[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 14]
[Senate]
[Pages 20100-20102]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          REPUBLICAN TAX BILL

  Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I come to the floor tonight, once again, 
to talk about this tax bill being rushed through the House and the 
Senate. This is the first time in 31 years that a tax bill of this 
magnitude has been considered. I don't refer to this as tax reform 
because it is barely reforming anything.
  It seems a shame that we didn't follow in the footsteps of what then-
President Reagan chose to do when he had the opportunity to reform the 
Tax Code. The bill he worked on, which was every bit as consequential 
as the one in front of us, commanded the vast majority of votes in this 
Chamber--Democrats and Republicans voting together--after years of 
process, years of committee hearings, years of hearings even out in the 
country, listening to business owners, economists, and citizens talk 
about what they thought our Tax Code needed to be competitive and to be 
fair to the American people.
  I would say through the Chair to the pages that I was in college when 
the last bill was passed. Now, 31 years later, we are on the verge of 
passing a bill in the Senate without one Democratic vote--not a single 
one--and without a single hearing in the Senate Finance Committee, on 
which I serve--not a single hearing about the text of this bill, not a 
single hearing to tell the American people that, on the individual side 
of this bill, we are borrowing $34 billion from our kids to give a tax 
cut to the 572,000 taxpayers who are fortunate enough to make more than 
$1 million a year. That is 572,000 taxpayers who are fortunate enough 
to make $1 million a year. We think it is so essential that each one of 
them get a $59,000 tax cut that we are willing to borrow that money 
from our children to do it. We can't think of a better use than that.
  A better use is not to give a tax cut to the middle class, because we 
know what those numbers look like in this bill. There are not a half 
million people who make $50,000 and less in this economy. There are 90 
million people. Those people are not getting $34 billion. Those people 
are getting $13 billion. If we do the math, it adds up to about $160, 
on average, per taxpayer making $50,000 or less, in the first year. 
That is the best year. So 2019 is the best year. That $160 per taxpayer 
works out to about $7.50 a paycheck.
  So we are justifying $34 billion going to 572,000 families because we 
say at the essence of this is a tax cut for the middle class that is 
worth $7.50. I think it is disgraceful to call this a middle-class tax 
cut. What is as disgraceful is the fact that we are blowing a $1.4 
trillion hole in our deficit.
  There are people on the other side--and I grant them this--who say we 
will grow out of this and that the tax cut will pay for itself. This is 
exactly what President Bush said in 2001, when he cut taxes. It is 
exactly what he said in 2003, when he cut taxes. Remember that when 
George Bush became President of this country, he inherited a projected 
surplus of $5.6 trillion. Then, he cut taxes and said it would pay for 
itself, in 2001. He cut taxes and said it would pay for itself, in 
2003. We invaded Afghanistan. We invaded Iraq. Not only did he not ask 
the American people to pay for those wars, but the 2003 tax cut 
actually came after the invasion of Iraq.
  Today we have massive readiness problems with our military. Today we 
confront the potential for conflict on the Korean Peninsula. Today we 
confront uncertainties in the Middle East and behavior by Russia that 
we need to worry about. Are we going to go in debt to give the 
wealthiest people in America a tax cut they are not asking for?
  I am more sympathetic on the corporate side. I believe our corporate 
rate is too high. If we had worked in a bipartisan way, I think we 
could have gotten to a deal that 75 or 80 people would have voted for. 
That would have been beneficial for two reasons. It would have 
represented more widely the American people's view of what we ought to 
do here. I have heard the majority leader on the floor talking about 
partisan efforts like this, and how they are doomed to fail because 
most of the American people will not support it. We can see that in the 
polling numbers on this bill. But we could have cut a deal that said: 
Let's bring our corporate rate down to 25 percent. By the way, let's 
get rid of some of those loopholes. As for all of the stuff we said 
over the years about lowering the rate and broadening the base, let's 
actually do that.
  That is not what this bill does. This bill cuts the corporate rate to 
20 percent and leaves all of the loopholes in place. There is no 
broadening of the base. So if the effective rate today is actually in 
the low twenties, even though the published rate is 35 percent, the 
effective rate is going to be far below 20 percent if we don't actually 
reform the Tax Code.
  I think there would have been bipartisan agreement about doing 
something with the earned income tax credit or the child tax credit, as 
my colleague from Florida has tried to do to a degree. I think there 
would have been bipartisan support for the idea that we ought to do 
something to repatriate the money stuck overseas and invest it here in 
the United States in infrastructure. But there was no effort to make a 
bipartisan effort here--none.
  There have certainly been cases where Democrats have been guilty of 
that. This is a profound case of the Republicans being guilty of that, 
and the result is that they have a lousy bill that speaks to the 
extreme wing of their party rather than to the middle of America, 
because only in that way could you end up with a piece of legislation 
that the President is describing as a middle-class tax cut that is not 
one. Nothing about the math in this tax bill suggests it is.
  By the way, the $34 billion I talked about does not include the 
estate tax. When we include the increase of the estates not subject to 
the estate tax in this bill, it adds, on average, another $10,000. Now 
we are talking about borrowing $69,000. So we are now borrowing an 
additional $10,000 from the sons and daughters of police officers, 
firefighters, and teachers in order to finance an estate tax cut that 
we will not pay for.
  Pay for it. Don't borrow the money.
  I got here 9 years ago at the depth of the worst recession since the 
Great Depression. Our economy had locked up. Because of the two tax 
cuts under President Bush, because of the two wars we didn't have the 
decency to pay for, and because President Bush passed so-called 
Medicare Part D--which is a prescription drug program for seniors that 
he didn't pay for--and then with the supply-side economics, they drove 
our economy into the worst ditch since the Great Depression.
  When President Obama showed up, the surplus was not a surplus. It was 
a $1.5 trillion deficit. I was here when we tried to work in a 
bipartisan way to figure out how to respond to a terrifying 
circumstance--not for the Senate but for our country.
  A woman who came to a townhall told me that her plan was to die 
sooner

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because overnight she had lost half of her net worth, and she didn't 
know how to make it through because the stock market had cratered and 
her pension was cut in half.
  We had more than a 10-percent unemployment rate in the United States 
of America, and we couldn't get a single person to lift their finger on 
the other side of the aisle because they said that the deficit was too 
big. They said that President Obama was pursuing what the pollsters 
told them was ``job-killing government spending.'' Those were the 
words. It wasn't his $1.5 trillion deficit; that is what he inherited. 
He left with about a $550 billion deficit. It was cut by two-thirds.
  Today, we stand here talking about this absolutely irresponsible tax 
bill. It is already at $666 billion. We have a government where we are 
collecting 18 percent of the GDP in revenue. It is actually about 17.9 
percent before this tax cut goes through. We are spending more than 21 
percent, and our answer is: Let's cut some more taxes, so we will be 
spending 17 and change. That is a big delta--17 to 21. That is a 
conversation we should be having together, not in pieces.
  All of these people who say: Don't worry about it; it will pay for 
itself--remember what they said in 2001 and 2003. They said the same 
thing. They are going to show up here after this Christmas season has 
passed, and they are going to say: That is why we need to cut Medicaid 
and Medicare.
  There is no doubt we have to have a conversation about the 
sustainability of these programs, and there is no doubt we have to have 
a discussion about how we are going to get out of the fiscal issues we 
confront. I have no doubt that the moment we face the next crisis, 
whether it is a national security crisis or an economic crisis, we are 
going to wish we hadn't passed this tax bill. We are going to wish that 
when this economy was at full employment, when interest rates are what 
they are, that we had thought about how to come together in a 
bipartisan way and actually do something responsible for once.
  There is a mayor in Indiana who sent an op-ed piece to the Washington 
Post last week. He said: Let me break this down for you in terms of my 
local community. The equivalent of what the Republican tax bill is for 
my community would be that we would go out and borrow $400 million, 
which is a staggering sum, not billions and billions of dollars but, on 
the basis of the size of their government, $400 million--four or five 
times what our indebtedness is today.
  Then, what I would do is say: We didn't borrow this money to build 
infrastructure. We didn't borrow this money to make sure we end poverty 
in my community or to make sure the water is clean. We gave it to the 
people in the biggest houses, the richest neighborhoods in our 
community, hoping that somehow the benefits would trickle down to 
everybody else.
  He said that they would be run out on the rail--and they should be.
  There are some politicians who say that it will pay for itself. There 
is no economist who has said that this is not going to create a 
deficit. There is probably a consensus, around $1.4 trillion--I have 
seen some math that says $1 trillion, and others that say $2.5 
trillion. Let's take the $1.4 trillion and consider, as an order of 
magnitude, if we didn't care about our deficit--which apparently we 
don't anymore--what else we could spend the money on besides giving 
this tax cut to the very wealthiest Americans in our country.
  In the 9 years I have been here, we have gone from no opioid crisis 
to an opioid crisis that is killing 50,000 Americans. There are 
communities all over our States, especially in rural parts of the 
States, where we have no answer. We have provided no additional 
treatment, even though we have an emergency today that we didn't have 
before. That is not the America I grew up in. That is not the America 
our parents and grandparents set up for us. Look at what you can do to 
create treatment in every United States county for 10 years. That is 
this $60 billion. That is this little orange part of a $1.4 trillion 
hole in our deficit. That is one thing you could do.
  Another thing you could do would be to provide universal pre-K for 
low-income children for a decade. That might be worth borrowing from 
the next generation for because they would actually be getting a 
benefit. They are not getting any benefit from this $59,000 that we are 
giving to people who make more than $1 million a year.
  You could double Federal funding for research and development on 
clean energy for over a decade. You could maintain our technological 
advantage over China in emerging industries for a decade. That is a 
huge concern. That would be $50 billion, just this little slice--a 
foregone priority if we pass this bill, just like the response to 
opioids. You could fund a 20-man mission to Mars. Because of our 
fecklessness, we can't even put an astronaut into space without putting 
them on a Russian rocket. That has nothing to do with our lacking the 
engineering talent. That has nothing to do with our lacking imagination 
or, for some of us, a sense of mission. It has to do with the 
fecklessness of this Congress and the inability of it to walk and chew 
gum at the same time.
  We could repair all of America's aging dams, which our parents and 
grandparents were thoughtful enough to build for us but which we feel 
we don't need to maintain for the next generation of Americans. We 
would rather give tax cuts to the wealthiest people in America.
  You could end the backlog of infrastructure repairs in America's 
airports--end it. Five years of funding, that is only $100 billion. I 
say ``only.'' That is a huge number, but not compared to $1.4 trillion.
  You could end the U.S. Air Force pilot shortage. Why do we have a 
shortage of Air Force pilots? Because this place, for 9 years, has run 
itself on continuing resolutions. The military can't plan, so we have 
airplanes that are being scavenged for parts and cannot fly. If they 
can't fly, the pilots can't get the training hours. If they can't get 
the training hours, they can't move ahead in their careers, and they 
can't be ready when the battle comes. You could easily pay for that 
here.
  You could fund the first 5 years of the Navy's plan to build a 355-
ship fleet. Everyone around here walks around saying: We don't have any 
money; we are broke. It is matter of choices and priorities. I cannot 
think of a set of priorities less out of whack with what Republicans 
think of in Colorado, much less our Democrats and Independents.
  Here is one we really do care about in Colorado and all across the 
country. You could pay for all deferred maintenance at our national 
parks and other land management agencies. That is right here, this tiny 
purple square--$19 billion. If you look at the bottom right, that 
includes over a dozen priorities for rural communities that have been 
kicked around by this Congress and our CRs year after year.
  Here are a few things that fit in there. Extend high-speed internet 
to every rural community in America. That might be a good use of money 
or a good reason to borrow money--to extend high-speed internet to 
people who don't have it. This is a world where telling a kid in a 
rural school that they don't have access to high-speed internet is no 
different than telling them: Sorry, you are not getting textbooks, but 
these other kids do.
  We could reimburse rural areas with significant public lands for lost 
tax revenue, the PILT payment.
  I promise my colleague from Pennsylvania I am coming to the end. I 
know he doesn't believe it.
  These PILT payments are a pain point for my rural counties. Every 
year we go through the same nonsense at the end of the year. Every 
single year they say: Is it going to be funded in the CR? They are 
using it to pay for something else. Yet it would cost a tiny fraction 
of just the rural priorities part of it. That is $111 billion for all 
the rural priorities. Eliminating the national backlog for the USDA 
rural water program--can you imagine what that would mean for rural 
America and economic development in rural America? They wouldn't have 
to wait for someone in New York to trickle down to them because they 
would have an investment in their community. It would

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create jobs. It would allow them to do economic development and keep 
their children in their communities and their schools open and their 
banks open. That is not a priority for the people writing and voting 
for this bill.
  President Trump cut Essential Air Service in his budget--zeroed it 
out. We could fund Essential Air Service for 10 years, providing a 
critical economic lifeline to small towns across America and in my 
State.
  We could fund the U.S. Forest Service fires suppression for a decade, 
so they wouldn't have to keep cannibalizing other parts of the budget. 
This year, for the first year, they spent more than half of their 
budget fighting fires because we don't have the sense to budget them so 
that they can do fire mitigation. Talk about penny wise and pound 
foolish.
  In Colorado, we could clean up the Gold King Mine spill, fund the 
Arkansas Valley Conduit to provide drinking water to some of the 
poorest areas in Southeastern Colorado, which we have been promised 
since John F. Kennedy was President of the United States.
  We could do everything I just mentioned, all of these investments--
infrastructure, research, public health, housing, national security, 
and rural communities--for the cost of this tax plan. This is yet 
another illustration of how profoundly Washington's priorities have 
decoupled from the priorities of the American people. Beyond that, this 
bill confirms every other suspicion about how Washington operates.
  President Trump ran for office saying that he would drain the swamp. 
This tax plan is a creature of the swamp. It was jammed through with 
last-minute changes, scribbled by hand in the dark of the night, with 2 
a.m. votes--shameful, 2 a.m. votes on legislation that no one had a 
chance to fully understand. There was input from lobbyists on K Street 
but not a single hearing where the American people could express their 
view.
  Given the process, it should surprise no one that the bill 
substituted the priorities of the American people with a litany of 
carve-outs and loopholes that powerful special interests have gotten 
into this bill.
  I am going to skip this part because I want to yield to my friend 
from Pennsylvania, but let me just finish by saying that today, 
incredibly in America, the top 10 percent of earners take home more 
than half of America's income. We have not seen that since 1928, the 
year before the Great Depression. I know the President knows these 
folks as well as I do. Everybody on this chart is working hard, whether 
it is the top 10 percent or the bottom 90 percent, but this is not the 
way our economy ought to work. For almost all of our history, this is 
not the way it did work.
  I was a businessperson before I came to Congress, before I was a 
school superintendent. I have nothing against anyone who has done well, 
but it is preposterous to suggest that the real problem in our economy, 
when we have a record stock market and record income inequality, is 
that wealthy individuals and businesses don't have enough.
  My final chart is this chart, which shows median household income. 
Since 1980 until now, the cost of housing, cost of higher education, 
and cost of healthcare--we have done nothing to address or help this. 
We have turned our back on this.
  I think we could have written a bill, as I said at the outset, that 
had a real middle-class tax cut in it, but we chose not to do it.
  Last year, I met a mom in Rifle, CO, at an early childhood center. In 
the course of our conversation, she said to me: ``I've got a job so I 
can have health insurance, and every single dollar I earn goes to pay 
for this early childhood center, so I can work.''
  That is the story of too many people in my State. My State has one of 
the most dynamic economies in the United States of America, and still 
too many people whom I represent are middle-class families whose 
incomes haven't really gone up, not over 10 years but since 1980, for 
whom the cost of housing, cost of healthcare, cost of higher education, 
and the cost of early childhood education have conspired to create for 
them impossible choices that their parents and grandparents never had 
to make.
  Tax reform should have been the opportunity to have addressed that. 
It should have been a chance to remind that mom in Rifle that our 
government or at least someone in our government understands the 
struggles she faces and has the capacity and the will to help to do 
something about it. This bill squanders that opportunity. This tax bill 
squanders it. Worse than that, it reminds Americans of the vast space 
between their lives and the priorities in Washington. It reminds them 
of the yawning gap between their voices and the voices of powerful 
special interests.
  We should reject this bill. It fails on the merits. We should reject 
it because the bill makes a mockery of how our government should work. 
There is still time to set aside this legislation and do bipartisan tax 
reform. I know the other side may believe that it has to forge ahead 
for a political win, but I would ask, at what cost?
  As with so many actions around here, we have put it on the next 
generation of Americans. We have kicked all the hard choices to them 
ever since I have been here. We have told them that we are going to 
continue to live in the house of our democratic Republic but that they 
are going to pay the mortgage. We are so fortunate that our parents and 
grandparents didn't behave the way we have--they had the decency to 
look ahead and think of those to come. We have enjoyed years of peace 
and prosperity in this incredible country. I think, tonight and this 
week, it is worth all of our asking, will our children be able to say 
the same of us?
  I thank my friend from Pennsylvania for his indulgence.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Pennsylvania.
  Mr. CASEY. Mr. President, I ask to speak in morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is recognized.
  Mr. CASEY. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Colorado. I heard 
most of his remarks, some of them on television before my moving to 
come over here to speak. I am grateful for his commitment to the 
arguments that he has made on tax reform and his commitment not only to 
the people of his State but to the people of our country. I will be 
speaking about tax reform later this week.

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