Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) slammed the Democrats’ inclination to raise taxes amid the debt ceiling debate, saying it is the “wrong” approach.
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden criticized Republicans for resisting the idea of raising taxes as part of negotiations to raise the $31.4 trillion debt ceiling.
REPUBLICANS RIP BIDEN FOR TRYING TO INSERT TAXES IN DEBT CEILING DEAL
While appearing on Fox News Tonight, Daines said the United States’s debt problem is more about spending than revenue.
“The way to increase revenue,” Daines said, pointing to fiscal policies seen under former Presidents John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump. “When you lower tax rates to create more economic activity, you actually increase tax revenues.”
“The Democrats have one thing that they want to do, and that is raise taxes,” Daines continued. “If you want to slow something down, you tax it. If you want to slow the economy down, you tax it. That would be the exact wrong thing to do, and it doesn’t solve the problem. It is truly a spending problem.”
The Montana Republican suggested the country could not raise taxes high enough to solve the problem.
“We’re $31 trillion-plus in debt. I didn’t think that I’d live to see the day to have this kind of debt showing up on the books. You look at the course over the next 10 years,” Daines said. “Right now, according to the Congressional Budget Office, our debt is going to be pushing nearly $50 trillion — just in the next 10 years, and 10 years is not that far away.”
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“This creates huge additional inflationary pressures, and that’s the destabilization that we know, at some point, you can’t keep running up this debt. You can’t keep running trillion-dollar-plus deficits every year and expect the rest of the world to come and keep buying our debt,” the senator added. “That will create higher interest rates, and this is the biggest challenge I think that we face as a nation. An existential threat is the crisis we’ll hit when this debt becomes such that it’s no longer sustainable as a country.”
As the date of a possible default looms less than 10 days away, debt ceiling discussions have picked up in urgency as negotiators began working “through the night” with the hope of coming to an agreement.