Relating to A National Emergency By the President on February 2025

Floor Speech

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Mr. FINE. Mr. Speaker, we have heard the opposition to this take on two things: number one, that this has somehow raised the cost of living and that, somehow, the fentanyl crisis is not a national emergency. I would like to disassemble those two arguments.

A long time ago, long before I came to Washington, one of my first jobs was I taught economics. I would say to my colleagues that they need to get beyond Karl Marx's ``The Communist Manifesto'' to understand how the world actually works.

When Joe Biden was President, prices went up 5 percent a year. Under the Trump trade regime that is supposedly making things so expensive for people, it has gone up one-half that amount, 2.7 percent. Obviously, tariffs are not the problem.

Economic results: The last quarter, our economic growth as a nation was 4.4 percent. The economy is booming. That is almost double what we saw the previous year under Joe Biden. His number started with a two.

These tariffs, rather than hurting America, have brought $15 billion, that is just from Canada, that we can use to pay down our debt and pay down our deficit, again, as we have lower inflation and higher economic growth. It has worked. The chairman talked about the cost of 5,000 lives a year in New York, almost 100,000 nationwide, but those statistics are 1 year old.

Under President Trump's tariff regime where he has cracked down on it, last year, fentanyl deaths in this country dropped by 21 percent. That is 20,000 Americans who did not die because of a fentanyl overdose. That is 20,000 national emergencies diverted. That is 20,000 families that aren't destroyed, and that is 20,000 futures that still get to be in our country.

We should not be criticizing the President for what he has done, because the last thing I will say is this: When I taught economics, we had a concept called Pareto optimality. It is something where everything is good and nothing is bad, and that is exactly what is happening here.

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