U.S. Senator Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), Ranking Member of the Senate Finance Committee, delivered remarks on the Democrats’ reckless tax-and-spending bill, outlining what Americans can expect from the mislabeled Inflation Reduction Act of 2022: more taxes, more spending, higher prices, and an army of IRS auditors.
“It’s too many taxes, too much spending, too big of a burden on American people across all income categories.”
To watch Crapo’s full remarks, click HERE or the image above.
On the state of the economy:
The nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model says the “Inflation Reduction Act” will, if anything, raise inflation in the first few years, with a small and insignificant negative effect later in this decade. That same model concludes that there is “low confidence that the legislation will have any impact on inflation.”
But it does have an impact on all of us and our economy.
The bill does nothing to bring the economy out of stagnation and recession. Rather, the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022” gives us higher taxes, more spending, higher prices, and an army of IRS agents.
On tax hikes:
Hundreds of billions of dollars raised through taxes-–around $350 to $400 billion. There’s a new book minimum tax on corporations; a new tax on stock buybacks…
There’s—believe it or not—a new tax on gasoline, on oil and gas and refineries at the very time when our President has shut down production of oil and gas on our interior and offshore, and has stopped the Keystone XL pipeline, basically freezing America’s production and driving us from a state of energy independence to a state of energy dependence, where we have to ask our friends and often our enemies across the globe to increase their gas production to help us deal with our prices at the pump.
Everyone in America knows that corporations don’t bear the burden of the taxes we put on them. Who does? Workers, consumers and owners.
My colleagues are quick to say this is just rich people and rich companies who are “tax cheats.” But the owners of the corporations are primarily people in America who have retired and are leaning on a pension, or who have not yet retired or are trying to save money for retirement by putting their money into 401(k)s or other investment programs.
That’s who bears the burden of these taxes.
On the costs of the bill outweighing purported benefits:
In response to this data that we’ve been able to show about the very tax proposals in this bill the Democrats surprisingly have claimed that this Joint Tax Committee analysis isn’t valid because it didn’t include the effects of their spending that they were putting into the bill.
Well that’s a novel idea—it’s okay to raise taxes and it’s okay to put more tax burden on people making less than $400,000 because we’re going to be sending some subsidies to some of them.
So, we asked the JCT to include those subsidies in its analysis.
The analysis that incorporated the Obamacare subsidies shows that burdens of the proposed tax increases in the Democrats’ reckless bill would be so substantial and so widespread throughout all income categories—I repeat, all income categories—that no amount of temporary health care credits, or subsidies for $80,000 luxury SUVs, will overcome the tax increase burdens that would be overwhelmingly felt by lower- and middle-income Americans.
On prescription drug price controls:
The largest source of proposed savings in the Democrats’ bill is a system of bureaucratic drug price controls that will lead to higher launch prices, stifle growth, gut domestic manufacturing jobs and aid foreign adversaries, like China.
Senate Republicans have developed a commonsense alternative, based on more than two dozen solutions aimed at providing relief at the pharmacy counter while ensuring long-term access to life-saving new treatments and cures.
These are the kinds of solutions that our prescriptions drug pricing system requires, not an arbitrary and offensive federal price-fixing program.
On plans to supersize the IRS:
This bill proposes $80 billion in mandatory appropriations to the IRS. Let me give you a little perspective—the annual budget of the IRS is only about $12.6 billion. Nearly six times the annual budget of the current IRS. Of this, $45.6 billion is for enforcement purposes. That’s more than 57 percent, almost 60 percent of this $80 billion is for enforcement purposes.
Some estimate the $46 billion for an army of auditors may allow the IRS to hire as many as 87,000 new agents. That would make the IRS one of the largest federal agencies--larger than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined.
Original source can be found here.
