Schumer Floor Remarks on Appropriations, President Trump’s Tax Outline, Trumpcare, and his Broken Promise on “Draining the Swamp”
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer delivered remarks on appropriations, President Trump’s tax outline and Trumpcare, and his broken promise on “Draining the Swamp.” Below are his remarks:
Now I’d like to talk first about some good news, the appropriations process and our negotiations to keep the government open. The President has backed off his threat to hold government funding hostage over the wall and over cutting health care funding for millions of Americans. This health care funding is essential to ensuring that millions of Americans won’t see their premiums skyrocket, and that they won’t be kicked off their plan. Make no mistake: we will watch the Administration like a hawk to make sure they follow through on their promise to continue this funding. But we are very happy that they’ve seen the light that Democrats have tried to show them for weeks – threating to hurt Americans for political gain is a loser.
Much like the administration’s withdrawal of their demand for wall funding -- which Democrats laid out a month ago as a condition for successful bipartisan negotiations on the appropriations bill – this decision brings us closer to a bipartisan agreement to fund the government and is good news for the American people.
The tendency of this administration, Mr. President, has been to go at it alone. What these negotiations show is that when the Trump Administration takes into account the Democratic position and is willing to move in our direction, they can make progress on issues, as we have on the appropriations bills.
On those appropriations bills, of course, there are a few remaining issues to be settled. The most vexing is poison pill riders. We won’t accept them, but I believe that we are close to final agreement. Our side will continue to work in good faith to see that an agreement is reached to keep the government open by tomorrow’s deadline. And I hope this is something of a metaphor for the future, that the administration won’t put together its plan and say bipartisanship means you support our plan without any Democratic consultation, input, or more importantly taking into account our values which we believe are close to where American values are and much closer than some on the other side.
On taxes, Mr. President.
Yesterday, the President released – and this is not as good news, unfortunately – yesterday the president released a one-page outline of his plan to change the U.S. tax code.
Even from the very limited details that were released, the president’s priorities are clear: give a massive tax break to folks like himself -- the very, very wealthy in America.
The top rate would come down, taxes that disproportionately affect the very wealthy would go away, while middle-class and working families would be denied some of the most frequently-used deductions.
This isn’t simply President Trump’s plan to lower taxes. It’s the plan to lower President Trump’s taxes and those with enormous wealth similar to his.
The prime beneficiaries of the Trump tax plan would be his Cabinet.
Secretary Mnuchin, one of the architects of the plan, could not guarantee this morning that the middle class won’t pay more under the Trump tax plan. If, on one sheet of paper, you can guarantee corporations pay less, you can guarantee that the wealthiest Americans pay less, but you can’t guarantee that hard working middle-class Americans pay less – you don’t have a good recipe for changing our tax code, and for the good of America you ought to go back to the drawing board.
So Mr. President, this proposal falls short, far short of the mark in several ways…
First and foremost, it mostly benefits the very wealthy.
In the Trump tax plan, corporations and the very wealthy get a huge break through lower rates and the elimination of things like the estate tax. In fact, the proposal the president put out yesterday is actually even more of a giveaway on the estate tax than his proposal in his campaign. In the campaign, President Trump promised to repeal the estate tax for estates worth up to $10 million – retaining it for the wealthiest estates. This proposal would eliminate the tax completely. Particularly on the multimillion and even billion-dollar estates.
The result would be that the 5,200 – that’s all – the 5,200 wealthiest families in America would each receive, an average of a $3 million windfall. And many would receive much, much more than that.
Now also, because the Trump tax plan lowers the tax-rate on so-called “pass-through entities” to 15%, wealthy businessmen (like President Trump) will be able to use pass-through entities to pay 15% in taxes while everyone else pays in the 20 percents and 30 percents. It also has implications for something we don’t need, the carried interest loophole. Now, President Trump promised to get rid of in the campaign. Instead of using the carried interest loophole under the President’s bill, Wall Street funds could file their taxes at the new pass-through rate at 15% -- even lower than the present tax on carried interest.
Ironically, President Trump’s tax plan would indeed get rid of the carried interest loophole, by only making it lower than the present rate and making it permanent – a total, total reversal of what he pledged in his campaign.
It all goes to show that those who stand to benefit most from this proposal are folks like the president and those at his level of wealth, while tens of millions of American middle-class, working families are hurt.
This brings me to my second point, which is that the Trump tax plan hurts middle-class and working-class Americans by eliminating their most popular and useful deductions.
Just take the elimination of the state and local tax deduction, for instance, which is used by so many middle-class families in my home state of New York. As it was cited in the Syracuse Post Standard, “The loss of the deduction will cost New Yorkers an average of $4,500 per year for those who file itemized returns, totaling about $68 billion per year that state residents will no longer be allowed to deduct from their federal tax returns.”
I saw a number of our Long Island Republican colleagues in Newsday this morning, said they couldn’t be for this. We hope they’ll stand up to any bill, any bill that gets rid of state and local deductibility.
Because let me repeat, $4,500 – $4,500 a year that New Yorkers would no longer be able to deduct on average.
Massive tax cuts for the very wealthy, crumbs – at best – for everyone else.
Third, the Republican plan is just steeped in hypocrisy.
Even without filling in the details, Trump’s plan is already impossible to pay for. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that Trump’s tax cuts will cost about $5.5 trillion over ten years, as much as $7 trillion. That’s a huge amount of money in our economy. CRFB projects that “no plausible amount of economic growth would be able to pay for […] the tax plan.” So the Republican plan would explode the deficit.
For the last eight years, all we heard from our Republican colleagues was that “Obama was raising the deficit,” and we need to cut programs that benefit the poor and middle class. All of a sudden, now with a Republican president and a proposed tax cut for the wealthy, we’re hearing from the other side of the aisle, ‘deficits don’t matter.’
Our Republican colleagues certainly believe the admonition that “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
Fourth, the Trump tax plan would explode the deficit and thus, endanger Social Security and Medicare, which may well be the nefarious, ultimate goal of the hard right.
Sadly, I know it can happen. I’ve seen it before with the Bush tax cuts. President Bush passed a big tax break for the wealthy. It blew a hole in the deficit and racked up debt, and then he and his Republican colleagues tried to pursue deep cuts to the social safety net to try to balance the ledger.
If Trump’s tax plan were to pass, you be sure America that a few years down the line (maybe even not that long), the deficit will be so large that our Republican colleagues will throw up their hands and say, “we have no choice but to come after Social Security and Medicare and other important programs to the middle class as a way to address the deficit that they created by showering tax breaks on the very rich.”
They will resume the cry they had in the Obama years, “cut the deficit” – which seems to apply to programs that help the middle class but never the ones that benefit the wealthy.
Mr. President, just from the bare-bones skeleton the Administration outlined yesterday, we can already surmise that this plan is not much more than a thinly veiled ruse to give away trillions to the wealthiest among us, starve the government of resources, balloon the deficit and then cut Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare to make up the difference.
This plan will roundly be rejected by taxpayers of all political stripes. The American people are once again learning that what President Trump promised in his campaign and what he’s doing are totally at odds.
Now on Trumpcare, very briefly, Mr. President, on the new version of Trumpcare that may soon be heading for a vote in the House…
Let’s not forget all the reasons the American people were against the first version of Trumpcare are still in the second version. This version is worse. And there’s been a lot of focus on a few of the changes, but the fundamental nastiness of the Trumpcare proposal raising the rates on people 50 to 65, 24 million fewer Americans covered, are still in this bill. In fact, even worse, the new Trumpcare will allow states to decide whether or not insurers have to cover Americans with preexisting conditions. It’s hard to come up with a crueler bill than one that would have resulted in 24 million fewer Americans with health coverage, but this Trumpcare manages to do it.
It would hurt even more Americans, and bring us back to the days when an insurance company could deny you coverage exactly when you needed it most.
I say to the more moderate Republicans in the House, if you didn’t like the first version, you sure shouldn’t like this version – and frankly you will pay huge consequences in the 2018 elections if you vote for it. Now we hope you don’t, because we know how many people it would hurt.
Even if it passed the House, its chances for survival in the Senate are small. We don’t even know if the new version would survive under the rules of reconciliation. The amendment to allow states to drop pre-existing conditions requirement, the fulcrum of the new changes, very possibly violates the Byrd rule and would be kicked out here and need 60 votes which they won’t get.
A warning to all those voting for it in the House: it may well be a chimera…all to save face for the president in his first 100 days.
And by all accounts, this has been a vastly different presidency than was promised during his campaign.
So far this week, we Democrats have highlighted how this president has broken or unfulfilled promise after promise to the working men and women of America.
Today, I'd like to focus on a particularly stunning reversal this president made in his first 100 days on one of the central pillars of his campaign: his promise to "drain the swamp."
President Trump repeated this phrase at every campaign rally. In many ways, it summed up his "outsider" campaign. Make no mistake about it, the president ran as a populist outsider, not as a traditional hard-right conservative Republican. He challenged the establishments of both parties and pitched himself as a change agent, someone who could change up the status quo. "Drain the swamp" was his tagline.
Now, we Democrats disagree with this president on many things, but we agree with him that the very wealthy, powerful special interests have far too much power in Washington. Large corporations, who have the resources to make unlimited, undisclosed campaign contributions...who have resources to hire lobbyists on issue after issue...hold far, far too much power in this nation’s capital. And that structure has created a system where the wealthy and powerful are advantaged in DC, while average, hardworking Americans have a much, much smaller voice.
Drain the swamp would be a good thing. But unfortunately, despite the many times he pledged to radically change the power structure in Washington, in the first 100 days, the president has abandoned the mission.
He's filled his government with billionaires and bankers laden with conflicts of interest. He's broken with the practice of the Obama Administration by ending the publishing of visitor logs to the White House, so the press and the American people don’t know who has the ear of the president and his top people. He has even granted waivers to lobbyists to come work at the White House on the very same issues they were just lobbying on -- and he’s kept those waivers secret!
A president who truly wanted to "drain the swamp" wouldn't have taken a single one of those actions. What are the American people going to think? He so campaigned on this and totally reversed himself within the first 100 days. What are they going to think of him? It’s no wonder his popularity ratings are low and sinking.
So, Mr. President, President Trump ran as a populist, but at the 100-day mark, he hasn't even tried to challenge the power structure in Washington, and in many ways, he's rigged the government even more to the benefit of corporate special interests.
This is one of the biggest broken promise he's made to the working men and women of America. We Democrats, that’s how we sum up the first 100 days: broken and unfulfilled promises to the working people of America. And when it comes to draining the swamp, he’s done it.
And one final point… The events of yesterday have further proven our point: the president promised one thing in his campaign and is now doing another. On his new health care proposal, he has shown his hand. Promised something for the working people, deliver legislation that only helps the very wealthy. On his new tax plan which so benefits the rich, again, promise the working people, deliver for the wealthy. The president has made our point better than we could this week. After these two bills, his promises to working people are in tatters.
Thank you and I yield the floor.