Category: Education

US Senate News:

Source: United States Senator for Idaho Mike Crapo
Washington, D.C.–Today on the Senate floor, U.S. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) discussed the Senate’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 Budget Resolution that lays the groundwork to make permanent and build on the 2017 Trump Tax Cuts, ensuring American families can keep more of their hard-earned money and stop financing Washington’s spending problem.
As Chairman of the Finance Committee, Crapo explained that the resolution’s instructions would unlock the ability for Congress to prevent a more-than $4 trillion tax hike on American families and businesses, provide certainty and predictability by making the Trump Tax Cuts permanent, and deliver additional middle-class tax relief. 
Crapo also emphasized Republicans’ commitment to restoring fiscal sanity by achieving deficit reduction, noting that spending reforms are the best way to achieve that goal, not imposing the largest tax hike in our country’s history. 

Full remarks as delivered:
“The problem that we have in America is not that our taxes are too low, but that our spending is too high.
“Republicans are unified in delivering—as President Trump calls it—one big, beautiful bill for the American people. 
“But what does this bill include?
“The FY 2025 Budget Resolution fulfills promises to secure America’s borders, increase our national defense, unleash our energy potential and finally start to get our fiscal house in order. 
“I agree completely with my colleague – we have got to reduce our spending and this bill contains a target with a minimum floor of $2 trillion in spending reduction in our federal budget. 
“Importantly, it also lays the groundwork to make permanent and build on the 2017 Trump Tax Cuts so that American families can keep more of their hard-earned money and stop financing Washington’s spending problem.
“Our conference is united in preventing an over-$4 trillion tax hike on American families and businesses and delivering additional tax relief to those who have suffered under four years of inflation.
“We are united in making this proven tax policy permanent to provide the certainty that businesses need to make the long-term investments that drive growth, and the stability that families need as they save and plan for the future.
“We are also unified in our resolve to restore fiscal sanity and know that the best way to do so isn’t to tax hardworking Americans more—it’s to spend less.
“While many tend to focus on the policy disagreements that occur—as they should—in these halls, the reality is Republicans are completely unified in delivering on President Trump’s agenda, a major portion of which is to restore the economic prosperity experienced under his previous presidency.
“Let’s just look back for a minute at the bill we’re trying to extend and make permanent now.
“Most Americans don’t pay attention to the minutia of tax policy.  But if you ask them, the majority will tell you they’d rather keep more of their money than let the government spend it, and that’s exactly what the 2017 tax cuts did.
“Those Trump Tax Cuts lowered tax rates for the overwhelming majority of Americans, simplified the tax code, and encouraged companies to do business in the United States instead of abroad.
“In addition to lowering rates across the board, it provided targeted tax relief to middle-class working families by doubling the standard deduction and the child tax credit, and to small businesses by providing a new 20 percent deduction, enabling America’s entrepreneurs to create new jobs, increase workers’ wages and reinvest in their business.
“The majority of benefits from the Trump Tax Cuts, contrary from what you’ve heard today from the other side, flowed to working middle-class families—the bottom 50 percent of earners received the largest reduction in average tax rates at 17.3 percent. 
“Contrary to claims that the benefits were only for ‘billionaires and corporations,’ the Trump Tax Cuts actually made the tax code even more progressive.  Meaning that the highest income earners now pay a greater share of all income taxes than they did before, and if we can extend this tax cut, that will continue to be the case.
“The generational reforms we made in 2017 were designed to strengthen investment, boost economic growth, increase take-home pay and reduce poverty, and it worked.
“Not only did taxpayers keep more of their hard-earned money, but a growing economy powered median household income to an all-time high.
“The labor market improved, workers saw record wage growth and the unemployment rate fell dramatically to 3.5 percent—the lowest in 50 years. 
“And the lowest-income workers experienced the largest wage growth.
“There was a capital formation explosion in the United States, and corporate inversions—corporations leaving America—became a thing of the past as companies came back home and America became the place to do business again.
“All Americans reaped the benefits of a booming economy. 
“Extending this current, proven tax policy—and building on it—is the best way to restore economic prosperity and opportunity for working families, many of whom are still struggling to recover from the historic inflation of the last four years.
“Tonight, I expect we’ll hear once again the ‘politics of fear’ at work as my Democrat colleagues claim all sorts of dire things will happen so that Republicans can cut taxes for the wealthy. 
“This attack has been used for nearly a decade, and it’s just as false now as it has been in the past.
“Americans should not be scared by these falsehoods. 
“What they should be alarmed by is what my colleagues and I are committed to preventing: the largest tax hike in history that will occur if we do not extend the current Trump’s Tax Cuts.
“Middle-class Americans and small businesses will pay the highest price. 
“If the tax cuts expire:
There will be a $4+ trillion tax hike on all Americans.
More than $2.6 trillion of that tax increase will hit people who earn less than $400,000 per year.
The average American household will see a more-than $1,700 increase in their tax bill.
An over $600 billion tax increase on more than 20 million small business owners, who could face rates as high as 43.4 percent. 
Families would have their child tax credit slashed in half from $2,000 to $1,000.
The standard deduction, claimed by over 90 percent of taxpayers, would be cut in half.
The economic cost has been estimated to be 6 million jobs; $540 billion in employee compensation, and $1.1 trillion of GDP.
“Republicans are united in our efforts to prevent these damaging consequences.
“Not only are we focused on extending these proven tax policies, but we are committed to making this growth in our economy permanent so that we don’t have to face these dire consequences in the future. 
“Permanent tax policies promote stability and lead to more pronounced economic effects than temporary ones. 
“Making the Trump Tax Cuts permanent will provide businesses the certainty and stability they need to make the long-term investments that drive growth, accelerate productivity and increase prosperity across all segments of the economy.
“Studies find that a permanent extension of TCJA would increase long-run GDP by 1.1 percent and increase after-tax income for Americans of all income levels. 
“Making the small-business deduction alone permanent is estimated to create 1.2 million jobs annually over the first ten years, increasing to 2.4 million in the long run.
“The President’s Council of Economic Advisers just released an analysis that says extending the Trump Tax Cuts, combined with other pro-growth economic policies that we are pursuing, would:
Boost the level of short-run real GDP by 3.3 to 3.8 percent and long-run real GDP by 2.6 to 3.2 percent;
Raise annual real wages by $2,100 to $3,300 per worker;
Increase real annual take-home pay for a median-income household with two children by roughly $4,000 to $5,000;
Save over 4 million full-time equivalent jobs from being destroyed; and
Facilitate $100 billion of investment in distressed communities.
“That analysis also projects that extending these tax cuts, ’together with the full suite of Trump Administration policies—such as deregulation, which the CEA previously estimated would add 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points to real GDP growth rates over a decade—is expected to result in 3.0 percent annual real GDP growth rates over the next 10 years.’ 
“Now what does that mean?
“According to CEA, that 3.0 percent annual real GDP growth will result in $4.1 trillion in additional revenue to the Treasury to help us deal with our national debt.
“$4.1 trillion dollars.
“To unleash that growth, the best way to make these tax cuts permanent is by using a current policy baseline: this is the scoring method that more accurately reflects reality. 
“The average American easily understands there is a difference between a tax increase and a spending cut. 
“However, there’s an inherent bias in Congress’s scoring process where tax policy is treated differently than spending policy. 
“If tax rates are scheduled to increase, like they are right now if we don’t act, preventing that tax hike is counted as a ‘cost’ in uncollected future revenue. 
“But many spending programs are assumed to be extended beyond their expiration, so the spending just continues and continues, unabated, which the budget rules say do not have any cost.  That’s what we’re trying to fix today in this bill.
“In fact, there is $2.5 trillion in spending that is automatically extended by our budget rules over the next ten years under a current policy baseline.
“Even the Obama White House has used a current policy baseline for tax policy. They recognized there’s a difference between increasing taxes and cutting spending.
“In 2013, they argued that a ‘current policy baseline to be the appropriate reference point, since it measures changes relative to the status quo, rather than the mix of expiring provisions and policy changes that would likely never be implemented.’
“Interpreted, what they said is exactly what I’ve been saying.  You can’t say that just keeping the tax rates where they are and not raising them is the same as spending more money.
“We need to level the playing field and sever the connection that creates a tax-and-spend budgeting process in Congress.
“And that’s another thing that we’re going to do today.
“Critics—who have been strangely silent over the years as trillions of dollars in spending has been automatically extended under a current policy baseline—now take offense to correcting the bias toward forcing federal spending. 
“As applied only to tax policy, those critics assert that we’ll be increasing the deficit by using a current policy baseline, or we’re using this baseline to ‘hide the cost.’
“Let me be very clear: we are not hiding the score that JCT or CBO would assign the bill under a current law baseline.  In fact, I like to see that score – it shows the amount of the tax increase that my colleagues on the other side are trying to push onto the American people.
“But let’s be fully transparent—both an estimate based on current policy and one based on current law will be released when we consider this bill on the Senate floor, and then Americans can see what kind of savings have been given to them by not raising their taxes.
“Under our existing tax regime, the tax revenue to GDP ratio this year will be 17.1 percent, meaning we will raise taxes for the federal Treasury—under our current tax policy—at about 17.1 percent of GDP.  It will also be about the same next year if we don’t let the taxes go up, meaning that the revenue will not appreciably change.
“Yet my colleagues on the other side say it’s going to spike a hole in the deficit—why? Because they won’t get their hands on that $4 trillion of new tax revenue out of the American people.
“This would not increase the debt relative to GDP; it would simply prevent a tax increase. 
“And we need to be honest about what those tax increases would and would not do. 
“Those who say we should let taxes go back up say, ‘Wow, then we could use it to pay down the national debt some more.’
“Every tax increase that Congress has adopted for as long as I can remember was not used to pay down the national debt; it was used by Congress to spend more money.
“Congress does not have a revenue problem—it has a spending problem.
“Senate Republicans are united in our desire to take concrete steps to address our deficit and get our fiscal house in order.
“Because the bill we’re debating today is within the confines of reconciliation, the scores and numbers that we’ll be discussing don’t reflect the full fiscal picture.
“In order to have an honest discussion, there needs to be an acknowledgment that there are other factors at play that can generate economic growth and reductions in spending.
“What am I talking about?  Economic growth.  As I indicated in one of the charts that we had up, the estimates from the CEA are that if we make the tax policy permanent, the confidence that will give our economy and the boost it will give our economy through proper tax incentive policy will grow the economy by as much as $4 trillion to the federal treasury.
“The President is also directly impacting government spending through his efforts with the Department of Government Efficiency, aggressively cutting waste, fraud and abuse from our government programs.
“Spending on federal government programs has ballooned in recent years.  We have a responsibility to evaluate these spending increases to ensure these programs work efficiently and effectively for everyone.  
“The President has also undertaken, and will likely pursue more, deregulation efforts, which have as big of an impact on revenues and economic growth as tax policy does, and we should recognize that.
“The bottom line is, in addition to the actions that Congress can take, there are activities that the President is currently engaged in that will impact our fiscal policy by either reducing spending or increasing revenue, and we should take those into consideration.
“Congress must begin the process of restoring fiscal sanity by achieving deficit reduction, and spending reforms are the best way to achieve that goal. 
“In contrast, imposing the largest tax hike in our country’s history would be counterproductive by easing the glide path for even more spending.
“We will be having a very robust debate in the weeks ahead about the best way to deliver on President Trump’s agenda, and I look forward to those discussions.
“This budget resolution unlocks the process to allow us to strengthen our national security, secure our borders, permanently extend the Trump Tax Cuts and provide additional middle-class tax relief.”

MIL OSI USA News –