Former Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney echoed his party’s ideological shift on coronavirus spending Tuesday morning, hammering a message of austerity and warning that the stimulus package is causing people to lose perspective on what government costs.
“We’re at risk of training people to believe that government is free, that we can borrow whatever we want to with no consequences whatsoever, and that is extraordinarily dangerous,” Mulvaney said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
In jarring message change, Mulvaney warns that the stimulus package is “at risk of training people to believe that government is free that we can borrow whatever we want to with no consequences whatsoever” pic.twitter.com/MfA6Wa1FgZ
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) May 26, 2020
Mulvaney, a Tea Partier and founding member of the House’s Freedom Caucus while in Congress, said that he had put his ideological beliefs aside in the face of the inevitable stimulus bills.
“Having an ideological conversation right now is a complete waste of time — there’s going to be another stimulus package of some type,” he said, pivoting to the need, now, to focus on how to repay the debt created by the stimulus efforts.
The White House too has grown stingy after an initial willingness to trumpet President Donald Trump’s role in getting money to struggling Americans — so much so that the delivery of some stimulus checks were delayed in order to get Trump’s name stamped on them.
But more recently, Trump has balked at the idea of giving more aid to struggling states, claiming that only the blue ones need bailing out.
“I don’t think the Republicans want to be in a position where they bail out states that are, that have been, mismanaged over a long period of time,” he said in an interview with the New York Post, citing New York, Illinois and California as such “mismanaged” states.
He even implied that aid could be conditioned on blue states’ adoption of more traditionally conservative policies.
Well run States should not be bailing out poorly run States, using CoronaVirus as the excuse! The elimination of Sanctuary Cities, Payroll Taxes, and perhaps Capital Gains Taxes, must be put on the table. Also lawsuit indemnification & business deductions for restaurants & ent.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 5, 2020
Last week, his economic adviser Kevin Hassett claimed that the economic recovery was going so well, there might not even be a need for more stimulus legislation.
“If the economy continues the momentum that we’re beginning to see over the last couple of weeks of data, then I think that one might conclude that the stimulus we’ve already passed is enough,” he told reporters at the White House. “But if that doesn’t happen, we’re really learning everyday a little bit more about how the economy responds to this.”
Per the Labor Department’s April jobs report, the U.S. economy lost 20.5 million jobs while unemployment rose to 14.7% — the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression.
