Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) made an appearance on this Thursday's The Source with Kaitlan Collins on CNN, and was asked by Collins about the Pentagon’s emerging plan to seek $200 billion in additional military spending to pay for Trump and Bibi's Iran war, and Perry came up with this doozy for how to fund it: Have the Iranians pay for the US to wage war against them.
COLLINS: Obviously you are a lawmaker. What's your initial reaction to the Pentagon seeking $200 billion for this war? Is that something you'd vote yes on?
PERRY: Well, that's the beginning of the... that's the offer on the table, right? We... all of Congress, including Republicans and Democrats, are going to want to see the granular details of what that involves.
Remember, the administration also asked for $1.5 trillion in military spending to rearm, refit, retool the production lines and so on and so forth. Is this part of that or is that separate? So we've got a long way to go. That's the initial offer on the table, but we have questions that are reasonable that we will get answered. And, you know, we're going to have a say in this thing. So we're going to work it out.
We understand that oftentimes you come in with something like that at the high point, you know, you reach for the stars, but then, you know, we settled on something very different than that. So it's a little premature to determine exactly what that looks like.
COLLINS: Okay,so you want to hear from the administration what they want to spend all of that money on before you're willing to say whether or not you're voting yes on it? Is that what you're saying?
PERRY: I think most members, like I said, it doesn't matter if you're Republican or Democrat. We represent our districts and we understand. We support the price, support the president. I support this action. But at the same time, we've got to pay for this. So how is this going to be dealt with?
I would actually like to see Iran pay for this, whether it's $20 billion or $200 billion, whatever it is. Look, they've been at war with us for 47 years and it's finally being ended by the president, which is awesome, but it comes at a cost and they have resources.
They have been siphoning those resources away from their population for those four and a half, five decades. And certainly they could pay that bill pretty quickly once things get up and running and the Ayatollah is no longer in charge. So I think that's an option that we need to pursue as well.
COLLINS: You want to see whatever this costs the U.S. taxpayer, whatever the Pentagon does come to you and ask for to be offset by Iran?
PERRY: Well, I think we had to have, we got to pay for this somehow, right? We don't have endless money. I mean, it doesn't just come with the cost of conflict. I mean, everything in Congress that we pay for, people like me that don't want to bankrupt the country say, how are we going to pay for this? What are we going to do without so that we can have this?
And unfortunately in Washington, there are very few people that ask that question, which is how you end up $38 trillion in debt. But you know,look, like I said, I support the president. We support the action. Iran has to be taken off the equation. We're sick of the terror. We're sick of being, you know, living under the scourge of potentially nuclear war.
We don't want to live like that, but all things come at a cost, so we have to be responsible with how we spend our money.
Every time Republicans are in charge, they do this. They start wars, explode the deficit and spend like a bunch of drunken sailors, and then when Democrats are back in charge start screaming that we need to cut social services and demand that Democrats clean up their mess. Wash, rinse, repeat.
We're still waiting for Mexico to pay for the wall. Good luck with this one buddy.
