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Washington, D.C. – In today’s installment of Marco’s Constituent Mailbox video series, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio responds to two constituents regarding the August recess.

The first letter came from Robert, a Florida constituent living in Fort Myers Beach who is asked why Congress is taking August off while the country is going bankrupt. Our second letter came from Brian, in Jupiter, who wrote asking how Congress could possibly take August recess without passing a budget first.

RUBIO ON AUGUST RECESS

Senator Marco Rubio: “The theory behind August recess is that members of Congress have to go home to their home states and have to confront the people that elected them. It’s an opportune time to travel the state if you’re a senator, or your district if you’re a member of Congress, and hear from the people back home, whether it’s in one-on-one meetings, town halls, visits to places, engaging and interacting with your constituents. So you go home, you hear from them on a full-time basis over a three or four week period and then you come back to Washington and hopefully turn their opinions into reality. That’s the theory behind August recess. That’s what I’ll be doing during that time. I’ll be touring different parts of the state. I’ll be going, for example, to a military installation in the Panhandle. I’ll be visiting other communities around the state.”

RUBIO ON THE DEBT

Rubio: “What I say to people all the time is that the most important thing the government needs to be focused on, other than national security, is creating an environment where jobs can be created. How are jobs created? When you have a pro-growth environment. That means when America becomes an easier and better place to start a business or to grow an existing business. That’s how middle class jobs are created. And so we should be looking for what can we do to make it easier for people to start businesses, grow existing businesses, and thereby create jobs for the middle class. And the debt is making it harder for people to do that. The reason why the debt makes it harder for people to do that is because it scares people from risking their money. At the end of the day, in order to grow a business or start a new one, someone has to take money they have access too, whether they’re borrowing it, or they’ve saved it, and they have to risk it. The reason why they’re willing to risk it is because they think they can make money in the future, that the business will succeed. The reason why they’re afraid to do that now is because they’re looking at this debt, and they’re looking at other countries that have debt crises, and they’re saying, ‘Look what happens in those countries that have a debt crisis.’ You have these disruptive changes in government spending, you have these dramatic increases in taxes, and that uncertainty, and the lack of a plan to fix it is scaring people from investing and risking money they have access to. And the result is we don’t have enough businesses being started. We don’t have enough people growing their businesses, and as a result, middle class jobs aren’t being created, and the American people are hurting. And that’s the reason why a budget hasn’t passed, because we refuse to vote for, I will not vote for, a budget plan that does not show how it’s eventually going to get to balance and get our country out of the debt problem that it faces. So I’ll keep working on that, and I’m sure I’ll hear about that during my travels in August. But I want you to know that I’m committed to that principle because the debt issue, it’s a moral hazard. It hurts future generations for sure, but it’s also an economic harm that it’s doing. Right now, there are jobs that are not going to be created this year because we have run up a close to $17 trillion debt and there’s no plan in place to fix it, and that’s what I’ll be focused on during the month of August, and when we return here, in September.”