Democrats’ “Inflation and Recession Act” includes higher taxes on small businesses, more IRS audits, greater inflation including on health care and drug prices, and will hurt Americans as we enter a recession, Ways and Means Republican Leader Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) said before a Rules Committee hearing on the Manchin-Biden Build Back Better bill.

CLICK HERE to watch Rep. Brady’s remarks.

Rep. Brady’s full remarks as prepared for delivery appear below.

Thank you, Chairman McGovern, Ranking Member Cole, and all the members of the Rules Committee, and thank you too for your tributes to our late colleague on Ways and Means Jackie Walorski.

 

Unfortunately, the Senate’s latest Manchin-Biden version of Build Back Better is a hoax on the American people.

 

This “Don’t Say Inflation or Recession Act” fails to reduce inflation, fails to reduce the budget deficit and fails to reduce the world’s temperature. 

 

If the Green New Deal and corporate welfare had a baby, it would look like this. And who pays to raise this poor child? 

 

Made-in-America manufacturing, small businesses, and Walmart shoppers. 

 

Who in their right mind raises taxes in a recession? 

 

The answer is President Biden and congressional Democrats who bungled this economic recovery. Other countries are lowering their taxes to fight inflation — only Democrats who bungled the recovery think this is a good idea.

 

The Biden economy is a very cruel economy, with families skipping meals, eliminating meat, and using their credit cards to pay for daily essentials. 

 

Food inflation is not 0.0. It went up 12.9 percent this past year on families. Inflation is so bad, one out of four Americans are delaying retirement because they can’t figure out a way to make ends meet.

 

We have a shrinking economy, shrinking paychecks, and a shrinking workforce. 

 

President Biden likes to brag he’s created nearly 10 million jobs and the unemployment rate is 3.5 percent. But he’s in denial that President Trump created 12.4 million jobs post-COVID and lowered unemployment to 3.5 percent for the first time in half a century.

 

Here’s the difference: Under Republican leadership, paychecks grew twice as fast as prices, the economy was surging, not shrinking, and 600,000 more Americans were working then than under today, this failed White House. 

 

In the impact of $350 billion in taxes, you’ll see higher taxes on companies that build here in America. It will kill jobs, slow the economy, and raise prices. 

 

Small businesses —who hire nearly half of all workers in America — will have a harder time surviving. This $50 billion in higher taxes falls on small business owners who file as individuals.

 

Raising taxes on companies that reinvest in their own stockholders hurts seniors and other savers. New energy taxes will drive up costs for families.

 

Unbelievably, all Senate Democrats, including Vice President Harris, voted for higher taxes on these small businesses so they could protect the millionaires and billionaires from higher SALT taxes.

 

Our Democrat colleagues love the wealthy, but not so much middle class families. 

 

The Joint Committee on Taxation – not Larry Summers or a list of liberal economists – reports taxes on Americans will rise for nearly every income level. The President is violating his pledge not to raise taxes on middle-class Americans. 

 

I hope no one is tweeting out that not one penny of taxes will be raised. I’m afraid that account would be suspended for misinformation.

 

This bill unleashes 87,000 new IRS agents on American taxpayers, targeting families, farmers, and small businesses. 

 

The Congressional Budget Office confirms the largest part of any new taxes collected will come from middle-class families.  

 

The biggest target are Walmart shoppers. You know who they are –  living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to make ends meet under President Biden’s raging inflation, with fuel costs making it hard just to drive to the store.

 

They will be hit with 710,000 new audits under the Democrats’ bill due to the skyrocketing surge of new IRS agents. It’s simple: more cops, more arrests.

 

This “Don’t Say Inflation or Recession Act” contains no language protecting middle-class taxpayers from this army of auditors. Not one sentence, not one word, don’t let anyone try to fool you there.

 

But boy, in this bill, Democrats love the wealthy. 

 

Under this bill, nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars in Green New Deal subsidies go to the wealthy and to the biggest, most successful businesses in America. These are government checks written to the wealthy even if they don’t owe any taxes. 

 

A single working mom will get hit with a tax hike starting next year, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. Her taxes will be sent in a government check to a large corporation.

 

A yardman will send his taxes in a government check to the well-to-do family whose lawn he’s cutting —so they can buy an $80,000 luxury electric vehicle. 

 

Democrats also increase the cost of healthcare and medicines, kill new life-saving cures, while providing Obamacare subsidies for those who don’t need them.

 

Congress’s nonpartisan scorekeeper, the Penn Wharton School of Business, and the University of Chicago, all confirm this socialist price-fixing scheme would be a death sentence for patients, raising the costs of new drugs, crushing innovation, and killing hundreds of cures.

 

Health care inflation is already up 17 percent, yet untargeted extensions of pandemic-era Obamacare subsidies do nothing to address these costs.

 

And they provide more affordable health care to some jobless than those who reconnect to work, making the workforce shortage even worse.

 

Democrats hide the true quarter of a trillion cost of making these Obamacare subsidies permanent, creating a massive funding cliff despite Senator Manchin’s pledge not to do so.

 

Higher taxes, more IRS audits on Walmart shoppers, greater inflation, including on health care and drug prices, will hurt Americans as we enter a recession. 

 

Do you trust the same President and the same Democrats, who drove this economy into a recession and drove prices sky high, with yet another economic recovery bill? For these reasons, I urge my colleagues to vote against this.