President Joe Biden’s spending and tax plans are leading the United States into a “very dangerous place,” former Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney warned Monday.
“We’re moving into uncharted territory,” Mulvaney, who also served as acting chief of staff under former President Donald Trump, told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo. “Inflation is a hidden tax and that’s where the Democrats are pushing us.”
The Biden administration is on track to push through more than $6 trillion in spending measures, including the $1.9 trillion COVID plan passed in January, another $2.3 trillion in infrastructure spending currently being sought, and the president’s American Families plan for another $1.8 trillion.
Mulvaney said Democrats don’t have the votes in the Senate, but “they do have the ability to drive inflation and that’s where I think we are headed.”
“We have decided I think as a country that it’s okay to spend as much money as we possibly want on everything that we want,” he said. “I disagree with that. Some Republicans do, not everybody does. A lot of Democrats disagree with that. They want to spend as much as they can.”
That approach will create a “dangerous place,” but “we’re going down it together.”
Congressional leaders will meet at the White House this week to discuss the spending plans, and Mulvaney said “a lot” of how Republicans will react will depend on how Biden handles the meeting.
“I’ve been in some of those bipartisan meetings when I was in the House,” he said. “We met with President (Barack) Obama and it didn’t go particularly well.”
Obama, he explained, wanted to tell House Republicans what they were doing wrong and how that needed to change, said Mulvaney. However, he added, Trump, in similar meetings with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was “interested in what the Democrats had to say.”
“I don’t know where President Biden is going to be,” said Mulvaney. “I don’t know if it’s President Biden who will be running the meetings…it will be curious to see how President Biden as the leader of the nation, someone who went on television who said he wanted to represent everybody, to see how he sets the tone for the meeting … will they throw the Republicans to the side and do everything they possibly can by themselves? I fear it will be the latter because I understand a little bit how Washington works. But the ball right now is in President Biden’s court.”
Mulvaney also discussed last week’s jobs report that revealed just 266,000 jobs had been added when Wall Street expected one million.
The report shows that the nation must start questioning the $300 supplement from the federal government to state unemployment weekly payments, said Mulvaney.
“Is that supposed to be permanent or not?” he said. “My guess is that my Democrat friends want it to be.”
He added that nobody is talking about changing the kind of unemployment insurance that has been in place for many years, but about taking away the extra payments that were approved to supplement pay during the COVID pandemic.
“If you pay people not to work, they’re not going to work,” said Mulvaney.
Source: Newmax
