Barrasso on Fox: Biden Has Fallen and He Can’t Get Up

On Sunday, Wyoming Senator John Barrasso went on Fox News Sunday to talk about the issues he has with President Joe Biden and the Democrats.

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After being asked by Fox News host Jeanine Pirro if he was blindsided by senators Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin agreeing to a bill designed to combat inflation said that the new bill will make inflation worse.

"We saw economic numbers continue to come out, we saw the president's poll numbers continue to fall," Barrasso said. "He's at historic levels. He's pushing for the life alert button because he's fallen and he can't get up and the problem with what Manchin and the Democrats are proposing here is the American public is having a hard time keeping up. They just can't do it. You can't afford a full tank of gas, you can't afford a week's worth of groceries and what Manchin and the Democrats and the president are now proposing are the two cardinal sins that you don't want to do when the economy is in such a dire situation. Number one is they want to raise taxes in the middle of a recession...the other is they want to do massive government spending."

Biden is currently polling at 39.9% according to FiveThirtyEight, which is slightly above his lowest score of 37.5% on July 21.

Biden is polling slightly lower than where former President Donald Trump was at this point in his presidency at 41.4%, and further below former President Barack Obama at 45.2%.

In June, there was a 9.1% increase in inflation over the past 12 months not seasonally adjusted, 1.3% for seasonally adjusted, with energy up the most at 41.6%.

While gas prices are higher than they were a year ago, national prices have fallen almost a dollar from a high of $5.03 a gallon on June 16, down to an average of $4.16 on Monday.

The bill proposed by Democrats aims to curb inflation while proposing several areas of investment, including energy, climate change, and the affordable care act.

Barrasso said, after being told that the bill will increase inflation, that what the Democrats are trying to do will make things worse for everybody.

"I believe inflation gets worse. The experts who are looking at it believe that inflation will get worse and this is false advertising by the Democrats," Barrasso said. "This is the last big wish, a dying wish, of a party that knows they're going to get shellacked come November. They have all the spending and the taxes in this that they've been trying to get...this is the parade of horribles from last year. They are hiring 86,000 additional IRS agents. That's not just to go after a couple of big companies, they're coming after families farmers small businesses and what do they want to use the money for? They're going after energy producers so they can give subsidies and pay people to buy electric vehicles. These are going to go to rich people. This is going to make the pain at the pump worse, it's going to drive up inflation, and it's going to hurt the economy even more."

While Barrasso did not reference any specific experts who believe the bill would make inflation worse, the president of the Center for a Responsible Federal Budget and a Harvard economist said it would lower inflation, while the head of PwC would make it worse.

The increase in Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents could be in reference to a Department of the Treasury report about efforts to modernize the IRS which includes a chart saying that they hope to increase the number of full-time employees to 86,852 by 2031.

The report states that doing so would provide a $3.4 per dollar invested and that in 2019 there was a $600 billion difference between taxes owed to the government and what was actually paid.

The IRS has also had several issues in keeping up with its work, answering 2.7 million of the 27 million calls it received during open hours in 2021 by person, having a backlog of 10.5 million unprocessed tax returns for 2021 by July, and reaching 9.7% of its onboarding goal of new employees by March.