Mr. President. Mr. President, I join my colleagues today to make a simple request: Let the people see the bill. Too often, this body acts without due time given to hear from all of the ones we represent: the American people. That has…
Mr. President.
Mr. President, I join my colleagues today to make a simple request: Let the people see the bill.
Too often, this body acts without due time given to hear from all of the ones we represent: the American people. That has absolutely been the case this year as Congress has rushed through massive, 1,000- or 2,000-plus-page bills, spending billions or trillions of tax dollars without valuable input.
Now you ask us to vote on a massive bill compiled just this evening. That is wrong, and the American public know it is wrong. We haven't had the time to read this. No one has, in fact. This entire bill as it sits here before us has only been under consideration for a little over 2 weeks, with thousands of pages, and it has been amended numerous times, including many times today. It spends hundreds of billions of tax dollars.
As my colleagues know well, I am as vocal an opponent of Communist China as anyone. America must take decisive action to protect our interests and combat the threats posed by China's Communist regime. If the purpose of this legislation is to address that urgent issue, it should do that with input and feedback from the public.
We should table this vote, let the Members return to our States, hear from constituents, and then move forward in a timely manner with the legislation after we have heard from our constituents. This is a simple and reasonable request. Therefore, I ask the Senator to modify her request to delay further consideration of S. 1260 until the week of June 7.
Mr. President, I want to thank my colleagues for their concerns about this bill.
You know, I have been up here a little over 2 years. I originally ran for office because I had the same concerns about where the State of Florida was going as I have concerns about where our Federal Government is going.
I ran for Governor in 2010, and in the 4 years ending at the end of 2010, the State of Florida had lost 832,000 jobs. Home prices dropped in half. We had I think close to a million people on unemployment, and we had I think a little over 1.1 million homes in foreclosure.
If you looked at all the articles, they said that opportunity for the Sunshine State was over. And I didn't believe it. I believe that if you run government in a responsible manner, you have unbelievable opportunities for individuals. The reason I believe this is, it is the life that I have had the opportunity to live in this country.
I grew up in the--I was born in the great State of Illinois. We lived in public housing. I had a single mom, and she told me that I could be anything. She said: If you will study hard, if you will go to church all the time, if you are an Eagle Scout and you go figure out how to work, there is no limitation. You can build a company. You can do anything you want.
I actually believed her, and I had the opportunity to do that. I built companies, employed a lot of people, and had a lot of opportunity.
So I ran for Governor in 2010 with the belief that you could turn around the State of Florida. At the time, I believe there was--you know, the way the country and the State of Florida were going, it was not a great place for families like mine growing up. So I ran a campaign of 7 steps to 700,000 jobs over 7 years. You know, all the economists said, well, we couldn't get 700,000 jobs in 7 years. It was not doable. Most of them said we couldn't even get single-digit unemployment in 7 or 8 years. People wouldn't move to the State.
So I shocked everybody, and I won a primary and I won a general election, and I set about to do exactly what I said we could do.
We reduced taxes. Every year, we watched how we spent the money. We allocated our dollars where we could get more jobs. We added 1.7 million jobs--not 700,000 jobs; we added 1.7 million jobs. When we did that, what happened was, our revenues grew, and we were able to have record funding for education, for the environment, and for transportation. We ended up becoming No. 1 in higher education; I guess generally about the top five in K-12 education; 47-year low in our crime rate; and record funding for things like the Everglades.
So I believed you could do the same thing up here, and that is why I came up here. I came up here with the belief that if you start looking at how you spend the money--and the way we did it in Florida was, we had--there are about 4,000 lines to the budget, and we went through every line in the budget every year, and we said: Do we get a return? What do we get for that? If we didn't get a return, then we didn't do it the next year. So my goal is to do the exact same thing up here.
Now let's look at where our country is right now. We have almost $30 trillion of debt. We are running multitrillion-dollar deficits. That is not sustainable.
And, by the way, who are we going to hurt long term? It is not going to be the rich. It is going to be the poor. It is going to be the people on fixed income. You can look at the numbers.
Look at inflation numbers right now. Inflation is caused by reckless spending. That is what it is caused by. The spending we have done this year is unbelievable--$1.9 trillion. It was supposedly for COVID, but it has very little to do with COVID--less than 10 percent--and 1 percent for vaccines.
Let's look at what has happened to inflation. In the 12 months that ended in April, the Consumer Price Index was up 4.2 percent. It is pretty surprising that we are up over 6 percent. Milk in 12 months, up over 5 percent; bread over 7 percent, and gas over 51 percent.
Now, if you have a lot of money, that is not going to change your life. But if you are struggling for food or you are struggling to put food on the table, a 5-percent or 7-percent increase has a pretty big impact. When you see that when the cost to fill up your gas tank to go to work dramatically increases, it has a pretty big impact. All this is caused by government spending--reckless government spending--excessive government spending.
You can't run trillion-dollar deficits. You can't have a Federal Reserve that continues to buy treasuries every month without ending up with inflation. And that is exactly where we are.
The only way out of this is to start watching how we spend our money. In this bill, there might be some good things in this bill, but we are spending money recklessly.
So, I have a real concern. Why are we rushing through this? Why don't we take the time--take the time so all
Americans have a chance to read it, know what is in it, tell us what they like, what they don't like? Why rush through it, where nobody in this Chamber knows everything that is in this bill? It is impossible. It has gone way too fast with all these amendments. There is no way this could even happen.
China
Mr. President, the other thing I want to talk about is China. Communist China is an adversary. They are not a competitor. They have become an adversary, and we have got to learn how to stand up.
Just putting more money in a government program is not how we are going to compete with China. How we are going to compete with China is to build up American companies. Government doesn't do that.
I have run a company. It is not what government does.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of Winston Churchill's speech to Westminster College, where he famously declared: ``From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an ``iron curtain'' has descended across the continent.'' For many, these words were seen as some of the first announcing the start of the Cold War.
Today, the threat of communism is once again spreading across Eastern Europe. The malicious and oppressive government of Communist China has shown it is eager to assert its power across the globe, undermine democracy and human rights, violate U.S. sanctions, and prop up dictators.
We have to do something to figure out how to compete better against Communist China. The United States has to recognize that a new Cold War is upon us and, with our allies, confront this threat and defeat this spread of tyranny using every diplomatic and military option at our disposal.
Communist China's intentions for world domination are clear in its recent $400 billion, 25-year deal with Iran to provide the Ayatollah with a steady military partner, investment source, and oil customer. Communist China has now secured a pathway to further extend the reach of its Belt and Road Initiative into the Middle East, while strengthening its relationship with the world's greatest state sponsor of terror. This dangerous development comes as Communist China continues its assault to destroy the democracy in Hong Kong, shows increased military aggression toward Taiwan, and furthers its embrace of Cuba's abhorrent and oppressive Communist regime--not to speak of what they are doing down in Venezuela.
The position we find ourselves in today is due to decades of appeasement by Washington politicians and corporate America, an attitude that is carried on by many of President Biden's Cabinet members. Throughout the confirmation process, nominee after nominee failed to show a true comprehensive comprehension of Communist China's threat to American security. Meanwhile, we continue to see American corporations put profits over people, ignoring Communist China's horrible human rights abuses and the genocide it is committing to preserve their forced labor-driven supply chains.
While I have no faith that Biden will be tough on China, I have welcomed and my colleagues have acknowledged the need to comprehensively combat the influence and power of Communist China through legislation.
Sadly, we are squandering this opportunity. I want to be very clear. Any plan that tries to broker a compromise on issues over and above the needs of American national security, American jobs, or human rights will do nothing more than perpetuate the status quo.
Since being elected to the U.S. Senate, I have sponsored and supported more than 40 pieces of legislation focused on addressing the security of our supply chain, holding communist China fully responsible for disgusting human rights abuses and genocide against Uighur Muslims, enhancing our ability to innovate and develop new technology, and countering Beijing's unfair trade practices.
This is where our legislative efforts must begin. We need to cut Communist China off from the American economy that it relies so heavily upon to feed its Communist oppression machine. There is no point in sacrificing our interests for the hope of compromise with a country that will never live up to its end of any agreement, is openly committing genocide against millions of Uighur Muslims, and continuously threatens not only America's security but that of our allies in the Asia-Pacific region.
Communist China is focused on one thing--world domination through oppression and Communist rule. We must not be naive in thinking that Communist China wants to operate in the modern world order and cooperate with other world powers. General Secretary Xi wants to reshape the world order into his image and is willing to strong-arm anyone who refuses to give in to his interests and those of the Chinese Communist Party.
If Communist China wants to enact a plan of world domination, the United States must respond appropriately. The United States must demonstrate America's strength and resolve, and our commitment to our allies. In this new Cold War, we have the chance to prove once again that the American style of government, free enterprise, and civil society remain the best system in the world
As the world's greatest beacon of freedom and democracy, the United States must do everything we can, in conjunction with our allies, to curb Communist China's reach, counter their policies, and punish those who are guilty of the ongoing genocide against the Uighurs. Whether we like it or not, we are in a new Cold War with Communist China.
I urge my colleagues to join me in actions that display the true resolve of the United States in addressing Communist China's destabilizing actions.
Here is what I am talking about. For too long, the United States has foolishly enabled Communist China's oppressive dictatorship, which is now the greatest national and economic security threat. Today, Communist China's Belt and Road Initiative actively undermines America's standing around the world with a strategy to dominate militarily, economically, and technologically. It has become clear that strategic decoupling from Communist China is the most effective way to limit General Secretary Xi Jinping's power and protect American jobs and security. However, our politicians in Washington and business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce still argue that decoupling from Communist China hurts American businesses. They are wrong, blind to the plans of General Secretary Xi and the pain of his citizens, and are more concerned with short-term profits than the future of our country.
As we chart a new course to advance American trade and interests, I believe we must adopt a bipartisan ``freedom-first'' strategy which protects freedom around the world from Communist China's growing power and aggression, restores our country to global leadership, and keeps American interests first.
What I am proposing is straightforward and achievable. First, we must acknowledge what has worked in our efforts to ensure free trade and keep policies in place that will hold Communist China accountable.
Next, the United States has to take decisive steps to strategically to remove Communist China from our supply chain while supporting the return of critical industries to American shores and promoting ``buy American'' policies.
Third, we must engage the international community and secure the full support of our allies to create a maximum pressure campaign with Communist China until it comes into compliance with all U.S. and international trade laws.
Finally, the United States must lead the world and take bold action to shine a light on and demand an end to Communist China's horrible human rights abuses and the horrific genocide it is committing on its own people.
The Trump administration took unprecedented action to thoroughly investigate Communist China's trade practices and found it had long been committing forced technology transfers, intellectual property theft, and espionage. The United States took action over the past 4 years to prohibit Americans from investing in Chinese companies that support Communist China's military, added those companies to a trade blacklist, banned imports of cotton from China's Xinjiang region over forced labor and protected American universities and research
labs from Chinese government spying and IP theft.
In Congress, I have fought for more than a year to prevent the U.S. Government from purchasing technology like drones with American tax dollars from Chinese companies backed by their government. We must keep these and other proven policies in place. It is time we acknowledge the fact that when American families buy products made in China, they are supporting this Communist regime.
We must get Communist China out of our supply chain. We can do this through simultaneously separating ties from companies backed by the Chinese Communist Party and rebuilding American-made products. By properly labeling products with country-of-origin information and encouraging businesses to return home, we can end our trade inequity with Communist China and create countless American jobs that support families and communities across the Nation.
While decoupling must begin now, we know it is not a process that will be completed overnight, and supply chains must readjust to remove themselves from the grasp of the Chinese Communist Party. Knowing that Communist China needs to live up to its agreements, the United States must lead the world in demanding the full enforcement of all U.S. and international trade laws.
Organizations like the World Trade Organization can no longer sit in the pocket of Communist China, and the Biden administration must insist that the WTO enforce trade practices fairly. This will require a coalition-style approach and the United States is well positioned to lead this important work to create increased accountability and real consequences for the abusive trade practices that Communist China has relied on for too long.
Finally, the freedom-loving nations of the world must ban together to say that Communist China's egregious human rights violations won't be accepted. General Secretary Xi is taking away the basic human rights of the people of Hong Kong and leading a brutal genocide of Uighurs, imprisoning more than a million in concentration camps. The State Department cannot back down from officially designating this as genocide, and other countries must follow this example.
That is why I led a bipartisan effort to demand that the International Olympic Committee move its 2022 Winter Games out of Beijing unless Communist China addresses these human rights abuses. The world is counting on the United States to stand firm against the use of slave labor in manufacturing and trade.
With regard to the Olympics, there are 180 human rights organizations around the world that have asked for the Olympics to be moved. The Parliament in Canada has asked for the Olympics to be moved. The International Olympic Committee has done nothing. It is despicable that international Olympics hasn't already asked the Olympics to be moved or has not moved the Olympics, and I have asked for all the sponsors of international Olympics to work to try to make sure the Olympics gets moved. But American companies have to do their part to rid their supply chains of such abuses.
The United States and so many countries around the globe stand for freedom of democracy for all people. Now we must unify and lead the important effort to accomplish this common goal, put American jobs and workers first, and counter the harm and unfair trade practices of Communist China that have been ignored for decades.
But surrendering America's strategic position to Communist China isn't the only failure of the legislation we are considering today. The other equally significant dangerous issue is the additional deficit spending this bill includes, driving America even deeper into debt.
Since first being elected to represent Florida, I have fought hard to call out wasteful spending and offer solutions to make our government accountable to the taxpayers. This should be the foundation of our work and service to our constituents. We can't forget that every dollar the Federal Government spends is borrowed from the American people.
Sadly, over the past 2 years that I have been in Washington, I realized that while many politicians make promises to uphold these values, few put their words into practice. It is no wonder, then, that our national debt continues to grow and grow and grow. In 2020 alone, the United States increased its debt by more than $4 trillion. Today, as we know, it is headed to $30 trillion.
America is clearly in a debt crisis, and we need to start talking about it and take decisive action to reverse course. That is why every time I am faced with the question of spending taxpayer dollars on government programs, I ask myself some simple, yet important, questions: What is the plan to pay for it? What is the return on investment for American families? Are there other programs already doing the same thing? When was the last time this program was reviewed for its effectiveness? Does the proposal include measures to prevent waste and fraud and ensure accountability? Are there unnecessary regulations making this more expensive than it needs to be?
Asking these questions isn't a novel idea. It is the same process I went through every day when I was Governor of Florida. That is what most Americans go through when making financial decisions at home or for their businesses. Families do it every night at their kitchen table. No family would needlessly spend money without a plan. No business can afford to not get a return on their investments. But here, there is no focus on return on investments. The bill we are talking about, we have no idea how much money we are going to spend.
Spending without consequence isn't how things work in the real world. It is not how things should work in government. Congress's decades of failure to think and act responsibly has led to enormous deficits, insurmountable debt, and out-of-control spending.
Right now, our country is spending out of control. And even before the pandemic, when the economy was booming, the Federal Government was running trillion-dollar annual deficits. This has got to stop. We need real reforms. That is why I proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution requiring a supermajority vote in each House of Congress to impose or raise any tax or fee and provide line-item veto authority for the President of the United States.
I have also led the charge to set a ``No Budget, No Pay'' policy in Federal law so that if Congress doesn't pass a budget on time--its most important constitutional responsibility--Members don't get paid. It is simple. You don't do your job; you don't get paid. During our vote- arama, we voted on this, and unfortunately my colleagues on the other side of the aisle all voted against it.
With America in such desperate need of leadership to fix our spending and debt problem, you would think that the first thing President Biden would do is to set a plan and work hard to make things right. Well, think again.
Four weeks after Congress spent $900 billion to address the economic impacts of COVID, Biden began his Presidency with a call for Congress to spend another $1.9 trillion. Then the Democrats passed it by themselves, despite the fact that we didn't know how much of the $4.9 trillion stimulus funding already allocated had been spent.
Today, President Biden is--soon President Biden is going to propose it sounds like a $7 trillion budget. It will take the United States to its highest sustained levels of Federal spending since World War II. This is on top of the $7.1 trillion in new spending Biden has proposed in his first 4 months in office--$7.1 trillion. You can't make this stuff up.
I think we are only going to collect about $3.5 trillion or so in revenues. How can we keep spending money like this? No family can do it. No person can do it.
I have been warning about the danger of reckless spending for years, and now we are seeing it play out in real life. President Biden's liberal dreams of big government, big debt, and high taxes are no longer speculation.
Now he is rolling out his plans for systemic socialism plainly for all to see. He has already proposed $7.1 trillion in spending in just 4 months, and now another $6 or $7 trillion of American taxpayer dollars on top of that, all while holding back needed funding for our military.
By the way, as we added those 1.7 million jobs when I was Governor of
Florida, we paid off a third of the State debt--over $10 billion--and cut over $10 billion in taxes. Everything we should be doing up here, we did in Florida, and we can do it here if we will start looking at how we spend our money.
Biden wants to redistribute wealth, making everyone dependent on government while asking our brave men and women in uniform to go without. It is systemic socialism, and it is already hurting American families.
America is in a nearly $30 trillion debt crisis, but that won't stop Biden's tone-deaf march toward socialism. As the President plans to spend our Nation into oblivion, 83 percent of Americans are already tightening their budget due to inflation pressures, and 87 percent of Americans already believe that we have significantly overspent money, and they know that the Federal Government's spending is causing their inflation
I grew up poor, and I know what it is like to watch my family struggle with inflation because of failed government policies and reckless spending. I watched my mom struggle to put food on the table and watch her as food prices went up. She struggled to put food on the table, and that is what we are doing to families right now all across this country.
Washington can't spend like this anymore. Debt has consequences. Massive spending has consequences. Tax increases have consequences. It all hurts America's poorest families the most.
And something else to think about: This summer, Congress and President Biden will face a critical choice of raising or suspending the debt ceiling. Congress has made a habit of maxing out America's credit card with no plan to pay for it for decades. Failure to rein in deficit spending will inevitably cause--and it is already happening-- high inflation, devastating the purchasing power of all Americans, and disproportionately impacting low- and fixed-income families.
Since the Biden administration doesn't have a plan to address this crisis, I hope they will join me in fighting for fiscal restraint and the adoption of sustainable and responsible debt reduction measures like we did in Florida and passage of reforms that produce concrete, enforceable limitations of deficit spending.
Americans understand they can't spend without consequences. It is time for government to embrace this same mentality. We did a poll earlier this year--I saw a poll earlier this year--80 percent of Americans are worried about the Federal debt, and they are concerned it is going to lead to financial problems for our country.
We have to scrutinize every bill we have, including this bill. Are we spending this money well? No one has had time to read this bill. Too often, lawmakers in Washington pass bills without having time to read them before they vote. These are new laws that impact American families and businesses and sometimes even authorize billions or trillions in tax dollar spending, and we don't have time to read these things. It is complete Washington dysfunction. It needs to end.
This bill is thousands of pages. It spends hundreds of billions of dollars. Growing up, my family lived paycheck to paycheck. My mom and my adopted dad struggled, but my mom instilled in me the value of counting pennies--a value I utilized as a businessman for four decades before I thought about running for office. I had to make payroll. I had to make sure there was money in the bank to make sure everybody got paid. I had to make sure we never ran out of money. First 10 rules of business: Don't run out of money.
My employees counted on me every time to make sure we never ran out of money. And if you look at what the Federal Government is doing, people are scared to death of what is going to happen to their Social Security, what is going to happen to their Medicare as this country racks up unbelievable deficits and unbelievable debt
When I ran for Governor, I just said: We are not going to do this. We are going to figure out how we can live within our means, and we did it. You know, we watched the pennies. As Governor, I had a line-item veto, and we went through every line every year, and, again, if we didn't get a return, we didn't do it.
When I took over Florida, it was like a failing business. I was worried about what it was going to be like for my children and my grandchildren in the State that I enjoyed living in. I wanted to make sure everybody had the same opportunity I had. We did it in Florida. We turned around the State, and we can do the same thing here.
You know, I was the first Governor in 20 years who actually paid down debt. Actually, for 20 straight years, the State of Florida increased its debt over $1 billion a year, and we paid off over $10 billion in 8 years.
So we can do it here, but we have got to start, with this bill, taking our time and looking at it line by line. Do we need to spend this money? Do we get a return for this money? Is this good for our taxpayers? Is this good for the families of our country? And if it is not, we have got to stop doing this.
I want the next generation to have the same opportunities I had to live their dreams in this country. If we continue down this path, that opportunity is going to be lost. At some point, the bill is going to come due.
You know, Robert Baden-Powell's famous plea to ``try and leave this world a little better than you found it'' has actually fallen on deaf ears here. We are not clearly leaving this country in a better shape. You would never do this to your kids and grandkids, leave the debt that we are leaving our kids and our grandkids.
The Federal Government takes in a little over $3 trillion. I think this year it is $3.5 trillion and it is spending trillions more. You just can't keep doing that. Right now, the interest alone on our nearly $30 trillion national debt is over half a trillion dollars a year. That is just interest. What are we getting for that? We get nothing for that.
It doesn't do anything to help with our families. It doesn't help us build our military. It doesn't pay for Social Security. It doesn't pay for Medicare. We know Medicare is running out of money. What happens when Medicare runs out of money? Doctors and hospitals are going to have to be paid significantly less or Medicare recipients are going to have to get less care. I don't want any Medicare recipient to get less care.
Social Security is running out of its cash reserves by 2034. There is an automatic cut in Social Security. That is not fair. People who are paying into their Social Security plan, they are not being told that there is not going to be enough money there.
In this country, Medicaid costs are increasing by about 5 percent a year--5 percent. I mean, our revenues are not growing 5 percent a year. And these programs are called mandatory programs, so we don't have any control over them. I was shocked when I came up here that we don't even look at the cost of those programs. We don't even pass a budget with regard to those programs. I mean, it makes it convenient that we don't have to vote on it, but it is not fair to the American taxpayer.
We see what is happening when debt rises. I mean, if you look at what happens with a company--when a company, when its debt rises and they can't pay their debt, what happens? They go bankrupt. And who gets hurt? All the employees who work there, they get hurt. Their customers get hurt; suppliers gets hurt; and everybody gets hurt. It is just a fact that is what happens. We have to think the same way here. We have to think how do we reduce the debt, not how do we increase the debt.
Just this week, I held a press conference showing how the Democrats' reckless spending has increased the cost of groceries and gasoline. Inflation also raises rent; not to mention it makes it hard to get a student loan or loan to start a business when the interest rate goes up.
It is just like I mentioned, 83 percent of Americans already tighten their belt. They are worried, and they know that it is caused by what we are doing up here.
I have been shocked that President Biden has been completely silent about inflation. He has not said a word about it. And if you listen to Secretary Yellen, all she says is we need to spend more money. I mean, they are not looking at what is happening with inflation.
Next week, we get the CPI numbers and PPI numbers, and we will see what they are. But you watch what is happening to families. The poor families and those on fixed incomes are getting hurt while all these prices go up.
We have got to stop this. The April consumer price index rose by eight-tenths of 1 percent. That is almost 10 percent on an annualized basis. Annualized basis inflation rate for the past 3 months has been 7.2 percent and 6.2 percent for the first 4 months
The core inflation rate, excluding food and energy, on an annual basis, grows in April by 11 percent--a rate not exceeded since June of 1982. While these price increases are significant, broad, and accelerating, are they temporary effects? We don't know. We don't know if it is temporary. Some people say they are temporary, but who knows. But are they going to go back down?
As traditionally understood, inflation is too much money chasing too few goods, and where does that money come from? It comes from reckless Federal spending. While it may seem old-fashioned to ask in this brave new world of monetary theory, where Joe Biden declared last year that ``Milton Friedman isn't running the show anymore,'' is there reason to be concerned that the broad money supply, M2, grew by 24 percent over the last year, a postwar year high? Never, in the history of this country have you seen money supply grow like that without having significant inflation.
And if you go back to what happened, the only way they stopped the significant inflation in the past is significantly higher interest rates, which hurts every family but especially the family on a fixed income and the poor families because their wages are not going to go up like that.
So 24.6 percent, that is more than twice the rate it grew--on inflation, it is more than twice the rate it grew before inflation reached 13.4 percent in 1979 and almost three times the rate it grew amid the guns-and-butter spending surge during the Vietnam war.
And what about the extraordinary stimulus spending of the past year? Larry Summers, the highly respected former Treasury Secretary and economic adviser to Presidents Obama and Clinton, warned that the Biden stimulus would create purchasing power ``at least three times the size of the output shortfall'' and would be ``the least responsible macroeconomic policies we've had in the past 40 years.''
We need only look at the Bureau of Economic Analysis comparison of the first quarter of 2021 to a year earlier to confirm Mr. Summers' concerns. Wages and salaries are already significantly larger in the first quarter of 2021 than they were before the pandemic. Transfer of payments have almost doubled, and personal savings have surged an extraordinary $4.1 trillion from $1.6 trillion a year ago.
The end of the pandemic isn't only unleashing the pent-up demand of the tremendous shutdown economy. It is opening the floodgate to a torrent of spending fueled by fiscal and monetary stimulus not seen since the Civil War. When inflation happens, first off, you end up with a mindset of inflation. Somebody stopped me the other day and said: I know car prices are up. Should I buy now because car prices are going to be up even higher in a year?
With that mentality, that is what causes inflation to continue to go up--when Americans start believing it is going to go up, it is going to keep going up even as a result of reckless spending. But once they get in that mindset, it is very difficult to stop it.
The U.S. economy clearly has the power to iron out the natural problems of restarting production, but the very nature of the subsidies in the $6 trillion Biden administration stimulus relief and the infrastructure bills constrain production.
You know, you look at what is happening with trying to get jobs. There are about 8 million job openings in the State. A year ago, I was here speaking on the Senate floor saying that you can't pay people more not to work than to work. I mean, people are going to make a logical economic decision, and they are going to do the right things for their families.
So now what we are seeing is we have job openings all across the country. In my State, we have restaurants--we have a lot of small businesses that can't find workers. I talked to an individual who has a cement company today. He couldn't get truckdrivers. What we have done to ourselves makes no sense.
In its modern incarnation, socialism denies that government incentives and constraints have anything to do with people's decisions to work, save, and invest, but we all know that is not true.
These Federal supplemental payments to unemployment have just caused--it has caused a catastrophe for our small businesses.
The Congressional Budget Office found that the Affordable Care Act would cut the number of hours worked by as much as 2 percent. So how can expanding ObamaCare in the recent stimulus not affect employment? It does. The same applies to expansions of COBRA, the monthly child credit, and other income supports.
Historically in America, the best housing, healthcare, transportation, nutrition, and childcare program was always a job--that is what our parents always told us--not some government program. If you give people things they typically get from a job, don't be surprised when they don't take the job.
The Biden administration claims that it hasn't seen evidence that its unemployment bonus is keeping people from work, but we know that is not true. I have talked to people who work in the Biden administration. While Joe Biden will say that, they acknowledge it is not true. With the Labor Department reporting record job openings and the National Federation of Independent Business detailing a record number of small businesses offering jobs but finding no takers, that claim is not credible.
Since the War on Poverty began, government transfer payments have risen to provide more than 90 percent of the income of the bottom 20 percent of income-earning households, and the labor force participation rate among work-age households has collapsed to 36 percent from 68 percent. How is that good for those families?
You get a lot of satisfaction out of having a job. We need to have safety nets, but we don't want to put ourselves in the position that people become dependent on government payments.
The Biden administration also asks Americans to believe that they can raise income, corporate, and death taxes, smother the private sector with regulations, kill the fossil fuel industry, and fill the regulatory Agencies with activists fundamentally hostile to the Nation's economic system, and it is not going to have any effect on economic performance. We know that is not true.
Back in the real world, much of what the President is doing will impede the recovery, reduce economic capacity, and fuel inflation. And who does it hurt? It always hurts the poorest families, always hurts the person who is struggling to find work, always hurts the person on a fixed income. That is who gets hurt.
If Congress sees inflation as a real threat, it should stop spending. Unfortunately, right now, Congress doesn't think that way. We can see what is happening in the real world. Any unobligated balances in the Biden stimulus or previous stimulus bills can no longer be justified using current economic circumstances and should be rescinded, or if we are going to spend new money with, hopefully, a way to get a return on it, we should still spend it with unspent stimulus money.
Rescinding the stimulus authority in the Biden stimulus at the end of the fiscal year on September 30 would save over $700 billion--$700 billion--according to the CBO. Rescinding authority sooner and including all previous stimulus bills would save us $1 trillion.
Congress should repeal the enhanced unemployment benefits and reinstate the Clinton-era work requirements for welfare. Work requirements should be applied to all unearned benefits to anyone except the elderly, the disabled, and students.
Congress should adopt a real, enforceable budget that funds infrastructure and the other functions of the government without further expanding the deficit and debt.
The debt ceiling, which expires on August 1, should be used to set into place a long-term, binding program to stop the Federal debt from growing beyond 100 percent of gross domestic product. If the inflation of the 1970s and 1980s has returned, it is the ``Gods of the Copybook Headings'' that have returned once again to teach us that
water will wet us, fire will burn, and the government can't give us something for nothing.
Debt also has an impact on interest rates. As interest rates go up, the interest on the national debt will increase faster and faster. It is going to be a debt spiral, and it is going to be very hard to deal with.
We have low interest rates now. If you look at the 50-year average of the 10-year Treasury, it is significantly higher than it is now. If that happens, it will be very difficult to fund any program we care about, whether it is Medicare, Social Security, or fund the military. When interest rates go up--and interest rates historically have always gone up when you have significant deficit spending, when you have significant inflation--then we are going to have a very difficult time funding the programs we care about.
I hope we don't end up having a sovereign debt crisis, but we are staring right at it right now.
None of this is to say I don't have hope for our future. I have clear hope for it. We can do it. We did it in Florida. Every time our country is faced with a challenge, we have shown our ability to rise above it, but if we don't acknowledge it, it doesn't happen.
So as long as I am a Member of the Senate, I am going to fight to rein in the out-of-control spending that is putting our country's future at risk. I have to. I have seven grandkids. I am going to do my best to leave this country in a better position than when I started.
But if you just look at the last 20 years, at the unbelievable increase in debt--I think when Ronald Reagan got elected, the national debt was under $1 trillion, and now it is close to $30 trillion. So we have to get focused on this. We can't just do something like this--rush through a bill that nobody has had the opportunity to really understand and spend hundreds of billions of dollars, not knowing whether we are going to get a return.
So, look, I want to figure out how to do good things. When I was Governor, we invested $85 billion in roads, bridges, airports, and seaports. I believe in investing. We invested in our universities. But we can't just keep spending money like this.
With that, I think I will yield to my colleague.