State Budgets

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, recent headlines have reinforced a warning that Republicans and economic experts have been articulating literally for months: The massive spending the Democrats insisted upon at the outset of the Biden administration was not in step with actual needs.

Yesterday, I talked about some of the ways the multitrillion-dollar spending spree rammed through in March has actually delayed our reopening and our recovery: about the disappointing fall-off in hiring, despite a historic number of open jobs, after the Democrats renewed a Federal program that pays people extra not to work. Well, here is another misplaced priority from that spending spree: our Democratic friends' insistence on stuffing another wheelbarrow of cash into the accounts of State and local governments that were already rebounding from the crisis.

Back in February, as the Democrats insisted States were in dire need of another huge bailout, 29 of the 50 States were actually closing a 12-month chapter in which their revenues met or exceeded the year before. Twenty-nine of the fifty States were actually closing a 12- month chapter in which their revenues met or exceeded the year before the pandemic.

The faster-than-expected economic recovery, combined with the five bipartisan bills Congress passed in 2020, left a lot of cities and States in even better shape in exiting the pandemic than they were heading into it. Rising tax revenues had put these States in a position not only to weather pandemic-related downturns but to fill in preexisting budgetary potholes that actually had nothing to do with COVID hardships.

Of course, that didn't stop the Democrats from cramming nearly another $200 billion in State bailouts into the American Rescue Plan. Impressively, California got its hands on $26 billion of the $200 billion. By the way, the State of California now claims it already has a budget surplus three times that size--three times that size of a budget surplus--and we are sending them another $26 billion.

They are having to brainstorm new ideas to spend the unneeded avalanche of cash. I understand the State's Governor has come up with one idea he likes. He is planning to cut a timely round of State-level stimulus checks to include people who are in the country illegally-- just in time for his recall election later this year. Is that the kind of urgent priority the Democrats had in mind when they used COVID to push through what they called the ``most progressive'' legislation in history?

Experts warned it was poorly targeted, and Republicans said American families deserved better, but the big catalog of political payouts was pushed right through. Let's remember exactly how this played out before we are doomed to repeat it again.

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