[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 101 (Tuesday, June 14, 2022)]
[House]
[Pages H5534-H5538]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
{time} 1845
EFFECTS OF INFLATION
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Jones). Under the Speaker's announced
policy of January 4, 2021, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert)
is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, we are going to try to do a continuation
on a theme. Last week, I came to the floor and sort of walked through
what inflation was doing to seniors. Today, I am going to try to walk
through what it is doing to the poor, the working poor, the middle
class, all of society.
One of the difficult things I am going to do, and I know it is
somewhat rhetorical, is ask my brothers and sisters on the left: Are
you happy with what you have accomplished?
Democrats took, functionally, power here 15 months ago. They had the
House, the Senate, and they took the White House. And we got to see the
playbook.
This is important because we often are so busy chasing shiny objects
here, we never sort of talk about some of the economic differences and
the way the left and those of us on the right view the world.
The left sort of believes in this model of consumption. Send people
checks, and they will go buy stuff and, somehow, that will make society
utopian. Of course, it also sets off really bad societal problems like:
``Hey, I have money. I don't have to participate in society and the
economy.'' ``Hey, I have money. Let's just go buy stuff today,'' and it
sets off inflation.
Those of us who actually showed up to our economics classes, we
believe in this concept--it is often referred to as supply side. It is
much more complicated. That is productivity in a society, when you are
going to pay someone more money, when a worker is paid more money, it
is, functionally, from two things: inflation, which doesn't mean they
got anywhere. As a matter of fact, when you raise someone's salary
because of inflation, they are often always behind the curve.
The second part is productivity. There was investment in plants and
equipment to be more productive, to have that newest, best, functional
product. That is a supply-side model. That is, functionally, what we
accomplished in tax reform.
The other challenge I will give to our friends on the Democrat side
is, take a look at our couple of years when we did regulatory reform,
when we did tax reform, 2018, 2019. The middle class got much
wealthier. Income inequality shrank. Food insecurity shrank. Minority
populations had their best economic period in the modern economic time.
I would visit the homeless shelter in downtown Phoenix, and St.
Joseph the Worker had a list of businesses that were desperate for
anyone who would just show up.
Now, the contrast: The Democrats took over, and, functionally, 15
months ago, they moved $1.9 trillion of spending. I have been to the
floor multiple times. I have shown you all the charts saying, isn't it
fascinating that almost on the day you did this, you can actually see
actual, functional, price changes in the wholesale markets? You can
actually see the curve going: Hey, they passed a bill; there is
inflation.
Now, some of that is not completely fair because some of it was
actually already built into the policy sets the Democrats had adopted.
When they blew up the capital stack, meaning when the Biden
administration took over, and they had a compliant Democrat Congress
and a Democrat Senate and, particularly, the left controlling the House
of Representatives, when they threatened capital markets for investing
in hydrocarbons, when they threatened capital markets for investing in
the transportation of hydrocarbons, moving natural gas--oh, you are
going to build a pipeline. We are going to do everything so that you
have to report to the SEC. We are going to basically make it so the
companies, the investors in this, have to do documentation of their
environmental scores.
You wonder why September a year ago you actually looked at the
futures markets and saw it was already beginning--natural gas, crude
prices. So, the horrible prices you are paying today at the pump, it is
not because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That just moved it
forward. This was already built into the Democrats' policy set.
Let's actually focus on something that is the derivative, that is the
next level over from last week's. Last week, we focused substantially
on what the left's policies were going to do to seniors, how many of
them will be in poverty a decade from now because of inflation today.
But let's actually sort of talk through inflation through the economy
because my fear is we do the headline discussion. Hey, did you see the
number last week? It was 8.6. My community, it is 11 something. I
happen to live in number one or number two, the Scottsdale-Phoenix
area, inflation in the Nation.
But what does it actually mean? It is much more than the little
number you saw saying, ``Hey, last month it was this.'' It is: What did
it do to your retirement a decade from now? What did it do to your
kids' and your grandkids' ability to ever purchase a house, to ever
build up savings, when every single day their savings become worth
less?
There is a reason inflation is the bogeyman. It is because it
functionally is government. You have a government with debt the size of
our economy, and we are out there taxing all of you. Whether you
understand it or not, that is the scam of inflation. This is what the
Democrats have set up.
Every single day, your savings becomes less, but also, the value of
that massive debt the United States has becomes less because we are
transferring your wealth. We are, functionally, devaluing your savings
and then devaluing our debt because it is being paid for by inflated
dollars.
I don't believe it is purposeful, but now that they have set it off,
I promise you, there are economists in this government who basically
look the other way and say let it run this way for a couple of years.
Think about it. The actual value of the debt, in constant dollars,
stays the same, but--well, excuse me. It decreases because the dollar
value has changed dramatically.
It is cruel. It is crushing. And the economic violence that the
Democrats' failure to understand basic economics has done to the poor,
the working poor, the middle class--please, just stop hurting people.
It is math.
Let's take a look at this. We all got the May number, and we saw the
price increases, the PCE. But when you started to look at the Consumer
Price Index, 8.6--now, do you happen to remember before May, April,
March, ``Oh, we have hit peak inflation.'' That is absolute crap.
Structurally, how many of you have actually looked at the gas pump
this month? Have you seen where gas prices are? Put that as a factor in
the inflation and tell me that prices are going down, that prices have
stabilized.
There is an argument out there that we have hit a plateau. It just
happens to be an outrageously high plateau. I don't see it yet.
We are in, functionally, what you call a wage-price spiral right now.
I
[[Page H5535]]
was made fun of about 3, 4 months ago when I came here and said that I
think we are on the cusp of a wage-price spiral. Well, guess what? I
was right.
What is a wage-price spiral? A business raises its prices. Well, for
my workers to be able to afford things, we need to raise their wages.
But if we raise their wages, well, we have to raise our prices. Well,
if we raise our prices, you raise your wages. It is the puppy chasing
its tail.
Right now, the only solution the left is offering, the only solution
the Biden administration is offering, is to let the Federal Reserve
break people's backs. Raise interest rates enough. Pull liquidity out
of the market. Break their backs. Put people in the unemployment lines.
That will slow it down.
The cruelty of what has gone on here--and there are other solutions.
I have been here to the floor multiple times saying there are things we
can do tax policy-wise, incentives to save, other things that would be
great for retirement security, great for growing the economy, and would
help. It doesn't solve the Federal Reserve's problems, but it would
help.
The problem is, I would need my brothers and sisters on the Democrat
side to basically open up an economics book and say: Yes, maybe making
more stuff, maybe becoming more productive, would be good for society,
and it would be good for pushing down inflation.
But God knows, the way the Democrats run this place, I can't even get
an amendment in the Ways and Means Committee anymore, assuming they
would actually hold a real hearing.
This place is nothing but virtue signaling anymore, but it is a
virtue signaling that--if they would actually talk about what they have
done to people.
The hits keep coming. You start to look--and I know some of these
charts are noisy. One of the tough things about talking about this
right now is, these numbers have been moving so fast, trying to make
sure you are using credible, third-party sources so you are just not
making up numbers out of your own office and building a pretty chart,
but you go out and find the experts. The experts can't keep up with the
movement of the prices, the economic distortion that is going on.
Part of my challenge is: Go look at your 401(k) right now. Are you
happy?
Now, you need to add in also that the fact of the matter is the money
you have in there is substantially worth less than a year ago. So it is
not that your savings, your investments, have crashed. Also, it is
buying about 10 percent less stuff anyway, so you needed to discount
rate that.
You understand that we have real negative interest rates right now.
That is one of the reasons the Federal Reserve is probably going to
have to jack up rates dramatically more than the talking heads are
telling you on cable finance news.
Think about it. If you are living in a country where the interest
rate--let's just use 10. It is an easy number. I know the number was
8.6. In my community, it is probably 11.
Federal funds rates, let's do a 10-year. Let's use 3\1/2\. Do you see
that gap there? That is actually negative. You invest in a 10-year T
bill, a 10-year U.S. sovereign instrument. You just lost all that.
The model basically says the Federal Reserve is going to have to jack
up interest rates to close that gap. And be scared. Be scared.
I have been here on the floor with charts before that basically said
if the mean interest rate is 2 points higher on U.S. sovereign debt
for, like, 25 years, at the end of that 25 years, every dime of tax
receipts, every dime of tax revenue, goes to just interest.
Do you understand the scale of the dystopian misery that the
Democrats' economic policy has set off?
Yes, it had great virtue signaling. We are going to give money to all
these people. Great job. They are all poorer today than a year ago when
you handed out $1.9 trillion.
You start to look at who you are hurting. You start to look at folks
in Social Security. Well, they are already upside down another percent.
You start to look at major healthcare programs. Well, the inflation
there, packing into that.
You start to take a look at other mandatory spending. Well, at least
that has actually been deflated upside down because they don't have the
same COLA kickers.
But you start to add up what is going on, major changes and projected
outlays. The budget process here is going to be really interesting
coming next year when we take the majority because the mess that has to
be cleaned up economically is not going to happen in a year.
For everyone who may be participating and crazy enough to listen to
me, it is going to take years and years, maybe a decade, to just clean
up this, functionally, 24-month cycle of what bad decisions did. For
everyone listening, please, rethink your retirement.
{time} 1900
Please rethink your savings. Please rethink your investments. You are
poorer today than you understand because it multiplies out into the
future, and I am scared.
I mean, we did one model in our office, and I have some boards here
that are going to sort of touch on this, but let's see if I can try to
describe it.
Let's go back to my retiree. You are on Medicare, okay. So there is a
hold harmless on the cost of Medicare, but not your co-pay.
So if medical inflation is going up at almost double the inflation
rate, so we had what, 8.6, but we have some charts that show medical
inflation in the previous month may have been as high as 16, 16.8.
So if you have almost double, that 20 percent of cash that comes out
of your pocket also just doubled. So you are going to get an 8 percent
COLA on your Social Security, okay, and your Medicare premium will
adjust some, but your co-pay is skyrocketing.
If you carry that out through the decade, the number of our brothers
and sisters who will be in their retirement who will be in poverty--it
is math. But, damn it, doesn't this place care about people, or is it
just too painful to step up and say we screwed up? Well, they screwed
up.
We are going to reach across the aisle. We are going to actually work
with people who actually showed up to their economics classes. There
are some ideas that would be good--and they should be bipartisan--that
actually would help productivity, help people save for retirement, and
would be great for bending the inflation curve.
Do you think any of us could get an amendment, actually even listened
to? Because they don't care. It doesn't fit. Remember, we do public
policy now by virtue signaling. The incredible difference--I am
realizing the difference between my brothers and sisters on the left
and those of us on the right is my constituents judge us on what did
our policies accomplish?
I swear to you. The media and the left judge their folks on what was
their intention? What were their feelings? Because if they were judged
on what they have accomplished, they have accomplished misery.
As of May 2020, inflation is plateauing, really, rather than peaking.
Understand what these economists were basically saying is this isn't
transitory. We were promised that over and over and over from the
Treasury Secretary, from the President, from Democratic leadership,
even my brothers and sisters on the Democrat side on Ways and Means.
Oh, it is temporary. It is a supply chain spike. No, it isn't. Such
horrible policies.
They built a structural inflation problem. Now you are in a wage
price spiral, and many of the economists are now saying it is not a
peak and a fall--it is a plateau.
One of the things that scares the crap out of me--and I am sorry, but
I don't know a better way to try without crossing the line and cursing
and getting my words taken down--is you hit the inflationary cycle with
stagflation, meaning you functionally have some economic growth. You
have employment. The Federal Reserve is jacking up interest rates, so
you are trying to push up some of the employment. You are going to see
some unusual charts and data we have here.
But the inflation is sticky, and you basically have a plateau of
inflation, you have a plateau of misery, and you are not able to raise
it and crash it.
One of the reasons I come to you with that as a personal theory--and
it drives some of my economists nuts on the Joint Economic Committee
when I
[[Page H5536]]
say this--is I think we have a much more difficult demographic problem.
Inflation in the late 1970s, very, very early 1980s, you had this
huge baby boom population that was available for labor, available with
new technologies, investments to spike productivity.
We have got a demographic problem. Functionally, in 7 years, 22
percent of America is 65 and older. We have gotten old. We have huge,
massive social entitlement promises that we have a moral obligation to
keep--the financing of Social Security, the financing of Medicare.
Remember: Every new dime of debt over the next 30 years is just
Social Security and Medicare. I know a lot of folks don't like to hear
that, but it is. It is our demographic. We got old. The rest of the
budget is functionally in balance.
Really hard to break a stagflation cycle without that available
population spike to have that productivity to start to say, hey, we are
going to make more stuff. We are cracking inflation.
When you start to see some of the smart economists saying hey, we
have got a problem. We are plateauing. It is not a spike. This may be
the mean for a while. What is amusing, in a very dark way, is I have
used this chart once before, so it is the projection of where inflation
was going to go.
The number of talking heads who would repeat the White House's line
that oh, it is transitory, or it is just temporary, or it is Putin
inflation. Come on. At some point, treat the American people like
adults.
They may not have spent their life bathing in the numbers. They don't
go home every night and read The Economist magazine and these things,
trying to dig. That is our job. That is what we are paid to do. Other
people need to take care of their families and have a life and try to
survive these prices.
But the trend line on inflation is heading toward almost a 10 percent
plateau. God, I don't think we are going to get there, I really don't,
but that is my charting.
You know, this was our target. We are nowhere near our target. We
blew through our target by 2.8 percent. I am trying to show the happy
talk that was going on in the previous three or four months. Oh,
inflation is transitory. They have been wrong.
I am going to do something slightly jerky. I have been here on the
floor, and I got it right because we actually looked at the real
numbers.
You know, when you looked at the April inflation and realize, well,
damn it, April inflation, they were calculating--they had fuel prices,
they had base energy going down .6, .4, based on the numbers. That
isn't what happened in May.
I mean, all you had to do was break it apart and look at the numbers
and own a calculator. But remember: We work in a math-free zone. You
start to understand.
I know I am a Republican. I come behind the microphone, I sound like
an accountant on steroids. That is not my point. These numbers are
people. These numbers are hurting people. There are millions--matter of
fact, almost all of America is poorer today than they were 15 months
ago when the left took power. Judge us by that. It didn't need to be
this way.
I mean, you know, what is it, Larry Summers--I mean, a leftist
economist is begging the Democrats, saying, don't do this. Don't do it.
Don't do it. You are going to hurt people. Oh, no. I am a Member of
Congress. I understand better than a guy with a Ph.D. from Harvard.
Turns out the Ph.D. leftist from Harvard who was begging you not to
do what you did; you went ahead and did it. Now you have a Republican
quoting him on the floor.
Only large businesses--now, this one is important--are adding
sufficient numbers of workers. So you remember how President Biden, I
think it was yesterday, got behind the microphone and said, but we have
such great employment.
The pessimism on small- and medium-size businesses has skyrocketed,
and that is actually where much of our job creation and disruption in
the economy and new spikes of productivity come from. They are the risk
takers who will try new methods and systems.
So, right now, big business has still been doing the hiring. What
happens is that function where the Federal Reserve goes about jacking
up interest rates, they are going to crush mid-market and small
businesses. I hope it doesn't come, but every number I look at says it
is going to come: the recession the Democrats have brought us.
Is it going to continue the movement of the United States being a
country of oligopolies, because we are going to wipe out a bunch of our
small businesses? Our regional, smaller, mid-size businesses get wiped
out, but the big boys stay because they can afford the regulatory--they
can actually participate in capital markets.
Is that going to be the outcome once again, that this, once again,
becomes more and more a monopolistic economy? You also know the problem
with that is you don't get a productive society when you have massive
players that control so much of the society, the economics.
Some of these numbers--you have got to understand, this number was
the worst reading in 49 years for the smaller- and mid-size businesses
doing hiring.
So you functionally have almost two economies running at the same
time. But this economy here, the small and mid-size, are most of our
employment. Be worried. These numbers are not warm and fuzzy.
Now we start to go to some of the cruelty that the Democrats'
economics have done. You see that bottom line? Those are functionally
real wages. So, hey, here are inflation wages. Hey, I got a raise.
Look, wages are going up. Real purchasing power. I am poorer today than
I was the day before.
So when you hear leftists come behind these microphones and talk
about income equality, they did it. It is driven by crap policy like
this. This is what is going on right now. Real wages. People are
getting poorer every single day.
Yet, there are folks here who are willing to just completely mislead
on facts. Oh, but wages are up. Yeah, they are up. But they are not up
nearly at the pace of inflation. This is really dangerous.
You have got to understand, if numbers like this continue, this is
what tears apart societies. This is not a game. This is beyond me being
a Republican, and I am beating up on Democrats.
Please. I know we are heading into election season. I know everything
is about knifing each other, but this chart is actually--this line here
is people. These are people getting poorer every single day.
We keep offering suggestions, and we can't even get an amendment
considered. I understand the partisan cruelty to our side. We are not
in charge. You are in charge. But why the cruelty to your own
constituents?
Because this did not need to happen, and it doesn't need to continue.
There are solutions, but maybe those solutions also require something
very difficult.
You know, if you are in a 12-step program--and God knows I have had
enough family in 12-step programs--what is the very first step? Admit
you have a problem. Democrats, I challenge you. Take the first step.
Admit you screwed up, you screwed the American people, and you are
willing to make it right. You are willing to work with us who own
calculators to make it right, to help our brothers and sisters not
continue to be poorer every day.
These numbers should start to scare you. There are a number of
economists out there I believe who have gotten this wrong. They say,
well, we handed out so much free money in 2021, everyone had so much
cash in their bank accounts, they set off inflation because everyone
went out and bought a new television. Fine.
Okay. What happens by the end of 2021? By the end. So several months
ago, credit card debt was climbing and had climbed rather
substantially. That basically lets you know the way people were
maintaining their consumption, their lifestyle.
It wasn't that they were building it in their earning power. They
chewed up their savings. They were using debt to maintain their
lifestyle. This is dangerous because at a certain point you hit that
debt wall and you have how many of your brothers and sisters who, all
of a sudden, now are in real financial stress.
[[Page H5537]]
{time} 1915
When you start to see 28 percent annualized increase in the fourth
quarter was the fastest on record, basically saying, hey, fourth
quarter last year was the fastest on record of credit card accumulation
of debt.
So when the White House, when my Democratic colleagues say, well,
things aren't that bad. Yes, we have inflation, but look how good the
economy is. You built an economy on fake money, and now people are
borrowing it through their credit cards.
At the end of the fourth quarter, there was a sizable but shrinking
pool of excess liquidity. So what they are basically saying is, do you
remember how a number of us were coming to the mike and said, hey,
Democrats, your $1.9 trillion that you did, what was it, end of March
2021, you pumped all this liquidity into the marketplace, as you set
off inflation. People shored up--they paid off some debt. They had lots
of cash in their bank accounts, and it was substantially gone by the
end of last year.
So how have people been financing the consumption of these incredible
price hikes over the last few months? We are hunting for the latest
borrowing data, but we are seeing some preliminary numbers. A lot of
Americans now are in substantially more debt, so they are poorer than
when the Democrats handed out $1.9 trillion.
So within a year, they set off inflation, and they made people poor,
and now they are upside-down in debt, and they have got to figure out a
way to pay for it. It is like every economic nightmare. Everything you
could do wrong has functionally been done in the 15 months of Democrat
power.
Mr. Speaker Pro Tempore, may I inquire how much time I have
remaining?
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman has 28\1/2\ minutes remaining.
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Look, this is functionally the same chart as the last
one, except the point I am making on this one is we functionally moved
from 1 trillion 726 billion up. Before that, we were at $1.3 trillion
of household savings. The savings basically has collapsed.
Is anyone talking about this? Remember, that was supposed to be the
big Democrat talking point is, yes, we gave away a lot of money, but,
look, we shored up people's bank accounts. It is gone. It is gone. And
it wasn't done through productivity. It wasn't done through investments
that lead us into a greater future.
The left keeps on saying, well, you invest in green energy. Fine. But
that is not what you did. You basically adopted almost every policy--
you do realize in the 15 months the Democrats have been in charge, we
are burning a hell of a lot more coal today.
The 2021 number is 23 percent more coal was burnt to produce U.S.
electrical energy because they blew up the natural gas markets. They
made the United States dirtier, according to the greenhouse gas
calculations. So even on that they screwed it up.
And then here is sort of the punch line of why I am here tonight. You
see the chart, you see the red, the red line? Is that red or maroon?
Let's go with red. Do you see this chart right here? That is for folks
under $40,000 a year. And red basically means severe hardship. They are
in economic stress.
This number here has exploded under the 15 months of Democrat
control. This is what functionally they have caused by inflation, by
everything around them. They have taken almost modest quartile of
incomes, and they are brutalizing the poor. They are just brutalizing
the working poor.
Now, those folks over $100,000, yeah, but most of it is no real
hardship. Their income category, they are doing not fine, but better.
But you get down to $40,000 and less. So if you ever let someone on the
left tell you they are the ones who care about the poor and the working
poor and the working middle class, they may care. They may care, but
they brutalize them by their policies.
Look, it is in the math. Once again, the math doesn't lie. The math
will set you free. But we seem to do policy by virtue signaling here,
not by some of the most compassionate, which is do the right thing.
You have a model. Take a look what we accomplished in 2018, 2019,
first quarter of 2020. The number of our brothers and sisters that were
less poor, it was one of the most amazing economic revivals in U.S.
history. Yes, we had the pandemic. Yes, it was miserable.
But think about this. Almost every bit of those gains are gone, and
not gone because of the pandemic. They are gone because of the last 15
months of horrible economic policy that set off inflation, has set off
optionality, has flatlined productivity, and actually really screwed up
the next decade of our economic future.
These get a little more difficult to show, but basically you are
trying to sort of demonstrate when we hit the Biden inauguration, so
this is the moment where Democrats had absolute power here, and how
quickly the financial cushion disappeared. Now, a lot of this
disappeared because you have the occasion where we are going to hand
you a bunch of cash, but we are also going to set off inflation. It
turns out the inflation chews up the cash a lot faster than we are
handing out free money.
As of April 2022, the average retirement benefits--now, this is going
to make complete sense, and in the scale, the reality is much, much
worse, but we are trying to do a calculation of if you are getting
retirement benefits, how much are you losing? How much is it changing?
Our first calculation was about $162.
Now I need you to add a couple more months to that. What we are
starting to try to model is every month people on a fixed income, how
much poorer are they getting. And that is also adjusting, say, they
have COLAs, so they are going up, but the actual purchasing power, even
adjusted with the COLA, they are falling, they are getting poorer every
day.
Now we are finally starting to get some of the data. The problem is
we are about 3 months behind on trying to do hard calculations.
Now you start to look, and this one is really important. I don't have
a brilliant way to try to lay this out. When we look at different
demographics and what they consume, a young family is going to have
different consumption than a couple in their seventies. This one is
going to be much more medical costs, and this one might be education
and a new bicycle. So what happens when you start to realize that food
energy, when you start to see it moving in the charts, but then you
come down here and start to see medical services, where they are in the
inflation graph, and then you try to adjust them to populations. Then
you realize you are ending up with this crazy sort of bell curve of
misery, where older Americans are getting crushed, and younger families
are getting crushed because they don't have assets that are inflating.
And this is what is going on.
I don't know why there is not a fire drill around here. I mean, what
would it take for those of us as Republicans to basically turn to the
Democrat majority and the White House and Speaker Pelosi and the left
who is in charge here and say, we actually care about Americans. We are
willing to work with you. Let's actually do the fire drill. Let's
actually do the things that set off productivity. Let's fix expensing
on the Tax Code. Let's do this, let's do that. What can we do instead
of just letting the Federal Reserve jack up interest rates and put
people out of work? And that way Democrats can blame the Federal
Reserve and not their own policies because they need deniability.
Our job is to make people's lives freer, economically more stable,
better, but also someone like myself--and, yes, I have a 6-year-old
daughter, and my wife and I are the same age. It is the greatest thing
that ever happened. Yes, I am an old dad. Greatest thing that has ever
happened. What is my moral obligation to her future? Seriously.
For every person who on occasion actually shows up and works here,
what is your moral obligation? What is your moral obligation to your
parents and your grandparents but also to these kids? We already have
this demographic curve that is going to make fixing inflation much more
difficult, and we are basically shifting.
If you are functionally under 40 years old, and you are still voting
for the left, please, please go to an economics class. Go buy a
calculator. Understand the amount of misery that has been
[[Page H5538]]
shifted onto your future. My back-of-the-napkin math basically says for
someone who basically is getting ready to graduate college today, when
they hit their peak earning years, their tax rate will have to be
double what today's is just to maintain today's benefits.
Congratulations.
Look, Mr. Speaker Pro Tempore, I still have a number of charts, but
basically they are all saying the same thing. You get to when the
Democrats took power, and just what they did in blowing up
affordability in our communities, blowing up affordability,
productivity in the country, and it was Democrat policies because it is
more than just what we voted on here.
It was basically threatening investors. It was threatening: The SEC
is going to come and start to look at your investments. It is
threatening. They used the regulatory state, they used the up and down,
even the virtue signaling within businesses. I mean, how many
businesses basically sold their souls so Democrats wouldn't say mean
things about them?
You start to look at family economic insecurity, and it just has
exploded again since the Democrats took power.
Mr. Speaker, and to whoever is interested, I am blessed to be the
senior Republican for the Joint Economic Committee, so I have access to
some very smart people, and we are just doing our best to try to
understand the numbers but also what we can do with the numbers.
Last week I became the senior Republican for Social Security, and,
you know, you are reading the actuary report, and then you are teaming
it up with the actuary report for Medicare, and you start to realize
the scale. The numbers here are stunning. The numbers of zeros.
And we will get the clown show around this place that says, well, if
you fix waste and fraud; well, if you get rid of foreign aid; hey, if
you just tax rich people some more, everything will be fine. None of
those things are close to being true.
The scale of the problem that was already built into just our
demographics and our promises, remember, the shortfall for Social
Security and Medicare when you pile on our current debt is $120
trillion, and that functionally hits in 29 years, and that is adjusted
to today's dollars. Add in inflation, and the distortion.
So my last comment I really want to try to share is one of our
projects we are working very hard in our office is if the Democrats'
inflation continues for 24 months, how much of our society will be in
poverty? How many seniors, how many younger people because of the
distortion? They functionally have wiped out all the amazing economic
progress we made in 2018 and 2019 and the first quarter of 2020.
Congratulations, you hated the last President, you hated the
Republicans and what we did for the economy. Fine, you got rid of it.
You wiped it all out.
{time} 1930
But understand, in just 15 months, we have whole regions, whole
populations, whole segments of our society that are several percent--
sorry to put it in a percent--poorer today. It just doesn't go away,
and you can't just do another transfer payment to make it up.
Turns out who you vote for does make a difference. Now, America gets
to pay a price for what they did in the last couple of elections. But
they were lied to. They basically thought virtue signaling was policy,
and it wasn't. It was about winning elections.
At some point, Mr. Speaker pro tempore, the calculator tells the
truth. Mr. Speaker pro tempore, at some point, we should be judged by
our accomplishments for the American people. If that accomplishment is
misery, be held to it. If it is prosperity, take joy in it. But we need
to step up and demonstrate that we actually understand what is going on
in our communities and that we are willing to step up and try to fix it
instead of talk away from it.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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