House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi fielded a question during a CNN town hall Wednesday from a business owner who clearly took issue with her characterization of the Republican tax cuts as “crumbs.”
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“We are a small business with seven full time employees that provide the fertilizer and seed products to our farm customers,” said the business owner named John. “When the tax and jobs bill was passed, I gave my employees $1,000 bonus, plus a 5 percent pay increase that they appreciated very much. Add to that the reduced withholding from their pay collection and it turned into a noticeable increase in income. This certainly was not crumbs to them. My question is, what can you add to this legislation that would also contribute to the growth of jobs and wages in our country?”
After thanking and congratulating the business owner for purportedly being one of only a “small share of businesses” that “shared” their tax cut with employees, Pelosi shifted the conversation to the contention that the cuts should have been more for him.
“But for many small businesses, this is a very, we could have done more,” said Pelosi. “Yes, why should 83 percent of the benefits go to the top one percent? We should start with small business. We should start with small business. And right now, many of the small businesses are saying to us, we are uncertain as to how we even benefit from what they call pass-throughs, because it is largely for business that’s the higher end and the rest. Not to get all the way down into the weeds, but we should have started with America’s working families, with the middle class, with small businesses, rather than have it be a smaller part of what the tax break would be.”
The GOP bill, according to Pelosi, could have been “done in a bipartisan way, in an open way” instead of in “the dark of night.”
“It just has the wrong values,” Pelosi said.