Infrastructure

Floor Speech

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Mr. BARRASSO. Madam President, I come to the floor today to associate myself with the remarks from the Senator from Oklahoma.

We are here as Republicans who believe in free markets, and so do the American people. The Democrats, on the other hand, are running a 100- yard dash towards socialism. They have decided to redistribute America's wealth. President Obama used to call this ``spreading the wealth around.'' Democrats are taking the wealth of our Nation and they are gathering it up in Washington, DC, and deciding then how they want to spend it.

In March, President Biden signed a big payoff to the people who run the Democratic Party--the union bosses, the DC bureaucrats, and bankrupt blue States. He said it was a coronavirus relief bill. Yet only 9 percent of the money actually went for healthcare.

Just weeks later, President Biden came back again, now requesting $2.7 trillion under the namesake of ``infrastructure.'' When you read through it, it looks like once again he is trying to spread the wealth around, gathering it not for what we consider traditional infrastructure--roads, bridges, ports, highways, airports, waterways, all of those things, dams, reservoirs, you name it--it seems that once again it is going for the Democratic elites. It looks to me to be a slush fund for liberal spending, going to union bosses, climate activists, and the Silicon Valley contributors to the party.

Where is the money coming from? The last bill went on the credit card. The next one is coming out of the wallets of the American people. President Biden is proposing the largest tax increase in a generation. Working families and small businesses are going to be on the hook. They will put the American worker at a disadvantage.

Look, there hasn't been a proposed tax increase of this size in this century. It is going to affect everyone in this country, and it is going to be a rude awakening for the many small businesses that are finally reopening after living the past year with the coronavirus pandemic. Now, in addition to the struggle they have been through, they are going to be hit with a big tax increase. Now, in addition to the struggles they have been through, they are going to be hit with a big tax increase.

Now, we know who is going to end up footing the bill for the President's tax hikes. He may say that it is just corporations. The American people are going to be hit with this tax increase. You can call it a tax hike on corporations, but that absolutely just ricochets back onto the people who work for those businesses and who buy the products of those businesses.

President Biden is going to try to spin it another way, but the highest costs of all of this is going to be borne by American families.

Higher taxes, of course, mean fewer jobs. One estimate says that the bill is going to kill a million jobs. These aren't CEO jobs. These are middle-class jobs. These are the jobs of hard-working families in my state of Wyoming and in States all around the country.

Prices across the country are already going up under President Biden. The cost of energy went up 9 percent just last month. Gasoline prices are up over 50-cents a gallon since President Biden took office and started his Executive orders attacking American energy.

If this bill that is being proposed now under the name of infrastructure becomes law, well, we will know that the price increases are just beginning. Because of President Biden, more wealth is about to be taken from places all across middle America and certainly in my home State of Wyoming. It will be sent to the Democrat elites in Manhattan and Silicon Valley and, of course, here in Washington, DC.

Democrats are focused on redistributing our wealth. They want to take it from working families and give it to their liberal donors. It is a bad law. It is bad economics. And I urge my colleagues to stand for jobs, for higher wages, and for the working men and women of our Nation, who know what infrastructure really means and the kind of infrastructure they need for their communities.

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