[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 9]
[Senate]
[Pages 11944-11947]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




         MIDDLE CLASS TAX CUT ACT--MOTION TO PROCEED--Continued

  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. MORAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. MORAN. Mr. President, I wish to speak about the tax issues the 
Senate is facing this week. There is clearly a tremendous need for 
comprehensive tax reform. Americans worked from

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January 1 to April 17 this year, 107 days, to earn enough money to pay 
their share of Federal, State, and local taxes. Americans also spent 
nearly 8 billion hours preparing their tax returns this spring. This 
amounts to 1 million people working full time for an entire year. There 
is no reason that paying taxes should be so confusing and so 
complicated, so time-consuming.
  The burden this process places on individuals and small businesses 
must be relieved. According to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, the 
average American taxpayer will spend more on taxes in 2012 then they 
spend on food, clothing, and housing combined.
  It is time for tax freedom. We need to replace our deeply flawed tax 
system with a commonsense system that is simpler and more growth 
oriented. The Tax Code matters when it comes to growing the economy. It 
is for these reasons that I am a sponsor of S. 13 and a long time 
supporter of the Fair Tax, which I see as a step in the direction of 
liberty and prosperity. The Fair Tax eliminates payroll, estate, and 
many other taxes, to be replaced with a national sales tax levied on 
purchased goods, placing all Americans on equal footing. The Fair Tax 
allows our businesses to thrive while generating tax revenues to be 
similar to our current 3-million-word-long Tax Code.
  The process of tax reform has major consequences for every citizen of 
our country. But it is a process that must be started because the 
consequences of inaction are too costly. The truth remains that 
Americans want and need some sort of tax-filing relief. The need for 
commonsense reform becomes more obvious each and every tax season.
  Over the course of the last several years, American taxpayers have 
become much more attentive to what is and is not happening in the 
Nation's Capital, and they have made their choices clearly heard. They 
have a message Congress should be willing to listen to, and that 
message is: Simplify the Tax Code.
  In doing so, we will create an opportunity for economic growth and 
new prosperity while increasing personal freedom and liberty. By 
reforming this broken process, the Tax Code we have today, Americans 
will once again be more in charge of their lives and their money.
  This coming January, as we know, our Nation faces a fiscal cliff. On 
top of the tax increases included in President Obama's health care law, 
if the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire, a tax increase of $494 
billion will strike the economy. For Kansans, that is an average tax 
increase of $3,000 per tax return, money they should be using to put 
food on their family's table, save for their children's education, and 
prepare for their own retirement. It is estimated that 70 percent of 
the looming tax increases will fall directly on low- and middle-income 
families.
  This week, Congress will consider a tax proposal from the majority 
leader that increases taxes, unfortunately, the exact opposite of what 
our economy needs. S. 3412 that we are debating this week raises the 
death tax on family farms, small businesses and ranches and estates to 
a level over a decade old, when they were brought down in a bipartisan 
basis.
  This proposal would increase the death tax from its current rate of 
35 percent to 55 percent. According to the nonpartisan Joint Committee 
on Taxation, the number of estates hit by this tax will rise from 3,600 
to nearly 47,000.
  Nothing hinders the transfer of a family farm to the next generation 
more than the estate tax. It is an unfair, unjust burden on our 
economy, and it punishes Kansans who want to continue their family 
business. I have long sought a permanent repeal of the estate tax and 
have pursued opportunities to increase the size of the estate tax 
exemption and lower the rates. Now we have a proposal to increase the 
burden of this tax. That will only create less certainty for farmers 
and small business owners as they plan for their future.
  Under this massive tax increase, 20 times more family farming estates 
will be hit by the death tax and 9 times more small businesses. This 
tax increase comes on top of significant small business tax increases 
already in the legislation. According to Ernst & Young, these tax 
increases on the top two marginal rates would shrink the economy by 1.3 
percent and reduce by over 700,000--reduce by over 700,000--jobs from 
the American workforce.
  This tax increase legislation will only add more uncertainty to our 
Nation's convoluted, ever-changing tax system. Common sense tells us it 
does not have to be Republicans and Democrats, common sense tells us a 
simplified Tax Code will help boost the economy.
  The revenues we need to balance our books are not increases in taxes; 
in fact, the United States has the highest corporate tax rate in the 
world. Revenues we need to balance our books will come from a strong 
and growing economy, where more Americans are working and therefore 
paying taxes.
  Government must get out of the way and reduce the drag on the private 
sector so entrepreneurs and small business owners can put Americans 
back to work. Americans know that when our economy is strong, when our 
tax laws are fair, simple, and certain, they can provide for their 
families. We will have the opportunity to see once again our children 
and grandchildren pursuing the American dream.
  I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. LAUTENBERG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                              Gun Violence

  Mr. LAUTENBERG. Mr. President, it is a terrible time in our country. 
The entire country is in mourning for the 12 innocent people who were 
gunned down in Aurora, CO, last week. Our thoughts and our prayers are 
with dozens more still recovering from their wounds. We are mourning 
with people we never knew, with unfamiliar names, but we have seen 
pictures of grief-stricken parents, friends, neighbors, and our hearts 
break with them. We wish we could reach across the country and offer 
them some comfort while we mourn.
  We know our mourning alone will not be enough to prevent a future 
tragedy unless we do something. We in Congress have an obligation to 
turn grief into action, as we have often done when faced with tragedy. 
So I come to the floor today to ask a question: When will we wake up? 
How many of our sons and daughters have to die before we go to work? It 
is time to sound the alarm on gun violence in our country. It is time 
for us to gather to talk about commonsense solutions. And I am talking 
about all of us--all 100. It should not matter which side of the aisle 
we are on. All of us who serve here have someone we love, someone we 
know, someone with whom we are in contact, whether it is our child, our 
sister, our brother, our father, or our mother. The lives of our loved 
ones depend on us and we should not let them down.
  Right now, our Nation's lax gun laws make it far too easy for 
murderers to commit incomprehensible acts of violence and terror. Very 
early last Friday morning, we witnessed a massacre, and it has become 
something we have seen far too often. A tragedy with even less deaths, 
with less wounded, with less hurt is a tragedy of enormous proportion 
when something like this happens in this great country of ours. There 
is so much to live for, so much to enjoy, but here innocent people 
died.
  This guy arrived at a movie theater in Aurora, CO, and he had an 
assault rifle with a 100-round magazine, a shotgun, and two handguns. 
He unleashed a barrage of bullets murdering 12 innocent people and 
injuring 58 more in a matter of minutes. In the theater at the time 
there was a total population of 200 people, and 70 of them were wounded 
or killed in a matter of minutes. Even though the police responded 
rapidly--within 90 seconds--with his high-capacity magazine, the gunman 
had more than enough time to carry out his reign of terror.
  Among those who lost their lives were parents, mothers, fathers, 
servicemen, a veteran, a recent high school

[[Page 11946]]

graduate, a college student, and a 6-year-old-girl named Veronica Moser 
Sullivan. She was the youngest to be murdered in Colorado that night 
and someone whose tragic death reminds us all too well of the time 9-
year-old Christina Taylor Green was murdered in Tucson last year 
because she wanted to know more about her government. She was part of a 
group who greeted Representative Giffords.
  The victims of these horrible tragedies deserve more than words of 
solidarity and mourning. They deserve our attention, our action. What 
we do to prevent these tragedies in the future will be the real test of 
character of this body. The best way to prove we are concerned is to 
take the action necessary to protect young lives because on that score 
now we lose.
  I have been in the Senate a long time, and I have seen too many 
Americans murdered by guns, too many lives cut short because of the 
easy availability of guns, and too many times Congress has sat back, 
cowered before the gun lobby and done nothing to prevent these 
tragedies from happening in the future. We can't wait any longer, Mr. 
President, without the public at large challenging our effectiveness, 
wanting to know what it is we are doing to protect the next group of 
children and parents and loved ones.
  The murderers in Colorado and Arizona both had something that enabled 
them to bring about the mayhem they did. They had a mega-magazine 
capable of shooting dozens of rounds without having to reload. They 
bought them legally. Here we see a picture of what this man had--a 
semiautomatic rifle and a 100-round drum magazine.
  These magazines were originally designed for law enforcement and 
military people. These magazines were banned from 1994 to 2004, a 
period of 10 years, but under pressure from the gun lobby, Congress let 
that ban expire in 2004. It wasn't an accident. It didn't happen 
without complicity.
  Just think about it. The Colorado shooter carried a 100-round 
magazine, and if he hadn't had that magazine, maybe the shooting toll 
would have been substantially lower. Maybe more lives would have been 
saved. Maybe more loved ones--husbands, wives, and children--would be 
alive today. Maybe there would be fewer people suffering from bullet 
wounds.
  In the Arizona shooting, the shooter was only subdued when he paused 
to change his 30-round magazine, and if he had to stop sooner, 
obviously precious lives could have been saved.
  These magazines are the tools of mass murderers. No matter what the 
gun lobby would have you believe, nobody needs a mega-magazine to go 
duck hunting. These high-capacity magazines put all of our families in 
danger, and they endanger our law enforcement officers as well. We send 
them into the line of fire to defend us against mass murderers such as 
the Colorado shooter, who legally bought 6,000 bullets and a gun 
magazine that holds 100 bullets over the Internet. The safety of our 
families is too important to let this continue. There are too many 
bullets, too many deaths, and too many funerals. But not enough people 
are saying: Stop it. Do your job. Protect my family. Protect my kids. 
Protect my parents.
  Here are the facts. Guns have murdered more Americans here at home in 
recent years than have died on the battlefields of Iraq and 
Afghanistan. More have been murdered on the grounds of the United 
States than have died in far-off battlefields. It is shocking. More 
than 6,500 American soldiers have died in the service of our country in 
support of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. During the same period, 
guns here were used to murder about 100,000 people.
  Americans deserve a Congress that makes the safety of our families a 
priority. That is why I urge my colleagues today to help our people. 
Bring back the ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines such as the 
one used in Colorado on Friday and the one used in Arizona last year. 
That was the law from 1994 to 2004. This shouldn't be a partisan issue. 
Even former Vice President Dick Cheney has suggested that it may be 
appropriate to reinstate this ban. It is time to work together, all of 
us, to ban high-capacity magazines. Don't do it for me. Do it for your 
family. Do it for your constituents. Stand and say: I don't want your 
family hurt. I don't want your children to fall prey to a gunman.
  It is time to begin a national conversation once more about taking 
commonsense measures to prevent gun violence in America. And to those 
who are fearful about the power of the NRA, understand that we bested 
them before and we will do it again. We beat them in 1996 when an 
effort that I began to ban the sale of guns to domestic abusers passed, 
we have stopped over 200,000 of those people from getting gun permits 
since that time, and a lot of lives could have been saved in there. We 
stood up to them again in 1999 when the Senate came together after 
Columbine and passed legislation to close the gun show loophole. 
Unfortunately, after passing in the Senate, the House refused to do 
anything about it. If we show resolve and if we stand with courage, I 
know we can do the right thing once more. There are no more excuses for 
inaction.
  I say to my colleagues, look at your children. Look at the pictures 
that may be on your mantelpiece. Think about the happy days with your 
kids, think about the enjoyment you share together, and think about 
what we want to do to be able to continue those lives we enjoy so much. 
The stakes are just too high. We have to intervene while the memory, 
unfortunately, is still fresh.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a 
quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Texas.
  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I am still trying to wrap my head around 
President Obama's recent remarks that small business job creators 
somehow owe their success to the Federal Government. His comment wasn't 
just wrong, it was actually kind of embarrassing. It showed that the 
President does not understand the enormous challenges and financial 
risks entrepreneurs and job creators deal with every day. It also 
affirmed that the President is going to continue pushing the same 
misguided big-government economic policies that have helped keep our 
unemployment rate well above 8 percent for some 41 consecutive months.
  I wish to highlight a few of the success stories from my home State 
of Texas that epitomize what the American dream is all about and to 
reassure my listeners that the American dream is still alive and well 
and thriving in the great State of Texas. But first I would like to 
make a brief point about tax policy because as mundane and boring as 
tax policy may seem to a lot of people, it actually has a very real 
impact on the people I am talking about.
  There is now an emerging bipartisan consensus that tax reform should 
involve lowering rates and broadening the base so that our tax system 
becomes simpler, fairer, and more conducive to strong economic growth. 
Don't just take my word for it. Look at the President's own bipartisan 
fiscal commission, the Simpson-Bowles Commission, which reached that 
same conclusion.
  Unfortunately, the President's own fiscal commission's report is 
inconsistent with the President's current demand that we have to raise 
taxes. That would mean a large tax increase for many people who are the 
people we are depending upon to create those jobs. The reason is that 
many small businesses pay their business income on individual tax 
returns. They are not major Forbes 500, multinational corporations; 
they are the mom-and-pop operations that are sole proprietorships, they 
are partnerships, and they are even sometimes subchapter S 
corporations. That is just a reference to the Tax Code that means you 
don't pay corporate taxes, you pay flowthrough business income on your 
individual tax

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return. So many people who are small businesses who may reach that 
threshold of $250,000 or above are businesspeople paying on an 
individual tax return. If this is an effort to soak the rich, well, the 
middle class and small businesses are part of the collateral damage.
  I would like to remind the President that Americans will spend about 
$350 billion this year alone just to comply with the Tax Code. That 
means hiring accountants and that means hiring lawyers just to try to 
figure out what they owe to the Federal Government. Small business 
owners face a particularly heavy burden because they can't afford the 
army of lawyers and accountants to help them figure out what their tax 
obligations are. Yet these are the folks we are depending upon to get 
America back to work and to get our economy growing again. But we 
effectively have a tax system that punishes them for their success. We 
can and we should do better.
  When it comes to dealing with the IRS, small businesses don't enjoy 
the same resources that large multinational corporations do. According 
to the World Bank, it is now more difficult to pay business taxes in 
the United States than in many Western European countries. When heavily 
taxed, heavily bureaucratic countries such as France make it easier to 
comply with their tax code than America does, we know we have a 
problem.
  If the President doesn't believe me, perhaps he should spend some 
time chatting with some of my constituents, people such as Steve Mayo, 
the owner of Mayo Furniture in Texarkana, TX. Steve's company is a 
family business that was established about a half century ago. It now 
employs 130 full-time workers and sells furniture in 25 different 
States. When I visited with Steve and his employees last year, they 
were worried about how in the world they were going to comply with the 
financial burdens of the new health care law, along with other taxes 
and regulations. They told me it would affect their business and their 
ability to create jobs and stay competitive. These are the same 
concerns I have heard about from countless constituents and small 
business owners all across my State.
  We are one of the lucky States. About half the jobs in America have 
been created in my State in the last 5 years or so. We are fortunate 
because when it comes to small businesses we are depending upon to 
create jobs, we asked this very simple question: How can we make it 
easier for them to create jobs? How can we make it easier for them to 
start a business? Unfortunately, the message emanating from Washington 
seems to be--in so many words--how can we make it harder? How can we 
increase the unpredictability of their investment?
  After talking to Steve Mayo, maybe President Obama would like to talk 
to Diane LaBleu. Diane is a breast cancer survivor in Austin, TX. Diane 
was creative enough to invent a clothing accessory to help women 
recovering from a mastectomy. The accessory is known as a Pink Pocket, 
and it is now being used by women around the world from Austin to 
Australia.
  The story of Pink Pockets demonstrates the power of a great idea. 
Diane identified a problem facing breast cancer survivors. She came up 
with a brilliant solution, something nobody else had thought of before. 
The remarkable success of her invention is a testament to her 
creativity and her hard work.
  The government was not responsible for the success of Pink Pockets or 
Mayo Furniture. Far from it. Many times all these small businesses want 
is for government to get out of their way, off their back, and out of 
their pocket so they can do what they do best.
  The government was also not responsible for the success of STS 
Coatings, a construction company based in the San Antonio area. The 
founder of STS Coatings, Cayce Kovacs, reports that she and her husband 
cashed in their savings to launch their business, which now has annual 
sales totaling more than $3 million. As Ms. Kovacs recently said:

       We were the ones sweating bullets over processing orders 
     and paying our bills, making payroll--not the government. The 
     government did nothing to help my business.

  You know who else can say that? Another extraordinary Texan named 
Frank Scantlin, who founded Sunbelt Machine Works in Stafford, TX, near 
Houston, some 34 years ago. Frank tells a story that as a child he was 
so poor he sometimes couldn't even afford to buy shoes, and he had to 
quit school in the ninth grade in order to support his family. This is 
a quintessential American success story. Frank persevered and went on 
to create a business that now has almost 60,000 square feet of 
workspace and employs 90 people.
  All these stories epitomize the American dream that has enticed 
immigrants from around the world to take a risk, leave everything they 
had behind, and come and make America their home. We were the one place 
in the world where they knew if they were willing to work hard and 
save, that hard work could be rewarded by success.
  In the meantime, those of us who depend on those small businesses to 
create those jobs and prosperity could benefit as well. The owners of 
Sunbelt, STS Coatings, Pink Pockets, and Mayo Furniture understand 
their success was not inevitable, and it sure was not guaranteed by the 
Federal Government. They had to take the hard risks, they had to work 
overtime, and they had to overcome challenges that many times the 
government put in their way. In the end, as in so many great American 
success stories, their hard work and ingenuity paid off. They can, not 
government, declare with confidence that ``I built this.''
  My office has received more than 250 of these stories since President 
Obama gave his speech in Roanoke. They are the type of stories that 
have made our country the beacon of prosperity and entrepreneurial 
energy for so many years. As one Texas business owner put it: ``Rugged 
individualism is alive and well in the United States.'' I hope we 
remember that, and I hope the President of the United States remembers 
that as well.
  I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Franken). The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. KOHL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (The remarks of Mr. Kohl pertaining to the introduction of S. 3427 
are printed in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills 
and Joint Resolutions.'')
  Mr. KOHL. Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence 
of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. KOHL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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