Extended Unemployment Benefits Are Hurting Main Street

Floor Speech

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Mr. DONALDS. The inflation report came out this morning, 4.2 percent increase in inflation. You have got to ask yourself what happened and how did it happen so fast?

Well, one of the key things we are seeing in this economy is very clear. What we are seeing is that the pool of workers is actually quite small compared to the demand for product from people who, frankly, have been locked down for over a year who are ready to go out and spend a lot of money that they have saved, get back to normal life, but there aren't the necessary workforce in order to produce the level of goods that the economy is demanding. So then, of course, the price of every individual unit is now going up because you have a scarcity of supply.

How did this happen? Well, when this body passed a coronavirus spending bill, or the American Rescue Plan or however you want to call it, when we put in an additional payment of direct checks to individuals, not to mention extended unemployment benefits that are 100 percent to what their wages were before the pandemic, and you let that run through the later part of this year, you are going to see exactly what we have seen all across America.

You have seen too many workers not filling their shifts. I will give you an example. I was at a McDonald's drive-through, 24-hour drive- through in my district about 12:30 in the morning. I was hungry. The first drive-through I went through, there was nobody there working. They cordoned off the drive-through. Has anybody in America ever seen a McDonald's 24-hour drive-through closed? It was closed because nobody was there.

The second McDonald's I went to, there was one worker in the shop. He said, ``It is going to take me 30 minutes to fill your order because nobody else is here, and I am making breakfast for the morning shifts.''

We have to pull back some of these benefits. We have to, because the way you miss a jobs report by 750,000 jobs is by paying people to stay home. That is not working for our economy. It is not working for our small businesses, and we are starting to see the effects in inflation, and it is only going to get worse unless we act swiftly here in the Nation's Capitol.

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