The Economy

Floor Speech

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Mr. MARSHALL. Madam President, this past week, we held 12 townhalls back home in my home State of Kansas. We heard from Kansans about a variety of issues, but thanks to this administration's economic policies, runaway inflation has replaced COVID at the top of the mountain of concerns for the people from my State.

Make no mistake about it--the inflation harming checking accounts of Kansans and all Americans rests squarely on the shoulders of the socialist economic policies coming out of the White House, otherwise known as Bidenomics.

As we all know, yesterday, the Department of Labor reported consumer prices climbed for the third straight month, jumping over 5 percent in June--the largest increase in 13 years. Gas prices are up, groceries are up, cars and truck prices are up, home prices are up, paper products are up, utilities are up, and I could go on and on.

Every day, we see the Bidenomics of inflation impacting hard-working Americans. In fact, inflation is a great social injustice. Inflation is really a regressive tax. It hurts everyone but none more than our seniors and young, hard-working families living paycheck to paycheck.

So what exactly is Bidenomics? Let's look at what they did to create this crisis. Stating the obvious, they are printing money, borrowing money we don't have, and implementing quantitative easing like there is no tomorrow, like there are no generations of America for our future.

Look no further than the cost of utilities. The administration has made it hard to use affordable, clean, traditional energy, and they leveled more and more regulations on the industry.

Manufactured products? Ditto. Bidenomics is paying people more to stay at home than go to work, creating labor shortages and government- created bottlenecks in manufacturing plants. And then, to top things off, we don't even have enough truckdrivers to transport goods to market.

As for gasoline, I bring your attention, which is up 31 percent since January, and according to AAA, it is expected to rise another 20 cents this summer.

Let's think about what all the administration has done. They shut down the Keystone XL. They stopped drilling on government lands and imposed harmful rules and regulations to slow down drilling and make it more expensive. We are now importing more oil from Russia than Alaska.

As a physician in rural Kansas, I had the privilege of delivering a baby most every day, and one thing I always noticed, when that price of gasoline got above $3 a gallon, all of a sudden, those moms were missing their appointments. Today, we are at that number, and we are expecting it to go even higher, unfortunately. Kansans aren't the only ones feeling the squeeze at the pump.

Many popular items we all regularly purchase at the grocery store increased in recent months. The cost of a typical all-American Kansas breakfast--two eggs, bacon, hash browns, toast, and orange juice--is up almost 10 percent.

Pre-COVID, we had the greatest economy in my lifetime, and that came about because we lowered people's taxes, we lowered regulations, and we lowered energy prices.

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