Billy Long: Build back broke

(From Seventh District Congressman Billy Long)

In the movie 'The Terminator' Arnold Schwarzenegger famously promised "I'll be back" and unfortunately it looks like the same is true for 'Bad News Biden's' massive tax and spending bill 'Build Back Better.' 

Politico just reported Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is open to negotiating a smaller version of 'Build Back Broke' as I call it. This is the same Senator who said over Christmas “this is a no.” At the time he couldn’t bring himself to vote for the radical spending plan, but it now appears he is willing to be cooperative on a smaller version of this boondoggle of a bill.

Build Back Better was always a terrible idea. Trump had our country hitting on all cylinders on January 19, 2021 so a better plan would have been the 'Leave Well Enough Alone' bill. 

Biden's proposal would raise taxes and spend trillions of dollars on Green New Deal priorities. I wrote in this space last week how President Biden’s proposed budget shows where his extreme left wing priorities lie. And here we find a prime example of that. 

Even the “scaled back” version that Sen. Manchin is working on will most certainly include tax increases on businesses, along with Pelosi's proposed socialist drug pricing scheme that will stifle innovation along with more pie in the sky spending on climate change legislation we clearly can't afford. Green thinking is admirable but we have to be realistic on how we get there.

In December, Sen. Manchin was against Build Back Better because of rising inflation. This is a legitimate concern, and he was right to bring it up. Spending trillions of dollars more would only worsen our ongoing inflation crisis. 

President Biden says only wealthy Americans would feel the impact of his new taxes but that's a false claim. The price of everything will continue to climb as inflation worsens. Inflation is already at a 40 year high. America doesn’t need more spending and more new taxes. Inflation is already a huge tax increase on everyone.

When it comes to the climate plans in Build Back Better, Democrats once again ignore reality. It is President Biden’s radical energy policies that gave us record high gas prices, but the Democrats want to double down on these policies instead of going back to the energy independent days of the Trump Administration. 

Now is not the time to be pushing this far-left energy agenda, further raising our gas prices. Instead we should be saying ‘Drill Baby Drill’ and opening up our domestic oil production. That would lower gas prices and make life easier for working class Americans. 

The Democrats don’t want to do this though. They are using high gas prices as an excuse to ram through their Green New Deal policies. Just last week, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said "until we achieve a form of energy independence that is based on clean energy created here at home, American citizens will still be vulnerable to wild price hikes like we are seeing right now." Americans don’t need to be held hostage by this insanity. We need to start drilling here in the United States, and lower our gas prices. Let's all hope Sen. Manchin once again does the right thing, and stops this new version of Build Back Better in its tracks.