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Floor Speech

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Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, I want to talk just for a few minutes this evening about my people in Louisiana.

They are hurting. Inflation is gutting them like a fish. This inflation, like all inflation, is manmade, and that man's name is President Joe Biden.

President Biden has proven to be an inflation machine. He has spent trillions and trillions of dollars that we do not have. He has injected so much money into this economy that we are practically drowning in liquidity.

Unless you were in the quad playing frisbee during Econ 101, you know that, inevitably, that is going to cause inflation. And, indeed, it did.

I realize there is a yawning disconnect between what President Biden says and what my people in Louisiana are experiencing. There is. President Biden says that the economy is just fine. He says the economy is just wonderful.

I will tell you what my people say. My people say, with respect, Mr. President: You need to put down the bong because, in our State, we are paying more to live worse. And we are not going to be able to retire because of you, Mr. President, until 4 years after we are dead.

Louisiana is not a wealthy State. Our median household income is about $58,000. That is mom and dad both working, two children--$58,000. It is about $4,800 a month. President Biden's inflation is costing my people an extra $900 a month. That is not a year--$900 a month; $11,000 a year. My average family is making, once again, $58,000 a year. They have got to find, all of a sudden, an extra $11,000 a year.

Since President Biden has been President, his inflation has cost the average family in Louisiana an extra $22,000. You don't have to take my word for it. You can see this chart. You don't have to be a senior at Caltech to see that the direction is up, and these extra costs were caused by inflation.

The prices of consumer goods in my State, on average, are up 20 percent since President Biden took office. Some are up a lot more; some are up a little less. But the average is 20 percent.

Credit card debt is up 46 percent. The average credit card balance in Louisiana is now $5,800. When you are making $58,000 a year for a family of four, $5,800 is a lot. Delinquent credit card debt is up 11 percent, the highest in 12 years. We have had a record number of people who have had to take early withdrawals from their retirement accounts.

The average electricity bill in Louisiana is up 28 percent since President Biden took office; gasoline in Louisiana, up 53 percent; eggs, 69 percent; bread, 28 percent; coffee, 28 percent; rice, 29 percent; flour, 30 percent; milk, 15 percent; ice cream, 22 percent; chicken per pound, 27 percent.

If you are a mom and dad and you are both working and you have maybe two car notes--certainly one car note--and a mortgage and two children, how can you afford this? You can't.

When you group these necessities that I have just talked about by category, what you see is that, on average, for my people in Louisiana--again, we are not a wealthy State--food is up 21 percent on average; housing is up 290 percent; clothing is up 11 percent; used cars and trucks are up 21 percent; new cars and trucks are up 19 percent; and mortgage rates are up a breathtaking 156 percent.

Now, President Biden has said, truthfully--and I agree with him on this, and I am very happy that it happened--that inflation is coming down, and it is. But let me tell you the difference between inflation and prices. When inflation starts to go down, we call that disinflation. That doesn't mean prices are falling; that just means that prices are going up less quickly.

At one point, we were experiencing 9 percent inflation. Prices were going up an average of 9 percent a year. Now, it is somewhere in the 2 to 3.5 percent range. That means that prices are only going up 2 to 3 percent a year. Again, that doesn't mean prices are falling; that just means they are going up less quickly.

That is a long-winded way of saying that disinflation, which I just described, is very different from deflation. Deflation is when prices fall. And these prices--the President leaves this part out. These prices, I am sad to say, are permanent. They may not go up any more if we can get inflation down to roughly 1 to 2 percent, but the higher prices are still permanent.

And don't take my word for it. I can refer you to the testimony of both Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell, who both testified in the Banking Committee on which I sit. These prices are permanent.

Mr. President, my people are really getting good--they are really getting good at barely getting by. And it hurts; it hurts deeply. President Biden's inflation, in my State, is a cancer on the American dream. And it didn't have to be this way. We tried to tell him. We tried to tell him. When I say ``we,'' not only many of my Republican colleagues, but many of my Democratic friends did as well. Jason Furman, economic adviser to President Obama--I remember clearly Dr. Furman, now at Harvard, said: With all due respect, Mr. President, if you spend this kind of money, you are going to have inflation. And we did.

And the worst part of this is that President Biden has no plan to get it down--none. And I regret to say, but I think the only place that we are going to find economic sanity in our country again is in the voting booth.
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Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, I neglected to introduce one of my colleagues to the Senate, Ms. Jess Andrews, who was just here. She is my communications director, and she helped me research my remarks, and I wanted to thank her.

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