News

Washington, D.C. — In response to repeated false news reports by POLITICO and other news outlets, Senator Marco Rubio’s office released the following transcript of Rubio’s remarks to The Economist and statement from Chief of Staff, Michael A. Needham:
 
“Last week, The Economist published an interview in which Senator Rubio stated the same view he expressed before, during, and after tax reform. Predictably, Democrats — many of whom voted against Senator Rubio’s amendment to give more tax relief to working American families — pounced on these comments to mislead the American people about the tax bill. Today, the Senator’s op-ed — articulating views he has always held — was misrepresented by some as a change of position.
 
“Since the vast majority of what he said about the tax bill in that interview was not included by The Economist in their article, we are releasing an audio recording and transcript of the tax portion of the interview.
 
“This information was provided repeatedly to POLITICO, who has declined to report it or update its previous reporting.”
 
Here is the portion of the interview that Politico was provided, but has refused to report on: 
 
Rubio: We, at one point, proposed a corporate rate of 20.9% to be able to fully do what we wanted. We did the .9 just to show the absurdity of it. And it was a massive fight because at the end of the day there was still a lot of thinking on the right of center that if Apple is happy and the big corporations are happy, they are going to take the money they are saving and reinvest it back into American workers. When in fact they bought back shares – they’ll invest in automation and productivity that way – a few of them gave out bonuses in the short term, but there’s no evidence whatsoever that this was massively poured back into the American worker.
 
I still think there are a lot of net positives of tax reform, let there be no doubt. I do think a lot of small businesses will now expand and immediately invest. But that had less to do with the rate, and more to do with the immediate expensing component of it. It had more to do with that than it did with the corporate rate. 
 
I was not a big a fan of slashing massively the taxes of multinational corporations who aren’t even American companies. We shouldn’t be discriminatory towards them, but we don’t have any special obligation towards them either. These are citizens of the world.
 
…
 
The problem is that growth as I said, if you’re a multinational corporation, you may be growing but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s helping Americans. Your shareholders are from all over the world, your customers are from all over the world, your supply chain, and your production chain may not even be in the United States. The idea that massive growth by some large entity that is a multinational footprint is going to somehow benefit Americans especially because they happen to be headquartered in the United States — 
 
The Economist: “So you were unhappy with the tax reform because of the cuts to the corporate rate?”
 
Rubio: I had no problem with cutting the corporate rate. I had proposed a cut myself. I just felt that we could have cut it a lot, to 22 to 21, and use that extra point as a tax cut, but instead of for the multinationals, applied it to working families making $50,000 to $60,000 a year. It wouldn’t have changed their lives, but would have shown we care. And we did some of it, but the fact that we had to fight so hard to achieve it and the arguments that were used against it showed me how far we have to go.”