Date: 2012-08-02
Speaker: VAN HOLLEN (democrat)
Chamber: H

Mr. Speaker. I thank Mr. LEVIN for all of his good work here. Mr. Speaker. lets start with a point of agreement. We should simplify the Tax Code. We should reform the Tax Code. Its an overly complicated mess. and it needs to be streamlined and reformed. We could start with some really simple things like getting rid of the special tax breaks and giveaways to Big Oil companies. but our Republican colleagues on this House floor have voted time and again against that. What we should not do is what we are hearing from a lot of our colleagues today. which is use the language of tax reform as a Trojan horse to provide another huge windfall to the wealthiest Americans at the expense of the rest of America. and yet that is exactly the direction that this bill takes us in. The main principle enshrined in this bill is the old Republican principle of trickledown economics. the failed idea that we need to give more tax cuts to the folks at the very. very top. and somehow those benefits are going to trickledown to everybody else. The problem. Mr. Speaker. is the American people have seen this movie before. Thats no longer a theoretical idea. We ran a realworld experiment on that idea. It was called the 8 years of the Bush administration. We had tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the very wealthy in 2001 and 2003. At the end of those 8 years. what was the state of the economy? Net loss of private sector jobs. less than zero. The one number that did go up. it wasnt jobs. it was the deficit. That number went through the roof. and the rest of the country is left to pick up the tab. And thats what the American people are beginning to focus on. Mr. Speaker: that these tax cuts for the wealthy are not a free lunch for the rest of the country but that they come at the expense of everyone and everything else. Because the math is pretty simple. If you refuse to ask the wealthiest Americans to pay one penny more for the purpose of deficit reduction. for everybody else it gets harder. Seniors on Medicare have to pay more even though their median income is under $23.000. It means deep cuts to investments in our economy and our kids education. in science and research. and in infrastructure. Now with todays bill. our Republican colleagues. as Mr. LEVIN said. are doubling down on an idea that we know does not work. [- 1440 Theyre providing another round of tax cuts to millionaires and directly asking middle class taxpayers to pick up the tab. Lets do the math. Lets do the maththats what we try and do in the Budget Committee. When you drop the top tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent. first of all. you provide huge breaks to the folks at the very top. but that loses $4 trillion over 10 years. in other words. the deficit grows by $4 trillion. Now. our Republican colleagues say. Oh. no. we dont want to do that. We really care about the deficit. Were going to make up those $4 trillion through tax reform. Of course they wont tell us one thing about what they would do in tax reform. But the good news is the Tax Policy Center. an independent group here in Washington. has told us what the Romney plan would do. a plan very similar to this plan. What they make clear is that when you start removing all those deductions and all the benefits. for example. for health plans or for mortgage interest deduction. what you end up doing is providing a big tax increase to middleincome taxpayers. financing tax breaks for the folks at the top by increasing the burden on-