House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday appeared for an interview on ABC’s “This Week” where she shot back at Sen. Joe Manchin’s suggestion that the Democrats’ policy initiatives are “contributing to inflation.”
“With all the respect in the world to my friend Joe Manchin, it’s not right to say that what we’re doing is contributing to inflation because it is exactly the opposite,” Pelosi told anchor George Stephanopoulos in response to the West Virginia Democrat’s comments about his reasoning for not supporting Democratic initiatives.
Pelosi’s remarks came days after the Labor Department announced that consumer prices in the year ending in January had increased 7.5 percent annually, which was the fastest rate since February 1982.
Manchin, who single-handily killed President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act, said in a statement that Congress should not add “more fuel to an economy already on fire,” a likely reference to the Democrats’ push for the roughly $2 trillion special spending and climate package. His statement came hours after the Labor Department released its data on Friday.
But Pelosi disagrees with Manchin, telling Stephanopoulos that the legislation is a “deficit-reduction bill.” She cited a letter in which 17 Nobel laureates said that the way the was written makes it non-inflationary.
Watch the interview below:
On Sen. Manchin's opposition to Build Back Better agenda, @SpeakerPelosi tells @GStephanopoulos: "It’s not right to say that what we’re doing is contributing to inflation because it’s exactly the opposite." https://t.co/V1vXWCWPAb pic.twitter.com/1AY9LvEQUK
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) February 13, 2022
