WASHINGTON (March 5, 2025) – WASHINGTON – Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) detailed the three ways in which Congress can work with the Trump administration to address inflation in a speech on the Senate floor.
Key excerpts of the speech are below:
“I don’t want to dwell on the past, but President Biden’s administration was an inflation machine. . . . What the American people are wondering every single day as they sell blood plasma to go to the grocery store is: when am I going to get some relief from these high prices? And we do need to provide them relief. I want to talk about three ways that we are in the process of trying to reduce those prices that my Democratic colleagues caused.”
. . .
“Number one: reduce spending. You see it every single day from President Trump. He said he was going to audit federal spending, and that is exactly what he is doing.”
. . .
“Number two: deregulation. The federal government wants to regulate every breath we take. . . . It is just amazing, and each one of these regulations has a cost. The cost of all of our regulations today is in excess of $2 trillion—not billion, not million—$2 trillion.
“What does that mean? That means when a business produces a product or it delivers a service—and it has to comply with a meaningless, gnarly federal regulation which costs money—that extra expense is added to the cost of the product or the service. Duh. I mean, businesses have to stay in business. They can’t eat the cost so they pass it on, and that leads to higher prices.”
. . .
“The third way we are attacking these high prices is by trying to stimulate the economy to increase wages so that we actually can grow out of these high prices so that people will have more money to spend when they buy a car or go to the grocery store. We are not going to do that with tepid GDP growth. . . . We are going to do that through the tax code.
“We have about $4.5 trillion worth of tax cuts that we implemented back in 2017 that caused the economy to grow and wages to go up until COVID hit. Those tax cuts are expiring here very shortly, and we are going to extend them.”
. . .
“We are well aware that high prices are gutting the American people like a fish, but by reducing spending, by deregulating the economy, and by designing a tax code that looks like somebody designed it on purpose, we are going to get those high prices down.”
Watch Kennedy’s full speech here.
