[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 157 (Monday, September 13, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6451-S6452]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             CLOTURE MOTION

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Pursuant to rule XXII, the Chair lays before 
the Senate the pending cloture motion, which the clerk will state.

  The legislative clerk read as follows:

                             Cloture Motion

       We, the undersigned Senators, in accordance with the 
     provisions of rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate, 
     do hereby move to bring to a close debate on the nomination 
     of Executive Calendar No. 64, James Richard Kvaal, of 
     Massachusetts, to be Under Secretary of Education.
         Charles E. Schumer, Patty Murray, Jack Reed, Jeanne 
           Shaheen, Patrick J. Leahy, Martin Heinrich, Catherine 
           Cortez Masto, Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Christopher 
           Murphy, Tammy Duckworth, Christopher A. Coons, Tammy 
           Baldwin, Chris Van Hollen, Tim Kaine, Thomas R. Carper, 
           Amy Klobuchar, Margaret Wood Hassan, Alex Padilla.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. By unanimous consent, the mandatory quorum 
call has been waived.
  The question is, Is it the sense of the Senate that debate on the 
nomination of James Richard Kvaal, of Massachusetts, to be Under 
Secretary of Education, shall be brought to a close?
  The yeas and nays are mandatory under the rules.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk called the roll.
  Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from New Jersey (Mr. Booker), 
the Senator from Nevada (Ms. Cortez Masto), the Senator from California 
(Mr. Padilla), and the Senator from Hawaii (Mr. Schatz) are necessarily 
absent.
  Mr. THUNE. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator 
from Indiana (Mr. Braun), the Senator from Texas (Mr. Cornyn), the 
Senator from Alaska (Ms. Murkowski), and the Senator from South Dakota 
(Mr. Rounds).
  The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 55, nays 37, as follows:

                      [Rollcall Vote No. 359 Leg.]

                                YEAS--55

     Baldwin
     Bennet
     Blumenthal
     Blunt
     Brown
     Burr
     Cantwell
     Capito
     Cardin
     Carper
     Casey
     Cassidy
     Collins
     Coons
     Duckworth
     Durbin
     Feinstein
     Gillibrand
     Graham
     Hassan
     Heinrich
     Hickenlooper
     Hirono
     Kaine
     Kelly
     King
     Klobuchar
     Leahy
     Lujan
     Manchin
     Markey
     Marshall
     Menendez
     Merkley
     Murphy
     Murray
     Ossoff
     Peters
     Reed
     Romney
     Rosen
     Sanders
     Schumer
     Scott (SC)
     Shaheen
     Sinema
     Smith
     Stabenow
     Tester
     Van Hollen
     Warner
     Warnock
     Warren
     Whitehouse
     Wyden

                                NAYS--37

     Barrasso
     Blackburn
     Boozman
     Cotton
     Cramer
     Crapo
     Cruz
     Daines
     Ernst
     Fischer
     Grassley
     Hagerty
     Hawley
     Hoeven
     Hyde-Smith
     Inhofe
     Johnson
     Kennedy
     Lankford
     Lee
     Lummis
     McConnell
     Moran
     Paul
     Portman
     Risch
     Rubio
     Sasse
     Scott (FL)
     Shelby
     Sullivan
     Thune
     Tillis
     Toomey
     Tuberville
     Wicker
     Young

                             NOT VOTING--8

     Booker
     Braun
     Cornyn
     Cortez Masto
     Murkowski
     Padilla
     Rounds
     Schatz
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Kelly). The yeas are 55, the nays are 37.
  The motion is agreed to.
  The Senator from Ohio.


                             Stock Buybacks

  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, a week ago today, we celebrated Labor Day, 
a day to honor America's workers, a day to honor the labor movement 
that built this country and built our middle class. It recognizes all 
Americans working hard every day to support families who contribute to 
community and power our economy.
  Over the summer, as I know that the Presiding Officer has traveled to 
Arizona, I have been all over my State of Ohio talking with those 
workers: steelworkers in Toledo, busdrivers in Canton, VA healthcare 
workers serving our veterans in Chillicothe, union mechanics in 
Columbus. They live in different communities. They come from different 
backgrounds. But the dignity of work unites all of us.
  We take pride in hard work in this country, and we believe, as Dr. 
King said and Pope Leo XIII said, that all work has dignity, whether 
you punch a clock or swipe a badge, whether you work for tips, whether 
you take care of aging parents, whether you are raising children or 
whether you are a new grandparent--no matter who you are, where you 
live, or what kind of work you do.
  For far too many people, hard work isn't paying off. Productivity has 
gone up. Stock prices have soared. Executive compensation is 
stratospheric. But wages have barely budged. This isn't a coincidence. 
It is not an accident of the market. It is not an inevitable result of 
our system of capitalism.
  Wall Street has the power in this economy. They are obsessed with 
accumulating more wealth for the people who already have it. The system 
we have, where most of the gains in the economy seem to go to those at 
the top, is by Wall Street's explicit design, and it comes at the 
direct expense of American workers.
  We don't always make the connection. People are rightfully angry, but 
they don't think about how decisions in corporate boardrooms and on the 
floors of stock exchanges thousands of miles away affect their job 
opportunities and their wages.
  Corporations focus on their short-term performance on the stock 
market, not the long-term success of the company and its workers. Their 
main goal too often becomes increasing stock prices quarter to quarter. 
That is how CEO performance is evaluated. They are compensated in large 
part with company shares. Stocks can account for as much as half of an 
executive's compensation package.
  Corporations, therefore, juice those stock prices by repurchasing 
their own stock, what we call stock buybacks. Here is how it works. 
There are a finite number of company shares at any given time. 
Purchasing shares will decrease the number of shares available to 
investors and therefore drive up the price and the value of the 
remaining shares.
  Existing shareholders will see their stock value increase. Lo and 
behold, often those existing shareholders are the executives of the 
company. This is often an even more attractive option to executives 
than dividends because buybacks are more flexible and, under current 
law, they aren't taxed until the shares are sold. That is what we want 
to change.
  The economy hasn't always worked this way. A few decades ago, most of 
Wall Street capital funded the real economy: wages, machinery, 
research, new construction, expansion of the

[[Page S6452]]

company. Stock buybacks used to be considered illegal market 
manipulation. Think about that. Stock buybacks then used to be 
considered illegal market manipulation.
  Today, they have become routine. Now, only 15 percent of capital goes 
to the real economy while the amount corporations spend on buybacks has 
just exploded. Between 2004 and 2013, Home Depot, a great company by 
most measures, in that decade spent 99 percent of its net income on 
stock buybacks--99 percent of its net income on stock buybacks. IBM 
spent 92 percent.
  That is right. Some companies spend close to 100 percent of their 
profits on their own stocks rather than workers' wages, rather than 
expanding the company, rather than investing in research and 
development.
  It has only gotten worse since Washington Republicans' 2017 tax 
giveaway to these corporations. We all remember--and I have pointed 
this out before--the lobbyists down the hall in front of Senator 
McConnell's office, the corporate lobbyists that lined up one after 
another as Senator McConnell decided, on behalf of his Members and with 
President Trump during the Trump-McConnell Presidency--how Senator 
McConnell handed these companies a windfall.
  Their executives turned around. I remember Senator McConnell, when he 
walked down the hall here after doing his conversations--I will just 
leave it at that--with his lobbyist friends. He would walk down the 
hall, and he would stand at the majority leader's--then the majority 
leader--and I think that tax giveaway is part of the reason he is no 
longer the majority leader.
  But he would say that that is going to trickle down and workers are 
going to get raises and companies are going to expand and benefits are 
going to go to the whole economy. Well, that is not exactly what 
happened. When he handed them that windfall, you know what the 
executives did--the executives who were lobbying him, the executives 
who were contributing to the campaigns, the executives who control the 
Wall Street Journal editorial board? Do you know what they did? They 
turned around; they plowed that money right back into stock buybacks, 
which meant, lo and behold, right into their own pockets.

  The largest U.S. companies--in 2018, right after the tax giveaway, 
over a trillion dollars, 70 percent, went to the richest 1 percent. 
Don't forget that number. In 2018, the largest U.S. companies spent 
more than $800 billion in stock buybacks, a 50-percent increase from 
the previous year, a 50-percent increase because they got that largesse 
from the Federal Treasury.
  They spent more on stock buybacks than on debt payments, than on 
capital expenditures, than on research and development, than on 
dividends--in other words, the real economy.
  Now, in 2021, as millions of families struggle to recover from this 
pandemic and get back on their feet, you might think things would 
change. We are hearing that a lot of companies--the Presiding Officer 
hears it in Arizona; I hear it in Ohio--a lot of companies complain 
about supposed labor shortages. You might think that these companies 
that are sitting on cash, that it might cause companies to reassess.
  They need more workers. Maybe they should cut back on juicing their 
stock buybacks, and instead they could permanently raise pay or 
increase retirement contributions or offer better healthcare plans or 
invest in new training programs--all of those to attract new, better 
paid, more satisfied, happier workers. But, no, this year corporate 
stock buybacks are on track to approach or even surpass the 2018 
record.
  Proponents of stock buybacks argue that companies purchase their own 
shares only after considering other, value-creating investment options. 
In other words, companies are arguing: You know, we do stock buybacks. 
Yeah, you are right; it makes us a little richer individually, and we 
can buy that third or fourth home in Florida or on the Cape or on Lake 
Erie or whatever, but also, we consider everything that would be good 
for the company. We funded all that; so then we do stock buybacks.
  That is a ridiculous argument. Talk to any family in Cleveland or 
Chillicothe or Mansfield or Marietta or Springfield, anywhere outside 
of Wall Street. Ask these families if they can think of a better 
investment for the trillions--trillions, thousands of billions--
trillions of dollars in wealth American workers have created.
  But, of course, executives' personal interests influence their 
decision making. One study of 2,500 companies found that the greater 
the percentage stock options in executive compensation packages, the 
more likely a company was to make stock buybacks. That is fairly 
logical. The greater percentage of stock options in an executive 
compensation package, the more likely a company was to make stock 
buybacks.
  So how do we stop this never-ending cycle of corporate greed and make 
sure that workers are sharing in the profits they create? We start with 
the new bill that Senator Wyden, the chair of the Finance Committee, 
and I are introducing: the Stock Buyback Accountability Act.
  The Tax Code is one of the best tools we have to influence 
businesses. The idea is simple. If you want to buy back your own stock, 
you have to pay just a little bit--a 2-percent tax--on the money you 
make off of it. Two percent is pretty small. It is a hell of a lot less 
than the tax rate that workers at First Solar, which I am going to 
visit this week in Perrysburg, are paying or workers at Whirlpool or 
workers at the local corner store, at the local Dave's supermarket in 
Garfield Heights, are paying.
  But that little tax will make companies think a little harder about 
whether stock buybacks are really the best use of their trillions in 
profits. I hope it will make it a little more likely that they will 
invest the money in something useful, something like a new factory or 
researching new products or training and apprenticeship programs or pay 
raises for the workers who are making these profits possible.
  It has to be the goal of any stock buyback plan. It is not about 
punishing executives. I am indifferent. I have always believed it is 
whom you fight for and what you fight against. I will always fight for 
workers in this job. I don't have any interest in punishing executives. 
I just don't want to unduly reward them at the expense of workers.
  It is about executives paying their fair share just like their 
workers do. It is about changing the incentives in our economy so that 
more of our country's wealth gets invested back to the people who 
created it.
  We have known for years that stock buybacks are a problem. They 
distort the market. They lead to less long-term economic growth. They 
divert investment from workers. That is why it is on worker pay, not 
stock buybacks.
  We have a real chance to actually do something about it. After years 
of politicians talking about reining in Wall Street, now is our 
opportunity to do it, to show people we are listening and to take 
action.
  Worker pay, not stock buybacks. Create a fairer tax system. Creating 
a fairer tax system is one of the simplest ways to change the Wall 
Street and corporations' first system that Americans are so tired of.
  We make this simple fix to finally, finally crack down on stock 
buybacks. We get rid of the tax breaks for corporations that ship 
American jobs overseas. We make multinational corporations pay their 
fair share instead of always, always, always forcing working families 
to foot the bill. We crack down on wealthy tax cheats that game the 
system. We give working families the largest tax cut ever.
  We did that in the bill we passed in March. We are going to do that 
in the bills we pass this fall.
  It comes back to the dignity of work. Wall Street simply doesn't 
recognize that all work has dignity. They consider shareholders' equity 
in a company to be all that matters. But workers have equity in a 
company too. It is called sweat equity. It is time they were rewarded 
for it.
  Worker pay, not stock buybacks.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Brown). The majority leader is recognized.

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