Why I Opposed the Tax Bill
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Speaker, I rise to say that I was saddened to have to oppose the tax bill that the House of Representatives passed last evening. I could not, in good conscience, vote for a deal that so lopsidedly benefits big corporations while failing to ensure a substantial tax cut to middle and working-class families.
I believe this deal is deeply inequitable, and at a time when we have seen the greatest rise in inequality when big corporations made super profits at the expense of the consumer, it is a mockery of whom representative government works for.
This bill delivers massive tax cuts for the biggest corporations while denying middle-class families the economic security they had under the expanded monthly child tax credit that was passed in 2021.
Let me be unequivocal. This is a reversal of the largest middle class tax cut in the history of the United States. This bill provides billions of dollars in tax relief for the wealthy and pennies for the poor. This expanded and improved child tax credit which we passed in 2021 returns $8 for every dollar spent.
How?
Because the child tax credit helps children learn more, earn more, and grow up healthier, which is why I find it upsetting and appalling that we would condition a limited extension of this life-altering program with a vast giveaway to billionaires and corporations who are already well practiced in paying no taxes.
DISH Network, FedEx, Salesforce, T-Mobile, and dozens of others--and I will later give you the list of the others, Mr. Speaker--these corporations and dozens of others paid no Federal income tax from 2018 to 2020 under the Trump tax law.
At a time when big corporations are richer than ever, the idea that we must evenly split the pot with working and middle-class families is absurd, but there is no even split in this bill. It is $5 for the corporations and $1 to our children.
Understand, Mr. Speaker, people are calling this an expansion of the child tax credit. It is no expansion of the child tax credit. It is a step backward. That needs to be understood.
When groceries and other costs like childcare have skyrocketed driving record corporate profits of $3 trillion in 2023, it was families bearing the brunt of inflation and high interest rates.
The expanded monthly child tax credit is an antidote to child poverty, it is an antidote to inflation, and it is a successful tool that lifted millions and millions of children out of poverty virtually overnight. One-half of children in the United States were lifted out of poverty--4 million.
Today, families live paycheck to paycheck. Their wages have not kept up with rising costs, the economy is not working for them, and to our great shame, it is children who will suffer the most.
This bill fails to sufficiently improve the child tax credit. It leaves millions of middle-class families without a tax cut like they received in 2021. It keeps millions of children in preventable poverty because of a policy choice. This bill strips working-class families of the true economic security that was achieved with the expanded monthly child tax credit under the American Rescue Plan.
I understand that no bill that can become law, especially in a divided government like we have today, is going to be perfect or have everything that we want.
I am grateful for the hard work of Representatives Neal and Pelosi, Senators Bennet, Braun, Booker, and Wyden on the bill, and for the Members who spoke out and offered amendments to improve it, Representatives DelBene, Sanchez, and Moore--Congresswoman Moore is here today and will speak in short order--and Representative Sewell and Representative Doggett.
An extension of the expanded monthly child tax credit is what our constituents need and deserve. It worked. It worked better than any other Federal program that we have seen. As I said, it lifted one-half of our children out of poverty and lowered the hunger rate in the United States by 26 percent.
We lowered the child poverty rate, and today the rate has gone from 5.2 percent to 12.4 percent, and, yes, working families, middle-class families, and vulnerable families have seen their wages decline as a result of pulling the rug out from under them with the expiration of the child tax credit.
It is the one best thing we can do to improve economic well-being and secure the most vulnerable American families and to bring back the largest middle class tax cut in history. This was a lost opportunity. It leads the way to in 2025 making the Trump tax credits which benefited the richest one-tenth of 1 percent of the people in this country and the biggest corporations in this country, it leads the way to moving in that direction. It can't go there. We have to stop that, and we have to make sure that we will.
I look forward to continuing that fight to have an expanded and an improved child tax credit that we delivered for all families in 2021.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Virginia because he is someone who has been an emphatic champion for education and for working people in this country, and as someone who is always at the forefront of what makes sense in terms of providing for the economic security of people in this country, and particularly in children.
Mr. Speaker, he just hit the nail on the head that this is a question of just such gross inequity that is going to be foisted on our families and our children. The people who are standing up and talking about the expansion are just fooling themselves about what this bill is about. They need to take a look at who the beneficiaries are.
Mr. Speaker, I, again, thank Congressman Scott for his work now and what he has done in the past and what he will continue to do in the future in this body. I thank him so much for being here.
She will talk about her amendment, which was defeated on a party-line vote, but she is someone who is never afraid to stand up and to speak out, and she did so last night on this floor in opposition to this lopsided tax deal.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Ms. DeLAURO. First of all, the point that you have made and that Congressman Scott made, these tax breaks for the richest corporations, they are immediate. They are immediate.
The child tax credit, this has to be phased in over a 3-year period of time, and it is a lower number than they had with the original expanded monthly child tax credit, which was $3,000 for kids between 6 and 17, $3,600 for kids who are under 6.
It is a lower credit, and then they phase it in in terms of refundability, and the most vulnerable kids are excluded altogether. It is astounding the inequity of all of that.
Now, what we did with the child tax credit, which was in the American Rescue Plan, the monthly credit reached 61 million children.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Ms. DeLAURO. Yes. There was about 4 million kids lifted out of poverty, almost half the kids in the U.S. lifted out of poverty.
Now, what we are talking about in this tax deal is 400,000 kids they talk about being lifted out of poverty versus 4 million. Plus, the 60 million that is made reference to is some piece of it at some portion in some time during this phase-in, et cetera, will be the beneficiary of a much lower tax credit. In addition to that, what people are saying is that we have expanded the child tax credit.
Folks out there are going to believe that they are going to be getting what they got in 2021, and it is misinformation. It is just about trying to put a veneer on what has been done here in giving the biggest corporations, as Congressman Scott pointed out in this 3-year period, $185 billion versus $33 billion for the child tax credit.
Give me the facts, and that is what we try to do. That is what we have tried to do in the last weeks since this proposal came out is give people the information, the accurate information about what is here. They are hiding it. They are hiding it. And you know what, as I said, it is an unbelievable missed opportunity.
I have to say this: I was told when we first went forward on the child tax credit, I wanted it to be permanent. They said we can't do it. We can't afford permanence. I said 5 years. Can't do it. Can't afford it, 5 years. I said 3 years. Can't afford it. I said 1 year, and then they asked me would you support 1 year of expanded monthly child tax credit, and I said yes.
As I mentioned earlier, the most successful Federal program that we have seen coming down the pike that met its mission in lifting kids out of poverty and providing families with economic security, helping them to deal with the cost-of-living effort.
I was also told at that time: Rosa, we do it for a year, it is not going to go away. It is not going to go away. It went away. And the first opportunity that we had to restore the child tax credit, we failed.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Ms. DeLAURO. That is right. The kids have gone back into poverty, and it is preventable, as you pointed out. This is preventable poverty. We know the answer and we have refused to take that answer and move forward on it. That is what happened here last night
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Ms. DeLAURO. Your amendment. Go for it.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Ms. DeLAURO. You ask a very relevant question. We have seen Congressman Casar, Congressman Scott, yourself, we have seen it on this floor, the denigration of working families in this country. It is that they don't work. When we talked about the child tax credit, they said: Well, they are not going to go to work, that they are going to spend the money on drugs.
And when we got the data of what happened in that 1 year, we found that women used the money for childcare so that they could go to work; that the money was used to buy food, to pay rent, to buy school supplies, to pay for healthcare, for a mortgage payment
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Ms. DeLAURO. Childcare was one of the biggest issues, because then it allowed people to go to work.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Ms. DeLAURO. That is right. It is because they wanted to denigrate working folks. They say these corporations and these folks are the richest one-tenth of 1 percent who cut coupons, that is the work. They exercise their fingers with scissors and cut coupons, or the corporations who deal with stock buybacks, that is okay. They are not held accountable, but by God, we are going to put it to people who are trying to make ends meet, trying to deal with the cost of living and inflation today. And that child tax credit helps them do that and we pulled the rug out from under them.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for her comments. You hit all of the points on this. Look, you just said it, children and families with zero to $2,500 in earnings get nothing--get nothing. Corporations who have avoided any kind of a tax liability get everything that they ask for, and the business community and the corporations put the red lines down, and when we had our red lines, they got blurred, and we walked backward, and we gave them everything they wanted. We made it retroactive. We said go for it, take it--laying the groundwork for next year. We said we are going to skimp on this child tax credit and make sure that it doesn't reach all of those who need to be reached in order for us to turn poverty around in this country, which we proved that we could do.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his interest, for his progressive nature on this stuff, and for all of the issues that face working and middle-class families in this country and make this a more equitable society.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman has made such very good points. It is a missed opportunity. That is the regret in all of this.
Again, I was told that you get it for a year, it is not going to go away. Well, not only did it go away, but it came back as a much watered down proposal. What is equally troubling is the number of people who are out there saying that this is an expansion. It really is doublespeak to the American people. It isn't an expansion. It is moving backward.
The notion that half a loaf is better than none, something is better than nothing; we cannot afford that kind of a philosophy going forward. That is not our job. Our job is to advocate for the American people, for those working families, those middle-class families, those vulnerable families, for children. That is what we should do here. We have that obligation.
When corporate profits have skyrocketed $3 trillion in 2023, how do we in good conscience say, amen, you get millions and millions of dollars in tax breaks? Your goal is to get to $600 billion. We cannot draw that line in the sand and say no.
I believe in research and development--we all do--but the inequity that is built into this tax package is stunning. To use the words of my colleague from Wisconsin, it is a capitulation of saying amen, it is okay, and that we will fight another day. No, we had a moment to fight, and we missed that moment.
We are not stopping. We are not stopping.
I heard a lot of people last night say that: well, we will get to it next year, and we will get the child tax credit to where it was. You know, it was not just a mental note. I made a list of the folks who talked about getting us to where we need to be. Time flies. We are going to hold people to their words here.
We heard that it is not ever going to be permanent. Well, we are going to hold you to that, as well. If we are going to make anything permanent, it has to be the child tax credit. It is the antidote to inflation. It allowed families to be able to achieve economic security that they had not seen in a generation because their wages haven't gone up in generations.
That is what is on the minds of people today, how they are going to economically survive. We had that opportunity to give them that help.
I don't put aside helping 400,000 kids, but we could have helped many millions of kids in what we call preventable poverty.
We don't understand what our values are, who we are, why we are privileged to serve in this institution. We can look at public policy in a way that makes a difference for people.
The great Joseph Stiglitz, who is a Nobel laureate in economics, said that inequality is not because of globalization or modernization, but it is the public policy choices that we make.
Last night, this body made a public policy choice to continue the inequality and inequitable advantage that corporations have over their lives, their families' lives, their kids' lives.
That is not the direction we are going in. We will continue the fight that we have started here. This now goes to the United States Senate, and let's just see how we can influence the process there. We will continue until there is a permanent child tax credit.
What is important that has come out of this debate in the last several days is that we have raised the decibel level on a child tax credit, its success, and its future and its future as permanent for this country. We are going to keep it on that front burner, and we are not going to let it go.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source