[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 4]
[Senate]
[Pages 4993-4994]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                TAX DAY

  Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, it has been said that April is the cruelest 
month. I think that pretty much captures how Americans feel as tax day 
approaches each year. This year, Americans will spend 114 days working 
to pay their Federal, State, and local taxes. In other words, Americans 
may have submitted their Federal tax returns or be getting ready to 
submit them tonight, but they are still not done working off their 
taxes. In fact, Americans won't start earning a dollar for themselves 
until April 25, almost one-third of the way through the year.
  Americans spend 6.1 billion hours every year trying to comply with 
the Tax Code. That is an average of 19 hours for every man, woman, and 
child in the United States or an average of 76 hours for a family of 
four. Almost half of small businesses spend more than $5,000 each year 
on tax compliance; that is $5,000 on top of their tax bill.
  Paying taxes is never going to be on the top of Americans' list of 
favorite activities, but it doesn't have to be the torturous process it 
has become. The Tax Code takes too much time to comply with, and it 
takes too much money from hard-working Americans.
  Comprehensive tax reform is long overdue. Unfortunately, instead of 
tax reform, under the Obama administration Americans have just gotten 
more taxes. The President's health care law created or raised taxes to 
the tune of more than $1 trillion over the first decade. Several of 
those taxes have hit families making less than $250,000 a year, despite 
the President's campaign pledge not to raise taxes on families making 
less than $250,000.
  Let's take the ObamaCare medical device tax. Thanks to this tax, 
families are now facing higher prices on lifesaving medical equipment 
such as pacemakers and insulin pumps. ObamaCare taxes are also driving 
up prices for families on essential drugs such as EpiPens and asthma 
medications. Other ObamaCare taxes are costing American families in 
other ways.
  The ObamaCare employer mandate tax is discouraging employers from 
expanding and hiring, which means fewer jobs and opportunities for 
American workers. Then there is the individual mandate tax that last 
year began hitting American families without government-approved 
insurance. For 2015, the individual mandate tax penalty is $325 per 
person or 2 percent of household income, whichever is greater. In

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2016, that tax penalty will rise to $695 per person or 2\1/2\ percent 
of household income, whichever is greater.
  But that is not all ObamaCare is bringing to tax season. This year, a 
full half of Americans receiving ObamaCare health insurance subsidies 
discovered they have to pay back some or all of their subsidies because 
they didn't estimate their income correctly. Ultimately, just 4 percent 
of households receiving subsidies had the correct subsidy advanced to 
their insurance companies. Unfortunately, the confusion and mistakes 
are par for the course for ObamaCare. The administration apparently 
finds the law so confusing that it sent out incorrect ObamaCare forms 
to more than 800,000 people. Yet the administration wants us to believe 
ObamaCare is somehow working.
  We need to repeal this broken law and its trillion dollars' worth of 
taxes, and we need to reform our bloated Tax Code. We need to cut rates 
for families so that Americans can spend more of the year working for 
themselves and less of the year working for the Federal Government. We 
need to cut rates for businesses, both large and small. The U.S. 
currently has the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world. 
That puts American businesses at a huge disadvantage compared to their 
foreign competitors, and American workers suffer the consequences--
lower wages and fewer opportunities. Reforming both corporate and 
individual tax rates would go a long way toward making American 
businesses more competitive and opening new opportunities and higher 
paying jobs for American workers.
  Of course, any tax reform measure should include reforms to the IRS. 
From mishandled customer service to the Agency's most serious 
offenses--the First Amendment violations involving the deliberate 
targeting of groups for extra scrutiny based on their political 
beliefs--this Agency, the IRS, is long overdue for reform.
  The IRS Commissioner himself, John Koskinen, was quoted in Monday's 
Washington Post as saying: ``We certainly can't afford to have taxpayer 
service be any worse than it is, although it is hard to imagine it 
being much worse than it is.'' That is a quote from the IRS 
Commissioner himself. When even the IRS Commissioner admits the 
Agency's taxpayer services can't get much worse, that is a signal the 
Agency is ripe for reform.

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