Blue states like California and New York were already in a great deal of debt before the coronavirus pandemic hit them, so it's hard to justify their demands for more federal money as the economy reopens, Rep. Dan Crenshaw said Tuesday.
"Well, it's no secret that blue states like California and New York, they have vastly more expenditures than red states like Texas and Florida that balance their budgets," the Texas Republican said on Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "They have really massive pension programs, and this is on top of the fact they actually tax their citizens to a huge extent. It also should be said that a lot of the coronavirus expenditures are in the form of Medicaid, which the federal government already pays for."
Crenshaw said that it's also hard, being from Texas, to tell his taxpayers that their federal tax dollars should go to other states that, in the case of California, "[were not] hit that hard by coronavirus but want a bailout nonetheless because their state finances were so bad before all this happened."
Further, California is already giving millions through Medicaid to illegal immigrants, said Crenshaw, but the state is "asking for more money on top of that." He added that "it's probably to replace their tax revenues because nobody is working. They won't let anybody outside, so they want to keep people locked down and want the rest of the country to pay for that. That's fundamentally what's going on here."
The HEROES Act approved in the House last week was "almost $1 trillion toward this end, so they can talk about helping the people all they want, but the vast majority of that bill was going toward their favorite blue state governors," Crenshaw said.