Floor Statements

Mr. President, I would like to congratulate Damiani Stores on their 30th anniversary of providing south Florida with exceptional service and quality men's clothing. With three locations serving the south Florida area, Damiani is an example of a successful local business, one that started by selling suits out of the owner's vehicle in 1987. They uphold a strong, longstanding reputation of prestige in our community, and I have no doubt they will see many more years of continued success.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to complete my remarks.

Mr. President, I know we are scheduled for a vote in a few minutes. We will have plenty of time to talk about this in the days to come.

I think one of the core things that I hope tax reform will be about is empowering the American worker. By ``the American worker,'' I mean the people whom they don't make Netflix series about and we don't see movies about too often anymore. There was a time when the American worker was a hero in our country. People looked up to the American worker and idealized them. Today, obviously, entertainment focuses on other professions. There is nothing wrong with that, but we have forgotten about their hard work and the millions and millions of Americans across this country who truly remain the backbone of our economy and our Nation.

There are hard-working men and women who are struggling to get by, not because they are not working hard but because everything costs more--something you quickly find out as your family begins to grow. That is why I have spent so much time talking about the child tax credit. A lot of people confuse that with the childcare credit, which is important as well.

The child tax credit takes into account the reality that raising children is an expense. It is a blessing, but it costs money. At the end of the day, it doesn't always matter only how much you make; it also matters how much you spend. And when you are raising children and raising a family, the costs are often out of your control, and they increase substantially every single year. So perhaps the best way to illustrate to my colleagues the impact that tax reform has on working families is to talk about real people and their real lives--how much money they make and what tax reform would mean for them.

I want to start with a real family, a particular family my staff has been communicating with; that is, the Starling family, Richard and Emily, a very young family from Jacksonville, FL. They have a 2-year- old daughter, and they are expecting their second child in March. Richard is a pastor, and he works part time at Starbucks. He makes about $25,000 a year. His wife Emily stays home and cares for their daughter while he is at work.

Because of their income, the Senate tax bill's nonrefundable child tax credit increase would actually be worth very little to them. A lot of people have said to me: Well, we have increased it to $2,000. Isn't that great? It is. But what it means that people don't understand is, if the majority--if all the taxes you pay are payroll taxes, it doesn't help a lot.

I, frankly, get offended when I hear people say: These are Americans who don't pay taxes. They do pay taxes--not income tax, but they pay payroll taxes. They take it out of your check every month. Trust me, it is a tax. It is less money than what was supposed to be there after the tax.

So the tax credit, while we increased it to $2,000--and that is great for a lot of people--it does nothing for them. The total effect is only about $115 for the family. That is how much they will be saving in their taxes from the current year--$115.

But here is where it gets worse. The Senate bill--which I am largely supportive of, but I just want to tell my colleagues what the numbers are so we can see where the changes need to be--the Senate bill would actually increase taxes in March when they have a child. You say: How can that be? Well, for some families in their income range, the nonrefundable increase for the child tax credit is less valuable than the current lost personal exemption. So we take away the personal exemption and we put in this additional child tax credit, but it is nonrefundable. They can't get to that tax credit because they are not paying income taxes, and the result is that if they make $26,000 instead of $25,000, the Senate bill would actually take away $15 from their per-child tax cut.

So these families work hard and pay their taxes, they raise children, they are contributing an extraordinary amount to our country, and they need our help more than ever before.

There are a couple other examples, and I will go to the first chart. Let's take for example a tire changer and a preschool teacher with two children in Gainesville, FL--the home of the university in Florida, the finest learning institution in the Southeast--an editorial thing, but it is a matter of fact. But I digress. Let me get back to chart No. 1 and talk about this family.

The husband, as I said, works at a local auto shop as a tire changer. His wife is a preschool teacher. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with these two jobs, their combined income would be $28,300. Because the increase to the child tax credit is nonrefundable--the extra money we put in--this family wouldn't nearly have enough income tax liability to take advantage of the full credit. So the bill as it is currently written gives them a tax cut of $200-- about $50 per person.

But what if we did what Senator Lee and I are proposing, which is to make the child tax credit fully refundable, even against payroll tax. Well, then their tax cut would not be $200, it would be $1,570. Trust me when I tell you that for a family making $28,000 a year, a $1,500 pay increase in real cash matters. It matters. It doesn't solve all of their problems, but it helps.

Here is another one. Take this example. The husband is a private in the Army National Guard, and his wife is a waitress at a local restaurant. They have three children. He is on Active Duty at Camp Blanding in Starke, FL. She works full time. They have a combined income of $33,832, according to the National Guard base pay.

Because the increase, again, is nonrefundable in the child tax credit, they don't have enough income to take full advantage of the tax credit. The bill as currently written cuts their taxes by $388. The proposal that Senator Lee and I have outlined would cut their taxes by $2,100. So a $2,100 pay increase for this working family in cash will matter. It will matter. It doesn't solve all of their problems but, trust me, $2,100 for this family, more than what they have today, will help them a lot, and it rewards the work they are doing.

What about a single mother. Let's say she is a childcare worker. She has one child and is living in Miami, FL, where I live. She works full time. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median wage for that job is $14,800 a year. She gets a tax cut under the current bill of about $100. If we do what Senator Lee and I are talking about doing, she will get a $1,000 tax cut. I am not telling you that $1,000 solves all of her problems, but a $1,000 pay increase for a single mother making $14,800 a year will matter.

How about a loading dock worker and a cashier in Northwest Florida after having two kids. Here is what we point to: a glaring blind spot in the way this is structured. Again, for many working families, because the child tax credit is nonrefundable, it will actually be less valuable to parents than the dependent exemption and the existing child credits are under current law today. I think

this is the opposite of pro-family policy.

Let's look at this example. He works as a freight mover at a lumber warehouse, and she works as a cashier. They both work and live full time in Live Oak, FL. Their average combined income is about $28,650. Under the current Tax Code, the way the law is today, if they have two kids, their tax cut would be $2,776. That is what they would save. Under the current bill, their tax cut would be $2,656. So, in essence, under the way the bill is structured now, they would be getting $120 less--or keeping $120 less--than what they would under the law today, for a family making $28,000 a year.

We can fix it, because under the proposal Senator Lee and I will have, they are going to see a tax cut of $4,000 for having that additional child. That is $1,200 greater than the current law. That is a raise of $1,300 more than would happen under the bill as it is currently structured.

I don't think this is an intended consequence. But this is a working family. They work. They pay payroll tax. They make $28,000, $29,000 a year. Trust me when I tell you this money will matter. It won't solve all of their problems, but it will help. It is a pay raise.

Last but not least, I live in West Miami, FL. I have lived there since 1985. It is a working-class neighborhood. According to the census, the average family income in West Miami, where I live, is $38,000--let's say $39,000. That doesn't mean that West Miami is poor. I know the people there. They work hard. They pay their taxes. They raise their children well. They go to work 5 days a week for 8 or 9 hours a day, sometimes on the weekends. But because it is a working- class town, the nonrefundable increase we put in for the child tax credit doesn't do much.

As an example, based on the census data for West Miami, for that ZIP Code that I live in, more than 2,500 children in this ZIP Code--meaning more than half of the total number of children living in that area-- would be receiving less than the full credit than they would otherwise be eligible for. Why? Because for their parents, their primary tax liability is the payroll tax. And you cannot help working families with a tax cut if you do not allow the cut to apply to the payroll tax. It is as simple as that.

We have to do that. If we want to help people in this country, if we really want to help them have a little bit more in their pocket, then let's implement the proposal that Senator Lee and I have put forward.

By the way, I hear these economists and other people say: Well, it won't do anything for growth.

You really don't understand how working Americans live. Someone who makes $38,000 a year or $35,000 a year basically spends every penny they make. They have to. If you make $38,000 a year, with two kids, you are spending every penny you make and then probably having to put the extra on your credit card, unfortunately. This proposal will drive consumer spending. It will allow them to pay for some things they can't buy now. These kids outgrow their shoes so fast. The bookbags don't make it through a year. There are so many things we could be helping families with, and our tax reforms should do that.

Everybody in this town has a trade association, has a lobbyist, has newspapers that write about them. Who writes about them? Who writes about these working Americans--working Americans, not people asking for anything from the government. They go to work. They work hard. They work every day. Who fights for them? Who talks about them? Who represents them? That is supposed to be us.

If we are serious about representing them, then let's prove it. Let's amend this bill and change it so we can give working Americans the raise they deserve, and that they need, to strengthen our country and strengthen our families.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I often praise the talents and goodwill of Floridians across my home State, and today is no different. Ms. Joani Slawson, a music teacher at Saturn Elementary in Brevard County, and Mr. James Yaques, of Palm Beach Central High School, have been nominated for a Grammy award. Their passion for teaching coupled with their musical talent is rightly being recognized as they are both semifinalists for music educator of the year.

As the Grammy process continues, I, along with my fellow Floridians, will be rooting for Ms. Slawson and Mr. Yaques. I wish them, their respective schools, and their students all the best.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. President, tomorrow the House will announce its plan for tax reform as a starting point. I doubt everybody here will agree with everything that is in it, but I imagine we will find a lot of good in it, and it will be a good starting point for this debate. But it actually is about a broader

topic that I hope will be a part of our conversation about tax reform because it hasn't been enough of a part of our national discourse over the last 20 years.

When we think about the history of this country, one of the things that truly distinguishes us is not that we have rich people. Every country in the world has rich people. We have an extraordinary amount of success. We have earned success in this country, and we celebrate it; we don't criticize it. But every society in the world has rich people.

Sadly, we are also not the only country that has people who are poor, who are struggling. That is something that challenges our principles, as a nation founded on the idea of equal opportunity to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But the one thing that really distinguishes America is that, by and large, the overwhelming number of Americans do not consider themselves to be either rich or poor; they consider themselves to be hard-working people. We can come up with any term we want, whether it is middle class or working class, but these are basically people who work hard every single day to provide not just a better life for themselves--to be able to retire with dignity and leave their children better off than themselves. They take pride in that. What they value is not how much money they make or how many things they own; it isn't even the title of the job. They value the dignity that comes from the work they do, and, more importantly, they value what it allows them to do, and it is not complicated things. It allows them to own a home in a neighborhood that is safe--not a mansion, but a home. We see that every weekend. People spend countless hours to constantly keep up the home that they take great pride in, and they take great pride in their children and their churches and their synagogues and their religious organizations and the voluntary groups that they belong to. This has been the fundamental core of our country.

That does not mean that others who do not fit that profile are not important to the country, as well, but it is what distinguishes us because most countries in the world don't really have that. In most societies in human history, you are either rich or poor. There are a lot of poor people and a handful of people in whom all of the wealth is concentrated. That sort of dynamic is what has separated us from the rest of the nations on Earth and, to this day, in many ways still does.

This is something I talk about not because I read about it or because I saw a documentary about it last weekend, but because, in many ways, I lived it. My parents were that. Neither one had much of an advanced education. I don't know how far my dad went in school--probably not beyond third or fourth grade; my mom, perhaps not much more than that. They actually came to this country and barely spoke any English when they arrived. They had to struggle to learn it, but they did. They ended up being a bartender and a maid. People who know me or who have heard me speak before know that story. It is one I tell not because I want you to know more about me but because I want you to understand what motivates me in public policy.

Even though my dad worked in the service sector his entire life and my mother did as well, they owned a home and they retired with dignity. All four of their kids went to college. That was possible through a combination of things: jobs that paid enough and the ability to have programs like Social Security and Medicare that allowed them to retire with dignity--programs they paid into all of the years they were working.

The reason I raise this is that people who fit that profile have been hurt more than anyone else over the last 15 to 20 years. It is not necessarily anyone's fault. The economy has changed. For example, the jobs my parents once did don't pay nearly enough to afford today what they could afford back then. As a bartender and a maid today--if my parents were doing that now, I am not sure what house they would buy in Miami-Dade County, where I live. I am not sure they would be able to buy one anywhere near where we live now, not because our neighborhood is some fancy place but because everything costs so much compared to how much those jobs paid then.

So everything costs more, the jobs aren't paying enough, and then they were hit with the recession. That is just the nature of changes in our economy. Many people lost their jobs altogether. The industry they were once in vanished. It went to another country or machines took their place or they just don't need as many people as they used to because they are able to do more with fewer employees.

Then they were hit with this recession, and it really hit them badly. Maybe it wiped out their retirement savings; it cut in half the value of their home, the most important investment they have, and to this day they haven't fully recovered.

Then you add to all of that the idea that in American politics today, we spend an extraordinary amount of time debating how we can help everyone else except for them. I don't think we do that on purpose or that people around here don't care about people like that. I don't know why it happens; I am just telling you that it has.

The result is somewhat of a little bit of resentment, but certainly there is a sense of isolation and the notion and the belief that they have been left behind. They are upset about it, and they have a right to be. It is not just about money, and it is not just about economics; it is about the values of hard work and dignity and responsibility and doing what you need to do to be a good citizen of this country and contribute to its future but also doing what you need to do to raise your family and instill in them the values you think are important.

I think it would be a terrible mistake to enter into tax reform-- perhaps one of the most meaningful public policy debates we will have had in this city, certainly in the time I have been here and perhaps for the better part of two to three decades in terms of our economy-- without in any way talking about what tax reform means for the millions of Americans I just described. The one thing it should mean is that for those jobs that have left, some of them should be able to come back because, frankly, our own policies have forced some of those jobs to go somewhere else. When other countries are making it easier to open up factories and create jobs over there instead of over here, we are going to lose some of those jobs. I am not saying all of them were a result of that, but a lot of them were. If we have tax policies, as we do, that do not allow us to compete and create those jobs here, we have to reverse that.

Tax reform should be about that, but it also has to be about working Americans--not Americans who are rich and can hire fancy accountants and lawyers and even lobbyists to help them create special tax statuses. I am not talking about Americans who are depending on government programs. I am not talking about disability or Medicare or Social Security--programs they have paid into; I am not talking about programs that assist anti-poverty programs--a whole other topic that we should talk about one day because some of them aren't working the way we hoped they would in terms of helping people escape poverty. I am talking about people who work and they make just enough to not qualify for any of that stuff but not nearly enough to afford the cost of living. That is just them. You add to that the cost of raising those children. It is more expensive to raise kids today than ever before, and the costs keep going up, and the paychecks are not keeping pace.

There is nothing we can do in tax reform by itself that solves all of those problems, but there is no way we can do tax reform without addressing the millions of Americans who feel as though every time there is a debate in Washington, it is about helping everyone else except for them.

Take, for example, the issue of the child tax credit, which is called the child tax credit, but it really is about helping families--parents and children. Take, for example, a married couple with two children. Let's say one of them works in a warehouse and the other one is a home health aide. These are not unusual jobs to find in the economy.

Let's say, based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics, their annual income combined is going to be around $55,000 a year. Depending on where you live--that is not a lot of money probably

anywhere in the country, and it certainly isn't a lot of money where I am standing now or where I am living now in Miami. If we do the whole framework on tax reform but do nothing on the child tax credit and leave it as it is, that couple making $55,000 with two children--if we do nothing--they are going to have a tax increase of $738. I cannot imagine a single person here voting for a tax reform package that does nothing on the child tax credit and thereby raises taxes on a couple making $55,000 a year with two children by a penny, not to mention $700 a year.

What if we do a little less, as some people are suggesting? Let's just raise the tax credit to $500, but let's not make it refundable against payroll tax. They will get a tax cut of about $263. When you compare that to some of the tax cuts we are going to see in other parts of this tax reform, I would say that is not nearly enough, certainly not enough to make a difference.

But what if you do this: What if we double the value of the tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000 and make it refundable toward payroll tax? That couple with those two children will have a tax cut of $1,263. That doesn't solve all of their problems, but it makes a difference.

I can give other examples. Others we will get to in the weeks to come and the days to come, but let's just take a family like the one I grew up in--a bartender and a maid. The median income of the bartender and the maid is about $42,000, $43,000 a year. They have three children. Without anything in the child tax credit--we just leave it the way it is and do the framework--they are going to pay $1,276 more in taxes. Can you imagine a tax reform plan that raises taxes on a bartender and a maid with three children, making $43,000 a year, and it raises their taxes by almost $1,300 a year? Who here is going to vote for that? I dare you. You won't. Actually, I don't dare you. I don't want you to vote for that. That is not what we are going to do.

So let's just do this symbolic thing: Raise it by $500 and make it nonrefundable. They will get a tax cut of about the same--$233. You might as well keep it because it won't make any difference. But what if we doubled the value of the child tax credit and made it refundable toward payroll tax. Then, their tax cut is $1,733. That is a tax cut. That is the direction we have to go.

I have heard some people say we shouldn't make it refundable to payroll tax because that is just more people who aren't paying anything in taxes. They are talking about the income tax. That is the way people here talk and think. That is the way economists think and the way accountants might think. But for the people who work and get a paycheck every week or every two weeks, when they get that paycheck, it shows that money came out of their paycheck. It doesn't matter if that money went into income tax or payroll tax; that is money they earned that you took away, using the power of government. They are paying taxes. Whether they are paying income tax or payroll tax, they are paying taxes. If you want to help people who are working but who don't make enough, then the only way--and they are trying to raise a family--the child tax credit is the best way to do it.

So as we move forward, I truly hope that some of these voices I hear, treating the child tax credit as some sort of welfare program or giveaway or gimmick, well, reconsider that attitude. Reconsider that attitude because the child tax credit applies only to families who are working, who make less than a certain amount of money, and who are raising children, our future taxpayers.

I am going to ask this: If our Tax Code does not help working families, given all the other challenges they face, how--that is inexcusable. How can we pass tax reform that is loaded up on how we are going to help the business sector--and it should, because it creates jobs and it will have higher pay down the road and billions upon billions of dollars to help the poor--but do nothing for the backbone of our economy, the one thing we all say that we take extraordinary pride in, the working class, the working people of this country? There is no way we can have a tax plan that doesn't do those things--no way. If we do head in that direction, that will convince millions of Americans that they were right all along, that the people in charge of this country, in both parties, and the people who advise them don't care about, look down on, and have no idea about what life is like for people like them, who work hard every day, who seek nothing from the government other than a fair chance. That is all they want.

All I am advocating for is that we allow them to keep more of their own money so that they can provide for their families and a better future and rebuild those working-class values and that working-class backbone that I believe are what has made America so great.

I look forward to continuing to work in this direction. We better do something real, and we better do it right; otherwise, I don't know how we pass tax reform. I am hopeful that is where we are headed. I know we still have some work to do, and I know tomorrow is only a starting point. But I will repeat, once again, any tax plan that doesn't cut taxes for working families with children is not one worth supporting. I hope that is the direction in which we will move.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, Chester Renfro of Pinellas County, FL, passed away this October 22. Chet, as he was known to family and friends, was a friend of mine, and I want to say a few words about him in his passing. Married to his wife, Betty, Chet was a graduate of the University of Southern California and an engineer by trade. He designed and installed industrial water pumps for commercial industries and water treatment facilities. He started his career in California, later moving to St. Louis and then Louisville, KY, where he started his own business. He moved to Pinellas County nearly 20 years ago.

Betty was the love of Chet's life, and he adored her. When they married, they each brought their sons with them into the family--Betty and her three sons, Gene, Brad, and Paul Garcia; Chet and his two sons, Rick and Greg Renfro. Their daughter, now Melanie Nethery, came later to bless that family full of boys. Chet loved all of his children but was exceptionally proud of his grandchildren. He would be glad to tell you all about them and their accomplishments.

Chet lived a full, meaningful life, and in everything-- professionally, personally, and politically--he worked hard. He loved his Wednesday golf game, his travels with Betty, and his pecan pies. He gave his time and energy to many State and local organizations, including the Southwest Florida Water Management District and the Pinellas County Canvasing Board. I looked to his guidance as a member of my academy board in the Tampa Bay region, interviewing many of the young men and women from that area who want to attend a service academy and serve our country.

Chet Renfro leaves behind a legacy of service to others and of love for his family, friends, and country. He was someone I was proud to call my friend, and he and his family are in my prayers.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. President, over the next few weeks, the Senate, the House, Congress--everybody here in Washington is going to be engaged in what I think is one of the most important and potentially impactful debates we have had here in a long time. For a place that has been so criticized for not doing anything, we have a chance to actually do something that is going to matter and help real people and help the country. It is called tax reform.

I think the great thing about a tax reform debate is that it actually goes to the heart and soul of our identity as a nation and who we want to be and who we have been up to this point.

We are a nation that has embraced free enterprise. There are people who don't believe in free enterprise. There are people who believe in different variations of free enterprise. By and large, America has believed in free enterprise. That basically means the government doesn't try to control too much of the economy. People have private property and private businesses. You have rules to make sure people don't cheat and steal from one another or hurt people, but by and large, we believe in a private economy. Why do we believe that? I think the answer to that is not just a purely economic one; you look back at our founding.

One of the unique things about this country that we have taken for granted and do not do a good enough job of teaching young Americans is that America was not created as a nation to bring together a common race or a common ethnicity or a common religion. There are a lot of nations around the world--in fact, I would argue that most of the nations that have ever existed have been a homeland for the people who were born and have lived in that one place--not us. We were founded on the idea that you could bring different kinds of people from different backgrounds and unite them as one people, despite their differences in background and ethnicity and religion. You could unite them behind a very powerful idea--the idea that all of us are created equal because we were born with a God-given right to life and to liberty and to pursue happiness.

That is not just a revolutionary idea; it has changed the world. It has been the identity of our country. It is among everything else that makes us unique and special. In every generation, it has been challenged economically, socially, and culturally. We need to continue to fight for that.

One of the core principles behind equal opportunity is the ability to fulfill your economic potential--to grow up and be who you want to be, do what you want to do, open a company or work for a certain industry or career or

stay home and raise children. Whatever your choice is, they are all legitimate. We are a nation that believes we all have the God-given right to pursue that, and that is something which free enterprise makes possible.

The difference between free enterprise and people who want government to control everything is--the best analogy I can think of is, imagine a pie. Let's use a pie as an example. I can't bring one on the floor to graphically detail it, but imagine one in your mind. Imagine if I said to you: This pie will never grow. It will always be the same size. Every single one of us gets a slice.

Well, if the pie can't grow and everyone gets a slice, then the bigger your slice, the smaller my slice. That is what people who don't believe in free enterprise argue. They argue that the pie really can't grow, and so you need government to make sure that pie is sliced equally or equal enough among everybody. The Tax Code is one of the ways they do it.

There is another argument. It is the one I believe in. It is the one that I think has made this country the most prosperous in human history. It is the argument that that pie doesn't have to stay that size. We can make it a pie that is a lot bigger and make sure it keeps growing. Therefore, it doesn't matter how big the other person's slice is, as long as your slice is big too. More for them doesn't mean less for you. That is one of the unique attributes of free enterprise: Everyone can be better off without anyone being left worse off. That is the theory, but it doesn't always work in practice for a lot of different reasons. That doesn't mean anarchy. We do need government. I am not anti-regulation; I am anti-overregulation.

I fly on airplanes. Everybody here flies on a lot of airplanes. I am sure we are all glad that airplane is inspected and the person who is flying it is really a pilot and not just someone who stayed at Holiday Inn Express.

I think all of us want to make sure that when you open a bottle of medicine prescribed to you, what is in that bottle is actually the medicine and not something fake or something different.

When we eat food, we want to make sure it is not poisonous or going to spread disease. These are all products of regulation.

The same is true in economics. That is why we have antitrust laws. That is why we take on anti-competitiveness, because it actually undermines free enterprise. I am not talking about corporatism, because there are a lot of countries around the world that claim to be free enterprise, but they really aren't. Four or five big companies control everything, and everybody else either works for them or is unemployed. That is not what I am talking about.

I am talking about free enterprise--a nation and a system in which someone can quit their job, open a business, compete with their former employer, and put them out of business--or at least take away some of their customers--because you are better than they are. That is free enterprise. That is what we believe in, and the Tax Code is a part of it.

What has challenged free enterprise in this country in the 21st century and you sense it in people's frustrations? There are two things.

The first is there is a lot of overcompetition. It wasn't true in the sixties and seventies. We forget Germany and Japan. These countries were wiped out completely during World War II. It took them decades to rebuild. America was the only show in town for much of the fifties, sixties, up into the seventies. But all of these other countries watched us grow, and they started doing the things we did. They started deregulating, and they most certainly started cutting taxes.

The result has been that over the last 20 or 25 years, most countries in the industrialized world, the big economies, charge companies a lot less in taxes than we do. What that does over time is make us uncompetitive. That is why not a day goes by that you don't read about some American company that was bought by a company in another country and moved over there. Do you know why? Because they pay less in taxes over there than they do here. Anyone who doesn't realize that is missing a big part of it.

We are not the only show in town anymore. We have to compete, and that is why our Tax Code is important. If it becomes uncompetitive, you are basically forcing and/or inviting companies to leave the United States for a more favorable tax treatment--and that has happened.

Do you know who has paid the price? Not the rich people. If you are a wealthy investor, you can invest your money anywhere in the world. Even if you make your money here, I promise you, you have the best lawyers and the best accountants to find every creative loophole to save money. And if that loophole doesn't exist, you will hire the best lobbyist to make one.

In the end, the truly wealthy--the billionaires, the owners with these extraordinary amounts of wealth--they will figure it out. Do you know who gets hurt? The people who get paid every 2 weeks. That is who gets hurt because when those companies leave the United States, they take their jobs with them. The fewer of those there are and the more people we have competing for fewer jobs, the less people get paid at a time when everything costs more.

There is another thing that is hurting us, and it is not part of the tax reform, but it is the way growth is now distributed. We can no longer just assume that if the economy grows, everyone will be better off automatically, because the truth is, in the 21st century, there are some careers, some industries, and some jobs that pay substantially more.

Do you want to talk about the haves and have-nots in the 21st century? The haves and the have-nots are the people who have advanced education and the right skills and the people who do not. We have to close that gap. Vocational training--that is a separate topic that has to be dealt with and is critically important in the way growth is distributed. But you have no growth to distribute if you don't have growth. So that is why this is so important.

When you hear all this talk about wealthy corporations getting huge tax breaks, it is not necessarily true. It is really, really important for people to pay attention to the details and not just the talking points on this.

For example, let's say company X is a publicly traded company, so they sell stock on Wall Street and the like. Next year, because we lower taxes, that company makes $1 million more than they did this year. What can they do with that million dollars for a publicly traded company? There are really only four things they can do with that money, and all four of them help working Americans.

The first thing they can do is grow the business. They can say: We like our business a lot. We now have a million dollars more than we thought we were going to have, but we believe so much in our future that we are going to take that million dollars and we are going to invest it to grow the company. We are going to open a new factory. We are going to open more stores and hire more people as a result. We are going to invest in more equipment, which means the people who make that equipment have more work. That is the first thing you can do with the money you might save on taxes.

The second thing you might have to do--maybe you don't grow your business, but with that million dollars extra that you have from the tax cuts, you are going to have to pay your employees more because, if not, they are going to quit and go to work for somebody else. So all of a sudden, you are now in a position to be able to hire good people and retain them by paying them more and by offering better benefits to keep them. That is the second thing you can do with the money.

The third thing you can do with the million dollars from the tax cut that you didn't plan on having is lower prices. You can say: I am in competition with these five other businesses to sell the same thing. We are going to use our million dollars to lower our prices just a little bit, just enough so that people buy it from us instead of them. Do you know what that other company is going to have to do? They are going to have to lower prices, too, to compete with you. Do you know who benefits from the lowering of prices? The middle class. The people who are going to shop are going to be paying less because of the competition. That is the third thing that can happen.

The fourth thing that can happen and the one that gets the most criticism is,

well, they will just pay it to the shareholders in dividends. OK. Who are the shareholders? The shareholders are wealthy people who trade in Wall Street and spend all day in front of a computer and have these brokerage accounts and people who handle their accounts. They are a part of it.

You know who else are shareholders? Millions and millions of Americans. If you are a firefighter or a police officer with a union pension, you are a shareholder. You might not be aware of the companies you have shares in, but it is in your pension, and the future of your pension will depend on how those investments go. If you are a 401(k) holder, you are a shareholder. Just because you are not in front of the computer every day, checking your TD Ameritrade account to see how much money you have in X stock and Y stock does not mean you are not a shareholder. You are a shareholder.

Virtually every sort of investment mechanism for retirement in America is invested in what is called equities, is invested in the market, is invested in stocks and bonds. If, in fact, those things are doing better, it is helping you retire.

That is why the business side of this is so important. It will help grow the economy, but it actually will also help people because there is nowhere else for that money to go.

The other type of small business, which is actually the majority, has been called a passthrough, and that is what most businesses are organized as. That is where you pay on your personal rate. If you are a small business owner with three employees, you are an S corporation, and at the end of the year, you pay your taxes on your personal rate. Your rate is actually higher than the companies, the corporations, except you can't hire the lawyers and the accountants and all the other expertise. You are actually, in many cases, paying more than the big companies. These small businesses need to be helped, too, and they would be with tax reform that lowers their rate and makes them competitive.

Beyond ensuring that people are either going to have better retirement funds, lower prices, more pay, more jobs, and we are helping small businesses, the vast majority of which are owned by people who are not multimillionaires and billionaires, the other thing we can do to help working-class people in this country is an expansion of the child tax credit. It is an idea that Senator Lee and I have been pushing for the better part of 2 years. It wasn't always universally popular, but I am going to explain three reasons why it is important. In fact, not only is it important, but it has to happen. If we don't do this, then someone could argue that this is not a middle-class tax cut. If we do it, it will be, perhaps, the single largest middle-class tax cut in modern history.

The child tax credit is a credit you get per child. Obviously, it phases out at some point--the more money you make. Why do we have it? We have it for two reasons: No. 1, we truly believe that the family is the most important institution in society and parenting is the most important job you will ever have. I don't care who you are. If you are the President, if you are a Senator, if you are a Congressman--I don't care what you do--the most important job you will ever have, the most influence you will ever have, the most impactful thing you will ever do is to raise a family, so our Tax Code accounts for that. It should.

The second thing is that raising children is expensive. If you are raising children right now or have at any time in the near past, you know how expensive it is. I don't know where they get these numbers, but they sound right to me. The Department of Agriculture estimates that to raise children from the time they are born to the time they are 18 is about $235,000 per child. That is a staggering amount of money. That doesn't even account for college, by the way.

All you have to do is spend just 10 minutes; just go out one day this weekend and talk to the people you know who are working parents, and ask them. They are going to tell you one of the most expensive things they face, especially between the time their children are born and the time they turn 4 or 5, is childcare. In over two-thirds of the States in this country, this costs more than it does to go to college. Imagine that you make $800 a week that you take home, but you have to spend $400 a week on childcare for your two kids. That is half your paycheck.

I am not saying a child tax credit fixes all of that. I am saying that is a cost that keeps going up. It is a reason why the tax credit has lost about $300 in value from the time it was last expanded in 2003.

The other thing to add to it is, if you look at some of the changes being proposed on the personal deduction, that is another $500 off. In essence, at $800 per child, we are just breaking even. That is why we have to have a child tax credit that is at least $2,000 to really have an impact.

The other thing we have to do is make it refundable. What that means is it has to apply against payroll tax. Medicare, Social Security taxes--that comes from FICA; it comes immediately off your paycheck. Everybody pays that tax.

Not everybody pays income tax. If you don't make more than a certain amount of money, you don't have an income tax liability, but you are paying taxes. It is called the payroll tax. If we don't deal with that, if we don't make the child tax credit apply to that, then we are basically not cutting taxes or not helping the vast majority of people who need it. There has been some speculation that this would be too expensive and cost a lot of money. It is not true.

No. 2, it is their money. You don't get it unless you owe it, and you don't owe it unless you are working. All we are saying is let people keep more of their money to pay for their cost of living.

By the way, they are going to have to spend that money. We know that a large number of families in this country are living beyond what they make. That is why credit card debt has risen over the last 20 years. They are going to take that money, and they are going to spend it. They are going to spend a lot of it on raising their children. They are going to spend a lot of it on the things that we talked about.

I am not saying this alone will change it, but, hopefully, the child tax credit, combined with a growing economy in which there are more jobs that pay more and prices are lower, is going to truly help people, and we have to help people in that regard. So this has to be a critical component of tax reform.

I wanted to set the stage for that, because, unfortunately, it is a complicated thing. Unfortunately, taxes are very complicated, more than they really should be.

There is going to be a lot of misinformation out there about who this actually helps and how the economy actually works. So it is really important for us to be clear and upfront about why it is that we are doing the things we are doing.

When I hear all this talk about helping millionaires and billionaires--they are probably the people who care the least about some of the tax reforms. They are going to be finding their way; they just want to know what the rules are. They just want to know what the rules are because they are going to figure it out one way or the other. If their taxes are too high, they will take their money to another country. If they are low enough, they might invest it here. Either way, they are going to be fine.

The people we really want to help are working people and small businesses, and the Tax Code is a part of that. It is not the only part of that, but it is a big part of it. That is why this has to happen. It has to happen. It has been far too long.

I want to take a step back and say that 50 years from now, when people read about this time in American history, they are going to ask themselves: What was wrong with those people? Did they not realize that all these other countries were taking their jobs, and one of the ways those jobs were leaving is that they were giving them away. They were literally inviting people to leave by acting so arrogant about themselves that they thought they could charge them anything they wanted in taxes, and they would stay. That is just not true anymore. I am not sure it ever was entirely true, but it is less true today than it ever was before.

In the end, the people who are really being hurt by this are the people whose jobs don't pay enough at a time when everything costs more.

The people who are really being hurt by this are the people who wish they

could start their own business, but they can't because they don't think they can make enough money to survive.

The people who are really being hurt by this are parents who are trying to raise their children at a time when everything costs more, but their paychecks aren't keeping pace.

The people who are really being hurt by this are the people who sit down every month, and they write down on a piece of paper: This is our budget for the month. And about 14 or 15 days into the month, something comes in the mail that they didn't expect was on its way, and all of a sudden, that whole budget gets blown out, and now they have to use a credit card to pay for it.

The people who are being hurt by this are the people whose kids are now 17 years old, and they say: I want them to go to college, but I have no idea whether they are going to be able to go. Even with financial aid, they are going to have to borrow money to go to school, and now they are in debt. Before they even vote in their first election, they already owe $10,000. We have to help them if we are going to rebuild the country's economy, and tax reform is a key part of it.

Here is my last point. There has been a lot of talk about debt--that this is going to grow the debt. That actually doesn't have to be true. If you lower the tax rate and businesses are hiring more people, creating more jobs, and growing, that is going to grow your economy. When you grow your economy, you have more taxpayers. When you have more taxpayers, you have more revenue. Even though you didn't raise the rate, you will still collect more money because even though you don't have more taxes, you have more taxpayers. That is a big chunk of this.

Just a normal, not unrealistic growth rate would more than pay for the money that people are saying we are not going to collect as a result of this. That is part one of it.

The other thing that is interesting to me is if we stood here today and said ``Let's take $1.7 trillion and spend it to build stuff that the government does,'' there would be no problem with that. That would be seen as stimulus. That is positive. That is good debt spending. But, somehow, if we say ``Let's take money and give it back to people so they can spend it themselves,'' that is bad debt. That is ridiculous.

The third thing I would say is that you are never going to tax your way out of debt anyway. Even if we tax everyone in America next year-- if, for everyone in America who made $1 million next year, we confiscated every penny of it and said ``Your tax rate this year is 100 percent,'' it would not even make a dent on the debt. That is how big the debt is and how fast it is growing. So you can't tax your way out of this, and you can't just cut your way out of it, either, by the way. So the only solution to our debt long term is that you have to do two separate things, and you have to do them both.

No. 1, you have to grow your economy. You have to. That pie has to grow. No. 2, the debt has to be held back so it doesn't grow as big as the economy. If you grow the economy by 4 percent and you grow the debt by 4.5 percent, then you are not going to get there. You have to do both. This is part one--grow the economy.

Part two is going to have to be to bring our spending on a sustainable path so that the growth and the benefits of the growth and the revenue from the growth aren't being taken and used to pay for even more government.

To use a best analogy, if you owe a lot of money and you only make $2,000, and next month you get paid $3,000 a month but you add $1,500 a month of expenditures, then you are still owing more money. So you have to do both. You have to generate more revenue through growth--not through more taxes--and you have to hold the long-term line on spending. This is step one of that two-step process. We have a chance to do it here before the year is out. We have to do it, and I believe we will. It will be hard. It should be hard.

I always laugh when I read these articles that say: Oh, tax reform is divisive, and people are arguing about it. They should argue about it. They don't have a lot of arguments about economic policy in China, by the way, because there is not much of an opposition, but in America, we are a republic. There are different ideas. There should be different ideas. Tax reform should be controversial. It is important. There should be debate, and there will be so we arrive at good public policy. There is nothing wrong with that. It is a good thing, not a bad thing, as long as that debate is geared toward reaching a result.

In the end, I will tell you this, if we don't do it, I actually think it will hurt our economy, not keep it the way it is. It will actually hurt it because a lot of businesses, a lot of employers, and a lot of Americans assumed that this would happen, given who won the elections in 2016. They have already made investment decisions on the assumption that some of this was going to happen. I am telling you, if it doesn't happen, the collapse of confidence will hurt the economy badly. Failing to act will actually reverse whatever gains we have already made this year on the expectation of growth and will actually shatter people's confidence in America's future.

If you are sitting there today thinking: Where am I going to open this big plant and hire 1,000 people, and you see tax reform collapse in the United States, and the people in the House, in the Senate, and in the White House are all supportive of tax reform, and you still couldn't get it done, you are going to say to yourself: Guess what; I am not going to invest in that place because even when the people who are in favor of it are in charge, they still can't get it done.

Not doing tax reform will not lead to the status quo. It will actually leave us worse off. That is why we must do it. That is why the child tax credit has to happen, by the way, because not only can we not pass it without it, but we can't justify it without it.

I am optimistic that we are going to get there. It will be a lot of work, but it will be good work. It will be the reason why so many of us are here to begin with. We come here to make a difference. We come here because we want to contribute toward making things better--not perfect, but better. This will make things better.

For all the people who complain that we spend years here and nothing ever happens, this is the chance to see something happen in our time here and be able to look back when our service here is done and say: We made a difference while we were there.

That is what we are endeavoring to do, and I am excited about the fact that I believe we are going to do it. It will be long, it will be hard, but it will be fun and it will be good for our country and for our people. If we do it right, it will be one of the most rewarding things any of us will ever do in our time here in public service.

I yield the floor.

Thank you, Madam President.

I thank the senior Senator from Florida on this issue. I want to elaborate on it a little further. Any time we ask the taxpayers of this country to step in and help a private industry, it is important and incumbent on us to justify why. The amendment he just made that we have been working to get included in what is before the Senate obviously deals with agriculture at large, and he described some of the different industries in Florida that have been hurt in agriculture and some of the crops in Florida that were impacted by the storm.

The reason I want to focus my attention on citrus is not because we don't care about the other industries that were damaged, but citrus is in a unique and precarious place. I want to describe it to people who may not be as familiar with this as those who live in Florida and see it all the time.

First, I would say that one of the signature issues in the campaign and in politics today is the desire to make more and produce more in the United States; the idea that somehow, because of these changes in the global economy, we have lost significant industries to other countries, and we talk about that primarily in manufacturing, but we also talk about it in technology and things of this nature. I don't think

we should leave agriculture out of that conversation. If we want there to be agriculture in the United States, then we have to deal with each of those crops and the unique challenges they face. We most certainly want to have agriculture in the United States.

A lot of people don't identify Florida as an agricultural State. It is better known for its tourism and being one of the largest places where people move to be in warm weather and not have State income tax, but Florida is a large agricultural State. I encourage people to look at the numbers. If you have spent any significant time in Florida, it is not just something we put on our license plates and not something we call ourselves in our heritage, it is real now. Tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of jobs across the supply chain and entire communities are sustained by the presence of agriculture. In the case of citrus, the overwhelming majority of growers are actually families who have had these operations for sometimes two or three generations and are trying to stay afloat.

You look at this and ask: What is this industry doing wrong to be under these circumstances? Yes, they had a storm, but why can't they rebuild like everybody else? Two things. First, citrus in Florida was already facing an extraordinary challenge. It wasn't a better orange or better grapefruit that some other countries are doing than we are. It is a disease called citrus greening that didn't just blemish the fruit the way the canker did, but it killed the trees. You have a significant number of growers who are on the borderline of being out of business because unlike--and I am not diminishing other people's losses here, on the contrary--but unlike a manufacturing plant that gets wiped out by a storm, where you put the new machine in and in 6 months you are up and running, that is not the way it works with citrus.

The time between when you plant the new tree and produce fruit is 4 to 5 years, and you have to stay afloat in between. They are already facing that. So that already has them on the brink of catastrophe, and they have been working very hard to get around and design scientific solutions. They have made some advances, thanks to the work at the University of Florida, but they are not there yet. In the process, they have been hurting already.

You heard about the production figures and how low they have gotten, and here comes the storm. The first thing it does is knock all the fruit off the trees. When we flew over these groves, all we saw on the ground was fruit all over the place. As those familiar with agriculture know, once that fruit gets in the floodwater, it can't be sold, and you can't do much with it. The fruit continued to fall over the days to come.

On top of everything else they were facing, they lost this year's crops. A lot of these fields were flooded, so they were sitting in feet of water. That kills the trees, and they will continue to lose trees in the weeks to come.

Put yourself in the position of the grower who has to say: I have already lost everything for this year. I lost a bunch of trees that I will not have next year or the year after that. I was facing citrus greening. Do I really want to replant or has the time come to sell my land for some other use, development, or has the time come for me to go into another crop or has the time come to declare bankruptcy? This is the life challenge of American agriculture families in the State of Florida.

Look, I hope very much that in November we are going to be here next month and we are going to pass a new bill and it will have this money in there and it will be fantastic, but we know how this place works, and I don't know why we wouldn't do it now. Do we truly want to keep American businesses in America? This is a great example of an opportunity to do it.

It is not an industry that benefits from anything extraordinary from the government. They are literally on the verge of going away unless we help them sooner rather than later. We have the entire Florida delegation in the House in favor of it, and they couldn't get it in the House bill. You have both Senators here for it. It can't be a part of this because if we change it, it goes back, and we lose time.

No one can tell you why it is not in there, no one can tell you why they are against it being in there, but it is not in there. Sometimes you start to wonder, and you guess why people look at this process and shake their heads.

Unfortunately, it looks like this has been foreclosed. Obviously, Senator Nelson moved forward and made that motion and it was objected to so it will not be a part of this package, but I hope we think about these men and women and families who own the groves. How do you explain it to them and what happens if it goes away? What happens if we lose this industry? It will not just hurt Florida, I think it hurts the country. I think it sets a precedent for other crops that might be threatened by floods in the future.

I hope this can be reversed, and I am hopeful we will deal with it in November, but if we don't, I just want everyone to understand what this means. This is not hyperbole. This industry is in a lot of trouble. I am not telling you that the amount of money we are asking for alone will save them, but without it, sooner rather than later, I feel we will lose not just Florida citrus, but I feel we will lose something as a key part of the State's heritage and a key crop for the country, and we will depend more than ever on foreign imports to feed our people with this problem.

With that, I yield the floor.

Cloture Motion

Mr. President, this amendment relates to the child tax credit. It is abundantly clear that perhaps one of the most effective ways to deliver tax relief--tax cuts--to working families is through the expansion of this credit, as it is our hope to achieve during tax reform.

I think it is important to point out that the U.S. Department of Agriculture compiles data on how much it costs to raise children in the 21st century. Today, it is expected that middle-income families are going to spend $230,000 to raise their children. By the way, that does not include the cost of their going to college.

Being able to deliver relief to hard-working families through the expansion of the child tax credit, which is applicable not just against income tax but payroll tax, is perhaps the single most effective way to do that given the framework under which we will be working. That is what this amendment intends to reserve the opportunity to do.

Mr. President, I am very happy the Senate is engaged in this debate on tax policy. It actually is long overdue. It has been some 30-odd years since this country has undertaken a massive reform of our Tax Code.

It is interesting. If we go back and think what life was like back in 1986, it was just a different planet, a different world, different economics. So, at a minimum, our code needs to be modernized. Everybody who has run for office--certainly every candidate for President from both parties for over two decades now--has run on the promise of tax reform and the need for it. So this is a very important debate.

What we are debating now on the budget, so people who are watching at home understand--you and I at home think of a family budget as a plan on what you are going to spend money on, and that is what the Federal budget is. It is kind of an outline, a framework of how and the parameters under which the government would spend its money. Then you have to actually go out and spend it through a separate process called appropriations. So this budget creates a framework for how we are going to spend money in the year to come, and then it is going to be used as a vehicle to pass tax reform, which is obviously the way and the system under which we generate revenue for the government to pay for the things we need to pay for. That is the first debate. But obviously the debate on the budget has led us to this debate on tax reform, because that is the primary purpose this year it is being used as a vehicle for.

Why does that matter? There are a lot of speeches going on already about tax reform and how bad the bill is and how this is a giveaway for this group of people or that group of people. That is hard to do since there is still not a bill, and the reason there is not a bill is that it is going to be worked through the normal process of the Senate.

That was the criticism, for example, from my friends on the other side and many outside of this building in the press. The criticism was, you put together a healthcare plan, and you didn't even go through committee, no one had any input, and there were no public hearings. That is what they are going to do with tax reform, and that is what is going to produce a bill.

The only thing that has been put out is called a framework, and the framework basically says: These are some of the ideas we have. This is our starting point that we want to operate from. But we are going to go through the committee process, there are going to be votes, there is going to be an opportunity to weigh in and make differences, and from that, we intend to produce a tax bill.

So they can criticize the framework, I suppose, but to basically go out and start trying to convince people that there is a tax bill that will do this versus that when it is just not true and when you have a seat here in the Senate and potentially on the committee where you can actually weigh in about the specifics of what is going to be in the bill and what is not, I think it is unfair and disingenuous. In any event, that is kind of the way things go nowadays. So I look forward to that debate.

The second thing that has been an interesting development is hearing people talk about how horrible this is going to be, that this is going to add to the debt, and then all of a sudden a bunch of people who have never had any problem spending as much money as they possibly could out of the Federal Treasury are suddenly becoming deficit hawks.

Here is what is so interesting. If we were to turn around and say: Forget about tax reform. We are going to take $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years and we are going to use it for debt spending. We are going to borrow $1.5 trillion and use it to fund all these things the government is going to do--for example, one of our colleagues here has offered a plan to provide healthcare for everyone in America, paid for by the Federal Government. That would cost tens of trillions of dollars. Over a dozen Members of the Senate have signed on to it as a plan. There is no plan to pay for it. It is not $1.5 trillion over 10 years; it is like tens of trillions of dollars over the next number of years. So there is a lot of concern there. It kind of boils down to we are prepared to borrow money and spend it so long as the government gets to spend it, but if this is money we are going take and give to you to spend, then that is a real problem, and that is irresponsible. That is the framework.

The second point I would make on the debt is, I believe the debt is a significant threat to the future of the United States. The problem is, we can't tax our way out of it, and we can't simply grow our way out of it. We have to do a combination of things. The first is, we have to grow our economy. The second thing we have to do is bring some constraint to future spending--not slash Medicare, not get rid of Social Security.

My mother is on Social Security and Medicare. This may surprise many people watching, but there are a significant number of people in my home State of Florida on Social Security and on Medicare. As I said, my mother is one of them. I am an enormous supporter of these programs. I also look at those programs and I look at the number of people going into them and how long they are going to live, and the math tells you these programs are going to have some big problems in the years to come, which threatens not just to take them down but threatens to trigger a debt crisis in America.

We have to deal with the spending side and create a more disciplined way of spending in the future years to bring some certainty, but we also have to grow the economy. In essence, if you take a stagnant economy, no cuts in the world are going to get you there. You can't simply cut your way there, and you can't simply tax your way there. The only solution to our debt problem--and it happens to be good for America all around--is the combination of discipline in future spending combined with rapid, robust, and sustained economic growth.

As much as anything else, this effort of tax reform is, among other things, an effort to generate sustained economic growth and to do so in a unique period in the history of the world. This is not 1986. Our economy is not the only show in town anymore. There are now dozens of developed economies around the world that are following our example from the eighties--reduce taxes, reduce regulations, and, frankly, make investments in infrastructure and the like--and today they are no longer recipients of our aid. They are no longer nations looking to work with the United States to get a little bit closer to the way we are. They are full-blown competitors in the global economy.

Every 4 years--every 2 years, actually, once in the winter and the next 2 years in the summer, we send our best athletes in different events to the Olympics to compete. In our economy, it is the Olympics every single day. What makes it even more complicated is, sometimes our team isn't just made up of Americans. Our team is partnered with the Japanese team to create a company or the Mexican team to create a manufacturing chain. So that complicates it further.

The fundamental thing to understand is, America today is in a competition--by the way, a competition that doesn't

have to be one where they lose and we win or we lose and they win but a competition nonetheless. Every day, businesses, investors, people with ideas are making a decision: Where do I want to do this activity? Where do I want to create this new job? Where do I want to create this new company? Where do I want to innovate this new idea? Where do I want to hire people to do all of this? Do I want to do it in America or do I want to do it somewhere else?

We are not performing well in that competition. It is not just because of taxes. We have infrastructure problems that we have to confront. We have a higher education system that is not built for the 21st century. We are not teaching people, in sufficient numbers, the skills they need for some of the best jobs in the world. I have no problem with a 4-year degree from a liberal arts college. That should always be an option on the menu. We need a lot of plumbers, pipefitters, electricians, and welders. These are important jobs as well. In fact, oftentimes, they pay a lot more than a 4-year degree in political science will ever pay you. We need to do a better job of training those people in those fields as well.

We need to have an immigration system that is pro-American but a pro- American economy that allows us to compete for the best talent in the world. If you think about it, I don't see anybody complaining that their team just signed a guy who can throw 98-mile-an-hour fastballs, but he is from the Dominican Republic. If in sports we go out and find the best people, we should be able to do that in our economy as well. You can do that without hurting the American worker.

We also have to have a tax code that is competitive. It cannot be substantially more complicated and expensive to start a business or operate one in America than it is somewhere else because if we do that, we will lose. That, as much as anything else in this global economy, is hurting the American people.

You talk about putting America first. I think it is about allowing America to compete. I am not asking for an unfair advantage over other countries. We are just asking for a fair chance to compete because I believe the American people who have been given the chance to compete can outthink, outinnovate, and outwork anybody in the world, and our Tax Code is a key part of it.

The goal here is, when you hear a lot of this talk about businesses getting this or that deduction, we want to make America an attractive place to invest. We don't want people taking that money and investing all of it in another country. We want them to invest it here, invest it here to allow a company to grow and hire more people. We want companies to decide that this is the place where we want to hire. This is the place where we want to innovate. We have to have a tax code that reflects that.

We have to understand that the vast majority of American businesses don't pay taxes the way the big companies do. They pay the small businesses through passthroughs. A lot of them--you know them because I know them--are not sophisticated operations. They are successful, but they don't have an army of lawyers to deal with a complicated tax code and accountants who know every trick in the book. To them, the Tax Code hurts them, especially since they are paying on their personal rates.

That is why the personal side is related to the business side. These are things we need to deal with so we can be competitive, so we can have more taxpayers--not more taxes, more taxpayers. More people making more money not just improves their quality of life, it generates more revenue to pay for the bridges, the roads, and the national security of the United States of America. So tax reform, as much as anything else, is the growth side of this endeavor, and it is not the only thing we need to do, but it is an important thing we need to do if we are going to let America compete and win in the 21st century global economy.

There is another dynamic of the 21st century that is different from 1986. From that, I rely heavily on my own personal experience, not just today but growing up. In 1986, I was in ninth grade. My mom worked at Kmart, and my father was a bartender in Miami. We owned a home. We didn't have everything we wanted, but we had everything we needed. They were able to sustain a family and allow us to go to school--public school--go on to college and do those sorts of things on the salary of a bartender and a stock clerk at Kmart.

I don't need to tell anybody here that there isn't a community in the country at this point, in the 21st century, where my parents could achieve the standard of living they had in 1986, for two reasons: everything costs more, and those jobs either don't exist anymore or have not kept pace with the cost of living.

Since the year 2000, up until today, my wife Jeanette and I have been raising four children in the 21st century. I enter it by telling you that while we certainly have been blessed to have more resources available to us than the vast majority of people who will be impacted by what we are about to do here, we certainly have enough people in our lives and certainly have had periods in our lives where we understand some of the challenges facing people today. Here is the bottom line. Raising children in the 21st century is more expensive than raising children at any point in the history of this country. The reason is, there are more things to pay for. I know people may tell you that Wi-Fi and access to the internet is a luxury. I am sorry, you can't do homework in the 21st century with your kids if you don't have access to the internet, and that costs money. Not only do you have to have access to the internet, you have to have access to it on a mobile device. Those mobile devices cost money. Those data plans cost money. If you are paying for a data plan, you know how much they cost. It is not just about watching movies on Netflix or talking to your friends on Snapchat, you literally cannot do homework in many of the schools in the country in the 21st century unless you have access to it. That is why I personally have witnessed people at McDonald's at 6:30 in the evening because they have free Wi-Fi, and the single mom or single dad is there helping their kids with homework.

The cost of everything keeps going up, the cost of clothing, of food, of everything. You look at our Tax Code, and it has not kept pace with it. Let me give you an example. Accounting for inflation, from 1960 to 2015, which is when the latest numbers were available, the average cost per child of raising that child, in a middle-income family, went up by over $11,000. It is over $11,000 more expensive, accounting for inflation.

Here is a stunning figure. Again, this is different in different communities, but, by and large, for middle-income families--and by that we mean a firefighter and a teacher who are raising a child--they are going to spend approximately $230,000 to raise that child in the 21st century from 0 to 18. By the way, my oldest is now 17\1/2\. I have been told by plenty of my colleagues that it doesn't end at 18. In many cases, it begins to accelerate in some form or fashion--but, nevertheless, $230,000.

Let me tell you something else. That does not even include college. That doesn't even include going to college, which is another thing we are going through right now, which, by the way, is completely and totally out of control in terms of what they are charging. It is more than that. There are people out there spending $10 or $15,000 on SAT prep courses. For the life of me, I don't understand how these schools can expect someone who comes from a single-parent home in a poor neighborhood to keep pace with people who are having these sorts of resources available to them, but that is another topic for another day. That is a cost that is involved in all of this.

How about childcare? In 38 out of 50 States, childcare is more expensive than college. Think about it. Let's say you take home $900 a week, and childcare is $250 or $350 a week. That is one-third of your paycheck just for childcare. These expenses are reducing the ability of families to afford to have children and to raise them. These costs keep going up.

One of the things we have offered as a partial solution--it is not going to solve every problem--is to increase the child tax credit and to do so in a way that actually helps people. What it would do is it would reduce families' tax bills on a per-child basis, increasing the flexibility that family has at a time, for example, when childcare costs

have risen more than ever before and are already higher than they have ever been. We have to understand, the family is the most important unit in all of society. It is the most important institution in society. It is the first government. It is the first school. It is the core institution that underlies everything else we do as a nation. There is no more important job than any of us will ever do than the job of a parent.

If you think about our Tax Code, it says: If you invest money in a piece of equipment or a business, the Tax Code will help you with that, but if you invest it in the future of an American taxpayer, if you invest it in someone whom we are going to need to build the sort of economy and future we want for our Nation, the Tax Code does not really take it into account. That makes no sense to me.

I have two charts to outline how important this tax credit is to tax reform. Again, I am operating off the framework because there is no bill out yet, but based on the framework, the amount of tax relief a working- or middle-class family will get almost entirely depends-- almost entirely--on what we do with a child tax credit.

Here is the first chart. This chart shows the average tax cut for American families if the child tax credit is doubled from its current size--not just doubled, but we make it refundable against payroll tax liability, which is the tax every American pays. For Social Security and Medicare, it is the first chunk that comes off your paycheck. No matter how little you make, everyone pays it. If we make the child tax credit double, and we apply it toward your liability on payroll tax, this chart--which is what I propose, and it is what Senator Lee and I have been working on, what Ivanka Trump has been advocating and we have been working with her office on--shows you what the impact of that would be. That is the blue line. You can see from the blue line that the chart begins with some cut, depending on how much money you make, and it begins to drop as the amount of--obviously, the more money you make, the larger the credit will be up to its limit because you can't get a credit if you are not making any money at all, even if it applies to payroll tax. You start to see that it also grows with the number of children because it is per child. It doesn't just phase off at two children. That is the blue chart.

What is the red chart? The red chart is if we do nothing or basically just do a gimmicky thing about it. Then you start to see that without the child tax credit being made refundable and without the child tax credit applying toward the payroll refundable, and without the tax credit being per child and sufficiently increased, this framework would be a tax increase. People would actually pay more, and the more children you have, the bigger your tax increase will be.

Suffice it to say, we have to do it. This red line cannot be what we wind up at. I don't think that is the intent of the people who drew up the framework, but that is where we wind up if we don't do it. I pulled that chart out to show you how important it is that we do it as part of this framework. It has to happen. It has to. It will not pass without it. It is the right thing to do. This is a pro-job, pro-family initiative. I actually think it is pro-growth. It is hard for economists to measure it that way, but it would be.

There are a lot of people who can't start a business because they can't afford to leave the security of a certain type of employment. The tax credit frees that up for them to be able to do it.

Let me get to the second chart. This shows you basically the same dynamic but now based on how much people are making, what kind of jobs they do. We arbitrarily picked out some of the jobs where many of us know people who are in these fields: a home health aide, a retail person working sales at Macy's, an office clerk--we all see office clerks every day--a truckdriver, an individual with a vocation to be a nurse, firefighters. Obviously, I have three firefighters in my own family. Again, of the $1,500 child tax credit, only the first $1,000 was refundable, and you start to see that red line here and how pathetic it is for these folks in these professions. It does not really do much.

Now look at the blue line. That is what we want to get to, which shows an at least $2,000 child tax credit being applied to their payroll taxes. Now you start to see the figures get better here. You start to see the home health aide getting about $1,000 in relief, the retail salesperson getting a little bit under $1,000, the truckdriver and the office clerk getting down to $1,400, the nurse getting down to about $1,200, the firefighter getting down to about $1,200.

A lot of people will tell you that $1,200 or $1,400 is not going to change the world, but it will help. I didn't say this was the solution to every problem. Another solution is to get these salaries up higher. That is the other part of it. Another solution is to get the cost of some of these things lower, like get a grip on the cost of obtaining college credits. Another solution is to provide more childcare options for people. Yet there is no way that this does not help. It helps. It helps the people whom we need to help, and it helps us get closer to the goal that we all have for this Nation, which is being a place of equal opportunity. We pride ourselves on equal opportunity, but I am telling you that we are lacking equal opportunity if, of two children who grow up in two different homes, one has access to quality pre-K education, then to quality schooling, and then to the right support for that schooling, and one does not. It starts by the time you are a junior and senior. It hurts you. It absolutely hurts you in your way forward in life.

This is not the solution to all of our problems--that would be misleading--but it is a big step in that direction. It would show in tax policy that we are supporting the most important institution in society, which is the family, and the most important function that any of us will ever have, which is being a parent. We are investing in America's future.

The children being raised--the two, three, four children--do you know who those are? Those are the people who are going to fund Social Security and Medicare when I retire and when many of you retire. Those are the people who are going to be starting the businesses. Those are the people who are going to be the backbone of our economy not in 50 years but in the next 10, 15, 20 years. This is the future of America-- literally and figuratively the future of our Nation--in which we would be investing. We would be allowing their parents to make that investment on their behalf, who are the right people to be making the investment.

This has to be a part of whatever else happens. I think this has strong bipartisan support, and I know the White House supports it. I am optimistic that it will happen. The only thing that would keep it from happening is if tax reform itself goes down, but this has to happen. There is no choice but to do it. We have to, and it is the right thing to do.

I am pleased that we have come this far on it, and I look forward to the work in getting it achieved, but it cannot just be a gimmick, it cannot just be that we increase the child tax credit by a little bit. If we do not do it right and sufficiently and structure it in an appropriate way, we will be raising taxes on working families. That cannot happen. I know no one here wants to see that happen.

We will have a lot of debate about everything else, but this is the one that I hope will have strong bipartisan support as we move forward on tax reform, and I am excited to be able to work on it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I have 5 requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority leaders.

Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate:

Committee on Foreign Relations

The Committee on Foreign Relations is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, October 18, 2017, at 2:30 p.m.. to conduct a hearing on nominations.

Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions

The Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, October 18, 2017, at 9:30 a.m., in room SD-430 to conduct a hearing on the following nominations: Patrick Pizzella, of Virginia, to be Deputy Secretary, Cheryl Marie Stanton, of South Carolina, to be Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division, and David G. Zatezalo, of West Virginia, to be Assistant Secretary for Mine Safety and Health, all of the Department of Labor, Janet Dhillon, of Pennsylvania, and Daniel M. Gade, of North Dakota, both to be a Member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Carlos G. Muniz, of Florida, to be General Counsel, Department of Education, Peter B. Robb, of Vermont, to be General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, and Gerald W. Fauth, of Virginia, Kyle Fortson, of the District of Columbia, and Linda A. Puchala, of Maryland, each to be a Member of the National Mediation Board.

Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs

The Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, October 18, 2017, at 10 a.m. to conduct a hearing on the following nominations: Jeff Tien Han Pon, of Virginia, to be Director, and Michael Rigas, of Massachusetts, to be Deputy Director, both of the Office of Personnel Management, and Emily Webster Murphy, of Missouri, to be Administrator of General Services.

Committee on the Judiciary

The Committee on the Judiciary is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, October 18, 2017, at 10 a.m., in room SH-216 to conduct a hearing entitled ``Oversight of the U.S. Department of Justice.''

Subcommittee on Federal Spending Oversight and Emergency Management

The Subcommittee on Federal Oversight and Emergency Management of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, October 18, 2017, at 2:30 p.m. to hold a hearing entitled ``Broken Beakers: Federal Support for Research.''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I had the opportunity yesterday, along with the Coast Guard and the Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico, Jenniffer Gonzalez, to visit San Juan, Puerto Rico, to see firsthand some of the devastation that has impacted this U.S. territory. I would summarize it by saying that what I saw were more than 3.5 million American citizens potentially on the verge of a serious and growing humanitarian crisis.

There are a lot of reasons for this. The first is that Puerto Rico has been in the eye of not one but three storms. The first was Hurricane Irma, which impacted it a few weeks ago, followed by the devastation of Hurricane Maria, and preexisting these two things was a very significant fiscal crisis that placed extraordinary constraints on the ability of the territory's government both to prepare for the storm and now to respond to it.

Our traditional model of hurricane response--one that, unfortunately, because of numerous storms, I have come to know well as a resident of Florida--is that FEMA basically arrives in support of the State. When Florida gets hit by a storm and Texas gets hit by a storm, FEMA comes in to the State and tells the State: We are here to help. Tell us where to go, tell us what you need, and we will provide those resources to the places you want. It works that way. The President issues an emergency declaration, and it opens up FEMA and other disaster relief, and then the State government directs that assistance and tells them: This is what we need, this is where we need it, and this is what we can handle on our own. This model will not work in Puerto Rico. It will not work foremost because, as I stated earlier, the financial and fiscal constraints have limited its capacity to build its own internal ability to respond.

They had just finished repairing the damage from Irma a few weeks ago. So, literally, there are not nearly enough basic things like those wooden poles to hold up the electric lines or the transformers that are attached to them or even the lines themselves, and, in many cases, the fuel, power, and crews to get to the work sites.

It will not work because, in many cases, the government of Puerto Rico still does not have a full assessment of the damage of the storm. While communication in San Juan is severely limited, in most of the other areas of the big island and smaller islands, communication is nonexistent.

Something was brought to my attention firsthand yesterday when we visited one of the Coast Guard centers and watched. Much of the response they are conducting there is limited to a paper map on the wall with some sticky note pads and four landlines on which they hope people can call in and get updates on what they are seeing in the field from a satellite phone. Hopefully, that has improved over the last 24 hours as more Coast Guard vessels have come in to support communications. But we still have large parts of Puerto Rico that have not communicated with the rest of the island, the government, or the outside world, for that matter, going on to today.

There are also logistical challenges. In most of the 50 States-- certainly in my home State of Florida, we saw the largest power restoration effort in the history of the world. At least that is what they are claiming. Literally, we saw hundreds of those bucket trucks from all over the United States--all 50 States and even Canada--coming in with prearranged contracts and their crews to restore power. Even with that dramatic level of response, there were people without power until late this weekend, and there are still a couple thousand people in Florida who have no power.

You can't drive a convoy of trucks into Puerto Rico. They have to come in on a barge, and those barges take 7 days from Jacksonville and 5 days from Miami, plus whatever time it takes to travel and position those crews to get there. You not only have to deliver the crews, you have to deliver the supplies in order to be able to restore power.

What is the practical impact of not having power? Having no power is not simply an inconvenience; for many people it is life and death. Imagine an area outside of San Juan where someone is a diabetic and depends on insulin that needs to be refrigerated. That medicine has gone bad by now if they haven't run out. Imagine someone who needs dialysis twice a week. It has been longer than that since they have had it. Imagine if someone needs chemotherapy if they have cancer. That is not going to happen this week or next unless things change.

These are real challenges, and I raise them only because this is a disaster that will require an intensity of effort on behalf of the Federal Government that you would not traditionally see in a storm that impacts the mainland for the reasons I have outlined--and many more.

Now, the good news is, earlier today you saw the White House engage even

more in terms of some of the things they are doing. There are more Department of Defense assets and, as a result of some restoration at the airport, the ability to land more planes more quickly. So, again, more things are coming in. The port opened fairly quickly, but the challenges remain.

Even if today we could approve $10 billion in assistance and somehow figured out a way to deliver it to Puerto Rico in the next 24 hours, they would still be challenged to take it from the airport to the seaport and deliver it to the places that need it the most because there are roads that are still not clear, because we still don't have a full assessment of where the damage is and where the need is most and, quite frankly, because there are probably roads and bridges in parts of Puerto Rico that will collapse if one of these big trucks drive over them.

I say this because there is only one entity in the world with the capacity to respond to all these various issues; that is, the Federal Government of the United States. Leveraging the power of the Department of Defense and an assortment of other agencies, it remains the only institution certainly in our country--and probably in the world--with a capacity to respond quickly and effectively to the crisis at hand.

While response to this storm will take a significant amount of patience, it will also take a significant amount of urgency. For each day that goes by, this crisis will get worse, not better. I fear that if, in fact, there is not enough urgency in the response, we will be talking about a very different set of stories in the days to come.

I hope I am wrong, with all of my heart, but I fear that when communication lines come back up and when we start getting more access to some of these areas that have been cut off, we are going to start learning that the toll and the impact of the storm is far worse than we had imagined. I pray with all my heart that someone will watch this video on YouTube one day and say: Oh, look, he was exaggerating. It wasn't that bad after all. I hope that is what happens, but I fear it will not, and every day that goes by, it will only get worse.

I don't believe it is fair to say that the response up to this point is because some people don't care or because they haven't paid enough attention to it. I honestly think it is just a challenge that is unique and that requires us to respond to it in ways we wouldn't traditionally respond, for the factors I have just pointed out.

In most places on the mainland, if not all, the States have a certain capacity internally to address this, but Puerto Rico, for the challenges I have just outlined--and particularly because of the storm that just passed--has already had many of those resources depleted.

There is positive news today. The USS Comfort, a ship that is a hospital ship, is on its way, but again it will take it a number of days to get there. The Federal Government has agreed to a 100-percent Federal match. It usually means the Federal Government paid a portion of it and the States pay the rest. The Federal Government, for the next 180 days, has agreed to 100 percent payment of these services, and that will be critical because these restoration crews are going to want to know how their costs are going to be paid if they show up and begin to restore power.

I just think it is imperative that we don't lose focus and don't lose sight of what is at hand because there are over 3 million American citizens in danger. A number of them--perhaps in the thousands--already have existing vulnerabilities and are in severe danger of losing their life and extraordinary human suffering.

I thank my colleagues on both sides of the aisle who, throughout the day, have expressed a tremendous amount of interest in wanting to know how they can be helpful and what they can do. I think the most important thing we need to do now is to continue to drive the sense of urgency, to do all we can to bring to bear all of the resources the Federal Government can bring to assist in this recovery. Then we will be able to work together on not just rebuilding Puerto Rico but helping her to rebuild so she is stronger, more prosperous, and more stable than ever.

With that, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, and I am on the island today with FEMA Administrator Brock Long, Governor Ricardo Rossello, Resident Commissioner Jenniffer Gonzalez, and other officials to assess the damage and assistance that is needed to help residents and make the island whole. It is our responsibility to do everything we can to ensure our government responds to this hurricane the same as it would anywhere else in the country. We must stand with our brothers and sisters, and give Puerto Rico the resources it needs to rebuild and become stronger than ever before.

(At the request of Mr. Schumer, the following statement was ordered to be printed in the Record.)