Sen. Marco Rubio went off message about the GOP tax overhaul in an interview posted Monday, suggesting that the corporate tax cuts have not benefited workers.
The Trump administration and other Republicans have argued just the opposite: that the corporate reform will raise wages because companies will invest and grow more.
“There is still a lot of thinking on the Right that if big corporations are happy, they’re going to take the money they’re saving and reinvest it in American workers,” the Florida senator was quoted by the Economist as saying. “In fact, they bought back shares, a few gave out bonuses; there’s no evidence whatsoever that the money’s been massively poured back into the American worker.”
The office of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., circulated Rubio’s comments to reporters Monday afternoon.
A representative for Rubio’s Senate office told the Washington Examiner that Rubio “pushed for a better balance in the tax law between tax cuts for big businesses and families, as he’s done for years. As he said when the tax law passed, cutting the corporate tax rate will make America a more competitive place to do business, but he tried to balance that with an even larger child tax credit for working Americans.”
Rubio voted for the GOP tax law. While it was being legislated, he negotiated to expand the child tax credit and extend it to more families, a stance that brought him into conflict with some on the Right.
In recent weeks, the former presidential candidate has gestured at departing GOP orthodoxy on fiscal and trade policy.
In a recent op-ed published by National Review in which he called for a “national American conservatism,” Rubio accused economic elites of caring more “about the profits multinational corporations can make doing business in China than they do about American workers losing their jobs.”
