WASHINGTON—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, today joined Your World With Neil Cavuto on Fox News to discuss the resuscitated reconciliation agreement and the damaging repercussions it would have on the economy.
Partial Transcript
Hagerty on Senator Manchin’s reversal on reconciliation: “I’m not sure what changed [Senator] Joe Manchin’s mind, but this is quite different from what we thought and where we thought Joe was just a day ago, so I think all of us are very surprised at this… Today we confirmed that we are in a recession officially. The last thing you do is raise taxes as we enter into a recession. And… I don’t know how the logic changed overnight, but certainly this is a big difference from where we thought Joe was.”
Hagerty on the consequences of Democrats’ reckless spending during a recession: “I think it’s going to be very challenging. Again, if you just think about what’s good for America right now, we are not in this place, we’re not ready to absorb this, and I think that there’s a great deal of concern that raising taxes on the people that we need to rely upon to invest more capital and create more jobs at a time that we’ve entered a recession is not the correct path to follow. They’re also talking about their aspects of this plan that’ll basically be government price controls on pharmaceuticals. Again, more of this green energy spending, which you’ve seen what the Biden Administration energy policy has done to the United States of America’s economy. It’s crushed our economy. Gas prices at the pump [are] killing people in Tennessee right now. We commute in Tennessee, and that inflationary spiral has rolled through everything that has to be transported. It’s also had global impact. Global energy prices have risen, and we’ve talked about this before—it’s inadvertently funded Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. So the energy policies here [have] got to be completely reexamined, and I am very surprised that we see this on the table again.”
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