Washington: Ahead of the annual budgetary proposals by President Joe Biden later this week, Indian-American presidential candidate Nikki Haley Tuesday blamed both the Democrats and Republicans for America’s spending crisis and the massive debt that it has now accumulated over its head.
Asserting that the US needs to stop America sliding towards bankruptcy, Haley in an op-ed in the USA Today pledged that as president, she would veto spending bills that don’t put America on track to reach pre-pandemic spending levels.
“It’s time someone in Washington stood up for taxpayers and stopped America’s slide toward bankruptcy,” she wrote as she acknowledged that her move would upset the stakeholders in both the Republican and Democratic party.
“These fights will inevitably pit me against Republicans as well as Democrats, but I’m used to it. As the governor of South Carolina, I took on both parties to stop wasteful spending and to put every spending vote on the record, a fundamental measure of accountability and protecting taxpayers. I won that fight,” she said.
Noting that the current push to raise the federal debt limit is depressing, Haley said worse is the fact that this same fiasco will keep happening. Washington simply isn’t serious about getting spending under control, she said.
“We must be honest: Both Democrats and Republicans are responsible for America’s spending crisis. They have both supported multitrillion dollar deficits that have brought us to a USD31.6 trillion national debt and counting,” said the former two-term governor of South Carolina and US ambassador to the United Nations.
“We need a president who will do what no one has done to date: Stand up to the big spenders in both parties,” she said. “The past few years prove that while Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on much, they do agree on spending America into bankruptcy,” Haley wrote.
In an interview with “Ruthless, Haley expressed confidence over the kickoff of her campaign.
“To have thousands of people show up at the announcement, as a former governor it was heartwarming…Then we went to New Hampshire and Iowa. It was standing room only, hundreds of people showed up, overflow rooms, it was great. The momentum is there, the strength is there…the feeling overwhelmingly is that people want a better option than Biden and Trump,” she said.
In response to a question, Haley said in 2022 she was the number one surrogate raising money for candidates.
“The half step ahead is that I got to be on the ground with people. I got to hear what they were saying. I got to look at the midterms and see what went wrong… Americans are tired of the drama and the chaos. They are tired of everyone jumping on TV saying something and not getting in a room and doing it,” she said.
PTI