[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 36 (Wednesday, February 28, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Page S1267]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          REPUBLICAN TAX BILL

  Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, for the elite, the powerful and the well 
connected, the Republican tax law has turned out to be manna from 
Washington. The benefits of the tax law are about as one-sided as it 
gets, and middle-class Americans come up on the losing end.
  It sure is one-sided when the price of admission for any middle-class 
tax relief is an investor handout big enough to pave Wall Street in 
gold. Democrats pushed for a tax cut that was centered on the middle 
class, but Republicans turned their one-sided wish list into law.
  It sure is one-sided to have a massive tax handout to multinational 
corporations, a lower top rate for the fortunate few, and a massive tax 
cut in the estate tax that touches only the wealthiest, while working 
families get handed only temporary relief.
  Those are the policies that are the essence of the Republican tax 
law. Yet the American people hear over and over again that the benefit 
of the proposals are going to work their way to the middle class and 
that those folks will get bulging wage increases.
  So I would like to start by getting a few facts straight. First, just 
a few hours ago, corporations crossed the $200 billion mark in stock 
buybacks this year. These stock-buyback bonanzas drive up the value of 
investment portfolios for CEOs and high fliers, and they are now coming 
in at a rate 30 times greater--30 times greater--than worker bonuses. 
They are on pace to double the amount from the first quarter of last 
year.
  Now, there was a whole lot of happy talk about this Republican tax 
bill last winter, but I don't remember--and I sat through a lot of 
markups in the Finance Committee and debates on this floor--I didn't 
hear anybody say there ought to be a stock buyback stimulus act.
  The wealthiest 10 percent of earners own 84 percent of all of the 
stock held by Americans. So when it comes to these buybacks, a huge 
majority of families are on the outside looking in. All the moms and 
dads who balance the rent, the groceries, and the cost of gas and 
electricity don't get much of anything out of a corporate handout that 
gets swallowed up by these buyback bonanzas for big-time investors.
  Second, when you talk about tax cuts producing massive stock 
buybacks, you are talking about sending huge amounts of cash overseas 
directly into the pockets of wealthy investors. That is because more 
than one-third of all U.S. corporate stock is owned by investors 
outside of the country. So under the Republican tax law, American 
taxpayers are on the hook, borrowing billions and billions of dollars 
to make wealthy foreigners even wealthier.
  We heard a whole lot about how working families were going to get 
lifted up in Portland and in Topeka and in San Antonio, but the reality 
is, the folks who are getting enriched are in Beijing and Moscow and 
Panama City.
  Finally, you don't have to take my word for it that these corporate 
windfalls overwhelmingly benefit those at the top. Fourteen years ago, 
the Federal Government gave corporations what is known as a 
repatriation holiday--a big tax break to bring back cash from overseas. 
What the American people heard back then sounds pretty familiar today. 
Corporations were going to invest in workers and equipment, and the 
money would trickle down to the middle class. That didn't work out 
either. More than 90 percent of the corporate cash windfall went to 
goodies for investors and CEOs. Once again, very, very one-sided.
  Not even two decades later, the American people are still being fed 
the line about how their one-sided tax plans are going to deliver 
bulging paychecks to the middle class.
  A few weeks ago, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin came to the Finance 
Committee. He was asked who really benefits when the Republican tax 
bill showers all of this cash on multinationals. He said: ``Even if 
there are share buybacks . . . that capital is recycled back into the 
economy. It just doesn't sit in banks, it goes back into the economy.'' 
That sounds an awful lot like trying to put a new spin on the failed 
theory of trickle-down economics.
  In my view, middle-class families are sick and tired of being told to 
wait for the benefits to somehow trickle down to them. From the get-go, 
our message on taxes was that if Senators were interested in real 
middle-class tax relief, we would be at the head of the line to work on 
it. I have been involved in a bipartisan bill. On this side, we were 
ready to go for a bipartisan approach focusing on the middle class. 
Instead, Republicans moved at breakneck speed to pass a one-sided bill 
that would fatten the accounts of the wealthy, the powerful, and CEOs 
around the world.
  It is time for the Treasury Secretary to stop peddling the old 
huckster's line that somehow all of this is going to work out for the 
middle class if they would just wait long enough. That is not going to 
work because this bill was never about middle-class folks. We see it in 
the numbers. We see it in the fact that what the middle class gets is 
temporary, but now we know, while middle-class families keep waiting 
for the promises to come true, these stock buyback bonanzas, these 
investor windfalls are just going to keep rolling on in.

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