Bobby Jindal wants Republicans to focus on growth

Indian-American Governor of Louisiana Bobby Jindal has criticised the Republican leadership of taking wrong tracks by focusing on government budgets and spending.

Describing the Democratic Party as becoming a party of economic contraction, he said that it is time that the Republican Party must become the party of more, the party that creates growth, the party that creates more in the real economy.

“We as Republicans have to accept that government number-crunching, even conservative number-crunching, is not the answer to our nation’s problems. We must also face one more cold, hard fact. Washington is so dysfunctional any budget proposal based on fiscal sanity will be deemed not serious by the media,” Jindal had said yesterday in his address to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

“It will fail in the Senate, won’t even make it to the President’s desk, where it would be vetoed anyway,” Jindal said at the CPAC, an annual political conference currently happening in Maryland.

“Look at the debates that have dominated Washington in just the last few weeks. We had the fiscal cliff. We had the debt ceiling. We had Joe Biden’s gun control task force, and more recently the sequester. In reality, these are government sideshows in Washington that we have allowed to take centre-stage. As conservatives, we are falling into the sideshow trap,” he said.

“Today’s conservatism is in love with zeroes. We seem to have an obsession with government bookkeeping. I’m here to tell you this is a rigged game. It is the wrong game for us to be playing. Yesterday it was the fiscal cliff. Today it’s the sequester. Tomorrow it’ll be the fiscal apocalypse, and then it’ll be fiscal armageddon,” said the Louisiana Governor, who according to political pundits is a potential presidential candidate in 2016.

“I’m here to say this obsession with zeroes has everyone in our party focused on what? On government. By obsessing with zeroes on the budget spreadsheet, we send a not-so-subtle signal that the focus of our country is on the phony economy of Washington, DC, instead of the real economy out in Billings or in Baton Rouge,” he said amid applause from the audience.

Jindal then went on to criticise US President Barack Obama and his economic policies.

“President Obama’s got our national debt over $16 trillion and climbing, larger than our entire economy, and he’s not worried about it in the least. He calls it progress.

You remember his campaign slogan. He says it is forward. I’ve got news for the president. If Washington’s debt is going forward, America’s economy is going backwards,” he said.

“If our end goal is to simply better manage the disasters that is the federal government, you can count me out. I’m not signing up for that. I mean, honestly, who of you here wants to sign up to help manage the slow decline of the United States of America? I sure don’t. That’s what we’ve got Democrats for,” he said.

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