in blue and the Tax
Cuts and Jobs Act in red, and I don't think those colors were
coincidentally done by my staff.
It shows how the benefits of these two bills--they are identical in
size--were arrayed across the income groupings, income quintiles of the
American public. The top 20 percent of the American public in income
got 65 percent of the benefit from the Trump tax cuts. They get 11
percent of the benefit from the American Rescue Plan.
In the 60-to-80-percent quintile, you will see that the two plans
were pretty close to equal. Not exactly--the Democratic plan was a
little bit better in terms of the benefits at that level. But as you
move into the 40-to-60-percent quintile, that midrange of Americans,
the Democratic proposal gave much more of the benefit to people in that
income frame, that income quintile, than the Republican proposal.
In the 20-to-40-percent range, it is quadruple the Democratic
allocation of benefits to that lower middle-class portion of the
American public, quadruple what the Republican tax plan allocated.
But what you really see is, in the lowest quintile income of the
American public, the people who struggle the most and during the
pandemic were hurt the most, 23 percent of the benefits of the American
Rescue Plan went to that lowest 20 percent of the American public while
only 1 percent of the
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benefit of the Trump tax cuts was allocated to that hard-hit,
struggling group of people.
Again, if you want to look at the priorities of the two parties by
analyzing these two sizable bills that each side claims is an
accomplishment they are proud of, you just need to look at this
particular chart and understand who each side, each party, is battling
for and who is each side, each party, trying to help.
Finally, one last chart and then a concluding comment. The last chart
shows the poverty rate in this country beginning in 2007. Now, we know
we had an economic challenge in 2008, 2009, 2010 that was significant,
and then the poverty rate started to come down late in the Obama first
term and continued to come down into the Trump first term. But you will
see what has happened since 2017 with the passage of the Tax Cuts and
Jobs Act. If that had not happened, the poverty rate would have started
to tick back up again after having come down for a number of years.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act did have an effect on the poverty rate. It
knocked it down a little bit. So there was a positive effect on the
poverty rate from the Republican tax proposal, but it was not very
significant.
But the projection about the American poverty rate following the
passage of the American Rescue Plan is a dramatic reduction--a dramatic
reduction of poverty from more than 12 percent down to poverty just
above 8 percent--and we would expect to see that by the end of the
year.
We are not talking about by the end of the decade or by the end of 5
years or by the end of this Congress. We are talking about by the end
of the year.
I think these charts--and, again, particularly this chart that arrays
the benefits of both the tax cuts bill of 2017 and the American Rescue
Plan and shows to whom the benefits were allocated--speak volumes about
two very different philosophies about the economy, two very different
philosophies about equity, two very different philosophies about how to
truly include everyone in legislation that is big, tough, challenging
legislation.
Finally, I will say this as I conclude: The passage and the signing
of the American Rescue Plan will also start a realtime economic
experiment because the Republican tax plan was done in 2017, and we can
measure what that has done and what it hasn't done from 2017 to the
beginning of the pandemic. You would not want to include the pandemic
necessarily; that wouldn't be a fair way to measure. But if you look at
the passage of the tax cut plan in December of 2017, say, to March of
2020, you can get a pretty good view of what that tax bill did or
didn't do to the American economy.
Now, in the passage of the American Rescue Plan and the allocation of
the benefits of the plan, as demonstrated here, we are going to start
the clock on a realtime experiment of a different economic philosophy.
If you take government action and you try to direct the focus of it on
middle and lower income people, my surmise is, those dollars will
likely be spent; they will be spent in community institutions and
stores and purchasing properties or maybe buying a car. They will be
spent, and they will have a multiplier effect throughout the economy.
They are not going to be used to buy back stock. They are not going to
be used or socked away because there is nowhere to spend it.
I think you will see that the spending effect of allocating benefits
in this way is going to have a significant, positive effect on the
American economy at a time when it needs it and at a time when the
people who are most helped are most in need.
We need to build an economy coming out of this crisis that is not
only robust but that is also sustainable, meaning environmentally
sustainable but sustainable and less subject to boom, busts in areas
that leave people high and dry. We also need to build an economy that
is more equitable, not measured just by GDP increase or stock market
increases that can affect some but measure more in statistics like
wages, reduction of poverty, startup of new businesses that demonstrate
an economic vitality that is spread broadly among the population.
We are starting the realtime clock on that experiment today. We will
be able to compare the value of the $1.9 trillion tax cut to the $1.75
trillion American Recovery Plan in years to come. And I am very, very
excited to understand that because I think it may point the way forward
to additional economic advances that will make us stronger.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina.