WASHINGTON—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Banking Committee, yesterday joined Liz MacDonald on The Evening Edit to discuss the White House downplaying the economic turmoil their policies have precipitated and the Biden Administration’s failed energy policies.
Partial Transcript
Hagerty on the White House downplaying our economy being on the precipice of a recession: “Just more spin coming out of the White House, Liz. I think you look at the estimates of what’s going to happen on Thursday, we’re going to probably read a negative 1.5 percent [Gross Domestic Product] growth. That’s another straight consecutive quarter to quarter decline. That is the technical answer for when we’ve hit a recession, but we have been on the precipice of a recession under [President] Joe Biden, and I cannot imagine that they’re going to have the gall to try to redefine things technically. When you go to people in Tennessee, in my home state, and ask them what they’re feeling, look, the prices at the pump [are] like they’ve never experienced before, going to the grocery store with record high prices there as well. You’ve got massive margin compression for corporate America, you’ve seen the consumer price index, you know, at one level you’ve seen the producer price index much higher. Again, that means margin compression companies [are] going to begin to go bankrupt at a much higher rate. They have thrown us into a recession and the Biden Administration is just trying to get out of this.”
Hagerty on the consequences of Biden’s green energy fantasies: “This is their green, new energy theology. This is some sort of non-existent world where the technology is not yet there. It’s not working today, obviously. Yet, they want to go ahead and kill an existing industry that gave us a huge competitive advantage here in America. They’d like to go ahead and kill that. They’d like to enrich our opponents. You think about Russia, Iran, Venezuela, who benefits from all of this. And then longer term, they want to throw the benefit to China because that’s who makes the solar panels and the windmills and the electric batteries that they dream about. But we aren’t there yet. Yet they’re willing to force this ‘transition,’ destroy our economy, and you know who feels it the most, Liz? It’s the most unfortunate in our economy. Joe Biden conducted the biggest bait and switch in American political history. He campaigned as a moderate, somebody that was never going to put a tax on the people that made below $400,000 a year. Who do you think is feeling the pain of this massive inflation, which is the greatest and most pernicious tax of all? It’s the lower and middle classes […] they’re just clinging to something that’s a pipe dream at this point. I’m not against any source of energy, Liz, but it needs to be economically viable. It needs [to] not put our economy into a tailspin. If you think about where we were just two years ago, we were net energy exporters. Now we’re not able to come to the aid of any one of our allies in Europe. Russia has a stranglehold over Germany’s economy and others. We really have put ourselves in a weaker position in every point, and every one of our industries that uses energy as an input factor is now less advantaged. He’s weakened the economy, and this has got to stop.”
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