On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Fox Business Tonight,” Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) said that “once we get out of this recession,” “we need to smooth out our spending and try to deal with our deficits and our debt.”
Cleaver said, “I think everybody ought to be concerned about inflation because inflation is concerned with you. But I think that we need to keep in mind that there are a lot of things that caused this. I mean, China’s zero COVID policy disrupting production and supply chains, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, giant corporations using inflation as a smokescreen. And then people will talk about the stimulus. And, make no mistake, $7 [trillion] is a lot of money to pump into an economy. But the reason we shouldn’t get into a partisan thing about it is because 70% of that 7 trillion was signed into law under President Trump. And I don’t blame him for doing it. I think we had to do something, my interpretation, to keep us from plunging into the economic abyss. And so, we were able to come through to this point. And I think the Fed still has a road to go to get us out of it, which probably means raising the interest rates again.”
Host Sean Duffy then asked, “[D]o you think there’s going to be some effort to constrain spending as we look forward over the next couple of years?”
Cleaver responded, “We’re going to have to. Look, once we get out of this recession, and I do think we’re going to get out of it. … I think we’re going to come out of this. And then I do think that Democrats and Republicans, particularly those folks on the Budget Committee and the administration, whether it’s a Democratic administration or Republican, we’ve got to, I think, come to the conclusion that…when things are moving a little bit better economically, we need to smooth out our spending and try to deal with our deficits and our debt.”
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