Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, told Newsmax on Thursday that the bipartisan bill he co-sponsored that would force Congress to consider government interest payments when approving any new spending will help legislators “get our fiscal house in order.”
The Cost Estimates Improvement Act would require “cost estimates prepared by the Congressional Budget Office or the Joint Committee on Taxation to include the costs of servicing the public debt,” according to the official summary.
Cloud said on “Newsline” that he introduced the bill because “one of the most important things we have to do right now … [is] get our fiscal house in order.”
He added, “Everybody’s looking to the United States to see, are we going to actually do it this time? It's upon us to make sure we get our house in order. And one of the biggest expenses that does nothing for the American people is what we pay in interest every single year.”
Cloud said that interest payments are "exceeding our military spending, which is substantial. And so we don't even count the cost for it when it comes to the estimates that, for example, the Congressional Budget Office does.”
The congressman added, “It’d be like going to buy a car or your house and not even looking at what … that interest payment is going to cost you every single month.”
He continued, “And so we're doing everything we can to make sure that we're bringing transparency to the process. We're looking at the real numbers. We're not playing these fuzzy D.C. math games, and that we restore fiscal sanity to our government and make sure that we're, again, doing what we need to be doing for the taxpayer.”
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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