Fox News host Chris Wallace on this week’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday” confronted Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) the Republican Party’s credibility on the issue of the national debt.
Wallace said, “I haven’t heard you say it today, but some of your colleagues in the Republican Party are complaining about this is going to explode debt, this is going to explode deficits. I want to put up what the Republican record is on those. During the Trump presidency, even before the pandemic, the national debt increased by more than $3 trillion. In 2017, every Republican in the Senate, including you, voted for the big Trump tax cuts, which cut revenue by almost one and a half-trillion dollars. So I guess the question is when I hear, for instance, Mitch McConnell talking about well, debt and deficits, hasn’t the Republican Party, haven’t you lost your credibility on those issues?”
Blunt said, “Well, I don’t think anybody has a very good record for the last decade on this. I think the deficit under the Obama years and the Trump years are very similar. The tax cuts, however, in real revenue produced more revenue and static revenue. They wouldn’t because you couldn’t anticipate the kind of growth we had, and remember after the pandemic did occur, we did five, not one, not two, not three, not four, but five bipartisan bills trying to be sure we stabilize this economy so we have a stable economy that would pay that debt off as we came out of COVID. Now we’ve seen one incredibly partisan bill from the new administration followed by what appears to be will be another incredibly partisan bill. You can’t spread that blame around if you decide you’re going to do it all by yourself.”
Wallace said, “Yes, I suppose that’s true. I just want to make it clear when I talked about the increase in debt during the Trump years. I did it purposely before the pandemic started.”
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