The Lead with Jake Tapper: Rep. Don Bacon, (R-NE), Is Interviewed About Debt Ceiling
Interview
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I wish it was farther along than what it is right now, but I'm glad he's going to delay or cut his trip short, he's got to take this serious. Today we didn't get progress on an end state or an agreement. But what I did hear was both sides said they wanted to negotiate and both sides said they were willing to compromise. That is a step forward.
Unfortunately, we lost 90 days where the President did not want to talk or negotiate. I think his spirit is in a better spot right now when he's saying he's willing to negotiate. And he's already offered up some sense of compromises that he'll make with us. And for me, if I think for the GOP, these are victories. We know we can't get everything we want, but saying absolutely no compromise was not right either.
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Well, it would be bad for our economy, and we do not want to default. I'm glad that Kevin McCarthy and President Biden say they want to negotiate and they want to raise the debt ceiling, but they got to meet in the middle somewhere. I point out President Trump negotiated with Speaker Pelosi and they raised the debt ceiling three times, and the spending went up. So I don't think the president followed his own medicine when he was the president.
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No. You know, at the time, we supported most of the agenda at that point, especially the first year, where we voted for the tax reform, which I thought we needed. It built the strongest economy in 40 years. It actually raised the revenue. And then we had COVID where we thought we had to spend money to help people that were out of work as we shut down their businesses.
But I would say the difference now is I opposed most of the agenda under President Biden, and so did most of the Republicans. Two of those massive spending bills didn't get a single Republican on there. And now we're at the debt ceiling. So we do want a compromise. We do want to meet somewhere in the middle. But I supported most of the agenda under the previous president.
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What we said is we could increase spending 1 percent a year. So that is a cut compared to what was projected at 3 percent to 5 percent. So raising spending 1 percent a year, it is a cut. Actually, President Biden has expressed interest in caps as well. It probably won't be 1 percent, maybe it'll be 2 percent, maybe 3 percent, but that's what we need to negotiate.
We also targeted the COVID money that has not been spent, that's 30 billion. We talked about the tuition, paying off those tuition loans, which I believe the Supreme Court will find unconstitutional. That is $400 billion. And we also detailed some of the Inflation Reduction Act tax incentives, that was also in the billions and billions of dollars. In fact, CBO is now scoring them three times higher than when the bill was passed.
So we did have some concrete proposals there. I will point out again, Jake, that I realize we're not going to get everything we want. We have to meet in the middle, and hopefully we can make some progress towards getting some fiscal sanity, because at $32 trillion in debt, it's going to grow about 2 trillion a year. We're building a debt to GDP ratio of 200 percent, and that is unsustainable for our country.
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Thank you.
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Thank you, sir.
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