DeSantis Campaign Press Release - ICYMI Ron DeSantis With John Solomon on Just The News: "We need a declaration of economic independence"

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Ron DeSantis joined John Solomon on Just the News. Read the highlights below.

Watch the full interview HERE.

On Bidenomics:

"Bidenomics is basically you pay more for everything and then he tries to tell you that you're better off when your standard of living is going down. Ultimately, what Biden signals (I think he's just a figurehead for this, I think there's people in the White House pushing), is they view the economy as a tool for them to advance their left-wing agenda. And that means the average person [is] going to pay more for energy or pay more for groceries, because that's what's necessary for them to further their agenda.

And the way I look at economic policy is, okay, what kind of society do we want to have? It's about dollars and cents to a certain extent, but it's also about what kind of side of it. For me, the type of economy I want is where if you work hard, you get the most out of your God-given ability as an American, you're going to do good. And right now, the people that are going about it the right way that are working hard, they're falling further behind. Meanwhile, you have a lot of cronyism because of Biden's programs. You know, he's aligned with some of the most powerful companies in the world. He's very deferential to the Chinese Communist Party. That is not what's in the best interests of the average American.

And just think about what we just came through with COVID. You know, the elites wanted the COVID lockdowns. What did that do? It absolutely decimated small businesses, decimated individuals, families, kids that couldn't get to school. Now in Florida, we fought back against that and did very well. But in the states that followed that, there was a massive transfer of wealth from working people to Google, and Amazon, and all that. And you know, a lot of these elites think they did a good job to this day with that, and they didn't. Biden, he didn't care about the average person. What he cares about is being able to use the economy to advance his agenda."

On reducing the size of the federal government:

"I will go much more than Congress would be willing to go. So, we're going to push Congress to reduce, and I'm going to get as much as I can, but think about this. The government, the agencies have grown 50% just since 2019. Do you feel 50% better off as an American for that? No, of course not. So, at a minimum, they need to take back government to what it was pre-COVID 2019, that would save you probably over 10-year period trillions of dollars. And so, but that to me, it'd be the bare minimum place to start, right? Do that and then there's other things you can eliminate. I'm all for doing, doing that. And I think that that's a good thing.

But I'll tell you this, Reagan said, the closest thing to eternal life on Earth is a government bureau. I remember being in Congress, we vote to cut spending, we had Republican majorities, we get 100 votes, 150 votes, you couldn't get to a team to do it. So, I thought, I think when I would be there, I could say, you know, I'll be the first president really, since Ronald Reagan to lean in against a spendthrift Congress, I'll be willing to veto spending bills and hold them accountable for what they're doing. We definitely need a major reduction, let's reset this baseline for the budget. And then let's make sure this is something that is achievable. So that's, that's one thing.

The other thing is just from a budget perspective, we've had anemic economic growth in this country. So, if you have 1% growth through the rest of the decade, you're not going to solve these budget problems, we need to get to at least 3% growth. I think that that's an attainable target. It's not attainable with Biden's bureaucracy, choking everything down and him trying to kneecap our domestic energy. But if you liberate our domestic energy, we're energy independent. You get the bureaucracy off the back, there's some other things that you do, you know, we have an opportunity to get that growth rate up. And that will be a huge thing, if we can achieve that." _

On the threat of the Chinese Communist Party:

"China is a threat to this country. Anyone that thinks otherwise, just has their head in the sand. Xi Jinping is the most ideological Chinese leader since Mao. He's got very significant ambitions beyond China's borders. They want to supplant the United States as the world's leading superpower. And here's why I think it's a challenge because it does go back to after World War Two with the Cold War. We had Soviet-US, right. But the Soviet Union's economy was a fraction of our economy, we had a much better economy. So, it was an ideological confrontation, you know, somewhat military the sense of mutually assured destruction and potential nuclear standoff, but we absolutely head and shoulders above them economically. President Reagan figured that out, he did the defense buildup basically bankrupted them, and ended the Cold War.

China, not only is their economy much stronger and much closer to ours, we are dependent on their economy, thanks to policies over the last 20-30 years, most favored nation status putting on the World Trade Organization. You go back when that was justified, '99-2000, the things that the elites were saying, what happened, they were wrong on everything. And so, they said, you know, this will make China - because they would basically say, look, Japan got wealthier, and they became peaceful, democratic. But that is not what happened with China. China plowed that into military. And they have the second strongest military in the world now. They become more repressive as they've been wealthier. So now we're in a situation, we've got an almost peer competitor who very well may pass us economically in the next decade if we don't get our act together with a strong military, but one in which we are dependent on them because of these policy choices for things that are really important to our country. So, what we need to do is we need a declaration of economic independence from China. And that's something that will need to be done methodically, and need to be done thoughtfully, but you just can't go where they are responsible for things that we really need. And so that's going to involve, you know, a very thorough approach. But that has to be done. And these corporations really need to understand that they're taking on huge amount of risk by going over in there. And, you know, I criticize them, but I also do acknowledge if you go back at the beginning of this experiment a lot of US policymakers were telling the corporations to go over there, which was a huge mistake. So that's the economics.

The threat of China is much more economic than the threat to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and then military, we have to be able to project hard power in the Indo Pacific. They are not going to want to do something like invade Taiwan if they see the United States, Japan, Korea, if they see that power there, they're going to take the path of least resistance. On Biden's path, my fear is, is that the weakness he's showing is going to lead us to getting into a war with China in the future that we will lose. So, we definitely need to do more in the Indo Pacific from a military perspective." _

On the labor market:

"All said and done, I prefer tight to loose labor market, because that puts an upward pressure on wages, and I want people to be able to do that. Now wages have gone up in the last few years- they just haven't kept up with the rise in prices, so people have had a net loss. And so, in some respects I think that a tight labor market is good. Now, people have just fallen out of the labor force because of COVID, because they were told you didn't have to work, they were paid not to work. Welfare reform: able bodied adults, particularly men, need to work. They shouldn't get benefits if they're not willing to work. I think that that going back to that, like we had in the 90s, I think is necessary." _