Providing for Congressional Disapproval Under Chapter 8 of Title United States Code, of the Rule Submitted By the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Relating to ``Update of Commission's

Floor Speech

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Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, on the way over to the floor, I received a CNN news alert, and the headline is: ``Biden dramatically scales up the pressure on Netanyahu.''

So I come to the floor to tell you and to tell the Nation that I stand with Israel. Like millions of Americans, I have been disturbed to see the Biden administration make a false equivalence between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas. There is no equivalence here.

Hamas is a terrorist group funded by Iran. These terrorists have fired over 3,000 missiles into population centers in Israel. Israel has every right to defend itself. If Hamas stopped fighting, there would be peace. If Israel stopped fighting, there would be no peace. Hamas would continue to attack Israel.

President Biden's readout of his call this morning with Prime Minister Netanyahu stated:

The president conveyed to the prime minister that he expected a significant de-escalation today on the path to a ceasefire.

President Biden doesn't get to tell Israel what to do. We all want peace. We all want a cease-fire. A cease-fire happens when Hamas stops its terrorist campaign. Until then, Israel has every right to the proportional response it is making right now. Israel has every right to take out the terrorist leaders that are directing the attacks on its citizens Economic Recovery

Mr. President, I would like to move now to a separate topic, and the one for which I originally came to the floor, and I came to the floor to talk about our economy.

In April, the unemployment rate went up. Surprisingly, it went up. It was supposed to go down. It went up, and so are prices all around the country. The experts in the White House actually thought that we were going to add 1 million new workers in America last month. In reality, only about 266,000 Americans went back to work. So the so-called experts at the White House were wrong, and they were wrong by three- quarters of a million workers.

Now, 40,000 of those people who went back to work went to government jobs, which means the cost of government continues to grow. The private sector was able to only hire 220,000 people rather than 1 million. It was the most disappointing jobs report in over 20 years.

There has also been a slowdown in the middle of a recovery, which is surprising to many. You know, before Joe Biden took office, we saw a fantastic economic recovery, and it was the fastest one in American history. We were bouncing back from the coronavirus shutdown. It is a very different story now. It is no coincidence that this is a direct result of President Biden's policies.

And the policies--the Democrats all voted for this, and the Republicans all voted against it. The Democrats and President Biden, party-line vote, voted to extend a bonus payment for workers to stay home, paying people more to stay at home than they could make at work, in many cases. People aren't lazy. They are logical, and it is a perfectly logical thing to do; that they took up the President on his offer to stay home when they were paid more to stay home than they could make at work.

So, as a result, job openings right now are at an alltime high. Businesses can't find workers. Everywhere I go in Wyoming, I see ``Help Wanted'' signs. The president of Delta Airlines reported they canceled 100 flights last month because they couldn't find enough people to work. They had people ready to fly. They didn't have people who were ready to work.

People want to work. People want to hire others. The incentives coming from government are absolutely wrong. Joe Biden and Big Government are getting in the way of people returning to work.

There is another big problem I heard about. I heard about it this past weekend in Wyoming. The business owners I heard can't find workers because of incentives coming out of this administration--``Help Wanted'' signs up--and from other people asking me: Why are prices going up? Why is inflation back?

You know, under the Obama-Biden administration, we saw the same thing. It is called the middle-class squeeze, where prices are going up faster than wages are going up. April was the worst month for inflation since the great recession 13 years ago.

In effect, inflation means that the money in your wallet buys less. So, in a sense, you have a pay cut. Inflation is a regressive tax. It means the poorer you are, the more it hurts and the fewer things you can buy for the money you have. The big donors in the Democratic league, they are going to be just fine. They won't even notice rising prices. They don't notice when gas prices go up. The Silicon Valley hotshots and the masters of the universe in Manhattan, they are going to be just fine.

It is families--working families in Wyoming and New Mexico and across the country who are struggling to get by. They are the ones who are going to get hurt the most. Just look at the cost of a trip to the grocery store. First, you have to go to the grocery store, and to you get there, you have to drive. Well, the price of gasoline is going up. Across the Nation now, the price of a gallon of gasoline is over $3 a gallon. A year ago, it was about $2 a gallon.

Since Joe Biden took office, it has gone up nearly 70 cents a gallon. That hits people when they fill up because they have to drive getting back to work. In Wyoming and New Mexico, people drive long distances, and we use more gas than most. So people in our States are paying more than many other places.

And I don't think it is a coincidence that the price of gas has gone up. Joe Biden's first action in office was to draw a target on the back of American energy and pull the trigger. He shut down the Keystone XL Pipeline. He banned new oil and gas leases on Federal lands. He has restricted the production of American energy. We need energy. We need it now.

Gas prices affect the price of everything else. It costs more and more to transport things across the country, and that is why we are seeing prices go up at the grocery store. Working families are getting squeezed. And this is a direct result of the policies of the Biden administration.

One reason this is happening is because President Biden is flooding the country with so-called easy money. We are finding out it is not too easy. In the month of March, President Biden signed into law a $2 trillion slush fund for basically liberal spending. It was described as a coronavirus relief package but, in fact, when you take a look at it, less than 9 percent of the money, a very small percentage of the money, actually went for medical care.

He crammed it through Congress--party-line vote, absolutely no Republican support--put the bill on the Nation's credit card, and the Federal Reserve started to print more money. Now, money doesn't grow on trees, doesn't come from a printer, and you cannot print your way to prosperity. The money has to come from somewhere.

History shows that this is a strategy that eventually backfires. Nations try to print free money, and they end up poorer than ever. Get- rich schemes don't work, never have, and they aren't going to this time either. Inflation is going up every single month since the election.

Now, the White House experts tell us not to worry. These are the same experts that predicted there would be 1 million new jobs and people working last month and that the unemployment rate would drop. But much of the $2 trillion that President Biden signed into law hasn't even gone out the door yet, and the President is asking for trillions and trillions more.

The House of Representatives, the other night, put out a proposal related to the infrastructure bill, one that I am trying to work with the administration on. They are requesting $7.1 trillion, an astonishingly high amount of money. If the President gets his way and we keep spending like this at the request from the House, inflation is only beginning.

You don't have to take my word for it. Listen to the liberal economist Larry Summers. He was in the Clinton administration as well as the Obama administration. He was Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury and played an economic role in the Obama administration.

He warned against President Biden's spending spree. He called that $2 trillion slush fund the least responsible spending bill he has seen in four decades--the least responsible spending bill in four decades. That is before all this additional spending may be coming.

Well, this is what he said after April's inflation numbers came out. He said:

I was . . . worried . . . about inflation . . . [yet] it's . . . moved much faster, much sooner than [even] I . . . predicted.

That is Larry Summers--Clinton administration and Obama administration--commenting on the Biden policies.

People who save money their whole lives for retirement are now watching their hard-earned savings go down with a stroke of Joe Biden's pen. Their buying ability is shrinking. People who did the right thing, who worked hard, and saved their money are now being punished by Biden policies.

Under President Biden, we are seeing more government, more taxes, more spending, and, as a result, the American people are suffering. They are seeing flat wages, higher prices, and disappointing job creation. We see gas lines. We see people hoarding gasoline. It sounds like it was in the 1970s. And President Biden should remember those times because he was still a Member of the Senate back then.

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Mr. BARRASSO. Thank you, Mr. President.

President Biden should remember that by 1980, the American people had had enough. We changed course. We thought it was enough of Jimmy Carter, and we elected Ronald Reagan President.

It is time to change course again. Let's create more American energy. Let's set down the taxpayer's credit card. Put it away. Cut up the credit card. Stop the reckless spending.

American families have been paying the price. The people in the middle are being squeezed. The American people expect and deserve better.

Thank you.

Vote on S.J. Res. 13

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