Wednesday on Fox News, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) argued against any efforts to bail out so-called blue states to help ease the burden of their liabilities as they tend to the coronavirus pandemic.
According to Scott, many of the problems currently plaguing those states comes from their spending policies before the COVID 19 outbreak. He especially took exception to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D-NY) rhetoric promoting the idea of the bailout.
“You know what’s un-American?” he said. “To keep borrowing so much money that your kids and your grandkids will have all this debt because we’re not fiscally responsible. I got elected when Gov. [Andrew] Cuomo got elected, back at the end of 2010. Both of our states had financial problems. He took a totally different tack. He’s borrowed money every year. He doesn’t pay down debt. I dropped about one-third of our state debt … I’ve cut taxes. And guess what — Cuomo is also mad because all of these businesses moved to Florida because they couldn’t afford to live there, and then the people moved here because they got sick and tired of his taxes, his regulation and his attitude.”
“He doesn’t watch the money,” Scott continued. “And now he is tired of taxing his citizens, so he wants the citizens of Florida, including a whole bunch of New Yorkers who moved here to get away from him to pay for his excesses. I’m not going to have it. It’s not going to happen. It’s wrong. You look at places like California, Illinois and New Jersey with their unfunded pensions — why are Floridians responsible for these bad balance sheets?”
Instead of more money allocated by the federal government, Scott argued there were other things for Congress to consider for recovery from the pandemic.
“[A]t some point we have to say, ‘How much money can we all borrow because we know our kids and our grandkids are going to be paying for this?'” he said. “I think Leader [Mitch] McConnell is doing the right thing. Let’s look at what we’re doing. What can we do to help those unemployed? What can we do to help our small businesses? And what can we do to make sure lawyers aren’t just suing all of our businesses and preventing them from opening because they’re trying to comply with how do you keep people safe, and you have all these trial lawyers wanting to sue our businesses, and it is scaring the living daylights out of our businesses? You’ve got to have liability protection for our businesses and our first responders.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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