Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of the Protecting Taxpayers and Victims of Unemployment Fraud Act. Right now, our Federal Government is borrowing one out of $5 we spend, over $45,000 a second. This fact alone should outrage every American. Yet, we face another outrageous problem here in the swamp: Waste, fraud, and abuse. Not only are we borrowing at historic rates, but we are borrowing to cover the costs of rampant fraud that exists frequently unchecked in our system. This was magnified during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. While there were good reasons to expand unemployment benefits when many Americans were displaced from work through no fault of their own, we are already 3 years removed from the passage of the CARES Act. The pandemic emergency declaration is over; not because the Biden administration followed the science and voluntarily gave up their emergency powers, but because House Republicans and the Senate came together to force the Biden administration to end the pandemic emergency declaration. One troubling data point that has emerged is the unemployment claims as a percentage of unemployed workers. This was 37 percent in February 2020, right before the pandemic came to our shores. Yet, by August of the same year, it had climbed to 216 percent. The data is clear, we were paying massive amounts of unemployment to people who were not unemployed.…”