WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act is Congress’s first major opportunity to push back on China while relieving the burden placed on families and workers struggling with inflation and high interest rates in the Biden economy, writes Ways and Means Republican Randy Feenstra (IA-04) in an op-ed for the Northwest Iowa Review.

Increases our competitiveness with China by supporting proven pro-growth policies here at home:

“For nearly a century, America has had the world’s largest and most innovative economy. But China has known that to truly compete with us, they need to compete at the frontiers of technological innovation. They’ve aggressively pursued policies to encourage research and development in China while our own policies have gone the opposite direction, and the results of that are evident in everything from their rapidly advancing military technology to the spread of the social media app, TikTok. This bill reverses that trajectory by restoring immediate R&D expensing.

“This change alone is critical to maintaining our global economic and technological leadership and corrects the self-imposed disadvantage we’ve given American businesses by making our R&D tax incentives less competitive than China’s and those of most other countries around the world. In fact, by supporting domestic R&D investments, this legislation will preserve more than 1,200 jobs in Iowa and support $104 million in wages for our workforce.

“But researching and developing the technology isn’t the end of the story, because we then need to deploy it here in America. When a business purchases a new piece of equipment, it can deduct a portion of that expense from that year’s taxes. By allowing it to deduct the full amount of that expense in that year, it becomes significantly easier for the business to invest in the technologies that it needs to stay at the cutting edge. This bill makes that correction and restores 100 percent ‘bonus depreciation.’”

Increases supply chain resilience to reduce America’s dependency on China:

“This change is going to be necessary for companies to domesticate our critical supply chains. We can build the mining and processing capacity for critical minerals that China has spent decades monopolizing, but it’s going to take a lot of investment in the equipment necessary to do that.

“By making it easier to develop and deploy the technologies needed to onshore these supply chains, the tax bill takes an important step toward fixing the ticking time bomb that is our current supply chain dependency on China.”

Read the op-ed here.