Motion to Discharge
Floor Speech
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Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I know that Senator Grassley is going to join us momentarily, so I will cut in line until he arrives. But I would like to thank Senator Crapo for his leadership in organizing this.
It is a little odd to be doing this on the Senate floor when we should be having markups and hearings in the Senate Finance Committee, but the Senate Finance Committee has not been considering any of this proposed legislation despite the fact that we are dealing with New Deal-size and -level legislation. Yet the Finance Committee is not considering it, so I thank Ranking Member Crapo for bringing us to the floor.
I want to talk about some of these taxing and spending issues, but I want to make it clear that I am not here to talk about this because I am obsessed about the marginal tax rates for the top 1 percent of Americans. I am not. It is not why I ran for office. But I am here today to talk about this because, as a China hawk, I am obsessed with the fact that the American people, the American Government, American technology companies and lots of companies that aren't today thought of as technology companies but will increasingly be technology companies operating in different verticals--I am obsessed with the fact that our firms and our people are going to need to be able to compete with the Chinese Communist Party.
The future of everything, from technology to trade, to global security and defense issues, is going to go one of two ways: It is either going to be led by the Chinese Communist Party or it is going to be led by the United States and our allies and Western values. The future of not just global economics but global security policy over the next 3 and 5 and 7 and 10 years is going to be radically shaped by which direction we go.
Failure is not an option. This next century is going to be defined either by oppression, censorship, and brutality--the sorts of things that we are seeing in Xinjiang right now as the Uighurs are brutally oppressed by the Chinese Communist Party--or we are going to see a world that is led by Western values and beliefs in trade and human rights and open navigation of the seaways and transparent contracts and the rule of law.
That is the proper context in which we should be considering this taxing-and-spending debate, and it would be helpful for the American people if we would discuss President Biden's tax-and-spending spree in the context of that global technology and diplomatic competition with the CCP because these dangerous policies in this $3.5 trillion or whatever pricetag it is going to end up at--this piece of omnibus legislation is going to hurt our ability to compete against Beijing.
Spending is out of control. The American people, last November, just 10 months ago, elected an evenly divided Senate. Yet somehow progressives believe they have a mandate to radically remake America. You actually hear a lot of them use language about radically transforming America, as if an American public that voted for a 50-50 Senate was voting for some sort of radical remaking of American policy as a newer-new, bigger-big New Deal.
They have spent trillions of dollars that we don't have already this year, and now they are looking to add another $3.5 trillion to expand cradle-to-grave government propositions about how government should interfere and interact with the average American's life.
Well, what is government? What a government is supposed to be is a compact for the common defense. The first and most fundamental principle that government exists to do is make sure that everyone is free from violence and chaos and tyranny so that they can organize their lives and local communities. That is the first thing government is supposed to be. Yet we also believe that government has some social safety net responsibilities.
Stated in a summary fashion, you might say that the government is supposed to be the army and we also have some social safety net insurance programs attached to them. It seems like, when you listen to Senator Sanders speak, he thinks of it exactly the opposite: The government is a giant insurance company that just happens to own a navy. And sometimes it sounds like he doesn't even really care if we own a navy; he just conceives of the government as a giant insurance program where everything is compulsory and government decides what programs people need to have and what services they want. The vast majority of the American people don't want that and they didn't vote for that, and a 50-50 Senate shouldn't be trying to deliver that.
This year, the President and my Democratic colleagues have increased spending in every area--social, environmental, and economic policy- related. If there was an opportunity to spend over the course of the last 8\1/2\ months, they have taken it. A couple trillion here, a couple trillion there, and pretty soon, you are talking about real money.
Now it is time to pay the piper, and my colleagues are talking about raising taxes. But this isn't just any tax hike we are talking about. When you look at the corporate rates that we are looking at, we would be talking about the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world. These are just the new taxes. Yet even that doesn't pay for all of the new spending. So we are talking about new legislation that would radically raise taxes to the highest corporate tax rates in the industrial Earth and yet still not pay for all of the new spending they are talking about. When deficits grow forever, opportunities shrink.
We have a Member of the House of Representatives who, in her supertelegenic way, figured out how to get attention last week by wearing a dress that said ``Tax the Rich'' on the back of it. What the dress should really read is ``Tax the Young'' because history tells us very clearly that when you deficit-spend at the level they are talking about doing here, this is a tax of current older and wealthier people against younger people. That is how inflation works. That is how debt and deficit work. The dress should have read ``Tax the Young.''
These are tax hikes that make communist China a much better business environment than the United States. Under the President's plan, Americans would have a 32-percent combined rate, compared to a much smaller Chinese tax rate, at their baseline nominal level. But it is important to recognize that the Chinese tax code currently incentivizes high-tech businesses with an even lower 15-percent rate. So we are talking about north of a 30-percent rate against the Chinese Communist Party trying to make sure they attract investment by taxing their technology and digital companies at a 15-percent rate. This is the definition of shooting yourself in the foot.
My friends on the other side of the aisle are a lot of smart folks, and they know that tax rates actually matter for international investment and for competitiveness. One of the ways you know they know is because, for months, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has been out seeking a global minimum tax arrangement. She is admitting the obvious truth--that a new tax increase will saddle American firms with a burden that other companies across the globe don't have.
The CCP is not going to bail us out, as we would potentially raise taxes to the highest rates in the world, by also raising their tax rates to bail out President Biden's domestic agenda. Beijing looks at our endless debt, at our entitlement crisis, at our tax hikes, at our disunity, and they see a strategic advantage.
These China-friendly tax hikes would raise the cost of doing business in America. These China-friendly tax hikes would drive innovation overseas. These China-friendly tax hikes would lead to more corporate inversions. These China-friendly tax hikes will hurt American R&D.
If you want the 21st century to be defined by global Chinese Communist Party leadership, you would tax and spend just like this legislation seeks to do. Reckless spending doesn't steward a great nation. Super tax hikes do not promote innovation.
Competition with the Chinese Communist Party is the defining national security issue of our time, whether my colleagues in this body want to admit it on a regular basis or not. While the Chinese Communist Party plunders American intellectual property, steals American ingenuity, and pours investments into their state-run technologies, Washington is debating whether or not we should punish innovative firms and innovative Americans.
This isn't strong. This isn't smart. And the American people know better.
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