Vivek Ramaswamy wants Washington to start from scratch.
The Republican presidential candidate on Monday laid out his solution to the growing national debt, saying that if elected, he would require the executive branch to adopt a zero-based budget.
“Start from scratch for each department and ask what spending (if any) is required rather than simply taking last year’s budget as the default,” the 38-year-old businessman argued in a policy proposal shared with The Post.
Nearly all of Ramaswamy’s rivals have proposed policies aimed at resolving the national debt – which reached $33 trillion for the first time, the Treasury Department announced last week – but no challenger has proposed a zero-based budget.
Ramaswamy argued that members of both parties could support his policy and lamented that “there is not a single red or blue state in this country that actually does.”
Like Donald Trump in 2016, Ramaswamy has touted his private sector experience throughout his campaign and did so again on Monday.
If Vivek Ramaswamy is elected, it would require the executive branch to adopt a zero-based budget. Getty Images
“I built a multibillion-dollar biotech company from the ground up by developing five now-FDA-approved drugs that Big Pharma bureaucracy abandoned,” he said. “I built an insurgent asset manager to compete head-on with BlackRock & Vanguard by leading the crusade against ESG bureaucracy. Now I face the biggest bureaucracy of all: the federal government. Our national debt is $33 trillion and growing; We need a real outsider to fix it. Sign me up.”
Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni told The Post that adopting a zero-based budget in any presidential administration would be feasible and “highly desirable.”
“Forcing all government departments to justify their existence and financial costs each year would go a long way toward returning fiscal sanity to Washington,” Antoni said. “While the president does not have the budget allocation authority that Congress has, he can certainly control the waste of that money, in the same way that a private sector CEO closely monitors spending within his company.”
Ramaswamy argued that members of both parties could support his policy. Getty Images
In the first debate of the Republican primary last month, Ramaswamy proposed embracing domestic energy production and unemployment reform.
“Unlock American energy, drill, frack, burn coal, go nuclear. Get people back to work by not paying them more to stay home. Reform the US Federal Reserve, stabilize the US dollar and go to war. The only war I will declare as president of the United States will be the war against the federal administrative state that is the source of those toxic regulations that act as a wet blanket on the economy,” Ramaswamy said August 23 in Milwaukee.
The long-shot candidate will appear on the debate stage Wednesday night at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, alongside Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), the former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie.
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Source: vtt.edu.vn