Fighting Hunger Incentive Act of 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Speaker, this is the final amendment to the bill. It will not kill the bill or send it back to committee. If adopted, the bill will immediately proceed to final passage, as amended.

Mr. Speaker, this motion to recommit does two things. First, it ensures that the charities we support, we support in a fiscally responsible manner by extending these incentives for 2 years, rather than permanently in order to, number one, give taxpayers clarity, but also to give this Congress time to work together on tax reform without piling up huge new deficits.

Mr. Speaker, just yesterday in the Budget Committee, we had a hearing on the long-term deficits. Our Republican colleagues said they worry about the long-term deficit picture, and yet, in the last 6 weeks, they have added over $500 billion to the deficit, in violation of their own budget, including what we are doing today. So let's do this extension for 2 years and in a fiscally responsible manner.

The second thing this motion does is it denies the benefits of this legislation to any corporation that effectively renounces its U.S. citizenship and reincorporates overseas to avoid taxes. These so-called corporate inversions are generating outrage among families and small businesses around the country who can't simply tell the IRS they have moved their residence to some tax haven country because they don't want to pay their taxes.

In recent months, we have seen corporation after corporation jumping on this bandwagon. In fact, the financial press reports that Walgreens, the drugstore chain that has almost all of its stores right here in the United States, is thinking about moving to Switzerland.

Now here is the catch: Walgreens' management doesn't want to do it, but they are being driven by outside hedge fund stockholders to do this simply for tax purposes, so we have a situation where the management of an American company is being forced to decide between pressure from hedge funds to exploit a tax dodge and loyalty to the United States of America, the country where Walgreens was built into a company and where its customers are.

Just on Tuesday, Secretary Lew wrote to Congress expressing urgency to stop this fled of inversions now as we deal with broader tax reform. He called for a new sense of economic patriotism, and I couldn't agree with him more.

The ranking member of the Ways and Means Committee, Mr. Levin, and others have worked together to do this. We have got to get it done. The respected reporter, Alan Sloan, just wrote about this in Fortune magazine this month and said he was angry about this.

Mr. Speaker, we should all be angry. We should do something about it. We have already voted to say, on appropriations bills, that you shouldn't benefit from contracts if you are just going to move your residency overseas.

We should say the same thing with respect to tax benefits. You shouldn't get a tax benefit if you are renouncing your U.S. citizenship and deserting U.S. taxpayers and the country for tax-avoidance schemes.

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Neal), a member of the Ways and Means Committee.

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