Roll daydream and you said this was a rebuke of the Biden agenda to transform and expand government's role that was a quote that you use from someone else, but in the Washington Post piece, it was mentioned that Biden is trying to engineer not only a revival of government but also a reconsideration of its essential role for this President restoring the soul of America requires reviving faith and government is a central rejection of the Reaganism type philosophies and I'm curious, given where we've been in this rebound hopefully that we're experiencing on the other side of COVID and people really have relied on government to, whether it's the deployment of vaccines or just to respond to Americans in crisis, maybe Americans now feel like, yes, there is a role for government, how do you reconcile perhaps those two competing philosophies,
well there's a role for government, but to me there's a dramatic difference between a 100 year pandemic, and how you should react to that and business as usual. Last year we got hit by a 100 year pandemic. We passed five major bills. The Cares Act being the biggest one, on an overwhelming bipartisan basis, even in the middle of a presidential election year, put aside our partisan passions and did what was right for the country. By the time this new administration came in, we had a modern medical miracle. Three highly effective vaccines, going into arms, people beginning to reengage the economy beginning to grow. And yet we had a new administration that recommended we do a $2 trillion package which is what we did in the Cares Act, a years ago, a year ago as if nothing had changed. Well, everything had changed by then. And so I thought it was a wildly, expensive, and unrelated to the needs of the country at the time best example of this $2 trillion package, the American rescue package did pass party line vote. 1% was about vaccines. 9% was about health care reform Rosado is about a whole lot of other things. And so I thought, let's take a look at what we've done here, but based on the pandemic, we now have a national debt the size of our economy for the first time since World War Two. Based on what we did last year, which I supported to continue down that path is already producing two big problems. I've met with a number of employers in our state. Very recently, inflation and cost of everything is going up, jobless people don't want to go back to work. We've sent them so much money that they compare what they could receive by staying home versus going back to work. Every employer I've heard from and Kentucky's having trouble getting people back to work. Enough is enough. And I'm sure you're gonna ask me about this but now they're recommending even more. Sure. Well, let's
talk about the infrastructure plan. Yeah, billion. The 2 trillion more for this. And so I'm curious about how we, how do you get from a no to a yes. Is there room for compromise there is it all about the figures he says he wants 2.3 trillion, you say six 800 billion, is there a sweet spot there, and is
the best place to start if this is really about infrastructure,
make it about infrastructure,
let's talk about infrastructure, if that's really what it's about, things that we can all agree on is infrastructure, roads, ports, bridges, water lines, broadband infrastructure. The proper price tag for what most of us think of as infrastructure is about six to $800 billion, which shall be more capital of my conference has put together and recommended as a bill that's related to the subject. What we've got here however is what could best be described as a bait and switch called M destructor, but much bigger, but a whole laundry list of other things, plus, plus, completely revisiting the 2017 tax bill, which did the following. In February of 2020 we had the best economy in 50 years, low unemployment overall lowest unemployment for African Americans in history, lowest unemployment for Hispanic Americans in history. The economy was rocking. A big part of that was because of the tax reform that we passed in 2017, the first comprehensive tax reform in 30 years. Businesses bringing jobs back from overseas, people are benefiting from all of this, and they want to as the price for going forward with this big package, much of which is unrelated to infrastructure to ask Republicans to undo what we thought was the single biggest domestic accomplishment of the last four years. That's not going to get a Republican support. In my conference from Susan Collins to Ted Cruz.
No way, or maybe in the Democratic caucus,
Democrats as you mentioned just here, don't have a huge margin to play with. They've got a 5050 Senate, which means absolutely every single one of us got to agree.
Have you talked to Senator Manchin about where he's
been quite vocal about this. He thinks it's way overdone as well. So here's what I think will happen and I think they'll see if they can pass this time by getting everybody in line, if they can't, then we're open to talk about infrastructure and how to pay for it. And the way to pay for infrastructure is through the gas tax that already exists, and what are the gap between that and we're willing to spend here, it needs to be credibly paid for and the best way to pay for infrastructure is with the people who use it not reversing the tax bill in a way that creates additional problems for the economy which is going to already have, based on what we've already done two big problems inflation and the difficulty of getting people back to work.
I want to revisit COVID and vaccine hesitancy which we were kind of talking about before we started recording as a polio survivor you will understand the significant significance of vaccines and President Biden has praised you and other Republicans who have been proselytising about vaccinations, and we know that President Biden said there's a goal of having 70% of every community, being vaccinated and right now we have half of US adults have gotten at least one dose.
