[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 14]
[Senate]
[Pages 20315-20316]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          REPUBLICAN TAX BILL

  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, last night the Senate passed an awful, 
partisan rewrite of the Tax Code. I said a good deal about the bill 
over the course of the debate and added my concluding thoughts into the 
Record before the final vote, but let me just reiterate one point. The 
Republican tax bill will cement the Republican Party as the party of 
the wealthy and the party of the big corporations against the middle 
class and the working people of this country.
  Corporations get permanent tax breaks. The individual tax breaks 
expire. By 2027, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, 83 
percent of the middle class--that is almost 145 million American 
families--will either get a tax increase or a tax cut of less than 
$100.
  Meanwhile, according to the Tax Policy Center, the top 1 percent of 
earners in our country will reap 83 percent of the benefits of the tax 
plan.
  Let's go over that again. The middle class, 83 percent, either get a 
tax increase or a tax break of less than $100. The top 1 percent, the 
wealthiest, get 83 percent of the benefits. Middle-class America is 
asking something: Why does the top get far more than I do? Why do I get 
a tax increase when so many of them get a huge decrease? To boot, 
millions of middle-class Americans will now go without health insurance 
and millions more will see their premiums rise. At the same time, 
multinational corporations and wealthy hedge fund managers enjoy a 
massive tax break. To repeat, the legacy of this bill will be to cement 
the Republican Party as the party of the rich and powerful against the 
middle class.
  We Democrats have been saying this for years, but our Republican 
colleagues with this tax bill have done us a major favor. Even their 
Republican supporters are realizing where the Senate Republicans and 
House Republicans are--on the side of the most wealthy, on the side of 
the big powerful corporations, not on the side of the middle class.
  Whenever we have had a Republican President and Republican Congress, 
we get the same thing--a program of tax cuts for the rich, higher 
deficit and debt, and then threats to Social Security and Medicare. 
That is what happened under President Bush, and we

[[Page 20316]]

are seeing the exact same playbook today. There is nothing about this 
bill that is suited to the needs of the American worker or the American 
economy. My Republican friends would propose it in a booming economy or 
recession, whether we have surpluses or deficits. No matter what, it 
seems to our Republican friends that tax cuts for the rich and big 
corporations are the answer to our problems. The benefits will trickle 
down like magic to the rest of us.
  Trickle down is the entire philosophy of this tax bill--trickle down. 
When they say they are helping the middle class, when they say they are 
creating jobs, it is because the wealthy get money and, in their 
belief, will create jobs. It hasn't happened. It hasn't happened. 
Corporate America has more money than ever before. The stock market is 
higher than ever before, and job creation isn't.
  That is where this bill is at. There is nothing about this bill that 
suits the needs of the American worker, as I said. Trickle down has 
been widely discredited as an economic theory. It has been discredited 
by recent history, and it will be discredited again.
  Our Republican colleagues are clinging. They are saying: This bill is 
so unpopular, but don't worry, once the economy takes off, once people 
see hundreds of dollars in their pockets, they will change their mind.
  The economy is not going to take off. The wealthy will do better. 
There will be a lot of dividends. There will be a lot of stock 
buybacks, not too much job creation. AT&T is a big American company and 
a fine American company. Their tax rate over the last 10 years was a 
mere 8 percent, and they cut 80,000 jobs. That one statistic belies all 
this trickle-down bunk that our Republican colleagues still cling to 
even though it is outdated and disproved, and the American people will 
have their chance in 2018 to reject this philosophy and move our 
country in a dramatically different direction--back toward government 
that works to lift up the middle class rather than one that gives more 
to those who already have so much. From now until then, we Democrats 
will focus like a laser on making things better for working Americans 
and the middle class. The contrast, particularly this tax bill, which 
so benefits the wealthy and powerful, could not be more clear.

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