On the recordAugust 2, 2012
I thank Mr. Levin for all of his good work here. Mr. Speaker, let's start with a point of agreement. We should simplify the Tax Code. We should reform the Tax Code. It's an overly complicated mess, and it needs to be streamlined and reformed. We could start with some really simple things like getting rid of the special tax breaks and giveaways to Big Oil companies, but our Republican colleagues on this House floor have voted time and again against that. What we should not do is what we are hearing from a lot of our colleagues today, which is use the language of tax reform as a Trojan horse to provide another huge windfall to the wealthiest Americans at the expense of the rest of America, and yet that is exactly the direction that this bill takes us in. The main principle enshrined in this bill is the old Republican principle of trickle-down economics, the failed idea that we need to give more tax cuts to the folks at the very, very top, and somehow those benefits are going to trickle-down to everybody else. The problem, Mr. Speaker, is the American people have seen this movie before. That's no longer a theoretical idea. We ran a real-world experiment on that idea. It was called the 8 years of the Bush administration. We had tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the very wealthy in 2001 and 2003. At the end of those 8 years, what was the state of the economy? Net loss of private sector jobs, less than zero.…
