Issues of the Day

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I think we need a little more talk about inflation. I know when we get home it is always the number one issue that is out there. I don't think there has been enough talk about how the inflation came about.

The inflation came about because of excessive spending. Every middle school student should know that if the Federal Government spends wildly more on the amount going out than the amount going in, the Federal Reserve has to, in essence, print the dollars to make those payments, and when the Federal Reserve prints more dollars, the value of the dollar drops, which is why we have these huge spending increases.

Now, I will make a couple of comments on them.

First of all, I think the numbers that we are supposed to talk about, the 9.1 increase in inflation, are woefully underrated. Here is the graph that all of us politicos are supposed to talk about.

Does anybody believe that the cost of shelter in the last 12 months has only gone up 5.6 percent? Where is the press? They ought to be making fun of that number.

When I talk to my landlords, when I talk to my builders, nobody thinks things have gone up only 5.6 percent in the last year. I think the cost of a new house has gone up 20 to 25 percent. I think the cost of rentals has gone up by 10 or 15 percent. It is way more than the 5.6 percent on this chart.

The same thing is true of automobiles. They tell us used automobiles have gone up by about 11.4 percent in the last year. Talk to your car dealers. They will laugh at the idea that used cars have only gone up by 11.4 percent in the last year.

Things are much worse than the numbers that are put out there by the Biden administration. Therefore, the American public is suffering a lot more than even this so-called record inflation increase of 9.1. It is much more than that.

But once we get done looking at that, let's look at the new spending bills that are coming out. Have people learned their lesson? All of a sudden, we are going to produce even on the relatively small part of the budget, this discretionary spending, which is the part we vote on around here? Are we going to do something to maybe have no increase there or 2 or 3 percent increase there? No.

When we look at the bills, some of which we passed last week, and they break up what I think the people at home would call the budget into a variety of different bills, military construction and veterans affairs, people want an 18 percent increase for the year beginning October 1; financial services and general government, 17 percent increase; the Department of the Interior and the environment, up 18 percent.

In other words, even after the horrific inflation, when we come back to the regular budget, this place has the pedal to the metal, trying to spend another huge amount.

I think the press ought to wake up and pay attention to both of these issues. I beg the press to talk to your local car dealers, to talk to your local landlords and see: Have we only had a 5.6 percent increase in shelter? Have we only had a 7.1 percent increase in used cars? No way. They are giving us numbers that are much lower than the reality.

The press ought to look at this, and rather than just sleepwalk through these budgets that get passed around here, we ought to be paying a little bit more attention to the sizable increases in these budgets, line by line, or the amount of inflation we have seen so far would be a drop in the bucket. Wake up, American press corps.

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