By Hannah Curran, Editor
TRUSSVILLE — U.S. Representative Mo Brooks (AL-05) sat down with The Trussville Tribune to discuss the current race to replace outgoing U.S. Senate Senator Richard Shelby.
Brooks explained the reason behind increased gas prices and inflation, as well as immigration challenges in America. Brooks also responded to the Coronavirus pandemic.
Brooks said that inflation is caused by three elements. The first, he said, is a significant increase in energy costs.
“You’ve seen it at the pump, that affects everything that the economy does,” Brooks said. “The reason that the energy prices are going up so much is that the Biden administration and the new Green Deal people basically have been attacking our energy supplies because they do not want us consuming them, which of course, drives up the cost since there’s less being produced.”
Brooks explained that this was seen “symbolically with the Biden administration’s cancelation of Keystone pipeline” and more “directly with their opposition to fracking.”
Brooks believes increases in energy prices are not accidental.
“Under Barack Obama, Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, publicly stated that he thought that America’s gasoline prices should go up to what is paid for in Europe, which at that time was like five, six, seven dollars a gallon,” Brooks said. “The reason they want to do that is to make green, or at least what they call green energy more competitive; for example, electric automobiles versus combustion engines.”
Brooks said to properly address that one-third of the cause of inflation is to be “more friendly to the production of energy that can be acquired and used at a more reasonable cost.”
He also claimed that the second major cause of inflation is the “socialist Democrats’ attack on our work ethic.”
“The federal government is paying a lot of people not to work, the federal government to some degree, but to a greater degree, city, county, state governments are encouraging people not to work because of COVID-19 concerns,” Brooks said. “All of that has cut into the labor supply made the delivery and production of items more uncertain, which in turn increases their price, when there is less of that good or service that is available to acquire.”
He explained that it is “economics 101, the demand-supply curve because if the supply is cut, everything else being constant, then the price of whatever supplies left is going to go up.”
“The demand has remained the same,” Brooks said. “So we need to quit paying people so much not to work, and we also need to learn the science of COVID-19. That is that these lockdowns and whatnot simply have done nothing to stop COVID-19 and are very economically kind of productive.”
Brooks also believes that the U.S. dollar has become devalued.
“We just blew through, as a country, the $30 trillion debt mark in the last few weeks,” he said. “We’ve had a $3 trillion deficit, a $3 trillion deficit. And now who knows how many trillions that will be this year. All of that has an inflationary effect …”
Brooks said as a congressman, and what he would do as a senator is vote against “a lot of the spending of money that we don’t have, have to borrow to get, can’t afford to pay back and that risk a national insolvency and bankruptcy.”
“The supply chain problems are with the absence of workers, and so you quit paying people not to work,” Brooks said. “When they go back into the workforce, then all of a sudden, the businesses that produce those goods and services have the people there to actually manufacture them or stock them on shelves or deliver them.”
Brooks also shared his viewpoints on the trade deficit and our relationship with China.
“For a significant period of time, our trade deficit has been $400 billion to $500 billion a year and getting worse,” Brooks said. “I hope people understand how bad that is for American incomes because basically what we’re doing is we’re hemorrhaging … $500 billion a year from our economy, weakening America and strengthening China, in particular, giving them the hard cash they need to build up their military, as they threaten Taiwan and other neighbors of China.”
He said the United States needs to “first understand that China is a geopolitical foe of the United States of America, liberty and freedom and democracy,” and know that “90 percent or so of the population of China consists of what are effectively slaves.”
“What the Communist Chinese party is doing is causing their slave class, their worker class, to work at substandard wages, and substandard, unhealthy working conditions, which in turn enables him to produce goods at lower cost that freedom loving countries cannot compete with.”
As a response, Brooks said as a country; we need to wake up to what is happening in our relationship with China and “act accordingly, using any means at our disposal.”
“To balance that playing field, we should not have a $400 billion to $500 billion a year trade deficit with Communist China, and it’s easy to fix. But we don’t have enough people in Congress who are willing to fix it,” Brooks said. “Give credit to Communist China where credit is due. They have been very masterful at manipulating our election system and impacting various special interest groups to make it harder for Congress to do what needs doing in order to balance our trade deficit with China.”
Brooks said that America is the greatest nation the world has ever seen.
“We’ve held that lofty stature for 75-plus years since the end of World War Two, and that’s by almost any empirical measurement,” Brooks said. “We have the greatest economy, the most wealth, the best national security, the most international influence, the most liberty and freedom of any major player in world history, and we are the greatest nation in world history because we have been blessed with foundational principles that have combined to enable us to excel as individuals, which means collectively, we’re better as a country.”
Brooks said we need more people in Washington as senators, congressmen and as presidents who understand why so many people are breaking into our country “because we are so great, and do everything that is necessary to protect those foundational principles.”
“It might be the need for honest and accurate elections, where we minimize the ability of evil forces to engage in voter fraud and election theft activities,” Brooks said. “It might be the protection of the First Amendment, freedom of speech in the face of big-tech, and other types of censorship. It might be in the protection of the First Amendment freedom of religion and our moral values that ensue from our religions, all of which are under attack right now across the globe by amoral forces. It might be the battle between free enterprise and socialism. Free enterprise, as the name suggests, is based on liberty and freedom or individually. We get to choose what they want to do with their God-given talents. Socialism is dictatorial. And if you look at the history of socialism and the history of free enterprise, free enterprise works, socialism does not.”
He said that if the definition of working is generating a strong enough economy, to have a reasonable safety net and a strong national defense so that your country is not at risk of being devoured in some kind of conflict ratio.
“All of these foundational principles are the principles that I fight for and believe in and have fought for and believed in as United States Congressman, and I’m doing the same as the United States Senator if the people of the state of Alabama should see fit to elect me,” Brooks said.