Washington, D.C. – House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (CA-23) appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box this morning to discuss the economic impact of the work the House is already doing on regulatory reform, as well as our plans to address the failure of Obamacare and implement tax reform.
Excerpts are below, or watch online here.
On the economic impact of the House’s regulatory reform agenda
“We’re already starting. You know Congress and Senate have already been sworn in. And you’ve got think about what has transpired in the last eight years. Just in the last five years there have been 82 major rules [per year]—and the definition of a major ruling is new regulation that costs at least $100 million—has been enacted. Just since the last election, meaning just this November, the President has put up 145 new regulations. He has enacted more than $16 billion of new regulations just since November.
“So there’s a couple ways to deal with this. One, you’ve got to bring back the Article 1 powers of the Constitution. So we have Regulatory Accountability Act being voted on this week that brings greater transparency and it tells the agencies to pick the ones that cost the least amount. We did the REINS Act, which means no major ruling—those regulations that cost more than $100 million—can be enacted without a vote of the House and the Senate, so that the people can actually have a voice in the process.
“Then the next step will be a Congressional Review Act. This is a bill that was put into place back in the 90s that allows Congress to take a look at any regulation that has been imposed in the last 60 legislative days that we can move to repeal that with 51 votes in the Senate, and that all becomes privileged around January 30th. So keep watching from January 30th, those first two weeks in February, you’re going to see a lot of those bills—meaning Congressional Review Acts, CRAs—being moved across the House and the Senate, because we have got to get this country working again. And I think if you look at regulations and you look at tax reform we really can move this economy in a different direction.”
On how doing nothing on Obamacare is not an option:
“There’s a number of people who have been working on this for a number of years. Now you know, Tom Price, who is a Congressman, who is nominated to become HHS secretary, he understands this backwards and forward. I think this was a tremendous pick for the Trump Administration. He’s going to go through confirmation. Hopefully he will be sworn in on the 20th as well and confirmed. That would be a unique ability for us to start this work.
“And remember, if you do nothing, what will happen? Well your premiums have gone up. Obamacare created 23 co-ops, 18 of them have already collapsed. In more than 1,022 counties in America—and there’s only more than 3,000 counties—there’s only one option. So you’ve lost choice. So you want more people to come back into the marketplace so there’s greater choice. You want to bring the premiums down. There is great opportunity here to make America healthy one more time. And you can do it with Republicans and Democrats. But this idea that you can’t deal with this, that you should just take a step back and wait, I think is wrong. If you wait, this whole health-care system is going to collapse upon itself.”
On fair tax reform that will create American jobs:
“I want to see tax reform because we have to get this country moving again. The one thing that I take form this election, this middle class has been left behind for too long. You’ve got to get growth in this country. And tax reform can make that happen. The border adjustment tax is a way to deal with that—to focus on manufacturing and other jobs within America. And think about it. We tax differently than the rest of the world. The rest of the world builds something in their country, refunds the tax from that country as they send it over to America. America taxes you when they build it and sends it to another country and gets taxed again. It is unfair.… If you’re lowering the rate and you’re taking away the deductions, I think it’s going to be a level playing field. I don’t think you can look at border adjustment just by itself, I think you have to look at it at the overall tax reform, and that’s the way I’m approaching this.”