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Floor Speech
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Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, yesterday, President Biden delivered a speech on the economy--a last attempt to rescue his dismal economic record. Incredibly, during the course of the speech, he repeated a phrase that he has often used about growing the economy from the bottom up and the middle out. I am not sure how that phrase continues to get past White House fact checkers because if there is one thing that President Biden has failed to do, it is to build an economy from the bottom up and the middle out.
Thanks to President Biden's signature economic legacy--an inflation crisis of historic proportions--today, a typical family has to pay an additional $13,375 per year to maintain the same standard of living it enjoyed when the President took office--$13,375 per year, more than $1,000 per month. And who do you think that affects the most? Not billionaire Democrat donors or Hollywood stars. No. It affects the bottom and the middle the most--the people who don't have a spare $13,000 lying around and who have had to cut back on extras or, in many cases, essentials to survive in the Biden economy.
CBS News exit polling in November found that two-thirds of voters described the economy as bad, and 45 percent said their financial situations were worse than they were 4 years ago. And it is no wonder. President Biden likes to talk about giving families breathing room, but his economy took away breathing room for a whole lot of Americans. Working Americans paying 22 percent more for groceries and 31 percent more for gas and 28 percent more for electricity and 23 percent more in rent than they were when President Biden took office are not seeing a lot of breathing room for their budgets.
The President likes to pretend, as he did in his speech yesterday, that he came in and saved the economy after COVID, but the truth is, the economy was already well on its way to a healthy recovery, and his massive, ill-advised, supposed COVID relief legislation helped kick off an inflation crisis whose reverberations are still being felt today in family budgets around the country. President Biden can give all the speeches he wants touting his economic record, but his economy has been the very opposite of a boon to lower and middle-income families.
The good news is that the days of President Biden's disastrous economic policies are numbered. In January, President Trump will take office, and Republicans will have control of the House and the Senate. Expanding economic opportunity and increasing growth and Americans' wages will be a top priority. That means taking action via reconciliation to preserve the tax relief that Republicans delivered during the first Trump administration--tax relief that improved take- home pay for millions of hard-working Americans. It also means targeting onerous regulations choking our economy, like the thousand- plus Biden-Harris regulations that have already cost Americans well over $1.5 trillion. It means things like unleashing American energy and restoring American energy dominance, which will benefit both the economy and our national security.
President Biden's energy policies have jeopardized the future of our already shaky electric grid and set us up for future supply problems, but his war on American energy ends next month, and a better future is in sight. It won't take long now.
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