Inflation

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, Washington Democrats' reckless spending has embedded painful inflation deep in our economy. Runaway prices are making families' monthly budgets harder to balance. And as interest rates rise, the financial markets where millions of Americans invest their life savings are becoming literally more volatile.

Short-term bond yields are trading at their highest levels since the precipice of the Great Recession in 2007. Indications of expected stock market volatility appear to be actually on the upswing.

But with Americans' retirement accounts already in jeopardy, Democrats have gone looking for still more ways to put workers' savings at even greater risk. The Biden administration is trying to enact a radical new regulation that would help liberals use Americans' very own retirement savings as financial muscle for political causes they may not even support.

The Labor Department's proposed new rule would water down financial managers' fiduciary obligation to get the best return for their clients. This administration wants to let the fund managers prioritize extraneous factors--from companies' carbon footprints to various HR policies--when deciding where to invest hard-working Americans' savings.

The Biden administration wants to let Wall Street use its workers' hard-earned savings to pursue leftwing political initiatives instead of trying to maximize the returns for their clients' retirements. Democrats want to let money managers making these unrelated ideological goals a higher priority than getting their clients, ordinary American workers, the best returns for their own retirements.

Not surprisingly, studies suggest that investment funds where the managers put a political thumb on the scale in this particular fashion tend, not surprisingly, to underperform normal investments. When you put ideology ahead of seeking the highest returns, well, the returns, of course, suffer. And if the Democrats have their way, the losers will be ordinary American workers who have spent their whole careers putting money away for their retirement. In effect, we are talking about letting financial companies garnish the retirement savings of workers, without their permission, in order to pursue unrelated liberal political goals.

The Biden administration wants to put American workers in a position where portions of their potential returns on their retirement savings could be effectively donated away to leftwing political causes without their consent.

What a disastrous way to pile onto the pain they have already caused millions of American families.

I am grateful to my colleague from Indiana, Senator Braun, and to my friend and fellow Kentuckian Congressman Andy Barr for leading a bipartisan resolution in both Houses to make sure that Americans' retirement accounts are about one thing: maximizing returns on investments. I will be proud to support this commonsense measure later this week.

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