NASHVILLE, TN—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) yesterday joined Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street on Fox Business to discuss Democrats’ inflationary spending and the growing crisis at the southern border.
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Partial Transcript
Hagerty on Democrats’ $3.5 trillion tax-and-spend spree: “Let’s just talk about what was advertised at the outset because we’d waited for weeks, if not months to see the infrastructure bill, and my colleagues have been talking about hard infrastructure. Look, infrastructure is in my DNA. I went to college, I worked my way through school shoveling asphalt. My father, my grandfather were in the road construction business. I think Tennessee taxpayers and American taxpayers can appreciate hard infrastructure investment that delivers a real return. But what we finally received was a 2,700 page bill that was full of a lot of things that weren’t hard infrastructure, frankly, they were a down payment on the Green New Deal. And by the time we got the scoring, the Congressional Budget Office revealed that rather than being paid for, as it was advertised, it was over a quarter of a trillion dollars in the hole. What was Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s response to that? Well, let’s accelerate it. Let’s go ahead and pass it tonight. I think the aim was to get a patina of bipartisanship and some momentum in place so they could move right to the $3.5 trillion bill. That’s when I said no, that’s when I put a halt to that process trying to accelerate it, and we showed daylight on it. And I think a lot of my colleagues had an opportunity to see what was really in it. Several of them moved their votes. In the end, we had 30 of us that were opposed to it. And I think what we’ve got right now is an opportunity to put a lot more pressure on those Democrats in the House of Representatives who were in swing districts, who are going to be faced with looking at this bill, along with the $3.5 trillion whopper coming from Bernie Sanders.”
Hagerty on the policy goals of the far left: “The far left has taken over the Democrat party and the pressure that Chuck Schumer must be under is, I presume, enormous because he’s allowed Bernie Sanders to author this bill, this 3.5 trillion, which as you and I’ve talked about before, Maria, will probably wind up being north of $5 trillion when it’s over. What he’s done is really moved this entire Democrat contingent so far left to the point that it looks like AOC is calling the shots right now.”
Hagerty on tax increases and inflation: “What’s happening is they’re accelerating inflation at an enormous pace. We’re seeing inflation on the run here in America right now that’s the most pernicious tax, Maria, because it affects everybody, our retirees the most. Everyone’s dollars are worth less. And what this $3.5 trillion additional money is going to do, along with the $1.2 trillion of infrastructure spend, is just put more and more money into the economy, more and more inflationary pressure. That’s going to be the broadest base tax. But to come back to your question, this is going to cause corporate taxes to go up again. They’ll make America the least competitive nation in the world. Death taxes are going to go up. It’ll be very painful for small companies and farmers to pass along their business to the next generation. They’re going to make us less competitive at every front. They’re going to kill the fossil fuel industry, as you know, they want to see that go away. They’re going to make every company in America, less competitive because their energy costs are going to go up. And China is going to be laughing all the way to the bank and we will be shoving, yet again, more American jobs off shore in the process.”
Hagerty on Biden’s border crisis: “This is the greatest national security crisis that we face as a nation. They’ve come in and absolutely collapsed the border. Maria—it’s now easier to get across our Southern border than it is to get a table for dinner in New York City. This is preposterous and the level of COVID transmission that’s coming across the border, too. In the midst of a pandemic, they’re doing this. They have absolutely destroyed our national security at the Southern border, created a crisis. They’re fueling the cartels and the coyotes, too. They’re just providing more and more messaging for them to send more and more vulnerable people across the border, whether they’re COVID positive or not. They’re sending them across the border, and they’re also sending more fentanyl into my state, and into the states all across this nation and killing our kids. It’s just a tragic situation. And to think that [Secretary] Mayorkas still has his job performing like this. In corporate America, this would never stand.”