Republican Congressman French Hill of Arkansas joins Yahoo Finance to join

Video Transcript

- 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.