Scalise: Deficit Cannot Sustain Itself

Statement

On President Biden's runaway spending and America's increasing deficit:

"Well, I want to thank Speaker McCarthy for bringing both Republicans and Democrats together, as well as Leader Jeffries for agreeing to do that, so that people on both sides of the aisle can see just how dire this problem is, and having the CBO director talk about this new updated baseline, which should be a concern to everybody in America.

"Clearly, this isn't a partisan issue, when you look at how out of control spending is, how the deficits continue to grow, and what that does to hurt the vital programs that we need to continue to work towards. We need a strong national defense. We want to strengthen Social Security and Medicare, and yet those programs are less stable today than they've ever been before.

"So as we talk about the debt ceiling and how to get control over spending, I think it's important to engage the country in just how serious this problem is. If you think about what the real spending problem is, for every dollar that the federal government takes in, the federal government is spending $1.29. That cannot sustain itself. That's why we have these runaway deficits. And the last two years of massive spending, trillions of dollars in spending that President Biden did, has only exacerbated the problem.

"And so as we talk about how to get control over spending, and addressing things like, "why are we paying people not to work? Why are we spending over one hundred billion, by the way, to get welfare benefits to people who are fully able-bodied who could be in the workforce?' Not only can they be helping solve this problem, but they would be paying billions more into Social Security so that it wouldn't be insolvent, as the current CBO baseline shows it.

"We can fix these problems. It's going to take a bipartisan agreement. Speaker McCarthy has laid out many times that he wants to have more conversations with President Biden to figure out how to get control over this problem. It's a national problem. It's not any one party that's going to solve it. It's going to take all sides coming together.

"And so today was a really good start, to get everybody in a room together with the CBO director talking about the problem. We need to come up with more ideas about how to solve this problem. But I think having a realization of just where we are is going to only help the conversation about how we get out of this mess."

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