Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King believes Congress should defund Planned Parenthood, reduce food stamps and entitlement spending to pay for the southern wall on the Mexican border.
Instead of the $1.6 billion price for the wall that some lawmakers have pitched, King would rather provide $5 billion in funding, he said on CNN’s “New Day” with Alisyn Camerota.
“Are you comfortable, congressman, with providing $1.6 billion of taxpayer money, not from Mexico, to build that wall?” Camerota said.
“Absolutely, yes and more,” King said.
“And I’d throw another $5 billion on the pile and I would find half a billion of that from right out of Planned Parenthood’s budget. And the rest of it could come out of food stamps and the entitlements that are being spread out for people who haven’t worked in three generations.”
Camerota pushed King on his belief that reducing money for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also called food stamps, is the right move.
“You want to take food from the people on the lowest rung in terms of the nation’s safety net and their children on food stamps, you’re willing to take money from them to build the $1.6 billion for the border wall?” Camerota said.
King suggested perhaps some poor people would be better off if the food stamps program was reduced. “We built the programs to solve the problem of malnutrition in America. Now we have a problem of obesity. When you match up the EBT card with what the scales say on some of the folks, I think its worth looking at,” King said.
Several congressmen have promised to force a shutdown if the current appropriations bills, which include funding for the wall, are blocked by congressional Democrats.
One of the benefits of the wall “would be that we will create the kind of security that would bring about 10 million new jobs in america by enforcing immigration law,” King said.
King also said that the food stamps program exploded under former President Barack Obama to an unhealthy size. “We’ve seen this go from 19 million people on the SNAP program up to 47 million people on the SNAP program,” King said.
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