President Barack Obama is hammering the middle class with his reliance on big government and seems determined to drive the nation over the fiscal cliff, according to Georgia Rep. Tom Price.
“It’s the president who’s holding the middle class hostage. It’s not Republicans,’’ Price, chairman of the conservative House Republican Policy Committee, told Newsmax TV's Kathleen Walter in an exclusive interview.
Watch the exclusive interview here.
“The president is holding middle class tax increases for the middle class hostage because he won’t identify any spending reductions. The amount of spending in the federal government under this administration, deficit spending, [is] $1 trillion plus each year for the last four years and continuing.
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“It’s clear through the president’s policies that he believes that big government helps solve problems. We simply don’t believe that.’’
Price said he is confident Republicans and Democrats will be able to reach a compromise to keep the nation from falling over the fiscal cliff, which would result in large tax hikes in 2013, “as long as we don’t violate the principles of not solving the problem.
“I’m happy to talk about revenue but I’m not interested in talking about revenue if we’re chasing ever-increasing spending.’’
Price said the GOP must convince Americans that the president’s policy is to raise taxes, spend money “we don’t have,’’ and take the nation over the fiscal cliff.
“We understand he won the election but that doesn’t mean that the Republican majority in the House who also won has to violate the principles that, again, made us a great nation,’’ Price said.
He said the message that voters sent Washington last month is “they don’t want unified government of one party, they don’t want all Democrats in charge and they don’t want all Republicans in charge . . .
“What they want is real solutions. If we go over the fiscal cliff, what will happen is that the American people will recognize that this administration has been delinquent in not putting real solutions on the table."
Recent news reports have identified Price as the lawmaker who could attempt to oust House Speaker John Boehner if he ends up cutting a fiscal-cliff deal that raises taxes and breaks with conservative principles.
Price denies he has plans to mount such a campaign.
“The issue right now is the spending in this nation and the onus right now is on the president to identify his spending cuts. The last thing we need to be doing is talking about an internal election within our conference right now,’’ he said.
“The thing that we need to do is to get this country back on track and the way that you do that is to decrease the size of the federal government, decrease spending coming out of Washington and adhere to the fundamental principles that made us great, and that’s what I’m concentrating on.’’
Price recently told the National Review that conservatives “don’t have a proper platform’’ in the Republican Party, an issue he said must be worked on for the GOP to move forward.
Editor's Note:
ObamaCare Secrets Revealed
“If you look at our conference from an ideological standpoint, [it’s] about two thirds conservative, one third moderate, about, in rough numbers,’’ he explained.
“If you look at both the leadership table and the steering committee, the committee that assigns seats on committees and identifies chairmen, it isn’t reflective necessarily of the conference.
“Now, that’s an internal conference challenge that we have and we’re going to work through that . . . how we can make the leadership table and the steering committee more reflective of the conference from an ideological standpoint.’’
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