Tim Scott’s Highlights ― Second Primary Republican Debate

I have a question that is on the minds of a lot of moms and dads and Americans, and I know that you've been thinking about it, because child care costs, they are up, they're topping $10,000 per month. Some families are spending up to half of their income on child care. And they're having to decide, is it worth it for me to work, or does it not make sense for me financially? In three days, the billions of dollars in pandemic-era funding is going to end. And 70,000 daycares could close. So you had an effort to broaden eligibility for child care assistance. That fell apart last year. And for the moms and dads out there who are worried, what can you tell them? If you weren't able to get it through the Congress, how could you do it as president? Certainly one of the things I did as a member of Congress was to make sure that we protected the Head Start programs around the country, giving people the opportunity to pick and choose the place that they send their children. The challenges that we see today under the Biden administration is that the cost for daycare has gone over $15,000 per child. In the Build Back Broker plan—he called it the Build Back Better plan—it was going up to $29,000. The way we fixed that problem is to make sure that we actually cut taxes and give more Americans their money back. When I helped write the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, we actually lowered a single mother's taxes by 70 percent on the federal level, for dual-income households by 60 percent. Then we went a step further. We doubled the child tax credit and made it refundable. By doing that, more parents had more resources to make the decisions how to take care of their family. The one thing we should do is let the American people keep their money. When that happens, the greatest opportunities rise from the ashes. Senator Scott, you oppose today's new standards. What is your message for Governor DeSantis? There is not—there is not a redeeming quality in slavery. He and Kamala should have just taken the one sentence out. America has suffered because of slavery, but we've overcome that. We are the greatest nation on Earth because we faced our demons in the mirror and made a decision. So often, we think that all the issues—you talked about crime and education and healthcare. We always think that those issues go back to slavery. Here's the challenge, though. Black families survived slavery. We survived poll taxes and literacy tests. We survived discrimination being woven into the laws of our country. What was hard to survive was Johnson's Great Society, where they decided to put money—where they decided to take the black father out of the household to get a check in the mail. And you can now measure that in unemployment, in crime, in devastation. If you want to restore hope, you've got to restore the family, restore capitalism, and put Americans back at work together as one American family. Our nation continues to go in the right direction. It's why I can say I have been discriminated against, but America is not a racist country. Never, ever doubt that we are the greatest country on God's green Earth. And frankly, the city on the Hill needs a brand-new leader. And I'm asking for your vote. I'm going to have a question for you. You're all auditioning for the job as president of the United States. You want to earn these votes. But the world's problems land in the Oval Office. During the presidential debates in the year 2000, neither Al Gore nor George W. Bush was asked about al-Qaida. Yet, just one year later, al-Qaida's attack on September 11th claimed nearly 3,000 lives. And the farther we get from September 11th, the closer we are to September 10th. Senator Scott, you have no executive branch experience. What has prepared you to protect the nation from a major man-made national security crisis? One of the things I've had the good fortune of doing is serving on committees in the United States Senate, like the Senate Armed Services Committee, I'm on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also on the Finance Committee and the Banking Committee. Talk about addressing the issue of fentanyl. I've written the legislation, passed it through the Banking Committee and the Senate that would freeze the assets and sanction the accounts of the Mexican cartels. There are weapons that we have within the arsenal that I was able to get past, 23-0, in the polarizing Senate as it is. I've also understood without question the fact that if you look at the details before 9-11, there was information and intelligence that was available that suggested an attack was coming. Having the right intelligence partners with us is key to making sure that we prevent the next 9-11 from ever happening. Having that experience for the last 10 years is really important in getting the job done. Senator Scott, the national debt has nearly doubled in your time in office. The approval rate for Congress is at a mere 19%. If this were a business, you'd probably all be fired in Washington, but you're here tonight looking for a promotion. In 2013, Governor Haley hired you for the Senate. I'd like you to tell her why you should be promoted to CEO of the nation instead of her. Certainly. One of the things I'd say is if you look at our national debt of $33 trillion, I would love to have an opportunity to have this country pass a balanced budget amendment. That would constrain the spending in Washington in the same fashion that it does in every state in our nation. Number one. Number two, if you want to actually reduce our national debt, you have to grow our economy. In order to grow our economy, you need to create about 10 million jobs to grow our economy at 5%. You can do that in three specific sectors. Number one, the energy sector. We could create between 3 and 3.5 million jobs if we unleashed all of our energy resources. America is the most—we're the richest country if you combine coal, gas, and oil. Why not unleash all of our resources? Number two, we've lost 100,000 factories—100,000 factories in the last 25 years. If we continued on my Made in America plan, we could bring jobs back to America in a similar fashion that we did when I wrote the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. We actually lowered the corporate tax from 35 percent to 21 percent, reshored or repatriated $1.7 trillion. We brought the unemployment rates for African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians to the lowest level in the history of the country, and a 70-year low for women.