Providing for Consideration of Senate Amendment to House Amendment to Senate Amendment to H.R. Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, and Providing for Proceedings During the Period From August Through September 2022

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I have got to tell you, being on the Ways and Means Committee and never actually engaging in some of your Rules debate, you guys are really polite with each other.

But here's a simple question: What are the two times in life you think you know everything?

When you turn 13 years old and the day after you get elected to Congress.

I am going to argue the arrogance of this place right now doing a piece of legislation like this. Why is this bill, the underlying bill, the underlying rule here so dangerous? And why this resolution actually fits this.

Basically, the underlying bill is industrial policy. Let's face it, some of the scoring is saying this is $400 billion, and it is the politicization functionally of a category of incredibly important industry, grants that you saw the President a couple days ago talk about--now you are going to have to come in front of me.

Do you understand how dangerous that is for an economy? That arrogance of the political class thinking you understand what the next disruption is. The controlling of intellect, the controlling of taking risk.

If you actually gave a darn about American competitiveness, of where chips--and who knows, quantum, and all the other possibilities of data management, data movement, of processing--are going, you would fix the Tax Code, you would fix the regulatory code.

If you care about China, deal with the made-in-America tax, the fact that they refund the VAT; and when we export, they put the VAT back on, and it makes us not competitive.

You also now have to deal with the reality, when The Economist is writing articles that we are heading toward a glut of chips. Look, I am from Arizona. On the side of my district, I have a $16 billion investment from Taiwan Semiconductor. Down the street I have Intel, I think they are spending $18 billion. It is coming.

But the brain trust around here is we are going to do industrial policy. We are going to control the money. It will be great for fund- raising. And the concept, once again, is we have politicized everything. Think of now the debate we have had the last couple days, is two quarters of negative GDP, well, that is not a recession. Okay, technically it might not be because the definition of recession now is a committee that is politicized.

Could we at least have some benchmarks here in Congress, here in Washington that we know what the rules are? I don't mean your type of rules. I mean the rules for society, the rules for tax policy, the rules for how we allocate capital, because you are offering right now functionally $400 billion of subsidies, controls, management, and industrial policy, government.

Why don't you just nationalize the chip industry because you are pretty much heading that direction.

This is a simple amendment. In some ways, it is actually very symbolic of we can't even agree anymore on what a recession is.

Okay, fine. Let's just make it a rule instead of making it a committee of individuals that get to express their opinion and their feelings.

I would love to actually offer something more complex. Maybe we should go back to the old misery index debates of how many people can't afford living anymore. You do realize the inflation from just the last 12 months, my constituents--I represent the highest inflation in the Nation--get to work about 6 weeks without compensation. The purchasing power of their lives has crashed so much, they now work a month-and-a- half for free.

These are the brilliant policies this place has brought. It is time we actually start to set some benchmarks on what the rules are.

Simple amendment. Just saying, hey, we will call it a recession when we have two consecutive quarters, and we can stop the politicization of everything here in Washington.

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