Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann says the GOP House should not have agreed to raise the debt ceiling, but instead should have prioritized spending so that the government would stop allocating money it doesn’t have. The Minnesota congresswoman also told Fox News’ Sean Hannity Monday Americans want an end to out-of-control spending.
“We’re continuing to spend money that we don’t have by an order of magnitude that we've never seen before,” said Bachmann, who voted against the debt-ceiling deal. “In all of my travels [across] South Carolina, New Hampshire, and Iowa, it’s been fairly unanimous, Sean — people across the country have said, please stop the out-of-control spending. And whatever you do, don’t increase the debt ceiling, because people see that under almost every scenario President Obama gets this $2.1 trillion to spend, and we’re getting $21 billion in cuts.”
Hannity said many conservatives believe that cuts of “$60 billion in two years doesn’t justify [a] $900 billion increase immediately” in the debt ceiling.
“I think the American people agree with you — and that’s what a lot of the polling data has said, certainly anecdotally from what I've seen,” Bachmann said. “Because people connect the fact that when government is overspending, to that amount, it impacts job creation. When I was in Indiana — Semantic [Company] they’ve lost 50 percent of all of their employees. Cisco is laying off 6,500 employees. Boeing, who would love to add thousands of jobs in South Carolina, and now they’re laying off 11 hundred jobs.
“These companies, Sean, they can’t make cuts over 10 years,” the head of the House Tea Party Caucus said. “They have to make them immediately — government doesn’t act like that.”
Hannity asked Bachmann whether the debt-reduction deal was a GOP failure.
“Well, I think that what we should have done is not raise the debt ceiling and instead prioritize the spending,” she said. “We needed to make sure we didn’t go into technical default — we needed to make sure that the military men and women got paid, but from there we had to make serious cuts.
“Unfortunately, the can’s been kicked down the road — now we have government that we obviously can’t afford.”
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