Economic Recovery After the Pandemic

Floor Speech

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Mr. ESTES. Mr. Speaker, we should be experiencing one of the greatest economic booms in our history as we emerge from COVID, yet prices are climbing, consumer sentiment is plunging, and there are more than nine million open jobs without workers to fill them. That is the most ever.

In my State of Kansas, we have 3.6 jobs available for every job seeker. Subsidizing people not to work and spending without restraint is stalling out this recovery and causing inflation.

In May, core inflation rose at its fastest pace since 1992. That is because Democrats' untargeted spending has acted like kindling for inflation. There is too much money chasing too few goods. Recent surveys show that 70 percent of Americans are concerned that President Biden's spending plans could lead to inflation. But if you have filled up your gas tank recently or entered a grocery store, you know that it is already there.

Instead of working to quickly reopen and prioritize getting America back to work, upon entering office, President Biden took his eyes off the ball and squandered the recovery that President Trump had handed to him. In the first five months of 2021, the current administration has added 500,000 fewer jobs than the last 5 months of 2020. President Biden should be concerned about his economic crisis.

Biden's slow-growth agenda calls for $6 trillion in government spending with $3 trillion in new taxes. That would crush small and midsized companies, resulting in far fewer jobs down the road.

One of the most antigrowth policies in President Biden's agenda is his plan to revert America's business tax rate to one of the worst in the world again at 28 percent, a move that would return us to the old tax code that incentivized jobs to be shipped overseas.

Biden's budget even acknowledges that a real recovery isn't their priority. It only forecasts a meager 2 percent GDP growth by 2023, with it dropping even lower until 2029.

The American people should contrast Biden's tax-and-spend agenda with what Republicans have done and are fighting to do. In 2017, we put the American people first by passing a progrowth tax code while removing massive amounts of government regulation. That created an economic atmosphere that enabled wages to grow for historically disadvantaged workers, brought the unemployment rate down to the lowest in 50 years, and allowed more people to find jobs in America than at any point in our history. The income gap was even shrinking as lower income wages were increasing faster.

We need to get back to that. It is not hard to see the impact that commonsense, progrowth policies can make. Our focus should be on filling available jobs and rebuilding our economy, not to line the pockets of progressive special interest groups with millions in Federal spending, as Biden's agenda would do. It is hard to ignore that, across the country today, the six States with the lowest unemployment rates all have Republican leadership.

Mr. Speaker, President Biden and Speaker Pelosi need to prioritize economic recovery, not unrestrained government spending.

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