Source: United States House of Representatives – Representative Don Beyer (D-VA)
Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), the Senior House Democrat on Congress’ Joint Economic Committee and a member of the House Ways and Means Tax Subcommittee, delivered the following remarks yesterday during the Ways and Means Committee’s markup of crypto tax legislation, the Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act, explaining his vote against the measure:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I truly appreciate you and your staff for working across the aisle on the bill before us today.
I am also thankful for Mr. Horsford’s hard work and leadership through this process.
This legislation is a substantial improvement from the measure we considered in our committee earlier this year.
Some of the more egregious giveaways to the digital asset industry have been sanded down or removed altogether.
And I am particularly happy to see the inclusion of improved language that would limit the ability of taxpayers from using Puerto Rico or other U.S. territories as venues for tax evasion.
However, despite these improvements, I cannot support this legislation at this time.
Simply put, this bill does not exist in a vacuum.
Most Americans, for good reason, associate digital assets and cryptocurrencies with fraud, instability, illicit finance, and most all, with corruption.
Everyday, we are confronted with story after story of malfeasance of all types, either enabled or worsened by the increasing ubiquity of digital assets in the global economy.
The promises that crypto boosters have made over the years that greater digital asset adoption would somehow lead to lower costs, higher financial inclusion, more transparency, and so on have all been unmet.
Instead of this utopian vision, the reality of crypto is that most Americans experience is much darker.
Unfortunately, the fact is that the digital asset marketplace is dominated by bad actors, and none more so than the current occupant of the White House and his family.
Through their various cryptocurrency ventures like World Liberty Financial and the Trump-branded meme coin, the Trump family has amassed billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains coming in part from foreign governments, criminals, and wealthy donors – all through crypto.
And hundreds of millions of these dollars are flowing through the President’s political apparatus and flooding the airwaves to attack his political opponents.
The crypto industry has been weaponized to corrupt our presidency.
In exchange, this Administration has worked hard to water down or eliminate regulations aimed at protecting consumers while also halting prosecutions of numerous crypto fraudsters.
And most of all, the President has been focused on ensuring that he can continue to personally rake in massive cryptocurrency profits without any accountability.
Just look at what happened yesterday in the Senate, where CLARITY Act, a digital asset market structure bill, failed due to the President’s desire to avoid any restrictions on his ability to benefit from his own crypto holdings.
Even the most basic ethics requirements limiting the President and other senior government officials from profiting from the policies they oversee were onerous to him.
The close relationship between the President and cryptocurrency, and his relentless profit-seeking while in office, is doing the industry no favors in the long-term.
This staggering level of corruption is unprecedented in our history and leaves our nation extremely vulnerable, to say nothing of the more mundane criminal activity enabled by crypto which inflicts a heavy cost on the American people every single day.
I do not believe that we should proceed with legislation that would further embed this industry into our economic life and republic until we can get a handle on these more pressing and immediate challenges.
And with that, thank you again, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.