Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul blasted Congressional Republicans for efforts to compromise with Democrats on the latest coronavirus stimulus bill.
During a Wednesday afternoon appearance on Fox News’ “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” Paul responded to a question from anchor Neil Cavuto about whether he would support a trillion-dollar Phase 4 stimulus package with, “Absolutely not.”
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“You know it’s funny that people say, ‘Well, Washington Republicans and Democrats never compromise and can’t get along,'” Paul said. “That’s actually the opposite of the truth. Republicans and Democrats compromise every day of the year to spend money we don’t have.”
Paul went on to compare budgetary expenditures from the Bush and Obama years to those of 2020.
“So, we were already running a trillion dollars short just from our normal budgetary expenditures for the year,” Paul began. “We added $3 trillion, now they’re talking about another $1 to 2 trillion. We’re gonna borrow $5 trillion … in five months. I remember when conservatives complained about George W. Bush borrowing $5 trillion in eight years. We’re gonna borrow $5 trillion in 5 months.”
“You know what? [Republicans] might lose this election because they are acting like Democrats now,” Paul said. “And so I’m very upset with my colleagues.”
He argued that Republicans should “apologize now to President Obama for complaining that he was spending and borrowing too much. He was a piker compared to their borrowing, what they’re doing now.”
The “Great Recession” in 2008 with which former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama contended was prompted at least in its early stages by a collapse in the United States housing and lending market.
“The Great Recession, which officially lasted from December 2007 to June 2009, pushed the unemployment rate to a peak of 10.6% in January 2010, considerably less than the rate currently [amid the pandemic],” according to Pew Research Center data.
Pew stated “the COVID-19 recession is comparable more to the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the unemployment rate is estimated to have reached 25%.”
The Kentucky senator said the $600 weekly federal unemployment payments “are once again making President Obama look conservative.”
“What did they do in 2008?” he asked. “They simply extended the benefits but they didn’t ramp up the benefits. When you increase the benefits and you pay people, the government pays people more for not working than they were getting for working, you institutionalize unemployment. Even President Obama didn’t do that.” (RELATED: Exclusive: Rand Paul On The Most Wasteful Government Funded Projects Of 2019)
“The only way to fix this government-mandated depression is get rid of the government mandates and let the economy function as it did normally,” he concluded. “We had a great economy until the government mandated this depression.”