The United States is facing a real threat in the way we’ve come to view the role of the federal government, Senator Mike Lee said during a teletownhall event earlier this week with Americans for Prosperity President Tim Phillips and Utah State Director Heather Andrews.
The three discussed last month’s House-passed $3 trillion spending bill.
The Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act (HEROES) is a bad idea, Senator Lee said.
One of the many ways that threat has manifested itself is through legislation moving through the House of Representatives — that has been passed by the House of Representatives — that would spend trillions of additional dollars … that we don’t have.
I think the HEROES Act is something that we need to not only oppose on its own merits — because it, itself, is bad legislation — [but] we need to push back on the very idea that the federal government’s role isto step in and borrow trillions of additional dollars in the name of creating new jobs. It’s just not how it works. I hope we can win that argument.
Senator Lee concluded the discussion by mentioning the approaching danger of spiraling interest rates, which would drive up our interest payments on the debt.
The point that I worry most about is the point where, all of the sudden, our Treasury yield rates start to return to their historic average. It won’t take very long — I mean, we’re talking within a year or two after our Treasury yield rates just return to their historic norm — before we go from spending about $300 billion a year on interest on our national debt to over $1 trillion a year in interest on our national debt.
Just that difference between our current payment, and whatever we’ll be paying at that moment — $700 billion or so — that’s going to end up exceeding what we spend on defense in an entire year.
“There’s not enough money that we could plausibly collect, there’s not a tax increase imaginable, that would cover that,” Senator Lee said.
Tell lawmakers to reject these irresponsible bailouts that will further harm future taxpayers.
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