Date: 2011-03-03
Speaker: DANIEL E. LUNGREN (republican)
Chamber: H
State: Cali

fornia. I thank the gentleman for yielding the time. My name happens to appear on this bill as the original author of this bill. H.R. 4. I remember when I introduced this last April. Members on that side of the aisle were told by their leadership dont dare go on this bill to repeal this necessary provision of the Affordable Care Act. By the way. if it is truly an affordable care act. why has Secretary Sebelius granted over 700 waivers to companies and unions? Because its not affordable. Why has virtually every member of my constituency who has health insurance had an increase in their premiums as a direct result of the "Affordable Care Act"? Just a passing question because Im asked that all the time by my constituents. Why did I introduce this? Because provision 9006 of the bill has nothing to do with affordable care and has everything to do with the capacity of our friends on the other side to find ingenious ways of impacting business because I guess business is considered bad. Well. Ive got an answer for you today to the question of who creates jobs. This is who creates jobs: small business. And this particular section of your socalled Affordable Care Act kills business. kills small business. What does it do? It is based on the assumption that everybody cheats. Why? Because the 1099 form is usually utilized for the purpose of making sure you carry out your obligation to pay payroll tax. But what did we do in the socalled Affordable Care Act? We increased the reach of 1099s so that when you have no obligation to pay anything. you have to report on the person on the other side of the business transaction. so that they. supposedly. are cheating. and therefore we have whats known as the universal snitch act. The idea that its going to gain $19 billion. in my judgment. is created out of whole cloth. You have to assume that almost everybody cheats to get your $19 billion. And heres the game here in Washington. D.C.: We create a new obligation on business thats never existed before. We then secretly put it in a billvirtually no one on this floor knew it was in the billand then we score it for gaining $19 billion to the Treasury. And if I dare come to this floor to repeal it. Im obligated to come up with $19 billion in new taxes or some sort of a spending cut? The American people ought to understand the game thats played. In secret. we pass something like this. which has an unbelievably pernicious effect on business. Now. how does it have such an effect? It requires every single person involved in business or trade to go into accounting to make sure that every time they reach that threshold of $600 or more with anybody they purchase something from they have to file a 1099. Heres what someone in my district just emailed me. a small business person. a woman: "I have 15 employees. As owner. I am the HR department. the bookkeeping department. the administration department. and still serve my customers while surviving this economic climate. It will be a tremendous burden. both in time and dollars. to send out 1099s to all my vendorsappliance manufacturers. parts distributors. other suppliers. utility companies." It is a jobkiller provision. We brought this H.R. 4 to the floor to get rid of a jobkiller provision. The other reason why it is a doubleedged sword on small business is. if you want to minimize the number of 1099s that you file. you will not go to your local hardware store. You will not go to your local restaurant. You will go to the big box store. You will go to the chain restaurant. And we are killing small business on this floor.