Rep. French Hill: Build Back Better Plan doesn't meet bipartisan standards in the House

Republican Congressman French Hill of Arkansas joins Yahoo Finance to join

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- Turn our attention to politics now. House Democrats are set to vote on both a social safety net bill and an infrastructure bill, capping months of in-party. Bickering here to discuss the size and the scope is Representative French Hill House Republican from Arkansas. Sir, thank you so much for your time today. I want to start off with this legislation expected to come to the floor for a vote today.

This spending bill was supposed to be done before the President touched down in Rome and in Glasgow. What are you hearing about whether it gets done? It's Friday afternoon in Washington, DC. And then I also want to ask you, sir, you say that the Build Back Better agenda is out of touch with reality. Is there anything that you can cite specifically that doesn't work along the lines that you're thinking of? And then where can you find some compromise?

FRENCH HILL: Well, good. It's great to be with you. Thanks for the invitation. Well, this is the sixth time since August that Nancy Pelosi has held the Congress over with a committee standing in recess awaiting for a vote. So I have no way to handicap suddenly on the sixth time that she's going to be successful in finding consensus inside the Democratic party to pass a now, according to Wharton, nearly $4 trillion spending bill on social spending and Green New Deal priorities with a $1.2 trillion tax increase and the Senate's infrastructure bill. I can't handicap it. On your point about what's important and what's bipartisan, I believe there are a lot of things. We want to have bipartisan support for infrastructure first and foremost.

And we had that in the broadband provisions that we did during the CARES Act and before on getting the resources to our states to extend high-speed broadband. It was in surface transportation where we had a compromise, surface transportation bill, ready to go last year just before the election that was held up by Speaker Pelosi in order to hold Democratic votes for a much bigger package. So there's no doubt that there's individual items where there's strong bipartisan consensus. They just don't meet that standard in these two particular measures today in the House.

- I want to ask you-- the Dems late last night changed their package on the SALT deduction. They've raised it to $80,000 through 2030. Is that something you support?

FRENCH HILL: It's not. I supported the compromise back in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017 because it was done based on a study of property taxes around the country. And it created a deduction for property taxes of about $10,000. 9 out of 10 American taxpayers were benefited by taking that standard deduction with that level of property taxes. What the Democrats have put back in the social spending plan today is something that allows you to have $80,000 a year of state and local tax deductions. That really only benefits high-income taxpayers in California, New Jersey, and New York, for example. So I don't think it helps the vast majority of Americans, and really subsidizes those very high tax states.

- Now, Representative, we'd like to get your reaction to the job numbers this morning. By all accounts, pretty good. I'm looking at 604,000 private payrolls. And the government's actually deducted jobs, or lost jobs. So I'm looking at the unemployment rate of 4.6%. Fairly low by historical standards. But I'm wondering how that squares with what you're seeing in your district?

FRENCH HILL: Well, you know, we have seen robust employment in our district. We've recovered much of the loss during the pandemic. Our unemployment rate's down to about 4%. Just below the national average. I'm very pleased to see that. We actually have a shortage of labor force workers. We just had a huge announcement of flex from-- or trex rather, from Winchester, Virginia that's going to come to Arkansas and hire hundreds of employees to do a new decking product there in Little Rock. Amazon is trying to hire 1,000 people in Little Rock right now for their new one million square foot location.

So we have a real worker shortage. And that's why I'm concerned about the President's one size fits all federal mandate on the vaccine. I support the vaccine. Everyone in my family is vaccinated. And I urge all Americans to talk to their doc about getting vaccinated. But as Governor Asa Hutchinson has said in our state, having that federal one size mandate increases some vaccine resistance in key sectors like truck driving, delivery, manufacturing. Key places where we have a job shortage now and a real recruiting demand.

- And, sir, I want to turn your attention to the loss in Virginia and a very close race in New Jersey. Has it changed the way Democrats go about their agenda? Was it a wake up call for them?

FRENCH HILL: Well, I'm speaking as a Republican. And in my view, it should have been a wake up call for them to focus on the kitchen table and not the faculty lounge in the Ivy League. Kitchen table issues now are about parents wanting to be very directly involved in their kid's education. A lot of the education challenges were revealed in the pandemic. And parents really want to be involved in what their kids are learning and how they can best help their kids develop.

Secondly, inflation. All of our families are suffering from the effects of the supply chain and too much government spending and too much Federal Reserve stimulus that's created this very high inflation. We had the lowest productivity announcement yesterday. The lowest since 1981. And the highest labor per unit labor charges. Up 8%. So inflation is a real kitchen table issue for families. And I hope the Democrats will join Republicans and focus on those kitchen table issues and not the issues of the Ivy League faculty lounge.

- All right. We will have to leave it there. Representative French Hill, House Republican from Arkansas, thank you so much for your time.