"Someone" must show how the government can pay to meet President Donald Trump's call to increase coronavirus relief checks from $600 a person to $2,000, but the measure will probably pass as there are a lot of "debt junkies in Washington, D.C.," Rep. Mo Brooks said Monday.
"I would imagine that anything that spends more money, these folks are going to pass," the Alabama Republican said on Fox News' "Fox & Friends." "That's just the nature of the beast here on Capitol Hill. In the Senate chamber, the House chamber, a majority of the members are debt junkies."
Trump on Sunday signed the $900 billion pandemic relief package, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., saying in a tweet that he'll offer up the president's proposal of the $2,000 checks for a vote in the Senate once the House passes a bill on Monday to allow the payments.
When asked if he'd vote for the measure, Brooks said that "someone has got to show me how we are going to pay for it" and asked how far spending will go "before we ultimately go into debilitating insolvency and bankruptcy that is going to do great damage to our country and more damage than COVID-19 could ever have done."
He added that he doesn't think people understand what happens when a government "goes bankrupt, but it's not pretty, Venezuela right now being a glaring example. We don't want to go there."
Brooks also pointed out that the nation has a $27 trillion debt, and "virtually all of this money that's being spent" in the massive bill is "borrowed."
"It's money we don't have, [that] we have to borrow to get, we can't afford to pay back," said Brooks. "At some point in time, we will have to have some financial responsibility rather than continue to rely on increasing the debt of the average American citizen."
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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