Job Protection and Recession Prevention Act of 2012
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Speaker, it's very important everyone understand the choice that's facing the House today. The Democrats will offer an amendment that will immediately extend tax relief to 100 percent of American people. The Senate has already passed that proposal; and if our Republican colleagues vote for it today, we can send it down to the White House, the President will sign it today.
Someone asked what we're going to do today. We could provide immediate tax relief to 98 percent of the American people.
Now, let's be clear. The Democratic proposal provides tax relief to everybody up to $250,000. What our Republican colleagues are saying is they will deny tax relief to 98 percent of the American people, unless people making over $250,000 get a bonus, an extra tax cut. In other words, unless the top 2 percent get an extra tax cut, nobody else gets anything.
It gets worse. We've heard a lot of talk here about small businesses, that we need to adopt the Republican plan in order to support small businesses. It's just not true.
The Democratic proposal, according to the nonpartisan Independent Joint Tax Committee, provides tax relief to 97 percent of the businesses that we're talking about here. In fact, they point out that the other 3 percent of businesses include about 20,000 pass-through businesses that make over $50 million a year.
Now, they may be good businesses, but these are not mom-and-pop businesses. The language we're hearing from our Republican colleagues would use small businesses as a cover to providing breaks for firms like Fortune 100 Pipeline Company Enterprise Products Partners; PricewaterhouseCoopers, good business, not a mom-and-pop; KKR Investment Banking; and guess what, Bain Capital, Bain Capital, the kind of small business that our Republican colleagues are trying to protect.
This is all really in service to the trickle-down ideology. We tried it in the Bush administration. At the end of 8 years we actually saw a net job loss.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. VAN HOLLEN. We tried trickle-down. We lived it; we saw a net job loss. But who picked up the tab? The rest of the country because it drove a huge hole in our deficit; and in order to deal with that, if we don't ask folks at the top to pay a little bit more, the rest of the country ends up picking up the tab. That's just not right, and it doesn't help the economy.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source