Bonus Depreciation Modified and Made Permanent

Floor Speech

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Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, Republicans say they would like to help, but they claim we just don't have enough resources for medical research in order to address cures for Alzheimer's, cancer, Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, and other dread diseases--diabetes, for example.

Wildfire season is approaching, and there are not enough resources to begin planning to prevent those wildfires because there is not enough money to actually address the fires when they begin, and delay is occurring.

We have hurricane season and tornadoes all over the country, but there is not enough money for the National Weather Service to give us all of the details we need.

Only yesterday, we learned that Republicans were refusing, once again, to correct the bankrupt transportation fund. The best they can do is postpone the bankruptcy into next year--after the election--as our highways crumble and bridges literally fall down.

As for the comprehensive safety inspection of our food and our drugs, they would like to do it, but there is just not enough money, and there are not enough funds available to monitor effectively infectious diseases or to produce vaccines to stop other diseases.

There is not enough to adequately staff our Federal prisons. There is not enough to fully fund Federal law enforcement. There is certainly not enough to provide strong, effective foster care for the many children, after having been abused and neglected, who are removed from their homes.

As for workforce development, so that we can be competitive with our friends abroad, there doesn't seem to be the resource to permit children from pre-K to postgrad to achieve their full God-given potential.

While there are so many vital needs that we just don't seem to have the resources to address, these same Republicans tell us today that we can afford to borrow from the Chinese or the Saudis--or whoever will lend to us--the resources to deliver bonuses to some people. They urge more public debt to fund more bonuses.

While they rightfully argue on every expenditure program that we should be looking for evidence-based programs--programs that actually work and that provide the promised outcomes--and that we ought to eliminate duplication and inefficiency, they have absolutely no interest in evidence-based tax expenditures, which is what is involved today. When the evidence conflicts with their ideology, they abandon evidence and pursue ideology.

The evidence-based approach to this particular expenditure could not be clearer. What is involved here is that when any business goes out and obtains machinery, a vehicle, a truck, a building, they depreciate it over the useful lifetime of that asset--standard accounting principles.

What is involved here today is Washington math. It is the Washington manipulation of traditional accounting rules. It is a matter of violating those traditional accounting rules, and we have learned from the economic studies that that is a very sorry, not evidence-based investment.

Indeed, even as a stimulus, the analysis shows that, for every dollar that is invested, we get 20 cents of growth. A fellow could go bankrupt with that kind of economics, and that is exactly what they would have the country doing and not meeting its other needs while funding something that doesn't work.

Both the Federal Reserve bank and Goldman Sachs--which is not exactly a Democratic organization--concluded this year that letting this special tax treatment expire that they want to make permanent and extend forever will not have any significant economic impact.

Today's bill is an example of the very kind of waste and inefficiency line items that they always say, in campaign rallies, they can discover and eliminate, but which, today, they are perpetuating.

I am for a pro-growth, pro-jobs creation set of government policies--including tax policies--that promote competitiveness. It is competitiveness that involves an adequate transportation system, a trained workforce, the research in medicine as well as in technology to help us compete, but we don't have the Federal resources to hand out one bonus after another to corporations when we know it won't work, when it will not grow our economy and at the same time that the same people who are advocating for policies that don't work refuse to pay for policies that do work.

We should reject this bill. It is not in the interest of the country. It may be good politics in an election year, but it is bad economic policy, as near every economist who has looked at the issue in an objective way has concluded.

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