Volume 167, No. 92, covering the 1st Session of the 117th Congress (2021 – 2022), was published by the Congressional Record.
The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“ECONOMY” mentioning Mitch McConnell was published in the Senate section on pages S3469-S3470 on May 26.
Of the 100 senators in 117th Congress, 24 percent were women, and 76 percent were men, according to the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
Senators’ salaries are historically higher than the median US income.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
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.”
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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