Schatz: Instead Of Addressing Rising Prices, Air Safety Issues, And New Disease Outbreaks, Trump And Republicans Want To Cut Taxes For Billionaires And Make You Pay For It

WASHINGTON – Today on the Senate floor, U.S. Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawai‘i) underscored President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans’ efforts to cut taxes for billionaires, while making working families foot the bill as they struggle with soaring prices, persistent air safety concerns, and growing threats to public health.

“The price of eggs has gone up by 15%, which is the single biggest monthly increase in ten years. Price of coffee is up 25% since the start of the year, and everything from gas to housing to car insurance is getting more expensive. But I don't want people to worry because Republicans are on it. Donald Trump knows that the main thing people elected him to do is to lower prices. And rest assured, he is working day and night to fix it. Everybody knows that the best way to lower costs for individual Americans is to cut taxes for billionaires. Everybody knows that. If eggs are eight bucks where you're living, obviously cut tax for billionaires. If coffee is increasingly expensive, cut taxes for billionaires. That is the very first thing that Republicans in the new Congress have decided to do is cut taxes for the richest people to ever exist,” said Senator Schatz.

Schatz continued, “People are dying because of the flu and the bird flu. Let's cut taxes for billionaires. Airplanes are falling out of the sky. Let's cut taxes for billionaires. People are losing their homes and wildfires and losses in Los Angeles and floods in Kentucky. Let's cut taxes for billionaires. Families can't afford their health care or housing, no matter how hard they work. Let's cut taxes for billionaires. Kids are falling behind in school with a third of a third of eighth graders lacking basic reading skills. Let's cut taxes for billionaires. Trump is illegally cutting funding for pediatric cancer research and disease prevention. Let's cut taxes for billionaires. Thousands of National Park Service workers fired. I know what we should do. Why don't we shovel a bunch of money to a bunch of billionaires? Millions of people. Millions of people are on the verge of starvation, disease and death because Trump suddenly and illegally suspended one of our primary arms of foreign policy, USAID. What is their solution? Not to exert any pressure on the State Department or the OMB. Or the President himself. Let's cut taxes for billionaires.”

“Their solution to every problem, big or small, domestic or global, complex or simple, is to cut taxes for billionaires,” Schatz concluded.

Video of his complete remarks is available here.

The full text of Senator Schatz’s remarks, as delivered, is below.

The price of just about everything is going up right now. Anyone that has been to the grocery store in the past few weeks now knows how hard it is to find a dozen eggs since the President was inaugurated.

The price of eggs has gone up by 15%, which is the single biggest monthly increase in ten years. Price of coffee is up 25% since the start of the year, and everything from gas to housing to car insurance is getting more expensive. But I don't want people to worry because Republicans are on it. Donald Trump knows that the main thing people elected him to do is to lower prices.

And rest assured, he is working day and night to fix it. Everybody knows that the best way to lower costs for individual Americans is to cut taxes for billionaires. Everybody knows that. If eggs are eight bucks where you're living, obviously cut tax for billionaires. If coffee is increasingly expensive, cut taxes for billionaires. That is the very first thing that Republicans in the new Congress have decided to do is cut taxes for the richest people to ever exist.

And they're going to do it by making regular people pay. Now, that might sound like a partisan accusation. And of course, on some level it is. But if you're sitting at home listening to the chatter about one big, beautiful bill or two bills and you're wondering what it all means, here's what they are doing. They want to cut taxes for billionaires to the tune of about $4.5 trillion, $4.5 trillion.

And because they already blew up the federal deficit in 2017, and because there are some House Republicans and maybe some Senate Republicans who won't vote for a package that increases the deficit, they actually need to find some savings elsewhere. It is very hard to find $4.5 trillion worth of savings. So what are they doing? They're having to cut programs and services that help people on a daily basis.

Hundreds of billions of dollars from Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, subsidies and food assistance. They're slashing funding for cancer research and disaster recovery and schools and national parks and VA clinics. They are laying off thousands of employees at federal agencies, one third of whom are veterans. And to be clear, this is not for the holy grail of efficiency.

Food is rotting at the dock. Medicine is rotting. The National Park Service is already backed up. Normally takes one minute to get into a national park, and a lot of places are. It's not even. It's like cold outside, taking 90 minutes to get into national parks. That's not efficiency. They're laying off probationary people. But let's be clear what probationary means.

It does mean new hires. It also means anybody who's getting a promotion, someone who has performed well. The United States government says, “You're so good. We want you to do something even more important”. So then you get put into this probationary category, and then you get laid off. Why? Why? Because they need to find $4.5 trillion worth of savings.

That's what's going on. As we speak, there are multiple outbreaks of diseases and illness within the United States. We're in the middle of the worst flu season in a decade. 13,000 Americans dead. Norovirus cases have skyrocketed by 340% this winter, and there have been 68 cases of the bird flu nationwide. Not to mention that if you can find eggs at all, there's sometimes 8 or $10 for a dozen.

In Texas, 58 people, mostly children, have gotten measles. And that's to say nothing of the Ebola and Marburg virus in eastern Africa. But don't worry, Trump is on it. And by on it, I mean he's laying off the very people who are responding to these crises. We learned yesterday that after DOJ's fired officials at the Department of Agriculture who were working on containing the bird flu, they had to quickly backtrack to try to rehire them.

Sometimes they don't have these people's email addresses. Sorry. Would you please come back? I don't know how to find you. This is not efficiency. This is an arson job. So they can generate savings so they can shovel $4.5 trillion to the people on that stage at inauguration. That's what this is. We are less than two months into the year, and we've already had four major deadly aviation disasters, including one right here in Washington over the Potomac and Trump is firing hundreds of FAA employees.

People who have jobs like maintenance mechanic, information specialist, safety assistant. They actually asked a bunch of air traffic controllers to quit. We're short air traffic controllers. We've been short air traffic controllers for 6 or 7 years. As a matter of fact, when I was the chairman of the relevant committee, we worked on a bipartisan basis to put a lot of a lot of money behind hiring more air traffic controllers.

Now, you can be a conservative and think the government should be smaller, or you can be a liberal and think the government should be bigger. I assume nobody thinks we should lay off air traffic controllers.

And if we're going to do that, it be it should be because something else even more urgent than air traffic control is at stake. But let's understand what's at stake. What's at stake is $4.5 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthiest people to ever walk this planet. We are less than a month away from the March 14th funding deadline to keep the government open, and we don't even have topline numbers yet alone, let alone full committee bills.

We are nowhere near a defense bill, but the only thing that Republicans are focused on right now immediately, urgently is cutting taxes for billionaires. People are dying because of the flu and the bird flu. Let's cut taxes for billionaires. Airplanes are falling out of the sky. Let's cut taxes for billionaires. People are losing their homes and wildfires and losses in Los Angeles and floods in Kentucky.

Let's cut taxes for billionaires. Families can't afford their health care or housing, no matter how hard they work. Let's cut taxes for billionaires. Kids are falling behind in school with a third of a third of eighth graders lacking basic reading skills. Let's cut taxes for billionaires. Trump is illegally cutting funding for pediatric cancer research and disease prevention. Let's cut taxes for billionaires.

Thousands of National Park Service workers fired. I know what we should do. Why don't we shovel a bunch of money to a bunch of billionaires? Millions of people. Millions of people are on the verge of starvation, disease and death because Trump suddenly and illegally suspended one of our primary arms of foreign policy, USAID. What is their solution? Not to exert any pressure on the State Department or the OMB.

Or the President himself. Let's cut taxes for billionaires. Anything and everything comes down to this. Why? Because it's the main thing they think about. There are so many smart people on the other side of the aisle, so many people who have accomplished so much in their careers. And they are lighting it on fire for this man.

The solution to every problem, big or small, domestic or global, complex or simple, is to cut taxes for billionaires. This is their project. This is their reason for being. Whatever else has motivated them to run for office in the first place? This is the first thing they're doing. Instead of a bunch of other stuff.

It doesn't have to be like this. You can be a Republican.

And give them their cabinet and their judges and justices. But my God, stand up for this place. Why would you run for office and then just remove your frontal lobe?

And do whatever this man thinks. It doesn't matter how much harm comes to your hospitals or your schools or your roads, or the one third of federal workers who are veterans. The solution always is to cut taxes for billionaires. I yield the floor.

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