Rep. Tim Ryan accused President Donald Trump Friday of going back on his promise to working Americans with his push for tax reform legislation.
"There is nothing worse than when someone makes a promise t you, you rely on that promise, and they go back on that word," the Ohio Democrat told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program, adding that people in his home district in Youngstown, Ohio, "feel betrayed."
Trump has promised to cut their taxes, expand healthcare, and make lives better, Ryan continued, but instead, "everything he's done in the last year has either thrown someone off healthcare or taken care of the wealthiest people in the country."
"You look at the groups against this teachers, AARP, veterans groups, Catholic bishops, these groups are all against it because it is going to put the screws to the person in Akron, Ohio or Youngstown, Ohio, not to mention, to pay for this entire thing," Ryan said.
"We are going to borrow $2 trillion from China and China is going to take our interest payments that we're making on this money that we are borrowing. They're going to build high speed rail.
"They're going to move to battery-powered cars. They're going to continue to go down the road of renewable energy and all that, the benefits that come from that . . . we are paying for China to move into a modern economy."
Ryan warned that the bill, with its call to end healthcare mandates, will cause hundreds of thousands of Ohioans to be "thrown off" their healthcare.
"We do have an opioid crisis," he added. "Many of these people are working class people that are going to work every day, they're playing by the rules, they have trouble making ends meet, and they literally live paycheck to paycheck. This was a lifeline for them to have decent health care and now the president is going to take that."
Instead, towns need private investment in order to attract business.
"When you drive through communities like mine and others across the country, there are thousands of blighted homes that need to come down," said Ryan. "That needs to be a public investment we need to make. We need urban agriculture. We need green space. We need new — we need to build a few communities and right now, we don't have the money to do it."
Instead, he warned, Republicans will "run a $42 billion hole in the deficit and borrow the money from China, mark my words, they're starting to do it. We need money to take down dilapidated homes in Youngstown to build roads, bridges, broadband and the new energy grid. They will say, you know what, we don't have the money."
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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