The Democrats' so-called human infrastructure plan being debated in Congress is really just $3.5 trillion in new entitlements, Sen. James Lankford told Newsmax, and it rolls back then-President Bill Clinton's efforts in the 1990s to "end welfare as we know it."
The plan would add $3.5 trillion in entitlements on top of current entitlements, Lankford, R-Okla., said Thursday on "Spicer & Co."
"If you combine the budget of every single state in America, including their federal dollars that come in, every state in America spends a combined $2 trillion," he said. "They're wanting to do $3 trillion in brand new entitlement, so that number is absurd."
But the cost is only part of it, Lankford told hosts Sean Spicer and Lyndsay Keith. The real effort in the bill is to shift money to people who are not working and "literally unwinds Bill Clinton's statement of 'We're going to end welfare as we know it.'"
The effort is simply a move toward socialism, he asserted.
The Clinton Democrats' effort in the 1990s was an incentive for people to work by helping those who got jobs, Lankford said. Current Democrats "take all that away and say, 'Don't worry about working. We're just going to mail you a check. And these people over here that have lots of money, we're going to take money from them and send it to you,'" he said.
"It's going to absolutely destroy the American work ethic and have generational poverty traps that they're putting in," Lankford said. "So it's not just how big it is. It's also how bad it is."
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