Rep. Hunter Addresses San Diego North Chamber of Commerce Breakfast

U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter, the Republican who represents the 52nd district, didn't have many good things to say on Wednesday about the state of affairs in Washington D.C. when he addressed a breakfast meeting of the San Diego North Chamber of Commerce at the Doubletree Golf Resort in Rancho Penasquitos.

In fact, he said that federal budgeting and spending is out of control, especially in the areas of Social Security and Medicare. Without fixes to these programs, annuals deficits will continue and the U.S. debt will continue to balloon, he said.

“It isn’t to do away with them, it’s to make them sustainable,” said Hunter, who represents Poway, Rancho Bernardo and East County. “Medicare is gone in 30 years. You have to reform it, that’s the only way to do it. We don’t want to get rid of the safety nets because people depend on them.”

Hunter also said he's fearful that small businesses are being perceived as rich businesses by the White House, which has great impact for chamber members, mostly small businesses.

“We all know where business is at in this country right now,” he said, referring to the increasing number of rules and regulations flowing out of Washington, especially from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “We’re talking about a company with three or four dry cleaning stores, grossing $300,000 a year, in which the owner takes home $70,000 or $80,000 a year. This is what you have left after paying expenses, and I don’t think the president realizes this. These are the rich people that he’s talking about. That’s not a lot for San Diego.”

“Unfortunately, I don’t think you’re going to see any improvement period,” said Hunter, who said he opposes President Obama’s re-election to a second term. “The first part to a good jobs plan in this country is getting Obama out of office – it’s that simple,” said Hunter. “And I don’t care who the Republican candidate is frankly, it doesn’t matter to me as long as Obama is gone.”

Hunter complained that hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars in projects and jobs were being shipped overseas to the detriment of the U.S. economy. He pointed to an that decried the fact that the steel supports for the new Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge approach were fabricated in China, then shipped to the U.S.  He said that work could have been done by U.S. steel companies.

He said such work, especially taxpayer funded projects, “should be kept in this country.”

Moving on to a new topic, Hunter told the small audience of chamber members that Congress wasn’t “ready to cut spending where spending needed to be cut.” He said that his fellow House members are even reluctant to cut funding for smaller areas, such as $30 million in support for the botanical gardens in Washington, or $50 million annually to stage the annual fireworks on the Capitol Mall.

“My colleagues on the same side of the aisle aren’t willing to cut spending,” he said. “The reality is that the rhetorical coming out of washing is not matching the votes.

Under redistricting required every 10 years, Hunter’s district boundaries will shift to the North to include Temecula, and he will no longer represent the city of Poway.

As a result, Hunter said he would be saying goodbye to his Poway constituents in the next election.

“We got lucky, it’s one of the most Republican district in the entire state of California,” he said. “Hopefully, we’re going to be a small business powerhouse, and bring forth a whole lot of oomph behind what I am doing.” He will continue holding his appointments on the armed services, education and transportation and infrastructure committees in the house, if he is re-elected.

Before his speech the U.S. Chamber of Commerce presented Hunter with a Spirit of Enterprise Award for his conservative voting patterns.

Meanwhile, he said the Navy—always an important component of Poway's region—is key to the continued health of the U.S., politically, as well as economically.

“We control the Atlantic Ocean and we control the Pacific Ocean. We control every trade route on earth, literally, with our U.S. Navy,” he said. “It’s never been done before. The British, French and Spanish navies could not sustain control of the oceans, while we have been able to do so. We're the first country to sustain a global navy from the South China Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. We are everywhere.”

Nonetheless, Hunter said he's worried about the future of the Navy, given the cutbacks that the military is having to sustain during the ongoing budget crisis.

“If you look at us in the big picture, we control the world’s trade routes, and the only way a nation can keep its superpower status is to keep controlling all of those trade routes,” he added, noting that China and Russian would like to push us off of those trade routes. “The only way we maintain our economic superpower status is by maintaining our military superpower status.”