Date: 2014-04-04
Speaker: VAN HOLLEN (democrat)
Chamber: H

Mr. Chairman. I rise in opposition to this legislation. I was interested to hear my colleague from Georgia end his comments by saying we should have more information rather than less. As I look at this legislation. on page 3. they say they want more information on the dynamic effects of different policies but specifically exclude. for example. the Committee on Appropriations. investments that we might make in our kids education. or investments that we might make in other areas to power our economyresearch and development. for example. It is particularly interesting because the Republican budget that was just released and voted on the other night in the Budget Committee. according to CBO. in the next couple of years will create a drag on the economy. will actually hurt jobs in the next couple of years. Why is that? That is. in part. due to the fact that they make deep cuts in parts of the budget for investment in research and development and other areas that help power our economy. So it is kind of interesting. Mr. Chairman. that they specifically excluded the CBO from doing an analysis on that. Now. a couple of my colleagues will have amendments to the bill. and if our Republican colleagues dont somehow mean to ignore those important investments. hopefully they will join us in supporting those amendments. If you were the CEO of a company and you were projecting your growth and you were projecting your income. you would want to look at how much you are going to make from certain investments you make in your workforce and those kinds of investments. According to this bill. you dont want that. What this bill is after is simply to do an analysis primarily on a tax policy. It is motivated primarily by this idea that. if you provide big tax breaks to people at the very high end of the income ladder. it will trickle down and lift up all the boats. everybody else. trickledown theory. We saw how well that worked in the 2000s. We had big tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. A few years later. for a variety of reasons. the economy tanked. You heard the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve who predicted that those tax cuts would generate growth come back and say. you know. he was wrong. So. I am all for additional information. On that point. I want to say to my colleagues that. on the most recent tax reform proposal that came out of the Ways and Means Committee. you actually do have a number of scores from the Joint Tax Committee. from our nonpartisan scores. They have eight. They have eight scenarios. One projects .1 percent growth. one projects 1.6 percent growth. That is. of course. the one that Chairman CAMP ran with in all the information he put out. But what he failed to mention is they came up with eight scenarios. The reason they came up with eight scenarios is because they couldnt boil it down to say this will be the dynamic impact of that particular legislation because there are too many unknown variables. That is why they had eight. Now you want them to somehow come up with one when they have repeatedly informed this Congress that it depends so much on the different assumptions that you make. that you cant make one prediction on that kind of legislation. I have trouble with this legislation for a variety of reasons. one being. when it comes to tax policy. we have been informed by the experts that it is hard to pinpoint one number and boil it down to a growth figure. Then. as I mentioned. my colleagues have left out the benefits of investing in things like infrastructure. things like our kids education. things like scientific research. so they are certainly not asking for more information when it comes to those important investments. I reserve the balance of my time.