{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.barrasso.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/news-releases?ContentRecord_id=B84D6B3D-AC28-4F8F-A813-FAD60A304D59", "Barrasso: Economists Expect Strong Growth from Tax Relief", "2017-12-13", "2017", "2017-12", "Republican", "House", "WY", "John Barrasso", "B001261", "www.barrasso.senate.gov", null, null, "legacy", "\u201cFour out of five studies agree \u2013 the Republican tax plan will deliver the kind of economic growth that the American people want and that the American economy needs. A strong, healthy, and growing economy.\u201d\r\nClick here to watch Sen. Barrasso\u2019s remarks.\r\nWASHINGTON, D.C.\u2014 Today, U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) delivered the following remarks on the Senate floor on how an overwhelming majority of economists agree that the Republican tax plan will grow our economy by more than 3 percent.\r\nExcerpts of Senator Barrasso\u2019s remarks:\r\n\u201cI come to the floor today to talk about the tax-relief, tax-reduction legislation that the conference committee is currently working on.\r\n\u201cTo me and to all Americans, this is a very important piece of legislation.\r\n\u201cI think it\u2019s going to get even better as the House and the Senate work to hammer out the differences to help lower the tax rates for American families.\r\n\u201cWhen you look at this legislation, there are so many policies that will help to make America\u2019s economy grow.\r\n\u201cFamilies across the country will get a tax break \u2013 it\u2019s what they need \u2013 it\u2019s what they\u2019ve been looking for, for a long, long time.\r\n\u201cMain Street businesses will also get a tax break.\r\n\u201cWhen people get a raise like that, they invest in their families and they invest in their communities.\r\n\u201cThey create jobs, wages go up, the economy grows, and our nation gets stronger.\r\n\u201cYou don\u2019t have to take my word for it.\r\n\u201cRespected, mainstream economists are saying exactly the same thing.\r\n\u201cThey agree that our economy needs to grow \u2013 and they agree that the legislation we\u2019re working on will \u2013 that passed the Senate, passed the House, being joined together \u2013 will deliver the growth that our nation needs.\r\n\u201cIn October, the Council of Economic Advisers put out a report looking at some of the ideas for tax relief.\r\n\u201cThis is a group that advises the president on economic issues.\r\n\u201cTheir report found that the tax plan like the one Republicans wrote will grow the economy between 3 percent and 5 percent.\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s real growth, it\u2019s strong growth, and it\u2019s good news for America.\r\n\u201cThere was another study that came out in October.\r\n\u201cThat was by a group of economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University.\r\n\u201cThey did their own calculations, used their own numbers, and they found the exact same good news for the American economy.\r\n\u201cJust like the other report, this one said that the Republican tax plan would grow the economy by between 3 and 5 percent.\r\n\u201cA third study came out in November \u2013 it was by the Tax Foundation.\r\n\u201cAgain, it\u2019s a respected group of economists who study this kind of thing for a living.\r\n\u201cThey looked specifically at the legislation as it was introduced in the Senate Finance Committee.\r\n\u201cThis group found that the plan would increase the size of the economy by 3.7 percent.\r\n\u201cThen there was a fourth analysis, by one more group of nine respected, independent economists.\r\n\u201cThis group wrote about their conclusions in a letter to the Treasury Secretary on November 26.\r\n\u201cThey wrote that they expect this tax relief plan to boost the economy by 3 percent over the next 10 years.\r\n\u201cSo we have four different entities, four different estimates, four different groups of prominent economists.\r\n\u201cThey looked at the tax relief plan \u2013 looked at it different ways.\r\n\u201cThey all found that it would grow America\u2019s economy by very similar amounts \u2013 all by at least 3 percent.\r\n\u201cNow, there was one other study out there that some people have been talking about.\r\n\u201cThis was an estimate by a group called the Joint Committee on Taxation.\r\n\u201cThis group predicts that growth under the Republican plan will increase, but by just 0.8 percent over the next 10 years.\r\n\u201cThat works out to roughly eight one-hundredths of 1 percent a year.\r\n\u201cAll of these other groups say at least 3 percent \u2013 maybe 5 percent \u2013 and this other group says less than 1 percent over a decade. Hard to believe.\r\n\u201cSo why is this group, that is being quoted often by the Democrats, so far out of line, out of the mainstream of what other economists are saying?\r\n\u201cThe reason they reach such a different conclusion is that they did their analysis very differently from the other groups.\r\n\u201cThis committee combines a few different economic models into their estimate.\r\n\u201cWhen we look closely at the models they combine, we find that they counted the most pessimistic models much more heavily than they did of more realistic models.\r\n\u201cSo of course they\u2019re going to come up with an overly pessimistic conclusion.\r\n\u201cI think that it can be useful to take these more negative numbers into view, and take them into account.\r\n\u201cNobody thinks that we should just pick from the rosiest scenario \u2013 or base our policies on one prediction.\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s not what\u2019s happening here.\r\n\u201cHere we have four different groups of economists that predict strong growth of at least three percent.\r\n\u201cThis one outlier, much more cautious.\r\n\u201cAnother thing to remember is that even this very cautious estimate says that our economy will get bigger because of the Republican plan than if we did nothing at all.\r\n\u201cEven the pessimistic group says yes, the economy will grow under the Republican plan. And they say that it will reduce deficits by an additional $400 billion over the next 10 years.\r\n\u201cI think we\u2019re going to do a whole lot better than that \u2013 because our economy is going to grow much faster.\r\n\u201cUnder President Obama and Washington Democrats, we had eight years of policies that held back our economy, and caused it to grow at a very tepid, slow pace.\r\n\u201cEconomists looked at these policies and they said that if things continue on that path we can expect the economy to grow by about 1.8 percent we\u2019ve been seeing throughout the Obama administration.\r\n\u201cWith Republicans setting the agenda, those policies are history \u2013 and so is the slow economic growth that had been created during the Obama years.\r\n\u201cLook at what\u2019s just happened in the past two economic quarters of this year.\r\n\u201cOver these six months, our economy grew at a pace of more than three percent.\r\n\u201cThe economy has created more than 2 million jobs since President Trump was elected a little over a year ago.\r\n\u201cThe economy is responding to the policies that Republicans have been talking about and what we\u2019ve been doing.\r\n\u201cWhen we pass legislation like this tax relief act, it will give businesses confidence that we\u2019re keeping our promises.\r\n\u201cIt gives them confidence that they can keep hiring, keep investing, and keep creating more jobs.\r\n\u201cSo when someone comes out with an estimate about economic growth and they don\u2019t account for all of these different things, I think that maybe they\u2019re living in the past.\r\n\u201cI think maybe they got so used to the anemic growth that we had in the Obama years, that they\u2019re still expecting that to continue into the future.\r\n\u201cThey\u2019re not taking into account that things are different now that Republicans are passing our economic plans and that the burdensome regulations and red tape has been cut.\r\n\u201cThey\u2019re not taking into account that President Trump is in the White House.\r\n\u201cThose things make a very big difference when it comes to sustaining this progress that we\u2019ve seen over the past year.\r\n\u201cFour out of five studies agree \u2013 the Republican tax plan will deliver the kind of economic growth that the American people want and that the American economy needs. A strong, and healthy, and growing economy.\u201d\r\n###", 1, "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z", "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.barrasso.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/news-releases?ContentRecord_id=B84D6B3D-AC28-4F8F-A813-FAD60A304D59"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.9524435736238956, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}