[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 92 (Wednesday, May 26, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3469-S3470]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                ECONOMY

  Mr. McCONNELL. Now, Mr. President, on a related matter, the 
Democrats' far-left turn thus far has affected the entire U.S. economy, 
and it is hitting working families right where it hurts.
  In January, President Biden inherited safe and effective vaccines. He 
inherited a reopening economy and a country that was sitting on more 
pent-up savings than anything economists had seen in living memory. 
That was the condition of the country when the President took office.
  The Democrats have already dreamt up a massive, record-shattering 
Washington spending spree. Like one House Democrat admitted way back at 
the start of the pandemic, liberals saw the crisis as ``a tremendous 
opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.''

[[Page S3470]]

  The Democrats had already decided to run up the American people's 
credit cards no matter what. Their first purchase was a $1.9 trillion 
excuse for a COVID bill that the Democrats rammed through on a party-
line vote. Even liberal economists and even former advisers to 
Presidents Clinton and Obama cautioned that the Democrats' bill was way 
larger than the remaining hole in our economy, badly tailored, and 
might well cause inflation.
  So everyone, from Republicans to liberal economists, warned that the 
Democrats' bad bill could easily cause inflation that would hurt 
ordinary American families. Well, look where we are today. Where are we 
today? We just got the most dramatic monthly inflation report in over a 
decade. Ask any working family about gas prices, food prices, home 
prices, lumber prices, used car prices. One survey just found that more 
than 80 percent of American families are literally tightening their 
household budgets because of the threat of inflation.
  Yet the problem with the Democrats' product wasn't just how much 
credit and borrowed money it flooded into the economy; the problem was 
also how little of substance American families got for the money. Larry 
Summers, former President Clinton's Treasury Secretary, put it this 
way--and this is the Larry Summers who also had a role in the Obama 
administration.
  Here is what he said:

       What's striking about [that bill, the COVID bill] is that 
     all of the trillions of dollars--all of it--does not include 
     a penny directed at ``building back better.''

  He continued:

       It transfers to state and local governments that don't have 
     any new budget problem. . . . It's paying people who have 
     been unemployed more in unemployment insurance than they 
     earned when they were working. It's giving checks to families 
     in the 90th percentile of income distribution.

  That is from Larry Summers. He is a Democrat. He is a friend of the 
administration's.
  The Democrats' hard-left turn has already hurt our economy, but they 
still seem to think that this massive bill should only actually just be 
the appetizer. The administration has proposed a total of about $7 
trillion of spending in its first few months in office. That absurdly 
overpriced COVID package would actually be the cheapest of the three 
massive bills the Democrats actually want to pass.
  For some perspective, about $7 trillion is considerably more money in 
inflation-adjusted terms than America spent in fighting and winning 
World War II. The Biden administration wants to tax, borrow, and print 
more money than America spent on World War II to finance a grab bag of 
miscellaneous liberal programs that would further jack up prices on the 
things families actually need to buy. It took less money to win a 
global war than these Democrats want to spend on a hodgepodge of 
stuff--stuff like electric cars and welfare programs. This is $7 
trillion of mediocre socialism and liberal social engineering. No 
serious expert thinks this is what our economy actually needs. No 
wonder Larry Summers says he is concerned that these proposals are 
``substantially excessive . . . way overdoing the requisite response.''
  The sooner this administration can get the memo, the more bipartisan 
progress we will be able to make, and the better off working families 
will be.

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