Inflation and Our Economy

Floor Speech

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Mr. CLYDE. Madam Speaker, I thank Vice Chairman Johnson for hosting this Special Order tonight and for allowing us to highlight the various crises that are affecting our Nation today.

Last week, inflation hit a whopping 8.6 percent, the highest since 1981, and gas prices have soared to $5 a gallon nationwide for the first time in history. In fact, just last week, for the first time in my life, I paid more than $100 just to fill up the gas tank of my pickup truck. As the good Speaker knows, if our own home State had not temporarily suspended the gas tax in Georgia, it would have been $110 to fill up my pickup truck.

Consumer confidence has plunged to a record low, and I don't blame them. Gas, groceries, utilities, common goods, they are all going up. Month after month, the sticker shock continues to burden American workers and families, with no end in sight.

Yet President Biden comically claims he is, and I quote, changing people's lives. Well, I think he really is, but it is not changing for the better. Dare I say the President's policies are actually ruining people's lives, destroying the middle class, and dismantling our economy. Our Nation is in full buyer's remorse.

The American people are increasingly fearful of a recession. What are the Democrats here in Congress doing about it right now? As of late, their focus has been prime time political hearings, aimed at smearing President Trump and his supporters, as well as infringing on Americans' constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

Not to mention, earlier this afternoon, the Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy of the Committee on Oversight and Reform held our very first hearing in 2022. The subject? Investigating tick and flea collars. I just can't make this stuff up. It was not Jimmy Carter-era inflation. It didn't make the cut.

And then we have the news reports from this morning that suggest some of my Democrat colleagues are focused on instituting gender-neutral bathrooms throughout Capitol Hill.

What in the world is going on? I can assure my Democrat colleagues that my constituents in Georgia's Ninth District are far more concerned about putting food on the table and filling their gas tanks than any of the liberal nonsense that this body is so fixated on.

Democrats' severely misguided priorities are a disgrace, but maybe they are actually intended to be a distraction because tackling inflation head-on would require Democrats and President Biden to face the undeniable reality that their Big Government, socialist agenda caused this mess in the first place.

The American people deserve better, period. Congress must refocus its attention on implementing effective solutions in order to get our economy and our country back on track, just like it was under President Trump's leadership.

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