Rick Scott contends COVID-19 relief bill not meant to ‘help people’

Sen. Rick Scott contended Tuesday that the American Rescue Act, a $1.9 trillion stimulus and relief package and a signature initiative of the Joe Biden White House, is not intended to “help people.”

Scott, appearing on the Fox Business Network Tuesday, agreed with host Charles Payne that $86 billion in the act to support union pension funds exemplified why the legislation was “never a COVID bill.”

“Well, I mean, this was never a COVID bill. This was not to help people,” Scott claimed of the legislation passed by the Senate this weekend and slated to be passed again by the House of Representatives Wednesday.

Scott described the bill as “just payback for the Biden election.”

Regarding the “help to reduce [union] liabilities,” Scott contended that unions, writ large, have “never lived up to what they told their members they were going to get. People that wouldn’t pay into their pension plan and now the federal government’s going to bail them out.”

Scott, worth more than $500 million by some reckonings, then questioned the need for pensions at all.

“Oh, and by the way, I mean, how many pensions do most Americans have? Very few Americans have pensions anymore,” Scott told Payne, decrying the bill again as “pure liberal payback.”

Scott’s commentary about the decline of pensions was new, but much of the rest restated concerns he expressed to Florida’s Republican-majority congressional delegation about the “shameful” relief act in a letter Monday.

“This bill is bad for Florida. Not only does it commit Florida taxpayers to unnecessary and wasteful bailouts of poorly run liberal states, it also unfairly punishes our state with less federal support for keeping unemployment below the unimaginable levels we’ve seen in Democrat-run states. The funding formulas throughout the bill benefit New York and California at the expense of states like Florida,” Scott wrote Monday.