WASHINGTON, DC — On October 2 and 5, Wisconsin’s First District Congressman Paul Ryan held a series of eight listening sessions across southern Wisconsin. During the meetings, Ryan talked with over 650 constituents about the key legislative items before the House of Representatives and answered questions about a variety of federal issues.
Excerpts of Ryan’s answers at the listening sessions follow. More information about the sessions can be found here.
Supporting comprehensive tax reform:
“I am a fan of tax reform. It’s one of the reasons why I chose to be the Chairman of Ways and Means Committee. We’re trying to get partial tax reform done given the government we’ve got. The biggest problem I have with tax reform right now is that the President of the United States and I just really disagree on how to do it. 90% of Wisconsin’s businesses are what we call ‘pass-throughs.’ They file their taxes as individual people. We refer to them as partnerships or S-corporations or sole proprietors. Only 10% of Wisconsin businesses are corporations like Harley or Rockwell Automation. Those are the big ones. The top effective rate on these folks is 44.6% right now and [the president] wants to go higher, so that is just killing our [competitiveness].”
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“So my argument is to take away the loopholes and deductions and just lower everybody’s rates so that we can be competitive internationally, and so the small business owner that makes the same kind of income should pay the same kind of tax. And right now that’s not really how our tax code works. So that’s our ultimate goal with tax reform.”
Bringing money back to the U.S. from overseas:
“What are inversions? An inversion is when a company changes their address for the purpose of lower taxes. For example, an American company that goes and becomes a foreign company, because if you’re paying 45% in America and then you go and become Irish, you are paying 12.5%. And so we’ve got all these companies doing this. So, how do they do it? Burger King is a perfect example. You still see a lot of Burger Kings, right? Burger King didn’t all of the sudden go away. Burger King was an American company. Burger King bought a company called Tim Horton’s — you know, like Starbucks but in Canada. It was much smaller than Burger King, but Burger King bought this Canadian company, and as a result they moved their headquarters to Canada and became a Canadian company. And so this is a real problem.”
Backing Kevin McCarthy for Speaker of the House:
“I think Kevin McCarthy is very likely going to be our next Speaker. He’s our current Majority Leader. He is conservative. I have watched him take very difficult pieces of legislation and shepherd it through the process. I have watched him get [legislation] from Point A to Point B to Point C to Point D more effectively than many other leaders I’ve seen since I’ve been in Congress. So he is very good at actually making the place work. And I get that at the end of the day, we will say who we are and what we believe, but being able to get it into law – it takes the Senate and the president, and right now, we’re constrained in the Senate and we don’t even a president that we want to work with on these things.”
Helping Americans move from welfare to work:
“We’ve got to come up with a solution to redesign the safety net, because the safety net is not doing what it was supposed to do. It’s supposed to help people who are able-bodied, who are down on their luck, get back on their feet, and then be there for people who are not able-bodied so that they can catch them completely from the cracks of society. We’re trying to find ways of easing the transition from welfare to work, and removing some of these obstacles so that people can get out of it to a better life.”
Discussing the negative effects of the President’s health care law:
“This year’s increases are going to be bigger than all the prior few years’ increases in health insurance premiums. The law was advertised to lower people’s premiums by an average of $2,500 a year. It’s going the opposite direction. The employer mandate is beginning to kick in now, and that ends up encouraging employers to drop health insurance for their employees and put people into the Obamacare exchange where you get those kinds of premium increases.”
