WASHINGTON, DC--Congressman John Rose took to the House floor Thursday to shine a light on the impact inflation is having on hard-working American families, and the continued reckless spending proposals coming from the White House.
The full speech, as prepared for delivery, is below:
Mister Speaker, inflation is an invisible tax that Americans pay each and every day.
Everywhere you look, inflation is wreaking havoc. At the gas station: gas is up 48%. At the grocery store: beef is up 20%, chicken is up 15%, butter is up 14%, fruits and vegetables are up 7%, and coffee is up 12%. At home: electricity is up 11%, furniture is up 15%, and rent is up 5%.
What about a vacation? You still won’t be able to escape inflation as hotels are up 29% and flights are up 23%.
Recent graduates entering the workforce will be forced to pay record-high rent and other expenses as they enter adulthood. New mothers and fathers will pay 10% higher prices for baby food. Many Americans who saved their entire lives to retire comfortably are now faced with the brutal realization that they may not have saved enough.
Even the Nashville airport, which is renovating and expanding, was hit hard by inflation when the price of a new satellite concourse jumped from $92.5 million in March of 2021 to $134.5 million today.
As you can see, inflation affects every aspect of our lives. It’s costing the average American family an extra $433 a month, and it is expected to cost each household over $5,000 just this year alone.
Inflation isn’t something you can easily turn off, but President Biden and Congressional Democrats proved that their reckless progressive policies can certainly turn it on! Since President Biden took office and Democrats gained control of both chambers of Congress, inflation has increased every single month.
They borrowed from future generations and spent trillions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars on wasteful government programs and ensured us that it wouldn’t cause inflation - even though we all knew it would. That’s why it is so disingenuous that the president, his administration, his Democrat allies in Congress, and the mainstream media are blaming inflation on the invasion of Ukraine. To use one of the president’s favorite words, that’s pure malarkey.
Meanwhile, as my constituents feel more pain each day from the growing inflation disaster, the president and his administration hardly even mention it, much less offer solutions, except to spend trillions of dollars more that we don’t have, which will of course only make things worse. Just look at President Biden’s budget proposal, where inflation is not mentioned even one time. Instead, it calls for spending a whopping $75 trillion over the next decade.
There is no denying that massive deficit spending got us in this harmful mess and doing more of the same certainly won’t get us out of it. I and my fellow conservatives have pushed back as hard as we can against this reckless approach to governing, but we have been outnumbered and outvoted.
Even though we’re outgunned for now, I will nevertheless continue to do all I can to fight back on every wasteful spending bill the Democrats bring until our common-sense conservative reinforcements are elected in the fall and arrive in January.
You can watch the full speech here.
Original source can be found here.
