Political Quotes

On the recordJanuary 15, 2025
Madam President, I would make the point to my friend from Massachusetts that when Democrats used reconciliation, we used the reconciliation process to do the Inflation Reduction Act and help everyone. The Inflation Reduction Act meant green jobs to red States, and it meant less pollution for everyone. The Republicans are teeing up to use reconciliation to help big CEOs, billionaires, and big corporations that are already doing amazingly well. If you feel you are being left behind by those folks, it is because you are. Look at what CEO pay has done, rocketing skyward, compared to the pay of the top 1 percent--other folks in the C-suite who may not be the CEO--compared to typical worker wages down here. Most Americans are right here, and most of the benefit of this tax reform will go to these folks. CEOs are taking a larger and larger share for themselves of the resources of American corporations, leaving less and less to pay their workers, and that is the difference: rocketing upward and more or less flat. They want to make this worse through their reconciliation. If you want to add another backdrop to what is going on here, this is the share of America's revenue that is contributed by corporations. A lot of people in this body seem to want to go back to the good old days of the 1950s when things were whatever they were then. Well, back in the 1950s, more than 30 percent of America's revenue came from our corporate community.…
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Sheldon Whitehouse
Democratic · Rhode Island

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