Real State of the Union

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I would like to comment a little bit on the speech last night and some of the issues that have been ignored and should be addressed and some of the issues that were given such short shrift it was almost comical.

The first issue I would like to address is inflation. Next time I should get my own billboard here. But if you look at M2, which is one measure of the monetary supply, in the 1970s--and I am old enough to remember the 1970s when inflation was really a horrible thing and something that we were never supposed to repeat--M2 was going up at a rate of about 7 percent year over year. We now are up about 37 percent year over year.

I mean, if you look at a graph, it is shocking the degree to which the Federal Reserve is just flooding money into our system. Of course, a major reason why they have had to do this is wildly excessive spending, because if you have excessive spending and foreign governments do not want to buy your debt, and who would want to buy your debt, you wind up with no alternative but to degrade the value of the dollar.

I thought it was particularly amazing that the President said or told businesses that you have to ``lower your costs,'' meaning that we shouldn't reduce wages, which is fine, but like it is an easy thing to lower your costs. I wonder, has President Biden ever actually talked to the businesses who are raising their prices?

The first thing I hear about is the metals, the aluminum, the different kinds of steel that are up 300, 400, 500 percent. When the market, the cost of these things go up to that degree, and you are a businessman, what in the world are you supposed to do?

The cost of transportation is going up, and the amount we pay truckers, which is a tremendously good occupation, has gone up. Sometimes you can't even get trucks. And what has President Biden done? He imposes a vaccine mandate on truckers, which further reduces the supply of an occupation that is already in demand, thereby guaranteeing the cost is going to continue to go up even more.

I strongly encourage President Biden to have some of his staff run around Washington, D.C., or maybe run around and talk to some of the factory owners in this country and ask them or advise them what they are supposed to do to ``lower their costs.'' Most of them, because we have a shortage of people working, are already probably exceeding last year's output in product. Despite the fact that they are doing that, and so, therefore, they are getting more per hour worked, but they can't find any new ways to reduce costs.

But, again, I hope President Biden sends some of his cabinet members around the country and either advises them on how it is going to be easy to lower your costs or hears from them how impossible it is for them to lower their costs.

By the way, every single manufacturer I have talked to in the last 2 months--and I bet I have talked to 15, 20--every one of them thinks inflation is going to get worse. When I talk to farmers who use a variety of fertilizers, whatever, that goes into their product, they see the costs going through the roof. And every single farmer I talk to thinks inflation is going to get worse.

So I strongly encourage the Biden administration to have some people get out there among the hoi polloi and find out what is really going on with regard to inflation.

Next, President Biden talked about the police. And maybe President Biden doesn't realize what the problem he and his allies have created by going after the police. In Milwaukee, the city just to the south of my district, there was a dramatic increase to an all-time record high number of murders in 2020, something that you never thought you would see again, and it was exceeded again in 2021.

Why is that happening? It is because President Biden and his allies have adopted an antipolice rhetoric, in particular implying an amount of racism out there, and they are pushing a bill that has already been through this House, a bill that will make it much easier to hire a policeman.

Now, if a policeman wants to do his job, sometimes they have to arrest people, sometimes they have to wrestle with people. If you can wind up being sued, you are much less likely to want to do that. And when you have police that are less engaged, particularly in our busiest cities, what are you going to get? More crime. We cannot say we are serious about the spiraling number of people who are being shot to death or stabbed to death in this country until we allow the police to be police again. We have got to stop that police hatred that goes on.

And I don't care whether we eventually send a few hundred million dollars around the country to hire more police or whatever President Biden has up his sleeve, what we have got to do is we have got to build respect for police again so that they are free to maintain the safety in this country.

The third thing I will look at that I thought, again, was misleading to the public, concerns election laws. Many States, including Wisconsin, have a photo ID law. President Biden and his acolytes imply that a photo ID law is motivated by racism. Again, this is unnecessarily divisive.

One of the reasons why I feel that Joe Biden is the most divisive President in my lifetime, I have praised him for his speech last night in which he didn't call this country racist after using the racial word or white supremacy so much in his inaugural speech; nevertheless, it is a little bit ridiculous when in order to have fair elections some of us want to have photo ID and then people stand around when photo ID is needed for things that probably have a much more dramatic impact on the average person's life, but it doesn't bother them.

We had a requirement here in town that you present proof of vaccine with which you had to produce a photo ID, if you wanted to go to a restaurant in this town. I would say it is a fairly significant thing. Did anybody say that the District of Columbia was being racist because they required a photo ID if I want to eat at a restaurant?

They want to look at my ID before I get in an airplane. If I had to fly somewhere to get some surgery, if I had to fly somewhere to see an ailing relative, that could be a real life-changing experience. Does anybody say, oh, it is racist to require a photo ID if I got on an airplane? We just put up with this routinely.

Nevertheless, President Biden fans the flames of division by claiming that those of us who want to make sure that we have fair elections are motivated by racism when photo IDs are needed so commonly.

The next thing I want to point out that I think he gave short shrift to with an insultingly small amount of time was the huge number of people who are dying of drug overdoses in this country.

I got this job only 7 years ago. At the time, 47,000 people a year died of drug overdoses. By comparison, in 12 years during the Vietnam war, 57,000 people died. And every politician was supposed to talk about it. Now we shoot up from 47,000 to 100,000 people, and President Biden can't even bring himself to talk about fentanyl, the drug responsible for most of those deaths.

I don't know why he wouldn't talk about fentanyl. My guess is because overwhelmingly it is coming across the southern border, and he doesn't want to do anything about the southern border. However, I would hope in the future, President Biden would meet with law enforcement around the country, find out what it is like to have to tell the parents or siblings or children of the people who have died that their relative has died. That is a horrible thing.

And I think to gloss over the 100,000 deaths we have every year in this country--twice the number of people who died in the 12 years in Vietnam--was I thought very callous. But, again, I would encourage President Biden to ask members of his administration to get out and about a little bit, talk to relatives of people who have died of drug overdoses, particularly fentanyl, and maybe it will cause him to devote a little bit more time on that in next year's State of the Union address when he realizes what a horrible situation we have.

There are many other things that I don't think were addressed accurately or in depth during the State of the Union address that should have been.

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