Servicemembers Home Ownership Tax Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. CRAPO. No, it does not. I appreciate the comments of my colleague from Florida, all my colleagues on the Senate floor today.
As the Senator from Texas indicated, one of the items of business before us today is my motion to commit this bill to the Finance Committee to take out the taxes that the President pledged would not be in there. The President pledged that no one who makes less than $250,000 as a family or $200,000 as an individual will pay any taxes under this bill. Yet in the very first 10 years, there is almost $500 billion of those taxes, a huge portion of which falls on people who are in that category.
As has been indicated, the real implementation of the bill on the spending side does not happen until 2014. If you count the amount of taxes that start when the spending starts, it is about $1.2 trillion of new taxes. Really, the only thing that is transparent--because this was all crafted behind closed doors--the only thing that is transparent is the gimmick.
The President said, as the Senator from Texas pointed out, that he would not let a bill come across his desk and get a signature if it spent more than $900 billion. First of all, you have to say: Wow, why do we need almost $1 trillion of new spending? But when they went behind closed doors and came up with this bill, it turns out it cost around $2 trillion or $2.5 trillion.
How did they make it meet the $900 billion test? They just said: Look, let's delay its implementation for long enough that the number comes out to under $900 billion. That happened to be the year 2014. So if you don't count the first 4 years and only count 6 of the 10, then in this budget window we are working in you can get your number. It is just remarkable.
Before I ask the Senator from South Dakota about his perspective, because I know he is working with the Senator from Texas on an amendment to try to correct this gimmick, I would like to respond to one quick point I know our opposition on the other side has continued to make, and that is they actually say there are no tax increases in the bill.
How do they say that? Here is the way they say it. There are subsidies in the bill that are provided to people with low income who do not have adequate access to insurance. Those subsidies total about $400 billion in the bill in the first 10 years, which is really only 6. They count those subsidies as a tax cut. The technical term given to them is a ``refundable tax credit,'' although $300 billion of those subsidies do not go to taxpayers. The people who receive them do not have a tax liability. But then they offset those subsidies against the taxes the rest of America will pay and say, therefore, there are no taxes in the bill.
I think that is another form of gimmickry. I ask my colleague from South Dakota what his perspective is on the types of gimmicks we are seeing and whether the American people should insist that these kinds of things be removed from the bill.
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