Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said on “Your World” that she helped balance the budget as governor of South Carolina and may do so again as president.
NIKKI HALEY: Look, I think Biden is the last socialist president. He likes to spend other people’s money. The answer to all of it is to raise taxes. And I think we have to be realistic. We owe $31 trillion. I think we are borrowing money to make our interest payments. This is not sustainable. The problem is that Washington, DC has a spending problem, and we need to go on a diet and put an end to it. I did this in South Carolina. We have to stand up for the country.
The first thing Biden should do is, “We’re going to recover the $500 billion in unfunded COVID.” The second thing he should have said was that instead of IRS agents going after innocent Americans, they went after the $100 billion COVID fraud that happened along the way. We have to make sure we reach the Republicans and the Democrats, who both opened the borders. This is not the time to spend $2 billion on counties that don’t exist and have no governing structure.
President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the economy at the Cuyahoga Community College Metropolitan Campus, Thursday, May 27, 2021, in Cleveland. ((AP Photo/Evan Vucci))
So if we’re talking about rights reform, the first thing we do is, look, I have 80-year-old parents. We take care of them. I don’t want them to harm the elderly or anyone preparing for retirement. But I have 20-year-old children, they are the ones who have to go and know that things will change. So what you would do is for those coming into the 20-year system, we would change the retirement age to match life expectancy.
The second thing we would do would be to limit benefits for the wealthy. Then you go further to make increases based on inflation instead of cost of living increases. That’s something Republicans and Democrats would agree on. And more than that, expand the Medicare Advantage plan, so we can have more competition and lower costs. So will the rights reform. That’s how you make it permanent. And that’s how you lower the cost that we’re seeing right now as well.
You keep your promises to those we made, you promise. Those who have invested must keep what they have. We must not in any way endanger those who are already expecting something. This is about the new team coming.
They are new arrivals. They are twenty years old. You’re coming to them and saying the game has changed. We’re going to do this completely different. That’s how you go and that’s what you focus on. We need to start doing things like this. But more than that, we have to see that there’s a spending problem in DC and the Republicans and the Democrats have done that to us, Neil. Don’t forget that when this all started, with Republicans, they passed a $2.2 trillion COVID stimulus package 419-6 in the House and 96 to 0 in the Senate that expanded welfare. Now we have 90 million people on Medicaid. You have 42 million people on food stamps. We should be moving people from welfare to work.
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We shouldn’t be paying people to sit on couches and add welfare rolls. He was under the watch of the Republicans. They reopened the claims. Why are we spending on pork projects when one in six Americans can’t pay their utility bill? We should stop borrowing. We don’t have endless credit cards in our homes or our businesses. Why do we allow this to happen? And we need to make sure they understand that you shouldn’t pass a spending bill that doesn’t return us to pre-COVID-19 levels. This will have to be tough. It will take a president who will call Republicans and Democrats together. I did that as governor. I will do it again as president.