Local Business Taxes, Regulations, and Reduced Workforce

Floor Speech

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Mr. MEUSER. Madam Speaker, I thank my good friend from Missouri, the Republican leader of the Small Business Committee, Mr. Luetkemeyer.

Madam Speaker, I am, as all of us are, I think, deeply concerned about the adverse impacts that the Democrats' budget reconciliation plan, as it is called, will have on our Nation's small businesses.

Today, small businesses are battling severe labor shortages, escalating energy costs, inflationary pressures, supply chain disruptions, and potential mandates that are causing uncertainty and threatening small businesses' viability. That is happening today.

All Members of Congress should be focused on pro-growth policies to help empower small businesses, startups, and American entrepreneurs. We should be discussing a smart deregulatory environment that allows the smallest firms to operate independently.

Instead, our Democrat colleagues are attempting to push through completely partisan legislation with trillions of dollars in reckless spending and over $420 billion, at least, in tax hikes on Main Street job creators.

Small businesses need better and they deserve better. Approximately two-thirds of American jobs are created by small businesses, so their strength is our Nation's economic strength. President Biden continues to tell business owners, and all of us, that this bill is going to reduce inflation and create jobs.

This reconciliation bill--by the way, that is reconciliation with a ``W'' because it will do the exact opposite. It will wreck our economy, unless somehow the President and the Democrats have figured out how to defy basic economic principles, which is pretty much like trying to defy gravity.

You cannot disincentive work and create more workers. You can't flood the economy with more dollars and drive down inflation. This just isn't how it works. It is against the simple laws of cause and effect.

Presently, we have a labor crisis that is at historic levels. How do new government programs that disincentivize work support millions of small business owners who are struggling to fill open jobs?

Has anyone ever met a single small business owner who believes raising their taxes will somehow help them build back better? The answer is a resounding no.

Most of us know this firsthand. I worked in small business for years. I hold regular business townhalls and talk with small businesses every day. We hold hearings where small businesses are saying the same thing.

Higher taxes, pending mandates, expanding the IRS--that will be a welcomed addition to their day--inflation, energy costs. I just got a text from a businessperson sending me a picture of over $4 a gallon gasoline and saying--well, I won't repeat what he said. Product shortages and labor shortages are smothering and perplexing American businesses. Small business owners are literally pulling their hair out. They are working harder and getting less for it.

Small businesses are not asking us to spend billions on a civilian climate corps or more IRS agents or amnesty, but they are demanding that Congress not raise their taxes, not issue confusing mandates, and that we won't make it more difficult for them not to just prosper but to survive.

It is time for the Democrats to halt this reckless tax-and-spend spree that does nothing but exacerbate the numerous crises facing Americans today. Reconciliation is a bad bill, it has been an even worse process, and it is truly an insult to small businesses who are counting on us.

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