Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, it is nice to hear my colleague's words. I would also want to mention a few things about the same issue.

Mr. President, it has been nearly 3 weeks since the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL. Still, unfortunately, the majority leader hasn't committed to any floor time for the debate on the issue of gun safety--no time to debate universal background checks, a policy that over 90 percent of Americans support, including the vast majority of gun owners; no time to debate protective orders to allow law enforcement to temporarily disarm individuals who have shown credible signs of being a harm to themselves or others, especially relevant after Parkland; no time to at least have a debate on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines on the floor of the Senate.

The kids who survived that horrific shooting are speaking up and speaking out and are demanding that we address this issue head-on. I believe they are moving the conscience of the Nation. I met with them. They are fine young men and women. Instead of just cursing the darkness after what they went through with the losses of friends and colleagues they suffered, they are trying to light a candle, urging us to debate and do something real. Yet, the majority leader is moving to a banking bill today with no promise of time to consider a package of commonsense gun safety measures.

We need to debate them on the floor. We can't just try to do one little bill by UC with no debate or put it into some other big bill. This needs a national debate. This issue is consuming America, and for the Senate to turn its back and do nothing, or to try to just slip some minor measure through, doesn't work.

Last week, America watched President Trump whipsaw on gun safety issues in a matter of days. All of America felt pretty good when the President met with a bipartisan group. He seemed to be open to tackling gun safety in a bipartisan way in a nationally televised meeting. Then, the next day, he met with the NRA behind closed doors and seems to once again have backed off.

It is a show we have seen before, and it is getting old. Too many times we have watched the President say the right things when the cameras are on but refuse to follow through the moment they are switched off--oftentimes doing a 180-degree reversal of his position.

On the issue of gun safety, just like the issue of immigration, we could find a bipartisan consensus. It is very possible, but it requires the President to show some leadership, some followthrough, and some consistency. Otherwise, Congress will do what it has done after every mass shooting for the past decade--nothing.

Those brave, young students will be here in a few weeks, having watched Congress do nothing again. What a black mark that will be-- lowering the even low ratings of this body. Republican Tax Bill

Mr. President, on to another matter, the Republican tax bill. Over and over, we have heard the Republican mantra that their tax bill was aimed at giving working Americans a boost. Yet every analysis showed that when you looked at the actual policy, the lion's share of the tax cuts are going to corporations and the richest 1 percent. According to one study, 83 percent of the benefits from the Republican tax bill go to the top 1 percent of earners.

Don't worry, our Republican friends say, that money will trickle down to workers, but trickle-down economics has never worked. It has failed time and again. Most of our Republican colleagues are even afraid to admit that the majority of the tax cuts go to the very wealthy. They simply say it is helping working people, but their mechanism of trickle-down is something they will not utter in public.

Instead of giving workers major wage increases, hiring new workers, or investing in new equipment and research, the most popular use of the savings from the tax bill for corporations is corporate share buybacks. That is from the big corporations. Already, big corporations have announced more than $200 billion in share buybacks this year. We just started March, and already, corporations are on pace to spend over $1 trillion this year buying back their own stock.

The problem here is, share buybacks don't really help workers. They don't really help grow the economy. They are a quick way for a big corporation to take more of their stock off the market, raising the value of the shares. Who benefits? Well, corporate executives who own lots of these shares and wealthy shareholders who hold the vast preponderance of the shares.

As one economist told Bloomberg, ``You're not going to get the macro- economic benefit the administration thought it was going to get from its tax cuts. It's going to go to the areas that don't stimulate growth,'' namely, buybacks, dividends. An analysis by Just Capital, which the New York Times called ``one of the most detailed accountings to date'' of how companies are spending the windfall from tax reform, finds that ``just 6% of capital allocated so far is going to [employees], while 58% is going to shareholders in the form of dividends, share buy-backs, or retained earnings.'' That is 6 percent for the workers and nearly 60 percent to share buybacks and other corporate benefits.

Today, the Joint Economic Committee, led by our wonderful ranking member, Senator Heinrich, pointed out that if you distributed the savings that went to just one big company--Berkshire Hathaway, which gained $29 billion as a result of the tax bill--you could give a $1,000 bonus to 29 million Americans.

This is amazing. That is the equivalent of every employee in Arizona, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia combined from just one company's worth of savings. The public is beginning to realize what is going on here. They see they are putting their children and grandchildren into deep debt, not to benefit themselves, the workers, preponderantly, but to benefit corporate leadership, owners of shares--the vast preponderance of whom are in the top 10 percent of American wealth.

Corporations are not putting the vast preponderance of the money where they should be--raising the salaries of workers or increasing productivity of the company by investing in new machinery and new techniques. No; it is that quick hit, the stock buyback.

It goes to show how beneficial tax reform could have been if it were aimed at the middle class and those struggling to reach it. Instead, the Republicans made a conscious effort to give corporations and the wealthiest Americans the bulk of the tax cuts and promised it would trickle down to everyone else. Unfortunately, past is prologue, and corporate America will invest in what is best for corporate America, while working America is getting left behind.

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