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Floor Speech
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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, last week, I came to the floor to debunk some of our Democratic colleagues' myths, disinformation, mistaken information about the work of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency.
Ronald Reagan liked to say that facts are stubborn things. It is important to talk about the facts because, hopefully, even in Washington, DC, we can agree on the basic facts. We may have some different interpretations, different policy preferences; but facts are facts are facts.
Today, I want to do the same thing about the Republican efforts to extend the upcoming expiration of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, or what is sometimes called the Trump tax cuts, through the budget reconciliation process.
Now, I don't blame the American people or anybody else, when listening to all the process we talk about, and just their eyes glazing over and just tuning us out. But the truth is, if we don't extend the expiring provisions of this tax bill that we passed back in 2017, during President Trump's first term, a vast majority of the American people will experience a tax increase. And that, of course, is on top of a 40-year high inflation during the Biden administration.
I guess nobody likes to talk about taxes because, on one hand, people say: Well, you know, people need to keep more of their hard-earned money. On the left, what they like to say is, you are giving billionaires a tax cut and leaving average wage earners and working families high and dry.
The truth is, on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act bill that we passed in 2017, the individual rates that will expire at the end of this year, if we don't continue the current policy using the budget reconciliation process, 62 percent of American taxpayers will experience a tax increase. That is not just millionaires and billionaires. That is everybody across the income spectrum.
On the left, our Democratic colleagues, some of them have been claiming that extending these tax cut provisions, as I said, will benefit the very rich at the expense of the rest of us. Our colleague from Massachusetts, Senator Markey, said:
Instead of fighting for working people, Trump is selling them out to give billionaires tax breaks.
There they go again.
And to no one's surprise, our colleague from Vermont, Senator Sanders, accused President Trump and Elon Musk of being ``oligarchs''-- ``oligarchs.'' He went on to say: ``The oligarchs''--that is the very rich people who have accumulated massive wealth, primarily in Russia and in Europe.
He said:
The oligarchs, with their tremendous resources, are waging a war on the working class of this country . . . the needs, the concerns, the ideas, the dreams of ordinary people are simply an impediment to what they, the oligarchs, are entitled to.
This accusation, if true, would be serious. But it is not true.
Representative Neal from Massachusetts, on the other side of the Capitol, went so far as to describe the Trump tax cuts as a ``reverse Robin Hood scam.''
And the list goes on and on and on. It is almost as if there is a concerted or orchestrated effort to use disinformation and propaganda to try to prejudice the American people against what it is we need to do in order to avoid this huge tax increase on the vast majority of Americans.
But let's set aside for a moment the fact that President Trump won this last election--promising to do what? Well, to extend the tax cuts that passed in 2017.
We know, before COVID hit, our economy was hitting on all cylinders. All cohorts of the population--African Americans, Hispanics, everyday working Americans--were experiencing record-high levels of employment, and the economy was the best it has been in my lifetime.
We know what happened these last 4 years. We know that Biden economics, or Bidenomics, as they like to call it--I don't know why in the world President Biden embraced the name ``Bidenomics,'' because it was associated with just so much misery and pain and a reduced standard of living by average working-class families across the country.
But we know that inflation--again, the 40-year high inflation that we have experienced in the last few years--has a disproportionate effect on low-income families. Now, that is no surprise because for your purchasing power, if you are on a fixed income or if you are just getting by paycheck to paycheck, the more inflation goes up, the more everything you buy costs.
And households across the spectrum are affected. We have seen that with our own eyes. And, in fact, I believe that was one of the reasons President Trump was elected in 2024.
When you spend a higher percentage of your paycheck on necessities, you have less of a cushion as prices increase. It is just common sense.
To add insult to injury, what did our Democratic colleagues do, when they were in the majority, in response to this massive inflation, which was the direct result of their policies? Well, they poured gasoline on the fire of inflation by using reconciliation to pass something called the Inflation Reduction Act.
Hold that thought for a minute because the Inflation Reduction Act, even at the time it passed, was evaluated and calculated not to reduce inflation.
Again, this is deception, really, at the outset, claiming that this Inflation Reduction Act maybe would have a negative impact on inflation. But President Biden himself later admitted it ``has less to do with reducing inflation''--that is what President Biden said--and was full of even more spending.
Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, would say the main cause of inflation is too much spending. You flood the economy with more dollars, and then, naturally, the price of everything tends to go up.
You don't need a Ph.D. economist like Dr. Larry Summers, who was probably the most prominent Democratic economist in our country, to tell anyone, especially not the President of the United States, that the answer to runaway inflation is not more government spending. But that is exactly what the Inflation Reduction Act did.
But that is not all. Not only did the Inflation Reduction Act do nothing for inflation, it actually did what Democrats have wrongly accused Republicans of doing. It benefited high earners at the expense of ordinary Americans.
You don't have to take my word for it. Just look at the data. Look at the facts.
By some estimates, the Inflation Reduction Act's electric vehicle and charging infrastructure provisions are projected to cost $180 billion over the next decade. The average cost of an electric vehicle was nearly $7,000 more than an internal combustion engine in 2023. So most working-class families, rather than pay $7,000 more for an electric vehicle--assuming they wanted an electric vehicle--have opted for the lower price internal combustion engine. So the ones who were taking advantage of the subsidy of $7,500, if you bought an EV, were wealthy people, by definition. So our Democratic colleagues, contrary to their propaganda and misinformation, have been the ones who have been providing your hard-earned dollars to subsidize wealthy people to buy luxury items like an electric vehicle.
Households that earn more than $200,000 reportedly represent 42.6 percent of electric vehicle sales. So people who make more than $200,000 a year represent 42.6 percent of electric vehicle sales, while those earning between $100,000 and $200,000 represented 32.9 percent. So if anything deserves to be called ``reverse Robin Hood,'' it would be the Democrats' Inflation Reduction Act.
Given the inflationary and regressive policies that the Democrats promoted during the last 4 years, it is ironic--and maybe you would say even laughable--to hear them accuse Republicans of being disconnected from everyday Americans. The reason why Republicans won the majority in both Houses and President Trump was reelected is because he connected with the concerns of everyday Americans, and particularly their concerns about overspending and inflation, not to mention the border.
So our Democratic colleagues really don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to the facts.
Failing to extend the Trump tax cuts would mean--this is according to the Wall Street Journal--that 62 percent of Americans would see a tax increase in 2026. On the other hand, extending the tax cuts would result in a 3.4 percent increase in after-tax incomes in 2026, by some estimates.
In the 2 years after President Trump signed his tax cuts into law, the median household income grew by $5,000. That is more money to spend on the necessities of life. And in the same period, real wages grew by nearly 5 percent.
Again, those are the facts. You would think that the facts would be something we could agree on, and then we can talk about policies. But, unfortunately, our Democratic colleagues seem to gloss right over those facts, while making wild accusations, which, frankly, are way off the mark.
Contrast this with President Biden's policies, slapping working families with an effective pay cut. With higher prices for food, gasoline, and other necessities, inflation-adjusted disposable income per capita during the Biden Presidency went down 7.7 percent. No wonder people felt squeezed, particularly if you earn a relatively modest income or you were a senior on a fixed income. Your purchasing power went down 7.7 percent.
The stark reality and the fact is, if Congress fails to extend the Trump tax cuts that expire at the end of this year, the average family of four making $75,000 a year will face a $1,500 tax increase next year. Working families will see the child tax credit cut in half.
So the facts are pretty obvious, as plain as the nose on your face: Extending the Trump tax cuts will actually benefit working families, and doing nothing, which is what our Democratic colleagues seem to want, will make them worse off.
At the end of the day, we work for the people we represent in our respective States. And, certainly, the voters in Alabama and Texas and in the majority of the country have made their preference clear. President Trump campaigned on extending these tax cuts. Republicans in the House and the Senate did the same. And we were rewarded with majorities in both Houses and with President Trump being reelected to the White House.
Working families in Texas and across the country voted for the President and the political party they thought would benefit them the most, especially their pocketbooks and their standard of living, and they voted resoundingly for President Trump and congressional Republicans. So it is simply not true to say that Republicans are somehow out of touch with the voters that gave us the majority in both Houses and President Trump reelected to the White House.
I know our Democratic colleagues are angry. They don't like being in the minority. It is not a lot of fun. But there is a reason. And they still haven't learned that the policies they promoted and that they sold to the American people were rejected on November 5. So sometimes, as Ronald Reagan liked to say--again--facts are stubborn things. So I would invite our colleagues across the aisle to look at the facts and maybe look in the mirror and say: What we were doing didn't work out so well, so maybe we ought to work with Republicans to change our policies.
The American people simply cannot afford a tax increase on top of 40- year-high inflation. I look forward to working with my Republican colleagues in the House and the Senate to deliver by extending the Trump tax cuts and to make life better for working families in Texas and across the country. And I would invite our Democratic colleagues to join us, if they will. I am not sure they are there yet. They are still pretty angry. They are still pretty upset. They are still--what do they call it? They call it the resistance. They are the party of the resistance. Well, right now, they are resisting what is best for the American people, and that is a bad place to be.
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