Friday's report that prices for consumers jumped by 6.8% in November, for the highest inflation rate since 1982, should come as no surprise, and the numbers will only get worse if the Build Back Better Act is signed into law, Rep. James Comer said on Newsmax Friday.
"If the government continues to print money, continues to spend trillions of dollars unnecessarily, obviously you're going to have inflation and that's what we have," the Kentucky Republican said on Newsmax's "Wake Up America."
He added that if the president's social program funding bill is approved, the inflation numbers will "go up probably another 50%."
"Inflation is a tax on the poor, and it's something that the Biden administration campaigned against," said Comer. "They said they were going to try to help people get out of poverty, and the sad part of this is Democrats believe that the solution to poverty? Their solution to inflation is to just spend more money when all that does is fuel the fire."
Also on Friday, Comer said Republicans are demanding answers from the Biden administration about how Chinese, Russian, and other international scammers were able to hack into computer systems and steal billions in unemployment funds.
"Unfortunately, the government didn't catch this," he said. "The state governments were probably the first to start noticing this. I always thought the unemployment rate was awful high. "
But the unemployment rates were "artificially high" in states where accounts were hacked, said Comey, and it's not certain if the money can be recouped, as the hackers were from all over the world.
"They move around a lot," said Comer. "When you get into wire transfers, it's hard oftentimes to recoup the money. We need to learn from the mistakes and try to fix them so that it doesn't happen again, but it's just more proof that the government can't continue to print money and create more safety net programs if they don't have accountability and transparency."
Comer, the top Republican on the House Oversight and Reform Committee, and Rep. C. Scott Franklin of Florida, a committee member, announced their probe into the hacking after a report in The Washington Times detailing how as much as $140 billion in unemployment funds approved during the pandemic were funneled to Chinese, Russian, and other state-sponsored fraud syndicates.
Last month, Justice Department officials said they filed charges in cases involving about $1 billion in fraud, but Comer and Franklin said that still leaves hundreds of billion dollars missing.
"It’s unacceptable that tens of billions of taxpayer dollars were stolen by foreign adversaries," Comer said in his statement about the probe. "The Justice Department must provide us with answers about how it plans to combat and prosecute these crimes."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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