[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 73 (Wednesday, April 28, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2278-S2281]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Unanimous Consent Request--S. Res. 185
Mr. SCOTT of Florida. Madam President, Americans are worried about
inflation. New polling shows that 87 percent of Americans are concerned
about the rising costs of household items, like diapers and gas and
groceries. That is up from 77 percent just last month. They have good
reason to feel that way. Right now, reports show that a third of
American households making less than $50,000 in annual income are
buying less because of increasing prices, and more than one-quarter of
all households report that rising prices on goods are causing them to
purchase less.
Just this month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that, over
the last 12 months, food prices have gone up, and gas prices have risen
23 percent. That means, since Biden was elected, gas prices have
increased about 70 cents per gallon across the Nation. Year over year,
consumer prices increased 2.6 percent in March. That is up from an
annual 1.7 percent increase in February. This is all in addition to
statements from some of America's largest corporations, like Procter &
Gamble and Kimberly-Clark, which recently announced that they are
increasing prices on a number of their products. That includes
essential household goods, like toilet paper and diapers.
The evidence of inflation is right in front of us. Just look at these
numbers that show the percentage change in average unit prices versus
last year: groceries up 2.6 percent; household goods up 5.2 percent;
baby care up 7 percent; general merchandise up 7.1 percent. Wages never
go up this fast. So who does it hurt? It hurts the poorest and those on
fixed incomes.
Businesses are also expecting price increases to continue.
According to data from FactSet, 47 S&P companies have mentioned
inflation on their earnings calls for Q1 2021. That is more than during
any other quarter in the last 10 years.
On its most recent earnings call, Procter & Gamble's chief financial
officer, Andre Schulten, said:
The commodity cost challenges we face this year will,
obviously, be larger next fiscal year.
Who gets hurt the most when inflation rises? Not the rich. It is
working families, especially those on low and fixed incomes.
I grew up poor and watched my parents struggle to put food on the
table. I know just how much a slight rise in prices can hurt a family,
because I saw it while I was growing up, and that is what is happening
right now across our Nation.
We know that those in the Biden administration are worried about
this. They know that rising costs caused by their massive spending are
bad for Americans, but they won't say it. While they are reportedly
worrying in private about the effects of their spending plans, they
have had a different message in public.
On April 13, the New York Times reported that officials and aides at
the White House and the Department of the Treasury have been holding
private meetings for months to discuss inflation and have conducted
indepth internal analyses for senior officials and President Biden.
The article goes on to read:
[[Page S2279]]
Mr. Biden's aides are sufficiently worried about the risk
of that spending fueling inflation that they shaped his
infrastructure proposal, which has yet to be taken up by
Congress, to funnel out $2.3 trillion over eight years, which
is slower than traditional stimulus.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the
Record this New York Times article, dated April 13, 2021
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the New York Times, Apr. 13, 2021]
The Biden Administration Is Quietly Obsessing Over Inflation
(By Jim Tankersley)
Washington.--Even before President Biden took office, some
of his closest aides were focused on a question that risked
derailing his economic agenda: Would his plans for a $1.9
trillion economic rescue package and additional government
spending overheat the economy and fuel runaway inflation?
To find the answer, a close circle of advisers now working
at the White House and the Treasury Department projected the
behaviors of shoppers, employers, stock traders and others if
Mr. Biden's plans succeeded. Officials as senior as Janet L.
Yellen, the Treasury secretary, pored over the analyses in
video calls and in-person meetings, looking for any hint that
Mr. Biden's plans could generate sustained price increases
that could hamstring family budgets. It never appeared.
Those efforts convinced Mr. Biden's team that there is
little risk of inflation spiraling out of the Federal
Reserve's control--an outcome that Wall Street analysts, a
few prominent Republicans and even liberal economists like
Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary, have said
could flow from the trillions being pumped into the economy.
Traditional readings of price increases are beginning to
turn upward as the recovery accelerates. On Tuesday, the
Consumer Price Index rose 0.6 percent, its fastest monthly
increase in more than a decade, while a less volatile index
excluding food and energy rose a more muted 0.3 percent.
But Mr. Biden's advisers believe any price spike is likely
to be temporary and not harmful, essentially a one-time event
stemming from the unique nature of a pandemic recession that
ruptured supply chains and continues to depress activity in
key economic sectors like restaurant dining and tourism.
The administration's view mirrors the posture of top
officials at the Fed, including its chairman, Jerome H.
Powell, whose mandate includes maintaining price stability in
the economy. Mr. Powell has said that the Fed expects any
short-term price pops to be temporary, not sustained, and not
the type of uptick that would prompt the central bank to
raise interest rates rapidly--or anytime soon.
``What we see is relatively modest increases in
inflation,'' Mr. Powell said in March. ``But those are not
permanent things.''
Armed with their internal data and conclusions,
administration officials have begun to push back on warnings
that a stimulus-fueled surge in consumer spending could
revive a 1970s-style escalation in wages and prices that
could cripple the economy in the years to come.
Yet they remain wary of the inflation threat and have
devised the next wave of Mr. Biden's spending plans, a $2.3
trillion infrastructure package, to dispense money gradually
enough not to stoke further price increases right away.
Administration officials also continue to check on real-time
measures of prices across the economy, multiple times a day.
``We think the likeliest outlook over the next several
months is for inflation to rise modestly,'' two officials at
Mr. Biden's Council of Economic Advisers, Jared Bernstein and
Ernie Tedeschi, wrote on Monda in a blog post outlining some
of the administration's thinking. ``We will, however,
carefully monitor both actual price changes and inflation
expectations for any signs of unexpected price pressures that
might arise as America leaves the pandemic behind and enters
the next economic expansion.''
Some Republicans call that posture dangerous. Senator Rick
Scott of Florida, the chairman of his party's campaign arm
for the 2022 midterm elections, has called on Mr. Biden and
Mr. Powell to present plans to fight inflation now.
``The president's refusal to address this critical issue
has a direct negative effect on Floridians and families
across our nation, and hurts low- and fixed-income Americans
the most,'' Mr. Scott said in a news release last week.
``It's time for Biden to wake up from his liberal dream and
realize that reckless spending has consequences, inflation is
real and America's debt crisis is growing. Inflation is
rising and Americans deserve answers from Biden now.''
Economic teams in recent administrations spent little time
worrying about inflation, because inflationary pressures have
been tame for decades. It has fallen short of the Fed's
average target of 2 percent for 10 of the last 12 years,
topping out at 2.5 percent in the midst of the longest
economic expansion in history.
Shortly before the pandemic recession hit the United States
in 2020, President Donald J. Trump's economic team wrote that
``price inflation remains low and stable'' even with
unemployment below 4 percent. As the economy struggled to
climb out from the 2008 financial crisis under President
Barack Obama, White House aides feared that prices might
fall, instead of rise.
``Given the economic crisis, we worried about preventing
deflation rather than inflation,'' said Austan Goolsbee, a
chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during Mr.
Obama's first term.
The conversation has changed given the large amounts of
money that the federal government is channeling into the
economy, first under Mr. Trump and now under Mr. Biden. Since
the pandemic took hold, Congress has approved more than $5
trillion in spending, including direct checks to individuals.
Mr. Biden's aides are sufficiently worried about the risk
of that spending fueling inflation that they shaped his
infrastructure proposal, which has yet to be taken up by
Congress, to funnel out $2.3 trillion over the course of
eight years, which is slower than traditional stimulus.
Even before Mr. Summers and others raised economic concerns
about Mr. Biden's $1.9 trillion relief bill, officials were
wrestling with their own worries about its inflation risks.
They had internally concluded, with direction from Mr. Biden,
that the biggest risk to the economy was going ``too small''
on the aid package--not spending enough to help vulnerable
Americans survive continued stints of joblessness or lost
income. But they wanted to know the risks of going ``too
big.''
They tested whether an uptick in inflation might cause
people and financial markets to expect rapid price increases
in the years to come, upending decades of what economists
call ``well-anchored'' expectations for prices and
potentially creating a situation where higher expectations
led to higher inflation. They estimated the odds that the Fed
would react to such moves by quickly and steeply raising
interest rates, potentially slamming the brakes on growth and
causing another recession.
The informal group that initially gathered to research
those questions included Mr. Bernstein, a member of the
Council of Economic Advisers; David Kamin, a deputy director
of the National Economic Council; Michael Pyle, Vice
President Kamala Harris's chief economic adviser; and two
Treasury officials, Nellie Liang and Ben Harris. More members
have joined over time, including Mr. Tedeschi.
The group reports regularly to Ms. Yellen and other senior
officials including Brian Deese, who heads the N.E.C., and
Cecilia Rouse, who leads the C.E.A. Its work has informed
economic briefings of Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris.
``The president and the vice president, their job is to
deliver good economic outcomes for the American people,'' Mr.
Pyle said in an interview. ``Part of what delivering strong
economic outcomes to the American people means is ensuring
that their team is fully on top of both the tailwinds to the
U.S. economy but also the risks that are out there. And this
is one of them.''
Mr. Pyle and his colleagues looked at financial market
measures of inflation expectations, including one called the
five-year, five-year forward, which currently shows investors
expecting lower inflation levels over the next several years
than they expected in 2018.
At the same time, officials at the Treasury's Office of
Economic Policy conducted a series of modeling exercises to
``stress test'' the virus relief package and how it might
change those price and expectation measures if put in place.
They considered scenarios where consumers quickly spent their
aid money, which included $1,400 checks, or where they did
not spend much of it at all right away. They talked with
large banks about trends in customers' cash balances and how
quickly people were returning to the work force. Ms. Yellen,
a former Fed chair, helped adjust the models herself.
The exercises produced a wide range of possibilities for
inflation. But they never suggested it would rise so rapidly
that the Fed could not easily handle it by adjusting interest
rates or other monetary policy tools. They saw no risk of a
sharp return to recession--and no reason to pull back from
spending proposals that administration officials believe will
help the economy heal faster and help historically
disadvantaged groups, like Black and Hispanic workers, regain
jobs and income.
``We're going to see some heat in this economy,'' Mr. Pyle
said. ``That heat is going to be good and redound to the
benefit of wages and labor market conditions overall and
particularly for a number of communities that have been at
the margins of the labor market for too long.''
If the data proves that forecast wrong, officials say
privately, they will be quick to adapt. But they will not say
how. If inflation were to accelerate in a sustained and
surprising way, some officials suggest, the administration
would trust the Fed to step in to contain it.
There is no plan, as of yet, for Mr. Biden to consider
inflation-fighting actions of his own.
Mr. SCOTT of Florida. The content and conclusions of these meetings
and working groups have not been disclosed or been made available to
the public.
While privately worrying about the same issue I have been sounding
the
[[Page S2280]]
alarm on for months, the Biden administration continues to mislead the
American public and ignore the threat of inflation.
Over the last 2 months, I have asked the National Economic Council
about its plans to fight inflation and protect American families.
I have written a Federal Reserve member, asked him what can be done
to help families who are seeing skyrocketing gas prices and increasing
mortgage rates.
I have called on President Biden and Federal Reserve Chair Powell to
lay out their clear plan to address inflation and rising prices that
threaten American families. I have yet to get a straightforward or
acceptable response. I have yet to hear them acknowledge this very real
threat or propose a solution to protect families.
So today Senator Braun and I are making a simple request that the
Biden administration share with the Senate all of its notes, memos, and
reports regarding their discussions and plans to mitigate and prevent
growing inflation.
Inflation is a very real threat to the well-being of already
struggling families, and the last thing American families need is to be
misled by this administration.
Right now, Democrats in Washington are living in a fantasyland where
debt doesn't matter, spending has no consequences, inflation is
impossible.
But the reality is that inflation does have consequences, and it is
the duty of everyone here, especially the President of the United
States, to be open and transparent with the American people about what
is happening with inflation.
There is no reason the Biden administration should be hiding this
information. Americans deserve to know the consequences of massive
government spending, and they deserve leadership that will show some
fiscal responsibility when it comes to their taxpayer dollars.
I look forward to all my colleagues supporting this effort to
increase transparency.
Madam President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous
consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 185,
submitted earlier today. I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be
agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be
considered made and laid upon the table, with no intervening action or
debate.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The senior Senator from Ohio
Mr. BROWN. Madam President, reserving the right to object, no serious
economists across the ideological spectrum are concerned about
inflation right now. No one is hiding information at the White House.
I am in meetings all the time with White House officials talking
about this package. No one believes--first of all, no one is hiding
information. No one believes what the Senator, the junior Senator from
Florida, is saying about this.
Perhaps some millionaire Senators want to make this into an issue,
and I hear that over and over and over, but I talk to people like Jay
Powell, Chair of the Federal Reserve, nominated by President Trump for
that position. He, of course, keeps his eye on these kinds of things,
but he has expressed no strong concern about inflation.
And we even know that when some experts have been concerned, they
have been wrong. We saw what happened in 2008 after too many elites
worried about inflation. What we really needed was to increase wages
and get people back to work. The result from 2008 was a recovery that
was too slow for most people, while so many of these big costs
continued to rise.
Our economy looks a whole lot better today than it did last year, but
we can't compare where we are today with where we were last year. We
were on the brink of a once-in-a-generation health and economic crisis
at this time last year. Millions of people, mostly low-wage workers,
lost their jobs. Our economy ground to a halt as we tried to stop the
spread of the virus.
This year, we have made good progress with the American Rescue Plan,
as the Presiding Officer from Wisconsin knows, getting shots in arms
and money in pockets and kids back in school, people back to work.
But our recovery is far from over. Just moments ago Fed Chair Powell
said that we are seeing some temporary upticks because things were so
dire last year, but we still have a long way to go.
The bigger risk to the economy is not doing enough to raise workers'
wages and to invest in the infrastructure that allows our economy to
grow.
We know corporate leaders, we know millionaire Senators, we know
people at the top have done very--in many cases, have done very, very
well through this, but we know millions of workers, many of them hourly
workers, have lost jobs. We know millions of workers, so-called
essential workers--one essential worker said to me, works in a grocery
store: I don't feel essential. Frankly, I feel expendable because they
don't pay me much; they don't protect me at work. Those are the people
we should be looking after.
I want to raise wages. I want to bring down costs. That is exactly
what the jobs plan and the family plan will do--bring down healthcare
costs, make childcare more affordable, create more housing people can
afford, bring down energy bills, make work--getting to work cheaper and
easier with better transit. These are the costs that have been rising
and eating away at family budgets for decades.
If my colleague from Florida is so concerned about the cost of living
and raising a family, I hope he will join me to allow Medicare to
negotiate directly with drug companies to bring down prices for
seniors. I hope he will join us in investing in childcare to bring down
the cost of childcare. I hope he will join us as we work to create more
housing, bringing down housing costs. I hope he will join us to raise
the minimum wage.
My first speech on this floor 14 years ago--14 years ago, my first
speech on this floor was to raise the minimum wage, and we did, and it
hasn't been raised since. That is what the Senator from Florida and the
Senator from Indiana can help us with.
But we know most of the conservative elites in this country--most
won't say out loud what this inflation alarmism is really about. They
don't want to invest in the American people. They don't want to do
anything to make Americans' hard work pay off. They would rather try to
scare people: Can't spend this money because there might be inflation.
They don't want us to do what too many have failed to do: put money
in people's pockets and raise wages and rebuild infrastructure.
I would ask my colleagues to listen to the words of a worker from
West Virginia, Pamela Garrison. She testified at our first-ever work
listening session, our ``Dignity of Work'' session in the Banking and
Housing Committee yesterday. She said:
We're seeing corporations make billions every quarter in
profit, but then when we ask for a minimum wage raise, we're
told that ``no that will raise the cost of stuff, oh that'll
cost jobs.''
Funny, corporate executives never seem to say they will have to raise
prices when they give themselves bonuses. It is just we will have to
raise prices if we increase the minimum wage.
This same Ms. Garrison also said: You know, they call me part of the
working poor. The words ``working'' and ``poor'' shouldn't be in the
same sentence, and she is right about that.
Real expenses for most families have gone up for decades, along with
corporate profits and the stock market. Executive compensation has
exploded upward, and workers' wages haven't kept up.
Executive compensation--productivity is up. Executive compensation is
up. Profits are up. Workers' wages are flat. That is the problem. That
is what we should be working on.
I object
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
The junior Senator from Florida.
Mr. SCOTT of Florida. Madam President, the decision by my colleague
to block this resolution is clearly disappointing.
Let's remember what this was about. This was about transparency. They
just blocked the Senate from requesting basic information that is going
to help all Americans.
And just look at these numbers again. Just in the last 4 months,
grocery prices are up 2.6 percent; household care is up 5.2 percent;
baby care is
[[Page S2281]]
up 7 percent; general merchandise up 7.1 percent. We are clearly seeing
inflation.
Senate Democrats just objected to transparency. That means they are
against getting the facts, against ensuring accountability, and against
getting the American people the information they need to make smart
decisions as prices keep rising.
Eighty-seven percent of Americans are worried about the rising costs
of goods. Apparently, so is the White House. So don't the American
people deserve the same information about what is happening with the
economy?
Floridians deserve to know the truth about inflation and so do the
people of Ohio. Why does my colleague want to keep them in the dark?
This administration is telling the American people one thing but
saying something else behind closed doors. That is wrong.
The American people deserve the truth. Inflation is real. It is
happening. It is hurting American families. It is time President Biden
does something about it, and I am extremely disappointed my colleague
is actually today helping the President mislead the American people.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The senior Senator from Ohio.
Mr. BROWN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to address the
Senate for 10 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.