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Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, yesterday, President Biden released his budget request for the next fiscal year. Here is the top line: He wants the American people to take on more than $16 trillion in cumulative deficits over the next decade. The President who told the Nation last week that he was cutting the deficit just put out a budget request that would do the exact opposite.

Unfortunately, this is hardly the only pledge that President Biden's request would break. After repeatedly promising not to raise taxes on households making less than $400,000 a year, the President is now selling a plan that would heap $5 trillion in new and expanded taxes on American workers and job creators.

Let's put this in perspective. The Biden administration's budget proposal would raise taxes as a share of the U.S. economy to levels our Nation hasn't seen since World War II.

Let me say that again. President Biden wants to bring taxes as a share of GDP higher than they have been since the middle of the fight against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Now, I have been pretty frank in my assessment that the threats America is facing today are as dangerous as we have seen since the Cold War, if not the era of the Axis Powers. But here is the rub: The President apparently only wants to tax the American people at wartime levels. By contrast, he shows no interest in the sort of defense investments that were needed to squeeze the Soviets in the 1980s, let alone to liberate Europe and Asia in the 1940s.

It is far more expensive to fight wars than to deter them. American defense spending during World War II spiked at 37 percent of GDP; during the Korean war, 14 percent of GDP; Vietnam, 9 percent of GDP. By contrast, the Reagan buildup that helped end the Cold War hit only 6 percent of GDP in 1986. But today, in a renewed era of major power competition, the Biden administration appears to lack the will even to sustain such credible deterrence.

Here lies another broken promise: After engaging in political hostage-taking over the debt limit last year, the Biden administration apparently doesn't intend to honor their own agreement on spending limits. The latest budget request uses accounting gimmicks to blow clear through agreed-upon limits for domestic discretionary spending. Yet, at the same time, administration officials insist it should ``not have been a surprise'' that the President sees spending caps on national defense as sacrosanct.

Of course, this reckless behavior follows a predictable pattern. Under this Commander in Chief, U.S. military faces the same historic inflation as everyone else in our country. As gas and groceries get more expensive, so do the capabilities our servicemembers need.

Yet this is the fourth straight time the Biden administration has turned in a defense budget request that amounts to a net cut after inflation. Apparently, the President hadn't yet learned the lessons of Bidenomics; instead, for more than 3 years, a global superpower has responded to growing coordination amongst its major adversaries, a restored haven for terrorists in Afghanistan, the first major land war in Europe since 1945, the deadliest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust on October 7 in Israel, and breakneck military spending and modernizations from our top strategic rival but cutting our own military strength.

In a budget request full of gross excess in all the wrong places, neglecting the national defense is the takeaway that history will remember as the most alarming.

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