Motion to Discharge

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I wanted to come down here tonight to talk a little bit about the bill that we have in front of us this weekend, the Inflation Reduction Act. I have been in the Senate for 13 years, and I think this is one of the most important pieces of legislation that we have ever considered.

Let me just say, also, that the Presiding Officer and I have been here for a long time, and there have been weeks and weeks and weeks, months, years that have gone by here where it felt like we haven't gotten anything done.

What an amazing moment to be here when we have a bipartisan infrastructure bill that we passed with the biggest investment in our infrastructure since Eisenhower was President. We passed the first bipartisan bill to overcome the NRA just a few weeks ago. Last week, we were able to pass the CHIPS Act to bring back semiconductors to the U.S.A. and the PACT Act, the veterans bill last night.

Today, we are here to talk about the Inflation Reduction Act. It is quite an amazing moment in our democracy and, I think, in the country's history. It is not the subject of my speech tonight, but I want to say, with the Presiding Officer on the floor, that there might be a reason to think that we are at a moment in our country's history when we are actually ready, finally, to turn the page on the trickle-down economics that have created such an unfair economy for so many families and so many young people in this country and create, once again, in the United States, an economy that, when it grows, it grows for everybody, not just the people at the very top.

This bill fits into that. The bill on infrastructure fits into that. The bill on the semiconductors fits into that, as well.

If you look at the agenda Washington has pursued for the last 40 years or so, it is pretty simple: Let the big corporations do whatever they want and call it ``freedom''; cut investments in working families and our future; and instead of grappling with the income inequality we have, instead of grappling with the economic mobility that we have, cut taxes for the wealthiest people in the country, cut taxes for the largest corporations in the country, hoping that those tax cuts will somehow magically trickle down to everyone else and pay for themselves. That has never happened.

Here is what happened instead: 40 years of an economy that has worked really well for the wealthiest people and corporations but hasn't worked very well for anybody else; an economy with income inequality higher than at any time since the 1920s, where the top 0.1 percent of Americans, a mere 160,000 families, hold basically the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90 percent of Americans, nearly 145 million families--160,000 families, the top 0.1 percent, hold as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, 9 out of 10 Americans, nearly 145 million families--where kids--I am sad to say this in front of the kids here tonight--have a 50-50 shot of earning more than their parents, where that number used to be 90 percent; that charges families more for their healthcare than any other industrialized country in the world; that forces seniors in this country--and only in this country--to cut their pills in half or skip prescriptions or decide whether they are going to be able to eat or take their medicine; that is shackled to a global fossil fuel market dictated by tyrants like Vladimir Putin, despite our abundant resources at home and despite the urgent threat from climate change.

That is the legacy of the past 40 years of trickle-down economics. As I have said many, many times on this floor, we can't survive another 40 years like the last 40 years and expect to hold onto this democracy. I don't think we can survive another 10 years like this and expect to hold on to this democracy with this failed agenda.

Working families can't sustain it. Our democracy can't withstand it because, when people feel like they have lost the sense of opportunity for themselves and their families no matter how hard they work, that is when, you know, throughout human history, somebody shows up. Some self-interested politician shows up and says: I alone can fix it. You don't need a democracy. You don't need the rule of law. You should expect your public sector and your private sector to be hopelessly corrupt, and you are a sucker if you don't believe that because people are going to take advantage of you.

We need a new agenda for America. I am pleased to say that we are closer, I think, tonight--this weekend--than we have been in a long time to pursuing one.

It started with the American Rescue Plan. It continued, as I said earlier, with the bipartisan infrastructure law we passed this year to rebuild our country and the bipartisan innovation bill that we passed last week to help us compete with China and bring thousands of good- paying jobs back home.

And, now, I hope we are close to passing the next part, the Inflation Reduction Act. This bill will lower costs for millions of families--at the pharmacy, at the pump, and on their monthly energy bills and insurance premiums. It will do more to achieve energy independence and fight climate change than anything that we have ever done as a nation.

And unlike the Trump tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, which added $1.9 trillion to the debt, notwithstanding the arguments that we have heard going back to Ronald Reagan--the false arguments that we have heard going back to Ronald Reagan--that these tax cuts will pay for themselves. Once again, of course, they didn't pay for themselves. And unlike that, a $1.9 trillion hole blasted into our deficit when unemployment was only at 3.5 percent. Every cent of that money was borrowed just for the privilege of giving tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. Fifty-two percent of that bill went to the top 5 percent of Americans. We borrowed every single cent to do that.

That would be no different than when the Presiding Officer was the mayor of Richmond, VA, and if he said to the people of Richmond: I have a really good idea for how we could spend a lot of money, but we are going to have to borrow money to do it.

And they said: Well, that sounds like a lot of money that you are borrowing. Tell us what you are spending it on. Are you using it for our roads and bridges?

No.

Are you using it for the parks?

No.

Are you using it for education, for mental health, which we desperately need in this country? Are you using it to transfer the local economy to greener energy?

No.

What are you using it for, Mr. Mayor, they would say.

And the answer is: I am going to borrow this massive amount of money, and I am going to give it to the two wealthiest neighborhoods in Richmond and hope that it is just going to trickle down to everybody else.

I am not making it up. That is the theory. That is the policy. And that was the theory and the policy when Ronald Reagan was President. That was the theory and policy when Donald Trump was President.

And unlike those bills, every single cent in this bill is paid for. More than that, it cuts the deficit by over $300 billion. If you listen to my Republican colleagues, at least some of them and the way they complain about this bill, you would think it was some sort of Bolshevik takeover of the U.S.A. It is ridiculous.

I think, sometimes, they just don't even want the public to know what is in this bill because what is in this bill is so popular with the American people.

Let's start with healthcare. For the first time ever, this bill requires Medicare to negotiate drug prices on behalf of the American people.

The Presiding Officer and I wrote a bill called Medicare-X. We introduced it, I think, in 2017, to create a public option so that everybody in America could have the benefit of choosing between their private insurance and public insurance. That is not in this bill. But in that bill, we said that Medicare ought to negotiate drug prices for seniors. This would allow Medicare to use its market power to drive down the costs of prescription drugs. That is going to save families thousands of dollars, and it is going to save our country billions of dollars.

The only reason we have not passed that is because special interests have succeeded at tying Medicare's hands so that pharmaceutical companies could keep charging Americans prices that no other developed nation in the world would tolerate--Americans like Julia from Denver. Her dad has a heart condition. He pays $6,000 a month for medication. That is $72,000 a year for something he needs to take for the rest of his life. That is outrageous, but I hear stories like that every day all over Colorado.

The Inflation Reduction Act also would cap out-of-pocket costs for seniors to $2,000 a year so they aren't spending down their retirement to buy medication. I know seniors in Colorado who literally spend their entire retirement trying to figure out how to get the medication they need, the medication they have been prescribed by a doctor. The choices they have to make look unlike any other choices any senior has to make in any other country in the world.

I was with some people in Pueblo recently where one of the people said: I have three inhalers, but I can't afford the three inhalers. So I can only take one of them at a time, and I have been getting sicker and sicker as a result of that.

Another person in the room had worked her entire life at the local newspaper, and she was telling me that she was having to cut her medications in order to make it through economically.

On top of that, this bill has a 3-year extension for tax credits to help millions of Americans pay for their health insurance, including over 150,000 Coloradans who are going to be able to afford their health insurance in ways they couldn't.

The second part of this bill closes tax loopholes for about 200 of the biggest corporations in America--those with over $1 billion in profit. This comes directly from a bill that I wrote with Senator Warren and with Senator King. Today, these corporations use armies of lawyers and accountants that no middle-class family has, no working family has, no small business has to pay almost nothing in classes.

Last year, Chevron paid an effective rate of 1.8 percent. Bank of America paid 3.5 percent--3.5 percent. That is after the Trump tax cuts cut the corporate rate and took it down to, I think, it was 20 percent--which, by the way, there was no consensus to do. The consensus was at 25 percent. Here you have companies paying 1.8 percent, and 3.5 percent in the case of Bank of America. Amazon paid 6.1 percent. They might want to fire their CFO because they are paying a little more than the 1.8 and the 3.5. AT&T paid negative 4.1 percent. That means they got money back from the Treasury in tax credits.

In Colorado, a typical firefighter, teacher, or police officer has an effective tax rate of somewhere around 16 to 22 percent. So, on the one hand, you have working Americans paying 20 percent of their income in an economy that has barely lifted their incomes in 40 years, while billion-dollar corporations are paying virtually nothing.

I had a conversation the other day with a ``Teacher of the Year'' from Colorado. She is from Glenwood Springs. She said that she wasn't complaining, that she was just making an observation. She said 70 percent to 80 percent of her colleagues in the middle school in which she teaches and at the high school in Glenwood Springs have to work two and three jobs just so they can afford to live in Glenwood Springs.

Do we think it is all right for her to have to pay 22 percent of her income in taxes and the biggest corporations in America that are making more than $1 billion in income don't have to at least pay 15 percent, much less the 20 percent gift that Donald Trump gave them when the number that everybody had basically agreed to was 25 percent? It is no wonder that Americans think this Tax Code is rigged against them.

We start to fix that problem with this bill. It is not everything that I would have wanted. I think we have a lot more to do to make this Tax Code fairer, not the least of which is to make permanent the expanded child tax credit that I worked on with Sherrod Brown, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris; and the earned income tax credit that I worked on with Sherrod Brown to give working people the biggest tax cut they had in generations. That is one of the things that is not in this bill that I feel really terrible about.

This bill also is limiting something called the carried interest loophole. Most Americans have no idea what that is because 99.9999999 percent of Americans are not hedge fund managers; they don't benefit from this loophole to lower their tax rate and pay less than their assistants or than their secretary.

That hasn't stopped my Republican colleagues from telling the American public that this bill would tax working people--that is what they are saying. And I guess that is true if by ``working people'' they mean hedge fund managers. Over half of them base their business in the Cayman Islands or billion dollar corporations. We are increasing their taxes--that is true--but there is nothing in this bill that is raising taxes on American families--nothing. Nothing.

It is amazing to me that people that I meet that simultaneously support the Trump tax cuts for the wealthiest people on the theory of trickle-down economics and are opposed to this bill on the theory that somehow the taxes that we are raising on, literally, the wealthiest humans in our country and the wealthiest corporations are somehow going to trickle down to people in the workplace. It is never going to happen. It never has.

The last part of this bill contains energy. And, first, I think it is important for us to have some context. It has been nearly 50 years since the 1973 oil crisis spurred America to seek ``energy independence.''

It has been more than 30 years since NASA scientist James Hansen urged Congress to fight climate change, I think at a hearing held by my predecessor Tim Wirth. And until now we haven't had a plan, we have had no plan to accomplish either.

We haven't just stalled--in some cases, we have actually gone backward. At home, right now, our use of coal has increased during the Biden administration. Abroad, Germany has been forced to reactivate coal plants after Putin's attack on Ukraine, while other EU nations plan on rationing natural gas or turning on their coal plants.

Instead of leading the world with a coherent approach on these issues, Washington has been deadlocked in the same old, tired politics around climate and energy. And as usual, the American people have paid the price.

They have paid it at the pump with incomes that have barely budged in this economy. In Colorado, we have paid for it in homes incinerated by record wildfires, mountain passes washed out by mudslides, fields withering in extreme drought that nobody has seen for 800 years, the Colorado River in crisis, and a galloping fear that the American West will somehow be unrecognizable to our grandchildren.

When this deal fell apart 10 days ago or so, whenever it was, my heart was broken as a result of it, because I thought about what Colorado has been going through. And I thought about--I had to call and explain to my 22-year-old and 21-year-old and 17-year-old daughters that once again we had failed.

And their sense of disbelief, of incredulity--which, by the way, I think is shared with every single member of their generation in this country, whether they are Democrats or whether they are Republicans or independents or if they don't even know what political party they are in. How can you not deal with this? How can you place this burden on us?

And if we pass this bill, we are going to be able to look the next generation straight in the eye and say: We are actually living up to our responsibility to you, at least with respect to climate. And that fills me with joy. And that is the reason to support this bill and feel good about it.

We can't afford another 10 years of dysfunction on these issues. This transition should have started 25 years ago--25 years ago.

And in my opinion, we urgently need a plan, an energy policy that secures the energy our economy needs and relentlessly lowers climate pollution.

In other words, we need a plan for clean energy independence. And we can start by being honest about where we are; I think that is really important.

Today, 60 percent of our power generation comes from fossil fuel; only 20 percent comes from renewables. Over 90 percent--90 percent of our transportation relies on fossil fuels, and less than 3 percent uses electricity. Across the economy, 80 percent of primary energy consumption still comes from fossil fuel. Renewables are just 12 percent.

We have made some progress, but to hit our emissions targets, renewables have to scale from 12 percent today to at least 60 percent by 2050.

That is why, even under the most ambitious projections, some fossil fuels will likely remain in our energy mix for decades, even through 2050. Don't take my word for it; that is not me saying it. These projections are from the National Academy of Sciences, the International Energy Agency, and Princeton. And that is the reality that they confront us with.

So when I hear politicians and others whip up Twitter with promises to reject every permit for new infrastructure, they ignore this reality. And I worry that we cede the scientific high ground to critics of climate action, who then paint climate advocates as disconnected or deluded or even dangerous to the economy. And the only thing that wins is our fossil fuels. The only thing that wins is coal.

And I worry sometimes that these claims also repel the very Americans we need to support our energy transition. If our position in the short term is to oppose every new piece of infrastructure, we are essentially forcing America to choose between scarcity and higher prices, to choose between either less energy or higher prices.

I was in Belgium and, with our colleague Chris Coons, met with the deputy prime minister there who said--we were on our way to Scotland for the climate conference, and he said: We have to meet these climate targets. We have to meet these climate targets in 2050.

And then he said: But I don't know how we are going to meet them and not lose the middle class.

And I said: What do you mean by that? And he said: I don't know how we are going to meet them and not have yellow vests break out all over Europe.

And we are seeing that now. We are seeing where Putin has cut off Russian oil and Russian gas because of his invasion of Ukraine--the challenges that it creates in democratic societies when it comes to energy. There is no country in the world better positioned on this question, better positioned to lead this transition to clean energy than the United States of America.

There is not a country in Europe; there is not a country in the Middle East. China is not better positioned than we are on this. We are the best positioned country in the world to lead this transition.

In fact, I think we are the only country in the world that can lead this transition--which, by the way, is why it was such a tragedy when it looked 10 days ago like this bill wasn't going anywhere, because then the rest of the world looks at us and says: Why should we do anything if the country that is most capable of being able to do this can't do it?

And what I want to assure you is that these outcomes of scarcity or higher prices, neither of those outcomes are going to support the broad and durable support that we need to be able to not just pass climate policy but keep it the law of the land and make sure that it lasts until the next generation of Americans can pick it up from us and say: Thank you for putting us in a decent position; we are going to finish the job.

And then if we can't pass this bill and we can't make progress on climate change, then what we have, instead, is our current policy, which is the status quo, which drives up prices, is bad for our national security, and is terrible at reducing emissions. That is where we are today. That is why coal is up, as I said, during the Biden administration.

For a successful transition, we have got to smooth the path with domestic energy production now to stabilize prices and bridge our way to a clean energy economy tomorrow. And to do that, we need every tool on the table.

This means deploying renewables like wind and solar, which my State has led in. We need to do it at record rates. We need to invest in next-generation technology from carbon capture to hydrogen to advanced nuclear.

That means we need to recognize the role that natural gas has played in our transition. Over the last 15 years, replacing coal with natural gas has accounted for 60 percent of our national carbon reductions, and that is really good. But we need to do a lot better because the time is ticking. And now we have the opportunity, because of this bill, to secure America's position as the global standard for production-- modeled on our example in Colorado, where we passed the first law to capture fugitive methane when Senator Hickenlooper was our Governor--by driving down methane pollution and strengthening cleanup and monitoring across the supply chain.

The last thing we should accept is the leaking pipes that the status quo allows when we have tools available to do better.

And we can't accept the painful price shocks that the American people have to bear because of our lack of a coherent energy policy.

Fortunately, this bill lays the foundation for a responsible energy policy for the country, and it has the largest investment to fight climate change in the Nation's history. And it is full of proposals I have worked on for years, proposals to rapidly deploy clean energy and to provide industry the long-term certainty it needs, to boost American manufacturing for wind and solar and batteries to power electric vehicles and our energy grid, to invest $14 billion to help rural communities transition from fossil fuels, along with over $25 billion for environmentally friendly farming, conservation, and forest health.

We also have an opportunity in this bill to address the drought that is ravaging the American West and to do it in a way that measurably improves the situation of the Colorado River Basin, reflects the interest of the people of my State and other States in the Upper Basin, and actually deals, finally, with the long-term causes of the crisis that we face.

When you add it all up, this bill would put us on track to reduce carbon pollution 40 percent by the end of the decade. That is light years ahead of where we would be without it.

But even if you don't care about climate change, you should still like this bill because it lowers costs for families. How does it do that?

By increasing the supply of American energy with a responsible approach while reducing demand for oil and gas by putting more renewables and electric vehicles on the market.

According to a recent study, this bill would reduce the average family's electricity bill by hundreds of dollars a year. From my perspective, as I said, this transition should have started 25 years ago, and we can't wait any longer. Now is the moment to act.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine should finally rid America and our allies of the delusion that we can continue to rely on foreign dictators for our energy needs. It should remind us how foolish we have been to surrender the lifeblood of our economy to the whims of tyrants.

So nearly 50 years after the 1973 oil crisis, let's make this the year that we finally pass a coherent plan for America's energy independence. Let's finally organize our thinking and advance a plan that liberates us from foreign energy and tackles the threat of climate change head-on.

And while we are at it, let's reforge the engine of American manufacturing to produce the clean energy we need and to create thousands of good-paying jobs along the way.

Let's support our European allies by exporting cleaner American energy so they don't have to rely on coal or Russian gas to heat their homes through the winter.

There is no country in the world better prepared than the United States to lead this effort. And this bill will do more than anything we have ever done to strengthen our hand in this regard.

In another era, a proposal like this would have received 70 votes on the Senate floor. Every provision in here is a victory for common sense and a victory for the American people over special interests and the status quo.

Frankly, I don't know how many people can go home and say they voted against a balanced approach to achieve energy independence, fight climate change, and lower costs for families at this moment in our history.

I don't know how you would go home and say they voted to preserve tax loopholes for hedge fund managers and billion-dollar corporations that no American family can even imagine as they are paying the rates of taxation that they are paying or how they voted to let pharmaceutical companies continue to gouge the American people instead of letting Medicare negotiate on their behalf; how they voted against reducing our deficit by $300 billion.

But that is the choice we have in front of us. To me, it is a choice that is obvious. We have got to pass this bill. We need to seize the moment to lower costs for the American people, to make our Tax Code a little fairer, to secure our energy independence, and spark a new era of clean energy manufacturing and innovation to support our allies and lead the world in a fight against climate change and, hopefully, hopefully, hopefully, leave something a little bit better for the next generation of Americans.

I thank my colleague from New Jersey for his patience.

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