The House debt ceiling bill’s alleged savings are “worse than fake,” according to Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). He and Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) both condemned the just-passed debt ceiling deal; as Biggs said, it’s sending the U.S. “careening off a [fiscal] cliff.”
MRCTV cited Lee to note that the House Republicans’ deal with the Democrats rescinds pandemic spending, but “uses a smoke-and-mirrors tactic to move $22 billion of that money into“ a slush fund that… well… no one seems to know how the money is used. “As to the $28 billion in claw-backs that you refer to: $22 billion of that immediately goes into a slush fund at the Department of Commerce that nobody knows what it does,” Lee said on Fox News.
“And, as for the IRS spending, we’re talking about, I believe, less than $2 billion that will be saved out of that — out of $80 billion. This is not at all what they promised. This is not at all how they’ve sold this,” Lee continued. “And, it’s not adequate to deal with our $32 trillion debt which, by the way, is likely to go up to $36 trillion debt by the end of the next year and a half.”
Lee also took House Republicans to task on the Senate floor, MRCTV said. “The compromise reached between Biden and [Republican House Speaker] McCarthy, which retains 98% of the IRS expansion — 98% — is nothing short of a surrender,” Lee stated. “Armed with a hefty budget and a woke agenda, the IRS will become an even stronger instrument of political bias and partisan manipulation.”
One of the most outspoken critics of the debt ceiling bill is Biggs. “It is a spending problem, not a revenue problem,” he explained on The Joe Pags Show. Only $1.4 billion of the more than $70 billion in funding to the IRS is removed, and there are no restrictions preventing the IRS from hiring more agents, he continued; McCarthy didn’t put restrictions on hiring the 87,000 new IRS agents in the bill. The deal is “bad for Americans, on a multitude of levels,” Biggs insisted. Republicans in Congress see only their fellow congressmen as their “team,” rather than their constituents, he said.
The claim that the deal saves $130 billion a year for 10 years is “dubious,” if not false, Biggs told Pags, because $2 trillion will be added to the U.S. debt every year. So America isn’t really saving money.
Biggs previously issued a harsh critique of the Republicans’ original proposal, saying, “Capping spending at FY2022 levels — levels that were inflated dramatically during COVID and would still exceed our annual revenues — is not aggressive enough.” The deal that was passed was even worse, however.
.@RepAndyBiggsAZ unpacks the details of the debt ceiling agreement and how it compares to the Limit, Save, Grow Act as it increases the national debt to an estimated $36 Trillion Dollars.
Full interview: https://t.co/9eBvLjU8xd pic.twitter.com/3zuUF4nDgD
— Tony Perkins (@tperkins) May 30, 2023
As Biggs tweeted, “For once, Speaker McCarthy had significant leverage over these negotiations and yet he capitulated on nearly every front.” His May 31 statement clarified, “The American people should not be fooled by the Uniparty’s misleading talking points propping up this bill. Broken down, ‘Largest deficit reduction’ is still massive deficit spending. ‘Largest recission ever’ is still massive deficit spending. And ‘significant wins’ is still massive deficit spending.” The congressman concluded, “[T]he DC Uniparty is taking a victory lap as they squeezed their radical wish list out of Speaker McCarthy. Americans got hosed.”
If Biggs’ analysis — and Lee’s — is correct, “The McCarthy-Biden spending monstrosity accelerates America off the fiscal cliff.”
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