Ron DeSantis Touts ‘Serious Overhaul’ Of Unemployment Insurance System Amid DOGE Spending Cuts

4 days ago

During an event with Gov. Brad Little (R-ID) in the Idaho State Capitol in Boise, Idaho on Monday, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) spoke about Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency’s examination into federal spending.

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Transcript

00:00I don't think you can find anybody who is going to disagree with balancing the budget.

00:07We have to do it as families, right?

00:09But why are so many people freaked out, so concerned about the endowments, Social Security,

00:14Medicaid, Medicare, unemployment insurance?

00:17They feel that there's going to be a shimmering above the mailbox when there's Social Security

00:22checkouts.

00:23Yeah, so Florida, we have a few people on Social Security in Florida.

00:29You know, they'll do this.

00:31This is like some of the people, it's this political rhetoric.

00:33They will say, Florida is not a donor state.

00:37They're a recipient state.

00:39And they count Social Security benefits.

00:41But, you know, my seniors, if they move to Alabama, it's not like that money is going

00:45to the state government.

00:46It's just the fact that it's going to people who now live in Florida who've earned those benefits.

00:51I feel very confident, certainly with President Trump, that they're going to be honoring the

00:56benefits that seniors have.

00:58Unfortunately, a lot of seniors live check to check, basically.

01:03You know, we do have some wealthy seniors that don't need Social Security, quote unquote.

01:08But even a lot of our middle class seniors, in this era of inflation, for them not to

01:13have Social Security checks, so they may miss a payment.

01:16And in Florida, we're now having to go to the voters, most likely in 26, to reform our

01:21property taxes, which is done at the local level, not at the state level.

01:25But we have elderly who bought a home in South Florida, let's say, for $200,000 30 years ago.

01:32And now it's being assessed at $1.5 million.

01:35Well, even though we have some protections against property tax, how are they going to

01:40come up with more and more money every year?

01:42So we're going to rein that in as well.

01:44So when you talk about elderly on fixed income, it's a really significant issue.

01:49I know the President very much is sympathetic to that.

01:53I don't think Social Security is as much of the problem as some of the other, particularly

01:59the discretionary, the way some of the medical is done.

02:03Although, you know, we're going to do, of course, Medicare for seniors.

02:06And Elon's going to get to this.

02:08There is a lot, I mean, when you have hundreds of billions of dollars in improper payments,

02:12I mean, that should not be happening.

02:14And I don't think it will happen once you have kind of Doge get in there and do that.

02:19Same thing on unemployment insurance.

02:22Now, different states handle it differently, as you know.

02:25In Florida, we call it re-employment insurance.

02:27You know, we're limited on it.

02:29We don't view it as a way of life.

02:31We view it as temporary.

02:32Our economy's been good, so people have the ability to get jobs.

02:36But if you look at the amount of fraud in unemployment insurance, it's been, especially

02:41since COVID.

02:42So we volunteered with the Doge team to kind of get them in our unemployment system.

02:48And even though we've worked hard to police it, and I think you'll see much different

02:51in Florida compared to, like, California, where there were tens of billions in fraud.

02:56We know that there's issues there.

02:58Like, for example, you are not allowed to have any of these benefits if you're in this

03:02country illegally.

03:04But are they using fake Social Security numbers?

03:06I know Doge thinks that that's a big, big deal.

03:08So you're going to see, I think, some serious overhaul of how the unemployment insurance

03:13system has worked.

03:16There's a role for that, but it's not for people to just dip in and to abuse.

03:21And so finally, we're taking a look at all these things, and I think it's going to be

03:25really, really positive.

03:26But if you just go back to 2019 levels of just the discretionary budget, forget about

03:31Social Security, just the discretionary budget, pre-COVID, when we were still kind of spending

03:36a lot of money, if you just kept it there and froze it for five years, you would save

03:42massive amounts of money right there.

03:44And I think what really kills us is that you have amount of spending, and then that's

03:49the baseline that never goes below that, no matter how effective or ineffective these

03:53programs are.

03:54A balanced budget amendment or requirement, that's going to cause them to totally overhaul

03:59the way they do budgets.

04:01So I really appreciate being here.

04:04I want to thank the governor, lieutenant governor, thank the legislators for really leaning

04:08in on this.

04:11What we don't want is to wake up 10, 15 years from now, us being some major financial crash

04:17because of interest rates and the debt and everything, and say, man, we could have done

04:23something in the states to avert this, and we chose not to do it.

04:27No, we see the problem.

04:28We've seen the trend lines.

04:30We're not just going to sit back and just hope that Congress changes its behavior.

04:34We, the people, have it within our power to make Congress change its behavior.

04:40All right.

Ron DeSantis Touts ‘Serious Overhaul’ Of Unemployment Insurance System Amid DOGE Spending Cuts

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