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Floor Speech
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Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, we are coming up on the 1-month anniversary of Senate passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, and there is a lot to celebrate: sorely needed funding to restore our military readiness and ensure that our men and women in uniform are fully equipped to defend our country; funding to continue the work of securing the border, ending the illegal immigration crisis that President Biden created; $1\1/2\ trillion in Byrd-compliant savings to trim waste, fraud, and abuse, and put our government on a more secure financial footing going forward; measures to unleash American energy production to ensure a stable, reliable, and affordable energy supply for the American people; support for local law enforcement--all this and a whole lot more.
And I could talk about each of these things for a good long while, but the biggest reason for the One Big Beautiful Bill, of course, was about making life better for hard-working Americans, and that is what I want to talk about today. Without congressional action, Americans were facing a massive $4 trillion tax hike next year. For a typical family in my State of South Dakota, that would have looked like a $2,500 tax increase--$2,500. That is a lot of money.
And the first thing Republicans were determined to do, if we got elected last November, was to make sure that Americans were not hit with this tax hike. And so months before last year's elections, we started laying the groundwork for an extension of the 2017 tax relief to prevent tax hikes on hard-working Americans.
But not just an extension.
My Senate Republican colleagues and I were determined to ensure that this tax relief was permanent so that Americans wouldn't have to worry about their taxes going up down the road, and that is what we did. The One Big Beautiful Bill makes the 2017 tax relief permanent, and it prevents a massive $4 trillion tax hike on the American people.
But we didn't stop there. We didn't just make the 2017 tax relief permanent. We added to it with new measures to provide relief for hard- working Americans.
We increased the child tax credit to $2,200 and indexed it to inflation so its value will never go down. We increased the standard deduction, exempting additional money from Americans' taxable income, and we added a new $6,000 bonus deduction for seniors, allowing Americans on Social Security to keep more of their money.
And that is still not all.
We eliminated taxes on tips for millions of tip workers: Uber and Lyft drivers, hairstylists, delivery drivers, and servers at restaurants. We eliminated taxes on overtime pay for millions of hourly workers. That includes individuals like nurses and police officers, firefighters and paramedics--people who put in extra time away from their families to keep Americans safe.
And the list goes on.
Americans can now deduct the interest costs of a new car that is made here in America. Parents can save for their children's futures with new investment accounts funded by an initial $1,000 deposit from the government. Then there is the small business tax relief and the other measures to unleash economic growth to create new opportunities for workers.
This bill is going to make life better for hard-working Americans, and now it is time to make sure they know the details. As I indicated, this bill is the product of more than a year of work and of incredibly intense work in the last few months. Now that we have passed it, it would be easy to feel like our work is done, but that is not the case. A lot of time went into putting together this bill, and an equal amount of time or more needs to be spent ensuring that hard-working Americans are aware of the opportunities this bill offers. That means not just talking about the bill here in Washington but going back to our States and talking about it with our constituents face-to-face.
We are extremely familiar with the details of our legislation--we have been working on it for a long time--but that doesn't mean that all of those details have made their way out of Washington, and our job now is to make sure that they do, to make sure that our constituents have the chance to learn about everything that is in the One Big Beautiful Bill in face-to-face conversations with all of us--the people who know this bill best.
Communicating about this bill should be a priority when we are in Washington but especially when we are in cities and towns across America. It has been a tough few years for the American people. Let's make sure they know that a brighter future is on the way.
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