HURON – Republicans passed a tax bill just before Christmas that was everything the 1986 tax overhaul – the last time for such legislation – was not, Tim Bjorkman, seeking the Democratic nomination for the U.S. House, said Thursday.
“That was a year and a half in the making and had broad bipartisan support,” the retired circuit court judge from Canistota said of the Reagan-era tax reform effort.
Instead of a revenue-neutral bill, this time around the $1.5 trillion tax package will add billions of dollars to the mounting debt.
“We haven’t begun to assess the cost of the damage done,” Bjorkman said at the District 22 Democratic Forum. “This is an unprecedented raid on the United States Treasury for the benefit of the wealthy donor class people.”
He said he believes in repealing the new law and replacing it with responsible tax legislation that takes a more bipartisan approach.
“There have to be adults in the room when you negotiate that bill,” Bjorkman said.
As a member of Congress, he would work to cut corporate welfare to help balance the budget, and close the loopholes that enable the wealthiest 1 percent to pay less in taxes than average Americans, he said.
Well-to-do Americans have made enormous amounts of money because of the tax laws, he said.
The best evidence that corporations don’t need a tax cut is that corporate profits over the last three or four years have reached record highs while the stock market continues to break its previous records, he said.
Two thirds of the comments he hears on the campaign trail, meanwhile, have to do with the health care system in the country, Bjorkman said.
They are coming from small business owners, workers who can’t access insurance and poor people who tell nightmare stories, he said.
“We need to get affordable, timely health care for every American citizen,” he said. “No other issue tops that in my view.”
Part of the problem lies with the fact that insurance costs too much and leaves too many people on the sidelines, Bjorkman said. By the time they go to the hospital, they typically end up in the emergency room and that cost is borne by everyone else, he said.
“So much of it has to do with this fundamental problem that our Congress sadly is way too controlled by corporate special interest money,” he said.
“The first thing we do is we cannot continue to send people who we like to go to Washington who want a career there and are going to play the Washington game of raising the big money to fend off any challengers back in the home state in elections and then doing the bidding of big money donors,” Bjorkman said.
Photo:
House of Representatives candidate Tim Bjorkman speaks to the District 22 Democratic forum on Thursday at the Huron Event Center.
Photo by Roger Larsen/Plainsman