In House floor remarks last week, Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) sounded off against what he perceives to be threats to the nuclear family.
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00:00Thank you. I think it's important that the chair and the public know that there
00:11are always debates going on in this building which will determine how the big beautiful
00:16bill is sent to President Trump. One of those debates involves the state and local tax deduction.
00:28Another of the debates which hasn't been as highlighted involves President Trump's proposal
00:33to reduce the marginal rate on manufacturing to 15%. President Trump is rightly obsessed
00:41with having America being the world leader in manufacturing. Another one of the debates
00:49is what we should do to encourage Americans to have more children. And President Trump
00:55has proposed a $5,000 credit for people having children. I think that might not be quite
01:03right. I personally prefer a new $5,000 exemption but nevertheless there's no time in life in
01:10which people are more financially strapped than when they have young children. I am strongly
01:17opposed to the so-called SALT Caucus of people who desperately want to have a greater deduction
01:27for state and local taxes. These people are as a practical matter looking to encourage their
01:34governors, their school boards, their county boards to raise local taxes. Last weekend when
01:43I was home, a county executive in my district, a conservative county executive, begged me not
01:50to increase the deduction for property taxes. He is a conservative and did not want to have
01:58the liberals on his county board making the case, wouldn't it be great if all of our property
02:06taxes and income taxes were tax deductible so we could raise taxes? And I am sure right now,
02:13particularly in the more liberal states, places like Governor Newsom in California, places
02:19like New York, the governors, the state legislators are waiting to see if they can increase the
02:26deduction for state income taxes, for local property taxes so they can spend more money. We have
02:37to realize that if the SALT Caucus succeeds, there will be less money available here to lower the income tax
02:45on manufacturing as President Trump tries to bring back American manufacturing jobs from China, from Korea,
02:54from Mexico. We will not have the money available to do eventually what I would like to do and that is
03:01have a $5,000 personal exemption to help out young couples who are just starting out so they have more income
03:09at the time in their life when they need it more than anybody else. I strongly encourage our negotiators
03:16to turn back the people who want a big state and local tax deduction even though
03:25Wisconsin is a mildly high tax state. I think encouraging any more taxes anywhere in the country hurts
03:36us all as it slowly takes away the freedoms of people in America and makes America more of a country
03:47that you would not want to move to and start new manufacturing.
03:54That's one of the things that is going on in this building.
04:00The next topic to take up, and I'm kind of disappointed we didn't deal with it like we should have
04:06in our proposed Big Beautiful Bill, but I know President Trump's team is concerned about this,
04:13is the degree to which so many of our welfare programs are designed to discourage people from
04:24getting married. We know that people who get married and have children,
04:30well, all types of families have successful children, and I personally know many people who on their own,
04:37both men and women, have done a very good job of raising children you would be proud of.
04:42In the long run, it is not fair to the next direction, next generation to discourage people from getting married and having children.
04:53I really, right now, there are many, many federal programs, what used to be called food stamps,
05:05the low-income housing, the Medicaid, which is health care for the poor, the Pell Grants.
05:14All of these programs are designed to penalize young couples who get married.
05:22If you have a single parent, they may be eligible for all of these programs.
05:28If you are married, you may be eligible for none of the programs.
05:31I think the most generous of the group is low-income housing or Section 8 vouchers, whatever.
05:40But in any event, it's not unusual to look up a hypothetical in which if a woman marries,
05:47say, the father of her children, she will lose $25,000 to $30,000 a year.
05:53This is why, since the Great Society in the 60s, we have gone from a situation in which in the 50s,
06:034% of the children in this country were born out of wedlock.
06:12And now, we are in a position in which we have over 40% of the children in the country were born out of wedlock.
06:21It did not happen by accident.
06:28It happened because the Great Society programs in the 1960s were designed to encourage this sort of behavior.
06:38You may say, who wants to discourage people who are married from having children?
06:48In fact, Karl Marx, of course, was very opposed to the traditional family.
06:54We've known since I've been here Black Lives Matter.
06:59Made it clear that they were opposed to what they referred to as the Western-prescribed nuclear family.
07:07And of course, even after Black Lives Matter came out for that, it did not present many of our members,
07:17particularly on the Democrat side of the aisle, from standing with Black Lives Matter, a group opposed to the nuclear family.
07:26We know that many of the feminists in the 60s, I'm thinking of Kate Millett, who was described as the mother of women's studies classes that are all over our universities,
07:38were outright opposed to the nuclear family.
07:42It is disappointing we are not doing more in this budget to address that problem, to stop encouraging young people not to be married.
07:54And we all by now have run into young couples who may even want to be married, but they won't be married because they lose $20,000 or $25,000 a year.
08:03Indeed, in this program, we're expanding the Pell Grant program, a program that was one of these things that has a marriage penalty associated with it.
08:13We are expanding the low-income housing tax credits, and while some of those credits do not come with a marriage penalty,
08:23particularly when coupled up with state programs, they do have a marriage penalty, another program we're expanding that's going in the wrong direction.
08:33In any event, I encourage President Trump to do what's already going on behind the scenes, and that is work towards, perhaps in our next reconciliation bill,
08:47a program to stop the hatred of the traditional family that is the marker of the Democrat Party today.
08:56Again, I emphasize we have to look at every one of these programs.
09:01The Earned Income Tax Program, the Pell Grant Program, the Low Income Housing Program, the Section 8 Program.
09:11In general, housing authorities, all of them have this hostility.
09:18If America is ever going to truly become a great society again, we have to work our way back up to where we were in the 60s and the 50s,
09:29where we had 4%, 5% of the children born out of wedlock.
09:34By the way, if you read on historic experts on this topic, and I'm talking about people like George Gilder, who is a very bright guy,
09:43a lot of times the person who is penalized the most when you set up a society without couples having children,
09:52is in fact the man in the society who has no purpose in life.
09:56As an Indian immigrant in my district told me, in America they have the woman marry the government,
10:03and of course I think society is better off if we have the woman marry the father of the children, not the government,
10:10like so many members of this conference want to do.
10:17The next thing I want to look at, which we're going to be viewing in the next few days,
10:21we have a proposed reconciliation bill in front of us,
10:28and I was under the impression that this bill would be an opportunity to decrease the amount of government programs,
10:37decrease the degree to which we have government programs controlling or directing Americans' lives.
10:45One of those programs that I really don't like, the more I talk to experts on the topic,
10:50is something called low income tax credits.
10:53These low income tax credits are tax credits given to property developers equal to 10% of the value of what they spend,
11:06on new apartments for nine years in a row.
11:10Now there's a time value of money, but even given the time value of money,
11:15it means that the government is paying for 70% of some people's projects.
11:21There are some requirements as to who you rent these to, but the requirements are not stringent,
11:28and some people point out that we could almost take people at random in the street,
11:33and that would be enough to fill their housing units.
11:42It really doesn't do a lot to help the so-called low income people.
11:46It does, however, because the government is giving so much money,
11:50it does encourage developers to spend far more than they would otherwise on their projects.
11:57Why not make Cadillac projects if the government is going to spend or pay for 70% of those projects?
12:07Furthermore, as we spend more on the projects, it's going to turn around and result in greater depreciation expense
12:16for the wealthiest banks in the country who frequently wind up buying the credits.
12:24For something that should be a relatively simple transaction,
12:28once the states get a hold of it, you can wind up with regulations of hundreds of pages
12:34that have to be negotiated when you begin running the projects,
12:39which obviously means a lot more money for the lawyers
12:43and much more difficult for the politicians to understand exactly what is going on.
12:50You would think of all the projects out there, all the government programs,
12:56this would be the easiest to get rid of because we're supposed to be broke.
13:01In fact, under our big beautiful bill, and I know President Trump wants the most beautiful bill he can on his desk,
13:08in this bill we are in fact expanding the number of tax credits,
13:14which is to say expanding the amount of money that the property developers on these projects are going to make.
13:22We are increasing the amount of tax credits that I'm told,
13:32a very high number going to the biggest five banks in the United States,
13:36tax credits the banks get.
13:39Furthermore, because there's only so many new rental housing units we need,
13:45it expands or you wind up crowding out the what I'll call legitimate developers and legitimate users of low income housing tax credits.
14:02I would hope, as we put together hopefully the final version of the big beautiful bill,
14:09sometime in the next couple of weeks, we look at this.
14:13It's not something that costs nothing.
14:15It's currently costing us, even under current law,
14:18about $13.8 billion a year in tax credits,
14:23which are going to these well-connected developers.
14:29I think one thing that will also tell you that they're well-connected,
14:33is it's up to states to distribute which property developers get the credits.
14:38Well, what do you think is going to happen?
14:41It's going to be the same people who know the same bureaucrats,
14:44who are connected with the same politicians,
14:46who are going to get these credits again and again and again.
14:51Again, on the face of it,
14:54the idea that in the future in this country,
14:57the people who build the apartments is going to be determined by state bureaucracies,
15:03is just an invitation for trouble.
15:07The fact that we are paying 70%,
15:10it therefore results in a situation in which given some areas in California in particular,
15:18we may be paying more than $95,000 a unit.
15:22Does that make any sense at all?
15:25If our goal is to create lots of new housing units for the so-called poor or working poor?
15:34No, you would never do that, except for that's the way the property developers make more money.
15:41In any event, I encourage our leadership team as they are looking for more money to seal the deal on this project.
15:51I don't think they have their 217 or 216 votes yet to grab that $13.5 billion.
15:59Another thing I'll point out, these credits have been around since the late 1980s,
16:04and people might wonder where they came from.
16:08I think they probably came from developers who found a way to schnooker the poor U.S. Congress in the late 80s,
16:17but at the time Congress felt something had to be done,
16:21because we had just gotten done with apparently decreasing or increasing the depreciation schedules on new residential real estate.
16:32So in the early 80s, you could depreciate an apartment building in 15 years.
16:38When they changed it to 27 and a half years, it greatly reduced the number of new apartments that people were building,
16:45and therefore it was easier to sell to Congress that one way to get more apartments online
16:52is to have these ridiculously over-generous credits.
16:56I don't know if they're going to have much of an impact.
16:59One of my goals is I would like to have the credits renamed instead of the low-income housing tax credits,
17:05the big banks, big law firms, and especially well-connected developer tax credits,
17:12because I think that would more adequately describe, accurately describe, the people who benefit from these credits.
17:19In any event, there are some of the issues that I think are going to be debated in the next few days.
17:28I hope the press does a good job of covering what low-income housing tax credits really are.
17:34I hope the press does a good job of setting before the American public,
17:40and particularly the Republican volunteers who did so much to get us here,
17:47laying out the differences between the tax cuts based on how high your property or sales taxes are,
17:58how high your local property taxes or state sales and income taxes are.
18:03We'll see if, how our base feels about who we should reward,
18:15or what type of behavior we should encourage through the tax code.
18:19Should we encourage people to have more children?
18:22Should we encourage people to work harder?
18:25And should we encourage businesses, more manufacturing, more manufacturing jobs?
18:31Or should we encourage local governments to raise taxes?
18:37And finally, in the future as we determine how we're going to build new apartments in this building,
18:45should we encourage these apartments, or the builders of the apartments,
18:51to go through the government accepting lavish tax credits?
18:57Or should we do it the way we always have in America?
19:00And that is let the free market win out.
19:03The idea that you cannot build apartment buildings is, on the face of it, preposterous.
19:10I know everywhere right now, be it single family or multi-family, the costs are way too high.
19:17I would hope that the speaker would maybe put together a committee or a subcommittee,
19:22seeing what we can do to lower those costs.
19:25But I am told it is possible to lower the costs,
19:29and the answer is not paying developers 70% of the cost of their project.
19:35By the way, I am told I must do this. This was my office's fault.
19:42Madam Chair, before I, before, as I conclude my floor speech today,
19:47I'd like to ask unanimous consent to remove...
19:50First?
19:51Yes?
19:52Gentleman yields back.
19:53Gentleman yields back.
19:54Gentleman yields back.
19:55Yes.
19:56For what purpose does the gentleman rise?
19:58Before I begin my floor, after I finish my floor speech today,
20:02I'd like to ask unanimous consent to remove Dan Goldman of New York as a co-sponsor of H.R. 1415.
20:09Without objection, so ordered.
20:12And then...
20:14I move adjournment.
20:19Would the gentleman withdraw his motion?
20:21Would the gentleman withdraw his motion?
20:23Sure.
20:27Persimant to Clause 13 of Rule...
20:29Persimant to Clause 13 of Rule...
20:31Persimant to Clause 13 of Rule...