Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor Debbie Davis, editor and assistant publisher of The Davis Enterprise, for her service to the Davis community and to congratulate her on her retirement.

For over 38 years, Ms. Davis has helped unite and inform the Davis community through her work at The Davis Enterprise. Her work expertise has earned her a reputation as a respected journalist, and there is no doubt in my mind that her legacy will leave a lasting impact on the Davis community.

The breadth of Ms. Davis' accomplishments is in itself an achievement, and some of her most notable milestones include developing the 2017 centennial magazine that celebrated the businesses and leaders that built the Davis community, the ``Those Who Make Memories'' book, and over 10,700 editions of The Davis Enterprise.

I speak on behalf of the entire Davis community when I say thank you to Debbie Davis for her generous service to our community. I wish her the best as she enjoys her well-deserved retirement.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleagues for reminding us of the enormously important work that was done for tomorrow's session here on the floor and here in the Capitol, where he will be lying in state.

I recall very clearly the day that my wife and I met Reverend Graham in Sacramento when he was having one of his ministries there in the city. We attended, and it was an incredible experience. We met with him personally after the event. And like the millions and, indeed, billions of people that heard him speak, we, too, were moved.

Earlier, when I learned of his passing, I said that, while he is no longer with us physically, his work remains with us. His speeches, his recordings, and his videos are all there for future generations and, indeed, for our generation. So I thank my colleagues for bringing to our attention what is a profoundly important event here in the Nation's Capitol when Reverend Billy Graham lies in state.

Mr. Speaker, there are a couple of other things I would like to bring to the attention of the floor. One, fortunately, is not a death, but rather a retirement. This one is for Debbie Davis, the editor and assistant publisher of the Davis Enterprise, for her service to the Davis community and to congratulate her on her retirement.

For over 38 years, Ms. Davis has helped unite and inform the Davis community through her work at the Davis Enterprise, the local paper. Her work expertise earned her a reputation as a respected journalist, and there is no doubt in my mind that her legacy will have a lasting impact on the Davis community.

The breadth of Ms. Davis' accomplishment is in itself an achievement. Some of her most notable milestones include the development of the 2017 centennial magazine that celebrated the businesses and leaders that built the Davis community, the ``Those Who Make Memories'' book, and over 10,700 editions have been used at the Davis Enterprise.

I speak on behalf of the entire Davis community when I say ``thank you'' to Debbie Davis for her generous service to the community of Davis, California. We all wish her the best as she enjoys her well- deserved retirement.

If I might, Mr. Speaker, move on to other events, some of them events here in Washington, D.C., in the days ahead. If I might retrieve my chart, Mr. Speaker. Normally I would bring this out with me, but I wanted to cover the Billy Graham event. I think he might have enjoyed this particular saying from Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I use this whenever I start my presentations here on the floor because it reminds me of values, at least a value that I think ought to be basic to our work here in Congress. So allow me to repeat not for the first, but maybe for another dozen times:

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the

abundance of those who have much. It is whether we provide

enough for those who have too little.

The test of our progress. It is interesting that there is so much we need to do, so much we need to do here in America, particularly for those who have too little. It is interesting to note what has actually happened over the last several years.

Are we really making progress?

Well, I think we ought to spend some moments talking about our infrastructure.

Are we making progress?

Well, no, not really. We once were the most advanced infrastructure-- highways, rail systems, transit systems, airports, maritime ports--in the world. We had great drinking water systems. You could come to America and drink water anywhere and not have to worry about the quality or the contamination of that water.

But here it is from the American Society of Civil Engineers: aviation, we are ranked a D; bridges, a C; dams, a D; drinking water, a D; parks and recreation, a D; ports, a C; rail, we are doing okay; roads, a D--we see that every day when we travel back and forth.

School systems--and we want to talk about safe schools; lots of talk as a result of the tragic shooting in Florida about making schools safe. Well, schools really rank in the D category. Whether they are safe or not, they are ranking as Ds.

Transit is a D. Declining wastewater is a D.

We are familiar with places around the Nation.

This bridge, about 6 years ago, this was a bridge that connected the United States to Canada. This was the Interstate 5 bridge, a road, Interstate highway from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Tijuana, Mexico. Infrastructure. The bridge collapsed.

On the water side of life, I think most of us would be familiar that, 1 year ago, the spillway at the Oroville Dam, the highest dam in the United States and quite possibly in the world, gave way during the heavy rains of the

2017 year, and we created the biggest waterfall in the world. It went on for some time.

It also threatened the lives of over 200,000 people downstream that had less than 3 hours to evacuate; because had this spillway further eroded, a 30-foot wall of water would have descended upon those communities and the water would have been more than 50 feet deep within 1 hour. Fortunately, the rain stopped; otherwise, who knows.

So we have a need for infrastructure. Just 2 weeks ago, the President announced his great big infrastructure plan. Two hundred billion new dollars, $1.5 trillion of public and private investment beyond the Federal participation. Sounds good until you read the big print; not even the small print, but the big print.

So what does the Trump infrastructure plan bring to us? Well, the $200 billion of Federal money, it is not new money; it is existing money, it is the reprogramming of existing money. In fact, it takes $168 billion from existing transportation programs, highways and transit, and repurposes it over to some new programs that are supposed to do the same thing. No new money; just money taken from an existing program that is working, underfunded to be sure, but working, and transferred over to a new program that the President can then put his gold letters, T-R-U-M-P, on it, and, wow, what a wonderful thing that has been done. Oh, yeah. Well, confusion and the like.

It also paves the way; it doesn't pave the highways, but it does pave the way for Wall Street and foreign investors to set up toll roads on our interstate freeways. Well, there is a great idea. It slashes Federal investments and passes the buck to cash-starved States and local governments.

You see, right now the Federal Government for highways and transit, about 80 percent of that money comes from the Federal Government, 20 percent from the locals.

In levies--I represent one of the most flood prone areas. I can put that picture of Oroville Dam back up. Seventy-five percent Federal, 25 percent local. So what does the great Trump infrastructure plan do? It flips that over, and guess what? The Federal Government will pay 25 percent for levies and the locals will pay 75 percent. Wow. That is helpful. Where are they going to get the money?

For transit, 80 percent Federal, 20 percent--no, not in the Trump plan. It flips it over: 20 percent Federal, 80 percent local. Where are they to get the money? Big question.

So where did the money go? Why is it that the President's big, new, fabulous, wonderful transportation/infrastructure program has no money, just existing money taken from existing programs and put into new labeled programs that are to accomplish the same thing but with less Federal support?

So one might wonder, what happened here? Why is there no new Federal money? Why aren't all of those Ds supported by new Federal programs so that we have a robust infrastructure program for the United States, one in which men and women would be employed building the foundation for tomorrow's economy? Tens of thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands, millions of people, could be employed if the $1 trillion, $1.5 trillion that he talks about, were real money. It is not.

Where did the money go? Well, I suppose some of you may have been listening when the President signed the legislation and then took his Air Force One jet to Florida, entered his resort at Mar-a-Lago, and announced to his guests: I just made you a whole lot richer.

Well, indeed he did. One person that he made richer was this gentleman, who has said repeatedly over the last 2 years: I don't need more money; I am quite wealthy, thank you; don't do a tax cut that makes me even more wealthy. Warren Buffett.

What did the tax cut do for Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway? Well, it was a $29 billion Christmas gift.

Mr. Speaker, the President was quite correct. He did make the rich even richer.

I thank Mr. Buffett for being brutally honest and saying he doesn't need more money. He would undoubtedly look at what FDR said: ``The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much.''

Warren Buffett said this last line: ``It is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.''

I thank Mr. Buffett. I don't know what he is going to do with the $29 billion, but I know what we could have done with $29 billion. We could have repaired the bridges of America. We could have repaired the tens of thousands of dams across America that are at risk. That is what could have been done with the $29 billion that went to Mr. Buffett.

And he wasn't the only one who benefited from those tax cuts. One of the Wall Street companies, Morgan Stanley, did an analysis of the corporate tax cuts, that about $1 trillion of the $1.5 trillion tax cut went to corporations.

So what did the American corporations do with that $1 trillion windfall? Morgan Stanley, just this last week, reported that their analysis is that 62 percent of that $1 trillion windfall will be used by the corporations to buy other companies; mergers and acquisitions, about 19 percent; and 43 percent will go for buybacks of stock and dividends.

All the talk about the employees benefiting. Well, let's see. About 13 percent is headed for bonuses and raises. Just 17 percent of that $1 trillion is expected to be used to increase the size of the business, not through mergers and acquisitions, which usually result in layoffs, not in new jobs, but rather in what are called savings, in other words, known as layoffs--just 17 percent.

So where are the jobs? I will give you an example. Nine of the large pharmaceutical companies in America have already announced that they are going to spend $50 billion of that tax cut that they received in buybacks, not in creating new pharmaceuticals and drugs for such illnesses as Alzheimer's. In fact, Pfizer, one of the large pharmaceutical companies, the day that they announced that they were going to stop their research on Alzheimer's, decided that they would spend their money instead on buying back their stock.

So thus far--we haven't finished all this; this is where they expect to go--American corporations have already announced $178 billion, nearly one-fifth of that $1 trillion tax cut, would be used to buy back stock. That is the largest amount ever reported in any single quarter in American history.

Now, many folks here on the floor say: Oh, but look at what Walmart is doing; they are giving over $400 million of bonuses.

Well, if you average that out among all of their workers, it is $190 per worker. Now, that is not chump change, and that is certainly not crumbs. That is $190, and that is important, but the total tax cut to Walmart was $18 billion. The $400 million is 2.2 percent for bonuses. And so it goes.

There is more. Boeing said it will spend $300 million on employees in increased wages or bonuses, and, at the same time, they will spend $18 billion to buy back shares.

Did I explain what a buyback of shares really does? Well, it reduces the number of shares that are in the market, and, therefore, simultaneously raises the price per share.

And how are executive salaries and bonuses determined? By the share price. The share price goes up, bingo, more money for the corporate executives.

So if you were given a huge $1 trillion windfall in reduced taxes, would you use that for capital investment, where the actual return to the corporation may take 3, 4, 5 years, or would you use it to buy back stock, which automatically will, in virtually every case, raise the share price and immediately reward the executives' bottom line salary? Not a tough decision. Or would you give it to your employees in bonuses and raises, when you could use it to buy back stock? Raise the share price, and, lo and behold, guess what? The corporate executive's pay increases, because his pay is based on the stock price. Pretty simple stuff.

Did I mention Comcast laid off over 500 employees after reportedly saying that they would use their tax cuts to give a $1,000 year-end bonus? And at the same time, they announced a $5 billion stock buyback for 2018.

It goes on and on.

Apple, $38 billion reduction in taxes; Microsoft, $6.3 billion; Citibank, $22 billion reduction; Johnson & Johnson, $13 billion; Qualcomm, $5.3 billion.

So if we wanted to repair the dams or the bridges, we would have to have money.

Where did the money go? Well, it didn't go to the bridges, it didn't go to the roads. The great infrastructure plan from the President is simply a shell game, moving money from under this shell to under that shell, no new money, and making the local governments and State governments pay even more.

And for those of us who represent California, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, there is one more, and that is we get to pay taxes on taxes that we pay to the State and to the local governments.

Now, that is a change. When the first income tax law was written nearly a century ago--in fact, more than a century ago--they said that you would not pay taxes on the taxes that you paid, and so they allowed for the deduction of State and local taxes. But, hey, that changed. Our President said it is a wonderful gift. Well, it is not for California, not for New York, not for New Jersey.

So where are we going to get the money? We are going to have to go back and look at this. We already know that, for every 1 percent reduction in the corporate tax rate, there is a $100 billion reduction in revenue to the Federal Government. We might want to look at that.

I am going to wrap this up in just a few moments.

We have been talking about a better deal for America for a long time. What we have from the Trump tax cut is a raw deal, a bad deal, a terrible deal for America. The Federal Treasury was gutted.

Yes, there are benefits for the broad American public, but that is like 17 percent of the total tax cut goes to the broad American public: middle class, upper middle, and the bottom quartile of Americans. It is useful. It is certainly going to be helpful.

But more than 80 percent went to American corporations, which, as I just showed, are not using it for their employees, not using it to build their capital infrastructure, their ability to manufacture more, but, rather, for those who already have a great deal of wealth: the stockholders of America, who happen not to be the bottom 80 percent.

We need a better deal. We really need to invest in America. We need that infrastructure, not the phony infrastructure program that the President has proposed, but a real infrastructure with real money. And we need to make that infrastructure in America.

And so make it in America, invest in America. It adds up for a better deal for America.

My colleague, Al Green from Texas, has some important things to add to the discussion tonight on a different subject, but I just want to remind the public that, when we talk on the floor here, we talk about infrastructure, we talk about real concrete, steel, programs that actually build infrastructure. We talk about trying to collect resources so that we can pay for this. We talk about how we might engage in various financing programs so that we can, over time, build the solid foundation for economic growth.

And as we do all of this, we are talking about a better deal for the American public, not the raw deal that this tax scam gave to Americans, not the kind of deal that The New York Times says: ``Well-Heeled Investors Reap the Republican Tax Cut Bonanza.''

Mr. Speaker, I include this New York Times editorial, dated February 25, 2018, in the Congressional Record.

[From The New York Times, Feb. 25, 2018]

Well-Heeled Investors Reap the Republican Tax Cut Bonanza

(By The Editorial Board)

After President Trump signed the Republican tax cut into

law, companies put out cheery announcements that they were

giving workers bonuses because of their expected windfalls

from the tax reductions. The president and Republican

lawmakers quickly held up these news releases as vindication

for their argument that cutting the top federal corporate tax

rate to 21 percent, from 35 percent, would boost workers'

incomes even as it added $1.5 trillion to the debt that

future generations would have to pay off.

Now corporate announcements and analyst reports confirm

what honest observers always said--this claim is pure

fantasy. As executives tell investors what they intend to do

with their tax savings and their spending plans are tabulated

into neat charts and graphs, the reports jibe with what most

experts said would happen: Companies are rewarding their

stockholders.

Businesses are buying back shares, which creates demand for

the stocks, boosts share prices and benefits investors. Some

of the cash is going to increase dividends. And a chunk will

go to acquiring other businesses, creating larger

corporations that face less competition.

In addition to benefiting investors, these maneuvers will

end up boosting the pay of top executives because their

compensation packages are often tied to the price of their

companies' stock. Finally, a small sliver of the money will

find its way into paychecks of rank-and-file employees, but

it won't be a big boost and will probably come in the form of

a temporary bonus, rather than a lasting raise.

Morgan Stanley analysts estimated that 43 percent of

corporate tax savings would go to buybacks and dividends and

nearly 19 percent would help pay for mergers and

acquisitions. Just 17 percent would be used for capital

investment, and even a smaller share, 13 percent, would go

toward bonuses and raises.

Other Wall Street analysts have issued similar reports. If

more evidence was needed, Axios reported that just nine

pharmaceutical companies have announced $50 billion in

buybacks since the tax law was passed.

Mr. Trump might argue that it doesn't much matter that the

tax cuts will be a boon for investors because many Americans

own stocks. The president has recently touted the rising

value of 401(k) accounts as a benefit of the tax law. But

roughly half of all families own no stock, and most people

have holdings that are worth less than $5,000. Most stock

holdings, a whopping 84 percent, are in the hands of people

whose incomes put them in the top 10 percent of households.

Republicans might further argue that none of this matters

because the tax law is becoming more popular as people learn

more about it. Indeed, a recent poll for The Times found that

the law now has more supporters than opponents. But this

swing in public sentiment might be less important than it

appears. Consider the results of a recent Politico/Morning

Consult poll that shows that just 25 percent of registered

voters said they had noticed an increase in their paycheck

because of lower tax withholding while 51 percent had not.

The poll also found that high-income people were more likely

to notice that their take-home pay had gone up. That's

because Republicans designed the law to principally benefit

wealthy families while offering crumbs to low-income and

middle class families.

Those crumbs, by the way, disappear after a few years.

Further, many taxpayers in states like California, New Jersey

and New York will be hit with higher tax bills when they file

their 2018 tax returns and realize that they can now only

deduct up to $10,000 in state and local taxes.

There was a legitimate argument for reforming the tax code

in a way that reduced the corporate tax rate, closed

loopholes and made the economy fairer and more productive.

But Republicans chose a plan that rewards the rich at the

expense of workers. They had to lie to make this scheme seem

legitimate. Now the true effects are coming to fruition.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize and commend Jay Sorensen upon his induction into the California Outdoors Hall of Fame. This honor is a testament to his dedication in working to promote conservation. As a lifelong fishing lover, his tireless advocacy for the Delta has not only inspired thousands of others to take part in the great outdoors, but has also helped preserve the Delta's waters and wildlife for future generations to appreciate. This incredible commitment to our region and to conservation merits our highest distinction.

On behalf of the people of California's 3rd Congressional District, I offer my sincere congratulations as well as my best wishes for the years ahead.

Mr. Speaker, I was trying to add up the number of times that we have been here on floor over the last decade to talk about infrastructure. I suspect it is maybe 20 or 30 times that we have talked about it, and this last weekend, guess what happened on Monday. The President decides to talk about infrastructure. So here we are. On Tuesday, we are going to pick up the issue of infrastructure.

Let me just take a quick tour. Since they don't allow movies or slides here on the floor, we are going to run through these fast.

Some of you remember this. This was 1 year ago yesterday when the Oroville Dam spillway gave way and we had the biggest waterfall in the entire world. It came very close to wiping out 200,000 people--bad maintenance problem.

Or maybe this one. This is not the bridge to nowhere. This is the Interstate 5 bridge between Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia. It collapsed, and I-5 didn't work.

Or maybe this one. Oh, I think you have heard about this. That would be the water in Flint, Michigan. Still haven't solved the entire problem, but maybe several thousand kids and families were drinking contaminated water, water contaminated with lead.

And I didn't need to go all the way back to Flint, Michigan, to find a problem. In my own State of California, many communities are facing the same problem: either contaminated water or no water.

We have got an infrastructure problem: dams breaking, bridges falling, water contaminated. Are you wondering why? Well, this is illustrative.

You see, way, way back in 1973, we were spending somewhere about $10 billion a year on clean water and sanitation, drinking water. And over the years, we have seen a decline. This is constant dollars, 2014 dollars. We have seen a decline in the purchasing power so that, in 2016, we were somewhere around $2 billion, so from 10 to 2.

Do you wonder why we have a problem? We are not spending the money on it.

And so the American Society of Civil Engineers comes out with an annual report card. Now, if your kids sent home this report card, you might have a serious conversation with them.

So Donald Trump comes into office and, whoa, we have got an infrastructure problem. And he comes up with a solution to address this report card from the American Society of Civil Engineers: oh, aviation, D; bridges, C-plus; dams, D; drinking water, D.

Let's go over here; rail is a B. That is good. But most of those are private companies.

Ports, a C-plus; parks and recreation, D; schools, a D-plus; solid waste, transit, D, D, D, all the way down. Yep, we have got a problem. We have got a serious problem.

And so what does it mean if we were to solve the problem? Well, here, let's solve that problem. We will turn this around. Well, the problem is all of those D's that you saw.

So what if we were to spend $1--how about $1 billion--on transportation infrastructure, the return to the economy is somewhere around $3.54; or, for every $1 billion that we invest in transportation and infrastructure, 21,671 jobs. A 6-year bill with at least $100 billion of annual funding supports 2.18 million American jobs.

Now, what is it that our esteemed President proposed? Well, here is his infrastructure plan: He cuts more than $168 billion over the next 10 years from existing transportation and infrastructure programs. He provides Wall Street with an opportunity to invest and slashes the Federal investments and passes the buck to the cities and the counties in the State. That is his infrastructure plan.

Oh, did I tell you he said he had $200 billion that he was going to use to leverage $1.3 trillion of private money? Well, it doesn't really work. And we are going to talk about that because what actually happens, that $200 billion that is so beautiful, so awesome, incredible--what is it?

Well, let's see. I have already said that, from the highway safety programs, total, $122 billion; from the TIGER grants, which are very popular, that go out to local entities to build specific transportation programs like intermodal--train, bus, rail, highway stations--cuts that by $5 billion; Amtrak, cuts that by $7.5 billion over the next 10 years; rural air service, cuts by $590 million; the Army Corps of Engineers, cuts that by $10.1 billion over the next years.

These are real programs. So what is that $200 billion that the President takes such pride in presenting to the American public? It is money that is already spent on infrastructure projects. There is zero-- no, nada, no new money. He is simply taking money from those programs that I just described and transferring it to a new set of programs that, well, he will probably put T-R-U-M-P in gold across the top of it and say: Look what we have done.

All you have done is to create administrative chaos. Not one nickel of new money. It is the repurposing of existing dollars and transferring it to new programs which, instead of 80 percent Federal money to 20 percent local money, he flips it on its head, and now the Federal Government will spend 20 percent and the local governments and State governments will spend 80 percent.

Huh? How does that work? Where is the Federal investment? No new money. And instead of the Federal Government being the big partner, the Federal Government becomes the minor partner. What is that all about?

Well, unless you happen to be a Wall Street baron and you want to buy Dulles Airport, in which case his program would pony up 80 percent of the money and the private investor would put up 20 percent of the money; and I guarantee air travelers, international and domestic, would be thoroughly paying higher fees for the privilege of going to Dulles, which is now a private airport. It doesn't make much sense.

Or maybe you want to travel on Interstate 5 from Mexico to Canada. He would propose that we turn Interstate 5, all the way up the West Coast, into a privately held toll road, of which, presumably, 80 percent would be paid for by some loan or some grant from the Federal Government and 20 percent by some Wall Street investors.

Final point, and then I want to turn to my colleagues, as I said, we have been here on the floor perhaps 20 or 30 times over the last several years talking about infrastructure. I will tell you this: The Democrats are proposing a better deal for America. We want to invest in America, and we want it made in America.

Oh, by the way, in the President's proposal is the elimination of the Buy America standards and the Davis-Bacon fair wage program.

So we have a better way of doing it, and we are going to spend a little bit of tonight talking about how we might have a better real deal for America, not some fake program that doesn't have any new money.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the Congressman from North Carolina (Mr. Price) to talk about infrastructure.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Price for the specific details. I am glad that he brought up the environment issues. They certainly need to be discussed.

And he is quite correct, the FAST Act, which is now just 2 years old, significantly moved projects faster through the entire program--I suppose we ought to say the FAST Act had some logic to it--and still maintained the underlying strong desire to protect our environment.

Climate change: he couldn't be more correct about that, and the specific programs that he mentioned that the President intends to cut.

If this was some sort of a--I don't know--State fair, and you had somebody on the boardwalk with the shell game, that is what is being played here. Programs that are working--he mentioned the TIGER program and the funding programs that the States and local municipalities know how to use and are now planning to put their own money in--the President would terminate those and start a whole new series of programs. New administrative, new chaos.

We have to make this point: all of us want infrastructure.

Here is the report card: Ds, Ds, Ds, one B, and a couple of Cs along the way.

Just to maintain these programs at the present would be $2 trillion-- not building new, not adding to what we have, but $2 trillion--just to maintain this.

What does the President offer us?

$200 billion. That is a B, not a T. $200 billion. The same money that we are already spending. No new dollars. Somehow that would leverage State, local, and private.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Price for bringing this to our attention.

I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, is the gentleman saying that the President's budget is inconsistent with the President's transportation plan? In the transportation plan he talks about new starts, new programs, and so forth, but he is eliminating those in the budget, transferring that money over to the new programs that I guess he wants to call the Trump programs. Is that what is happening here?

I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Price for those comments.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Payne).

Mr. Speaker, I will attempt to answer the gentleman's question. It doesn't make any sense. What the President proposes, instead of the normal 80/20, sometimes a 75/25 split in which the Federal Government is the major partner so that these transportation systems are of national importance--the President is proposing across for all kinds of projects, wherever they may be, on the Northeast corridor, or on the West Coast, or anywhere in between, that he flip it over and the Federal Government becomes the minority partner, at 20 percent; and the State, the county, the city, or in the case of New York, the tri-borough----

The tri-State entity comes up, in this case, as the gentleman said, 50 percent. But that is not good enough. He wants 20 percent Federal and 80 percent tri-State. It is a formula for a major disaster for America's infrastructure, because it is not just tunnels and Amtrak, it is water systems. It is repairing the Flint system, repairing the Chowchilla water system in California; it is the flood control. It goes on and on and on.

Unless, of course, you happen to be a Wall Street investor, and you want to--well, let's say you want to build that tunnel. Well, the Federal Government will give you 80 percent. You come up with 20 percent. And by the way, what is going to be the cost to the commuter?

So none of this makes much sense, except for one thing. Thankfully, the President, after a year plus, has come forward with a plan. We will work with that. We will take his bad plan, we will do a judo move on it, we will flip it, and then we will build a definite program for America. Let's call it a better deal for America, a better infrastructure plan. What do you think? Can we do that, Mr. Payne?

I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey.

I do need to move on to Mr. Cicilline here, but Mr. Payne was asking about the water systems. Just look at real dollars, 2014 dollars, where the Federal investment has gone over the last 25 years, almost 30 years. So no wonder that we are not repairing and rebuilding.

Mr. Speaker, let me turn to Mr. Cicilline who, together with his teammates, the gentlewoman from Illinois (Mrs. Bustos) and the gentleman from New York (Mr. Jeffries), developed a way of describing what it is we need to do. Last week, Mr. Cicilline took on this issue of transportation, infrastructure, generally, and made a proposal. Could the gentleman share with us.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Cicilline).

Mr. Speaker, there are so many things we need to talk about.

First of all, that $200 billion is simply repurposing existing programs, and they are laid out here. The highway fund, $122 billion reduced, transferred over to his new program, which is really, really strange. He calls it $100 billion of innovation.

Who is going to determine what is innovative? Who is going to determine what is going to be funded?

A whole new administrative and serious chaos is going to occur--TIGER grants, gone, Amtrak. Mr. Payne was just talking about Amtrak and the importance here in the Northeast corridor.

I am from California, but I have got to tell you, I care a great deal about Amtrak because that is how I like to get from Washington to New York City. That is the best way to do it. Airplanes are fine, but, actually, Amtrak is just faster if you want to get downtown to downtown.

But not to worry. He is going to privatize Reagan and Dulles. And you think that is going to work out well for us? Oh, if you want to pay more money, yes. Rural air service.

Army Corps of Engineers, extremely important to us on the West Coast, in my district. I have quite possibly the highest flood potential of any place outside of New Orleans, and we depend upon this, and yet they are going to cut it by $10 billion.

It goes on and on and on. This is just the beginning of what is proposed. It is a massive shell game. The money is under this shell. No, the money is under that shell. It is the same money back and forth.

We need a real program, and I am so pleased that you and your colleagues put together a real trillion-dollar program. It is solid. It is foundational. And what an opportunity was missed in this wonderful Christmas gift that the President gave to whom? The top 1 percent and American corporations.

Ponder this for a moment: For every 1 percent reduction in the Federal corporate tax rate, it is $100 billion.

Corporations and the Chamber of Commerce were saying from 35 take it down to 25 percent. No. Our Republican colleagues and the President went all the way to 21 percent. Let's see, 25, 21, 4--4 percentage points. That is $400 billion over 10 years.

Think of the possibilities if, instead of that money flowing to corporations who apparently are going to use that money for stock buybacks and dividends, not for new investments--oh, excuse me. They did say they had increased the wages. Do a careful study. Most of those wage increases are in States and localities that have increased the minimum wage.

So $400 billion right there. Could it have been used? Yes. Foreign earnings? Mr. Delaney, 40 Democrats, 40 Republicans put on the floor a proposal to repatriate those foreign earnings back here to the United States, very low tax rate, far lower than what is in the tax bill if that money was going into an infrastructure bank, into investments, real investments in America.

Mr. Speaker, I know Mr. Cicilline has worked long and hard on this. I would like to hear more. I yield to the gentleman from Rhode Island.

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Cicilline seems to have prompted some energy and excitement for Mr. Payne. It seems as though he wanted to jump in and say a few more words. I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey.

Mr. Speaker, there are so many things that we are going to talk about over the next several months.

The President did a good thing by putting the infrastructure program on the front burner. Now, obviously, from what I have said this last hour and my colleagues, Mr. Cicilline, Mr. Payne, and Mr. Price, the proposal doesn't fly. It is not a solid proposal that will solve the problems of America in a way that is good for the people you just talked about, the working men and women and the families of America.

But we can work together on this, the program that the Democrats have put out, A Better Deal for America, an infrastructure plan that includes all of the elements. We haven't talked about broadband and the availability of broadband in rural areas, which I happen to represent, high-speed internet, but that is also a problem in the urban areas.

We have a common interest in a good, solid infrastructure plan. Unfortunately, we are looking at the deficit hawks returning. They disappeared last November and December when the tax bill went through. In fact, the President's budget contemplates a $1 trillion deficit each and every year for the next 10 years.

So where's the money?

Well, $1.5 trillion wound up in the top 1 percent and for the American corporations and the LLCs and golf courses, as you said. That is money that could have been used for the infrastructure, building the foundation for economic growth, educating, reeducating, teaching the skills.

Now, the President mentioned that in his address on infrastructure, and good. But where's the money? Show me the money.

Well, it is a shell game. It ends one program, starts a new one. Administrative chaos will ensue. We need real, solid investment, and we can do it. The proposals are there.

And we are going to talk about this every week, every day, every community meeting. We are going to talk about the tax scam and where the money went. We are going to talk about the wealthy getting wealthier. We will talk about income inequality and the way in which it invests, it actually creates more. And we are going to talk about the great missed opportunities: education, highways, water systems, sanitation systems, ports, multimodal. That is what we need to do.

Mr. Speaker, I am losing my voice, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the incredible life of Donald L. Christians. Donald L. Christians recently marked his 90th birthday. His is an American story of the last century in which an adventuresome, generous soul migrates from a small farming community to cities and broader global experience. Don looked back on Grafton, Iowa where he grew up (recent census of 252) and wrote Homer's Whip, that depicted a tiny prairie town with timeless small-town values. At the same time, he embraced the diverse world.

During his second year at Luther College he enlisted in the U.S. Army to fight in World War II, and served 1\1/2\ years in the occupational forces in Japan in 1946 when he was just 18. Like so many farm boys, his world was transformed. Upon discharge, Don finished college with a degree in political science from the University of Northern Iowa in 1950 and later earned a Master's Degree from Northern Colorado University.

Don headed to California in 1955, settling in North Beach, living the life of jazz, card playing, bocce ball, horse racing, and writing, while beginning his 29-year career teaching in the San Francisco Unified School District. There he met and married the artist/fellow teacher, Joan Clay, in 1960 and they spent their honeymoon driving a VW Camper Van to Tierra Del Fuego in Chile. Both often taught the most challenging students to whom they devoted their creativity, respect, and good humor.

In 1967, Don was appointed Associate Director of the Peace Corps Program in Ethiopia where Don and Joan lived until 1969 where Don was assigned to support the work of volunteers in a remote region of the country. He was extremely effective in all aspects of this assignment. He mentored volunteers in the classroom and in school protocol and interaction, e.g., with headmasters who required extensive memorization even though the students did not have pencils or paper. He also modeled the expected interaction with the broader community. His expertise, life experience, and winning manner made him the ideal person to relate to volunteers, faculty, administrators, townspeople, as well as the Peace Corps bureaucracy. He supported volunteers who undertook ambitious, often impactful projects that departed from the mainstream and served as the trusted confidant of Peace Corps Ethiopia leadership, shaping policy for the Program as a whole.

In 1969, Don was appointed Country Director Peace Corps Dominican Republic. Visitors recall Don selling co-op crafts to tourists on cruises on Christmas Day. Don and Joan remained in the Dominican Republic until they were recalled by President Nixon and Don worked on the Muskie campaign until Don and Joan returned to San Francisco in 1973. Don taught high school Civics for 29 years, retiring from Galileo High School in San Francisco in 1986 where he was beloved as an inspiring teacher by a wide range of students.

Over the years Don made an enormous number of friends from his many interests and vocations, reflecting his enthusiasm and variety of interests. He and Joan owned shares in 22 race horses and had particular success with ``Mac Rhapsody'' and ``Pleasure Grounds''. Don worked at Golden Gate Fields as a mutuel clerk. He wrote numerous articles for horse magazines and hosted a radio program for 5 years on KWMR in West Marin interviewing authors. After Joan's passing, he met Neva Beach, a book editor, and they were together until her passing in 2010. Don has been living with their dog Cody in San Francisco's colorful Mission District since he met Neva and they were often seen feeding homeless men and women in a local park as well as taking neighborhood children to zoos and museums.

Don loves bridge and bocce ball and excels at both. He was a member of the Marin Bocce Ball team that won the Northern California Seniors championship, and he played in bridge tournaments around the U.S. as a Silver Life Master. He places bets on horseraces and plays bridge online every day when he is able.

On behalf of the people of California's Third District, I commend Donald L. Christians on his distinguished life and wish him the best in the coming years.

Mr. Speaker, with all the things that are happening in Washington, it is pretty easy to feel concerned and to lose faith in what it is that we are doing here. It is language, questions of racism, questions of tax policy, winners, losers.

Mr. Speaker, I decided today to be optimistic, to be upbeat, and to say: Hey, there really are things that we can do if we just put our minds to it and begin to work together.

Before I start these sessions on the floor, I always like to ground myself in what is it that I would like, and that I would like my colleagues, to accomplish. I always turn to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who brought us through the Great Depression and the Great War. Etched in the marble at his memorial here in Washington, D.C., are these words: ``The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much . . . .''

I probably ought to repeat that.

``The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.''

I always want to start with that because it grounds me as I look at the multiple opportunities we have here to do just this: add more to those who have much.

For example, the tax bill that passed just before Christmas and was signed into law clearly does more for those who have much. Well over 80 percent of the $1.5 trillion--actually, far more than that--that were involved in the tax giveaway went to the superwealthy and America's major corporations.

But I said I was going to be positive and I didn't want to drag all of us down further in that tax scam, but what I really want to talk about is what we can do to add for those who have too little. So let me start with that.

My Democratic colleagues and I have been talking for the better part of 6 months now about a better deal for America, things that we can do to improve the lot of everyday Americans so we can provide enough for those who have too little. We all know that middle class America has stalled out over the last 20 years. So we set up a series of policies, programs, and legislation to improve the situation for working men and women of America, for those who clearly have too little and those who are struggling every day to meet their mortgage, keep their kids in school. So it is really about investing in America and making it in America, a series of programs and policies.

I am not going to talk about all of those tonight, but I want to focus on this one: making it in America and investing in America.

Before I go on to explain more about it, the rest of the program, really, is this: better jobs, better wages, and a better future.

So when we talk as Democrats about a better deal, a better deal for America, we are really talking about these three fundamental things: better jobs, better wages, and, therefore, a better future for Americans.

There are many different ways that this can be done. One of the principal ones is this: those of you who follow this--and I suspect there are very few of you--but if you have been following these floor sessions that I and others have been doing for the last, in this case, 6 years, we developed this little placard: ``Make It In America. Manufacturing Matters.'' It is pretty fundamental.

Over the years, we have looked at the hollowing out of the great manufacturing centers of America. Some people like to say it is the Rust Belt. Well, the Rust Belt is coming back, and it can come back, roaring back, if we pay attention to the policies that create manufacturing opportunities.

The President has talked about this, but, unfortunately, the policies that actually have emanated from the administration, in many cases, harm the manufacturing sectors--I am the ranking member of the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee--maritime, ocean, inland waterways, the great Mississippi, the Ohio River system, the Great Lakes of America; and, of course, the coasts; the harbors, New York Harbor; Charleston; the harbors in Florida and across the Gulf Coast; in California, the great harbors of San Diego, Los Angeles, Long Beach, and the San Francisco Bay Area; and further North, Oregon and up into Washington.

These maritime opportunities are enormous. And, unfortunately, we, far too often, ignore those opportunities. And so on the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, we are trying to focus on ways in which we can actually rebuild the great American maritime industry.

If you go back in the history of this Nation, back to its very earliest days, in the early policies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, they set out policies to encourage the maritime industry. By the way, for those of you who really want to know where the first inheritance tax came into being, it was John Adams. He actually put the inheritance tax in place to build a frigate for the U.S. Navy. So it goes way, way back.

That takes me back to tax policy, and I said I wouldn't deal with that too much, but it is hard to ignore the fact that it was a very bad tax bill for the working men and women. One of the reasons it was a bad tax bill is that we need to build our infrastructure. There is going to be a lot of talk here in the next several weeks about the President's infrastructure plan--$1 trillion infrastructure plan. Good idea. Let's do it.

What was that movie? That famous line? ``Show me the money.'' It disappeared. It disappeared in that tax bill. Where did it go? It went to the superwealthy. Maybe they will build the infrastructure. I am sure the top 1 percent, the top 10 percent, would be

happy to build a road if, of course, they could charge a fee to get the people who use the road to pay that fee. But that doesn't make much sense.

I will take you back to Alexander Hamilton and George Washington. They put into America's public policy, in the very first Presidency, a road-building policy, and it has, more or less, been with us over the years where the public pays for this in fees and services. But the money disappeared. It is gone. It is gone in the tax cut. It is not there. $200 billion will be discussed over the next several weeks.

Where are you going to get $200 billion in this year's budget? More than $150 billion disappeared now in the tax scam. So maybe they can find it somewhere. The military wants another $50 billion, and, of course, there are healthcare services, and there is a need for education and so forth.

So here is what we can do without going into the budget bill, without trying to find new money, but, rather, to use a public policy that was first enunciated and written into law when the Arctic opened. Do you remember the North Slope of Alaska back in the 1960s, when the U.S. Government decided to allow oil drilling on the North Slope of Alaska? It was written into that law that allowed for the pipeline to be built from the North Slope down to Valdez in southern Alaska, that all of the oil that would come through that pipeline would have to be on American- built ships with American sailors.

And guess what? Ships were built, mariners were hired, and oil was put on those tankers and shipped into the American ports. Later, that oil was shipped offshore to Japan. And over the years, the petroleum industry was able to whittle away at that requirement of American ships built in America with American mariners. And so today, there is no requirement that any oil developed in the United States, any natural gas developed in the United States and exported, be on American-built ships.

So what does it mean? It means that ships are coming into our ports to take a strategic national asset, our oil and our natural gas. It is being put on a foreign-built ship with foreign sailors, foreign mariners who come and go, who don't pay taxes in the United States; ships that are not built in the United States with American steel, American-made engines, and all of the electronics and pumps, and all of the other equipment, not made in America.

So here is the deal. What if we decided to go back to the future? What if we decided the future ought to be like the past, and this strategic national asset be used to rebuild our shipyards, to employ our mariners, to give us in the United States the ability to build commercial ships of all sizes, and, at the same time, enhance the productivity of our shipyards as they build our U.S. Naval vessels and our Coast Guard vessels?

What if we were to do that? Well, we would employ thousands of people in the shipyards; our steel companies operating, taking ore from the North, bringing it to the steel mills, manufacturing that steel for the shipyards, the engines that go into those ships--which, by the way, are maybe about a quarter of the size of this room. I mean, huge diesel engines--and all of the other pumps and all of the other equipment, what if we were to do that? Why not? What would that mean? Well, let's see. We could make it in America, or they could continue to be built in China, Korea, India, but not in America.

Here is the deal: all we need to do is to write a law. All we need to do is to go back and copy the law that was written in the 1960s that required that the oil from the North Slope of Alaska, coming down the pipeline to Valdez, be on American ships. That is all we have to do. And if we were to do that, wow, we would employ thousands of people in our shipyards. We would have thousands of men and women on those ships across the oceans delivering a strategic national asset to far places in the world, to Japan, to China, and to beyond.

It is possible. Our work here is to have a better deal for America, a better deal for Americans, policies that lead to the employment of Americans, policies that help to rebuild our steel industry, that bring strength back into our shipyards so that we can provide the jobs.

We are not talking about minimum-wage jobs here. We are talking about jobs that are at the higher echelon of the middle wages, of middle America. We are talking about skill sets, welders, pipefitters, steamfitters. We are talking about engineers who design these ships. We are talking about marine architects. We are talking about the financing of these.

We are talking about thousands upon thousands of jobs spread out across America, and all we need to do is to go back, visit the past, bring it forward into law, and make sure that a strategic national asset is used to bring jobs to America.

It would be nice if 100 percent of that oil and gas were on American- built ships, but, frankly, the American shipyards don't have the capacity to do it. Now and probably never would they have the capacity to build all of the ships that are necessary. Right now, at a facility in Texas, the Sabine Pass, a company called Cheniere Energy is shipping natural gas taken from the ground in the United States, brought to Texas, put on ships that are taking that natural gas all around the world--most of it going to Asia.

That natural gas could also go to Europe, and if we were to work out a deal with the European Union and the countries in Europe, we would use that natural gas as a strategic asset to put in place in those countries of Europe that now have to depend upon gas from Russia. And let's understand this. Russia is using their natural gas as a lever against the European Union and against the Europeans as we try to build our relationship with Europe.

So how many ships are being used? Probably when that one export facility in Texas is up and operating at its full capacity, it will take over 100 LNG tankers to meet the demands of that one export facility. Now, it happens that there are five--maybe six, but certainly five--new export facilities that are being licensed around the United States: one in Maryland, not too far from Washington; another in Oregon; and others in other parts of the coastal areas of the United States.

So how many ships? We don't know for sure. But I do know this: if, over the next 10 years, we were to require that just 15 percent--well, let's make this over the next 20 years--that just 15 percent of the expected export of LNG were to be on American-built ships, we would, in American shipyards, build at least 25 ships. And these are not small, little tugboats. We are talking about major oceangoing LNG tankers.

Now, for the crude oil, if just 10 percent of the crude oil were on American-built ships, by 2032, we would have 31 ships built here in America. So we are talking well over 50 ships built in the United States. To put this in context, major, deep-draft ships built in America's shipyards over the last 3 years, the average number of ships, deep draft--these are big ships--built in American shipyards has been in the range of 10 to 12 ships.

Eight of those are for the U.S. Navy; maybe three have been for the commercial fleet. So we are talking about the potential for a very significant expansion of work in American shipyards if we were to write just a couple of lines of law to require that, beginning in 2022, just 1 percent of the natural gas be on American-built ships. That would bring three ships in. And then they would ramp it up over time, increasing the percentage: 3 percent by 2026, 10 percent by 2034--that would be 16 ships--and 15 percent by 2040. So that would be 25 ships built in America carrying LNG, liquified natural gas.

For crude oil, let's start at 1 percent. That would be three ships; 4 percent by 2026, 12 ships; 8 percent by 2029, 24 ships; and 10 percent by 2032, and that would be 31 ships. This is the art of the possible. What does it mean for America? It means good middle class jobs.

I will give you another example. This is a locomotive, an electric locomotive built in Sacramento. Some 70 of these locomotives were built for the railroads for Amtrak here in the East on the Eastern corridor. It took probably more than 1,000 jobs in Sacramento, California, to build these locomotives. One hundred percent American made.

How did that happen? Do you remember back in the Great Recession in 2009, Congress--Democrats, without Republican support--put in place the stimulus bill, the American Recovery and

Reinvestment Act? Some $800 million were set aside to provide locomotives for the East Coast, for the Eastern corridor.

Most companies said: We don't build locomotives anymore.

So General Electric and GM just waved off the possibility. But in Sacramento, there was this German company called Siemens that was building light railcars, transit cars and the like, at a newly established plant in Sacramento, California.

They looked at it and said: $800 million, 100 percent American made. We are a German company, but we are operating in America. Do you want 100 percent American-made locomotives, the wheels, the electrical engines, the electrical motors, all of the electronics? That German company said: Bring it on.

$800 million, they signed the contract, and they produced 70, 100 percent American-made locomotives.

So what is the point? The point is, maybe 1,000, maybe a little less, middle class jobs in Sacramento, California, and you can bet that steel wasn't made in California. It came from the Midwest. You can bet that those wheels were made outside of California. The electric motors came in from the East and the Midwest.

So this opportunity was spread out all across America. It is exactly the same if we were to require that our liquified natural gas, a strategic American asset, were exported on American-built ships, and the same for the oil that comes from the Bakken up in the North and the Middle American States.

All of that is the art of the possible. So we are all about doing this. We are all about making it in America.

I will take a couple of seconds, and I am going to give you one more example. For those of us in northern California and anybody who wants to tour San Francisco and the San Francisco Bay Area, you will see a fabulous new bridge spanning the bay from Oakland to San Francisco. It is a beautiful bridge.

However, it was a bridge that was built with Chinese steel. It was supposed to be 10 percent cheaper, so they went for the cheap, but they wound up with the crud. They wound up with steel that had weld problems and that had quality problems. It ultimately wound up to be way, way over the budget, and 3,000 jobs and a brand new, high-tech, most advanced steel manufacturing plant perhaps in the world was built in China. No jobs in America, no new steel mill in America, but there was in China. That is what happens when you buy foreign.

I guess New Yorkers were a little smarter than my California colleagues. So in New York, they wanted to build a new bridge called the Tappan Zee Bridge. They said: We are going to make it with American steel. It costs $3.9 billion, under budget, and there were 7,728 American jobs.

It makes a difference. Public policy makes a difference. If you want jobs in America, then you set about to give Americans a better deal. Public policy and laws, that is our work. We are your Representatives.

We ought to be representing you, not the Chinese steel mills. We ought to be representing you, not the shipbuilders in Japan or Korea. We should be representing you, the American people, the people who are working in the shipyards of America.

The children of today's shipbuilders need an opportunity to continue the work of their fathers and their grandfathers in America's great shipyards.

I will tell you this: our public safety, the security of America, depends upon the U.S. Navy. The U.S. Navy depends upon shipyards for their ships. The more commercial ships we build in the shipyards, the more competition there will be to build naval ships.

So here it is, a better deal. This is what we Democrats are offering. We are offering a better deal. We are going to focus directly on better jobs.

Tonight, we have talked about American manufacturing. We talked about making it in America. We talked about making ships in America once again. We are talking about high-paid, middle class jobs in American manufacturing, whether it is the shipyard or whether it is where these great engines are manufactured, wherever it may be in the United States.

So better jobs, better wages from these high-quality jobs, and, therefore, a better future for America.

So here, while we spend all of our time wondering what the next tweet will be from our President, I want us also to think about the art of the possible, about legislation that provides Americans with a better deal.

We will talk more about this in future days, but, right now, I want us all to think about what we can do for America so that we will have a better deal for the working men and women of America.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the Chair for the opportunity to talk about a couple of issues here on the floor of the House. I really have two things I want to talk about today. One is the incredible tax bill that was passed by the Congress and signed by the President just before Christmas, a tax bill that has profound effects on the American economy, most of them negative and bad, but also a tax--I will use the word ``scam''--that will really--well, if you happen to be superwealthy, it is terrific.

I guess, Mr. Speaker, the President, when he went to his Christmas party at Mar-a-Lago, spoke to his guests, most of whom I suspect were rather wealthy, and he said: I just made you a whole lot richer.

Indeed, he did. So we will talk about that in a little more detail.

I also want to talk about the ongoing Mueller investigation. On the floor of the House, from time to time, many of my colleagues from the Republican side come here to the floor, or on cable television, and attack Mueller, attack the FBI, and anybody else who happens to be standing nearby, in an effort to discredit the special counsel's investigation of what happened in the 2016 Presidential election.

It seems to me that here in America, since the very first days of our constitutional government, we have always said that we are a country of laws and that the laws dictate what we do.

We are not a country of individuals that dictate what happens but, rather, a country of laws. What is happening here in this effort to discredit the Mueller investigation is to move away from that nearly century and a half of profound importance in how people govern themselves not by the will of an emperor or the will of a king or even the will of a President, but we govern ourselves by the laws that are enacted by elected representatives: Senators, Members of the House of Representatives, in the case of the National Government, or legislatures, county commissioners, county supervisors, or city council members.

We are a country ruled by laws that are enacted by the citizens; however, the effort to discredit, to derail, to stop the investigation of the appropriate entity--in this case, the Department of Justice, acting through the special counsel--is contrary to the fundamental foundation of the way in which we govern ourselves. That is to say that that discrediting, that effort to stop the investigation of whether laws were broken, disobeyed, or not followed completely undermines the foundation of our government and our relationship as individuals.

None of us want to be subject to the whims of an individual like a king or an emperor or a President. We want them--in this case, the President--to act through the law, that is, to follow the law and, in this case, an agency within the executive branch, the Department of Justice, to carry out its responsibility to determine if the laws have been followed, if there has been a breach of law, if there has been some other element that is contrary to the rule of law. It is that simple.

So I would ask my Republican colleagues here in the House of Representatives and in the Senate and those who are constantly on cable television who are attempting to knock down the Mueller investigation, to discredit his investigation, to discredit the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies of the Federal Government to slow down, to stand back, and to let the operation that is fundamental to our well-being, that operation of enforcing the law to occur and see where it goes, let the investigation play itself out and not get caught up in questions of whether the Steele dossier was the reason for the investigation. It was not.

Clearly, today, we have learned from Senator Feinstein, whom I thank and whom all of us should thank, for making public the 10 hours of testimony from Fusion GPS available for all of us to see so that we can, as individuals, judge the validity of the charge that has been made that somehow the Steele investigation is all that this is about. It is not. It was not and is not. It is about information that came to the FBI from multiple sources, including counterintelligence information developed by our intelligence agencies. That then led to the investigation and eventually to the establishment of a special counsel.

So take a deep breath. Let this process unfold. Let the facts lead the way. Let the development of those facts be done, and let us then judge the outcome of the investigation.

It seems to me that a lot of the heat that has been put on the FBI and the Mueller team comes from a fear that there is something to fear. So the question should be asked: What is it that you fear?

Why is it that you are doing so much to try to waylay, discredit, stop the investigation?

Is there something that you know that the American public should know?

Is there something that you fear that Mr. Mueller will find out about the 2016 Presidential campaign, about connections to Russia?

Do you know something that would cause you to so aggressively try to stop the investigation? Perhaps you do, in which case, come to the floor and share with us.

I will let it go at that. It just seems to me that we ought to recognize that we are a nation of laws. We are not a nation of a king or an emperor or of a President. We are a nation of laws in which the President's task is to faithfully carry out the Constitution and the laws. If you don't like the laws, come here and change them or go to the Supreme Court and get a ruling that somehow that law is not constitutional. That is the way we should do it.

So enough of that. I have taken a few moments to look at this profoundly important issue about the very nature of government in the United States.

Let me take up another issue, which I actually opened on for just a few moments, and that was tax policy.

I have stood here on the floor before, many times, and talked about the tax bill as it was being developed, and I raised the alarm that somehow this tax bill would not be good for American families and working men and women in America.

I always want to start this discussion with this placard. Those of you who have followed me on the floor may have seen it before, but I want to frame what I am concerned about. I want you to understand the scope of this discussion and why it is of concern. I found this to be an extremely useful way to frame my values and, I think, to frame the values of my colleagues in the Democratic Party.

What is it that we want to accomplish?

What is the value that we put forth?

What is our goal?

What are we trying to do with our public policy statements?

What did we attempt to do with our unanimous opposition to the tax bill that the House of Representatives and the Senate passed and the President signed?

This is the framework. If you would, this is the statement of values. It

comes from Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That is actually etched in marble at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial here in Washington, D.C. These are his words: ``The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much.''

Let me repeat that: ``The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.''

For myself, and I know for my Democratic colleagues, this is the touchstone. These words are the touchstone about our policies, about the programs that we push forward. These words are the touchstone that give us a foundation upon which we then analyze the legislation and come to a conclusion to vote ``yes'' or ``no.''

In our analysis of the tax scam, we found that that legislation, now law, failed this test. It failed the fundamental test.

Did that legislation help those who have little or did it add to the abundance of those who have much?

The answer is this from the Joint Tax Committee: during the 10-year life of this legislation, the result of the tax scam is that 83 percent of the $1.5 trillion goes to the top 1 percent.

How can that be? How could it be that a piece of legislation that has been enacted and is now the law of the land will, over the next decade, shift more than $1.5 trillion to those who are already the richest men and women in this Nation, if not in this world?

Why? Why would we add a king's ransom--no, a national ransom--to those who already have 80 percent of the wealth of this Nation?

Why would we do that? Why?

Why would we ignore this test?

We didn't. We Democrats did not. We said ``no'' 186 times because it fails the fundamental test of fairness.

We know across this Nation, it is in economic study after economic study, that America has concentrated wealth in the handful of the top 1 percent to an extent only seen once in America's history before this time, and that was the Gilded Age at the turn of the 19th century. Never, other than now and then, did so few have such a high concentration of America's wealth.

Now, there are those who would argue that is a good thing because all of that wealth will be spent and trickle down to the rest of America. There is not one economic study anywhere that says that trickle down will actually happen; but, rather, what the tax scam bill does is to continue the concentration of wealth for the next decade.

So what of the poor, what of the elderly, what of the students in school who are borrowing vast sums of money so they can get an education?

What of the men and women who have been able to acquire a health insurance policy through the Affordable Care Act because they were able to have that cost of the premium subsidized?

What of those people?

The working men and women of America were dealt a very, very bad hand. But, Mr. Speaker, as the President said when he walked into his club for a Christmas party after signing the bill: I have made you so much wealthier.

So here we are. We had meetings today with military. We need to build new nuclear bombs. We need to build new missiles. We need new ships. We need new tanks.

Whether they do or not, you can debate, but there is an incredible demand for money from the military. By the way, we need to fight wars. We need to prepare for conflict on the Korean Peninsula.

Need, need, need, we need--yes, they do need. Not all of it. I would disagree with much of it, but nonetheless, enormous demand.

And in this tax bill, where is the money for that? Where is the money for the military?

If you are a military hawk, ask yourself: Where is the money?

It went to the top 1 percent and American corporations that already had $2.5 trillion of cash stashed away in their treasury. They didn't need more money. They were not even investing what they had, yet they received even more as a result of this tax scam.

So what is the purpose of all of this?

Oh, did I mention that in this bill--for that family out there that was able to get health insurance for the first time so they could have a baby, so they could have an operation that they needed, so they can have continuing access to preventative care, do you know what was in this bill? Do my colleagues understand what was in this bill?

Six, seven, eight million of our American families will lose their health insurance as a result of this bill, and all the rest of us are going to wind up paying anywhere from 10 to 20 percent more premium cost as a result of the language that was in this bill that restricts and literally guts the Affordable Care Act. A test of our progress.

So what did the tax scam do?

It shifted a king's ransom--excuse me--a Presidential ransom to those who already have much, the top 1 percent. There you have it, 83 percent of it. And it purposely harms millions of Americans because they will lose their health insurance as a result of the language of this bill that guts the Affordable Care Act's programs.

How could it be? How could we do that?

We Democrats didn't. We said: No. This is bad public policy.

Now, guess what. That was step one of what I like to call the Texas Two Step.

Do you know what step two is?

Step two is to suddenly wake up and realize: ``Oh, my, we have just added $1.5 trillion plus interest, maybe another 3- or $400 billion of interest to the national debt. Oh, my goodness. We have to do something,'' they say.

In fact, it has already been said by our esteemed Speaker. Not the gentleman that is in the chair at this moment, but Mr. Ryan. He has already said: We have to take the next step now. We have to cut entitlements.

Oh, my, the entitlements, we have to cut them in order to deal with the huge new deficit that was created by the tax plan. Wait a minute. Mr. Speaker, you just created the deficit and now you want to go after entitlements. Stop. Time out.

Do we understand what an entitlement is? Do we know what an entitlement is?

Let me tell you. Social Security. Medicare. Oh, we are talking about seniors. Social Security. Seniors.

You mean we have got to cut entitlements, Social Security? Oh, Mr. Speaker, that is what you want us to do? You want us to cut Medicare?

You are suggesting we do that by raising the eligibility age, not from 65, but maybe 67, 68. Terrific. And you just cut the ability for these people to get health insurance at the same time? How does that calculate?

In my mind, it doesn't.

Did I mention Medicaid?

You know those programs--Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, education--those are entitlements.

That is what you want to cut? When 60, 70 percent of Medicaid goes to seniors, nursing homes, other disabled people, extended care, and nursing home facilities, that is what you want to cut?

Guaranteed, as sure as I am standing on the floor at this moment, that is the second step.

And I am not dreaming this up. These are the words of the Republican leadership in this House and in the Senate. So be prepared, America, there is a critical fight, an absolutely important fight that is taking place in your National Legislature, the Congress of the United States. It is about the very future of this fundamental notion.

What are we here for? Are we here for the superwealthy, those who have much? Or are we here for the rest of America?

I know where the Democrats are. I know why we are here. I know why we fight every single day for policies that address issues that help those who have little.

We respect those who have much. They are wonderful people. Well, not all of them. But that is not our concern. They are doing quite well by themselves. It is those who have little.

I see my colleague from New York has joined us.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Jeffries.)

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Jeffries very much for his remarks. If he can stick around, maybe we can have a colloquy here and discuss this a little better.

Mr. Jeffries and his two colleagues, the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Cicilline) and the gentlewoman from Illinois (Mrs. Bustos), developed the Better Deal discussion, and I would like to talk about this in the context of infrastructure.

Now, in the next couple of weeks, the President says he is going to deliver to the Congress his infrastructure plan. Well, we know across this Nation that we definitely need infrastructure. He just talked about it a moment ago. And the question will arise: How do you pay for it?

This year, right now, the current fiscal year where we are talking about ``can we fund government before it shuts down,'' $150 billion was ripped out of the Treasury. It is gone for the wealthy tax cuts.

So where do we get the money to pay for infrastructure? How do we do that?

Here is my fear. My fear is that the wealthy 1 percent, top 10 percent, the big corporations have already got their big chunk of the pie, 83 percent of it.

Where do you go to get the money?

I think that the proposal coming from the President will be to tax fees on folks who are using the transportation system.

And who are they?

They are the American families. They are the people commuting to work on the trains or in the buses or in the cars. We need to think through how is it that we can do the infrastructure so there are better jobs, better wages, and better life for Americans?

Mr. Speaker, I yield to Mr. Jeffries to expand on the way in which the Better Deal proposal that we talked about can accomplish that transportation education.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman for laying out the essential agenda of the better deal proposal that the Democrats are putting forth. There are many, many elements to this.

He mentioned education. Infrastructure is a piece of it, medical care, research, and so forth.

Staying with the infrastructure, the Democrats have proposed several different ways to pay for the infrastructure program. Two of those, or one big one, is now gone.

American corporations held $1 trillion--I think, almost $2 trillion-- of profits offshore. In the tax, bill that money cannot be retrieved. It is going into the coffers of the corporations if they bring it back to the United States, with a very small tax.

One of the proposals brought forward by the Democrats was to repatriate, bring that money back to the United States and use it to support infrastructure, to use it to pay for immediate bonds, that we could then sell those bonds and use that money for infrastructure investment. That, of course, is gone as a result of the tax bill.

There is another proposal that really, I think, dovetails with the extraordinary ramp-up of the stock market. A lot of that has to do with transactions, billions of transactions every day. A small fee of less than one one-hundredth of a penny on each transaction would raise billions of dollars and go directly to deal with what is a problem in the stock market, and that is computerized gambling that goes on in the stock market.

There are other ways that we have proposed to raise the money, but one of the things that I fear is that the President is going to come up with a plan that saddles working men and women of America with the infrastructure cost.

Already, working men and women pay for most of the infrastructure. They are the ones who are driving the cars, paying the fees and so forth. This, we have to tackle. We need to do it in a bipartisan way as Mr. Jeffries has suggested, but we ought to do it in a way that tries to claw back as much of that unnecessary wealth that has been transferred to the superwealthy.

I yield to the gentleman from New York.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, did I hear the gentleman correctly that an individual who lost their job, for whatever reason, and moves to another State can no longer deduct the moving expense? Is that correct?

However, a corporation that decides to close that plant, that facility, that laid off that individual, and open a factory in China can deduct the cost of doing that?

Something is radically wrong here.

Mr. Speaker, I was reading the tax bill yesterday, which is not a good read, and I found a provision that was of particular interest to me. Back in the 1990s, I was Deputy Secretary for the Department of the Interior, and we were trying to deal with the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.

We have also, since that time, had this little thing called the Deepwater Horizon. There has been a small 9-cents-per-barrel fee that the petroleum industry has been paying for the cleanup of oil spills. The big ones, Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon, there was even more money as a result of the legal action taking care of them.

Little oil spills in the rivers and lakes and harbors are cleaned up using that fee. It is about $400 million a year--small, but absolutely essential. In the tax bill, they eliminated that small fee, and it is a $400 million windfall to the petroleum industry.

You go: Why would you do that? Who, then, is left to clean up? It is going to be the taxpayer in the State.

Mr. Speaker, did the gentleman mention State and local taxes? He is from New York. I am from California. Perhaps the two of us can get in a bit of a rage that the tax bill forces Californians, New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians, and Illinoisans to pay a tax on a tax that they have paid.

I yield to the gentleman from New York.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, it is probably not really appropriate that we get into a rage about the way in which this tax bill purposefully harms contributor States and forces the taxpayers in those States to pay Federal taxes on the taxes that they have paid to the State governments.

We could probably go on and on here for some time about the inequities and the harm that this tax bill does, and we certainly should. We should probably come back tomorrow and every day thereafter and tell the American people what has happened to them as a result of this tax scam.

In doing so, I really want to thank the gentleman and his two colleagues for developing, within the Democratic Caucus, a set of proposals, legislative proposals, policy changes, that will give the American public a better deal. We can juxtapose that against the tax bill, which is a raw deal for the American working family, but the gentleman has developed a better deal.

In the days ahead, I would love to join the gentleman and his colleagues juxtaposing the tax bill against the proposal that it is beneficial to working men and women in America, so perhaps we can do that.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would like to wrap up, I will follow him with a wrap-up.

I yield to the gentleman from New York.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank Mr. Jeffries, Mr. Cicilline, and Mrs. Bustos for developing the Better Deal program for our caucus.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to end where I started. So, for the American people, I want them to know where we are coming from as Democrats: ``The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.'' If you want to know where I am coming from, read that sentence.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the Chair for this time to talk about something that is rather important. Something we did today was to pass a horrendous tax cut that doesn't meet this fundamental goal.

Really, whenever we legislate here, we really ought to keep in mind our values: What is the purpose? What are we trying to accomplish? What is the goal? What is the human value that we are trying to put in place?

I often use this because it is here in Washington at the FDR Memorial. It is on the marble there: ``The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much.''

Let me read that again, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: ``The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.''

I want to use this as my compass, my guiding light on where we need to go. So this afternoon, this House of Representatives, by a vote of, I think, just over 200 voted to enact a tax law that goes in exactly the opposite direction of what FDR would say is our value, our goal.

Here it is. The Speaker of the House came here to bring down the gavel to announce the vote that he was so proud to have.

Eighty percent of the individual tax cuts don't go to the poor, don't go to the middle class. They go to the top 1 percent.

How does that fit with what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to the American Nation during the height of the Great Depression?

No. You may as well take Franklin Delano Roosevelt's words, turn them on their head, because this House didn't follow the edict, didn't follow the value, but did exactly the opposite: gave away, to the top 1 percent, even greater wealth.

How could that be? Why would they do that? Why would they do that?

Well, I don't know why they would do it, but they surely did it. And in addition to that, not just the wealthy 1 percent, the wealthy 10 percent, why don't you add American corporations to that who are awash in cash? $2.5 trillion in the bank accounts of American corporations, and they don't know how to spend it to create jobs in the United States.

Instead, the Republicans, today, decided they needed $1.43 billion additional cash as a result of the tax cut that no Democrats, not a one, but every Republican voted for, $1.43 billion--the number is from the Joint Committee on Taxation--of new after-tax revenue to American corporations.

And what do you suppose they are going to do with that? Create jobs in the United States? Expand their manufacturing? No. Or higher wages for their workers? No.

I will tell you what they intend to do with it. This is it. The corporate tax giveaway will give Wells Fargo an 18 percent earnings increase.

How do they intend to spend it? Hint: Not on jobs.

In his own words, Tim Sloan, CEO of Wells Fargo, December 2017--I think that is this month--said: ``Is it our goal to increase return to shareholders and do we have an excess amount of capital? The answer . . . is yes. So our expectation should be that we will continue to increase our dividend and our share buybacks next year and the year after that and the year after that.''

All right, Mr. Sloan. You can thank the Republicans, because when you buy back your shares, when you increase your dividends, guess what. The stock price goes up, and we know that your compensation is based on stock price. Are you going to use that extra money for loans to small businesses? to farmers? No, you are not. You are not going to make more loans.

This is replicated across the American corporate culture. This is not unique. This new after-tax bonus that the Republicans are giving to American corporations is going to be used for the benefit of the wealthy. So you can add, if you will, to the tax cuts that are coming as a result of the reduction in the top income tax bracket for individuals from 39.6 percent to 37 percent, you can add to it, but, by the way, their investment portfolio is going to go up also.

This tax program is an abomination, and it is going to hurt every American over time.

I am joined here tonight by my colleagues who are probably as riled up about this as I am. I am not sure which one of them came in first.

I yield to the gentleman from the State of Oregon, Peter DeFazio, my colleague.

I thank the ranking member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee for making a very clear case on how we might better spend our money.

I yield to the gentleman from the great State of California (Mr. McNerney), my colleague and neighbor.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Perlmutter), my friend.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman's final sentence was ``rushed through.'' There has not been one substantive hearing in either House. There has been a markup hearing, but that is not a substantive hearing.

No Democratic amendments have been accepted. Not one economist has been called to testify--not one accountant, not one tax lawyer. No hearings whatsoever.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Cicilline) to share with us his perspective.

Mr. Speaker, did I hear Mr. Cicilline correctly that the action taken here on the floor is not dispositive, but has to be modified in the Senate and brought back because they screwed up?

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Rhode Island.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Cicilline for bringing to our attention some key elements here: The deficit issue, which we will discuss a little longer today. Also, the issue of really growing American jobs: growing wages, growing the future, and creating a better future for American workers. I know that has been the gentleman's passion and his work. We will go through all of those things in the day ahead.

This bill may very well become law, but I would surely like to see exactly how the President is going to do with this. I suspect this passthrough business in which he has 500 passthrough corporations--he is not an active investor. He will make out very, very well, and the working men and women of the middle class are going to lose.

I am just looking at this. This is the distribution tables from the Joint Committee on Taxation, December 18, 2017. Income category, a distribution of individual income tax side of the proposal. 2019, a small $127 million reduction for everybody making less than $10,000. In 2021, they are actually paying higher taxes. So the very, very bottom, in just 3 years, they are going to pay higher taxes.

I notice that my friend from North Carolina has joined us, and I thank him so very much for joining us. I know he has a few things on his mind, as do Mr. Cicilline and I.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Price) to share with us his views on what has happened today and where we are going.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, oh, absolutely. And I would say, also, that maybe it is an oligarch, and maybe we are creating one of those Russian oligarch societies here in which a few who are well connected to this President are going to do very, very well.

We are not talking about the Russia thing here today, but it gives me some pause to think: Why are they working so hard to end the Mueller investigation? But that is another subject for another day.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, we don't need to guess what they are going to do. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr. Ryan, has said very clearly that next year will be step two. They will take on what he calls the social safety net: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps. That is where the cuts are going to come. This is not our words. These are the words of the leadership of this House of Representatives, the words of the Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Price of North Carolina so very much. His thoughtful discussion of this is much appreciated.

He mentioned the deficit issue. $1.5 trillion does not include the interest on the $1.5 trillion. So if you were to add the interest to the $1.5 trillion, it would actually probably be over $2 trillion to $2.3 trillion that this will cost. The actual reduction in revenues, $1.5 trillion, interest on top of that another $600 billion or so, so we are looking at something really serious here.

I would like to go through some of the numbers.

I looked at this. This is not something that is off 10 years from now. This is now.

In 2019, the structural deficit that is already in place, without even talking about this additional burden of increased deficit, the underlying structural deficit in 2019 is right around $600 billion. This tax bill will add maybe $250 billion to $300 billion of additional debt in 2019. So we are going to get very close to $1 trillion of deficit in 2019.

And, by the way, the military budget is increased by about, I think it is over $50 billion. That is not paid for, so that is additional debt. That is going to be here on the floor tomorrow or the next day.

In addition to that, there is this ongoing effort to deal with the hurricanes, fires, and so forth. That is another $120 billion that is not paid for.

So if you take $120 billion, you take $50 billion, and you take the $250 billion to $300 billion in the tax bill and you add that to the $600 billion that exists to begin with, in 2019, it will be over $1 trillion of new debt. And I will guarantee that the exodus, the migration of the deficit hawks from Washington, D.C., during December of 2017 will reverse in the warmer weather, coming back next year. And those deficit hawks will come back, they will come back to Congress, and they will go right after the programs that FDR talked about: those who have the least.

Our colleague, Mr. DeFazio, from the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee talked about what we could do if we had the money in infrastructure or if we had that billion dollars; 15,000 people would be employed. But we won't--we won't--have an infrastructure program, and they will be back here.

They will be back here to make cuts in the social safety net, as the Speaker has already said he intends to do. Medicaid, $800 billion to $1 trillion reduction in Medicaid over the next decade.

Who are the beneficiaries of Medicaid?

We think they are the people on welfare. Well, yes, but some 60 percent of Medicaid recipients are seniors, seniors in nursing homes and long-term care facilities.

I thank Mr. Price very much for joining us.

I think I am going to stop for just a moment and turn to my colleague from the great State of Maryland. If the gentleman would care to join us, I yield to Mr. Raskin for his remarks.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Raskin so very much for his remarks. The voice of Maryland is strong and powerful and quite correct. Mr. Raskin spoke of income inequality.

The wealthy in America, the top 1 percent, own as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent?

Mr. Speaker, this bill would seem to further the skewing of wealth to the wealthy.

Mr. Speaker, that is interesting. Perhaps the House of Lords is in our future.

I was just thinking, as Mr. Raskin was talking, of an old comic book that used to be popular. It was one of the Donald Duck comic books, and I remember it was Uncle Scrooge McDuck. I guess, in his treasury, he was playing with the dollars, throwing the coins up into the air. I am wondering if that is what we are really into here.

The superwealthy are just accumulating more and more wealth. For the benefit of the economy? Not really. It doesn't trickle down. There is absolutely no evidence that it does. In fact, there is plenty of historic economic evidence that trickle down doesn't work, but pushing up from the bottom would. We could have had a tax bill.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Raskin).

Well, if their tax bill is for their donors, we have a pretty good idea who the beneficiaries of the tax bill are. So the donors are the plutocrats, the superwealthy. It is Wall Street. Very much it is Wall Street because this is really about raising the stock price.

I think Mr. Raskin may not have been here when I put this up, but I am going to do it one more time. It has been clear that before the 1980s, 50 percent, maybe 55 percent, 60 percent of the after-tax income of corporations went into creating a bigger corporation, into manufacturing jobs, plant equipment, hiring more people, paying better wages.

Beginning in the mid-1980s or so, that began to shift so that, today, exactly the opposite occurs. Maybe 70, 80 percent of the after-tax profits now go into buying back stock, increasing the stock price, higher dividends.

Case in point: the corporate tax giveaway in this bill, which is actually--I said earlier it was $1.4 trillion reduction in corporate taxes over the next decade. It is actually $1.3 trillion. My apologies for being incorrect.

$1.3 trillion reduction in corporate taxes. For a company like Wells Fargo, a rather major bank, the corporate tax giveaway will give Wells Fargo an 18 percent earnings increase.

How does Wells Fargo intend to spend it?

Not on jobs.

Here is what the CEO of Wells Fargo, Mr. Tim Sloan, said in December of 2017. That is this month. He said: ``Is it our goal to increase return to shareholders, and do we have an excess amount of capital? The answer to both is `yes.' So our expectation should be that we will continue to increase our

dividend and our share buybacks next year and the year after that and the year after that.''

So where are the jobs?

May I cite one other example. Lowering the corporate tax rate was said to be an incentive for corporations to invest. Well, here is one of the great American corporations.

Are they investing?

I think not. They are buying back stock.

AT&T, another major American corporation, effectively reduced its tax rate to 8 percent over the last decade. So they are paying not 21 percent, as this bill would require. They are paying 8 percent.

Did they create jobs?

No. During that same period of time, they laid off 80,000 workers.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to Mr. Raskin, if he would like to make a few closing remarks, and then I will wrap up.

Mr. Speaker, they could be raising wages. I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, from their own mouth comes from the truth of what Mr. Raskin said. They have said it very clearly, they need to do this for their contributors.

Who are their contributors? Well, the wealthy, the superwealthy, and the rest.

Mr. Speaker, I think we are going to wrap it up here. I want to thank Mr. Raskin for his participation. I want to thank my colleagues who came to the floor tonight to express their dismay at what has happened.

Now, because the bill was rushed through without any public hearings, there were errors in the bill that require that the Senate take the approved conference committee report and modify it, which I suppose means there has to be yet another conference committee, modify it, remove the errors that are in conflict with the Senate rules, and send it back here. Presumably, that will be done tomorrow.

Maybe now, as we bring to the attention of the American public the way in which this tax bill is harmful to the economy, harmful to the American middle class, and will result in 83 million Americans immediately paying higher taxes, and over the period of time, everybody that is less than $100,000, maybe $150,000, will be paying higher taxes, but the wealthy and the corporations will go on and have their lower taxes for many, many years to come, all of that hopefully will begin to sink in on the American public, and they will rise up in indignation and call a halt to what is a major rip-off of the American Treasury and America's future.

So we will continue to talk about this in the days ahead, and those who have voted for this are going to be held responsible and accountable as the days and the months go by.

Keep in mind that the Texas Two-Step is very much in play, and that, in the days ahead, in the next year, as the weather warms, the returned migration of the deficit hawks will take place, and they will go after Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, education, children's health, and other programs that men and women of America rely upon, and perhaps many, many more.

We will be fighting this fight for many months to come.

Mr. Speaker, keeping in mind the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the distinguished career of Marjorie Dickinson, a tireless advocate for California higher education. Since 1987, Marjorie has served as the Assistant Chancellor for Government and Community Relations for the University of California, Davis. As the first person to be appointed to the position, her impact on shaping the university's Government and Community Relations program cannot be understated.

Marjorie and her team serve to represent UC Davis to local, state, and federal government officials, advocating for the university community on a wide array of issues. Her work has cultivated positive relationships within the local community while also balancing a national perspective, helping UC Davis continue to be a leader in the field of higher education whose impact is truly global.

A product of the University of California system herself, having graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, Marjorie has also served with the California Post-Secondary Education Commission. Her entire career is a testament to her dedication to higher education in our state, and her passion for the University of California is constantly on display.

Marjorie's remarkable tenure is coming to an end, but she is preparing to embark on the next phase of her life: a well-earned retirement. We want to express our sincere gratitude to Marjorie for her three decades of service, and we are joined by the entire UC Davis community in wishing her nothing but the best for the future.

Mr. Speaker, one of the tasks of having the second Special Order Hour is to find myself sitting here in this Chamber listening to the most absurd, ridiculous conversation that I think I have ever heard anywhere. My esteemed colleagues were here for the last hour in a different world, in a completely different universe, not of this world, but a different universe, And I am thinking: What in the world are they saying?

By my recollection, every one of our intelligence agencies said that Russia was involved in the campaign and developing information that was supporting the current President. I am thinking: I think that is what I heard over the last 9, 10, almost 14 months now. And yet my colleagues are up here and in a different world.

I will tell you what it is all about. This wasn't the subject matter that I was going to talk to tonight, but it was really about another scam, another scheme that is being perpetrated. This is all about, this last hour's discussion was all about somehow turning the table so that Special Counsel Mueller is demeaned, his work is somehow not authentic so that the investigation that is coming closer and closer to the Oval Office is discredited, setting the stage for what may very, very well be an extremely important task that this House has.

As that investigation continues, we will hear even more shrill discussions from the President's supporters tearing down that investigation, undermining the integrity of it, so that when that task comes to the House of Representatives in an impeachment resolution, they will simply say: Well, his entire investigation is discredited and, therefore, we are not going to proceed.

The American public isn't buying it, gentlemen. The American public is not blind. They are not deaf. They are listening, and they are understanding that an honest investigation is underway, based upon what our intelligence agencies discovered, based upon the fact--the fact-- that the Russians did hack the DNC and did hack the chairman of the Hillary Clinton campaign and then weaponized those emails that were stolen. That is a fact, gentlemen, and you cannot wash away that fact.

And from there, we now have a special prosecutor, a special counsel in place who is carrying on an investigation, and indictments have come forward and penalties have been assessed and people have pleaded guilty.

All of that is the fact, and it is pointing closer and closer to the White House; and, therefore, I understand, gentlemen, I understand why you are so upset. I suppose if I were somehow to stand here and be an advocate for the President, I might be upset, too, because the net is drawing tighter, because information is coming clearer.

So come to the floor, do what you can, do what you can to undermine the investigation; do what you can, through your falsehoods, through your incorrect interpretations of plain facts, to undermine the integrity of an investigation. I understand why you would be intent upon doing so.

But the purpose of this evening isn't that. It is something that will affect America for the next two decades, at least. The purpose of this hour is to talk to the American people about what is happening here while these foolish floor discussions are going on.

What is happening here in Congress at this moment, this week, is one of the biggest transfers of wealth ever in America's history; the transfer of wealth from the working men and women of America, from the poor, from the elderly, to the superwealthy of America.

What is happening here in Congress now, in a conference committee, is the drafting of legislation, tax legislation, that will dramatically affect the American economy for decades.

Transferring wealth, benefits that the elderly receive in Medicare, transferring benefits that the poor receive in food stamps, in Meals on Wheels, in Medicare, Medicaid, children's health programs; transferring those necessary benefits that these men and women need to survive, to be able to live; transferring those benefits to the superwealthy in a tax proposal that gives to the largest American corporations and to the top 1 percent, over $5 trillion over the next decade, that is what is happening.

Here is a fact: American corporations that have already seen their share of burden to finance this government, to educate the Americans, to keep our military, to deal with national security, they have seen their share of the Federal revenues drop from some 20 percent-- actually, 30 percent in 1939, 15 percent in 1960, down to somewhere in the 5 to 10 percent range. At the same time, the burden is shifted to the middle class. That is what is happening.

Here is what should be happening. Here is the way we ought to look at it. On The Mall here in Washington, we have the FDR Memorial. Etched in the marble is this: ``The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.''

I presented this upside down almost on purpose because that is precisely what our Republican colleagues are doing. They are taking that value and turning it upside down. Instead of doing more for those who have little, they are doing much for those who already control the greatest amount of wealth ever in the handful of a few people since the 1400s, when the Spanish Empire was ripping off the Western Hemisphere. That is what is happening.

Of all of this money, the top 1 percent and America's biggest corporations are gaining, and the rest of Americans, over the next 5 to 7 years, are going to pay for that. We have to stop this tax cut. We have to stop it because it is terrible public policy.

American corporations don't need more money. It was reported today that Apple--the world's largest, most valuable corporation, Apple, in my State of California--is sitting on $2.5 trillion of cash today in the United States, and another $2.5 trillion of cash outside the United States, and they want their tax rate reduced. They are almost paying nothing now because they are able to escape American taxes.

They say: Lower the corporate tax rate so that there will be investment in America.

It ain't so. In the last 20 years, there has been a cataclysmic change in the way in which corporations use their profits.

In the 1970s, 50, 60 percent of the after-tax profits of corporations went into building their business, building new equipment, new manufacturing plants, adding employees, increasing wages. The remaining 40 percent or so went to dividends.

Where are we today?

Less than 10 percent goes to increasing a company's manufacturing, the company's employment, wages for workers.

Where does the rest of it go?

It goes to stock buybacks and to dividends. It goes to the shareholders.

And who are the shareholders?

The top 1 percent.

This is the scam of all times. They say we have got to reduce the taxes on corporations so that they will employ more Americans. If only they would. If only they would.

I am sure you have heard of AT&T. Do you know what the effective tax rate of AT&T is?

Not 35 percent, not 30 percent, not even 20 percent, as this tax bill would set as the maximum rate of corporations. The effective tax rate for the last 10 years for AT&T has been 8 percent. Eight percent.

And during that time, did they use that after-tax profit to add employees, to increase wages?

No. They laid off 80,000 American workers.

What did they use that money for?

Stock buybacks, corporate executives, $124 million to the CEO just 2 years ago.

I could go on and on, but I would like to bring to this debate Mr. Cicilline,

who has determined that there is a better deal, better wages, better future, better jobs.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Cicilline).

Mr. Speaker, I actually have seen something like this before. Last summer, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, or at least the attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, where 24 million Americans were going to lose their health insurance, this House rammed it right through, just totally ignoring the welfare. And I am not talking about corporate welfare. I am talking about the well-being of 24 million Americans who stood to lose their insurance.

Now that is being repeated. In fact, in this legislation, there is a provision that it would only cause 13 million Americans to lose their insurance.

So not only are they doing this tax scam, as the gentleman so well described it, but they put in a provision that would cause 13 million Americans to lose their insurance over the next several years, and 4 million Americans next year.

A person might say: What morality do you have? What are your values when you do that kind of thing?

So, yes, I have seen it, and we are seeing it once again.

So what is the value? It is not this. It is not the test of our progress of what we do for those who have little. It is the upside down of that. It is: How can we do more for those who have much, the top 1 percent:

Mr. Cicilline is from Rhode Island. I am from California. I think the view from ocean to ocean and somewhere in between, there has got to be some sanity here, if you will.

I yield to the gentleman from Rhode Island.

I thank the gentleman. He is absolutely correct.

It used to be, I think just 2 or 3 months ago, that, on this floor, you would hear the sound of the deficit hawks. You would hear them screaming, crying out about the huge deficit. And, indeed, we do have a huge deficit. If you take a look at the growth of the deficit, this is 2027. At the end of this tax bill, it is growing at $500 billion a year without the additional deficit created by the tax bill. They would cry. They would lament the situation.

Suddenly--maybe it is because it is winter, and, like the Canadian geese, they flew south--they have disappeared. They are nowhere to be found around Washington, D.C. But I suspect, with the new year, as the days grow longer, as it warms up, the deficit hawks will return, and they will come back with a vengeance, just as the gentleman said.

Wait a minute. The gentleman didn't say it. He repeated what the Speaker of the House of Representatives said, what our Republican colleagues voted for in their budget proposal just ahead of this tax proposal. They said it very, very clearly. They intend to take $500 billion out of Medicare, right out of the healthcare for seniors.

They intend--they did it in their budget. They did it in their words. The Speaker did it in his own words. They intend to cut Medicare $500 billion and Medicaid by $1.5 trillion so that the deficit that they created with the tax scam that gives all of that money to the wealthy and to the corporations, they are going to take it right out of the pockets of the elderly. They are going to take it right out of the pockets of the poor.

Keep in mind that some 50 to 60 percent of Medicaid money goes to seniors in nursing homes and in extended care facilities.

Something is dramatically wrong. Where is the morality of this? Where is the human value? Where are the words? Where are the words of FDR? Blowing in the wind, long gone.

Mr. Cicilline, I have noticed we have been joined by one of our colleagues. I don't know if she wants to join me.

We will just continue.

I yield to the gentleman from Rhode Island.

The word ``we'' is incorrect.

Mr. Speaker, we have heard that argument over and over. If I am not mistaken, the economy is working pretty close to maximum right now, 3 percent. The unemployment rate is 4 percent or in that range, maybe a little lower, and the Federal Reserve is looking at increasing the interest rate to slow down the economy. Our Republican friends say they need to beef up the economy.

So tell me how it works. When the Federal Government borrows more money for this deficit, that will cause interest rates to go up because they are competing with other folks who want to borrow money. The Federal Reserve is increasing interest rates. So we can look for interest rates going up. The economy is slowing down.

So how does this increase? It just doesn't work in macroeconomic terms in any way.

But I don't want to be an economist. What I want to be is just factual. So if I might, for a moment, these are 10 popular deductions that the Republicans are limiting or repealing in their tax bill, the list of horribles: limits the State and local tax deduction, which is a big problem for California, a big problem for New York, a big problem for, really, every State because every State has taxpayers who deduct State and local taxes.

For California, in my district, 32 percent of the taxpayers use this deduction, and it is over $10,000. We are a high-cost State, housing and so forth.

I yield to the gentleman from Rhode Island.

The gentleman mentioned this one, but I think we need to focus on it.

Right now, if you are going to go to college, almost every person is going to have to borrow money. Student debt is over $1.2 trillion. Young men and women who graduate are burdened by that student debt. They are not buying cars. They are not building any business. They are trying to pay off the debt. They are able to deduct the interest on that debt. It helps them out a little bit.

So what do our Republican friends do? They eliminate the interest deduction on student debt. The gentleman has spoken to this.

I yield to the gentleman from Rhode Island.

That is precisely what they are doing.

The gentleman talked earlier about a better plan. He talked about better education, about better opportunities. We know. And the gentleman and I have been on this floor talking about how to build the American economy. In that discussion, we know that the economy grows on research. It grows on research at universities all across this Nation.

What do our Republican friends do in their tax bill? They are going to make it extremely difficult to do research at the universities by placing a very onerous tax on graduate students who are working in those research institutions.

Right now, graduate students get paid a stipend, a small amount of money to do the research in those research institutions, and they get their tuition free. Our Republican colleagues, for reasons that make no sense whatsoever, would tax that tuition that is not paid. So these young men and women in these graduate studies are going to have to pay a tax, and they never receive any cash to pay the tax.

What would be the result? Universities across the entire Nation are saying: Stop it. Don't do this. We will not be able to hire graduate students to do research because they cannot afford it.

How stupid. If we are going to have a better economy, if we are going to have better jobs, better wages, education is the essential foundation for that. And yet what do they do here with this? They go right after the students.

When it comes time for cuts--the gentleman said it before--Pell grants, other kinds of stipends, other kinds of assistance for education, gone. One of the fundamentals of the Democratic program is a better education, a better educated workforce so that there will be better jobs, better wages, better economy.

I yield to the gentleman from Rhode Island.

I have gone through three of the horribles here, the student loans and the graduate deductions.

We have seen disasters across America: floods, hurricanes, California fires, thousands of homes lost in California. So what does this brilliant tax thing do? It eliminates the casualty loss deduction.

It eliminates the casualty loss deduction. So if your home burns down in a fire--maybe it is one of the catastrophic fires that are now burning in California--your home is gone. Comes time the next year to pay your taxes, you can deduct the loss that you had incurred. Not anymore. Not what our brilliant tax writers on the Republican side would do. The casualty loss disappears.

If that is not enough, you have lost your home, you have lost your job, and you need to move. You need to move your family. They eliminate the moving expense deduction.

How is a family going to get a better job?

You used to be able--you would today--to eliminate--you would be able to write off the moving expense. But not with the tax bill.

But the individual can't deduct the moving expense to follow the job.

Mr. Speaker, something is terribly wrong here. Four in my family are teachers. It is a little thing, but it means everything. It is little. Teachers are able to deduct from their taxes $250 for expenses that they have paid for classroom supplies. Gone. It is gone. If you want to hurt the system, stick it to the teachers.

Why would you do that?

It is not a big thing. It is a little thing, but it means everything to that classroom. It is the additional paper, the crayons, the chalkboard, whatever.

How small is that? Is that a better deal for America?

I don't think so.

The casualty loss deduction hurts. Three hundred homes in my district were lost in the October fires. The casualty loss deduction is gone. I don't know, maybe they will be able to rebuild. But when it comes time to address that deficit, I can assure you that they will do everything they can to cut the programs that would support that family as they attempt to rebuild.

So you get the program, you lose on the front end, your tax deduction is gone, and you lose on the back end when you go to get mortgage assistance.

There has got to be a better plan. There has got to be a better way to do it.

Mr. Speaker, over the years, in the last several months, Mr. Cicilline and his colleagues on the Democratic Caucus have put together a program for a better life for Americans. It involves much of what we talked about here. It involves a tax program that is balanced, one that provides the incentives for businesses to stay in the United States. We haven't talked about the corporate tax program that allows for territorial taxing, a specific effort in this legislation to encourage corporations to go offshore where their corporate income will never be taxed.

That is not a better plan. That is not a better program for building American jobs and wages. It is a way for corporations to continue to escape. Someday soon I would hope Mr. Cicilline and his colleagues would bring to this floor--the three of them who have put together this program on how we can build the American economy--well, the gentleman can talk in specific ways about how we can have educational programs, apprenticeship training programs, and job training programs, how we can encourage corporations to invest in America, and how we can Make It In America.

I would love to join Mr. Cicilline and talk about a bill that we are soon going to introduce that would require that, when we export a strategic national asset--our oil and natural gas--that it would be on American-built ships with American sailors. We could employ hundreds of thousands of people in our shipyards by changing the laws and by providing incentives for Americans to stay here and to work here.

Mr. Speaker, I know this is Mr. Cicilline's effort. I know the gentleman wants to get to it. Perhaps we can wrap up.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Cicilline so very much for joining me tonight.

I really want to go back and plow this field one more time. I am just a farm boy from California. I don't know that we have said it enough nor have we said it all. We do know that in this tax scam there is a $1.4 trillion reduction in corporate taxes with no assurance that that is going to create jobs in America. But quite the opposite. It will be a great boon for the superwealthy, who will see their stock values go up as that additional after-tax income for the corporations is spent on stock buybacks, dividends, and executive pay.

We know that the alternative minimum tax will disappear, and that is about $900 billion to the, again, top income earners.

We know in California and across the Nation that the State and local tax deduction will be gone. That will probably cost those 32 percent of the taxpayers--the tax filers in my district that use that deduction-- $1,000 to $2,000 in additional taxes.

We know this is going to go on and on, and we know that the deficit is going to be increased. There may be some growth. There has been one analysis that said there may be a couple hundred billion dollars of growth, but it is not going to make up for the $1.5 trillion deficit on top of the existing deficit.

We know the deficit hawks will be back. They have said it very clearly. They are going to come back and they are going to cut Medicare and Medicaid. We know they are going to take it out of the healthcare for the poor. They know they want to end insurance in the Affordable Care Act for 13 million Americans. All of that has been laid out. We know all of those things.

Oh, just in case you are one of those people who have high medical costs, like a senior 50 years of age, who has a serious medical condition and you have been able to deduct from your taxes the medical costs, forget it. Our Republican friends are eliminating the medical cost deduction.

Why would they do that? Why would they take after people who have serious medical problems?

Their out-of-pocket costs are covering all of that.

This is a long story, but for my colleagues here on the floor, Democratic and Republican, be very, very careful because this particular tax bill, should it ever become law, is going to take this Nation a decade, maybe two decades, to get out of from underneath the extraordinary burden that it is going to place on the American economy, on the working men and women, and on the poor in America.

The things we need to do, Mr. Cicilline talked about infrastructure. The President says: I am going to have a $1 trillion infrastructure program.

Really? Really? He is going to do that?

He just ripped the guts out of the American Treasury.

Where is the money?

Oh, it is going to be private money. No. He has already given up on that. His words, not mine.

So where is the public investment?

Five trillion dollars disappears. Five trillion dollars. Some of it made up by the elimination of these deductions that I have talked about.

Still, there is at least a $1.5 trillion hole. The only way that they can possibly make up that after giving away all of that money to the corporations, all of that money to the superwealthy--and did I mention the estate tax?

I probably should have. The House bill eliminated the estate tax.

What does that mean to our esteemed President?

Well, he says that he is worth $10 billion.

Who am I to argue with him?

If he is, and he were to die, it means $4 billion less tax to his children. Four billion. Now, others say he is only worth $4 billion. So let's take $4 billion. For his children, it is simply a tax reduction of $1 billion.

What does that amount to?

That is what this is about. This is all about the wealthy. This is all about those who have much. It is most definitely not about what FDR said. Etched in stone on the FDR Memorial: ``The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much. It is whether we provide enough for those who have little.''

So where is our heart? So what is our moral value? Is it morality? Is it right to add more to those who have much? Or is the purpose, the central value of this Nation the opposite, to add more to those who have too little?

That is where I am. That is where my Democratic colleagues are. I am afraid my Republican colleagues are proving the opposite.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, the recent passing of the father of my district director brings me to the floor today to speak about the extraordinary career of Albert O. Orta and his selfless service to our Nation.

He began his career in the U.S. Air Force at Lackland Air Force Base in 1947, where he became an expert on radar and communications equipment. In 1949, he married Mary Louise Guerrero, which resulted in 12 children, 31 grandchildren, and 29 great-grandchildren.

Mr. Orta was a busy man, but he also served his country after leaving the U.S. Air Force. He became an expert in radar engineering and communications, working on the B-29, B-36, B-47, and B-52, as well as fighter jets F-84, F-86A, F-89, F-102, and F-106.

His outstanding accomplishments and his willingness to serve our Nation faithfully and to the best of his abilities brought him praise from President Jimmy Carter and a host of generals all around this Nation.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues and the United States House of Representatives to join me in honoring Albert O. Orta for his distinguished career and his proud service to our country.

Mr. Speaker, a moment ago, you heard from my colleague from California (Ms. Judy Chu) about the tax bill. She put the first page of H.R. 1 up and she added this little percentage, H.R. 1 percent. I thought that was not only accurate, but it really does reflect what I was going to show a moment ago, and then I decided to use hers.

H.R. 1 is really about the 1 percent. The top 1 percent wealthy Americans would get 50 percent of a $1.5 trillion gift from the American people, which really amounts to an enormous transfer of wealth from the working men and women of America who depend upon programs like education--and that was discussed by my colleagues a few moments ago-- and depend upon medical services from Medicare, Medicaid. In California, we call it Medi-Cal.

But what is going to happen here with this $1.5 trillion tax cut--and when you add the interest to it, basically, a $2.3 trillion bogus deal that our Republican colleagues are putting forth--is what I call the Texas two-step. This really is Mr. Brady from Texas' program to really do a two-step, together with the Speaker of the House, Mr. Ryan.

The two-step was laid out in the budget bill, and the two-step is this:

First, make a monumental tax cut that really is for the superwealthy. And then as soon as you get that signed by President Trump, you do the second step, which is to do massive cuts so that you can deal with the deficit.

So I am going to just bring up the issue of the deficit for just a moment with this. I don't expect you to really look at all of these numbers, but this is the structural deficit that exists today: $563 billion structural deficit. Every year--this year and in the past years--we are running a serious deficit: $1.5 trillion. Ten years from now, it is going to be over a $1 trillion-a-year structural deficit.

So what does H.R. 1, the 1 percent bill, do to you?

What it does is it adds to the structural deficit this year $115 billion; and, in 2027, it will add $155 billion.

You can look at it this way--and perhaps this is a little easier to understand. It is about the deficit, and this is why the two-step is going to happen.

By the way, all of the deficit hawks that once occupied that entire array on the right side of the congressional House of Representatives disappeared. They migrated. They migrated south or somewhere. But I will tell you this: as soon as this H.R. 1 percent passes, the deficit hawks will return with a mighty force to make cuts.

So here is what happens to the deficit: it starts down there--this is the annual, not the total deficit--and rises to this in 2027. This little orange across the top is what will be added. We don't deal with the deficit directly.

So here is the deal, folks: cut taxes now so that the superwealthy, five of which are in President Trump's administration--oh, yes, eliminate the estate tax. Great idea.

Do you know what that means to the Trump family?

If his wealth is $10 billion, as he says, what it means is that somewhere around a $4 billion tax avoidance. Eliminating the estate tax and the Trump family immediately saves $4 billion. But maybe his net worth is really only $4 billion. So maybe it is just a $1 billion tax savings. That is just on the estate tax alone.

This is a bad deal for Americans. It will increase the deficit and it will create what we call the Texas two-step. Or maybe we should call it the Speaker Ryan two-step.

Mr. Speaker, let me introduce a couple of my colleagues who have joined us today from the State of New York.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Suozzi) to comment on this piece of legislation and what it means to his constituents.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Suozzi for his remarks. I appreciate him bringing to my attention the SALT--the State and local tax.

What basically happens is the Republicans are putting salt on the wound and causing an enormous amount of pain for Americans--certainly in California, another high-cost State; Illinois; New Jersey; and Massachusetts. This is a problem for about 50 percent of the population of this Nation that is going to see enormous things.

In my own State, there are 120,000--not 250,000, as in the gentleman's State, but 120,000--who are looking at somewhere over a $12,000 loss deduction.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from New York.

Mr. Speaker, there is one additional factor--I know this is the case in California and also in New York--and that is both New York and California are net contributors to other States. In our State of California, even with this deduction, far more tax revenue flows to the Federal Government than Federal Government revenue comes back to the State of California. It is probably in the 15 to 20 percent net loss range to the State of California, and I think in New York it is similar.

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Suozzi and I could probably spend a couple of hours going back and forth.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Jayapal), who comes from the far side of the continent from New York, Washington State.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman very much, Representative Jayapal, for her comments. She brought to our attention the inconsistencies that are in this piece of legislation.

Everywhere I go and people talk about this, they say: I don't understand why they want to do that. I don't understand why, with a growing economy and the economy actually moving along pretty well, 4 percent-plus unemployment and growth somewhere in the 3 percent range, why they want to totally turn the American economy upside down in a way that does not create growth.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler), bouncing back across the continent and picking up, once again, in New York. I thank the gentleman for joining me, and I look forward to his words and the wisdom that he brings from Manhattan.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for bringing us the view from New York. He is quite correct about what happened during the great crisis in 2008, 2009. The American public, probably to the tune of about $1 trillion, bailed out Wall Street. And here we go again. Major support for the American corporations who are hiding trillions of dollars overseas.

Let me just give you one other example. There is a lot of talk around here from our Republican friends that somehow, if we reduce the corporate tax rate, we will see jobs being generated and some $4,000 a year of new money in the pockets of American workers.

Really? You think so?

Let me give you an example of one of America's great corporations, AT&T. I think we all know AT&T. We probably have them on our smartphone. In the last decade, AT&T was capable, using various tax loopholes and deductions, to lower its effective corporate tax rate, not to 20 percent, but to 8 percent.

So over that period of time, while they were reducing their effective tax rates, that is their real tax rate, from whatever it was to 8 percent during that decade, did they create new jobs? No.

What they did was to lay off 80,000 workers. And at the same time, guess what? The CEO, he raked in $124 million.

So what is going on here?

The American corporations, back in the seventies and sixties, actually invested more than 50 percent, almost 60 percent, of their after-tax profits in expanding their business--investment in plants and equipment and wages and hiring people.

Today, less than 10 percent is spent on expanding their businesses. Instead, they are pumping up their stock prices with buybacks and with dividends.

So what is going down?

Tell me that this is going to somehow create jobs.

And, by the way, the gentleman didn't quite pick this one up, so let me add to the weight of this terrible bill. They use what is called territorial tax system. Terrific. Corporations will not be taxed for their profits globally, but, rather, they will only be taxed for their profits within the United States, so it is even a further incentive to offshore your jobs to the lowest tax place in the world: Bahamas. Used to be Ireland, but the EU decided that Ireland was cheating the rest of the European countries; put a stop to that, so now they are off.

Apple, a great California company, abandoned Ireland and is now, I think, located in the Jersey Islands off the coast of Great Britain.

Scheme, scam, the American public is going to be the beneficiary? No. It is going to be the victim, is going to be the victim of this great transfer of wealth.

The gentleman had one more point to make, and then I would like to go to my colleague, also from New York and what we still call the East- West Show.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from the great State of New York (Mr. Tonko).

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Hastings).

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, as an esteemed member of the Rules Committee, there is an emergency meeting to push this bill to the floor without any public hearings. Is that correct?

Mr. Speaker, my recollection in the 1986 Reagan tax reform, it took 2 years of public hearings all around the country and some 30 hearings in the House Ways and Means Committee, probably a similar number on the Senate side before the bill came to the floor. There were many, many amendments that were offered.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the work that the gentleman does there trying to protect the American public from this hasty--Mr. Hastings, thank you so very much.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from New York.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman, very, very much. There has been much discussion. We are going to be yielding this floor to our Republican colleagues, and I see them beginning to assemble, all of them who, just 3 weeks ago, were deficit hawks.

I am going to point this out, and I am going to leave it here for my colleagues who will be talking about why we ought to increase the deficit.

The current structural deficit is about $500 billion. We are going to add, just this year, $115 billion on top of that. You can see that. But over the next decade, that present structural deficit will grow to nearly $1 trillion a year, and we will add to it another couple hundred billion dollars.

The deficit hawks have a choice. They can live with the deficit, forget they ever were deficit hawks and just increase the deficit with this 1 percent tax bill, H.R. 1, or they could do what I call the Texas two-step.

Keep in mind, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee is a Texan. The Texas two-step is first you seriously cut the revenues with this tax bill that is not a reform but, rather, a bill that actually 50 percent of the $1.5 trillion reduction goes to the American corporations and the top 1 percent. Forget about the deficit or do the Texas two-step: cut the revenues and then cut the programs.

What are the programs?

You mentioned Medicare. Already in the budget that passed this House with Mr. Ryan as Speaker was a $500 billion reduction to Medicare and a $700 billion or $800 billion reduction to Medicaid, 60 percent of which goes to the elderly in nursing homes. That is what they have in mind.

Secondly, they are going to talk about a trillion-dollar infrastructure. No way. The money is gone. There will be no infrastructure program, no roads, no trains, no buses, no levees, no repair.

Exactly, and you might add education to that. So what do you do? Student loans of which $1.4 trillion and nearly a trillion of that is owned by the Federal Government, these students are paying interest to the Federal Government; and to add to that, we are going to deny them the ability to deduct the loan interest that they are paying.

This is really just hypocritical, and it is very harmful to the economy. We want to do job training. Forget it. The money is gone. The Texas Two Step will deny us the money that we need for education, reduce the revenues, and then cut the programs to attempt to bring back under control the deficit. It did not work. It will not work. And what it means is, the American economy that is recovering is going to be given a wallop on the side of its head, and we are going to see some real serious problems as we attempt to build the foundation for future economic growth. The money will not be there.

Mr. Speaker, I suspect that that emergency meeting of the Rules Committee is to specifically deal with the problem that was announced by the Congressional Budget Office just 3 hours ago that said this tax bill will, because of the sequestration law--it is a law--will create an automatic $25 billion reduction in Medicare immediately and another $111 billion reduction in programs, not to be determined by the Representatives of the people of the United States but, rather, by Mick Mulvaney, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, who is known to be really weird in his budgeting proposal.

He will make a $111 billion reduction all on his own, if this tax bill passes as it is written today.

This is serious business, Americans. This is about your future. This is about your ability to have a decent job in America, a decent infrastructure, a decent education system, and medical services.

What about the children's health program which is not yet in place? It is unbelievable that, without one public hearing, the Republicans are determined to pass a $1.5 trillion tax cut of which 50 percent of the benefit goes to the top 1 percent, and America's corporations are given yet another reason to offshore their jobs with what is called territorial pricing.

This is where we are, folks. Wrap it up, if you will.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is exactly right. Finally, as we turn this floor over to our Republican colleagues, I am really interested in hearing why--and I see one of our colleagues from my area--why in the Central Valley of California where anywhere from 110,000 to 150,000 families who pay taxes are going to lose their State and local tax deduction? They will lose somewhere between $7,000 and $12,000 of deductions.

That amounts to an increase in taxes anywhere from $1,500 to $2,000. I want to hear them explain why that is good tax policy. We will see what they have to say. They will be on the floor in a few moments.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, February 17, Oroville Dam, California, a 30-foot potential tsunami coming down on the cities of Oroville and further down the river in Marysville and Yuba City. 200,000 people evacuated. Thankfully, the rain did stop and the levee, or the spillway, that had failed did not become a catastrophe.

FERC is now in the process of relicensing the dam, and a complete environmental impact statement is now more than a decade over, 2007. However, there have been very significant changes like, you know, maybe the dam could collapse, or the spillway. We know that the river has been further congested with the material that came from the broken spillway.

There are serious negative environmental impacts that have resulted from the damaged spillway. The river can't carry the same capacity. It has been silted.

Bottom line, it is for these reasons that a failure by FERC to require a supplemental environmental impact statement would be a serious abdication of FERC's responsibility.

Unfortunately, a proposed amendment by Mr. LaMalfa, my good Republican colleague, and me to require such a supplemental impact statement was not included in the bill. Nevertheless, my message to FERC is clear: you must do this so that there is full protection and full understanding of the potential impact that this dam will have on communities, our water supply, as well as flooding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize Sheila Allen, a proven leader in the Davis, California community who embodies the qualities of a true public servant. Sheila is currently the Executive Director of the Yolo Healthy Aging Alliance. She has been instrumental in building an organization that serves as a vital voice for older adults in Yolo County and elected officials and community leaders consider her the expert in addressing senior issues. Sheila is credited with organizing the 2010 Aging Summit that recognized the need for sustained attention of older adults. Her leadership has enhanced the lives of countless older adults in Yolo County through educational programs, collaboration with over 80 providers of older adult services and is a faithful advocate for needed programs and services at every level of government.

Working alongside County Supervisor Provenza, Sheila was instrumental in helping to advocate for a new Adult Day Health Care Center in Woodland as well as a Memory Center in Davis. Sheila also advocated for legislation to protect seniors from abuse and provide greater access to services in the community. She is currently working on a similar project in Winters, California.

Sheila's community involvement includes, Trustee, Davis Unified School District, Board Member, First Five Yolo, Board of Director, Explorit Science Center, Board of Governors, Agency on Aging, Board of Directors, American Nurses Association, Board of Director, Golden State Nursing Foundation, Advisory Committee, Yolo County Home Supportive Services, Member, Yolo County Health Council, Member, City of Davis Human Relations

Commission, and Advisory Committee, Unitrans. Sheila holds a B.S. in Nursing from University of Wisconsin, Masters and a PhD in Nursing from University of San Francisco.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize Ms. Tranine Chisom of Fairfield, California, who has dedicated her career to community service and improving support for people with mental health disabilities and those who experience housing challenges and homelessness. As the Director of Supported Housing of Caminar in Solano County, Tranine has tirelessly worked with property owners, and city and county officials to increase and leverage affordable housing resources for our most vulnerable citizens. Annually, Tranine and her team provide supportive housing services to over 100 residents who might not otherwise be able to obtain or maintain affordable housing on their own.

Ms. Chisom also serves as the Board Chairwoman for Housing First Solano, a coalition of service providers in Solano County working together to end homelessness. She has been instrumental in the development and now the implementation of Solano County's Neighbors Helping Neighbor-Forward Together 5-Year Strategic Plan to address homelessness.

Tranine is also active in the Solano Napa Habitat for Humanity program where she actively participates as a crew member on community building days, as well as serves on the Family Selection Committee to identify families most in need of a Habitat Home.