DAINES ON FOX NEWS TONIGHT: SKYROCKETING DEBT IS "EXISTENTIAL THREAT" TO AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE

Press Release

U.S. Senator Steve Daines tonight joined Trey Gowdy on Fox News Tonight to discuss the impending default on the national debt and President Biden's refusal to rein in reckless spending.

Daines on White House's Handling of Spending Crisis

This is a crisis management driven operation. They try to lead by crisis. They started with the border. It's all self-induced. They opened up the border, we got a border crisis.

It leads to a crime crisis, then they unleashed spending, now we have an inflation crisis. Now, we have this debt ceiling crisis. But the important word in the debt ceiling debate is the word debt. This is a symptom of the biggest problem and that's the crisis of the debt. We're $31 trillion plus in debt. I didn't think I would live to see the day to have this kind of debt showing up on the books. If you look at our course the next 10 years, Trey, right now according to the Congressional Budget Office, our debt is going to be pushing nearly $50 trillion just in the next ten years. Ten years is not that far away. This creates huge additional inflationary pressures. And that's the destabilization that we know at some point, you can't keep running up this debt. You can't keep running trillion dollar plus deficits every year and expect the rest of the world to come in and keep buying our debt. That's going to create higher interest rates and this is the biggest challenge I think we face as a nation and the existential threat is the crisis that will hit when this debt becomes such that it's no longer sustainable as a country.

Daines on Biden and Senate Democrats' Wasteful Spending Habits:

Trey, we've seen that happen under John F. Kennedy, it happened under Ronald Reagan, it happened under Trump, and that is when you lower tax rates to create more economic activity, you actually increase tax revenues. The Democrats have one thing they want to do and that is raise taxes. If you want to slow something down, you tax it. If you want to slow this economy down, you'd tax it, that'd be exactly the wrong thing to do. And it doesn't solve the problem. It is truly a spending problem.

Looking at spending versus revenues as a percentage of GDP, we are clearly in territory now that says you can't raise taxes high enough and solve the problem we have with our deficits in our debt. So, the answer is you've got to reduce spending. Trey, the very first bill that I introduce every Congress is pretty simple, simply says, "if Congress doesn't balance their budget, they don't get paid." I spent 28 years in business, you've been in business as well. You know, if you don't balance your budgets in business, you don't have a business. We've got to hold members of Congress accountable and let them work through all the imaginations in terms of priorities on defense spending, on other programs that are important. But there's not a single person I've yet to meet who says you know, "there's no room to improve efficiency in the federal government. There's no room to somehow to cut some spending." Of course there is, of course there is.

Daines on his Bill to Not Pay Members of Congress if they don't Balance the Budget

I'll tell you. When I'm back home in Montana I talk about that. Not only to folks stand up and cheer they jump on their chairs and start cheering. That's exactly right. Put the pain on members of Congress, like business owners have that pain, family businesses, managing your family household. The pain goes on those who are trying to balance. Put the pain back on members of Congress. I can tell you the cheer back home in Montana, which suggests that, but you're right, Trey it's a little more of a chilly response back in Washington with my colleagues.

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