Joe Biden and the Democrats have pushed the national debt to over $32 trillion.
But Democrats are not the only big spenders in the Swamp.
And Ron DeSantis told Brian Kilmeade one truth about Donald Trump’s four years in office that put jaws on the floor.
At the end of the Fiscal Year 2016, America’s national debt was $19.5 trillion.
But the national debt is now approaching $33 trillion, a staggering 64% increase over the past seven years.
Of course, the debt increase received a boost from the pandemic spending in 2020 and 2021, but the debt was already on the rise before COVID.
The trillions of dollars in new spending is also driving inflation through the roof and is why polls show the economy is a top issue for voters.
On Thursday, DeSantis appeared for an interview on Fox News Radio’s Brian Kilmeade Show.
DeSantis ripped the Biden administration for the wasteful spending, but also noted that Republicans bear some of the blame.
“As much as we rightfully criticize Biden for what he’s done since he came into office, Republicans have spent and borrowed trillions and trillions of dollars,” DeSantis said. “And I think, just with the Trump administration, they did $7-8 trillion in new debt added on,” he continued. “So, that’s just the reality.”
DeSantis said Oliver Anthony was right about the rich men north of Richmond and pointed out that “five of the eight wealthiest counties in our country are suburbs of Washington, D.C.”
Kilmeade then brought up the excuse often made by the political class about how Congress can’t cut spending because of Social Security and Medicare.
“But two-thirds of our budget goes to automatic payments on entitlements that people paid into,” Kilmeade said. “But how do you get elected and tell people, ‘I’ve got to revamp Social Security and Medicare?’”
DeSantis said in the last six or seven years, the majority of new debt came from discretionary spending.
“They didn’t have to spend the money and they chose to do it,” DeSantis said. “Then what happens is, you’re locking in these high levels of spending that they justified with COVID, and that’s kind of the new normal, but you can’t sustain that.”
But DeSantis did more than criticize the big spending during COVID.
He also offered a solution.
“So, I do think you’ve got to take the actual budget that we deal with every year, and you’ve got to revert a lot of that money back to where we were four or five years ago,” DeSantis said. “You won’t miss a beat, these agencies have grown by 50% in terms of their budget, like the CDC and all those.”
DeSantis told Kilmeade the reality is that “Congress has spent Social Security money for decades,” as “Social Security has run up big surpluses through the years.”
“Congress would take that surplus and they’d spend it and they’d write an IOU,” he concluded.
DeSantis is running on a platform of cutting the footprint of the federal bureaucracy in the Swamp by 50% as a way of reducing regulation and red tape.
Under DeSantis, Florida has a AAA credit rating compared to the federal government’s recent downgrade to AA+.
If elected President, DeSantis is promising to lead the United States with the same fiscal stewardship that led to a AAA rating for Florida.
DeSantis Daily will keep you up-to-date on any new developments in this ongoing story.
