-9999

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, I am here to join some of my colleagues to talk about President Biden's budget proposal. I have heard a lot of the floor speeches today, and I hear a lot of facts and figures that are all very important, but sometimes it is kind of hard to translate that down to what it means around a kitchen table.

I am actually speaking with a very vivid memory of the life I lived as a teenager back in the seventies when my mother and father, with six kids, were always on the economic bubble based on what happens in Washington.

The challenges of working families are significant, and the challenges this budget presents make them even more so.

I will start off with a couple of facts and figures because I think it is important. We have had inflation go up at about 15 percent since President Biden was in office. I am going to talk a little bit about that in a minute.

If you go on Bloomberg or you read the Wall Street Journal, they use words like ``CPI'' and ``PCE'' and all these things. That won't necessarily make a lot of sense to folks who haven't studied it, but it does matter that grocery prices are up by 20 percent since President Biden took office.

That is a 40-year high. And it also matters that rent prices-- something that my family in the seventies, depending upon what Congress did to us, very seldom for us, we would either be in a house that my parents owned or a house or a trailer that my parents rented. And when rents go up like that, the choices get fewer and fewer.

These interest rates--these numbers are hurting the American people, but I want to go back to the interest rate discussion.

The fact of the matter is, we found ourselves in a once-in-a-century challenge with the global pandemic in COVID. And in this body, I joined the vast majority of Democrats and Republicans to do everything we had to do to make things meet. That is why we did the Paycheck Protection Plan, which saved hundreds, if not millions, of jobs. We did a number of things on a bipartisan basis.

So I think that we have to look at that overall inflation number and see how much of that was just necessary so that, in our judgment, we could weather a storm that could have created a global economic disaster. There are some of my Members who say we shouldn't focus on that, but I think we need to be honest with the American people.

However, what we have seen since President Biden came into office was something that really disappointed me, as somebody who has worked across the aisle a number of different times, and that was two partisan bills: one that was $1.9 trillion shortly after President Biden took office; another one, the so-called--I call it the ``Inflation Production Act'' because it has very little to do with reduction. Its official title is the Inflation Reduction Act.

So we are talking about $3 trillion in spending, after we had all decided that the money that we put out there to weather the storm for the global pandemic needed to be spent. We even raised questions about whether or not that money should be spent for what we originally intended. The point to that is the government had spent enough, and then these partisan bills took place, and these partisan bills are absolutely one of the root causes and primary reasons why we are seeing inflation today.

As a matter of fact, the rising inflation is one of the root causes behind what we are seeing, and with that interest rates, because when inflation goes up and the Federal Reserve wants to get inflation back down to 2 percent--we are at 6 percent now. There are some people high- fiving over that. I don't know why. Yes, it is down from 7 percent or so, but we are nowhere near where we need to be.

And inflation happens when government spends too much. That is what we are seeing happen, and, in fact, because of inflation and the need to raise interest rates, now we have banks that have failed, largely based on the inflation rate exposure and what they are having to do when their debts come due.

So we have a budget that even the additional spending--I think the top-line number is $6.8 trillion. Now, to be fair, in the COVID timeframe, it was a little over 4 trillion--I think maybe even a little bit north of that but certainly not at this level. We are spending too much. And the American families, and working families, in particular, people on that economic bubble, are the ones who are going to suffer the most if we don't figure out how to get it right.

So we have got a deficit, a deficit in this budget. We have got new debt in this budget. We have got new taxes in this budget. And we have invalid assumptions about where we are today.

How on Earth can we be making an optimistic assumption about inflation that is somewhere near 2 percent? Does anybody here honestly believe that we are going to be high-fiving and being at 2 percent inflation over the next year and a half or 2 years? I don't believe that that is true. But how can you make that an underlying assumption in the budget--because the President is smart, his advisers are smart; they know that that is a false premise for a budget.

So it is even worse than it may seem. And what makes me sad about this is it is really worse for the people who are already getting 80 cents on the dollar for groceries, for the people who are only getting 90 cents on the dollar for rent today. It all comes back to the people who are struggling the most.

We should talk about some of the other taxes that are in this legislation. Energy. Generally speaking, most people have to buy gas; they have got to heat their homes. Energy taxes are going up. I think the estimate that we have right now is about $20 billion in additional energy taxes.

I don't know about you all, but virtually every time I see a tax increase, if you wait long enough, you will see how that translates into a tax burden on working families. It is inevitable. Corporations ultimately don't pay taxes.

When you are going to increase a corporate tax by 30 percent, who ultimately pays for that? Yes, they may be able to work around the edges and absorb some of that, but what they are going to do is find a way to get the consumer--working families--to pay for that. That is how this works.

That, incidentally, is how the bailout of Silicon Valley Bank is going to work. It is fair, and it would pass a fact check, that the plan that was agreed to over the weekend to resolve Silicon Valley Bank isn't a tax in the way that we describe a tax. It is that tax you get from the IRS, for example. It is that tax you get--sales tax at a register.

Why is this also a hidden tax? Because do you honestly believe that some community bank that is struggling to keep a branch open in an underserved area in rural North Carolina--they are going to make one of two choices. They are either going to make that banking service more expensive or they are simply going to leave that bank. And now we get to unbanked and underbanked areas that are most hard hit, the ones that actually have working families who need banks to serve them.

The other thing--I am not going to get into details, but I am also very concerned with the signal that President Biden has sent on defense.

There is a plus-up in defense spending, but the President's proposed budget--in the worst possible time with all the conflicts that we are dealing with--the Ukraine conflict, the threat from China, the continuing threat in the Middle East. Is this really a time to send the signal that we are going to spend less on national defense?

We have been trying to get to a 355-ship Navy for almost a decade--at least 8 years, as many years as I have been here. I have been on the Senate Armed Services Committee for those 8 years, and we were always talking about how are we going to get to 355? We are just under 300 now.

This budget is suggesting that we may even have a smaller Navy than we have today, when China has one of the largest navies that has ever existed--actually, probably the largest navy that has ever existed in the history of the world.

So we are prioritizing domestic spending; we are turning our back on national security; and all the net increase in spending is based on assumptions that they are making that will ultimately--if they don't believe it, they need to believe it--it is going to hurt working families the most.

Well, the good news about President Biden's budget is that it gives us a real, I think, understanding of what his priorities are.

The better news is that that budget is not going to pass through Congress because we are going to have to work on something that is more responsible, that is not inflationary, that tries to get taxes in line so that people can afford the bill that you will ultimately have to pay.

And I hope that over the next--in the coming months that we can have a discussion about let's start with the people who are hurt most. Let's look at the policies that channel directly into making that burden greater, and let's do something good for the United States and the hard-working families across this country.

And for that reason, I will do everything I can, Mr. President. You are somebody I have worked with on a bipartisan basis. I hope that we can get the Senate and the House to recognize that it is time for us to stand up and produce something that puts working families at the forefront.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source