The only way President Joe Biden's proposed $6.8 trillion budget proposal can be made better is "with a shredder," Sen. John Kennedy commented Sunday.
"The president's budget took my breath away. His numbers are extraordinary. We're going to run out of digits here," the Louisiana Republican told "Fox News Sunday."
Biden "says that his budget will solve our financial problems with Medicare and Social Security," Kennedy added. "That is not true. Anything seems possible when you don't know what you are talking about."
Kennedy, meanwhile, accused Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., of preventing the Senate from working on its version of the budget, as the House is doing.
"We should be meeting right now," said Kennedy. "We split the budget into 12 budgets. I'm the ranking member on one subcommittee. We should be meeting to talk about reducing spending and debt accumulation but Sen. Schumer will not allow us to meet. When you can't sit down with colleagues, it is hard to put together something to talk to the American people about."
There is also no doubt there are savings that can be found, said Kennedy, as "fair-minded Americans believe you can't find efficiencies in a $6.9 trillion budget."
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., has said that Republicans must talk about cuts in spending, and Kennedy said he is correct as there have been "any number of bills that passed with Republican support in the Senate that added to spending."
However, Kennedy said he didn't vote for the legislation, including a $40 billion subsidy for big tech, the CHIPS Bill.
"The idea is to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to America," he said. "Right now we have a 10% market share, we spent $40 billion on in a giveaway to big tech. You know how much it will increase market share — 1%. I will not buy a car to get the cup holders."
The government must also quit sending checks to Americans, said Kennedy, while speaking out against Biden's student loan forgiveness plan, totaling $400 billion over 10 years.
"We had a plan to repay student debts. It is called a job," said Kennedy."
And when it comes to Social Security and Medicare, Kennedy said Americans should get what they've paid for.
"Medicare is going to start getting in trouble financially in 2028, Social Security in 2035," said Kennedy. "We should be talking now how to make sure these programs are solvent. The problem is President Biden in his state of the union address decided to demagogue the issue…you can only be young once, but you can always be immature, and I thought it was a very immature thing to do."
However, he said he does think there needs to be conversations about changing the age to collect benefits.
"The life expectancy of the average American is about 77 years old," he said. "For people who are in their 20s, their life expectancy will probably be 85 to 90. Does it make sense to allow someone in their 20s today to retire at 62?"
There are also changes needed in Medicare, said Kennedy.
"Medicare pays more for the same surgical procedure in a hospital as it does in a private outpatient clinic. Why?" he said. "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 is nonsense, nonsense on a stick."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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