CNN "Outfront" - TRANSCRIPT Ukraine: Russia Has Mobilized 500,000 Soldiers, New Offensive Soon; GOP Representative Ready To Go "Over The Cliff" With Vote Against Debt Limit Hike; FBI Interview U.S. Veteran Who Alleges George Santos Took $3,000 From Dying Dog's GoFundMe; African American AP Course Revised Amid DeSantis Criticism. Aired 7-8p ET

Interview

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BURNETT: OUTFRONT now, Democratic congresswoman and U.S. Senate candidate Katie Porter of California.

And, Congresswoman, I appreciate your time.

Well, you heard it, shut it down, go off the cliff. So, what should Biden do? Stand firm on refusing to negotiate with Republicans or not?

REP. KATIE PORTER (D-CA): Biden should definitely make clear that it does not benefit any American -- Democrat, Republican, or otherwise -- to have our credit rating damaged.

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This simply helps nobody and hurts everybody. Every single American, regardless of their political ideology, benefits from a strong, stable, globally competitive economy. And that is at risk if we do not vote to raise the debt ceiling.

BURNETT: So, the issue here, of course, is that many Republicans want to attach a raising of the debt ceiling, which, of course, is debts already incurred, right? It's paying bills you already incurred with future spending changes, right? They want to marry those two things together.

So, some of them specifically have called for changes to Social Security. For example, things like raising the age to receive full Social Security.

And I thought it was interesting, Congresswoman, there was a recent CBO report that projected part of the funding for Social Security will be completely gone, totally gone in ten years.

Do Republicans pushing for changes to Social Security have a point?

PORTER: They do not. And here is why. This is how much Social Security adds to our national deficit. Zero, nothing.

Social Security is not debt-financed. In fact, by law, you cannot use debt spending to fund Social Security. And, in fact, we currently have over $2.9 trillion surplus.

So, do we need to think about how to make Social Security as strong and as viable for future generations as we can? Absolutely. But it is nuts to try to blame Social Security and blame working Americans who pay for the program and suggest that Social Security is in any way responsible for the national debt. It simply is not.

BURNETT: Well, I'm glad you brought your trademark white board. And luckily there was -- you didn't need to write the whole national debt number on it. You just need to write zero.

But, to this point, the overall debt number is immense, right? The debt since the last time we were on a brink of a default, 2011 when we lost that first credit rating, right, as you know, the debt has more than doubled. And today, our debt dwarfs our economy, right? So you've got debt 134 percent of what our economy produces in a year, right?

Now, when you've looked at that in other countries, it's often presaged economic crisis and collapse, really horrible things and have completely destroyed families living -- standard of living for generations.

Does America need to cut something big time, big picture here?

PORTER: Well, I do think we always want to be responsible with our tax dollars. We want to ask about any tax dollar that we're putting toward anything, whether it's the Pentagon budget, which takes up about half of our discretionary spending each year --

BURNETT: Right.

PORTER: -- or whether it's toward an environmental program, pandemic employment fraud. I had a hearing about that today.

Every tax dollar should be spent wisely. But a lot of these tax dollars are spent on investments that actually help us grow our economy. When we grow our economy, when we have more Americans at work, we have more tax revenue.

And that's exactly how President Biden has been able to lower the deficit twice, once through the Inflation Reduction Act and creating growth in our economy and savings there, and another time through simply addressing and reducing programs.

So, the solution is to have a strong economy. And, as you do that and if it's consistently strong, you're not having high jinks around things like the debt ceiling, you will see overall that come into balance. But it's not -- it's wrong -- it's right that we should think. It's not wrong to say that we ought to look at every dollar and make sure it's spent wisely.

BURNETT: Yeah.

PORTER: But when you see things like Social Security being put on the chopping block when it doesn't even add a single dollar, not even one dollar to the deficit, it makes you wonder whether Republicans are really being sincere about their effort to protect taxpayers.

BURNETT: Right, right. Whether it's about politics or actually about cutting spending. And, of course, many of us are skeptical about their goals of cutting spending because they've increased it significantly when they have had control of the spending purse.

Thank you very much. Appreciate your time, Congresswoman.

PORTER: Thank you.

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