Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Monday made clear that the ongoing feud between the United States and China involves a “competition with a dictatorship with no sense of honesty.”
Transcript:
Newt Gingrich
Fox and Friends
04/27/2020
NEWT:
Well, I think the first thing to do to recognize as the Hudson Institute’s timeline makes very clear, this was caused by the Chinese dictatorship. They lied about it. The first case was in mid-November. And they were lying about it all the way through January. The University of Southampton suggested that 95% of the people who died would still be alive if the Chinese dictatorship had not lied to the world. And as you point out. And as Peter Navarro points out. They went around not just lying but also took advantage of their advanced knowledge to try to corner the market on a variety of public health goods in a way which is totally despicable. Let’s just start with we are competing with a dictatorship which has no sense of honesty, which cannot be trusted. And which will use its muscle whenever it can. And we have got to design a strategy that recognizes these realities. One, we should make it possible for Americans to sue the Chinese dictatorship just as we did, for example, after the Lockerbie bombing, we allowed Americans to sue and they got on average $8 million per person, which probably in today’s money would be about 11 million. If every single person set the standard in the U.S. And then encouraged the rest of the world, if people die, this is China’s fault. They ought to sue the Chinese to get the money. Two, I think we should seriously consider basically putting all of the debt on all the Chinese assets in escrow so they will pay these things. There is no reason for us to lie about who they are and no reason for us to tolerate them running over the planet killing several hundred thousand people causing 10’s of trillions of dollars of economic pain. And then getting away with it.
NEWT:
I think the President is doing the right things. Put the governors in charge. Different governors will take different risk. I started by pointing out that on Friday, the Montana Zoo reopened in Billings. And Billings is a town of 109,000. And they have perfectly safe, very few cases in Montana. Very different than the Central Park Zoo, which is in the middle of a city of 8.5 million. So, we are a very complicated country. It’s better not to compare us to Italy or France or Germany. Compare us to all of Europe. Because we’re bigger than all of Europe geographically. And that means some places will take risks, other places won’t. And we will learn over the next three or four months how to do it right. But we have to also recognize that we not only have to defeat the virus this round, reopen the economy, we have to make the investments so we can crush the virus so that if it comes back in October or November or December. We can’t go through a second round of this kind of mitigation by destroying the economy. It’s a very, very destructive way to respond to this kind of a challenge.
NEWT:
Sure, look it’s not a shock that the liberal Democrat wants the largest possible amount of money particularly if they can borrow it all and not have to worry about paying for it. So, Nancy Pelosi is behaving like a good liberal Democrat the question for the country is to draw the distinction between an amount of money that allows to us bridge the problem. I do think with the dramatic decline in the economy, the dramatic decline in the tax revenue and the rise in the various other costs probably some kind of bridging amount makes sense. I would be deeply opposed to a bailout. If you look at for example as Illinois which has the worst pension system in the country. Grotesquely overcommitted, I don’t think the rest of America should bail out the politicians in Illinois who have made a total mess of their state pension fund. So, let’s distinguishable between a bailout and a bridging amount of money and let’s also say that states that are really out-of-line need to reorganize what they’re doing get their act together if the federal taxpayer is going to send them money. I don’t think we should automatically assume business as usual if they are showing up hat in hand saying give me the money, we ought to say fine give us the reorganization, so you are not going to get back in this shape again.
