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Floor Speech
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Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, last week, American families' pain was confirmed by yet another round of awful statistics. Year-on-year inflation set a new 40-year high in June. The painful fallout of Washington Democrats' 2021 spending binge continues to spread. A loaf of bread costs the American consumer 10 percent more than it did a year ago. A dozen eggs will run you 33 percent more. The price of a gallon of gas, of course, rose more than 100 percent on Democrats' watch.
Across the board, the American people's hard-earned dollars are not going nearly as far as before Democrats' inflation. Even as nominal wages rise, millions of families have seen their real income decrease; a net pay cut for workers, courtesy of Washington Democrats' runaway spending. No wonder three out of four Americans--three out of four--say inflation is causing them financial hardship. Seventy-five percent of the country is in a tough spot.
Of course, it is not affecting everyone equally. The lowest earning Americans consistently spend larger portions of their incomes on the sort of essentials that are most expensive right now, from housing to fuel, to groceries. And workers in blue-collar industries are among those having the hardest time keeping up. U.S. manufacturing workers are seeing their lowest average earnings--adjusted for inflation--since 2014, while the overall private-sector workforce is seeing wages at 2019 levels.
Unfortunately, these hardships show little sign of slowing anytime soon. Last month's core inflation, when compared to just a few months earlier, is actually accelerating. So we have got the worst inflation since 1981. The vast majority of Americans are saying it has them in a bind financially. And it is low- and middle-income families who are actually bearing the brunt of it.
This, Madam President, is the landscape as Washington Democrats keep trying to force even more party-line liberal bills with even more new Washington spending and--for a bonus--a bonus--massive new tax hikes. For the better part of a year, our colleagues have been trying to cook up legislation that would make life harder for small businesses, attack affordable American energy, and hike income taxes on families in every single tax bracket.
Apparently, for most Washington Democrats, spending the country into inflation actually wasn't enough. Now, for a second act, they want to tax us into a recession. The response for Democrats robbing American families once cannot be for Democrats to rob American families a second time.
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