ROSWELL – Extending the tax cuts Congress passed early in Republican President Donald Trump’s first term will be the first order of business when federal lawmakers return to Washington next week from the Easter recess, U.S. Rep. Rich McCormick said Thursday.
The tax cuts, which are due to expire at the end of this year without congressional action, played out to former President Joe Biden’s advantage when the Democrat gained the White House four years ago, McCormick, R-Suwanee, said after hosting a roundtable for North Fulton business owners at the offices of Axis Infrastructure.
“The impacts gave Biden a pretty decent economy,” he said.
McCormick gave the business owners a sense of hope that the uncertainty plaguing the business climate in the wake of Trump’s roller-coaster tariffs will settle down.
“Everybody understands that what we see now is not what we’re going to get,” he said. “Hopefully, the EU (European Union) tariffs will zero out. The big unknown will be China.”
However, McCormick said the tariffs are likely to produce supply-chain disruptions when the dust settles.
“A lot of people are withholding orders right now,” he said. “When the market reopens, there’s going to be a glut of orders and a shortage of supplies. That’s what happened with COVID.”
McCormick said there’s widespread agreement in the House Republican Caucus on the need to maintain the 21% top marginal tax rate on corporate income the 2017 tax cuts put in place. How to pay for removing taxes on tips and Social Security, as Trump promised on the campaign trail last year, is less certain, he said.
Congressional Democrats oppose extending the tax cuts, arguing it would benefit primarily upper-income Americans while threatening the social safety net.
But McCormick said programs including Social Security and Medicare will go bankrupt by the middle of the next decade unless federal policy makers take action to control entitlement spending, which makes up 76% of the federal budget. But he called warnings by Democrats of looming cuts to Medicare and Medicaid “scare tactics.”
Republicans only have three votes to spare from their narrow House majority in order to extend the Trump tax cuts. In the Senate, use of the “reconciliation” process means only a simple majority vote will be required to pass the legislation.