On the recordJanuary 9, 2018
Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman for laying out the essential agenda of the better deal proposal that the Democrats are putting forth. There are many, many elements to this. He mentioned education. Infrastructure is a piece of it, medical care, research, and so forth. Staying with the infrastructure, the Democrats have proposed several different ways to pay for the infrastructure program. Two of those, or one big one, is now gone. American corporations held $1 trillion--I think, almost $2 trillion-- of profits offshore. In the tax, bill that money cannot be retrieved. It is going into the coffers of the corporations if they bring it back to the United States, with a very small tax. One of the proposals brought forward by the Democrats was to repatriate, bring that money back to the United States and use it to support infrastructure, to use it to pay for immediate bonds, that we could then sell those bonds and use that money for infrastructure investment. That, of course, is gone as a result of the tax bill. There is another proposal that really, I think, dovetails with the extraordinary ramp-up of the stock market. A lot of that has to do with transactions, billions of transactions every day. A small fee of less than one one-hundredth of a penny on each transaction would raise billions of dollars and go directly to deal with what is a problem in the stock market, and that is computerized gambling that goes on in the stock market.…
