David Schweikert: “I love public policy by storytelling, but this being the Joint Economic Committee, let's actually go back to math. Madam…”

“I love public policy by storytelling, but this being the Joint Economic Committee, let's actually go back to math. Madam Chair, I would say to Mr. Beyer that I want to make sure I am communicating right, but at least we are down to, instead of the Armageddon, his number was, well, if you cut $2 trillion over 10 years, that is $200 billion. He is right, but that is actually not what is in the document here. It is functionally 1.2 with a shock absorber. Once again, I will give you the shock absorber, depending on what Ways and Means ultimately does. I thank the gentleman again. It shows we actually are fairly close on math. Another thing, and this is just someone who actually had worked on the tax reform in 2017 and the storytelling that has existed, particularly with my brothers and sisters on the left--Madam Chair, how would you feel if I could document to you that the post-2017 tax reform was more progressive? They were lower rates, but the top portion of income earners actually were paying a higher percentage of Federal income tax. When you start looking at this, remember, this is the distributional problem that I was going to try to walk through. I believe when you do the math here, 5 percent of the population are people making stunning amounts of money. If we want to have a discussion about whether they should pay more--guess what?--this opens up that discussion because there are no rates locked in to this.…”