WASHINGTON, D.C. — Congressman David Schweikert (AZ-01) delivered a speech on the House Floor last night dissecting the numerous tax hikes in President Biden’s $6.8 trillion budget proposal. Congressman Schweikert highlighted the toll inflation has taken on his constituents in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area and how hardworking Americans’ purchasing power has been devalued over the last decade. Excerpts from Congressman Schweikert’s floor speech can be found below:
 

On Democrats pumping trillions of dollars into the economy and fueling inflation:

[Beginning at 5:32 mark]
“So, you have the Federal Reserve trying to pull liquidity out, but on the other side of this equation, you have fiscal policy. This Congress, when it was controlled by the Left, our Democrat brothers and sisters put so much cash, so much money into the economy, whether it be [..] the American Rescue Plan, the omnibus bills that actually raised spending, you add everything from even the CHIPS Act, all these other things where you’re pumping in money. So do you understand the point I’m trying to make is if you cannot line up fiscal policy, and fiscal policy is what we do in Congress. And what happens when it’s working contrary to monetary policy. Monetary policy is what the Federal Reserve does. And we’re starting to actually see a really, really interesting — let’s call it an academic debate — except it hurts people.”

On President Biden adding $5 trillion to the deficit:

[Beginning at 8:15 mark]
“How much has President Biden added to the deficit in these last couple of years? […] Why haven’t we been able to knock down inflation more? And it’s this spending. And when you start to realize that it’s functionally well over $5 trillion of additional spending that the Democrats created over the last couple of years. Okay, you may love it. Maybe you think [these are] your priorities. But then understand how much poorer you are through inflation because this actually worked contrary to trying to slow inflation down. It’s the concept of fiscal policy [crashing] into monetary policy. And then you start to wonder why the high school math that we were all taught and how this is supposed to work isn’t working.”

On inflation impacting the Phoenix-Scottsdale area the hardest:

[Beginning at 9:45 mark]
“For most of the last two years, my neighborhoods have had the highest inflation in America. So when America is over here saying, ‘We had 8 percent inflation, it’s devastating!’ I’m having 13.1 [percent]. You’re just that hard-working person in my community, and you’ve had your teeth kicked in. This is important, and I’m heartbroken we don’t talk about this more. Inflation has dramatically reduced workers’ purchasing power. But let’s go all the way [back] ten years. So you had 2 percent and 2 percent and 1.8 percent, and then 2.3 [percent inflation]. And then you hit the last two years. In 2013, you’re making $60,000 a year and you haven’t had a pay increase. You’re making $60,000 in 2013 and you kept the same salary those ten years. Dear Lord, I hope you’re been being paid more. But let’s say you’re not. That $60,000 today would only buy [$46,253] worth of goods. You’ve gone from $60,000 of purchasing power in ten years to $46,253. In 2021, if you’re being paid $60,000, by the end of the year, you’ve functionally lost about $8,000 of purchasing power. And that’s the mean. In my state, in my community, it was substantially more than this.”

On the reality that Americans’ salaries have been devalued because of inflation:

[Beginning at 11:48 mark]
“When we devalue your salary, when we devalue your currency, where does that money go? […] We took your salary, your savings, we devalued it, and we put it over here to those of us who borrow. Who’s the biggest borrower? The United States government. So we are going to now pay back the debt with inflated dollars. Now, it’s not a magical free option. You didn’t suddenly say, ‘Hey, you’ve got $30 trillion of debt. We’re going to pay it back with dollars now that are only worth $0.90. Isn’t this neat? We took $0.10 off of our debt.’ No, we didn’t. What we did is we stripped it from you. We taxed you, and you didn’t even know it. You do understand because we stripped the value of your salary, the value of your savings, it was functionally transferred to the United States Treasury, and devaluing the debt when we pay it back. How many Americans understand the last two years, [we had] maybe the largest tax hikes in modern history. We made you poorer.”

On the tax hikes in President Biden’s FY 24 budget proposal:

[Beginning at 21:13 mark]
“We’re going to look at a lot of the Left’s priorities here. This is just one of a couple of boards of tax hikes. Tax hike after tax hike after tax hike. I cannot wait to try to figure out some way to model these tax hike boards and try to understand the level that this actually slows down the economy. I’m going to make the argument that the duplicity we’re seeing in the President’s budget just blows off the page with the amount of the GDP, the size of our economy that is going to go to taxes, and then to pretend it’s still going to grow. […] These are all the proposed tax hikes that are in the President’s budget. And then they’re going to tell you this nice thing, saying, ‘We’re raising taxes enough to reduce the deficit over the next decade by $3 trillion!’ They forget to mention that we’re borrowing [$20 trillion].”

On debt as a share of GDP rising to 110 percent by 2033:

[Beginning at 32:34 mark]
“So my Democratic colleagues are running around here saying, ‘If we get all these taxes, we’re going to lower the deficits!’ It’s just not true. But just even believing the top line that’s written in the President’s budget before we’ve actually had a moment to really dive in and see what the economic analytics are there and do they model for how much they’re going to slow the economy down, what that does to revenues, are they still just pretending they’re still getting the baseline growth? We functionally go from 98.4 percent of the publicly-held debt to the size of the economy to [in] 9 budget years, we go to 110 percent. We’re basically right on top of the World War II peak. So we’re basically going to line up with the highest debt to the size of the economy in our country’s history.”