[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 16 (Monday, January 29, 2024)]
[House]
[Page H256]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    R&D CHANGES TO FEDERAL TAX CODE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Connecticut (Mr. Courtney) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. COURTNEY. Mr. Speaker, I want to take a minute this morning to 
again look at the 118th Congress, which just completed its first year 
of operation last December, and it was sadly the least productive 
Congress in memory.
  Thirty-one bills were enacted during that first year of the 118th 
Congress. Again, that is a fraction of the number of bills that have 
been introduced in this Congress. That now surpasses 7,000 bills which 
were introduced in the House and a comparable number in the Senate.
  Obviously, much of the year was consumed with a lot of interparty 
fighting with the majority party, but now with really a year left, it 
is our duty to try and find bipartisan measures that are actually going 
to help this country and address real problems for Americans.
  The good news is, a week ago Friday, the Ways and Means Committee 
reported out H.R. 7024, which is a bill aimed at making corrections and 
improvements to the Tax Code that are long overdue.
  There are three basic pieces to it.
  Number one, it reinstated the child tax credit, which had been wiped 
out after ARPA expired. This will basically take roughly half a million 
children out of poverty. Low-income families don't qualify for the full 
value of the child tax credit. Thankfully, the two sides came together 
to come up with a meaningful fix. We really have more work to do, 
because the initial version that was part of ARPA actually cut child 
poverty in this country in half.

  The second thing it did is it expanded the low-income housing tax 
credit. We have a desperate need for more housing supply in this 
country, and this will stimulate more investment by developers to build 
more housing.
  I want to be clear. Those units that will benefit from this will be 
mixed income and will benefit working families and folks who are 
desperate to find affordable places to live.
  Mr. Speaker, what I really want to talk about is the research and 
development tax deduction, which, in 2017, when the tax law was passed, 
which I opposed at the time, it basically took the research and 
development expensing mechanism that had been on the books since 1954, 
which allowed businesses to write down the investments that they did in 
new products, processes, workforce innovation, and basically forced 
them to have to spread it out over 5 years, causing a huge hardship for 
small businesses, particularly small manufacturers.
  I have a poster next to me from the Westminster Tool company in 
Plainfield, Connecticut. I visited it a few days ago. This is a firm 
with 35 workers. Again, a family-owned business. They do great work in 
terms of medical device manufacturing. They also make aerospace parts 
that go into our F-35 program that is so critical to the Air Force and 
the Navy.
  When this new expensing mechanism went into effect, it is almost hard 
to believe this, but their tax bill went up 355 percent. Again, for 
companies like this, who don't have cash reserves to continue 
innovating in terms of new products and processes, which Westminster 
Tool does, this is basically a wipeout in terms of their ability to 
invest.
  This is showing up across the country. It was a terrible decision 
back in 2017. This bill will resume having the annual expensing 
mechanism, which will allow this company--and this is a picture with 
Ray Coombs, who is to my immediate right there, the owner, and his two 
daughters and his son, Colby, who are running the business. Behind him 
is the president of the Eastern Manufacturing Alliance, which has been 
desperately asking Congress to go back and fix this ridiculous change 
which took place in the 2017 tax bill.
  So, again, this is a pro-growth measure, which is going to allow 
companies like this to get back on track in terms of innovation, which 
is so important for us in keeping ahead of our global competitors and 
creating jobs--good jobs, skilled jobs. Westminster Tool has been just 
an absolute shining example of why we need to make this change.
  Hopefully, we are going to get this across the finish line and make 
sure that, again, the problem is fixed. We could do more; there is no 
question about it. But the fact of the matter is, in this Congress, we 
have to take Ws where we can and victories where we can to address real 
problems for companies like Westminster Tool.

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