Majority Leader Schumer Floor Remarks On Republicans’ Release Of A New GOP Tax Scam
Washington, D.C.–Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor on the newly introduced Republican tax bill. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:
With the predictability of a metronome, Republicans are back doing what they do best: pushing tax giveaways that benefit the huge corporations, while telling working families to take a hike.
Last Friday, House Republicans released a sweeping array of new tax giveaways that double down on some of the worst parts of the 2017 Trump tax law.
This latest GOP tax scam feels like a bad rerun: once again the biggest winners are billion-dollar companies, Big Oil polluters, and very high-income households. Once again, the biggest losers in this Republican tax scam are vulnerable families and anyone who worries about protecting our planet for future generations.
The bulk of these new business tax giveaways will flow directly to the largest corporations in the country. Half of the $10 billion in interest deduction benefits, for example, will flow to companies with revenues over a billion dollars annually.
Republicans’ latest proposal will also gut billions in clean energy investments essential for lowering our carbon emissions and creating millions of good-paying green jobs. In just ten months, the Inflation Reduction Act has helped create over 142,000 new good-paying jobs, and more are coming in the next few years, but Republicans want to gut those investments.
Big Oil polluters, meanwhile, under the Republican plan, would get a $10 billion tax break. It’s almost too perfect that Republicans unrolled this Big Oil tax giveaway right as millions of Americans endured the hazards of toxic air pollution exacerbated by climate change.
And of course, this tax giveaway by the Republicans will mean next to nothing for too many Americans who aren’t among the top percentage of earners.
And for all of the consternation we’ve heard from Republicans about lowering the deficit, this latest tax package will do what Republican tax packages have regularly done in the past: blow another hole in our deficit. Independent forecasters say Republicans’ proposals would increase the deficit by a trillion dollars.
These are the same Republicans who nearly defaulted us because they were worried about the deficit and about debt. And now they’re making a proposal that increases debt by a trillion dollars. What hypocrisy.
Republicans love to sing from the hymnal of fiscal responsibility and deficit reduction when it suits them, but whenever they push tax breaks for the ultra-rich and the big corporations that increase the deficit, suddenly they switch their tune. Republicans claim that these tax cuts pay for themselves, as if by magic. But the GOP has been claiming for decades that their tax cuts pay for themselves, only to have the actual economic facts repute them over and over and over again.
Americans know by now that cutting taxes for the rich while ignoring working families is a failed approach, the trickle-down approach that Republicans seem to love, but Republicans seem remarkably impervious to learning from experience.
After all, the last time a Republican tax scam was passed under Trump, we know what happened: the winners turned out to be wealthy shareholders and corporations, not families. And then big corporations used their windfall from the GOP tax scam to spend trillions of dollars on corporate stock buybacks.
This latest Republican tax scam is more of the same: giveaways to large corporations, giveaways to big oil, and another massive hole in the deficit.
The good news: the American people saw through the GOP tax plan when Republicans passed it in 2017, when they were running in 2018 they hardly mentioned it because America was aware it was not for them, but for the wealthiest people. The American people will once again see through this tax scam just as clearly today.
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