[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 82 (Wednesday, May 12, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2470-S2474]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                         American Families Plan

  Ms. ERNST. Mr. President, Washington has been on a dizzying spending 
spree over the past couple of months, passing trillion-dollar bills 
right and left. It is nearly impossible to calculate the total cost. 
And now, President Biden and the Democrats in Congress are proposing 
several trillion dollars in even more spending.
  With tax day approaching on May 17, the time has come to pay the 
bills for all of these government giveaways. And guess who will be 
forced to pay for it? Well, of course, it is the American people.
  Right now, Democrats are hoping to finance their ongoing spending 
splurge by increasing taxes on hard-working Americans across this 
country. One of the key tax hikes included in the President's so-called 
American Families Plan would hit farm families especially hard.
  The Biden proposal would eliminate a protection that allows Iowa farm 
families to pass down their assets to the next generation without a tax 
penalty. The Farm Bureau says the end result would be a significant tax 
increase on our farmers and ranchers.
  This is the last thing the ag sector needs as they continue on their 
economic recovery. While hiking taxes on our farmers who help feed and 
fuel our Nation every single day, my Democratic colleagues also want to 
give a tax break to high-income coastal elites.
  And don't just take my word for it. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez, the leader of the socialist squad in the House, says the 
Democrats' proposal to repeal the cap on the State and local tax 
deduction is ``a gift

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to billionaires'' and ``a giveaway to the rich.'' Never in a million 
years did I ever think that I would agree with AOC, but there is no 
arguing on that particular point.
  Those aren't the only parts of the Democrats' tax strategy that make 
no sense. According to recent reports, their demand to raise taxes on 
capital gains could actually cost the government money. The calculation 
is that if rates get too high, people will just stop selling their 
assets.
  Well, here is an idea: Rather than taking more of Iowans' hard-earned 
dollars to pay for their plans, maybe Democrats could stop their 
reckless spending. But let's be honest, that probably won't happen. 
They are the party of tax and spend, after all.
  Rather than raising taxes, my friends across the aisle could start by 
collecting the $380 billion in taxes that is already owed, but not 
paid, every year. Current and retired government employees alone owe 
over $3 billion in delinquent taxes. Why should Iowans be paying the 
salaries and benefits of those who aren't even paying their own tax 
bill? They shouldn't. And that is why I am helping lead an effort that 
would collect the billions in back taxes owed by Federal employees.
  Another solution: We could bring in billions of dollars by closing a 
tax loophole that literally goes all the way to China. If the communist 
regime was treated the same as a U.S. citizen, it would be required to 
pay taxes on interest from our debt to China.
  But as a result of a three decades old treaty, communist China is 
exempt from paying taxes on these profits. Instead of increasing taxes 
on farm families and working Americans, the Biden administration should 
collect the hundreds of billions of dollars that is already owed to us 
and close the loophole that treats communist China better than our own 
U.S. citizens.
  Right now, to pay off your annual Federal tax bill, you would have to 
set aside every penny you earned from January 1 until mid-April, every 
single penny.
  Folks, Washington should be working for you, but it turns out you are 
working for Washington, and you can't even claim the government as a 
dependent on your tax return. This plot to pickpocket taxpayers to pay 
for the left's unpopular progressive policies is bad for our Nation's 
economic recovery and even worse for working Americans who get stuck 
with the bill.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Wyoming.
  Mr. BARRASSO. First, I would like to associate myself with the 
remarks from the Senator from Iowa, who very clearly stated the 
problems that people all across the country are facing. I love the line 
about we can't even claim the government as a dependent because the 
government truly is dependent upon the people of this great country.
  Tax day is just a few days away so I come to the floor to oppose the 
tax hikes proposed by President Biden. Today, tax revenues in America 
are at a near-record high of all times. We don't have a revenue 
problem; we have a spending problem. Yet President Biden wants to take 
more money out of the wallets of America's hard-working men and women.
  How much is he calling for? Astonishingly, $3 trillion in additional 
taxes. This is on top of the taxes that are already being paid. It is 
the biggest tax increase in over half a century.
  It is supposed to pay for a lot of liberal spending ideas. It is a 
big liberal agenda that this President is promoting. Yet even with 
these historic tax increases being proposed, our Nation will still need 
to continue to borrow money from China.
  In just over 100 days, President Biden has already put $1.99 trillion 
on our Nation's credit card. Now he wants more. In total, President 
Biden's agenda would cost more than America's total commitment to World 
War II. Are these liberal spending proposals as important to our Nation 
as was our victory in World War II? Of course not.
  As I have said before, our economy was already on track to be back to 
normal this summer. That was before President Biden passed his spending 
bill on a party-line vote crammed through the Senate after a middle-of-
the-night debate, crammed through on a direct party-line vote using 
budget reconciliation.
  President Biden has said--it is interesting, astonishing, and amusing 
to listen to the President when he says only the rich will have to pay 
these taxes. The American people have seen this movie before. We know 
as Americans that when we hear politicians say only the rich will pay, 
it is time to hold on to your wallet because they are coming for you.
  Working families are going to pay in the form of higher prices, lower 
wages, and fewer job opportunities.
  We are already seeing higher prices. We are seeing significant 
inflation since the day President Biden has taken office. We see it 
again today with the newest economic statistics that have come out. We 
hear about it at home on the weekends as we talk to folks at home about 
what is happening with their day-to-day life and their expenses.
  Experts tell us that President Biden's tax hikes could destroy a 
million jobs--a million jobs. When Republicans cut taxes in 2017--and 
it is good to be here on the floor with my friend and colleague from 
Ohio who is one of the four horsemen who put that proposal together on 
behalf of the Republicans--revenue at the Federal Government actually 
went up. It is the same thing that happened when taxes were cut under 
President Coolidge and Kennedy and Reagan and George W. Bush.
  If you cut taxes, there is more money in people's hands. They can do 
what they want to do with that money and make better decisions than the 
government. I think it is very important to let people keep more of 
their hard-earned money. They make better decisions than Washington, 
DC, does.
  People can decide what they want to spend, what they want to save, 
what they want to invest, how much they want to donate. And all four of 
these are very good for our Nation. That means more jobs, more growth, 
and, ultimately, more tax revenue with more people working, even though 
each is paying less in taxes individually.
  I have much more confidence when money is in the hands of the 
American people than I do when it is in the hands of the politicians in 
Washington, DC.
  I would urge all of my colleagues to say: Stop these tax hikes. Stop 
this reckless spending. Let people keep more of their hard-earned money 
and make decisions for themselves.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Ohio.
  Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, first, I would like to congratulate my 
colleague from Wyoming for his thoughtful remarks. I mean, he is 
absolutely right. This is not the time for us to be raising taxes.
  It is tax day coming up next week, and Senator Ernst of Iowa put 
together this colloquy to focus us all on that issue and the fact that 
here we are coming onto tax day, yet there are proposals out there 
saying you are not paying enough tax. So all of you who think you are 
paying too much tax, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle and 
the administration would like to increase those taxes substantially.
  It is going to really hurt our economy and hurt workers. That is my 
big concern about this proposal in this so-called infrastructure 
package. Our economy is kind of limping along still, in part, because 
we have spent so much in stimulus that it has overheated the economy, 
and you can see the inflation that is hitting us. You can see it in the 
gas prices when you go to the pump or food costs or, if you are trying 
to buy lumber these days, check out the cost.
  On the one hand, Democrats are encouraging more inflation through 
stimulation that really wasn't needed based on what we had learned from 
the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office--and that has overheated 
the economy--and, by the way, as former Secretary of the Treasury Larry 
Summers predicted. This was in a Democratic administration, two of 
them.
  I am concerned about the spending, but then to pay for the spending, 
these tax cuts are really a mistake. What I would like to do is go back 
to the economy we had before COVID. That economy was really helping 
everyone. It was an inclusive economy.
  Two years ago, just before COVID, we had significant economic growth, 
which most people know about. What folks might not know about February 
a year ago, just before COVID hit, it was the 19th straight month of 
wage growth of 3 percent or more on an annual

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basis. Think about that, 3 percent or more wage growth. We haven't had 
that in Ohio, my home State, in a long time, perhaps a decade and a 
half.
  That kind of wage growth was primarily focused on lower income and 
middle-income workers, so the benefit wasn't just to the companies and 
the people at the high end. The benefit was primarily to those who were 
at the lower end of the economic scale.
  We had a study by the Congressional Budget Office, as we looked to 
these corporate tax cuts that were made in 2017, and they said that 70 
percent of the benefit was going to go to workers in terms of higher 
wages and better benefits. That is exactly what happened. I think they 
were right. We tied the 50-year low in unemployment at 3.5 percent. We 
also had historically low unemployment for some groups--Hispanics, 
Blacks, Asian Americans.
  In fact, before the pandemic, we reached the lowest poverty rate we 
ever had in this country. We started keeping track of it back in the 
1950s, the late fifties. We had the lowest poverty rate going into the 
pandemic than we had ever had. You probably haven't heard that much 
because it wasn't reported much. Again, it was not just a growth 
economy; it was an inclusive economy.
  Importantly, the tax reform that was put in place in 2017 didn't just 
help stimulate this kind of inclusive growth but also stopped these 
companies in America from going overseas. I remember this word 
``inversion.'' The companies were literally inverting, meaning they 
were switching and becoming foreign companies to get out from under our 
Tax Code. We have two big companies in Ohio that did this. Probably 
some companies in your State did too.
  We were losing jobs and losing investments because they went overseas 
and took the investments with them. This was not a good situation for 
American workers.
  In addition, there was a lockout effect while companies were saying: 
I am not going to bring my cash home because it costs me too much. I 
will keep it overseas and invest it over there.
  So $1.6 trillion from overseas earnings came back to our company 
after the 2017 tax reforms because we changed the way we taxed 
internationally, and companies no longer had this incentive to keep 
their money overseas--$1.6 trillion.
  As a result of the 2017 changes, the largest U.S. companies increased 
their domestic research and development spending by 25 percent to $707 
billion. They increased their capital expenditures by 20 percent to 
$1.4 trillion. Before the pandemic, we had a good economy, but, 
importantly to me, it was an opportunity economy, creating jobs and 
increasing wages right here at home. All that progress could be thrown 
away through the tax increases that are being proposed.
  The centerpiece of the Biden plan is corporate tax increases that 
would raise the combined Federal and State corporate rate from an 
average of 25.8 percent. That is the 21-percent Federal rate plus the 
average of the State income tax for corporations. Twenty-one percent, 
by the way, is above the average of the OECD, the developed countries 
in the world. When we put it in place back in 2017, we did it at 21 
percent, specifically, to get right at the average so we wouldn't be 
noncompetitive. We would be able to compete and win.
  Since then, other countries have come below us, so we are actually 
above the average now. Yet the Biden administration would like to take 
this rate from 21 up to 28, but when you add the State and local, you 
know, the State taxes, it is to 32.8 percent. Again, it would put 
America, of course, as having the highest corporate tax rate in the 
entire world. It gives us a much higher tax rate than many of our 
competitors like China. Why would we want to do that?
  Based on analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation, these combined 
corporate tax hikes are actually five times as big as the corresponding 
tax cuts were in 2017. Let me repeat that because it is fascinating. 
Democrats are proposing, they say, to get rid of the 2017 tax cuts, but 
that is not what they are doing. They are actually proposing going back 
and adding five times more tax increases than were cut
  The Joint Committee on Taxation--again, a nonpartisan group--says the 
tax cuts were about $300 billion over 10 years, and the proposed tax 
increases are about $1.5 trillion. That just makes no sense for our 
workers. Again, CBO has said 70 percent of the benefit went to workers. 
Who is going to get hurt by doing this? The workers.
  The Biden plan also eliminates what is called the FDII, or the 
foreign-derived intangible income provision. That is the one that 
incentivized U.S. companies to bring their intellectual property back 
here. We wanted that. We did it on purpose. The companies that did that 
brought all their IP back here, including Google, Cisco, Qualcomm, 
Synopsys, and Facebook--some pretty big companies and a lot of others. 
We wanted them to bring that valuable IP back here, and they did 
because it creates high-paying, high-skilled jobs here at home. Why 
would we want to stop that? That was the carrot to bring it back.
  It also makes it more costly for U.S. companies to operate outside 
the United States, again, punishing American workers who have jobs here 
that support international sales. Studies by the nonpartisan 
Congressional Budget Office have shown, again, it is workers who will 
bear the brunt of that. This is what many seem to miss. When we talk 
about how this proposal makes us less competitive, we are really saying 
that it makes American workers less competitive. It ties their hands 
behind their backs.
  In Ohio--this is one example--we have Procter and Gamble. Procter and 
Gamble makes a lot of diapers and a lot of other products. It is not 
cost-effective for them to make diapers here and ship them overseas so 
they have diaper plants overseas. That is the only way they can be 
competitive. These tax increases would punish companies like that if 
they are to do business overseas, even though they are creating jobs 
here in America by doing that. There are about 13,000 people who work 
for Procter and Gamble in Southwest Ohio, where I live. Forty percent 
of them have their jobs because of international sales. You are talking 
about losing thousands of jobs in America if they can't be competitive 
globally.
  We want our American companies to be competitive globally, at least 
we should. These tax hikes are going to hurt our competitiveness and 
put domestic jobs at risk.
  By the way, the Biden administration knows all this is going to 
happen. They know that increasing the corporate rate is going to make 
us noncompetitive. Taxing international overseas earnings, taxing 
companies more that want to bring their IP back will make us less 
competitive. We know this because when Secretary of the Treasury Janet 
Yellen announced these proposals, she said: Help us, other countries in 
the world. Raise your taxes, too, to make it a ``more level playing 
field.'' It is a plea by America to other countries, saying: Please 
raise your taxes, too, so we can all be in this together. Other 
countries aren't going to do that. Again, they actually lowered their 
taxes since 2017, on average.
  By the way, it is interesting. The Irish Finance Minister said right 
after that, when he was asked at a press conference ``Are you going to 
raise your taxes?'' he said ``No, we want to be competitive. We want to 
bring jobs.'' Of course, they want to bring jobs to their countries. 
Other countries are looking at us and saying: Wow. America is just 
going to show the white flag and allow us to now beat them in terms of 
this global competition that is out there.
  That is the real world. It may sound good to raise taxes on business, 
but it is going to hurt workers, and it is going to make us 
noncompetitive. I really hope the Biden administration is not 
successful in this effort. I don't want to see the workers hurt whom I 
represent in Ohio. I want to see us get back to that economy wherein we 
had not just low employment but rising wages and low poverty rates--the 
kind of inclusive economy we should all want.
  There are all sorts of other issues here, and I know my colleague 
from Iowa is probably going to talk about some of those, like the 
estate tax and the capital gains tax. I mean, there are all sorts of 
things that are being talked about. Yet, in this first package of 
infrastructure, just the corporate taxes

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alone are going to be so damaging to our economy. Instead of pursuing 
these kinds of partisan tax hikes, let's focus on getting back to where 
we were pre-COVID--back to that strong job and wage growth and back to 
that competitive opportunity economy.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Iowa.
  Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, we are now in the final week of tax-
filing season. While filing season typically ends on April 15, this 
year, taxpayers have until May 17 to file or to request an extension.
  This is also the third filing season under the tax cuts and reforms 
that the Republicans enacted in 2017. For the vast majority of 
Americans, this means they are paying significantly less in income 
taxes than they were under prior law. Moreover, thanks to a nearly 
doubling of the standard deduction, most Americans are paying less 
without having the headache of itemizing their taxes.
  More importantly, prior to the pandemic, tax reform contributed to 
the best economy America had seen in decades. Unemployment reached a 
50-year low and was at or below 4 percent for 24 consecutive months. 
Family incomes and workers' wages experienced robust gains. In fact, 
wage growth was the strongest for low-wage workers. As a result, we 
actually saw income inequality decline.
  Unfortunately, the current administration's ambitions to use the 
pandemic as an excuse to pass a Big Government, anti-growth agenda 
threatens our return to a thriving economy.
  First came its $2 trillion untargeted COVID relief bill that focused 
more on enacting a liberal wish list rather than on pandemic relief. A 
lot of my colleagues have referred to only 10 percent of that $1.9 
trillion bill actually being related to problems caused by the 
pandemic.
  The dangers of passing this untargeted and largely unnecessary 
spending are already beginning to weigh on our economic recovery. 
Throughout the economy, prices are soaring, and job growth is tepid. 
April's jobs growth data fell short of expectations by more than 
700,000 jobs. This is deeply concerning, and it ought to be to every 
one of the Members of the Senate.
  I have heard firsthand from business after business in my State of 
Iowa that they are desperate for workers but that job applicants are 
scarce. As my Republican colleagues and I have warned our Democratic 
colleagues for months, this is the natural result of the Democratic 
policies that pay people more not to work than to work. Yet, despite 
the obvious overreach of their liberal agenda, my Democratic colleagues 
are preparing to double down with an additional $4 trillion Big 
Government spending spree. Then, in turn, to finance their progressive 
dreams, they are proposing trillions of dollars of job-killing tax 
hikes.
  You just heard from my colleague from Ohio, Senator Portman, who went 
into that very deeply, how those tax policies are going to hurt our 
economy and the workers in our economy.
  Their proposals to roll back critical reforms to our corporate tax 
system would result in the United States once again having the highest 
corporate tax rate among our major trading partners and incentivizing 
companies to move headquarters abroad
  Small businesses are also in their crosshairs. Family businesses and 
farms could be decimated by proposals to hike capital gains taxes and 
subject paper-only gains in family business assets to taxation 
immediately upon the transfer of that farm or that business at death.
  My Democratic colleagues' tax proposal would make the United States a 
less attractive place to invest. It would erode American 
competitiveness and slow our Nation's postpandemic economic recovery. 
That means fewer jobs. It means lower wages for middle-class Americans.
  Postpandemic prosperity won't be achieved through higher taxes and 
Big Government spending programs or the government itself, which 
consumes and doesn't produce wealth. The real wealth of America is 
created by the working men and women of this country. If we are going 
to have this growth, it is going to be achieved through pro-growth 
policies and in the unshackling of our economy from stringent pandemic-
era restrictions as we move toward a vaccinated world.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Tennessee.
  Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. President, I was on the floor earlier this week, 
and I made a point that I think is really relevant to the discussion 
that we are having today as we are now looking straight into these 
proposals coming from the administration that would end up totaling $6 
trillion in new spending. Now, that is not the annual appropriations; 
that is new spending.
  The point that I had made was that we have to go back pre-COVID and 
remember what was going on in this economy. Everything was thriving, 
really thriving, and people kept talking about how great the economy 
was. In Tennessee, I had so many people who would say: You know, I have 
more money at the end of the month, and before, during the Obama years, 
I had too much month left at the end of my money.
  Do you know what? They liked having some money left over at the end 
of the month.
  That economy we had pre-COVID came about because of the Tax Cuts and 
Jobs Act. It came about because of the work of President Trump and a 
Republican-led House and Senate and, indeed, because of the support 
from some of our Democratic friends. This gave us, our country, the 
most robust economy we have seen in decades. Unemployment had hit 3.5 
percent--historic lows. Wage gains were at a record high.
  Pro-growth policies, like the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, had set a new 
standard. We proved we don't have to tax and spend ourselves into 
oblivion to make a difference in the lives of struggling families. It 
is a legacy that my Democratic colleagues wish the American people 
would forget because that memory is getting in the way of their work on 
behalf of big spending, big government, and big programs that take big 
bucks right out of the American taxpayers' pockets.
  The Democratic agenda is not cheap. It is going to take a lot of 
taxpayer dollars. So how does President Biden intend to pay for this? 
It is called a $2 trillion tax hike that targets all of the usual, 
supposed villains but that in reality would harm the very people my 
colleagues across the aisle insist they are trying to help.
  Let's look at the proposed corporate tax hike. Corporations are the 
left's favorite villain, and they would certainly suffer under this 
scheme, but it is not the CEOs and the high earners who would feel the 
pain. As it stands, the proposal would impose a combined corporate tax 
rate higher than any other developed nation. It would put us at the top 
of the heap in tax rates. The only way American corporations would 
maintain their competitiveness is if other countries were to set aside 
their advantages, which, of course, we know would never happen. Not 
only will the Amazons and the Apples bear the brunt of this decline, so 
will nearly a million small businesses. We call them the mom-and-pops, 
and they are organized as C-corps.
  Workers won't escape the fallout either. When the cost of doing 
business goes up, growth and investment stagnate, wages fall, and the 
people driving the economy suffer. That is right. This is going to hit 
Main Street in local communities where you are going to see small 
businesses that cannot afford to keep up with inflation, that cannot 
afford these high taxes, and that cannot afford increased regulation. 
They are your friends and neighbors who have these small businesses. 
They are the ones who are going to suffer. And why will they suffer? 
Because the Democratic majority never ceases to have an outsized 
appetite for the taxpayers' dollar.
  Even conservative estimates from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on 
Taxation show that workers will bear a quarter of that new cost of 
doing business. The workers, the laborers, are going to have this on 
their shoulders. Think about it. Think of what you are doing to 
families.
  The view doesn't look any better from the owners' side. Anyone taking 
advantage of an IRA or a pension plan will see a bigger tax bill too.
  Watching this White House make fiscal policy is like watching reruns 
of the Obama administration. The formula is the same: Pitch a big idea.

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Sound compassionate. Make a big promise--you are going to help all of 
these people--and then send the bill to hard-working taxpayers. They do 
it every time.
  Increasing taxes is bad enough, but now they are demanding bigger 
payouts from struggling families and small businesses on Main Street in 
your community, and they are doing this in the middle of a pandemic 
recovery. They locked you down, and now they are going to push you 
down. They are going to shut the doors of your small business, your 
version of the American dream. Do they give a ripping flip? Probably 
not. It is all about getting the money to pay for what they want to do. 
It is a power grab.
  I would encourage my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to 
stop the madness, because we know this will cause irreparable harm to 
our Nation's already fragile recovery.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Alabama.
  (The remarks of Mr. Tuberville pertaining to the introduction of S. 
1582 are printed in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced 
Bills and Joint Resolutions.''
  Mr. TUBERVILLE. Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Baldwin). The senior Senator from Utah.