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Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, the price of everything is up, and that is on purpose. It is on purpose because Donald Trump made it so.
We are not in the middle of a pandemic or a recession or a national emergency, but the President of the United States has decided that Americans should pay more for everything--food, gas, electricity, healthcare, housing, clothes, everything. So while he is busy lining his pockets with crypto schemes and insider-information subscription programs, regular people can't afford their lives.
Now, I say he is doing this on purpose because these are deliberate policy choices he has made. First, it was the tariffs that jacked up the prices of goods across the board. Tomatoes--tomatoes--went up 40 percent. Coffee went up by 20 percent. Clothes and car seats went up by 20 percent. Electronics shot up by hundreds of dollars. So it wasn't as if you could avoid the hit by not shopping at a particular store for a particular thing.
People in Hawaii are very expert at figuring out ``OK, turkey is high; let's get chicken. Pork is high; let's get beef.'' The difference now is that there is no escape. Literally everything is up. That is because the President of the United States has decided, through this Iran war, through the tariffs, through the energy bans, through the Medicaid and Medicare cuts, through the ACA cuts, through the nutrition cuts, to make literally every aspect of your life more expensive.
Then came the One Big Beautiful Bill where, in order to cut taxes for billionaires, Trump and the Republicans slashed subsidies for affordable healthcare and food assistance.
I want you to understand. This sounds like the kind of thing a partisan would say, and it is, but it is also true that the way they paid for tax cuts for the wealthiest people and the wealthiest corporations on this planet--the way they literally paid for it--was to take away people's healthcare. Without the enhanced premium tax credits, ACA premiums went up by close to 60 percent. As a result, millions of Americans are living without healthcare this year. Millions of Americans are living without healthcare this year not by choice but by force.
I want to read some of what those people had to say about it.
A man in Texas said:
The prices are simply too high. I don't think we could afford our mortgage if I had to pay for health insurance. If I have a catastrophic health event, it makes more sense for me to just declare bankruptcy than it would to be delinquent on other payments.
Here is another one--a 38-year-old from Alabama:
[I] can't afford insurance, [I] can't afford health care without insurance, so basically just hoping and praying I don't get sick . . .
People are having to gamble on their health so that the richest people to ever live can pay even less in taxes. And the price hikes aren't over yet because premiums are set to rise by double digits again next year according to proposals from insurers.
Aside from healthcare, the Republican tax bill also compounded Trump's ban on wind and solar energy. They are banning wind and solar energy, which is not only clean and helps us to address the climate crisis, it is just the quickest and cheapest energy that we could possibly get on the grid. It is not like we are in 1970 and we are arguing with the climate crisis versus the price that people pay on their utility bills.
The way to address the climate crisis is to do a lot more wind and solar, and the benefit is that it is the cheapest form of energy. Yet, this President has banned wind and solar energy through their administrative actions, and that is spiking the price of utilities across the country.
This is all before you factor in the war in Iran. In addition to being a spectacular failure that has achieved very little of Trump's own stated goals, it has also caused gas and energy and food prices to spike everywhere. Gas is over 4 bucks, right now, nationally, and it is even higher in Hawaii at $5.45. Diesel is $1.60 more than it was a year ago, which means that we are all paying more at stores for deliveries and transportation. In Hawaii, electricity bills went up 20 percent in 1 month--20 percent in 1 month--because of skyrocketing oil prices. Food prices continue to climb everywhere as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz extends a global fertilizer shortage.
It is common for Presidents to have to deal with the problems related to the economy. Specifically, what can be a real political killer is the question of inflation, but this is very unusual, and it may be unprecedented in American history. You have a President of the United States whose stated policy on tariffs, on energy, on Iran, on healthcare, and on food is to raise the price of everything. That is not a sort of accidental outcome of his economic policy; it is his economic policy to raise the price of everything.
People are going broke, and they are doing it to you on purpose.
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