Student and Family Tax Simplification Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. DANNY K. DAVIS of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the ranking member for yielding.

Tax-based aid represents more than half of all nonloan Federal support for higher education, giving tax policy a critical role in promoting college affordability, access, and completion.

Although I strongly support improving the education credits for students and families, I cannot support the Republican piecemeal tax approach that would add $825 billion to the deficit and imperil our economic recovery and the well-being of our citizens.

As partners in the Education and Family Benefits Tax Working Group, I was delighted to work with Representative Black and her staff from Tennessee. I want to thank her and her staff for a wonderful legislative experience. It was, indeed, a delight.

I also want to commend Chairman Camp for taking the bold initiative to put comprehensive tax reform in the discussion and on the table.

Our bill represents a bipartisan compromise that integrates promising reforms to tax-based education benefits suggested to us by both conservative and progressive stakeholders.

This bill simplifies our Tax Code and strengthens our investment in students and their families, expanding aid to the lowest-income students by modestly expanding the refundability of the credit, removing obstacles to claiming the credit, improving the coordination of tax and Pell policies, and indexing the credit to inflation.

However, the Student and Family Tax Simplification Act was intended as part of comprehensive tax reform. Within a comprehensive package, policymakers are better able to pay for our tax cuts and ensure that groups of taxpayers who may lose out in one section are helped in others.

I look forward to continuing to work in a bipartisan way to improve education tax policy, but I oppose moving this bill in isolation of other education tax reforms and at the exclusion of other critical tax provisions that help the working poor, strengthen economically distressed communities, promote affordable housing, help cover public transportation costs, incentivize businesses to hire hard-to-employ workers, and assist teachers with classroom expenses.

I don't think anything is much more important than education affordability, but I believe that first things come first. For me right now, before I would suggest spending any more money, I would suggest that we find a way to put an unemployment check in the hands of the 3 million people who are waiting in America, so they can live until they can get to college.

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