Speaker Ryan Pitches Tax Reform for Middle Class Families

Press Release

Speaker Ryan sat down with Face the Nation for an extended interview on tax reform, and how it will help create more jobs, fairer taxes, and bigger paychecks. CBS's John Dickerson joined Ryan at Penn Machine Works, a family-owned and -operated pipe manufacturer in Aston, Pennsylvania.

"The whole purpose of this is to get a middle class tax cut"

Speaker Ryan: "Well first of all, the whole purpose of this is to get a middle class tax cut, to help the people who are working paycheck to paycheck and keep more of their hard-earned dollars. They haven't had a break in a long time. Our economy's been growing between one and two percent for a long time. We haven't had three percent growth in about a decade, and that means workers are struggling. So number one, a middle class tax cut to help those families keep more where they earn. But number two, this business is a perfect example of how we need to help get tax reform to get the tax rates down on these businesses so they can stay competitive and keep hiring people"

"We're going to lower his taxes"

John Dickerson: "But I'm a blue-collar worker, what's my paycheck going to look like? What am I taking home? What are you promising. . . . Do I know some money's coming to me?"

Speaker Ryan: "You know some money's coming to you. We're going to double that standard deduction. We're going to make it so he can fill out his taxes on a postcard. We're going to lower his taxes. That's really important. So he has more tax-home pay. But there's another component to this is, look at this machine shop, this business pays about a 40 percent tax rate but it competes with companies all around the world who pay an average 22 and a half percent on their taxes. So we're going to lower the taxes on this business so it's globally competitive, so it can compete with its foreign competition. And then we're going to give this business an ability to write off the investments that they make in this business to buy more machines, to hire more workers, to raise wages. That, to us, is really important."

"Keep more of their own hard-earned money"

Speaker Ryan: "We're going to double your standard deductions so you can file your taxes on a postcard. We're going to take people who are in the ten percent bracket and put a lot of that money in a zero percent tax bracket. We're taking the 15 percent bracket down to 12 percent. We're going to get rid of the marriage penalty. We're going to increase the child tax credit. We're going to maintain critical things like incentives for home buying. . . . Those are all middle class tax things. The purpose of this is to help people...keep more of their own hard-earned money but also get more jobs, a faster-growing economy."

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