Amendments
AMENDMENTS -- (House of Representatives - June 17, 2004)
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Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time.
There are 8.2 million Americans unemployed today, another 4.7 million Americans who have been so frustrated in their search for a job that they have dropped out of the workforce looking for work, and another 4.7 million Americans who cannot find anything more than part-time employment: Close to 18 million Americans today not satisfied with their opportunities to have a full paying job.
There were 2.7 million manufacturing jobs lost in the last 3 years. The share of the population in America that is working today at 62 percent is the lowest it has ever been since 1994. Payroll remains 5.5 million jobs short of the average that we have seen in most economic recoveries since World War II.
What is the response of this House to those conditions of America's trying to work? Billions of dollars of tax incentives for corporations to invest abroad and ship American jobs with that investment. This is a textbook case of how loopholes seep into our Tax Code. Where else but in the world of catering to special interests would it take $150 billion in tax cuts for corporations to remedy a $4 billion problem?
The dirtiest joke about all of this is that while we are giving tax cuts to corporations to send jobs overseas, there is a provision in this bill that actually would have bounty hunters to go out and try to collect taxes from Americans who actually filed a tax return but have not yet been able to pay the perhaps $500 that they still owe the IRS. So now these bounty hunters will be paid 25 percent of what they collect from you and you and you to do the work that the IRS says it could do at 4 to 5 percent of the cost.
That is what this bill is loaded down with. That is why this bill should not win. Democrats had a bill that would have kept jobs here, given manufacturing corporations in America a chance to pay less in taxes if they kept jobs here. We were not given a chance to put that bill on the floor today. That is what we have today.
Who will win? It will not be the interests of the American public, but there are a lot of special interests that are watching very closely. Vote against this bill.