Issues Facing America
Floor Speech
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Mrs. BLACKBURN. Madam President, when President Biden addressed the Nation on Inauguration Day, he promised unity and bipartisanship. It was a big part of his inaugural address, and so far the Democrats here in Washington are not living up to that promise. Their message, and we saw this last week, is not unity; it is submit and conform.
On his very first day in office, President Biden rubberstamped 17 separate Executive orders. Since then, he has approved so many changes that a lot of Tennesseeans can barely keep track of the orders and memos and directives that are flying out of the Oval Office.
It is safe to say the only benchmark they have to work with is the number of lost jobs we will see as a result of all of this paper-and- pen governance and paperwork. Jobs gone--stroke of a pen.
The American people are very unsettled by this. I am hearing it from Democrats, Independents, Republicans, Libertarians.
Last week, I came to the floor, and I spoke in detail about how this lack of clarity about the future has made many Tennesseeans fearful of the impending changes to our national security policy. They are very unsettled.
So many of our veterans in Tennessee have talked with me about this. They don't like all this soft talk when it comes to talking about China and Russia and Iran and North Korea. They are worried about what comes next. The domestic policy mandates have done nothing at all to give reassurances or calm spirits.
Last week, the Senate Democrats put forth a budget proposal that treats struggling communities like hypotheticals that could work with theoretical changes, all created for a graduate-level economics exam. They are not dealing with real problems and real life.
For about 15 hours, we debated and voted on a fraction of the almost 900 amendments filed in an attempt to do some damage control to that budget resolution. But when Friday morning came and went, all the Democrats had to offer was a glaringly partisan resolution that blatantly contradicted President Biden's stated commitment to unity and bipartisanship.
And, you know what, in a perfect world, the solutions the Democrats have come up with just might work. But we do not live in a perfect world; we live in a fallen world.
This country is not created in the image of the Democratic Party. To anyone who has ever managed a small business budget, what my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are trying to do just does not make good common sense.
One of the top issues I hear about from people back home in Tennessee is this proposal they have for a $15-an-hour minimum wage. I feel I should remind my colleagues that resistance to this mandate doesn't come from a place of stinginess or classist hatred but from a place of absolute confidence that it will destroy small businesses, even with the phase-in period.
I have not heard from a single business owner who will be able to pay the wage and employ the same number of people--not one. They will have to let staff go.
A report by the Congressional Budget Office released just today echoes and confirms their concerns. By 2025, the Democrats' proposal will cut jobs for 1.4 million workers, at a time when workers are struggling to get back to work. So much for job creation, and we all know the best economic stimulus is a job.
Just 6 weeks ago, Congress passed a $900 billion COVID relief package. Very little of that money has been spent. Yet Democrats and the White House continue to demand trillions--that is right, trillions--in overbroad spending that targets no specific problem and has no actual bipartisan support. If that is not bad enough, billions of dollars from last year's bipartisan relief packages, all five of them, also remain unobligated.
So we are at $3.6 trillion in spending, and they are wanting another $1.9 trillion, with little idea of the effect that remaining unobligated funding will have on the economy. But still, the data shows that what has been spent already has made a difference and will continue to do so.
Relief should be timely. It should be targeted. It should be temporary. Those that need the help should get the help, but we do not need overbroad spending.
The Congressional Budget Office released another report just over a week ago showing that if we leave the laws governing how we tax and spend alone--leave them alone on the books, in force--the GDP will continue to rise and the economy will get back to its prepandemic health without, without Congress authorizing one more penny in relief spending.
So the American people want to know why, why are the Democrats claiming that the only solution to our present crisis is to spend as much as possible, as quickly as possible, without considering which sectors of the economy actually need the help, which families need help, which individuals need help.
What we do know is what we saw in 2009 and 2010 and 2011 and 2012 and 2013 and 2014 and 2015, which is that, if you get in here and overspend without targeting, without direction, you slow the recovery. We know that. We watched it. We lived through it.
They are going to need a better answer than ``because we say so,'' ``because this is what we are going to do,'' because the people understand that the Federal deficit was historically large even before the pandemic. They know how debt works and that a big deficit means more of that Federal debt.
They also know that who holds that debt matters and that we are beholden, right now, to China, to OPEC, for trillions of dollars in that debt.
Scale that down for a minute. When that same thing happens to one of these small businesses, when they max their credit line, if they fall behind in their payroll, they can't plan for the future, they can't plan for emergencies, and they can't invest in their own success.
The same concepts apply to the Federal budget. You cannot tax and spend your way to prosperity. You have to have economic growth.
So I ask my colleagues: Why are you making decisions that are going to slow the recovery and slow the economic growth?
The Democrats' approach to planning for the future might sound good in theory, it might sound good in hypotheticals, but real-life economics is not. Future pandemics are not. The need to innovate and stay competitive in the warfighting domain is not. Those are real-life issues.
The Democrats have been so aggressive this past couple of weeks, and President Biden, in taking out the eraser and trying to erase 4 years of productive policy that benefited millions of Americans, and the people are starting to wonder what else they are going to throw away in favor of a very autocratic, authoritarian, empty vision for our Nation.
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