PRESS RELEASE
Fights on Congressional Front This Week, Including on Tax Bill
Dec. 15, 2017 (EIRNS)—The U.S. House of Representatives plans a nearly unheard-of five-day session in the week of Dec. 18-22, after activists with the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee distributed a dossier titled "Robert Mueller Is an Amoral Legal Assassin: He Will Do His Job If You Let Him" to every office in the House of Representatives today.
In addition to trying, probably on Dec. 19, to push across the Republican Party’s final "tax reform" legislation, Congress will finally take up a substantial hurricane reconstruction supplemental budget, which was requested by the White House more than a month ago. And it will be debating bills to fund various parts of the government for various parts of the next year, as all authorized funding ends on Dec. 23.
On one hand, this supplemental is likely to be in the range of $55 billion, according to one source, compared to the $44 billion the White House requested and which was called inadequate by bipartisan Texas and Florida delegations and others. On the other hand, reconstruction aid for Puerto Rico will likely be excluded from this supplemental—it had by far the worst economic devastation and its governor’s reconstruction request, $94 billion, is the largest among the states and territories hit by the storms. And there may be fights over demands for "offsets," cuts in other budget areas to offset the supplemental.
This again raises the necessity for a national credit institution for infrastructure building, as in Lyndon LaRouche’s "Four Laws To Save the Nation" introduced in 2014. The underlying requests from Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands are full of necessary storm-protective new infrastructure, which is not being funded. This is particularly true in Puerto Rico, which now has a detailed work-out of a plan to rebuild the island’s power infrastructure at a higher level.
Regarding the "tax reform," top Wall Street banker Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase advised Wednesday to "think of it as QE4," i.e., version 4 of the "quantitative easing" bailout policy. In other words, the taxpayers now bailing out, not exclusively the big banks, but all the big corporations, including the big banks. Dimon, at an Axios forum in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was specifically answering whether the "reform" would cause a surge in business capital investment. He replied,
"Companies will retain more capital and start to use it over time. Some will raise wages. Some will buy companies. Some will do bigger dividends and stock buybacks. Don’t act like that is a bad thing. That is their money. Think of it as a QE4."
