Transcripts For CSPAN Rep. Hoyer Town Hall Meeting On Tax Reform 20180113

Poverty. Watch sunday night at 9 p. M. Eastern on book tv on cspan2. Maryland lawmakers held a town hall meeting with local officials and constituents to discuss the tax reform bill and its potential impact. Steny hoyer, senator Chris Van Hollen and congressman Anthony Brown also responded to the president s recent comments about haitian and african immigrants. The town hall was held by the prince georges counties corporation. It is one hour and 45 minutes. It is one hour and 45 minutes. [inaudible] good morning, everyone. Welcome to the best roundtable discussion in the country this morning. Welcome to sunny and bright Prince Georges County, maryland. Maryland, i would like to give you a warm welcome. To haveecially honored congress men brown here this morning. I also welcome the mayors, the town managers, and the unions to this very important roundtable. I want to thank the congregation for their unwavering support. Andhave been our champions brought funding for Significant Economic Development projects. The fbi andported the gsa would be very proud of how Cost Effective they are. Therefore, i am pleased to inform you that due to your maryland hasrts, job growth. It has led for four consecutive quarters but none of that would have happened without your support. This county leads the entire washington dc region in job growth. Better than fairfax, montgomery, howard, we are ahead of each of them. That is because of this Significant Economic Development project that was bright here and funded here. Without that it would not be possible. There is a report on your desk that shows the numbers. You will be happy to know that we lead the state of maryland and the entire region. Therefore, todays roundtable discussion is about the potential negative impact of the proposed federal tax relation. Regulation. This could have a significant negative impact not just on real estate but also on the average citizen. We are going to be the most negatively impacted by this legislation. Today you are going to hear from on what these issues make theow we can changes more conducive to our citizens. They give very much. Once again thank you very much. Welcome to the economic engine of the state of maryland. This has been a brief message from our sponsor. Thank you. We appreciate all of the things you do and your leadership. I know the senators and myself and congressman brown is working that the to make sure federal bureau of investigation, one of the great Law Enforcement agencies in the world, will not comments from some people in this country, and we are working daily to make that happen. We have had some good meetings recently. Not only come up with members of congress but with the fbi. Thank you very much. Thank you to the county executive and his team and what they have been doing to facilitate everything. I know he is going to be able to. Peak thank you to my partner Anthony Brown, who is so experienced and who is now doing a magnificent job. Thank you very much for being here. We want to talk about legislation that was passed frankly, over the opposition of all three of us. As a matter of fact, all but one opposed the tax bill. We are going to talk about the tax bill and talk about its consequences and how we believe it is a bill that will not help the average working americans in this country. In fact, it will undermine the ability of many taxpayers. Particularly, in maryland. We will talk about that at a greater length. I want to thank and welcome all the localdiscuss impact of the talks tax overhaul. Think it is critically important for people to understand what they are going to confront in this tax bill that was passed. The impact on them and the community. First, i want to make clear that what was signed into law was not the type of comprehensive tax reform that most people have been wanting for years. We need tax reform. We need tax simplification. We need to make sure that tax legislation does in fact, benefit the working men and women of our country as well as, Small Businesses so that they can make it in america. Passed, the tax bill was through a bipartisan process but a partisan onesided says that would guarantee the outcome would not be a fully Sustainable Tax reform. In fact, there will not be a person in america that comes to any of these teach ins who was given an opportunity to testify at any hearing about these bills either in the house of representatives or the United States senate. There was not a single hearing. Not a single witness was invited to testify on the merits or demerits of the tax legislation which was passed. It was passed in a hurry. It was passed in two months with no hearings. There were markups but the markups were very brief and without opportunity. No amendments were allowed. In a Conference Committee got no democrat was allowed to offer an amendment. So not only were there no witnesses, there were no amendments allowed in the conference. The most obvious example, is that the bill included permanent corporate reforms on one hand and in other words, we passed a bill that says we will give deep tax cuts to Corporate America and that they will keep going for amber. Forever. They gave marginal tax cuts to working americans but they will expire in 2005. However, in the final version of the bill, kept their tax cuts. Ryan, when he spoke on behalf of the tax bill, talked about how he wanted to help working americans. Of 59,000amily income. That is it about the average income or a family of four. Certainly not a rich family, not a poor family, and average family. Steny if you look at this chart, i do not know whether you could see it but what this chart shows is the average 59,000 ofily got a tax cut annually 1182 per year. That is 23 per week. 1 got a tax cut of 1100 and 91. 1191 per week. 900,000op 1 , that is a week. That is the stark disparity that we see in trying to help working men and women. We know the theory is trickledown. Willmebody at the top 1 trickle down to someone that you give 23 two per week. To per week. That tax cut will expire sometime in the middle of the next decade for the average person. You might see that i have asked james to come up front. The reason why i asked him to come up front is because he knows the answers. Time, this tax cut forces children and grandchildren to pay for these tax cuts. They are plunging our country deeply into debt. Trillionrrowing 1. 5 to give baby 83 of the tax cuts to the wealthiest and america. I am not for class welfare. Raise your hand if you do not want to be healthy wealthy. All of us want to be wealthy. God bless the people who are successful but the fact of the average families are who are struggling. As opposed to giving them 23 per week and giving the week, wet 1200 a should have reversed that. A 1. 5are going to bar trillion, we should have reversed that. I do not think we should have borrowed that 1. 5 trillion because ive three children, three grandchildren and four great great grandchildren. They are the ones that are going to pay the bill. We will not be around to advertise this that. Our children will. Suggestion that the speaker has made is that we will now address trying to balance our budget by cutting Social Security, cutting medicaid and cutting medicare. Those are not the priorities that this country should have. Now, let me tell you why the individual mandate was important. If everybody was insured, everybody would pay less. If only the sick are insured, the previous will have to be higher. All of us know that. How do we know . Automobile insurance. Your automobile insurance would be four times higher than it is today if everyone of us had accidents. Insurance is based upon spreading the risk and the theory that most people will not get sick or will not get into accidents. Therefore, you can advertise the cost over a bigger group of people. As a result, you have the people who are sickest who must have insurance and therefore, get insurance and therefore, the restful is much higher and their cost become prohibited. Are expected to go up as a result of this. 13 Million People are going to lose their access to Health Insurance as a result of this mandate. The republican plan also takes he credits away from working families. So, we are going to talk about that. It is going to have ramifications. Those whose job require them to purchase new tools or uniforms, will not be able to deduct that anymore. Those who relocate and pursue a new job opportunity will not be able to deduct moving expenses. Mortgage,alue of a the interest has been reduced. The interest has been removed entirely from home equity loans. If you now take out a home equity loan, you will no longer have a deduction. As a result, home values in some areas are already starting to drop. Tax onncludes a double middleclass families by limiting deductions. Municipal officials are going to be placed in a position where taxpayers find themselves seeking relief on this double taxation. For cities like greenbelt, raising the affected tax rate will make it harder to Fund Public Services such as, police and firefighters and teachers. Jennifer and teresa are here from the education association. Razor hands. Your hands. I understand that there are others here who will be speaking. Raising the effective rate for taxing property, encourages renting over ownership. What chart three says is that middleclass households with a tax increase in 2027 and marilyn in maryland, 700,000 families. Those are whole tax holds deduction. E andtrict, 200 33 233 will get a tax deduction. This may surprise you. We are number one in the country. We have a lot of high middleclass with two people working together. The Fifth District is even higher. Reduction taken before the tax bill is 12,900 dollars. Which means, it will be capped and you will have much of that that you will no longer be able to deduct. In maryland, 87 of taxpayers are advantaged by being able to deduct state and local taxes. I will say that this has a much greater impact on socalled blue states then red states. Perhaps not a surprise. This affects almost everybody. 87 as i said, are in the middle tax bracket. 20 that just 10 or will adversely be affected by this, we are talking about 87 of our population. Taxpayers deducted 2. 3 billion of their state and local taxes. That will be cap in the future. Clearly, this tax overhaul is going to be a disaster for our taxpayers in our state. Democrats were eager to do real reform. Nd real tax we were never given the chance. No ability to change this bill. There are other things on here to theanted to yield senator and congress brown. Chris thank you for bringing us together here this morning. Thank you for your leadership. Thank you congressman brown for your leadership and for hitting the ground running. We were successful together at stopping the effort earlier last year to totally repeal the Affordable Care act which would have done incredible damage to the Health Care System throughout the country and here in maryland. Indicated, andn spite of our best efforts, we were not able to stop this atrocious tax plan which is also going to do great harm to people throughout the country. Thank you for the introductory remarks. This county has been a great engine for opportunity and a great job creator. Thank you to everyone on the team. We are pleased that we succeeded in getting federal funding for the purple line. We try every day to bring the fbi here to this county. We are an Incredible National example of how people from all different backgrounds can come together and make a county work and have a strong powerful economy. I just have to say how despicable President Trumps comments were yesterday in the context of immigration reform. Have allan hoyer and i made it clear how unacceptable those comments were. They undermine the idea behind our country which is, that we all have value and that this is a country in which people from all over the world come together and have an opportunity to get ahead. Degradingnot be anyone from any part of the world. We are all stronger. Together. Believetax plan, we that we need tax reform. We have a tax code that is riddled with special interest tax rates. We had a tax code that was already in favor of the very wealthy and vital interests. Corporations. How can you argue that you have a middleclass tax plan that raises taxes on hundreds of thousands of middleclass families around the country . How is that a middle last tax rate . Secondly, we do not believe that the wealthiest in this country need a tax break. Run of our debt by 1. 5 trillion and create pressure to cut things Like Health Care in order to provide the wealthy with huge tax cuts. It is a huge giveaway to corporations. We could do Tech Corporate tax reform but the way they did it, it is a huge giveaway. A lot of people do not realize stock holders of are actually foreign. Have beennal leaders thinking President Trump for the bump in stock values. It is not surprising that the bottom line of corporations are going way up when they just got handed Corporate Tax relief. While hundreds of thousands of middleclass families will be paying more, foreign stock holders will get a 49 billion dollar tax wind fall. Maryland middleclass families are paying more. While, foreign stockholders who are already doing very well are getting this huge stock when fall i. Want to focus for a moment on the double taxation fees. We have adopted the principal that taxpayers should not have to pay taxes twice on that same dollar. Thrownve undermined and veterans will out because now you are capped at 10,000 dollars in your combined state and local taxes. The maximum you can now deduct is 10,000. In this state, the average deduction for state and local is about 30,000. That is why you are about to see full thousand 900 and 31 hundreds of families having to pay more because when they sent their pet tax dollars to help marylanders with their health care and to help invest in their important economic engines here in maryland whether it be transportation projects or you are now going to have to pay a federal tax. That is double taxation. We as a delegation, those of us who opposed this tax plan, have written the governor and have asked him to give us his plan for how he is going to protect the people of mary land from this tax plan. We have said in his letter that we are more than happy to work with him. We have already talked to the legislative leaders and indianapolis. Maryland is now the second hardest hit state and new york in terms of york the percentage of the population that will see a tax increase. One is essentially treating a as a charitable contribution. Other folks are looking at payroll tax approach on the business side. Aside from corporations getting that big when, the corporations still get to deduct their state and local taxes. Maryland families do not. Corporations do. We and mary land need to come up with a plan as to how he is going to work with us to address these issues. It came down to a few votes and the United States senate. Now maryland and all of us need to Work Together to do everything we can to protect maryland taxpayers and our economy from the really damaging consequences of this bill. Thank you for being a part of that. What has happened with this bill is the revenues that you asked , it constituents to provide will become much more expensive for them. That dollar that they are now providing to local and state services is now being taxed twice. We need to make sure we look for ways to mitigate and protect that but that from happening. Prevent that from happening. Thank you senator. I might say that he is a member of the appropriation committee. Are very wellors situated to deal with these important issues both on health care and revenues and texas on behalf taxes on behalf of of our citizens. While there is a squiggly line that separates the fourth and Fifth District, either one of us recognize those lines. Act as partners in full cooperation with one another. I want to say what an extraordinary and positive addition Anthony Brown has been to the congress. Anthony thank you. In and in communities in Prince Georges County. Steny and i also have anne arundeln county. But to do it in partnership with steny makes it that much more rewarding and partnership with everyone of you for convening with us today and Chris Van Hollen. My only regret i got to the house a little bit too late. I looked forward to serving with chris and the house, but he is yeomansemens job job. I couldnt start my remarks without a fullthroated condemnation of President Trumps remarks yesterday. I found them to be vulgar. Whether you think President Trump is racist or not, the remarks, that he made yesterday directed towards african countries, el salvador, haiti is one in a series of, unbroken series of racist remarks that he has said both during and before the presidency. I think it bespeaks of racial animus and prejudice. I think it belittles the office of the presidency. I think it betrays our values , not only as americans, but as human beings. And i also think that it put as burden on americans abroad in africa, both military and civilian, who are doing difficult and often dangerous jobs to promote humanitarian interests, economic interests, and the important military and security interests. So i certainly condemn those , remarks. Theyre regretful remarks on behalf of the commanderinchief. For the business of today, though, you know, i think all of us would agree, you heard it from both steny and chris that we can embrace comprehensive tax reform as outlined originally and i think all of us could support tax reform that creates a fair tax code, a simple tax code that does promote Economic Growth, but instead we got a tax scam. Because it does it promotes none of those goals or interest. Richard neil, our Ranking Member on ways and means often comments the goal we thought was to be able to let the average american file their income tax on a piece of paper the size of a postcard. Yet, after this, tax scam it will probably fill an entire billboard. This is complicate what they have done. It isnt there. As you heard, the top 1 of americans income earners will benefit from 83 of what is in the socalled tax reform. Steny outlined the disparity here in the tax benefit, the tax relief. Yes, there will be meager tax relief for Many Americans but theyre meager, theyre temporary. And in a few short years, a huge percentage, in fact, most people who make less than 75,000 will be paying more in the years to come. There are unfortunately winners and losers as a result of this tax scam. On the winning side, it is that top 1 , who is getting 83 of the benefit. Their tax rate has gone from 39. 5 down to 35 , for those incomes above 400,000. And 37 for incomes above 60,000. The losers, as we mentioned here, lower income earners and this tax scam adds, if you heard 20 im sorry, 2 trillion to the deficit. What is 2 trillion, right . That is a lot of money. How much money is it . The deficit is already 20 trillion. What is it . Here is two 2. 3 trillion gets you. 2. 3 trillion i know a lot of you are municipal leaders every year, in annapolis, fighting for highway user revenues, right . 2. 3 trillion, we can repave, repair every street, road and highway in america three times over. And since we would not do that, you can pave, repair, every highway in america once and have enough money to address most of the major infrastructure projects, transit, ports, airports, in the country. Thats what 2. 3 trillion will get you. 2. 3 trillion is three types more than the cost of governmentprovided veteran health care. And today democrats are in Congress Every day fighting to increase benefits, Health Benefits to our veterans. It will get you 2. 3 trillion, more than six times the costs of the National Institute of health. 13 times the costs of funding the national guard. And 60 times more than what it would cost to fully fund the bipartisan or i should say job training through the bipartisan workforce innovation an opportunity act. It is a lot of money. So now with this 2. 3 trillion deficit that they have created, this additional deficit over 10 years, it gives the republicans, as steny mentioned, the motivation to return to congress and justify what they are going to propose which are substantial cuts to Social Security, medicaid, and medicare. Already weve seen proposals over the last year for a 10year cut in medicare, 500 billion, and i think 1. 5 trillion for medicaid. Tremendous burden on state governments. Political donors are also among the winners, as they cut estate taxes. Double the exemption for state taxes. On the losing side, american workers. There is a provision, not only do the republicans cut the Corporate Tax rate from 35 to 21 , and there is an argument they make that will boost Economic Growth but most economists reject that there will be that type of growth that they project, there is provision there, corporations, if you have a certain percentage of your Manufacturing Activities overseas, youre only going to have to pay 10 10. 5 on the income that you generate overseas. So what happened to the commitment to bringing jobs home . When youre saying to corporations, you have a certain percentage overseas. It is half of the alreadyreduced tax rate that youre enjoying. There are winners and there are losers. As steny mentioned, our kids and grand children are going to lose. They will lose as they wrestle with how to address this deficit and this growing debt. 1. 3 trillion in permanent tax cuts to corporations. Only meager, and temporary tax cuts to individuals. Finally, let me just follow up, chris mentioned that the maryland delegation, i will close with this, sent a letter to Governor Hogan. He said, in december, that he is going to address it, but typical of our governor, no details. So we provided some suggestions because some other states who are similarly situated such as new york, california, new jersey, high income, Median Income states, like maryland, have a number of proposals allowing their taxpaying residents to make charitable contributions to the state, to offset taxes. That is a proposal because there is still unlimited ability to deduct for charitable giving. There is some precedent for that. Another proposal, since individuals as, were talking about are limited in the deductions that they can take, where corporations arent, to shift some of that burden to increase the payroll taxes on corporations and reduce the individual tax rates on workers. That is another proposal. There are a few states, such as new york that are actually going proposing filing lawsuits. There are a number of options out there. We will continue to engage our General Assembly and our governor to insure were providing maximum relief to marylanders in light of what just rolled through the congress in december. So, thanks for being here. Looking forward to the conversation, and i will turn it back to you, steny. Rep. Hoyer thank you so much, anthony. I know weve been a little bit longer than we had expected and this is a teachin, the teachin is not just from us to but from you to us. Because although weve touched on some of the ramifications which we think are mostly adverse in the tax bill we know that you and your roles in the Public Sector and private sector have been looking in the ramifications of this tax bill on your own enterprises and your service, either to your people and to your consumers and to your customers. So we would like to hear from all of you. So whoever would like it start, we would love to hear from you. Ok. Mr. Mayor. [inaudible]. Do we have some, yeah, lets, lets see. Can you maybe take one of these microphones and give it to whoever wants to speak. Microphones are over here now. Take one of these. Do you have one . Underneath, the very bottom. Push it in. Push it in. Now its on. Thank you very much. Im pat mahoney. Im the mayor of chesapeake beach. I first want to thank you gentlemen for hosting us and for bringing these issues to light. Having just spent two days up in annapolis for the opening session, i definitely was a part of a lot of the discussions on this subject matter and, what concerns me and what should concern everybody in this room, and the families that we represent is that next year, when we and they all go to file their maryland state tax return, we are all going to experience an increase in our maryland tax bill. And quite simply, this is because the newlyreduced federal itemized deductions but not the newlyincreased federal standard tax deduction, federal federal standard deductions, they will not port over. I mean, they do port over to your tax return. Now, maryland is not going to recognize any of the tax decreases but it will, the things that are not allowed anymore, like you were saying, you know the real estate taxes, that sort of thing. So, you know there is 90day session up in annapolis. I would encourage everybody in this room, reach out to their legislators and ask them to compromise and come up with a solution that will provide this tax relief for the families of maryland because of what just passed down on capitol hill. Thank you. Yeah. Comment on that briefly. It is important to understand the distinction in terms of how marylanders will be. Can we have more mics . Thank you, mayor for raising that issue. I think it is important to understand that marylanders get two ways. One, and i think this is what you were referring to. Marylanders will see increase in their state Tax Liability because the new federal law essentially eliminates your ability to take your personal exemptions. It increases the standard deduction but it takes away your ability to get those personal exemptions, which currently flow through to what your state tax would be. So if you can no longer take those exemptions on your federal taxes, you start with a much higher income amount on your state taxes. So your state of maryland taxes, if nothing is done, will go up. That is one issue important to tackle. It is also important to tackle the issue of the increase in peoples federal taxes through the double taxation peace. These are separate, separate issues. And both of them need to be addressed. They are distinct pieces. One is increase in maryland state taxes, what were referring to specifically in this letter, is the double taxation because of the increase in federal taxes. Both need to be addressed. It is important as we listen to the conversation that people recognize that. Thanks, thanks so much for this forum, senator, and congressman hoyer and congressman brown. Let me, just give a quick show im done kettle, professor and former dean of school of Public Policy at university of maryland. I look what it means for maryland in particular. There is no state in the country, border to border no more affected by maryland. And just a couple of quick back to make thats point. Maryland is number one in the nation number of taxpayers that use the state and local tax deduction. The second thing is, the total amount of exemptions lost in maryland by this tax reform is 4 billion. 4 billion worth of Tax Deductions that are lost as a result of this. And in terms of the number of counties that are affected, in 17 of the states 24 counties, the average deduction is greater than the cap. So that virtually every county in the state is going to be affected and if you look at those places where people are very close, it is 21 of the 24 counties are affected. So in terms of border to border, coverage, the amount of money thats involved, 4 billion worth of deductions, this is a serious impact on maryland more than any other state in the country border to border. A second and related piece of this is the implication in this plus the changes in mortgage deduction according to early projections a decrease in Property Values. By how much . Hard to say for sure at this point, some early suggestions by middle of 2019 in Montgomery County the average Property Value will drop by 3. 2 . In frederick and charles 2. 6 compared to what it would have been otherwise. Calvert county, 1. 8 . What this means is, for many people who have this is the lions share of their savings, they will take a hit on their personal savings. For many of the local government officials in this room who live taxes, their property tax revenues will drop because the average Property Value will drop. And so that the impact on the ability of local government officials to fund what it is that we count on is enormous. And the last point in all of this, tremendous amount of uncertainty that comes in part because we dont know how this is going to affect things, we dont know what the impact will be, we dont know how the state will respond and we dont know how badly local government taxes will be hit. We may not know until this time next year, long after the next calendar year is done, exactly what the impact will be on taxpayers takehome income. Put all this together what we have is an incredible situation where not only are taxpayers and governments affected, the services are affected, the savings are affected, but we dont even know how much the impact is going to be except we know that it is going to be huge. It really puts enormous burden on all of us to think incredibly carefully how to get our way through what will be extraordinarily difficult year. Thank you very much for that comment, obviously as expert in taxation and somebody who has been active at university of maryland in our state i dont think there is any doubt, maryland if not the most adversely affected state is certainly in the top three. 700,000 marylanders will get a tax increase under this bill. Yes, sir . Identify yourself. Mike wise, president of laurel city council. Let me first of all say a disclaimer, because i do work for a federal agency, so that any opinions i express are mine. The one thing that bothers me about the whole hearing process that we went through, there was only one witness was sitting in front of those people and that was the chief of staff for the joint committee on taxation. Ok. On several occasions different people asked what is impact on the taxpayers from my state . I know that person that was sitting there. And he made a statement that he didnt have that information. Now he does have that information. That informations available. The zip code information is available. All kinds of Information Available on income and what are the impacts. So i dont think, in speaking to the citizens in the city of laurel who have talked to me about it, i dont think they understood that we were number two behind new york. Because maryland typically wasnt mentioned. It was california, new york, new jersey and i think, i saw something in the newspaper where the new tax tables have been released. So, there is going to be a bump in takehome this year. And that will fall through the bottom of the floor next year, when they fill their tax returns out. I think that there has been im not going to call it a scam, i think there has been some misleading information that has come out of our elected officials on capitol hill that voted for this. But again that is my opinion. Thank you. Mike, thank you very much, and before i recognize the next person, i want to emphasize, congressman brown mentioned this, heres the disparity. Speaker ryan says we want to help average working americans im using his figure, he picked this family making 59,000 because that is about the median. They will get 23 a week. This crowd will get 1191 per week. So, yes, there is going to be in the initial phases some small tax appreciation for the average working person. Into bigll pale significance insignificance, on the 83 of that 1. 5 or the 2. 3. What Anthony Brown said i want you to understand the difference. It is 1. 5 this year, but you have to pay interest on what you borrow. And therefore thats where congressman brown gets the 2. 2 trillion. But contrary to what President Trump said and the the secretary of treasury said, there would be no tax cuts for those like mr. In fact, trump and his family are huge beneficiaries of this tax cut. Next. Im just so glad to have you here. I am mayor robinson of the town of north brentwood. I did read the letter sent to Governor Hogan. And i just want to know, i like some of the suggestions on trying to mitigate this. I wanted to know from you how long are we going to wait for a response from Governor Hogan . And what can local government what can we do as mayors to put something on the table to stop this foolishness. This is craziness. It just does not work. Everybody here has children and grandchildren. This is i cant see my children living like this to pay off of a debt. That is my two questions. So i dont think it would be prudent to wait on Governor Hogan. And this is not necessarily a Governor Hogan Bashing Forum but across the board on a number of issues, he has commented about his disapproval with the administration yet has taken no substantive steps to address what he is commenting on. Good news is members of the General Assembly not only talking about but i have no doubt are now down in bill drafting in annapolis today working on a number of proposals to offer set some of the or mitigate some of the harm we see in this tax bill. One thats already been reported on. And brianelnick feldman are introducing legislation to address the tax bills elimination of the individual mandate. So that in maryland they would reintroduce the individual mandate which would keep those young and healthy in the market. Let me just explain a little bit more detail about the individual mandate. I know mr. Hoyer commented on it, so why do we need young people in the market . Young person, 27 years old, theyre paying maybe 100 a month in Health Insurance premium. 1200 a year. Say roughly. It only costs about 50 a year to provide Health Insurance to that young person, ok . Because its a flu shot and a Preventative Care checkup. There is about 1100 there that then is used to offset the more expensive care like the 56yearold like me, who may have chronic illness, hypertension, diabetes, coronary, other types of illnesses. That is why you have to let the young people in and you eliminate the individual mandate and 13 Million People decide they will not be in the market, that drives up premiums. Maryland legislators are addressing that. I have no doubt that they will be looking at considering and offering provisions on this charitable contribution. So, what you can do is what you do very well. You lobby your state delegates and senators on important matters for your residents. So, lets Work Together to work with our General Assembly members. If i could just say we have to get this done in 90 days, right . We have to get it done during this session of the General Assembly, because otherwise the impacts will hit marylanders starting next year. So if everybody can make sure , this is a top priority because it undermines your efforts at the local level. Because as i said it adds a lot more to the cost of all of our constituents providing basic services. Don mentioned 4 billion, 4 billion more from marylanders. That is without any increase in services. If we, you know, those are dollars that, you know, should not be flowing to the federal government through double taxation. Mr. Mayor . Thank you. So, mayor of college park. I want to thank you for having this forum but fighting for us every day on the hill. I know the Current Administration and the majority leadership in congress is not making it easy right now so i appreciate everything youre doing for us. I want to talk patrick, i will talk about at the end of this, one of the comments some of you probably saw i was sitting next to the president on wednesday talking about dreamers, i will talk a little bit about that at the end, the most comments are received, you didnt look very happy. I was not very happy. I understand. So, im not just as mayor of college park but im a member of the board of directors of the National League of cities. Weve been setting our agenda for this year trying to figure out how to respond to everything that is going on the hill. One thing i want to stress, we hear it from our member cities all around the country this tax reform, this tax bill doesnt just hurt our residents in the pocketbook, it hurts our ability to serve our residents because it takes away the tools and it reduces the federal role in that partnership that we rely on to make sure that we can do, what our residents need to think about. I do appreciate, we were able to protect some of the tools that we have like Municipal Bonds and private activity bond. Unfortunately, we lost the advanced revenue bond which will hurt our ability to get financing for some projects. But most importantly what we need right now in this country to be making investment in our infrastructure. When we have crumbling bridges in our region, when we have a metro system that desperately needs to be fixed just as a couple of examples we need the federal government as a partner really making an investment in our infrastructure. And i know that the president has talked about a infrastructure proposal that is supposed to be coming out soon but i cant imagine how he is but i cant imagine how he is, going to make how the federal government is going to make a Real Investment in our infrastructure when they just, increased our deficit by 1. 5 trillion, 2. 3 trillion without a penny going to federal priorities. Where that money is going to come from, im very concerned what we are going to see is robbing peter to pay paul, where money comes from some other federal priorities in order to barely adequate to hundred billion dollar 2 billion investment in infrastructure he is proposing. Im also concerned that not only is that the federal, the federal dollars not going to be adequate, but he essentially will fund infrastructure, invest in infrastructure by passing the buck down to from what i have heard part of the proposal is , only going to be approving projects that quote, unquote, leverage a lot of local dollars. Essentially saying well put some money into it but the local governments have to make up the difference. That is not adequate for us. It is not going to do what we need to do. So i appreciate your time. I love to hear your thoughts on that. Rep. Hoyer mr. Mayor, first, i went to senator van hollen and congressman brown. President said during portion of his campaign, one of his efforts would jobs. Second of which was going to be infrastructure related to that. We have no bills that have been offered by the white house by the president of the United States on either of those subjects. There have been discussions. There have been outlines. Very brief, conceptual things no legislation has been offered on either of those issues by president of the United States. So, we are waiting for that, but infrastructure is critical objective of ours. Unfortunately, what we have done is, we put peter deeply into debt, to give paul, the richest person in our country, additional dollars in his or her pocket. That is what weve done. It makes no sense. Youre absolutely right. We know we have a huge infrastructure deficit locally, statewide around the country. And instead of focusing on that as the first order of business, which i think would have gotten a good bipartisan response, we see other measures helping folks doing well with major corporations at expense of this will add 5,000 a year in debt to every income tax paying household in a the United States. That is 15,000 over 10 years. Then it will come around and say, hey, we no longer have the funds to do a robust Infrastructure Modernization plan. Democrats have put forward a plan to invest a trillion dollars, generate a lot of good paying jobs and meet these local state and federal priorities. We are to have a heck of a fight. Instead of investing in those areas, as was pointed out, the budget this is not speculation. The budget that passed the house and senate calls for 500 million for cuts in medical and medicaid. Big tax cut for corporations, and everyone else is going to get left holding the bag. That is why we have to fight back. With the fight back level, but also the local level. 2. 32. 6 trillion dollars. There is a lot of coincidence in those numbers. 2. 3 trillion is the additonal debt. 2. 3 or so trillion is about the value of the unfunded Critical Infrastructure projects around the country. And about 2. 32. 6 trillion is about the amount of equity held by u. S. Corporations overseas to avoid paying taxes. Imagine a scenario where forward thinking officials are marrying up that money. We have a 2. 3 trillion deficit in infrastructure, we have 2. 3 overseas. Let us try to bring it back and get some of it invested in infrastructure. But instead, as i mentioned earlier, there is now an incentive to keep big portions of that overseas, you are generating income at a lower rate. We just create the 2. 3 trillion deficit. When you invest in infrastructure, it takes federal government, state and local government, and the private sector. We have just tied both hands behind our back. That is why the president is talking about state and local having to do more. That is what the administration says, some say publicprivate actresses, some say no. They put us in a real bind. Democrats have proposals. To put money to work in infrastructure in the United States. I offered they rejected every amendment that was offered on this tax bill. I offered an amendment that would do for investments in workforce training what this country, years ago, for investments in r d. When we created the r d tax credit, we were leading the world on incentivizing investments and r d. We have been surpassed by other countries. We took that idea, offered an amendment to make those investments in Workforce Development they resoundingly rejected that. We are in a difficult, if not impossible, position to make federal investments in infrastructure. Yes . Microphone down there. You are next. Thank you so much. I represent the Prince Georges County association of realtors. Thank you so much. Im a real estate agent, not a real estate broker. I work every day. I help people buy, sell, and invest in real estate. The negative impact that we are finding is that it is going to impact the lower income, moveup buyer. The firsttime buyer. They will be impacted because that move up buyer in it 400,000 home can now no longer deduct any income over 10,000. There is no incentive for them to move into a different house, a different neighborhood. Now, the extra money that they may have gotten back on their income taxes, it is not a little bit of money. Were talking about 30,000 tax reduction that has been reduced to 10,000. This makes a huge difference in a nurses, firefighters, police officers, way of taking care of their families. We are not talking about rich people. Someone said that a rich person affords a 500,000 home. It would require that 30,000 tax deduction. No. These are those nurses, firefighters, teachers, police officers. Twoparent families. That do not want to live in West Virginia to commute to where they have to work in order to have decent housing. This impact is going to be very negative on the housing industry. We know that real estate funds everything else. It keeps home depot profitable. He keeps lows profitable. It keeps Furniture Companies in business. We do appreciate all of the efforts that you are making in order to reverse this, change this, and improve it from the bottoms of our hearts. Next. She is taking the microphone, all the way at the end. Good morning. I appreciate this talk. This is enlightening and informative. My name is Cynthia Miller from district heights. I am the Vice President of prince georges municipal association. District heights is the center of the world. Otherwise known as my hometown, where i grew up. Yes. We still want you to come back. One of my concerns is [laughter] one of my biggest concerns is the fact that we have been working to try to get back the highway user funds for our municipalities. We are talking about reductions for our residents, and were trying to provide more services to our residents. I am just hoping that we can Work Together, as the pgcma with you all to move us forward for solutions. The other question i have is, how is it that corporations get these tax cuts when we know most of the jobs here are parttime . How are our younger people going to move up if they are always parttime jobs . Companies know that they can get away with parttime workers. They are hoarding all of this money, making them richer. We are getting poorer. Im looking for some solutions to how we can Work Together to make this better. Thank you. Thank you very much. You put your finger on a critical issue in our country. That is fulltime employment with fulltime benefits, fulltime Social Security payments. For security in the future as well as now. That is a real problem confronting our country that we are not dealing with. The administration and republican members in the congress dealt with two issues last year. I do not mean that there were not other bills. Two issues. Taking Health Care Coverage away from people and giving tax cuts to the wealthiest in america. 83 . With respect to your question on a highway user fund, very frankly, it was last raised in 1993. We are trying to maintain and construct highways to keep up with our population and use with 93 income paying 2018 prices for maintenance and construction of highways. In addition to that, not only have we not raised the revenue necessary to maintain roads that we all use, it is a user fee. You can call it a tax but it is a user fee. Not only do we have a frozen revenue to pay for an unfrozen and rising cost of maintaining and building, we also have the good news is, good news, our automobiles are much more efficient. Not only do we have a frozen capital, we have automobiles using it is good news. Not bad news. Much more efficiently the fuel that they buy. Even though we have more people driving, which means more use of the roads and more necessity to maintain, we have the driving much more efficiently. The revenue is tapped down because of that as well. That is good news. We are cleaner burning and all of that. Nobody would say that we do not want that. The reality is, the revenue stream is less. The last time we did this was under president clinton. Since then, republicans have refused i will say this, at the state level, maybe want to refer to the state level because we did adjust the maryland state gasoline taxes that we can try to maintain our roads and build roads that are needed. And invest in public transportation, because we have a unified Transportation Fund in our state. As you know, we made a tough decision in maryland. We raise the gas tax, we index it. We also made a commitment to keep that revenue in the Transportation Trust fund. There is going to be more pressure, because of that we have been talking about all morning. With this socalled tax reform. It will be more pressure on the state to maintain those commitments to the various transportation projects. We did some difficult work at the state level, where there is no will to do the same thing at the federal level. There are proposals. Folks are talking about increasing the revenues in various trust funds for the federal highway funding programs and the like. There is no will. Let me use this as an opportunity to address a local issue that may have been mentioned. Metro. On the table now for the General Assembly, it is down in richmond and the district of columbia has taken it up. Dedicated Funding Source for metro. Marylands, the presiding officers are putting an idea to dedicate additional revenues from the Transportation Trust fund. That is what we did several years ago. All of this made so much more difficult as the state is projecting what Revenue Streams will be available to them. All of this is made more difficult by this tax reform. Ok, we have time for one more question two more questions and then were going to have to leave. Mike palomino. I thank you for your leadership on the hill on this issue as having this roundtable. I would be remiss, we represent the finance officers at the state and local level. Not to underscore the mayor from college park, his comments on the bonds. That was eliminated in the bill, that was something that many of you, as you probably arduino, it was a way to refinance bonds that have been issued in the past. That saved taxpayer dollars. That is certainly something that we already saw that the attempts to limit or eliminate the salt deduction as tying one hand behind your back for the state and local government officials. Some of the other provisions that were included in the bill, that were passed in the bill, like the elimination of the advanced refunding as well as the elimination of tax credit bonds, the attempted elimination of private activity bonds all goes towards that other hand that you have scores your financing ability. Its going to make it harder we think of course in the future, and i think i dont have the numbers in front of me but advanced refunding bonds were about onethird of the municipal security market. Again, that was just to take advantage of favorable Interest Rates and that saved the taxpayers money in the long run when it comes to debt service. So again i would be remiss if i didnt underscore the mayors remarks on advanced refunding. Thank you very much. We have one more and that will be the last. Yes, sir. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today, and we really appreciate that you allowed us to have this roundtable. My name is edward, im a newly elected mayor of the city of glenn arden, maryland and we right around the corner here from largo and i wanted to just present that im really happy that youre here to speak with us, but as the new mayor and being an urban designer and architect and working for the District Government Office of planning, ive entered into a situation where the city of glen arden is very disadvantaged in the sense that we have a mixed situation of a rich growing economy in a commercial area, Moore Townsend and with the rich, growing Residential Community as well within the center. Great housing that all houses are over half a million dollars, but we also have a community that is historically part of what most black historic communities in the country were developed through the 1940s, 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s through different phases of architecture and residential design. But they are slowly eroding in the houses, the owners, previous owners are leaving or they are dying and the children are not redeveloping the homes or keeping the homes. So were having more vacancies in these properties and were also having more renters. And we are losing the quality of housing that existed originally in the community. What we are faced with is that we have a very Robust Community that is paired with, i would say we have a high poverty level, 40 . And most of it is elderly seniors is the reason for that. But the problem is, as the mayor, is if were going to have the strain of the salt tax issue and were having a a New Residence development coming in shortly at bright seat, makes income as well as elderly housing, how can we control the impact on the elderly housing, or the housing that is the older housing . And how do we preserve the residents that live in the newer homes where their taxes are going up . Because what happens is that people that live in the new housing really want to relieve themselves of the double taxation of the city government. So that is sort of the situation that the city is facing and as a decisionmaker, partly not even having the role of being able to make a strong decision, im faced with fighting the council and the city manager thats not really interested in these issues. So im really wondering how can my congressman and the senators can help me with a highway that goes through our city that wont get paved because of the highway road taxes, wont help us get our road paved, but beyond our city limits they get paved. And its really, you know, we are crippled and were supposed to be the star of the central Prince Georges County. Let me give it to your congressman. [laughing] first of all, youve got a lot packed into that question, you and i have an opportunity, mayor, to have conversations around this. What you are describing, and i know municipalities, communities throughout Prince Georges County are experiencing this at various degrees. This is part of a larger challenge that we have in Prince Georges County to grow our local economy. When you have a vibrant local economy, and there are examples throughout Prince Georges County where there are, theres Economic Activity and job creation, but for the most part Prince Georges County continues to be a Bedroom Community. And as as a Bedroom Community without a large economic tax base, it puts a tremendous strain on the municipal and county government to deliver the services that residents deserve and that they demand. When you have those tensions, the stressors on the Services Like school and Law Enforcement, just to name two, as well as infrastructure issues, roads, people tend not to invest in their homes. People tend to move out of that community and rent what they continue to own in that community. So as part of, this is part of a larger issue. At the federal level, there are things that we can fight for that will if not directly, certainly indirectly improve this quality of life issue that you are addressing. Thats fighting for more funding in our schools. Federal funding is 10 of our education on budget in Prince Georges County, and believe me they rely on every penny of that. As republicans are talking about cutting funding for education, it is our job to resist that and fight that because we know its important in order to give our schools and our schoolchildren a fighting chance, its to fight for those investments like bringing the fbi to Prince Georges County. What we can celebrate is we just broke ground in october or november bringing the uscis, Immigration Services to branch avenue metro, 3700 jobs. There are things we can do to encourage investments, which leads to jobs. Because the bottom line is we got to be focused on job creation. We had account executive that is focus on job creation. We are focused on job creation. Thats whats going to result in people staying in investing in those committees. There are a lot of other things that i can talk about to address some of the specifics of your question and comment, but i just want address this sort of larger issue that youre raising and some broader concepts that we need to be focusing on to address them. Let me just piggyback off a bit on what congressman brown said in response to this. Because we are right now, of course, in congress trying to deal with the budget for the remainder of the current fiscal year, and one of the things were all working on is to try to make sure that we provide adequate investments in areas that help drive our economy, whether its creating more opportunities for education, whether its to investments like transportation, whether its Community Development block grants. I think we all believe that as we make investments to make sure our military remains strong we also need to make investments that make sure neighborhoods, our community, our country has a strong economy. Part of that is making sure local communities can be successful. So, for example, in the budget proposed by the Trump Administration they actually zeroed out Community Development block grants. They zeroed out other important tools for local jurisdictions. The good news is that if we can get a budget agreement we think weve gotten bipartisan agreement in congress to fund things like cdbg and these other important tools and we need to make those investments to help all of you be successful. What we should not be doing is making your job even harder. Thats why we want to be here to talk about this tax bill because it makes your job even harder. If you think those residents are right now debating whether or not they want to be paying City Property taxes, this bill, federal bill, tax bill, has made that that much more expensive for them because they cant deduct those local property taxes. On on the one hand, you got the Trump Administration saying local jurisdictions and state should do more on transportation, and local investments. But theyre making it more expensive. On the one hand, we hear from people, we need to make sure local decisionmakers and state decisionmakers have more flexibility and freedom because they are closer to people. The mayors and the Council Members are the closest. On the one hand, they say okay, lets provide more power and Decisionmaking Authority to our local leaders and we should be doing that. And on the other hand, they are actually taxing those local decisions with federal taxes. Because they are prohibiting you from taking those deductions. So yes, we want a Transportation Plan that puts more burden on the state but we are actually going to make it more expensive for the people in the states by taking away some of these deductions. And thank you for the realtors statement, both locally and at the national level, because of the National Association of realtors did everything they could to warn the American People about the hit that homeowners around the country are going to take. Congressman hoyer mentioned on average that 59,000 families for a short time will get a small tax cut. It does go away, where as the Corporate Tax cuts are forever. But what people will not be seeing is they should be made aware of is their losing and all sorts of these other areas. If youre a homeowner, as the National Realtors have pointed out ,and they did an independent study, the value of homes are going to go down, right . It may sound like a small percent but youre talking about a small percent on homes that had quite a bit of value. That is a big hit to peoples savings. We need to work overtime to make sure that we stop the bad consequences of this and we should focus at least for the next 90 days in maryland on the state legislature and the things they can do and have under their power and control. And thats why i want to thank you for being here because we have an opportunity to try to protect our state from these Trump Administration tax, this tax plan. We have 90 days to do it. And so lets get to work. I want to thank all of you for being here. This this is a critically important issue for our country in terms of how we as a country and as a society can pay for the priorities that make our country great. We talked about making America Great again. America is great now, but we need to keep it great and we need to keep it great by investing, investing in much of what the public wheel does. That is education primarily. If we dont educate the next society and if we undermine our ability to do that whether its at the primary or Preprimary School level or junior high school, high school or college and postcollege training, then we will not be the country that we want to be and we will not be competitive with the rest of the world. And so thats what tax questions are all about. When you see the tax bill skewed so dramatically towards that who have the most in our country, with pittance for those who are had the least, companies are not not the least, this 59,000, by a long shot, but they are getting simply a pittance. And that is something that we, as a country, in a democratic way need to come to grips with and make decisions about. And so i thank you for being here because we need the advice and counsel and we need to educate one another. I dont know all the ramifications that you look at as a mayor, as a city, as a commissioner. You see what this has effect as a realtor, as a homebuilder, because the homebuilders weighed in pretty heavily as well. So were going to have a number of these teach ins as we refer to them to come to grips with what this is. Although i understand what senator van hollen is saying, we have 90 days. We have 90 days in which the legislature will be in session so that we can ameliorate some of the adverse consequences of this tax bill on marylands taxpayers. Very frankly we have longer than that in this sense. This is a bill that needs to be corrected and needs to be fashioned in a way that is much more positive for the overwhelming majority of america. And i would say all of america. And we will keep working on it. With your help and your advice and counsel well keep working with it. Now, let me close the way senator van hollen and congressman brown started. I was aghast at what President Trump had to say yesterday. And i want to read you what i put together last night and we sent out, its now on my watch page and its on my blog, because i think it is so important for us as americans to reject the promotion of division and confrontation in our country. I said this President Trumps comments are racist and shameful. They do not reflect our nations values and the president must apologize. Let me say as an aside, an apology will not be enough. A change of conduct and rhetoric is what is demanded by this president. I went on to say, immigrants from throughout the world have built this country and are contributing today to economic and social wellbeing. All of us are the children, grandchildren, greatgrandchildren or some great, great predecessor of immigrants. We celebrate that we are a land of immigrants and a land of opportunity. And we left a lamp besides what i went on to say these comments exposed his true feelings on immigrants, and make it questionable whether he will work in an honest way on legislation to protect dreamers. Or if he will hold them hostage in an attempt to impose racist policies. That is very tough language. I understand that. Face of the undermining of american values, where we hold these truths to be self evident, that all of us are , and endowed not by the constitution, not by statutes, not by the majority, but by our creator. Rights that jefferson called unalienable. I am working hard to make sure that 1. 6 million young people brought to this country, not by breaking any law, but by their parents. They attended elementary school, junior high school, high school, college is, are members of the military, doctors, nurses, computerengineers analysts and programmers. I have met thousands of these young people literally. The president of the United States has said we should not send them to a place they do not know and did not grow up in. Languages that they do not know. They stand in school and pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of america. They sing the national anthem. They love this country. They want to join us in making this country all that it can be. Country, weof this need to band together with one voice to reject racism, division, confrontation, and disrespect for others who may not look exactly like us. Who may not come from the same country we came from. Hollen forator van bringing this forward. This was not the subject of this meeting. But it would be written it would be irresponsible for us not to address something as damaging to our country here at home and around the world. Thank you for being here. [applause] i want us to give a big round ,f applause for the leadership whose team organized this event, and for senator van hollen, congressman brown to be here. I have a copy of the jobs report. You should walk out with one of these and your head held high. Thank you very much for coming here. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] you can hear more from senator hoyer this weekend. He talks about ongoing efforts to protect socalled dreamers. Interview on sunday at easternm. And 6 00 p. M. Here on cspan. Sarah various reports on appropriation and the budget for politico ahead of the january 19 government funding deadline