Rep. Tom Cotton: We Can't Keep Raising Taxes to Pay for Obama's 'Welfare Spending'
They just can't stop themselves. Here's Rep. Tom Cotton (R-Ark) on this week's Fox News Sunday, explaining to host Chris Wallace why he doesn't think it's fair to be raising taxes on the rich and why we cannot make any cuts to defense spending, but cut away at domestic spending, or in his words "welfare":
WALLACE: Congressman Cotton, I want you to react to that, and as you saw in the clip we played from the president's weekend address, once again the president is trying to make Republicans pay the price politically. He's basically saying, these cuts are going to affect the middle class in education and law enforcement, food inspectors. And once again, you guys want to protect your wealthy friends from any tax increase.
REP. TOM COTTON, R-ARK.: Chris, the bigger risk, I think, is the way they are going to impact the Department of Defense. It's cutting almost $10 billion or 10 percent of the Department of Defense's budget this year, and that is after four years where the Department of Defense has been the one agency of the federal government that has not had hundreds of billions of dollars stuffed into its budget. You go back and you look at domestic spending over the last four years that exploded under the stimulus and just annual resolutions funding the government, there is a lot more fat to cut there. So as Bill said, Republicans have proposed a responsible alternative to the sequester, which is what President Obama proposed in 2011, which are shift those cuts away from the Department of Defense and to domestic spending so we can ensure, for example, that we have two aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, which we just stopped because of the sequester spending.
