PODCAST: Senator Marco Rubio - Elizabeth Warren's 'Economic Patriotism' Plan is Incompatible with Radical Progressive Agenda

On June 6, 2019 Senator Marco Rubio joined Guy Benson on his new Fox News Radio show: The Guy Benson Show. They touched on Senator Rubio’s op-ed in Fox News titled “Warren’s ‘economic patriotism’ plan simply not possible with a progressive agenda” that talks about why Elizabeth Warren’s “economic patriotism” plan isn’t compatible with the progressive agenda.

Partial transcript:

Benson: You’ve got an op-ed at Fox News.com today. You write: “Warrens economic patriotism plan is simply not possible with a progressive agenda” this coming on the heels of what you put out your calling it an investment report, what’s your argument?

Rubio: I actually give her credit she is the first Democrat to kind of lay out the argument that American economic policy should put American workers and American businesses first.

I think where she’s going to have big troubles is what it’s actually going to take to actually do that is going to run smack into the demands of the progressive radicals, radical progressives that dominate the party she is trying to become the nominee of. They demand cultural warfare, they demand the demonization of corporations that are large, they demand all sorts of things that matter to upper middle class people living in certain coastal areas of the country and in the pockets of prosperity. They demand that those things are to be put in front of the hard choices that need to be made to reorient our policy.

Frankly, if she decides that she wants to have a policy that achieves what she’s talking about she is not going to have a home in the Democratic party. That’s not what they want from their nominee.

Benson: What are those hard choices that need to be made in terms of reorienting policy?

Rubio: Well I think at first it begins by recognizing that you can’t have a healthy economy with high paying jobs without companies and corporations that are doing well.

Look I’ve beat up on big corporations because I don’t think they have Americans interests at heart most of the time. I was reading an article yesterday about these big companies leading boycotts and all sorts of social activism. These are the same companies who on the other hand ask us not to put sanctions on China, or they want us to lift sanctions on Russia, or they want us to get back in to the JCPOA so they can do business in Iran. So they seem to be very tolerant of dictators and authoritarians all over the world but are prepared to boycott states because they don’t like some law passed by the democratically elected legislature of that state. So I’ve beaten them up pretty good.

On the same token, you know we do need big business in America we also need a lot of small businesses. We need them both, and some of the key things we need success for in our country cannot be achieved if we have a climate that’s negative to these companies.

The other choices that have to be made frankly would require us to take on some of the orthodoxies in the Republican party and that includes this notion that we have become this party almost dominated by the needs of the financial markets. The financial markets, the stock market, Wall Street, investor class… They are an important part of the economy, but they are not the economy. So what you end up happening is you have corporations today who basically feel that their number one objective is to return value to shareholders and as a result many are committing corporate suicide in the long term. They are not investing, and that has an economic implication for this country. The more and more that this investment deteriorates the likelier it is that the great innovations, the great companies, the great industries of the 21st century are going to be located somewhere else, but not in America and not for Americans.