Rick Scott on Balancing the Budget and our National Debt

Message from Senator Rick Scott

Dear Fellow Floridian,

This week, our national debt hit $40 trillion. It's hard even to fathom just how much money we're talking about, and even more difficult when you think about how much the United States government is now paying in interest on that debt.

Here are a couple of things to put it in perspective:

• If we paid down $1 million every day since the birth of Jesus Christ, we still wouldn’t have covered even 2% of the current national debt.
• Meanwhile, we’re currently paying $3 billion per day in interest ALONE.
• Congress managed to double our debt from $20 trillion in less than NINE YEARS. It was less than $6 trillion just 25 years ago. The federal debt is an exponential problem.

Think about it like a credit card bill that keeps growing with no plan to pay it off, causing prices to rise, the value of the dollar to fall, and your paycheck to cover less and less of the expenses piling up around you. We can’t sustain this.

Florida families are facing this reckless reality every day, and it's why I'm fighting to Make Washington Work for YOU by demanding Congress STOP THE SPENDING and BALANCE THE BUDGET.

That’s why I have sponsored numerous bills to tackle the swamp’s decades-long spending addiction, such as:

• Leading the Balanced Budget Responsibility Act to provide the president with the authority and discretion to curb wasteful government spending and balance the federal budget.
• Cosponsoring Senator Jon Husted’s Principles-Based Balanced Budget Amendment, which would amend the Constitution to require the federal government to balance its budget, just like every American family and business does.
• Fighting the Senate’s reckless, wasteful, and corrupt earmarks.
• Introducing my Locating Every Disbursement in Government Expenditure Records (LEDGER) Act to require the Department of the Treasury to track all government payments.

As your governor, I balanced the budget, cut taxes, paid down nearly one-third of our state debt, supported private-sector job growth, and lowered costs for families. Washington needs that same approach.

It’s time to cut wasteful federal spending, pay off our debt, and restore fiscal sanity so that we can protect the American Dream for our children and grandchildren.

Sincerely,

Rick Scott