On the recordFebruary 7, 2023
as my colleague from Texas said, people are looking forward to hearing what the President will say and what he will not say tonight. As I have been home over the weekend, one of the things I have heard from Tennesseans about is the out-of-control Federal spending. Now, we know what the Democrats have done in plussing up the budget for the last couple of years, but one number kind of stuck with me, and it is about $3.6 trillion--that is taxpayer dollars--that has been spent on Democratic wish-list items. A lot of this is the Green New Deal. A lot of this is the reckless spending agenda they are pushing. Now, they forced through, in 2021, $1.85 trillion in spending. Then they came back around, and they wanted to talk about inflation. Joe Biden had 1.4 percent inflation when he took office, and because of this out-of-control spending and spending more and more and more and hundreds of billions of dollars, we saw inflation in June of 2022 hit 9.1 percent. People are frustrated about this. But one of the things that got Tennesseans was the fact that this President didn't say: Well, it is because we put all this money-- Federal spending--your dollars--we are putting these back out there. No, he blamed Vladimir Putin. It was Putin's fault. To Tennesseans, this was outrageous. It was the ``go blame somebody else'' game.…
