Former Vice President and Republican presidential candidate Mike Pence unveiled a four-point policy plan on Wednesday to combat President Joe Biden’s “inflation nightmare.”
The four aspects of his vision include ending both deficit spending and the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate while also bringing back domestic supply chains and reviving American energy independence.
“Government cannot spend its way to prosperity, and yet Joe Biden is set on dismantling our once great economy and hurting families who can no longer afford food or find a good paying job,” he said in a press release.
President Joe Biden speaks in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, DC, on July 28, 2022. The drumbeat of recession grew louder after the economy shrank for a second straight quarter. (Oliver Contreras/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Pence, who governed Indiana from 2013-2017 after serving in the House of Representatives, seeks to freeze non-defense spending if elected while also nixing “unnecessary government programs,” according to his campaign’s release. He also envisions repealing upwards of $3 trillion of Biden’s new spending while “reforming mandatory programs that drive our debt.”
Pence includes a more detailed “initial list” on his website of where he would make cuts. Among them are plans to end Biden’s student loan debt transfer, ending the Environmental Protection Agency altogether, and defunding “Biden’s IRS Army.”
Earlier his year, Pence broke with other candidates in the field and told Breitbart News that Social Security and Medicare need reform because they are heading for insolvency in the next decade.
“It isn’t just that they’re going bankrupt. It’s that there will be automatic cuts when they do,” Pence said in part of Medicare and Social Security. “Literally, programs people depend on, go to the mailbox to get the checks for, go to the doctor and expect, will be cut if we don’t deal with those issues in the short term. In the long term, if we allow our national debt to grow to $150 trillion in the next 25 years, all the choices for my three granddaughters and for our children and grandchildren will be bad.”
Republican presidential candidate former Vice President Mike Pence and his wife Karen chat with a patrons during a campaign stop at a diner, June 9, 2023, in Derry, NH. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)
He did note he thinks it can be done where anyone aged 40 and up is not affected, though it requires action in the short term from politicians.
The second facet of his plan calls for the Federal Reserve to end the dual mandate, including the goals of achieving both price stability and “maximum sustainable employment.” Pence argues that the Fed should only be concerned with price stability.
“Instead of focusing on jobs and inflation, the Fed should be solely concerned with keeping interest rates stable and fighting inflation,” his website states. “Fostering American jobs should be up to the policies implemented by the President and Congress.”
Third, he plans to revive domestic supply chains “by removing regulatory burdens, enacting pro-growth tax policies, and ensuring access to abundant American energy,” per the release.
If elected, the Republican hopeful hopes to bring back America’s energy independence, which was a substantial achievement of hand former President Donald Trump’s administration.
He sees “restarting oil and gas leasing on federal lands, opening the Arctic and offshore regions for exploration, approving safe transportation of oil and gas, mining rare earth minerals, and rejecting climate change hysteria” as the vehicles to revive domestic energy dominance, per the campaign release.
