Political Quotes

“Madam President, I rise today--in a few minutes, I am going to make a unanimous consent request for a bill that we refer to in our office as the American Deficit Relief Act; but before I do, I want to talk about why I am here. We have a program--if you all remember, during the COVID era, we came to this floor multiple times on a bipartisan basis to do everything we could to try to keep the economy afloat while we were dealing with something that hadn't happened in this country in 100 years called a pandemic. We did some things that were good; we did a few things that were proven to be not so good. One of those things is referred to as the employer retention credit, also known as the employer retention tax credit or ERC. It was under the CARES Act that we first implemented this bill, and at that time, we thought it was going to be about $55 billion reduced revenue to the government. I guess a different way of saying that is $55 billion remaining in the private sector. That was the concept behind so many of the things that we did in the COVID relief measures. But then we had--in the Appropriations Act of 2021 and the American Rescue Plan, we have added even additional reductions, extensions, that resulted in $86 billion in revenue not coming back to the Federal Government. Now the challenge that we have out there, like we have in a few of these programs, is we have had fraudsters run rampant--and probably none more than the employer retention tax credit.…”