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Rep. Arrington: Pelosi Payout won’t crush virus, create jobs

February 25, 2021

WASHINGTON, DC – Today, Ways and Means Committee member Jodey Arrington (TX-19) joined CNBC’s “Squawk Box” to discuss how House Democrats are forcing a $1.9T COVID-19 “relief” bill without any bipartisan support.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE INTERVIEW

“I see no desire on the part of my Democratic colleagues to work with Republicans. This is the first time in five pieces of legislation prior that this is a straight partisan play. We’ve spent four trillion dollars together in bipartisan packages. We have a trillion dollars unspent that’s working its way through the system.”

“This is so riddled with wasteful spending and barriers to recovery like paying people more to be on unemployment than to be in their previous job. It’s fraught with bailouts like union pension bailouts and rewarding behavior that pre-existed COVID with cities and states who are fiscally irresponsible. It’s hard to cover all the ground of how bad this bill is. It’s not disaster relief. It’s a disaster in itself and I can’t imagine a single Republican voting for this.” 

“If the American people could sit in the hearings like I was participating in as a Ways and Means member where we offered commonsense amendments… we said, ‘provide more cash assistance to people who are hurting.’ I support that but let’s put a provision in there that says if you haven’t been economically harmed by COVID than you should not get one of those cash assistance payments – that was rejected.”

“It is going to be worse for this country long-term not to mention the debt and the tax that’s going to be put on the next generation of Americans because we’re spending money that we don’t need [to spend].”