Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, 2017--Motion to Proceed--

Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, how much time remains on the Franken- Klobuchar request to speak on this issue?

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I will be very brief. I know Senator Brown feels very strongly about this, as well, so I am going to make a few remarks and leave time for him. I want to commend Senator Franken and Senator Klobuchar, who have talked to me about this issue many times.

Today in the Finance Committee, with a significant bipartisan vote, we were able to pass the miners legislation to address the health care and retirement needs of those miners. As my two colleagues have pointed out, at its heart, this is the same emergency. Today it is the mine workers. Tomorrow it could be the truckers. The next day it could be the construction workers and the woodworkers in my part of the United States. As my colleagues have said, the reason that is the case is that for generations of Americans, getting a good-paying job came with a simple bargain: You worked hard, you earned a wage and benefits, and those benefits wouldn't be taken away.

Today, bit by bit, that bargain is crumbling. There are two points that I would touch on so that Senator Brown can have some time, if his schedule permits. I think Senator Klobuchar has made a very good point about how important it is that Congress address this issue because, with respect to troubled systems like Central States, Congress is partially responsible for creating the problem.

As Senator Klobuchar noted, 2 years ago Congress passed a bill--a bill that I was very much opposed to--the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act. It was slipped into a must-pass government funding package, and it gave a green light to slashing benefits in a lot of struggling multiemployer plans. In effect, for a generation of workers, it said: Sorry, times have changed. The benefits that you earned are no longer going to be protected, and the weight of this economic transformation in America is going to fall on you.

It wasn't fair and it wasn't practical. I certainly share the view of my colleagues who said it was a good thing Treasury rejected the proposal that would have cut benefits earlier this year. Obviously we are going to have to take more steps to shore up the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which is a financial lifeline for 10 million workers, and we are going to have to look at a variety of approaches.

I very much share the views Senator Franken spoke about, which Senator Klobuchar supports as well, when he talked about this rotting economic carcass known as the Federal Tax Code and how unfair it is to working families. My colleagues have just pointed out one example.

Let me say that at the heart of the bipartisan tax reform proposals I have written over the last decade is my sense that we now have a tax code that really represents a tale of two systems. If you are influential and well connected, you can pretty much decide what kinds of taxes you are going to pay and when you are going to pay them. A fortunate few basically have that kind of opportunity. But the people my colleagues have been talking about--for example, truckers--don't have a tax code like that. Once or twice a month, those truckers have taxes extracted from their paychecks. They see it on their paychecks. There are no loopholes or anything that states about whether it is carried interest or derivatives or half a dozen other things; they just have their taxes extracted and there are no writeoffs or any kind of figuring out what you are going to pay and when you are going to pay it. It comes right off your paycheck.

We have a lot of heavy lifting to do. Today, it seems to me that Congress began the task. I can tell my colleagues that there is so much work to do to modernize these pension and retirement systems.

Chairman Hatch agreed to a proposal that I made today to allow people to contribute to their IRAs after they are 70\1/2\ years old. That proposal was adopted, as Senator Franken may know, sometime in the early 1960s. I won't pretend to be anywhere near as humorous as my colleagues, but I finally said--I thanked Chairman Hatch for adopting my proposal that let's people over 70\1/2\ contribute to their IRAs because people are living longer and feeling better. It doesn't seem that it makes much sense to have so many Senators and working Americans younger than the retirement laws that were adopted for a different time.

We have a lot to do. First and foremost, we have to shore up Central States. We will be looking at a variety of approaches on how to do that, and, as both of my colleagues have said, a fundamental part of what we are going to have to do is fix this broken tax system.

When I start talking about the Tax Code as a rotting economic carcass, my wife always says: Will you just stop there, dear, because you are frightening the children? We have small children. The reality is, this Tax Code is infected with loopholes and the inversion virus. It just goes on and on.

As my colleagues have said, it is not right for working families-- particularly those who are depending on Central States pensions--to sort of hang in suspended animation, hoping that somehow there is going to be a piece of legislation that will pass through here so that they will get something resembling what they were promised--a dignified retirement based on the pension they earned.

I commend my colleagues for doing this. This comes at the end of the day where at least we began the long push to pension reform with a successful bipartisan effort on miners, but, as my colleagues have said, this work has just begun.

I thank Senator Franken and Senator Klobuchar for their commitment and their eloquence.

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