[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 184 (Wednesday, December 11, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Page S6946]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                                Economy

  Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, yesterday, President Biden delivered a 
speech on the economy--a last attempt to rescue his dismal economic 
record. Incredibly, during the course of the speech, he repeated a 
phrase that he has often used about growing the economy from the bottom 
up and the middle out. I am not sure how that phrase continues to get 
past White House fact checkers because if there is one thing that 
President Biden has failed to do, it is to build an economy from the 
bottom up and the middle out.
  Thanks to President Biden's signature economic legacy--an inflation 
crisis of historic proportions--today, a typical family has to pay an 
additional $13,375 per year to maintain the same standard of living it 
enjoyed when the President took office--$13,375 per year, more than 
$1,000 per month. And who do you think that affects the most? Not 
billionaire Democrat donors or Hollywood stars. No. It affects the 
bottom and the middle the most--the people who don't have a spare 
$13,000 lying around and who have had to cut back on extras or, in many 
cases, essentials to survive in the Biden economy.
  CBS News exit polling in November found that two-thirds of voters 
described the economy as bad, and 45 percent said their financial 
situations were worse than they were 4 years ago. And it is no wonder. 
President Biden likes to talk about giving families breathing room, but 
his economy took away breathing room for a whole lot of Americans. 
Working Americans paying 22 percent more for groceries and 31 percent 
more for gas and 28 percent more for electricity and 23 percent more in 
rent than they were when President Biden took office are not seeing a 
lot of breathing room for their budgets.
  The President likes to pretend, as he did in his speech yesterday, 
that he came in and saved the economy after COVID, but the truth is, 
the economy was already well on its way to a healthy recovery, and his 
massive, ill-advised, supposed COVID relief legislation helped kick off 
an inflation crisis whose reverberations are still being felt today in 
family budgets around the country. President Biden can give all the 
speeches he wants touting his economic record, but his economy has been 
the very opposite of a boon to lower and middle-income families.
  The good news is that the days of President Biden's disastrous 
economic policies are numbered. In January, President Trump will take 
office, and Republicans will have control of the House and the Senate. 
Expanding economic opportunity and increasing growth and Americans' 
wages will be a top priority. That means taking action via 
reconciliation to preserve the tax relief that Republicans delivered 
during the first Trump administration--tax relief that improved take-
home pay for millions of hard-working Americans. It also means 
targeting onerous regulations choking our economy, like the thousand-
plus Biden-Harris regulations that have already cost Americans well 
over $1.5 trillion. It means things like unleashing American energy and 
restoring American energy dominance, which will benefit both the 
economy and our national security.
  President Biden's energy policies have jeopardized the future of our 
already shaky electric grid and set us up for future supply problems, 
but his war on American energy ends next month, and a better future is 
in sight. It won't take long now.
  I yield the floor.