Source: United States Senator for Florida Marco Rubio
Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined Eric Bolling on Newsmax TV to discuss infrastructure and Rubio’s proposed amendment to provide uncensored access to the internet for the Cuban people. Watch the video here and see below for highlights.
On the infrastructure bill:
“Given the nature of American politics today, anytime you enter into a compromise on an issue of this magnitude you’re going to have to give the other side some bad stuff in order to get some good stuff.
“The other part is that it’s not paid for, right? They said it was gonna be paid for and look, this is not.
“We just went through a pandemic. And in this pandemic, we had to spend money we didn’t have. Frankly, there’s no country in the world…[that] had a rainy day fund for a global pandemic.
“So we had to do that, and we understood it. I think now as we spend money moving forward, we have to be cognizant of the fact that we are not where we were three or four years ago. We already have an existing mountain of debt created by this pandemic. We have to have economic growth to get out of it. So the problem with this bill is it’s got $300-$350 billion, when you add it all up, of net add to the debt over the next 10 years.
“They should have really focused on the things that could unite everybody and not add some of these other things in it. And look, it’s 2,700 pages. So that’s the other problem here. Even now, people think that’s not a lot. You still have to read it very carefully because there are provisions in there that you may not know what they mean unless you catch it. These are things that slip through. There was a lot of money left over from the pandemic spending that had not been spent and so repurposing some of that money would have made sense, but that would have taken us to, you know, a bill that would have been at least $300 billion less than this one.”
On Secretary Buttigieg’s comment that there’s no gas or mileage tax in President Biden’s infrastructure plan:
“He’s technically right…there’s no gas tax in it. What is in it is the mechanism you would use to one day have a gas tax. If you can begin to track miles and set up a pilot program to study what that would look like, then you come back in a couple years and say, ‘Ok, this thing is costing more money than we thought and here’s a way to pay for it.’ So you’re laying the groundwork for one down the road, because ultimately stuff has to be paid for.
“Look, I get it. During the pandemic, we had to deficit spend. A lot of people point to the tax cuts, although I think there’s a big difference between allowing people to keep more of their own money — to me that’s not government spending, that is the government not collecting money that doesn’t belong to them. But this is different. This is actually borrowing and spending this money above and beyond what we already did over the last two years because we had to.
“That’s the other problem with this bill. This bill is part of a two-pronged dance. The first step is passing this and then what Nancy Pelosi has said is ‘This is great, but we’re not passing this transportation bill that 60-something senators want unless we pass a three point something trillion dollar expansion of the federal government into every aspect of our lives.
“So what’s going to happen here is a lot of people are going to say, well, I’m not for that, I wasn’t for that. I only voted for the transportation bill, but don’t know full well the reason why we even got to that three point something trillion spending is because of the support they gave the transportation bill. And that’s what this does.
“This now opens the door and creates the glide path for that other thing to happen, and that alone is reason to be against. These things should stand on their own and they shouldn’t be linked. [Pelosi] publicly linked it and that is right there where they lost.”
On Rubio’s proposed amendment to give uncensored internet access to the Cuban people:
“It’s part of this reconciliation budget. What we do is we create this reserve fund that basically requires the federal government to figure out a way of how we can provide free, unfettered internet access to as many people in Cuba as possible, and that’s a big deal for a couple reasons.
“The reason why these protests and the sort of turning on the government has taken to the next level is because Cubans have somewhat access to the internet — access to the internet in terms of being able to go on social media and not just talk to each other, but also communicate with the world, show the world the reality of Cuba, and get news and information from abroad.
“So we were actually working on this under the Trump Administration. Had President Trump still been there, I think we would have been far ahead on it.
“Unfortunately, it got set back and look, it’s problematic [that] a lot of people in the White House don’t want any of that. [T]he person in charge of Cuba at the State Department right now and the person in charge of Cuba at the National Security Council right now are people that are in favor of the Obama policy of opening up to Cuba, which was a total failure and a disaster. So we’re gonna have some resistance from them. They give lip service to internet. We haven’t seen [them] do a thing yet, and so this is sort of pushing and forcing their hand to do it.”