Rob Portman: “first, I would like to congratulate my colleague from Wyoming for his thoughtful remarks. I mean, he is absolutely…”

“first, I would like to congratulate my colleague from Wyoming for his thoughtful remarks. I mean, he is absolutely right. This is not the time for us to be raising taxes. It is tax day coming up next week, and Senator Ernst of Iowa put together this colloquy to focus us all on that issue and the fact that here we are coming onto tax day, yet there are proposals out there saying you are not paying enough tax. So all of you who think you are paying too much tax, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle and the administration would like to increase those taxes substantially. It is going to really hurt our economy and hurt workers. That is my big concern about this proposal in this so-called infrastructure package. Our economy is kind of limping along still, in part, because we have spent so much in stimulus that it has overheated the economy, and you can see the inflation that is hitting us. You can see it in the gas prices when you go to the pump or food costs or, if you are trying to buy lumber these days, check out the cost. On the one hand, Democrats are encouraging more inflation through stimulation that really wasn't needed based on what we had learned from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office--and that has overheated the economy--and, by the way, as former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers predicted. This was in a Democratic administration, two of them.…”