Chairman Aguilar: Americans can't afford their doctor's visits or their groceries, or gas, but they’re watching the Trump administration send more tax dollars abroad.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar and Vice Chair Ted Lieu held a press conference calling out the Trump administration for spending billions on a war overseas while working Americans here at home struggle to afford groceries, gas or health care. You can watch the full press conference here and read the transcript below.
CHAIRMAN AGUILAR: Good morning. We're officially in the third week of Donald Trump's unilateral war in Iran with seemingly no end in sight. It's hard to measure the amount of damage this administration has done both at home and abroad, but there are a few horrifying statistics that we learned in recent days. Number one, 13 of our brave service members were killed, with more than 140 injured. Americans are mourning their family members who died in the war that the Trump administration can't explain. And what does Trump do? He sends a fundraising email out using a photo of the casket of one of these soldiers. It's beyond disgraceful.
This war is not just claiming the lives of men and women in uniform abroad; it's costing hardworking American taxpayers here at home. According to the Department of Defense, the Trump administration is spending billions of dollars a week in taxpayer money to fund the war in Iran—money that they refused to invest in health care for families and providing food assistance for hungry children. Americans can't afford their doctor's visits, or their groceries, or gas, but they’re watching the Trump administration send more tax dollars abroad.
At this rate, the cost of the war could have paid for extending the Affordable Care Act tax credits that kept insurance premiums low for at least a year. Of course, Americans were already facing an affordability crisis after Trump and House Republicans passed their Big Ugly Law to gut Medicaid and SNAP in order to give billionaires a tax cut. Now, Trump's war in Iran has caused gas prices to skyrocket across the country, with the average price in California surging to over $5.50. Trump promised the American people he would lower costs on his first day. He lied to the American people, and he is betraying Americans. It's time Republicans finally join Democrats in standing up to the reckless president. Vice Chair Ted Lieu.
VICE CHAIR LIEU: Thank you, Chairman Aguilar. The American economy is getting worse. The last economic report showed that GDP was revised downwards to an anemic 0.7 percent last quarter. It also showed that core PCE, the Fed's inflation gauge, that they prefer, increased. So we have a slowing economy, increasing inflation and now diesel has hit over $5 for the second time in U.S. history. All of this has hurt and will continue to hurt consumers even more. And what is the response from the Trump administration? I'm going to quote for you what Director of the National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett, said on national TV. He said that hurting consumers is, ‘the last of our concerns.’ So I want the White House to send Kevin Hassett to every single TV channel and to every single swing House district, where you can tell the voters of America that hurting consumers is, ‘the last of our concerns.’ And that is where the administration is. They don't care about the American consumer. They don't care about people who can't make ends meet. And we're going to see what happens this November.
I also now want to talk a little bit about the Iran war. I'm going to go back to a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing. We have a Department of Defense witness for acquisitions, and we have a problem in terms of a missile shortage. How do we know we have a missile shortage? Because the President called an emergency meeting earlier this month with all the top defense contractors, talking about increasing missile production. Lockheed has said they are going to quadruple missile production. Well, that's great. Let me just give you some numbers. Right now, they make eight THAAD missiles a month, for a total of 96 the entire year. So even if you quadruple that, it's not a lot. It goes up to about 400. And you know how long it's going to take them to do it? In their own press release: three years. So that's where we are. And then you have Iran that has over 80,000 drones, by some estimates, and other ballistic missiles. And so they're launching all this at U.S. bases, at allied countries, and we're firing THAAD missiles and Patriot interceptors. The cost of one Patriot interceptor is $4-4.5 million per missile. The cost of one THAAD missile is about $12-15 million per missile. The cost of an Iranian drone could be as low as $20,000. This is like launching Cadillacs at baseballs. It is not sustainable. So, I urge the Department of Defense and the administration to come up with a plan to Congress as to how they can sustain not only this war, but any future war. Because clearly, there's a huge mismatch between the weapons that the Department of Defense has and what our adversaries are able to launch at America and our allies.
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