On the recordSeptember 6, 2023
Mr. President, we recently passed the first anniversary of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, and despite the White House's showy anniversary celebration, this legislation is not aging well, and that is not exactly a surprise. It was clear from the beginning that this bill had problems. It was called the Inflation Reduction Act. Yet before the bill had been signed into law, the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model was noting that the bill's impact on inflation was ``statistically indistinguishable from zero.'' In other words, the Inflation Reduction Act would do nothing to reduce inflation. Even President Biden has essentially admitted that the bill's name was misleading. It was also clear from the outset that the bill's claims of deficit reduction were extremely shaky, relying on accounting gimmicks and fuzzy math. Then, of course, there were the hundreds of billions of dollars in tax hikes on American businesses--rarely, I might add, a strategy that produces economic growth or benefits for working Americans. There was a massive funding infusion to the IRS focused not on improving taxpayer services, interestingly enough, but on increasing audits to help fund the Democrats' Green New Deal agenda--and more. The best that could be said for the Inflation Reduction Act when it passed, which isn't much, was that it was less damaging than the staggering multitrillion-dollar spending spree Democrats had originally tried to implement, their so-called Build Back Better Act.…





