Fox News Sunday

Interview

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Thank you.

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The president's budget took my breath away. His numbers are extraordinary. We're going to run out of digits here. It's $6.9 trillion budget, $4.7 trillion in new taxes that will affect everyone over 10 years; $18 trillion in new debt, a cut to defense.

The president says that his budget will solve our financial problems in Medicare and Social Security, that's not true. Anything seems possible when you don't know what you're talking about.

"The Wall Street Journal" just reported that the president's budget will add eight -- rather $11 trillion in a financial shortfall to Social Security and Medicare. The only way I know how to improve the president's budget is with a shredder.

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Well, I'm going to try to do what's right for the American people. The media can do what it wants.

The House is on its track to put together a budget, Shannon. The Senate needs to be doing its work on the budget. Senator Schumer has prevented that. I'm on the Appropriations Committee. We should be meeting right now.

As you know, we split the budget up into 12 mini budgets. I'm ranking member on one of those sub-committees. We should be meeting right now talking about how to reduce the rate of growth of spending and debt accumulation, but Senator Schumer will not allow us to meet.

So, when you can't sit down with your colleagues, it's not hard to put together something to talk to the American people about, because no question that there are savings to be had in this budget. No fair-minded American believes that you can't find efficiencies in a $6.9 trillion budget.

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Well, that criticism that you just read is correct. There have been any number of bills passed with Republican support in the Senate that added to spending. I didn't vote for them.

I'll give one example. We just passed a $40 billion subsidy for big tech. It's called the CHIPS bill. The idea is to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to America. Right now, we have a 10 percent market share.

We just spent $40 billion on -- in a giveaway to big tech. You know how much it's going to increase our market share? One percent.

Our infrastructure bill, which is not really infrastructure bill -- I didn't vote for it because I'm not going to buy a car to get the cup holders.

If you want to talk savings, we ought to stop sending checks to dead people. We spend about a billion to two billion every year to send money to dead people, the checks are being cashed. It's obviously a fraud.

The president's plan to have the American people pay for student debt cost $400 billion over 10 years. We already had a plan to repay student debt. It's called a job. We ought to get rid of that.

We ought to talk about how to reduce the federal workforce through attrition. We ought to talk about why in the Medicare program, we're paying more for the same surgical treatment in a hospital as opposed to an outpatient clinic.

There are lots of things we can do to reduce spending in this budget. But on the Senate side, we have to have Senator Schumer's permission to do that and he's not going to give it, nor is President Biden.

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Well, I think you ought to get the Social Security that you pay for, and I think you ought to get the Medicare that you pay for.

Now, Medicare is going to start getting in trouble financially in 2028. Social Security in 2035, I think. We should be talking now how to make sure that those programs are solvent.

The problem is that President Biden in his State of the Union Address decided to demagogue the issue. We all saw it. He basically said, if you talk, talk -- speaking to Republicans, if you talk about Social Security or Medicare, I'm going to call you a mean, bad person. And that just took the issue off the table when the president decided to demagogue it.

It was -- you -- you can -- you can only be young once, but you can always be immature, and I thought it was a very immature thing to do.

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Well, of course, we ought to talk about it. I mean, the life expectancy of the average American right now is about 77 years old. For people who are in their 20s, their life expectancy will probably be 85 to 90.

Does it really make sense to allow someone who's in their 20s today to retire at 62? Those are kind of things that we should talk about.

There are changes in Medicare we should talk about. Let me say it again, Medicare pays much more for the same surgical procedure in a hospital as it does in a private outpatient clinic. Why?

There are a lot of things we could talk about, but President Biden has taken that issue totally off the table. He says he has fixed it in his budget and that's nonsense. That's nonsense on a stick.

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But it still leaves a shortfall. It still leaves $11 trillion shortfall. So, when the president says, "I fixed the problem", with all due respect, he's not telling the truth.

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I think -- I think Attorney General Barr is correct. Look, the cartels, we know who they are. They're killing Americans on both sides of the border.

And the fact is that the American military could partner with the Mexican military and the Mexican police and we could wipe out the cartels. But President Lopez Obrador in Mexico refuses to do that. And when Senator Graham and I talked about the issue this year -- this week, rather, President Biden said it was a bad idea.

And the truth is that President Biden believes in open borders, the cartels don't seem to bother him and President Lopez Obrador, he can answer for himself, but I don't understand why he would turn down American help to get rid of cartels that are killing his people and our people.

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No, we can't -- no, we can't go into Mexico without -- without Mexico's permission.

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Thank you, Shannon.

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