Crapo: Americans Can’t Afford More of the Same Tax-and-Spend Strategy

Washington, D.C.--In an interview with Larry Kudlow on Fox Business, U.S. Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) talked about his reaction to the damaging tax-and-spend proposals outlined in the President’s State of the Union address.

On the President calling for more taxing and spending: 

“The President said ‘let’s finish the job,’ so it sounds like he doesn’t think he’s finished.  $4.8 trillion of mostly debt-financed spending in the last two years; trillions of dollars in taxes he appears to be proposing; and another who-knows-how-many trillions of dollars in new spending.”

…

“I read it to say that he didn’t get everything he was demanding in the last two years. . . . Look at what he was proposing--it’s hard to tally it all up, but it looks like we’re in for proposals that will put us right back into an inflationary spiral.”

…

“It wasn’t just more taxes and more spending, but it was more regulating.  It doesn’t seem like there was anything he didn’t touch. . . . The bottom line with regard to spending is that we can’t spend ourselves into prosperity and I thought it was very clear--he was saying, ‘Hey, we’re not done yet.  Let’s finish the job.’”

On how Republican tax reform worked:

“His big hit last night was to say that we need to make the rich people who are cheating on their taxes pay their fair share. . . . The top 1 percent already pay 42 percent of taxes, the top 50 percent of income earners in America pay 97.7 percent of taxes, and the effective tax rate on those who pay those taxes is much higher than others.  He’s creating a false premise.  The reality is our tax code is working very well right now and does not need to be reformed.” 

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“In this last year, we collected almost $5 trillion in revenue--$4.9 trillion. That is record tax revenue.  Our tax system is working.  We also saw that the corporate payments were $425 billion--far more than was projected before we passed our tax cut legislation in 2017.  It’s working, and the President is creating false goblins here to try to justify more taxes on everyday Americans.  He’s proposing new corporate taxes, but corporations don’t bear the burden of these taxes, workers do.  Retirees do.  And consumers do.  We’d see prices go up, we’d see peoples’ retirement and pension plans lose, and see workers with lower wages and lower benefits because of the taxes that he’s proposing.” 

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“I think most Americans get it.  The fact that we see groceries are now 18 percent higher than when he took office; gasoline is 37 percent higher than when he took office; electricity is 20 percent higher than when he took office.  Inflation is also a hidden tax on all people in America, particularly for the middle and lower-income categories of earners.”

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