Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis bashed President Biden for his economic policies and said that Biden disdained American energy independence.
In 2021, Biden pushed for and got a huge $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill, then later got a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. At the end of March 2022, Biden proposed a $5.8 trillion budget, and last week the Biden administration announced they had canceled three oil and gas leases, including a mammoth one in Alaska.
“People are getting actually hammered with gas prices and the overall inflation is attributable more than anything to Biden’s policy of printing trillions and trillions of dollars like they have done since he has gotten into office,” DeSantis said Sunday, noting the record-high gas prices plaguing the nation.
DeSantis responded to Fox News host Dan Bongino, who pointed out, “We’re seeing record gas prices, people are really struggling. We have a lot of people in Florida who are on fixed incomes down here. And yet this week we learned they canceled oil and gas leases.”
Last Wednesday, Biden’s Department of the Interior killed the potential to drill for oil in over 1 million acres in the Cook Inlet in Alaska, informing CBS News that the cancellation stemmed from a “lack of industry interest in leasing in the area” for the decision to “not move forward.” The DOI killed two leases under consideration in the Gulf of Mexico area because of “conflicting court rulings that impacted work on these proposed lease sales.”
“Well, Dan, the energy policy is intentional,” DeSantis charged. “They are intentionally reducing our ability to produce oil and gas here in the United States. They will beg OPEC for more oil, they’ll beg Maduro for more oil. I guess Maduro’s oil isn’t global warming but American is.”
“I mean it is nonsense; it is ideology but it is very destructive,” he continued. “People are getting actually hammered with gas prices and the overall inflation is attributable more than anything to Biden’s policy of printing trillions and trillions of dollars like they have done since he has gotten into office. … He was warned by Larry Summers and other Democratic economists that if you do this, you are gonna spark inflation.”
Summers, who served as Secretary of the Treasury under former President Bill Clinton, warned Biden in May 2021 about massive spending, saying, “The sense of serenity and complacency being projected by the economic policymakers, that this is all something that can easily be managed, is misplaced.”
“And that’s a tax, Dan, on every single American,” DeSantis declared of the massive inflation under Biden. “We’ve got people that may be making seven, eight percent more year-over-year, but if the costs of everything to live are up 15 to 20 percent, and they are, the inflation is understating it when you look at the things that really matter.
“So I think it’s been absolutely a failure in policy, and here’s the thing: Reverse course,” DeSantis asserted. “Start producing more energy here in the United States. He could very easily do that, but yet what does he do, as you just pointed out? They are still canceling oil and gas leases. They don’t want us to be energy independent, and they don’t care if you suffer at the pump.”