[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 11]
[House]
[Pages 15883-15886]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                  RESPONSE TO THE REPUBLICAN TAX PLAN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Ms. Tenney). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 3, 2017, the

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gentleman from California (Mr. Khanna) is recognized for 60 minutes as 
the designee of the minority leader.


                             General Leave

  Mr. KHANNA. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members 
have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and to 
include extraneous material on the subject of my Special Order.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the 
gentleman from California?
  There was no objection.
  Mr. KHANNA. Madam Speaker, before my colleagues in the Congressional 
Progressive Caucus and I begin our discussion about the response to the 
Republican tax plan, I wish to take a moment to express our sympathy 
for the people of northern California who are facing devastating and 
destructive wildfires.
  I represent a Silicon Valley district where hundreds of our neighbors 
to our north and south remain missing. Tens of thousands are suffering 
at this very moment from the destruction of more than 150,000 acres and 
counting, as well as an increasing number of family homes and 
businesses. It seems that our Nation has been struck by one national 
tragedy after another. Our prayers are with the California residents, 
and I know that everyone in this body is committed to their relief.
  I also, on a personal note, want to recognize Liz Bartolomeo, who has 
been my communications director and worked very hard with the 
Congressional Progressive Caucus. She is going on to work for Democracy 
Alliance. I wish her very well in her next steps, and I thank her for 
her service to our office and to the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
  The purpose of this hour is to discuss the Republican economic plan, 
and I have distinguished colleagues of mine who will be joining us. I 
just want to, at the outset, articulate the basic difference in 
philosophy.
  The President and the Republicans believe that to grow our economy, 
to create jobs, the way to achieve that is by giving tax cuts to 
corporations, giving tax cuts to the investors in stock, giving tax 
cuts to the executives who already get large compensation packages; and 
that if we do that, if we cut corporate tax rates at a time where 
corporations are making record profits, if we give more tax breaks to 
those who are investing in our stock market, if we give more tax breaks 
to those who get dividend checks, then somehow, magically, people 
making 30 grand or 40 grand will see their wages go up, that somehow we 
are going to get many more jobs in places across this country.
  And the question is why would we believe that? Why would we think the 
trickle-down economics, which has failed time and again, is going to 
help? Does someone really believe, in my district, who is a 
construction worker or a nurse or a teacher, that lowering the 
corporate tax rate is going to do anything to put more money in their 
pocket, that it is going to do anything for a nurse who is struggling 
to get an apartment and pay rent to be able to afford that rent, or 
that it is going to do anything for people in Youngstown, Ohio, to be 
able to send their kids to school or get vocational training or get a 
college education?
  The difference is very simple. Our belief is, if you want to raise 
wages--if you want to give more pay to average Americans, just go raise 
wages. Provide the tax credit to those making under $75,000. For one-
third of the cost of the Republican tax plan, which is geared towards 
corporations and the investor class, we could give every single 
American, who is making under $75,000, a 20 percent pay raise. I 
believe that is bottom-up economics, and that is actually what is going 
to grow the economy.
  It is not a matter of just the economics. It is a matter of common 
sense. Think about it. Who do you think is going to create more jobs in 
the United States? Someone worth 5 million bucks who gets tax money 
back and is going to invest in stocks? Or is that money going to create 
jobs in the United States? Or could that money be spent anywhere in the 
world, sheltered anywhere in the world? As opposed to if you give that 
money to someone making $50,000, $60,000, they are going to spend that 
money in their local community; they are going to buy more groceries; 
they are going to buy more things for their house; they are going to 
get more education; that money is going to go into the local economy, 
and it is going to actually create jobs. That is what is going to grow 
the economy. That is our only shot of getting 3 percent economic growth 
if we invest in actual workers, the people doing the work.
  By the way, they haven't gotten a raise for the past 40 years. Since 
1979, wages in this country have stagnated, and we heard the same 
thing: just cut the taxes on the top and the wages will go up. But the 
wages haven't gone up.
  Guess who promised to help, finally, those forgotten Americans? Guess 
who promised to help them? President Donald Trump. That was his whole 
campaign: The stock market is doing great, but you are being left 
behind. The coasts are doing great, but you have been left behind. And 
I am going to come to the White House and I am not going to give the 
keys to the Wall Street bankers. I am going to actually worry about 
raising wages.
  His biggest disappointment as President is that he went back on the 
promise that he made to ordinary Americans, and we know that he can do 
it if he wants to. All he has to do is tell his Wall Street advisers: 
No, no more tax breaks for Wall Street. I want the tax credits going to 
Main Street, and I can do that at a third of the cost of the plan that 
you are selling to me and the American people.
  This is the debate in this country, supply-side economics that 
believes the greatness of America is with the investor class and the 
CEO class and the elite class, or bottom-up economics that our party 
and the Progressive Caucus is putting forward that believes the 
greatness in America is with the people who actually do the work, who 
work 40, 50 hours, who go on the assembly lines and work in factories, 
who work overnight as nurses taking care of folks, who are doing the 
education as teachers.
  Who do we believe is really contributing to the economy? Who do we 
believe is really driving America's economic growth? The Democrats 
believe it is ordinary workers across this country, that that is the 
greatness that drives the American economy, and the Republican tax plan 
believes it is the investor class.
  It is a very clear difference, and our commitment is not just one 
towards fairness but also one about investing in people who are going 
to create jobs and create innovation in this country.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Raskin), my 
distinguished colleague, who is not just a constitutional law professor 
and a leading thinker on issues of juris prudence but has also been a 
leader with the Congressional Progressive Caucus in helping us craft an 
economic policy that is really for ordinary Americans and not for just 
the very wealthy.
  Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I thank Congressman Khanna for his 
leadership in putting this together.
  Madam Speaker, I want to invoke a great Republican member of this 
body who went on to become President of the United States, Abraham 
Lincoln, who spoke of ``government of the people, by the people, for 
the people.''
  The tax plan that has been presented to us by the GOP in the 21st 
century is government of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent, and for the 1 
percent. It was written by a billionaire Cabinet of a billionaire 
President for the richest 1 percent of taxpayers in the country.
  The same policy experts whose healthcare plan was to throw 30 million 
Americans off their health insurance and reduce women's access to 
complete reproductive services now have a tax plan to sell America. But 
read the fine print first. In fact, you don't even need to read the 
fine print. You just have to look at the headlines.
  Under this plan, 80 percent of the total tax cut will end up going to 
the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans who earn more than $900,000 a 
year. Let me repeat that: 80 percent of the money that will be saved in 
this tax cut will

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go to Americans earning $900,000 a year. That is astounding.
  In the meantime, tens of millions of middle class families making 
between $50,000 and $150,000 a year will pay higher taxes than they 
were paying before. And check this out. The very wealthiest sliver of 
Americans, those who make at least $5 million a year, and, on average, 
$16 million a year, would get an average tax cut of over $1 million. 
That is a $1 million tax cut for millionaires.
  The slogan for this plan should be: The Trump tax cut, because the 
rich just aren't rich enough and everybody else is doing just fine.
  Madam Speaker, if you know anyone who makes $16 million a year, 
please ask them to write me and tell me what they are going to do with 
their extra $1 million. Maybe they will send it to a Swiss bank account 
or to the Bahamas; maybe they will run for Congress; maybe they will 
invest it in Australia where a lot of the superrich are apparently now 
buying property in order to have a getaway plan from the escalating 
crises of climate change in North America.

                              {time}  1630

  So the billionaires make out like bandits.
  What about the rest of us? How much will this plan cost us?
  Well, the bipartisan Committee for Responsible Federal Budget's 
initial analysis shows that the GOP plan would add $2.2 trillion to 
deficits over the next decade. This is the result of cutting taxes for 
the wealthy by a staggering $5.8 trillion and then adding new tax 
revenue of only $3.6 trillion, so we are going to be adding $2.2 
trillion in deficits.
  What about the deficit hawks?
  They are an endangered species, as Congresswoman Pelosi says now. 
Actually, they have mutated into a completely new species. We don't 
have deficit hawks anymore. We have deficit ostriches. They are willing 
to squawk and strut and kick dust like hawks when there is a Democrat 
in the White House, but when a budget-busting, deficit-ballooning, 
debt-deepening Republican occupies the White House and proposes 
inflating the deficit and the debt to unprecedented levels with the 
most breathtaking fiscal recklessness anyone has ever seen, they become 
deficit chicken hawks and transmogrify into deficit doves, and then 
finally turn into fast scurrying deficit ostriches and run away from 
everything they have been saying for years about the necessity to 
reduce the deficit, they simply bury their heads deep in the sand and 
let the debt and the deficits climb up all around them.
  Speaker Paul Ryan, when he was campaigning with Mitt Romney, said the 
national debt is threatening jobs today, it is threatening our 
prosperity today. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, while calling 
for changes to Social Security and Medicare in 2013, told supporters 
only one thing can save this country, and that is to get a handle on 
the deficit and debt issue. Well, that was then, this is now, as they 
say. Now the GOP leaders are twisting arms to vote for a tax plan that 
will blow up the deficit and drive our children and our grandchildren's 
generations deeply into debt.
  What happened to all of the fine speeches we heard about how we owe 
it to our kids not to engage in deficit spending? What happened to all 
the magnificent oratory about how the national debt is a moral crisis?
  Can any of the Members of Congress, who built their careers on the 
principle of deficit reduction and ending the debt, explain why it is 
responsible today to add more than $2 trillion to our national deficit?
  We await an answer, Madam Speaker.
  Why are they doing this to America? Why are they proposing it? Who 
wins with this assault on the common good?
  Well, let's see. Donald Trump and his family certainly do. The only 
President who ever bragged that he would be able to make money by 
running for President is showing what a good job he is actually doing 
at achieving his objective.
  A New York Times analysis shows that Trump and his family could save 
more than $1 billion under this plan. That is right, the President and 
his family could save more than $1 billion under the tax proposal that 
has been sent to us in Congress. Of course, it is impossible to know 
precisely how much would be saved because President Trump, despite his 
campaign promise to release his tax returns, if elected, still refuses 
to release his tax returns, which constitutes not only a radical breach 
of faith with the people, but a radical break from past practices of 
other Presidents for the last half century, who have opened up their 
tax records for the rest of us to see.
  But let's see what we can do based on information we know. This 
proposal would eliminate the estate tax, which would generate massive 
tax savings for President Trump and his family. If his assets, 
reportedly valued at $2.86 billion, were transferred after his death 
under today's rules, his estate would be taxed at around the 40 percent 
level, still leaving his heirs with more than $1 billion.
  Repealing the Federal estate tax, which they propose to do, would 
save his family $1.1 billion, at least, in estate tax costs.
  Why would we do this?
  The Founders of our country were passionately opposed to hereditary 
wealth, just like they were passionately opposed to hereditary 
government. They thought it was dangerous to have the intergenerational 
transmission of wealth and great fortunes like that. They said that it 
would cause idleness and irresponsibility in the heirs to great wealth, 
and they would be able to convert their wealth not just into bigger 
estates, bigger land purchases, bigger houses, but actually in the 
public offices. They had a very profound democratic critique of that 
kind of intergenerational wealth inequality, because, at a certain 
point, you have bought enough houses, you have bought enough jets, and 
now you want a governorship, you want the Presidency, you want a Senate 
seat. In a democracy, we need to have much reduced levels of inequality 
that are being proposed under this idea of abolishing the estate tax.
  They also are proposing to abolish the alternative minimum tax, which 
is the only reason that President Trump paid any taxes in the one year 
over the last two decades that we know he paid taxes in, in 2005. 
Remember, somebody mysteriously leaked information about that year to 
the Rachel Maddow show, and it turned out that the President paid taxes 
because of the alternative minimum tax which says that you can't push a 
good joke too far, you can only use all of your deductions and 
allowances, and so on, up to a certain point. If you are at a certain 
place, in terms of your wealth, you have got to pay something.
  Well, The New York Times now estimates that the GOP tax plan to 
repeal the alternative minimum tax would save the President at least 
$31.3 million. He would not have had to pay in that one year that we 
know where he paid taxes, and we don't know about the rest because he 
has refused to release it.
  And let's just look at one more provision, which would change the 
treatment of pass-through business income. According to The New York 
Times, President Trump could save as much as $6.2 million on business 
income and $9.8 million on income from real estate and other kinds of 
partnerships under changes to the taxation of pass-through income.
  Now, look, Madam Speaker, nobody likes paying taxes, nobody loves it, 
especially when we know that there are billions of dollars being 
wasted, for example, at the Department of Defense in boondoggles, 
fraud, and abuse taking place, according to a hearing that we had just 
this session in the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. So 
people don't love the experience.
  But just as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, that he didn't mind paying 
his taxes because he understood that they were the price of 
civilization. It is what we all put in, in order to have roads and 
highways and airports and schools and universities. That is what it 
means to be a citizen. People don't mind, as long as there is a basic 
sense in the

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public that everybody is participating and we are not getting ripped 
off.
  And I am terrified that if they succeed in barreling this plan 
through Congress, that it is going to spread more cynicism and more 
disenchantment and more negativity about the tax system and about the 
government, and we can't afford it. Because of the escalating crises of 
climate change, which are all around us, our people are suffering. We 
have millions of people in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands tonight 
who have no access to power, no access to electricity or clean water. 
We have people in Florida and Texas and Mississippi and Louisiana who 
are still recovering from the last hurricanes. We have Californians, 
many of whom have died already, who are struggling against the forest 
fires out of control.
  Now is a point when we need a tax system that brings our people 
together, that says that wealthier people can pay more because they are 
wealthy, but everybody is going to pay their share, and we are all 
going to participate together. That is the tax system we should be 
looking for, a tax system where we get rid of all of the special 
interest inflected deductions and allowances and loopholes and rip-offs 
that are built into the system, where it is simplified.
  In the European countries, you can pay your taxes in about 10 or 15 
minutes, and you don't have to go to the multibillion-dollar tax 
preparation industry, or go find a law firm to do it. We can simplify 
our taxes if we decide to get rid of all of the special interest 
loopholes. And wealthy people can pay more because they get more out of 
being part of this society, and they use more of the infrastructure of 
the country, instead of paying less than everybody else, instead of 
trying to rip off the system by paying nothing.
  Madam Speaker, now is the time when we need the wisest and most 
principled leadership to get us through the accumulating crises of the 
time. This tax plan is totally irresponsible. I hope that it will be 
withdrawn and we can work together across the aisle on a bipartisan 
plan that will represent the best values of government of the people, 
by the people, for the people.
  Madam Speaker, I thank my distinguished colleague from California for 
allowing me this opportunity.
  Mr. KHANNA. Madam Speaker, I thank Representative Raskin for his 
thoughtful points and comments on the President's tax policy.
  I have a few other points before we conclude. The President has said 
that we can't afford foreign aid given our deficits, but the President 
thinks that the average American doesn't know math. Mr. President, the 
average American can do math.
  The deficit is $20 trillion. Our foreign aid every year is no more 
than $30 billion to $40 billion. Your proposal would increase the 
deficit between $200 billion to $500 billion. So this red herring that 
somehow foreign aid is responsible for the deficit is just false.
  What is responsible for the deficit is the massive tax cuts that you 
are proposing that would add, according to conservative economists, 
between $2 trillion to $5 trillion more to our deficit, and it is all 
to finance the corporate interests, all to finance the investor class.
  We have, on the Democratic side, on the progressive side, proposed an 
alternative, and that alternative is based on the view that we need to 
encourage job creation and raise wages for mainstream America, that we 
need to invest in the people actually doing the work. It is based on 
the thinking of people who used to be Republicans and people like Jack 
Kemp, who said: Let us invest in areas that don't have jobs and 
economic growth and have heavy investment for training on the 
technologies of the future. That used to be the thinking on the other 
side of the aisle. We used to have differences, but there used to be 
creativity and a sense of what is actually going to invest in people to 
grow the economy.
  And now, under this President, it is just a mantra of tax cuts for 
the very wealthy, tax cuts for the people who need it least, tax cuts 
for corporations, no sense of actually investing in new industries, 
investing in the training and skills of the 21st century, investing in 
bringing capital to places that need them. I hope and believe that as 
people in good faith will look at the two contrasting proposals, one 
that says tax cuts for corporations, the other that says let's invest 
in American workers, let's invest in American communities, that they 
will conclude that the way to actually raise wages, the way to actually 
create jobs, the way to actually grow our economy is by bottom-up 
economics by investing in the American workers and in those Americans 
who are part of the middle class.
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Members are reminded to refrain from 
engaging in personalities toward the President.

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