Schumer Remarks from Conference Call on Tax Reform
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer today delivered remarks on a call with reporters regarding tax reform and the Trump Administration’s plan to do away with the estate tax. Below are his remarks:
Thanks everyone for getting on, and particular thanks to my colleagues, two of my great colleagues, Senator Wyden, Ranking Member of Finance, and Senator Sanders, ranking member of Budget. You’ll hear from them in a minute.
Now later today, Secretary Mnuchin and Gary Cohn are slated to discuss their tax plan behind closed doors with Senate Republicans.
Now, we Democrats want to actually achieve tax reform in this country, but we can do so in a way that doesn’t sacrifice our principles or sell out working and middle class families to accomplish it.
That means we’re willing to work with Republicans and the White House, but only if they adhere to three basic principles we outlined this summer, which I think most Americans would support.
First, we believe that tax reform shouldn’t increase the tax burden on the middle class, and there should not be a tax cut for the wealthiest one percent of Americans—period.
That means not one penny of tax cuts should go to that top one percent.
Wages for millions of Americans in the middle class, and those struggling to get to the middle class, have been stagnant for far too long, while the benefits of a growing economy have gone almost exclusively to the top.
It’s middle class Americans, not those in the 1%, who deserve tax relief. So we Democrats will not go along with a tax plan that includes a tax cut for those who need it least.
Second, we believe that tax reform should go through Regular Order so both Democrats and Republicans have an opportunity to craft a bipartisan package that’s good for the American people.
And third, tax reform should not add to the deficit.
Tax reform should be deficit neutral, as determined by a non-partisan, independent scorekeeper. Republicans should not use fuzzy math or blatantly partisan estimates to provide the mirage of deficit neutrality. It should actually be deficit neutral.
Now for decades, the hard right wing of the Republican Party, which has a load of clout in that party, has tried to implement a concerted strategy: cut taxes to starve the government of revenues, then come back and say “Oh deficits are so big that we have to cut Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid.”
We Democrats are not going to be a part of that cynical strategy and if Donald Trump is going to stick to his promise to not cut Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security, he shouldn’t be either
Now unfortunately, the drips and drabs we’ve heard of the Republican plan so far reveal a tax plan designed to benefit the ultra-rich while leaving the middle class in this country out to dry.
Case in point: Last week in North Dakota, President Trump said the estate tax was a “tremendous burden for the family farmer” and it was crushing the American Dream.
Well, thanks to brand new data we are releasing today from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, we know that’s false.
According to the new CBPP data, the Republican plan to repeal the estate tax would provide a tax cut for about five thousand of the richest families in America – that’s approximately 0.2 percent of all the estate owners in this country.
How does it work? Well, the estate tax only kicks in when couples with estates of nearly $11 million transfer their wealth to their family. For families that have less than $11 million, they don’t pay a penny.
Repealing this tax is not a tax cut for the middle class. It’s a tax cut for the wealthy elites in this country the President promised to stand up to. And by the way, they know that. Our Republican colleagues, they can’t say “we want to give the very rich a tax break,” which is what the estate tax elimination would do, so they talk about family farmers, they talk about individuals. It’s all bull.
And to boot, it would cost $269 billion over ten years—not exactly the deficit reducing kind of policy Republicans have been crowing about for years.
Hundreds of billions of dollars that won’t be available to fund Medicare, to fund Medicaid. That’s hundreds of billions of dollars that Republicans will say we don’t have, so we have to cut Social Security.
And now the Washington Post is reporting that the Administration is pressing Republicans to eliminate the state and location deduction and the mortgage-interest deduction.
In my state of New York, eliminating these three tax provisions would mean the middle class pays more while the top one percent and corporations get a tax break.
It’s a bad signal to Democrats and to the country when the first deals we’re seeing from Republicans is a repeal of the tax provisions that would benefit the wealthiest families in this country.
The President has two paths he can take. We hope for the sake of the country, he’ll choose to work with us and put the middle class, rather than wealthy special interests, first. And just look at these numbers.
Now I’m just going to mention the state of North Dakota, okay, because that’s where the President said. We don’t have any people who are listed as affected by this in North Dakota. It has an asterisk. It’s such a small number they can’t even find them. Because some of the other states have 20, Oregon has 20, Mississippi has 20, so this is below that. They can find almost no one. This does not affect the family farmer in North Dakota, or anywhere else.
