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Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I am a firm believer in the American dream. People come to this country, perhaps as legal immigrants, start with little, invest themselves in a lot of hard work because they don't have anything else to invest, provide for their families, maybe even eventually start a small business of their own, create jobs and a means to earn a livelihood for their employees. That is what I think most people think of when they think about the American dream.

And it is built on an economic system known as capitalism, as distinguished from socialism. And capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system known to humankind.

There are those who have a different point of view. They call themselves democratic socialists.

I actually have here before me the Democratic Socialists of America web page that asks the question: ``What is democratic socialism.''

They start first with the criticism of capitalism. They say:

Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit.

That is an incredibly cynical and, I think, misguided view, but that is their opinion.

And they go on to say:

We must replace it with democratic socialism.

And there are a number of Members of Congress, notably the junior Senator from Vermont here who is an advocate for democratic socialism. I have read where he gave a speech explaining why he thinks that is a better way to go.

And then there are a number of Members of the House known colloquially as the Squad, who are members of the Democratic Socialists of America and advocate their particular point of view.

Even though Joe Biden was elected President of the United States in 2020, he essentially has embraced the democratic socialist agenda--the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free college, free childcare, free everything.

Well, to no one's surprise, once people called it what it was and what it is, it didn't make it very far. The American people experienced a severe sticker shock when they heard the cost of these proposals.

One estimate pegged the cost of the Green New Deal at a whopping $93 trillion, an absolutely unfathomable amount of money.

And much to our Democratic colleagues' surprise, families do not want the Federal Government managing every little detail of their lives, from making their childcare arrangements to determining which doctors they can see or, rather, which doctors they can't see.

Our Democratic friends found that socialism wasn't as popular as they hoped, but they weren't ready to give up on the bigger government dreams so they made a few marketing changes. They switched branding. They adopted a new strategy, and now what we are seeing, I believe, is the new socialism.

Now, it is not as in your face, not as startling as what we saw a couple of years ago when people openly advocated democratic socialism, but the new socialism, I believe, is just as bad and even more dangerous because this time it is actually coming to fruition.

You don't need to look very far. Just look at President Biden's claimed authority to ``forgive'' student loans. The President announced that he would cancel student loans for millions of borrowers. Any family with a mortgage or car payment or credit card debt knows there is no such thing as canceling debt. Every dollar that was borrowed will have to be paid back by somebody. Traditionally, and legally, that responsibility lies with the borrower--the person who took out the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans without a thought about how they might eventually pay it back.

But the President decided to throw tradition, personal responsibility, and, I would argue, the law, out the window in favor of a socialist approach where everybody chips in.

To state the obvious, not every taxpayer has outstanding student debt. Many of our fellow Americans never went to college. Many have very good-paying jobs because they have pursued a trade--carpentry, plumbing or the like or they may decide they want to be a teacher or perform some other work that doesn't pay perhaps as well as a Wall Street job.

Many people who did get a degree decided they needed to work at least part time to help pay for their bills. And then many, perhaps most, decided they had to pay the loans back after they graduated, just as they had agreed to do.

Still, every person without a college debt will be expected to shoulder the cost, under President Biden's proposal, for someone else's degree, regardless of their ability to pay it back.

College degrees are not a public good that should be covered by tax dollars. We provide a lot of generous support for higher education, and we should--Pell grants. Many colleges and universities have huge endowments that they use to give scholarships and financial aid to students.

But this is not something that ought to be placed at the foot of the American taxpayer, in this form certainly. Once somebody has agreed to pay back their student debt, to be able to just walk away from it, to me, encourages all sorts of irresponsible conduct and expectations.

These aren't shared expenses like commonly used roads, hospitals, or police departments. The individual who decides to borrow the money so they can attend college alone reaps the benefits of that degree. And, in fact, if you do go to college, your chances of earning more income tend to go up.

But the real kicker here is that student loan socialism will cost the American taxpayer roughly half a trillion dollars--all to pay off the debt that the individuals involved knowingly and willingly took on.

Of course, President Biden isn't the only one forcing more socialism on the American people. Our Democratic colleagues have gotten into the action too.

Last month, they passed a reckless tax-and-spending spree that included enough handouts to make Fidel Castro proud.

First are the expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies. Originally, the subsidies were provided, back when ObamaCare passed, to provide subsidies for people earning less than 400 percent of the Federal poverty level.

But our Democratic colleagues last month not only increased the amount of assistance people can receive, they also expanded eligibility; in short, giving more people more money, regardless of their ability to pay for their own expenses, shifting that, again, out of the pockets of middle-class taxpayers into the pockets of those who don't need the subsidies and especially those who can pay for their expenses themselves.

Our colleagues said this was a temporary provision that was critical to the pandemic response, but here we are, a year and a half later, and they have already extended it.

The people who gained insurance coverage because of this proposal aren't low-income families. Those individuals have already been eligible for ObamaCare. Assistance now extends to people earning 750 percent of the Federal poverty level--six-figure earners.

So, here again, our Democratic colleagues are taking money out of the pocket of middle-class taxpayers, who are struggling with inflation and trying to make ends meet, and providing enhanced, generous subsidies to people making 750 percent of the Federal poverty level.

So even as this started out as a temporary fix, I don't have any reason to believe that our Democratic colleagues will ever allow these subsidies to expire.

In the words of Ronald Reagan, ``The closest thing to eternal life on earth is a [temporary] Government Program.'' Our Democratic colleagues seem to be intent on proving the accuracy of that statement.

The Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated the cost of permanent expansion, and it is pretty jarring for a number of reasons.

First is the financial cost. By expanding the ObamaCare premium tax credits and making them permanent, our Democratic colleagues would add $248 billion to the Federal debt over the next decade. Of course, this will have an adverse effect on people with private insurance. Under permanent expansion, some 2.3 million people will lose their current employer-provided coverage. So our country would end up basically paying wealthy people to lose their employer-sponsored healthcare so they can end up on a taxpayer-funded plan.

This isn't about helping the uninsured; it is just a backdoor way to implement Medicare for All--another Democratic socialist objective. Our Democratic colleagues couldn't get enough support for this radical plan by trying to build consensus, so they passed it with 50 votes, plus the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Harris. So, bit by bit, our colleagues are pushing Americans closer to a single-payer healthcare system that they do not want.

Then there is electric vehicle socialism--taxpayer handouts for wealthy car owners who buy fancy, state-of-the-art electric vehicles. A couple earning up to $300,000 a year can now count on taxpayers to chip in for their big-ticket purchase--$7,500 for a new electric vehicle or $4,000 for a used one.

Families are already being crushed by inflation--high grocery costs, up 13 percent over the last year alone; high gasoline prices; housing prices that are going up dramatically. These families are now being burdened with the expense of helping wealthy car owners buy fancy, new electric vehicles when they can't even afford to buy one on their own. Someone who can only afford a quarter of a tank of gas because they can't afford to fill up the whole tank doesn't have $80,000 to spend on a fancy, new electric vehicle. Still, thanks to our colleagues' electric vehicle socialism, middle- and low-income families are getting stuck with the bill, which always seems to be the punch line.

Well, in order to finance this new socialist redistribution, our Democratic colleagues need more money on top of the debt that they are adding to. They needed a cash cow, so what they did is they turned to everybody's favorite: the Internal Revenue Service.

Our colleagues voted and passed a bill that will double the size of the IRS by adding 87,000 new agents to ensure that those IRS agents can squeeze every last penny out of hard-working American families. This isn't going to have an impact on the top 1 percent; it will unleash a tidal wave of audits on middle-class families and small businesses. Families earning less than $225,000 a year are already five times as likely to be audited already, and this will just make it even worse.

The independent Congressional Budget Office confirmed that lower and middle-income taxpayers will see more IRS audits as a result of this move. The government is about to squeeze, once again, working families like a piece of coal, while our Democratic friends say: Well, we are just making diamonds.

I must add, I live in a border State, Texas, where we have seen 2.3 million migrants come to the border in this last year and a half during President Biden's administration. We have seen 108,000 Americans die of drug overdoses, with most of those drugs coming across the southwestern border because the criminal organizations that move people and drugs across the border understand that if they flood the border with people, with migrants, it will divert the Border Patrol's attention, so the drugs can come flowing into our country, distributed by criminal networks and street gangs who are responsible for most of the crime and gun violence in our local communities.

Don't you think some of the money that our colleagues have spent to try to build an army of IRS agents over the next 10 years--that some of that could have been spent to help secure the border, to stop some of those drugs? Well, unfortunately, the Biden administration has an open borders policy. They don't actually believe in enforcing our immigration laws, and what we have seen as a consequence is a result of that.

Thanks to our Democratic colleagues' new socialist policies, Texans who are trying to save money to go to college or buy a home or prepare for retirement are about to get stuck with the bill for massive government expansion. And what is this going to do to inflation, which is already at a 40-year high? It is going to make it worse. As the Federal Reserve ratchets up the discount rate or interest rates in order to slow inflation, it is going to slow our entire economy and make it harder on middle-class families just trying to get by.

Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of England, once wisely said:

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.

Again, that is true. We have seen approaches of socialism fail over and over and over again, and we have seen its leaders oppress their people and send their country into ruin.

Well, right now, we are seeing the new socialism rooted in American soil gaining ground in Congress and the White House every day. This new socialism may look a little bit different, but the goal is the same: to grow the role of government in the lives of everyday Americans and to burden them with additional taxes to pay for this bigger and bigger government and to take money from people who, by virtue of their hard work, were pursuing the American dream and transfer that money to someone who is well-off in order to advance misguided policies like $7,500 taxpayer subsidies for rich people for electric vehicles.

Part of it is an attitude or perspective that our Democratic colleagues seem to have. They seem to think, We know better; we know better what is good for people than they do themselves.

That is why they want to choose what kind of healthcare plan they get or what kind of childcare facilities families get to use.

They want to take money out of your pocket and redistribute it to the chosen wealthy few.

They want to denigrate the concept of hard work and personal responsibility that has made America the economic success that it is because of our capitalist system and because of the American dream, again, where people can come here, let's say as a legal immigrant, with very little, but by virtue of hard work and commitment and determination, they can achieve their dream and help others achieve their dream at the same time--but not if you eliminate the concept of hard work, accountability, and personal responsibility and just continue to dole out government handouts.

So it doesn't really make any difference what our colleagues try to call it. They call it the Inflation Reduction Act--the bill they just passed, the reckless tax-and-spending bill--when virtually all of the outside experts said: No, it won't reduce inflation, certainly not in the near term. So it doesn't make any difference how they try to brand it; socialism is socialism, and it is leading our country down the road to a dangerous destination.

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