Mississippi’s Republican delegation will be voting against President Biden’s $1.9-trillion Covid Relief Package today. Democrat Bennie Thompson–who voted in favor of the package when it passed in the House a couple of weeks ago–isn’t expected to change his stance.
MS Congressman Michael Guest says as bad as the bill is, it’s better than it was when the House sent it over to the Senate. “The senate was able to strip out some things, such as the $15 minimum wage. They were able to strip out some of the pet projects for Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. And so it is still a very bad bill, but the bill was even worse when it came out of the house just a couple of weeks ago.”
Guest says it’s the largest piece of legislation outside of the regular budget Congress has ever appropriated, and only 9% of the money will actually be used to fight Covid.
“We’re doing this at a time when there’s $1-trillion unspent dollars from the previous stimulus packages. We’re doing this at a time in which our economy is continuing to recover. We went from a high 14.7% unemployment rate last April to now we’re down to 6.2%, so we’re seeing growth in the economy. We’re seeing people go back to work. And now we’re gonna add roughly $2-trillion dollars to our current national deficit. And only roughly 9% of this funding actually goes to fight Covid.”
Check out Guest’s full remarks below:
