[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 77 (Thursday, May 8, 2025)]
[House]
[Pages H1939-H1942]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL

  (Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025, Mr. 
Grothman of Wisconsin was recognized for 30 minutes.)
  Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, we are heading into what many people hope 
is the finishing stretch of our legislature, putting through what 
Donald Trump calls the big, beautiful bill.
  There are a lot of issues yet to be decided, and I would like to 
address some of those issues today.

[[Page H1940]]

  The first issue I have talked about once already, but it seems to be 
a major holdup, the rumors are, in negotiation.
  There are clearly going to be some tax cuts in this budget. Our goal 
will be to continue with tax cuts that were put in place in 2017 but 
add some others.
  As we hear rumors of what tax cuts will be added, we have to remember 
that taxes in the United States are so high that every tax provision 
affects our behavior.
  Some people want taxes, and I am one of them, to be lower on 
manufacturers because manufacturers have to compete with other 
countries. A good way to make sure we have good manufacturing jobs, as 
well as to make sure we get more research on manufacturing in this 
country, is to aim our tax cuts at manufacturers.
  Some of them specifically aim at research and development. They feel 
the most important thing in manufacturing is research and development.
  Others are made to encourage savings. In the past year, we have 
passed tax cuts to encourage people to put more money in their IRAs or 
401(k)s.
  We have a problem in this country that not enough people are having 
children, and that is not only a problem for the country; it is a 
problem for individuals who, I think--I am told, many of which regret 
when they are 35 or 40, not having children when they were younger.
  People want to use the tax code to incentivize people to have more 
children. There are a variety of ways you can do that. President Trump 
floated a balloon just to give people a large check. I think that is a 
big mistake because we do not want to have people having children just 
to get a large check.
  If you want to make it easier to raise children, maybe raising the 
personal exemption to $5,000 would be a good way to favor parents.
  One thing that concerns me. Unlike people who want to encourage more 
manufacturing, encourage more work, encourage more overtime, encourage 
more children, there are people who want to change the tax code to 
encourage local governments and State governments to raise taxes.

  There is a provision called the SALT provision in which they want to 
make tax deductible State and local taxes. They are already, to a 
degree, tax deductible, but there are people who want to help the 
wealthier people deduct their State and local income taxes as well.
  I have talked to both my State legislators, and last weekend I talked 
to a county executive, and they both gave me the same story. They are 
both conservative people. They said they were shocked that there were 
Republicans who want to increase the tax deduction for State and local 
taxes because what does that incentivize? It doesn't incentivize more 
children. It doesn't incentivize more research and development. It 
doesn't incentivize more manufacturing.
  What it does is it incentivizes State and local governments to raise 
taxes and spend more money. I had to explain to my State legislators 
these were Republicans who wanted it. They found it hard to believe. It 
sounds like a tax provision that you would be more likely to hear 
Democrat legislators want.
  In any event, I think we have to follow the negotiations that are 
going on, and we have to see whether within the Republican Party we 
wind up with a product to encourage more work, encourage families, or 
whether we wind up with a bill designed to encourage State governments 
to raise the income tax or sales tax, or encourage local governments to 
raise their property tax.
  I am going to be very disappointed. It would certainly be a defeat 
for, I guess what I will call, traditional Republicans, such as myself, 
but that is one of the negotiations going on behind closed doors.
  There is another provision that they are going to use the IRS code 
in--which concerns me a little because there are rumors that this may 
be out there as well. Quite frankly, I have a suggestion how we could 
cut taxes and put ourselves in a stronger position.
  Right now there is a provision in the tax code called low-income 
housing tax credits, and what it means is that if a developer wants to 
build a new development, they would get a credit equal to 10 percent of 
the cost of the building over 9 years, which, right off the bat, sounds 
like the government is paying for 90 percent of the value of the 
building.
  That is not quite right because there is a time value to money, and 
if you are getting a building that you paid $10 million for, if you get 
a credit worth $1 million 10 years out, you have got to wait for that 
credit, and there is a time value to money.
  Nevertheless, even taking into account the time value of money, a 
potential developer has the government, through tax credits, pay for 70 
percent of the cost of a building.
  Now, this is not open-ended. Usually these credits go to politically 
well-connected developers picked by State agencies or State 
organizations.
  I think, personally, of all the tax cuts particularly, people 
complain about tax cuts for the rich. Of all the provisions in the 
Internal Revenue Code, I can think of no provision more questionable 
than having the Internal Revenue Service reduce somebody's taxes so 
that you get 70 percent of the value of your project paid for.
  Now, people do not earn enough income to use, say, in the case of 
$100 million, a building, they don't have enough credits to offset $70 
million in taxes. So they have to sell the credits to somebody else. 
This means getting lawyers and experts from LIHTC involved so that 
these credits can be transferred.
  A significant number of these credits go to some of the largest banks 
in the country. And, of course, the largest banks in the country, I am 
sure, would love to have Congress change the provisions so that they 
were able to use still more tax credits.
  Why at a time when we can do so many other good things would we do 
that? I don't know, but they have been very active in this building, 
and they are looking to get more tax credits.
  The next thing to remember about this is there are some units, but 
not all units, which have restrictions on the amount of rent that can 
be charged. Quite frankly, there is no guarantee that any of these 
rents will be below market rate. In fact, some of the people who live 
in these projects will be able to use vouchers, what we call Section 8 
vouchers.
  So the government, first of all, sets aside money for somebody to get 
free rent, and then the vouchers are given to a property developer or a 
syndicate that is going to wind up owning the building, and they wind 
up with a voucher as well. It is kind of hard to believe it is 
developed that way, but it has developed that way.
  I had always wondered before hearing about these things why sometimes 
low-income housing developments look nicer or more elaborate than 
regular old apartments. Part of that is they are newer, and, of course, 
newer buildings are usually nicer. A lot of it is we are paying these 
developers 70 percent of the cost of their building.
  And just like if you at home were building a new house and the 
government said we will give you 70 percent of the cost of that new 
house, if a developer is building something new and the government says 
we will pay for 70 percent of the cost of your apartment building, of 
course the building becomes more lavish, which, of course, makes the 
property developer wealthy as well.
  And you can begin to see, as we work our way through here, that the 
developer is the big beneficiary here.
  Then what happens is the building is sold to a syndicate of a variety 
of wealthy people who get the tax benefits of depreciation for about 15 
years, and then eventually it is returned to the original developer.
  So there are many people making money here. Certainly the banks are 
making money. Above all, the developers are making money. The lawyers 
are making money, as they have to constantly draft documents between 
the banks and the syndicate and the developer. And, like I said, the 
syndicate itself, which is made up of a variety of wealthy individuals 
or wealthy limited partnerships, is able to get money here as well.
  When I think of all the things we can--well, I digress. Again, the 
developer who gets this is determined by a

[[Page H1941]]

State agency. It is naive to think anything other than these developers 
are politically well-connected people.
  I do not know why, if we think it is the Federal Government's 
business to provide housing to people--which, of course, it is not--we 
would set up a system in which a private developer gets such a large 
chunk of money that the Federal Government is laying out.

                              {time}  1400

  Right now, as a matter of fact, the money is so great, even though 
new projects are spread out or the tax credits are spread over nine 
years, we are spending over $13 billion a year on this method of so-
called creating workforce housing or low-income housing.
  I will also point out that there are some people who would say this 
is necessary because nobody builds any housing anymore. Well, I am from 
Wisconsin, which is not what you normally consider a booming State. It 
is not like Florida. It is not like Texas. As I go around my district, 
everywhere I look there is new housing. There is single family housing 
and new apartments.
  For a variety of reasons, it is grotesquely expensive. We can deal 
with that by working our way towards more of a balanced budget, so 
interest rates are not so high. As the cost of energy goes down, it 
will lower the cost of anything and lower inflation on other goods as 
well. Anybody who remotely believes in the free market believes there 
will always be a market for new housing.
  There are apparently some places around the country where it is hard 
to build new housing, but that, in general, is because there are State 
governments and local governments which are hostile to business in 
general and hostile to developers in particular. People then don't want 
to do more building in this city or that city.
  In any event, as we work our way through the process, I hope the 
negotiators who are meeting in unknown rooms in this building, if they 
need to balance the budget, think about getting rid of the low-income 
housing tax credits and use the $13 billion a year that is primarily 
benefiting some well-connected and wealthy property developers and use 
it somewhere else. I think that is one of the things that we have to 
look at carefully.
  There was another topic I wanted to take up. I have been talking to 
some people who wonder why we have demonstrations in this country 
hostile to Israel, and even more bizarre, demonstrations favorable to 
Hamas and people who live in the Gaza Strip.
  It has been my belief--and I give this conversation privately to 
people, but I should make my case more public--that when people take 
bizarre positions, in other words, when they see Hamas invade Israel 
and kill over a million people with pride, not even embarrassingly and 
hiding it, but taking pictures of it, and their sympathy goes towards 
the people killing the thousand people, including young children, one 
has to wonder if something psychological is going on here.
  My belief is that anybody who is hostile to Israel in this conflict 
and is demonstrating in favor of Hamas has some sort of psychological 
problem. I will refer to this psychological problem as--we will name it 
after the young girl who was obsessed with global warming in Sweden.
  We will call it Thunberg syndrome. You all remember the little girl 
whose father said she was depressed and unhappy, but then she read 
about global warming and decided to obsess over it. She, all of a 
sudden, became happy because she could run around and had a purpose in 
life. Prior to that time, like a lot of wealthy people in the West, she 
really didn't have a good purpose, but it gave her a purpose. Like I 
said, she could run around, she would give speeches and feel she was 
saving the world.
  Of course, eventually, Greta Thunberg also wound up siding with the 
Palestinians, who had killed the Israelis, against the Israelis. I 
think it was for the same reason. She wanted to adopt a cause to feel 
she had a purpose in life.
  When one particularly has kind of a spoiled life, the people you want 
to help are people who are kind of opposed to the successful society we 
have here in the West, be it America, be it Europe.
  There is a certain hierarchy of needs that everybody has, right? We 
need food, we want safety. Once you take care of food and safety, you 
also need a purpose in life. There are sadly many, many people in 
America and Western Europe who don't have that purpose.
  I think this is particularly a problem for people who may not have a 
family to devote time to. They may not have children to devote time to. 
They may be financially well enough off.
  You very rarely see Thunberg syndrome on somebody who has three jobs. 
They are busy with their life. They are going from job to job and 
working all the time. You would rarely see Thunberg syndrome in, say, 
somebody with four kids, because four kids is very time-consuming. You 
have to earn money to take care of the kids, spend time with the kids. 
That is a purpose in life.
  I think, as we have more and more young, single people not having 
children in the West, you have more and more people looking for a 
purpose in life. For whatever psychological reason, they want that 
purpose to be hostile to the West in general.
  If they are in the United States, they frequently want that purpose 
to be anti-American. Of course, when Greta Thunberg wants to get 
involved in foreign affairs, it is not surprising that she picks global 
warming because then her enemy is the West and the factories and the 
cars.
  It is interesting that when people have Thunberg syndrome, they do 
not get mad at things done by what used to be called Third World 
countries, right? People who have Thunberg syndrome, well, they may 
object to a new, clean power plant in the United States. They never 
worry about the plethora of new coal plants going up in Red China or 
going up in India, and that is because those aren't Western countries. 
There, miraculously, they don't care.
  When it comes to the attacks on the Jews in Israel put out there by 
the Palestinians, they will purport to care about the Palestinians who 
lose their life when the Israeli Army inevitably had to go back into 
Gaza, but they don't care about Muslims who are dying in other wars. 
They don't care that many, many Muslims are dying in Syria.
  That is because those people are being killed by other Syrians, and 
it doesn't fit the narrative of, I want to hate the West. They don't 
care about a civil war going on in Ethiopia, they don't care about the 
conflicts currently going on in Iraq.

  They don't care at all about all the suffering of the Muslims in 
Western China, the Uyghurs. Why doesn't the left or why don't these 
demonstrators care about all the Uyghurs being killed or persecuted in 
the western part of China? It doesn't solve their psychological need to 
hate the West.
  I think more research should be done on Thunberg syndrome to see how 
we can prevent it from growing because inevitably the United States and 
the West will fall if a significant number of their populous winds up 
for some psychological reason adopting causes that are hostile to the 
West.
  That is what is going on right now, be it in global warming, be it in 
the Palestinian situation, be it the bizarre opinions that President 
Biden had about the United States being such a racist community.
  I mean, here you have a country, the wealthiest people are Indian 
Americans, the second wealthiest are Filipino Americans. People come 
here from Cuba and do fantastically well.
  Another cause adopted by these people with Thunberg syndrome, despite 
the fact that anybody could open their eyes and see the wild success of 
people from all around the world coming to the United States, these 
people have decided to adopt an ideology in which they have to fight 
this imaginary racism in the United States with people like Joe Biden 
or other opportunistic politicians egging them on.
  I strongly encourage this body, or if not this body, some 
universities to look at people who have these bizarre opinions that 
will inevitably destroy this country. They hate wealth production, they 
certainly hate energy production even when it is new energy that is 
fantastically clean, so much cleaner than it was when I was a child.
  They hate it when Western countries wind up in armed conflict with 
horrific opponents like Hamas, but for psychological reasons they side 
with Hamas.

[[Page H1942]]

  Those are some of the issues that I think we ought to be paying 
attention to over the weekend. I think I have used up enough of my 
time.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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