Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024

Floor Speech

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Mr. GOOD of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding me the time. I appreciate it.

Mr. Speaker, here we are again where the minority party isn't even using their time to oppose the bill put forward by the majority.

Just 2 weeks ago, the last major piece of legislation that we passed by suspension of the rules, the Democrat minority party voted for it 207-2. It will be interesting tonight to see how many Democrats vote for this and how many Republicans vote for it.

I am against this because of the suspension of the rules, the process that we are using. I am against it because the expansion of the welfare state. I am against it because we are not correcting the fact that illegals can have access to the child tax credit.

I have never done this on the House floor before, but I am going to read what someone else wrote about this bill.

This is from Kevin Roberts with Heritage Foundation. I commend them for what they said: ``Although, the bill claims that its aim is to provide `tax relief' to families with children, it contains very little relief for working families. Instead, nearly 91.5 percent of the `family benefits' in this bill are cash welfare payments to families who pay no Federal income taxes.

. . . the bill provides $30.6 billion in new welfare cash payments. If these new cash welfare benefits were extended over 10 years (which is very likely) the total cost would exceed $140 billion.''

The Ways and Means bill moves toward fulfilling President Biden's aims. The bill embraces the premise and goals of Biden's plan to greatly increase cash welfare payments, predominantly for single parents while weakening the already poorest work requirements.

This bill obviously sets the ground for a future compromise that would fully enact the Biden child allowance program. Overall, this portion of the Ways and Means bill represents an enormous political victory for President Biden.

Under current law, illegal aliens who have children that were born in the U.S., and many do, can claim welfare payments from the additional child tax credit. The Ways and Means bill expands these welfare payments for millions of people who are in the U.S. illegally and for millions more entering in the future. The bill weakens welfare work requirements and continues a longstanding push by Congress to dress up welfare benefits as tax relief.

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