Sandy Fitzgerald
Rep. Darin LaHood told Newsmax Friday said he is giving a group of nine moderate Democrats credit for not wanting to move forward with voting for a $3.5 trillion spending package before the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill passes the House and is signed into law, as the legislation will cost Americans far too much money.
"It's going to cost taxpayers a lot of money," the Illinois Republican said on Newsmax's "Wake Up America" of the $3.5 trillion bill, noting that the United States spent that much on World War II.
"We have no way of paying for it," LaHood continued. "You look at this social infrastructure, human infrastructure, that's going to add to the national debt. What we're doing is we're hurting our kids and our grandkids."
As far as the infrastructure bill, LaHood said he agrees with spending money for good roads, bridges, airports, and rail systems, but "you've got to figure out how you're going to pay for it."
"Adding $260 billion, which the infrastructure bill does, to the deficit is not the right approach, in my view. I'm going to, first of all, read the infrastructure bill. It's over 2,000 pages long. I have an obligation and responsibility to my constituents to do that. But to think that we're going to continue to add to the $29 trillion that was already in debt, I think is really really poor fiscal policy, and we've got to think long and hard before we do that."
Meanwhile, inflation is getting worse under President Joe Biden than it was under former President Donald Trump, and will probably grow with the infrastructure bill, said LaHood.
"We're talking about passing an infrastructure bill, but who's going to build all this stuff?" he said. "We can't even get the 10 million jobs that we have now filled. I've been in my district (you) can't find truck drivers, can't find manufacturers, can't find welders, can't find cooks and waitresses."
But before the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States had "the best economy in my lifetime. By every indication of people at all levels of our economy in our society were benefiting from the bottom to the middle to the top, and that's what really got to get back to. Continuing to spend money and be on the sugar high that we are with all of this government money needs to stop."
