Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005--Conference Report--Part I

TAX INCREASE PREVENTION AND RECONCILIATION ACT OF 2005--CONFERENCE REPORT--Part I

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, am I right that we are prepared to proceed to the text of the conference reconciliation report?

The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator is correct. That is the pending business. There are 8 hours equally divided.

Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, before I explain what is in the conference report, I want to make clear what the tax policy is we are talking about. For 90 percent of the legislation that is before us, we are talking about maintaining existing tax policy as it has been, either from the 2001 Tax Reduction Act or the 2003 Tax Reduction Act. The reason I want to take some time to explain that--and that is not part of my explanation of the conference report--is because the public listening in and/or my colleagues are going to be confused over the words ``tax cuts.'' For 90 percent of this legislation, we are not cutting anybody's tax bill. What we are trying to do because of sunset is we are maintaining for the next year, or in some cases the next 5 years, existing tax policy. So I don't want anybody to come over and say we are cutting taxes.

If we don't pass this legislation in the year 2006, or in some cases in the years 2009 and 2010, people are going to get an automatic increase of taxes without a vote of Congress. So we are talking about maintaining existing tax policy. The reason we are talking about maintaining tax policy would be for two reasons. In the case of dividend and capital gains tax policy, the tax policy we adopted in 2003 is the reason we have created 5.2 million jobs.

That is why the economy is rolling. I know the public is listening. When they pay $3 for gas, the $3 for gas blinds them to the fact that we had 4.8 percent growth last quarter. It blinds them to the fact that we have 4.7 percent unemployment, which is practically full employment, and some economists would tell you it is full employment, or that we have a low inflation rate.

It seems that when my constituents, and probably constituents in every State, see high gasoline prices, that is all that is on their mind. I don't blame them because I put gasoline in my car--I don't have some driver do it, I put it in myself--and I know what the price of gasoline is. I know a lot of my constituents go out of the same convenience stores I do with a bottle of water. Bottled water, if you buy it in these small containers, you are paying about $8 a gallon for water and never complaining about the cost for water but complaining about $2.63 gas that you can buy in Des Moines, IA, this very weekend.

We are talking with regard to capital gains as maintaining existing tax policy. Just so everybody understands, we are not cutting anybody's taxes below what they are today. We are maintaining existing tax policy. But if we didn't take the action we are taking today, taxes would automatically go up in these areas by 33 percent, and for low-income people, who have zero capital tax gains, they go up--what would that be? One hundred percent. If they are not paying taxes today and they start paying taxes at the rate everybody else pays, it is a 100-percent increase in taxes.

I don't know why people would argue with us, when we have a zero capital gains for lower income people, that you would want to tax lower income people. But if we do not continue this tax policy, that is the case.

I wish to emphasize again what Chairman Greenspan has said about the 2003 tax policy we are continuing today, and that is that it is responsible for the economic recovery we have had of 18 quarters of economic growth and 5.2 million jobs being created.

The other part of the bill is to continue tax policy existing since 2001. That existing tax policy is that 22 million Americans--well, no, I better say it this way. That tax policy since 2001 has been that when we reduce people's taxes here on the one hand, we are not going to take it away from them on the other hand by having them hit by the alternative minimum tax. I am going to explain this in greater detail, but up front, a good part of this bill is to maintain the policy Senator Baucus and I have had in place since 2001 of holding people harmless from the alternative minimum tax. In other words, if you get a tax decrease here, we are not going to have the same people pay a tax over here on the alternative minimum tax.

As far as the alternative minimum tax is concerned, I think the best policy is what we did in the late 1990s when this body sent to President Clinton a bill to repeal the alternative minimum tax, and he vetoed it. I don't know how many Democrats we are going to have condemning us for not doing more on the alternative minimum tax. What more could you do than what we did in 1999 and repeal a very bad tax policy, the alternative minimum tax? And a Democratic President vetoed it. But they will probably be the ones complaining and crying the most because we are not doing more.

What we are talking about here today is maintaining present tax policy through this reconciliation bill for roughly 90 percent of it. Ten percent of it would be some change in tax policy. If people want details on that, I will be glad to go into that.

Maybe another thing I ought to explain--and it is more personal because I am going to be the chief negotiator for the Senate on this bill because I am chairman of the Senate Finance Committee--I have negotiated for a long period of time with Chairman Thomas, and everything has worked out fine as compromises have to work out fine, and I think I have done a very good job of protecting the Senate's position.

Let me remind everybody, all of my colleagues, particularly Republicans, particularly about a telephone call from the President on the Thursday before we began our Easter break--the exact date I don't have in mind--and in meetings with the leader and the Speaker and all this, we were just very anxious to get something done before Easter. At that point, the position of the House was that we were not going to have hold harmless on AMT. Consequently, I didn't agree to this agreement. I believe I probably disappointed a lot of my colleagues and the leader and the Speaker and the President of the United States because I just didn't, how would you say, surrender to a House position that we were doing too much on AMT.

Our policy since 2001 has been hold harmless, and I believe that is what we passed three times on the floor of the Senate: in November last year, January this year, February of this year, as the Democrats made us go through three periods of 3 days of debate on the same tax bill that ended up passing by a bipartisan majority of somewhere between 64 and 67. So it has been the policy of the Senate since 2001, reaffirmed by three votes of this body in the last 6 months, to hold harmless.

I didn't believe I was doing 66 Senators a favor by agreeing to something which would have 3.5 million--let's say more accurately 2.5 to 3 million taxpayers being hit by the alternative minimum tax out of the 22 million to whom I have already referred. So it took a little longer, and here we are--what, May 11, 1 month later than when it originally happened. But we have hold harmless in this bill. Hold harmless is in this bill.

Everything is going smoothly between Chairman Thomas and me. Nobody is going to believe that because if you read the papers, we are always at each other's throat. You know, those characterizations are entirely wrong. He has strong convictions about tax policy, and he is the negotiator for the U.S. House of Representatives. He has a right to stand firmly for their positions, but I have a responsibility to stand firmly for the Senate position, with the understanding that someplace there are some compromises. I guess enough said on that point.

I have mentioned, in summation, before I go into explanation about the conference report, and this is the third time, but it cannot be said too many times because I don't know how many times you are going to hear today--in fact, we ought to count how many times we are going to say we are cutting taxes, we are cutting taxes, we are cutting taxes. Would you keep track of that for me? I want to hear how many times that is used. We are not cutting anybody's tax. Maybe we ought be cutting people's taxes, but we are not. We are maintaining existing tax policy as expressed by this body in the 2001 and 2003 tax bill so 22 million Americans don't get hit by the alternative minimum tax and so that we have incentives for investment and taxes don't go up, and capital gains and dividends, without a vote of the people in 2009 and 2010; so that we keep the incentives Chairman Greenspan said are the reason we are having the economic recovery we have had for 18 quarters, creating 5.2 million jobs, 4.8 percent economic growth, 4.7 percent unemployment, et cetera.

We have moved to the final step in the tax reconciliation process to which I have already referred that we dealt with three times and probably 3 days each time during November, January, and February. We have an agreement of the conferees from the House and Senate on a conference report. The basic objective of this conference was to produce a conference report that will pass both the Senate and the House and be sent to the President.

To achieve that objective, we needed to focus our efforts on a true bipartisan, bicameral compromise. As I said and will probably say again today--but you have heard me say it over the last 3 months to my colleague and friend, Senator Baucus--a compromise must be bicameral. Likewise, I said to Chairman Thomas of the House and to House conferees that the compromise should be bipartisan.

In the Senate, we passed a reconciliation bill for the second time but the contents of the bill for a third time, on February 2, with a bipartisan vote that included 66 Senators. So that obviously includes a vast number of Democrats.

My preference was to continue working in conference to produce a bipartisan compromise that could pass in the Senate. Unfortunately, I doubt if we will get 66 votes for this conference report. But I am very hopeful that we will pick up some Democratic votes.

Going into conference, everybody knew that the House bill and the Senate bill were significantly different. The centerpiece of the House bill was a 2-year extension of the 15-percent maximum tax rate on dividends and capital gains and the zero percent tax rate that will apply to taxpayers in the lowest two tax brackets. Such an extension would continue the bipartisan tax policy enacted in 2003, a policy which has been vital to our economy's recovery and continued growth.

The centerpiece of the Senate bill was a 1-year extension and modification of the alternative minimum tax hold-harmless provisions. This provision would keep 15 million American families from being hit by the stealth tax. The AMT is a stealth tax because you really never know when you are going to be hit by it. Hitting Americans with such a stealth tax, the alternative minimum tax, is wrong. So, as I said before, the AMT should be abolished. It is not abolished. We did vote to abolish it in the late 1990s, but President Clinton vetoed that. So here we are, since 2001, working in a bipartisan way to do what we call hold harmless.

As I said at that particular time, my highest priority was to make sure we kept our promise to make certain that no additional taxpayers are brought into the AMT system on an annual basis, and that is the purpose of the Senate's hold-harmless provision on alternative minimum tax.

I will expand on that notion for a moment and be somewhat repeating myself from my extemporaneous remarks, but exactly 5 years ago today, May 11, 2001, Senator Baucus and I announced the bipartisan deal that became the basis for historic 2001 bipartisan tax relief legislation. I say historic because taxes were as high as they had ever been in the history of the country as a percentage of the gross national product.

When newly elected President Bush released his budget for that first year in 2001, his tax relief plan did not contain a general hold harmless on the alternative minimum tax, and the House passed a bill that did not have hold harmless provisions for the alternative minimum tax. When Senator Baucus and I were negotiating the bipartisan plan, we agreed on that bedrock principle of hold harmless--hold harmless on AMT so no new people would get hit with it. Because they got a tax decrease over here, we should not take their taxes away over here.

We agreed to make sure the AMT would not take the tax relief we were providing. This is how we came up with the concept we refer to as hold harmless. To me, it goes to a fundamental principle of transparency in government: Don't promise taxpayers relief that you know they are not going to really get.

Some of my friends on this side of the aisle--meaning Republicans--rightly complain about doubletalk on alternative minimum tax that we hear from Members on the other side, Democratic Members, the Senators from so-called blue States. You remember the blue-red map in Presidential elections of 2000 and 2004? Blue States generally go for Democratic candidates for President, red States go for Republican candidates for President.

I am going to refer to the blue States which are those that generally vote Democratic. Senators from these States are generally hostile to the tax relief we have provided in 2001 and provided again in 2003, and seem to be sympathetic to tax hikes. They take this position despite the fact that their constituents in these blue States, and represented for the most part by Democratic Senators, tend to bear the highest per capita Federal tax burden. The hostility of these Members seems to grow to a white-hot intensity when anybody above, say, $100,000 in income benefits from any tax relief package.

It has always been a strange disconnect to those of us on this Republican side of the aisle because that intensity--and at times what appears to be outright anger--seems to grow as the States' shade of blue grows much darker. Ironically, the per capita income, living costs, and Federal tax burdens tend to rise as the shade of the State tends to get a darker blue. The implication appears to be that constituents in these blue States should be happy to bear this high tax burden as their Senators fight against tax relief for them. In fact, Members from blue States seem to have no limit to the level of Federal taxes they believe folks in their States should bear. Taxes can never be too high, goes the rationale, as long as we keep growing the public's dependence on more Federal programs.

When Members on the Republican side hear demagoguery on taxes emanating from Members from blue States on a daily basis that we shouldn't have tax cuts for high-income people, they ask, Why do these folks then seem to change their mind when we are talking about the alternative minimum tax? As you tend to get intense debate that we ought to do something about the alternative minimum tax from the same Senators who are complaining because we are giving too much tax relief to high-income people in their various States, and the AMT happens to most dramatically impact taxpayers between $100,000 and $500,000. How is this any different from other forms of tax relief? They are hot and heavy to have the AMT which helps their taxpayers in blue States, but they are not hot and heavy to have tax relief in the first instance when you vote to reduce tax rates.

If I go to some extent talking about this contradiction, it is a contradiction that affects and bothers a lot of people on the Republican side of the aisle. It is an argument we do not understand. Frankly, it is a sentiment I have to overcome in my caucuses as I argue for the AMT and for tax relief; and I have had to argue this contradiction particularly with my House counterparts as we go to conference to negotiate differences between the House and Senate and try to explain to them why we need to do a hold-harmless provision on AMT.

I had people from the other body who would say, What is wrong with having an alternative minimum tax hit people in blue States who are in the high bracket because their Senators are arguing we shouldn't reduce the tax rates in the first place? It is a very difficult thing to argue that sort of contradiction. I think it would help me a lot if they would get off this kick.

I want to take a chart on the AMT and explain some of what we are talking about. This chart will show the alternative minimum tax hold-harmless benefits that have always been the bedrock of our tax bill since 2001 because it is something Senator Baucus and I agreed on to be our tax policy, how the hold harmless benefits taxpayers everywhere but is especially important in the blue States.

We don't have a map with blue States versus red States. But the chart you are looking at, and which I need to explain, is based upon 2003 return data because it is the most up-to-date data we have. But projecting out the numbers, we think it would be entirely possible and intellectually honest to double the 2003 figures. As a rule of thumb, I am going to do that as I explain California being a blue State with 2 million taxpayers; Texas, not a blue State, a red State, but 1.2 million; Florida, a blue State, 900,000 taxpayers affected if we don't do something about the alternative minimum tax as we have it in this legislation; Illinois, a blue State, 848,000; New York, a blue State, 822,000; Pennsylvania, 694,000; Michigan, 640,000; New Jersey, 632,000; Virginia, 568,000; and Massachusetts, 490,000.

I go to this length because Senators, particularly on the Democratic side of the aisle, might think about voting against this bill; that in all these States so many hundreds of thousands of people are going to be hit by the alternative minimum tax if you do not help us get this bill passed. Those are people who were not hit in 2005 but who will be hit when they file on 2006 income.

The bottom line is in blue States versus red States implications shouldn't decide this issue. As you can see, there are plenty of red States affected as well as blue States. Again, that shouldn't matter. We ought to do the right thing--and the right thing would be to pass this bill and continue the hold-harmless policy Senator Baucus and I have led the Senate through in the 2001 and 2003 tax bills, and also on the Senate consideration of hold harmless in this conference report.

Senator Baucus and I understood that when we took resources in the Finance Committee package to make sure that for at least 5 years this broad-based tax relief we promised will not be undermined by the alternative minimum tax.

Moving on, this conference agreement also contains some loophole closures and tax-shelter-fighting provisions that raise revenue. There are two reasons to raise revenue. The most important one is when we have tax shelters that allow people to cheat on their income tax and when we have loopholes that don't make sense, they ought to be closed as a matter of fairness to all taxpayers. But they also raise some revenue. We need some revenue in this bill to offset some provisions of this bill so we didn't exceed the $70 billion reconciliation instructions of Congress for us in the Finance Committee.

The House bill, however, didn't contain any revenue raisers. Although we didn't come back with all the loophole closures, especially clarification of something that needs to be done with the economic substance doctrine defined, and the House conferees very much oppose any change in that, we did make some headway on loophole closings and closing tax shelter abuse.

Let me go back to economic substance. My argument for it: It raises a lot of revenue. But we have had several courts that have instructed Congress--and courts cannot make Congress do anything we don't want to do--to define economic substance. By defining it, it brings in some revenue.

I don't understand why it shouldn't be defined. My feeling is there are a lot of K Street lobbyists and maybe a lot of lobbyists who aren't on K Street who benefit from the loopholes that can stretch economic substance in the Tax Code.

The Senate bill and the House bill that went to conference also shared some similarities. Both bills sought to extend and extend and in some cases modify certain provisions that expire at the end of 2005--provisions such as the research and development credit, increase small business expense, cost recovery for leasehold improvements, the savers credit, or better said, the small savers credit; the deduction for State and local sales tax in those States that is not particularly valuable to those States that don't have a State income tax; the qualified tuition deduction for college; and teachers' classroom expense deductions. Local teachers who spend money out of their own pockets to bring tools to the classroom can deduct that from their income tax.

A true bicameral compromise would merge both bills in a way that takes care of these common extenders which I mentioned, and many more I did not mention.

Second, it accommodates the centerpieces of each bill which, as I have explained this morning, are the AMT hold-harmless provisions on the one hand and the extension of the dividends and capital gains tax provisions as they now exist, not cutting capital gains and dividend taxes below what they are presently, and providing as much tax relief as possible by using appropriate revenue-raising measures.

We ended up with cornerstones of each bill in this conference report and made progress on some of the revenue raisers, meaning loophole closings, and tax shelter abuse closings. The extenders for the most part--I guess almost entirely--will be addressed in another vehicle. They are not part of this conference report. We have compromised and agreed on that point. We also agreed to resolve key Senate priorities in the extender vehicle.

Can I tell Members exactly what is going to be in that vehicle? I can't because we are still negotiating. What I can tell Members is we had good preliminary negotiations and I feel we have a solid foundation to come to a fair compromise on these issues. The final determination of those key Senate priorities will depend upon the vehicle that we will go with and other parts of the agreement when it is finalized.

After laying out the basic structure of the conference agreement and the Senate's key provision, AMT hold harmless, I want to talk about the parts of the agreement the House needed.

The dividend and capital gains provisions in the House bill were met by strong opposition from the other side.

A principal argument against this policy made over and over again by the Democrats is that it is simply a tax cut for high-income people. I use the words ``tax cut,'' and that brings me to emphasize once again that if anybody says we are cutting taxes, we are maintaining existing tax policy for an additional number of years. Without doing that, then, we would get an automatic increase in taxes basically undercutting what Chairman Greenspan has said about the goose that laid the golden egg--the tax policy we adopted in 2003 being responsible for the 18 quarters of economic growth which we have had.

In support of their claim, Democrats cite distorted statistics that include taxpayers who don't receive dividends or capital gains. They fail to take into account the zero percent rate for lower income taxpayers in 2008 and ignore the size of the overall income tax liability that taxpayers bear.

My analysis of 2005 data that I received from the Joint Committee on Taxation shows that lower income taxpayers actually have more at stake than higher income taxpayers. The Joint Committee on Taxation is not a Republican or Democratic operation. These are professional people who spend whatever time they are in public service on this committee becoming experts on the Tax Code, the economic implications of tax policy, and whether it is good or bad for the economy, whether it brings in more or less money to the Federal Treasury. These are not people wearing a Republican hat or a Democratic hat. My quoting of their statistics ought to have a great deal of credibility because they are professional people.

This is 2005 data received from the Joint Committee on Taxation showing lower income taxpayers actually have more at stake than higher income taxpayers. Of course, I don't mean to speak in absolute dollar amounts because I cannot say that, but I can say in percentage advantage to various income classes that lower income taxpayers have more at stake than higher income taxpayers. It is common sense for me to say that because higher income taxpayers receive higher tax cuts measured in dollar terms, quite simply, because they pay more taxes to begin with. But the extension of the lower rates on dividends and capital gains will give lower income taxpayers greater tax savings as a percentage of their total tax liability.

I will refer to a couple of charts that summarize tax savings as a percentage of total income tax liability of average gross income levels. The chart illustrates the dividend tax savings as a percentage of the total tax liability for those who benefit from the reduced rates. The savings percentages include 2008 savings, when the tax rate for lower income taxpayers drops to zero percent. That we will continue, then, for an additional period of time. That is the rate we are talking about extending.

Based on my staff's analysis of the Joint Committee on Taxation data, taxpayers with adjusted gross income of less than $50,000 will save 7.6 percent of their total income tax bills and seniors will save 17.1 percent. Those making more than $200,000 will save a lot less as a percentage of their taxes paid, at 2.2 percent.

Opponents of this policy want to persecute these taxpayers--I point to those earning $200,000 and over--by taking back their 2.2 percent savings.

At the same time, they would punish these taxpayers, those under $50,000 at the lower income level, by taking away their 7.6 percent savings and punish the seniors in the same tax bracket by taking away their 17.1 percent savings.

One cannot help but wonder, as we are all concerned about senior citizens having a decent opportunity to have a greater retirement, one that is comfortable as when they worked, with a chance to keep their tax savings at what they are right now, and not raise them or lower them anymore--but raise their taxes by 17.1 percent?

This chart illustrates the relative savings from reduced capital gains taxes across the alternative minimum tax levels. Now, here again, extending the lower tax rates will give a bigger percentage reduction in their tax bill for taxpayers making less than $50,000. Opponents of this policy want to persecute these taxpayers earning $200,000 and over by taking back their 7.6 percent savings. But that also has a negative impact, then, upon lower income people, people making $50,000 and under, by taking away their 10.2 percent savings. And they would punish senior citizens in that same tax bracket of $50,000 and under, by taking away their 13.2 percent savings.

Extending this tax policy, not cutting taxes but extending existing tax policy, will provide meaningful tax savings to taxpayers across the income spectrum. Lower income taxpayers will save more than higher income taxpayers when measured as a percentage of total tax liability.

Extending the lower rates will allow millions of Americans to keep more of their money to spend or add to their savings through reinvestment in the economy rather than give it to those in Government to spend for them.

Those on the other side describe the capital gains and the dividends provisions as applying to only a few high-income taxpayers. The reality is reflected in the following chart. Take a look at capital gains. I will not go through every State, but in the State of California, 839,616 families and individual taxpayers report capital gains. If you take a look at the dividend statistic in California, 2,053,398 families and individual taxpayers report dividends.

I will not take time to go through all of these, but if you think the economy growing at 4.8 percent, as Chairman Greenspan says, is because of the tax policies of 2003, and we have the economy growing, why would you want to hit these families with a big tax increase on capital gains and dividends? Two million more families in California is only one State. Why would you want to hit them again? It seems to me in California you would want to keep the economy growing, as we want to keep the economy growing in Iowa.

We know that 7.5 million families and individuals across the country with capital gains are not all millionaires, obviously. We know that 19 million families and individuals across the country with dividends are not millionaires. These numbers are based on 2003 IRS data.

The Joint Tax Committee estimates for 2005 over 21 million returns will report dividends savings and 6 million of the returns will be filed by senior citizens. Nearly 12 million returns will report capital gains tax savings with almost 4 million people who are senior citizens. These families and individuals are not millionaires.

Yet to listen to some on the other side, all of these people are wealthy. That false assertion is going to be repeated time and time and time again. That false assertion in itself is their justification for opposing this conference report, putting in jeopardy what Chairman Greenspan said is a reason for economic recovery, therefore putting in jeopardy economic recovery and taxing all of these people when this sunsets by taxes going up automatically, because there will not be a vote of Congress, by an increase of 33 percent. It does not make sense.

To sum up, my goal for this conference was to produce a true bipartisan bicameral compromise with both bills. A compromise should accommodate the centerpiece of each bill, meaning the House bill and the Senate bill. That includes the AMT relief in the Senate bill and the dividends and capital gains relief in the House bill, take care of common extenders and maximize tax relief by using appropriate revenue-raising measures. This bill contains the cornerstone of each body's bill. It is conditioned upon an agreement between the Ways and Means and Committee and Finance to process the extenders and other issues on later vehicles. I believe the conference agreement and collateral agreement on extenders is a fair outcome of the House and Senate.

To make everything relatively clear, I did not make up my mind to sign this conference report until we had 6 hours of negotiations with the House of Representatives last Friday. Even though we had an agreement on reconciliation, I wanted to make sure there was some understanding on what we were going to have in the follow-on bill, everything that could not be included in the conference report. As I said, it is somewhat under negotiation, but I am satisfied we have enough of an agreement that I can come back and say the things that the Senate, for the most part, is concerned about, that are very basic to our economic growth, will be included in a bill that will come before the Senate shortly.

I yield the floor.

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, first, I will respond to some of the things that Senator Baucus brought up in his opening statement. He complimented me in our working through this, and I always have a good working relationship with Senator Baucus. And 90 percent of the time, or maybe more, he and I are on the same side of the fence. I remind people in the Senate that on three occasions, in November and January and February, we were on the same side of the fence on this issue.

The difference between us now is related to the extension of the capital gains and dividend tax credit that was not in the Senate bill at that particular time. And since it is not in the conference report, that is one of the reasons he and I are on separate sides of the fence.

I will respond to some of the points he made on extenders because they are not in the conference report. Senator Baucus's criticism is right that they are not in this bill. They are, however, covered in a collateral agreement between tax-writing committees and congressional leadership. And on a document basis for my saying that we will be dealing with those, even though they are not in the conference report, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the RECORD a joint statement on a collateral extenders agreement, that they will be in a follow-on piece of legislation that ought to be before the Senate very quickly. These are not in dispute between the House and Senate. This is a product under negotiation, but these issues are no longer under negotiation.

There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:

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http://thomas.loc.gov/