Build Back Better Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. SMUCKER. Mr. Speaker, what a time to raise taxes and to spend nearly $1 trillion more. The economy is in a recession, food inflation is up 12.9 percent over the past year, gas is up 49 percent, and shelter costs rose by 5.7 percent.

What will families get instead of relief?

They will get $10.6 billion in tax increases, and 50 percent more may get audited by the IRS.

Now, the chairman on the other side has disputed these 87,000 new agents. I would ask him to read page 37 of the bill which provides for $45 billion in new funding to the IRS, specifically for enforcement activities, and ask if he will dispute that as well.

Where does he think $45 billion is going to go?

In fact, we all know the IRS needs a lot of help to provide constituent services. Fourteen times more dollars are going for enforcement than to helping them do their job.

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Mr. SMUCKER. Our Democrat colleagues are also falsely insisting this bill will not raise taxes on small businesses or households with incomes below $400,000. Yet, during Rules Committee debate on the bill, a Ways and Means Democrat admitted that households making less than $400,000 per year will see a tax increase in this bill. He was citing the nonpartisan analysis from JCT.

Don't be fooled. This bill is not a plan to address inflation.

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Mr. SMUCKER. Madam Speaker, there are so many things wrong with the policies in this bill. It will certainly punish Americans' pocketbooks through record-high inflation, new taxes, and an army of IRS agents. It can get even worse.

This drug price setting regime in the bill, which I want to speak about briefly, may very well put American lives at risk. The CBO agreed. Fewer drugs will be developed as a result of the policies in this bill.

According to a study from the University of Chicago, government price controls in the bill will block 342 new cures from reaching market over the coming decades. That means that our constituents and family members who are battling diseases like cancer or Alzheimer's may well be left with no hope of finding a cure.

The university estimates that blocking these cures will collectively take 330 million years off of Americans' lives. That is 1 year per American, which, by the way, is a toll 31 times worse than the COVID-19 pandemic.

American innovation and ingenuity got this country out of the COVID- 19 pandemic. This bill abandons free enterprise in favor of socialism and will cost the taxpayer too many dollars and cancer patients too many years.

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