With ‘grave concern’, Rick Scott calls for debt ceiling freeze

Rick Scott.

The U.S. Senate is currently occupied with the impeachment trial, but Sen. Rick Scott wants them to think about the imminent decision to again raise or suspend the debt ceiling.

With massive deficit spending a hallmark of the current era, Scott wrote a letter to his colleagues Thursday, urging them to consider his “grave concern over our nation’s massive and unsustainable debt.”

Of particular interest: the potential dread specter of inflation.

“For too long, we have spent with reckless disregard for the consequences of a growing national debt on the ability of the federal government to serve the people and its effect on inflation,” Scott warned, adding tautologically that “if Congress continues to spend and do nothing about our growing debt, inflation will rise even higher.”

That inflation is an “existential threat” for those with no margin for error, Scott warned.

“When inflation rises, the price of every day goods goes up. That means gas is more expensive, milk is more expensive, and rent is higher. However, this increase in the cost of everyday goods is rarely ever accompanied by a proportional rise in wages,” Scott contended.

The Senator, who is worth roughly a quarter billion dollars, has been deeply concerned about wages of late. Earlier this month, he made an emphatic argument against the $15 minimum wage, a federal proposal that is already guaranteed to happen in Florida later this decade.

The letter also included the kind of grandiose rhetoric one might imagine from a presidential candidate.

“Solving America’s debt crisis and mitigating the devastating impacts of inflation require us to reimagine how the federal government operates. Rising to accept this challenge may be the most important work any of us do in our service to the American people,” Scott contended.

Scott continues to counterprogram the trial underway in the Senate, and the timing of this evergreen letter could be framed as another example thereof.

The Senator, who had previously been spotted reading a book about the Vicksburg insurrection of 1863, was seen Thursday by reporters with “a blank map of Asia on his desk and was writing on it like he was filling in the names of the countries.”

He did a radio hit before Thursday’s hearing, in which he said the trial was a “charade.”

He posed a rhetorical question to host Hugh Hewitt: “Why are the Democrats focused on the past rather than the future?”