Democrat Bailout Funneling Taxpayers’ Cash to California Despite Big Surplus
‘Recent headlines have reinforced a warning that Republicans and economic experts have been articulating for months: The massive spending Democrats insisted upon at the outset of the Biden Administration was not in step with actual needs.’
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered the following remarks today on the Senate floor regarding state budgets:
“Recent headlines have reinforced a warning that Republicans and economic experts have been articulating for months: The massive spending Democrats insisted upon at the outset of the Biden Administration was not in step with actual needs.
“Yesterday, I talked about some of the ways the multi-trillion-dollar spending spree rammed through in March has actually delayed our reopening and recovery…
“About the disappointing fall-off in hiring, despite an historic number of open jobs, after Democrats renewed a federal program that pays people extra not to work.
“Well, here’s another misplaced priority from that spending spree:
“Our Democratic friends’ insistence on stuffing another wheelbarrow of cash into the accounts of state and local governments that were already rebounding from the crisis!
“Back in February, as Democrats insisted states were in dire need of another huge bailout, 29 of the 50 states were actually closing a 12-month chapter in which their revenues met or exceeded the year before!
“The faster-than-expected economic recovery, combined with the five bipartisan bills Congress passed in 2020, left a lot of cities and states in even better shape exiting the pandemic than they were heading into it.
“Rising tax revenues had put these states in a position not only to weather pandemic-related downturns, but to fill in pre-existing budgetary potholes that had nothing to do with COVID hardships.
“But that didn’t stop Democrats from cramming nearly another $200 billion in state bailouts into the ‘American Rescue Plan’.
“Impressively, California got its hands on $26 billion of that $200 billion.
“By the way, the state of California now claims it already has a budget surplus three times that size. They are having to brainstorm new ideas to spend the unneeded avalanche of cash.
“I understand the state’s Governor has come up with one idea he likes. He’s planning to cut a timely round of state-level stimulus checks, to include people in the country illegally, just in time for his recall election later this year.
“Is that the kind of urgent priority that Democrats had in mind when they used COVID to push through what they called the ‘most progressive’ legislation in history?
“Experts warned it was poorly targeted. Republicans said American families deserved better. But the big catalog of political pay-outs was pushed through.
“Let’s remember exactly how this played out, before we’re doomed to repeat it.”
Related Issues: Jobs, COVID-19
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