West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, D., joined "Sunday Morning Futures" and spoke to Maria Bartiromo about the debt ceiling, addressing the threat of continued government spending.
MANCHIN CALLS FOR BIPARTISAN DEBT CEILING TALKS: 'WE'RE WRITING CHECKS OUR CHILDREN CAN'T CASH'
SEN. JOE MANCHIN: I'm going to vote for a debt ceiling because we have to pay our bills. I hope my Republican friends will join us and we're all in this together, but the bottom line to say you're not going to have any discussions or negotiations on how we can get this debt under control, $31.5 trillion in the last ten years, almost $20 trillion. Can't we see how we've expanded the debt so rapidly and find out if there's ways that we can make adjustment? You don't have to basically say and scare the bejesus out of people, your first thing they go to is cutting Social Security and Medicare. That's not going to happen. But you can review all the spending that's gone on in discretionary, which means we have make decisions on and nondiscretionary basically things that you don't negotiate on because it's mandatory spending. How did it increase by one or $2 trillion in such a short period of time? How did we increase discretionary spending? Can't we look at some of that and find out if there's some adjustments?
… We've got to get this trajectory down. You can't carry this debt and we're doing that and interest will eat us up, and [Adm.] Mike Mullen said one time with me in the Armed Services Committee that the debt of the nation is the greatest, the greatest threat we face, not another country, but the debt of our own, the weight of our own debt and our nation. You've got to get this under control. We've got to speak about it intelligently. The bottom line is, Maria [Bartiromo], everyone's trying to blame each other. You've got to work together.
HOUSE, SENATE REPUBLICANS BATTLE OVER POSSIBLE DEFENSE CUTS IN EFFORT TO CURB SPENDING
… You're going to have you have to raise the debt. So you have to vote for this. We have to pay our bills. The full faith and credit of the US currency. We're the superpower of the world. We have the U.S., the reserve currency. The world is a US dollar. We're not going to let that default any way, shape or form, but in saying that, you mean we're not even going to talk about how we incurred this much debt so rapidly, can we not find a way to have more efficiencies? I'm told if we just do our job on time, Maria [Bartiromo], get our basically our budget done by the end of the fiscal year, September 30 saves billions of dollars. I'm told also if we just commit to no more, no greater than 1% in discretionary funding for the next ten years, 1% can save like a trillion dollars. Can't we at least talk about things that we should be able to come to agreement on and have a vote on later? ... It doesn't have to be held hostage right now.
