Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL) is very dour on congressional efforts responding to the damage inflicted by government response to the coronavirus outbreak.
Thursday, during an interview with Huntsville radio’s WVNN, Brooks declared Americans deserved “better” than what they were getting, noting the expenditures and what the country was getting out of these massive federal government expenditures.
Brooks said he was undecided on whether or not he would vote on Thursday’s bill.
“Quite frankly, America deserves better than what America is getting,” Brooks said. “We’re going to spend roughly $484 billion — much of which is human-caused, those losses. And there has been absolutely no effort whatsoever to find a reasonable way to pay for it — zero. Apparently, Congress believes there is no waste, fraud or abuse in the federal bureaucracy because we’re not cutting any of that to pay for this COVID-19 problem. Congress must believe there is no lesser priority than spending money on COVID-19 because there’s not a single federal program that we’re cutting in order to come up with the money to pay for the cost of this legislation [Thursday].”
“Congress must think that we need to keep our men and women in uniform in every part of the planet where we can put them and that none of those servicemen and women need to come home and save the tens of billions of dollars that we’re spending in places like Afghanistan,” he continued. “Congress must think that giving $50 billion a year in direct and indirect foreign aid is more important than shifting that money to save American lives that are threatened by COVID-19, or to rescue the finances of businesses and people who are suffering because of these government shutdowns imposed by American governors and mayors.”
“So, I’m really frustrated with how financially irresponsible this legislation is in the context of a report that came out recently, again emphasizing to Washington how unsustainable the federal government’s financial path is,” Brooks added. “And now we’re looking at a minimum $4 trillion deficit, which in absolute dollar terms would be about three times worse than the worst deficit in the history of our country. Absolute dollars, for emphasis, means it is not adjusted for inflation.”
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