Texas

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, on another matter, we have just arrived back in the Nation's Capital following a couple weeks back home, and I am glad to report that I was able to put that time to good use.

It is no secret that Texas is one of the best places in the country to do business, and that was certainly confirmed by my visit back home these last couple of weeks. I had the opportunity to visit with some of our most impressive businesses, from major manufacturing facilities to local, family-owned small businesses.

One such visit was to Daikin Texas Technology Park in Waller County, a suburb of Houston. There, I had the opportunity to tour their facility and attend a townhall with many of their employees. It is a truly impressive facility, employing more than 10,000 workers in our State and leading the world in the engineering and manufacturing of heating and air-conditioning products.

I also visited Alliance, TX, which is actually in Tarrant County or Fort Worth, which is now a massive, master-planned, mixed-use development in North Texas. Alliance is home to a number of important businesses, residential neighborhoods, and a thriving island inland port that boosts our country's supply chains. Located along an interstate with rail and air access, at 27,000 acres, Alliance is nearly double the size of Manhattan. From its inception in 1990 until today, Alliance has had an incredible $130 billion economic impact on our State.

Now, as you might imagine, one of the major themes of my discussion back home was the importance of our major task at hand here in the Senate, which is extending the expiring provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. While we made an important first step by passing the budget resolution in the House and the Senate, now the various committees of jurisdiction have their work cut out for them to pencil in the details of the precise policies that will then require the President's signature.

I spent a great deal of time back home hearing about the importance of these tax cuts and how they have benefited not just Texas families but small businesses throughout the State.

I know most of the time when we think about job creators, we think about Fortune 500 companies, but the fact is, in Texas and across the Nation, it is our small businesses that are the primary engine of job creation.

In the Dallas area, I met with Andy Ellard, the owner and general manager of Manda Machine Company, a third-generation, family-owned company in Dallas. Andy's grandparents founded the company in 1950, operating the business out of a back room in their house. Eventually, when the time came for them to retire, they sold the business to their daughter and her husband, who in turn sold it to their children. Now more than seven decades later, Andy and his siblings are the third- generation owners of Manda Machine Company. Now, if that is not the American dream, I don't know what is.

Andy told me how beneficial the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was for his family business. He said that over the last 3 years, he has been able to invest $80,000 in improving his business as a result of that legislation. So if the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is not extended at the end of this year, Andy and his employees in this small business will lose out on these benefits that have helped his business grow and thrive and provide employment for other families.

I visited another place in the Rio Grande Valley, this one called 5x5 Brewing Company. This is a veteran-owned, as it sounds, brewery which is dedicated to brotherhood, tradition, and, yes, you guessed it, great beer. This tradition is reflected on their menu as many of their signature beverages have names of military significance.

There at 5x5, we had a panel discussion of small business owners, including Luis Espindola, who is one of the coowners of 5x5 and a Marine Corps veteran. I met with other business owners at that panel, like Sarah Hammond, who owns Atlas Electrical Air Conditioning, Refrigeration & Plumbing Services. Sarah is known as a pillar of her community, serving as chair of the Rio Grande Valley Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and helping to oversee the management of Hummingbird Trailer Park. On top of this, she is involved with an organization dedicated to helping develop and empower other women business owners.

Then there was Jessica Delgado, who, having worked in the restaurant industry since age 16, now owns multiple restaurants, and she serves on the board of the Texas Restaurant Association and is a former chairwoman of the Texas Restaurant Foundation.

Another impressive woman small business owner was Hortencia Camargo, the owner of C4 Transport and Hacienda La Hortencia and a licensed Realtor in McAllen, TX, and she is also the founder of GRASP, which advocates for safe gun storage practices around children.

I also had the chance on this same panel to visit with representatives of the agricultural sector, including Dante Galeazzi--I am going to butcher Dante's name--Galeazzi, who is president and CEO of Texas International Produce Association, who emphasized to me how beneficial the Trump tax cuts were for Texas farmers and ranchers.

The message I heard from all of these impressive Texas entrepreneurs, job creators, and pillars of the community was simple: The Trump tax cuts helped their businesses grow and flourish, providing benefits not only to themselves and their families but to their employees and their broader communities.

Stories I heard from my fellow Texans like Andy, Luis, Sarah, Hortencia, Jessica, and others show how patently false the accusation is of our Democratic colleagues who somehow claim that this is just to benefit rich people. The fact of the matter is, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is not about helping the wealthy few at the expense of ordinary Americans, contrary to the Democratic talking points.

You know, I have been here working in Washington--or what I like to call the forward operating base in hostile territory--for some time now, and the truth is, you get these prevailing narratives that get repeated over and over and over again and written about by the press that simply have no basis in fact or reality.

The truth is, if we fail to extend the expiring provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, 62 percent of American taxpayers will see their taxes go up. Obviously--on top of a 40-year high inflation, which has raised input costs across the board by about 20 percent or more as a result of the policies of the previous administration, that obviously would have a tremendously negative impact on our economy and the standard of living, like the folks I mentioned back home.

This is really about lifting up hard-working men and women across the country. The tax cuts are about helping every hard-working American achieve their dreams. If President Trump's tax cuts are not extended, as I say, virtually everybody or at least a significant supermajority of American working families will see a tax increase. Texans specifically will see taxes increase about $3,000 on average. I am sure every single one of my constituents can think about somewhere better to spend that $3,000 than to write a check to the IRS. Small business owners like many of the folks that I met with these last 2 weeks would see tax hikes of nearly 50 percent, and working families could see their child tax credit cut in half, along with the standard deduction, which was dramatically increased in 2017.

Despite these hard facts, our Democratic colleagues continue to peddle the myth that President Trump's tax cuts are just for rich folks. It couldn't be more clear that these claims are nothing more than just that--myths.

So I urge my fellow Republican colleagues to never mind the naysayers across the aisle. The American people, on November 5, gave us a job to do. We took the important first step by passing the budget resolution just before the Senate adjourned, and now that we are back in Washington, it is time that we finish the job.

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