On the recordMarch 15, 2023
I am here to join some of my colleagues to talk about President Biden's budget proposal. I have heard a lot of the floor speeches today, and I hear a lot of facts and figures that are all very important, but sometimes it is kind of hard to translate that down to what it means around a kitchen table. I am actually speaking with a very vivid memory of the life I lived as a teenager back in the seventies when my mother and father, with six kids, were always on the economic bubble based on what happens in Washington. The challenges of working families are significant, and the challenges this budget presents make them even more so. I will start off with a couple of facts and figures because I think it is important. We have had inflation go up at about 15 percent since President Biden was in office. I am going to talk a little bit about that in a minute. If you go on Bloomberg or you read the Wall Street Journal, they use words like ``CPI'' and ``PCE'' and all these things. That won't necessarily make a lot of sense to folks who haven't studied it, but it does matter that grocery prices are up by 20 percent since President Biden took office. That is a 40-year high. And it also matters that rent prices-- something that my family in the seventies, depending upon what Congress did to us, very seldom for us, we would either be in a house that my parents owned or a house or a trailer that my parents rented. And when rents go up like that, the choices get fewer and fewer.…
