Pathway to Job Creation Through a Simpler, Fairer Tax Code Act of 2012

Floor Speech

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Mr. HENSARLING. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, every single day we see more proof of the President's failed economic policies. We just have heard that last quarter's GDP was revised down. It's probably two-thirds of what it ought to be. Forty-one straight months of 8 percent-plus unemployment. Millions can't find jobs; millions more only can find part-time work. Real disposable income of working families down under this President's failed policies.

And because his policies have failed, he resorts to the politics of diversion, division, and envy. Change the subject. Let's talk about taxes. Let's divide Americans into smaller groups and make them envious of each other.

So the President comes and says, Let's increase taxes. Let's increase taxes on a million small businesses.

Fact: Ernst & Young has said this will cost our economy 700,000 jobs.

Fact: Small businesses now say, for the first time in almost 4 years, the greatest threat is not lack of sales; it's taxes. And that's why House Republicans voted yesterday to stop the tax increases. Stop the tax increases.

Today we take the next step, and that is to create a process for a fair, flatter, simpler, and more competitive Tax Code, one that will assure that the family budget doesn't go broke paying for the Federal budget, one that ensures that the success of working families depends on how hard they work in their hometowns and not the size of their tax loopholes in Washington, D.C.

Now, my friends from the other side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, they have great theories that we're going to tax our way into economic growth. If only we will tax small businesses more, then somehow they'll create more jobs. Beatings will continue until morale improves is their theory.

Well, we have history. We have history. Go to the Coolidge administration, the Kennedy administration, the Reagan administration, the Bush administration. Every time we have lowered marginal rates, every time that we have simplified the Tax Code, not only have we ignited economic growth, but we've actually received more tax revenues.

And yet my friends from the other side of the aisle and the President, they want to defend the status quo, only more so. And now I wake up this morning to discover that, as they defend the global system, that even our Olympians are going to be taxed on their Olympic medals. So we've had a President who told every small business man in America, every small business woman, You didn't build that, by defending this global system, they now tell our Olympians, You didn't win that. That belongs to the Internal Revenue system.

This is what it is about today: less taxes and more jobs; more taxes, fewer jobs.

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