American Families Plan

Floor Speech

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Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. President, I was on the floor earlier this week, and I made a point that I think is really relevant to the discussion that we are having today as we are now looking straight into these proposals coming from the administration that would end up totaling $6 trillion in new spending. Now, that is not the annual appropriations; that is new spending.

The point that I had made was that we have to go back pre-COVID and remember what was going on in this economy. Everything was thriving, really thriving, and people kept talking about how great the economy was. In Tennessee, I had so many people who would say: You know, I have more money at the end of the month, and before, during the Obama years, I had too much month left at the end of my money.

Do you know what? They liked having some money left over at the end of the month.

That economy we had pre-COVID came about because of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It came about because of the work of President Trump and a Republican-led House and Senate and, indeed, because of the support from some of our Democratic friends. This gave us, our country, the most robust economy we have seen in decades. Unemployment had hit 3.5 percent--historic lows. Wage gains were at a record high.

Pro-growth policies, like the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, had set a new standard. We proved we don't have to tax and spend ourselves into oblivion to make a difference in the lives of struggling families. It is a legacy that my Democratic colleagues wish the American people would forget because that memory is getting in the way of their work on behalf of big spending, big government, and big programs that take big bucks right out of the American taxpayers' pockets.

The Democratic agenda is not cheap. It is going to take a lot of taxpayer dollars. So how does President Biden intend to pay for this? It is called a $2 trillion tax hike that targets all of the usual, supposed villains but that in reality would harm the very people my colleagues across the aisle insist they are trying to help.

Let's look at the proposed corporate tax hike. Corporations are the left's favorite villain, and they would certainly suffer under this scheme, but it is not the CEOs and the high earners who would feel the pain. As it stands, the proposal would impose a combined corporate tax rate higher than any other developed nation. It would put us at the top of the heap in tax rates. The only way American corporations would maintain their competitiveness is if other countries were to set aside their advantages, which, of course, we know would never happen. Not only will the Amazons and the Apples bear the brunt of this decline, so will nearly a million small businesses. We call them the mom-and-pops, and they are organized as C-corps.

Workers won't escape the fallout either. When the cost of doing business goes up, growth and investment stagnate, wages fall, and the people driving the economy suffer. That is right. This is going to hit Main Street in local communities where you are going to see small businesses that cannot afford to keep up with inflation, that cannot afford these high taxes, and that cannot afford increased regulation. They are your friends and neighbors who have these small businesses. They are the ones who are going to suffer. And why will they suffer? Because the Democratic majority never ceases to have an outsized appetite for the taxpayers' dollar.

Even conservative estimates from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation show that workers will bear a quarter of that new cost of doing business. The workers, the laborers, are going to have this on their shoulders. Think about it. Think of what you are doing to families.

The view doesn't look any better from the owners' side. Anyone taking advantage of an IRA or a pension plan will see a bigger tax bill too.

Watching this White House make fiscal policy is like watching reruns of the Obama administration. The formula is the same: Pitch a big idea. Sound compassionate. Make a big promise--you are going to help all of these people--and then send the bill to hard-working taxpayers. They do it every time.

Increasing taxes is bad enough, but now they are demanding bigger payouts from struggling families and small businesses on Main Street in your community, and they are doing this in the middle of a pandemic recovery. They locked you down, and now they are going to push you down. They are going to shut the doors of your small business, your version of the American dream. Do they give a ripping flip? Probably not. It is all about getting the money to pay for what they want to do. It is a power grab.

I would encourage my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to stop the madness, because we know this will cause irreparable harm to our Nation's already fragile recovery.

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