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Mr. WALDEN. Mr. Speaker, my wife and I were small business owners for more than two decades, and we still retain part of that business, so I know what it's like to meet a payroll. I know what it's like to employ people. We only had 15 to 20 people on our payroll over the course of 20 years, but I worked a lot with small businesses. And in small business it really is about how do you grow, how do you have the positive cash flow, Mr. Speaker, to grow your business, to invest in new technology, new equipment, to take your ideas and spin them forward and grow jobs. That's your whole nature as an entrepreneur in America, and as it should be.
In Oregon, we've got 86,000 small businesses employing more than three-quarters of a million people. This legislation will help those small businesses have what is called ``positive cash flow.'' That is from whence jobs flow.
If you have the money and you can retain it rather than have to give it all up to the government, then you're going to make wise choices in your business to grow your business, because it's your competitive nature to grow your business, which means to create jobs in the economy.
My friends on the other side of the aisle had no problem a few years ago spending $1 trillion to have the government borrow the money and pick winners and losers and waste it.
This is a good way to spur jobs and growth in our economy. I urge its passage.
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Mr. WALDEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Speaker, I am intrigued by my colleague's comments a few minutes ago about how we need to support this substitute to help small businesses and all.
Yet what troubles me is, first of all, it's highly complicated. It further complicates the Tax Code. The real beneficiary will be your accountant because you've got to go through all of these machinations to figure out which side of this you qualify for. At the end of the day, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, because of the imposition of the additional restrictions called for by the Democrats in their substitute, which we're debating at this moment, the entire relief would be something on the order of $287 million nationwide to small businesses.
So there is your alternative.
You've got the Democrats saying, boy, according to Joint Tax, $287 million. Oh, that's going to solve the problem this year. That's really going to help. We're saying, no, we want to do something that really affects small businesses, middle class small businesses--people like my wife and me when we were in small business and worked with other small businesses in small communities. They are small businesses that want to keep some of their cash flow home, where they can invest it in their businesses, in their employees, chase these ever-rising costs of health insurance and all of these other things that you do in small business--the added government costs of regulation, all of the things that drive up your costs you need cash to pay for.
We want to help those small businesses because that is the heartbeat, the growth of where innovation comes from--from jobs in America. It is small business. This is targeted specifically at small businesses in America that can keep some of their money.
By the way, it's not the government's money first. The government wasn't your best business partner. You went out and you earned it. You ought to be able to keep more of it. That's the difference in philosophy working out here on the floor; and those of us who have met payrolls, who have paid bills, who have dealt with government regulation get that. Those who haven't have a hard time understanding why, at the beginning, this is the business's money, the individual's money, the individual who has worked hard. It is not the government's money. It is the individual's money.
I urge the defeat of the substitute.
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