Ranking Member Cole Hearing Remarks on the Senate Amendment to H.R. 5376

Hearing

As delivered during today's hearing:

Today's hearing covers the grossly misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.

Once again, the Majority is bringing forward a deeply partisan reconciliation bill. Last year, the Majority passed into law a terrible reconciliation bill, on partisan lines, that spent $1.9 trillion. At the time, economists warned that spending that much money would inevitably lead to inflation. A year later, and those predictions have come home to roost: we are now facing the worst inflationary environment in 40 years as a direct consequence of the Majority's actions last year. But today, Democrats are bringing us another breathtakingly bad taxing and spending bill that will only make inflation worse and extend the current recession.

The same Administration and party that assured us that the American Rescue Plan wouldn't spark an unprecedented surge in inflation is now telling us that this latest tax and spend monstrosity won't deepen and lengthen the recession. They were wrong last year, and they are wrong again this year.

Unfortunately, it will be the average American who pays the price next year as the policies proposed in this bill actually take hold. That price will come in the form of more inflation, fewer jobs, slower growth and a lower standard of living for every family in America.

To make matters worse, this bill is coming to us after a truncated process that prevented any House member from having input into this bill. Perhaps it would be better to say there was no process at all. This bill has not gone through any committee in either the House or the Senate and is the product of a back room negotiation between two Democratic Senators operating on their own.

This is about as far from regular order as one can get. Not a single House member on either side of the aisle has had any substantive input into this bill, and the same can be said for all but a small handful of Senators. Much like the infrastructure bill we passed earlier this year, this bill is an egregious and outrageous surrender of the institutional power of the House. Having been left with a "take it or leave it" offer from the Senate Democrats, with no opportunity to provide input or to amend the bill, I am appalled that the Majority is once again choosing to simply take it.

Mr. Chairman, I want to remind you of something you repeatedly said when you were in my shoes: "usually when you have a lousy process, you have a lousy bill." The legislation before us today is a case in point. A lousy process does indeed make a lousy bill, and this bill is particularly lousy.

To see why, let's talk about the policies included in this bill. Far and away the most dangerous part of this bill is the section covering taxes. The Majority has included a massive tax increase and a massive expansion of the Internal Revenue Service, a more than 600 percent increase in the budget for the IRS.

And despite the Majority's claims to the contrary, these new taxes will fall on every taxpayer, and the IRS will focus on every taxpayer. Policies like these are bad enough in good times, but raising taxes when we are in a recession, even if my friends on the other side won't admit it, violates every basic principle of good economics, not to mention commonsense. As Senate Majority Leader Schumer once said, "You don't want to take money out of the economy when the economy is shrinking," which is exactly the place Democrats' economic policies have brought us to.

But don't just take my word or the Senate Majority Leader's word for it. I would refer my friends to the open letter signed by over 230 economists warning that this bill will "perpetuate the same fiscal policy errors that have helped precipitate the current troubling economic climate." And they're correct. Taxing and spending the way the Majority is proposing to do will only make inflation worse and will bring about an even deeper recession.

I ask unanimous consent to insert a copy of this letter for the record.

Now, let's talk about what's not included in this bill. Despite the title, there's nothing in this bill that will address inflation. In fact, this is probably one of the most misnamed bills that has ever been brought before this body. Inflation remains the number one problem our nation is facing, and it is astonishing that the Majority would push forward a bill of this magnitude that will not help inflation and in fact will only make matters worse.

There's also nothing in this bill that will address our current energy crisis. In fact, the policies in here are likely to make it worse. While my friends in the Majority are willing to pour tens of billions of dollars into green energy boondoggles, there is nothing in this bill that will lower the price of diesel or gasoline at the pump, nothing that will make it cheaper to heat and cool homes, and nothing that will ensure energy independence for America. Such a failure is bad for the nation and bad for working Americans all across the country.

It should come as no surprise that not a single Republican will vote for this bill, just as not a single Republican voted for the last reconciliation bill -- because we knew at the time what it would do. Economists warned us then that it would lead to an unprecedented outbreak of excessive inflation, and they were right. Now economists are warning that this bill, too, will make inflation worse and will slow the economy even more. Democrats would do well to take that warning seriously this time.

Mr. Chairman, all the available evidence is that this bill will make inflation worse, not better, and it will deepen and lengthen the recession that we are in. We cannot tax and spend our way into lower inflation. Rather than compounding the same error the Majority made last year, we should reject these policies and reject this bill.

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