Inflation
Floor Speech
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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, now on an entirely different matter, last week, President Biden spent part of his State of the Union Address celebrating what he seemed to think was a victory over inflation. Yesterday, however, another wave of official figures confirmed what working families already knew: The President was simply wrong. The Democrats' football spiking was premature. The American people are hurting badly. The CPI rose another half a point last month, even faster than predicted, for an overall price hike of 6.4 percent year on year.
Now, mind you, that is not 6.4 percent inflation since President Biden was sworn in. That is an additional 6.4 percent just since February of last year--since February of last year--a baseline that already had an entire previous year of historic and unacceptable inflation already baked into it.
The overall Biden inflation rate is 14.4 percent. The overall Biden inflation rate is 14.4 percent from January 2021 to today. Rents are up 12.7 percent since President Biden took office. Grocery prices are up 19.6 percent. Energy prices are up 38 percent after 2 years of total Democratic control here in Washington.
Prices are still rising out of control. And, even worse, the rate of increase is speeding back up again. This past month was the hottest for inflation since last October.
We have now had 21 straight months above 5 percent annual inflation-- a mind-boggling policy failure.
And what does the White House have to say about it? Well, yesterday, the President's press secretary claimed:
The President's economic plan is indeed working.
So I guess the official White House position is that Democrats caused all of this crushing inflation on purpose. This is the kind of insanity that has left just 16 percent of Americans saying they are in a better financial position than they were 2 years ago. That has nearly two- thirds of Americans saying they are living literally paycheck to paycheck. So much preventable pain, because Democrats gambled away families' security on their radical plans and their reckless spending.
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