The Biden Border Crisis and So-Called Infrastructure Plan

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I would like to address the Chair with regard to the upcoming infrastructure bill. I am going to talk about some numbers. I don't mean to bore you with numbers.

When you put together a bill, you don't want to be an outlier. I am going to address two areas in which I think this bill makes this an outlier in very, very serious ways.

The first one is, you have changes in the tax law. And when you look at the taxes that a business pays in this country, a corporation, you have to look at kind of a double taxation. They will tax you at a corporate rate when the business earns the money; and when the business gives the money to its shareholders, you will be taxed at a dividend rate.

There is a graph here comparing all of the OECD countries around the world as to where they stand on this combined tax rate. The lowest countries, the Baltic countries, Latvia and Estonia, are 20 percent.

Right now, the United States, even after the last tax cut, at 47 percent, is middle of the pack. Actually, a little bit higher. If the tax hikes are put in effect that are published right now, you are going up to 62.7 percent. In other words, of the over 20 countries here, the United States will have the highest combined dividend, plus corporate tax rate. That is an outlier and a dangerous place to be an outlier.

There are a lot of things that go into a decision as to where you put a manufacturing facility, but taxes is certainly one of them. And given one of our goals should be to bring manufacturing back to the country, it is a bad place to be as the highest combined corporate tax rate, plus dividends.

The next area I am going to address is the money supply. To a certain extent, because of previous bills passed during the COVID crisis, we have had a rather dramatic increase in the money supply.

I would suggest you google ``M1.'' You will see that, in the last 6 months, the amount of dollars floating around has gone through the roof. Some people, including me, would say M2 would be a better measurement. But even if you look at M2, we have a 27 percent increase in the money supply over the past year. That is just screaming we are going to have a lot of inflation in the very near future.

It is certainly not the only reason, but we already see the rapid increase in the cost of housing construction. We see an increase in food prices and an increase in energy prices. This is given what we have already done.

Now, you are going to tell us--or some people are going to say that we are going to raise enough taxes to pay for this spending. But we are going to be raising enough taxes over the next 10 or 15 years. We know around here that when we say we are going to make a pay-for the next 10 or 15 years, a lot of times that pay-for never materializes.

So I am afraid we are going to have another big increase in the money supply when we have already had a 27 percent increase in the last year, and this is going to come back and cause serious concern. I beg the majority to look at a graph of the combined tax rates, us compared to the other OECD countries, and I beg them to look at the money supply and don't make us any more of an outlier on either.

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