Prior to joining the South Shore Press, our own Stefan Mychajliw served as the Spokesman and Deputy Communications Director for the Presidential campaign of business owner and political outsider Vivek Ramaswamy.
This past week Mychajliw caught up with Ramaswamy at his Columbus, Ohio home and spoke to him about an issue that was critically important to his presidential campaign: reviving America’s lost identity while also reducing the $34 trillion national debt, which is expected to climb to $54 trillion in ten years.
The conversation has been edited for length.
South Shore Press: “Vivek, how important is it, for politicians on both sides of the aisle, to get the hard work done, to reduce the $34 trillion national debt?”
Former Republican Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy: “It’s vital. If the interest payments on the national debt are the largest line item in our federal budget, we’re done. We’re toast. We’re in quicksand. Because at that point, the largest line item in the budget is for paying interest payments. It’s a downward spiral from there. We’re not working with a lot of time here.”
SSP: “It’s alarming that very soon America will pay more in interest on the national debt than on national security.”
Ramaswamy: “The more we buy down the national debt, the more you see the shrinkage of the interest rates. Now is our wake-up call. Both parties have been guilty of this. Republicans can and should lead the way. We’re spending money on things that do not advance our own interests.”
SSP: “Vivek you mentioned on the campaign trail how the solution for politicians was to simply cut, but they never considered America growing its way out of the problem by creating economic prosperity.”
Ramaswamy: “We need cuts regardless of the national debt problem. We do need to fire 75% of the bureaucrats in Washington DC just to revive the essence of a three branch, Constitutional Republic. The cuts we need to make to government excess should be made independent of the national debt, which is a symptom of a deeper problem.
When it comes to solving the national debt we need to be ambitious in growing our way out of solving some of those problems. Drill, frack, burn coal. Embrace nuclear energy. Get American resources out of the ground. Sell it. Use the resources to pay down the national debt.”
SSP: “Isn’t there also a national debt that can’t be calculated in dollars and cents, a loss of purpose and meaning that you also talked about extensively on the campaign trail?”
Ramaswamy: “There is a debt of identity that we suffer in this country. We lost a sense of who we are. The way I look at it, the $34 trillion national and growing national debt problem, it’s a deeper loss of who we are as Americans. If we live in a nation that secures the border, embraces economic growth, that embraces merit, meritocracy, and the rule of law, and hard work instead of disincentivizing it, automatically our national debt problem gets smaller.”