NOTICIAS

Washington D.C. — U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined The Wayne Allyn Root Show to discuss Florida’s response to the pandemic, the Biden Administration’s failure to address inflation and high gas prices, and more. 
 
On Florida’s response to the pandemic:
 
“I think Florida did it right in a lot of ways. I think that’s why people have been attracted there. The pandemic was a serious thing, and I think we have to treat people like grown ups. I think you deal with it and then you have to go on with life. At some point you start balancing costs and benefits. 
 
“There came a point where the benefits of [some] restrictions were far [outweighed by] the costs…. We have an entire generation of Americans here that have been permanently damaged and hurt by being out of school for a year and a half, imposed on them by people whose kids are going to private schools and getting private tutoring. All these kids in public school lost a year and a half to two years of learning. We’re going to be seeing the impact of that for a long time. I think we avoided the worst of that in Florida. …
 
“When you’re faced with a situation like [the COVID pandemic], you have got to balance out…. It’s a lot like medicine…. You give people medicine sometimes to treat a disease. Disease is bad, the medicine is bad, but the disease is worse than the medicine. You would never give someone medicine that’s as bad as the disease or worse than the disease. Yet that’s what we did when it came to COVID ….. You provide people information about how to protect themselves, Then at some point you’ve got to get back to some level of normalcy. There are still parts of this country that up until the other day, earlier this year, were still not doing that. Washington, D.C. was one of them.”
 
On record-high inflation:
 
“The first thing we [should] do is learn from the mistakes of this administration so we never do them again. Ideology is one thing, but when ideology becomes policy, it becomes real. This ideology has become real. 
 
“Today, the price of everything is going up, and the central driver behind all of it is gasoline fuel prices — whether it is diesel gas [or] jet fuel, transporting things costs money. That’s the single biggest driver. Why? Well, it’s pretty straightforward. People are using it and there’s not enough of it being produced, for a lot of reasons. One of them being that we, in the United States, are producing over a million barrels of oil less than we were in 2019. Why is that happening? There are a lot of reasons, but the main one is if you tell an industry, ‘What you do is evil, you’re destroying the world, and we’re trying to put you out of business over the next 10 years,’ I bet you that most of the time those industries will stop growing and investing in new capabilities. Why would anybody invest in a new refinery that takes at least 10 years just to pay off the investment when you’re telling them that eight to nine years from now, you’re going to put them out of business, when you’re telling banks not to lend them money? 
 
“That’s what’s happened here. That was the ideology. [It’s] one thing to be annoyed by the ideology and explain to people why it doesn’t work, but when you actually turn it into law the timing couldn’t have been worse. Now everybody’s paying the price for it. Now [the Biden Administration is] going around begging people to produce more oil, as long as they don’t do it in the United States. Can you do it in Saudi Arabia? Can you do it in Iran? Can you do it in Venezuela? But don’t do it in America, because somehow Saudi oil is better for the environment than American oil….
 
“People forget [that] under President Donald Trump’s last month, we passed the COVID relief bill, and then they came back four months later and put another $1.9 trillion into the economy. So a lot of money chasing limited goods drove up inflation as well, and now it’s going to take some time…. We’re in Jimmy Carter territory right now.”
 
On the limits of green technology:
 
“Maybe 20 years from now, we’re going to have batteries that are phenomenal. They can store a bunch of power in them…. If you told me that a battery powered car costs me less per month, I’d do it — that doesn’t exist today. 
 
“[Instead, we have] inflated prices [on] the bare necessities of life — food, clothing, transportation, and housing. The four things that you need to survive. All four are much more expensive than 8.5 percent [inflation] a month [would indicate].”
 
On the reasons for the Biden Administration’s failures:
 
“I think there’s a couple of things at play here. The first is incompetence, without a doubt. That’s number one, people that just don’t understand the difference between theory and reality. 
 
“Number two is a flawed ideology…. One of the reasons why I feel so bad for Colombia — a country that my wife’s family is from, they’re a very important U.S. partner in the South, our best ally in South America — [is that they] just elected a leftist president. These leftists take over and the only change[s] they bring are poverty, misery, and suffering. Those are the things they bring. Leftism doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. It has never worked. At least it doesn’t work to achieve what we hope to achieve. I think that’s a big factor. 
 
“I do think that when it comes to things like gas prices, there are a lot of people on the Far Left that are happy that gas prices are $5. They [want them] to be at $8 or $9 because they think that the more gas costs, the less people will drive, and the better the environment is going to be. But more importantly, in their mind, more people will use mass transit and more people will go and gravitate towards electric cars. That’s their thinking and their mindset when it comes to that. That’s part of it. 
 
“The other thing, I think they like inflation. The Far Left likes inflation because that means people become more dependent on the government. What are the answers that Biden is now offering? ‘I’m going to send everybody a gas card.’ That’s their answer to everything. A $2,000 check, a gas card, whatever.”