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Democrats' out of control spending will wreck our food supply

October 27, 2021

The White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain recently retweeted a preposterous claim that inflation is a "high class problem." I disagree.

Inflation hits working families the hardest, starting at the farm and making its way into every grocery store and gas station in the nation. The wealthy, like Klain, may not notice price hikes at the checkout line, but many who live paycheck-to-paycheck feel the sting. Such an out-of-touch comment makes clear why so many Americans seriously doubt the competency of this administration. Every year, I host an annual agriculture tour of Arkansas' Fourth District to see firsthand how the policies developed in Washington, D.C. affect folks at home.

On this year's tour, more than any other, I saw how the road to economic strife is paved with good intentions. Every farmer talked about price spikes or inflation. While Democrats fight each other to spend nearly $5 trillion, farmers and producers understand the chain reaction such reckless, out of control spending will have on our food supply. During my tour, I visited a trucking company in Huntsville, Ark., who reported labor shortages and supply chain issues that have left the company with back ordered trucks and a serious driver shortage. Similarly, a large supplier of poultry to grocery stores nationwide also cited significant challenges with securing reliable labor.

This problem is not unique to these industries -- they are widespread across many sectors of the American economy and I heard about it at nearly every stop along my tour. I fear that new federal COVID-19 vaccine mandates on large employers will lead them to lose even more workers. Fewer workers mean less goods produced, and lower production with increasing demand equals higher prices. It's basic economics. Processing bottlenecks reverberate through the supply chain. If beef, pork, and poultry processing are stymied at the processing facility, producers and suppliers feel the effects just as the processors are affected with upstream supply chain restraints. At the end of the day, consumers pay the price. In fact, farmers in my District warn that the consumer may soon face an additional increase in the price of food in the near future. Meanwhile, the Biden administration's focus remains fixed on spending hundreds of billions on Green New Deal programs, increasing energy prices, paying workers to stay home, and implementing mandates on health care that will force workers off the job. While we can't control what's happening with supply chains in China or with OPEC oil production, we can control our own laws.

President Biden is trying to solve Klain's "high class problem" through profligate government spending on social engineering and high-cost, low-reward pet projects, and he's using your hard-earned tax dollars to do it. Digging deeper into debt, raising taxes, and wasting money on programs that fail to get people back to work aren't the solutions that American families want. Inflation is real. Inflation is making Americans' lives more difficult, and if Biden's policies continue, the worst is yet to come. Instead of contributing to the problem by borrowing more and spending more, President Biden should focus on solutions to bringing down prices on food and gas for American families and getting people back to work.