Kelcie Hartley, Daily Herald file photo

U.S. Senator Mitt Romney, R-Utah, was the guest speaker during a business breakfast in Spanish Fork Wednesday morning co-hosted by the Spanish Fork and Payson/Santaquin Area Chambers of Commerce.

According to a staffer for Romney, the event was organized to discuss business-related issues including inflation, supply chain, wages and unemployment.

In Romney’s opening speech, he talked about President Joe Biden’s signing of the Inflation Reduction Act into law on Tuesday.

“Not a single Republican in the House or Senate voted for that bill,” Romney said. “You might think can the Democrats do whatever they want without any help of Republicans? Well, the answer is yes and no. By the rules of the Senate, if there’s a bill that’s just about spending and taxing, that can be done on a simple majority vote without needing a super majority. … Well, the Democrats have used this little rule twice now.”

Romney discussed parts of the bill that Republicans didn’t agree with. According to CNN Politics, the bill will cost $750 billion. Romney said Republicans disagreed with the amount of money spent and didn’t want to add fuel to the “inflation flame.”

Kelcie Hartley, Daily Herald

“Part of it is they’re hiring 80,000 new IRS agents. They are going to more than double the size of the IRS. Another issue is they are going to set prices on drugs. You may think pharmaceuticals are too expensive and I agree, but there are better ways to deal with high prices of pharmaceutical companies than having the government set prices,” Romney said. “The challenge of that is, if you’re a drug company developing a new drug, you don’t know what the price will be of the product you create. So, are you willing to spend the billions of dollars it takes to create the pharmaceutical if you don’t know what you can sell it for?”

Romney also called the Inflation Deduction Act a misnomer, questioning how “spending more money and taxing” would fight inflation.

“That’s not all, they are going to put subsidies on buying electric cars. I think electric cars are great. With gas prices the way they are, I wish I had one, but go out and try to buy one. You can’t. They are out of stock. There’s so many people trying to buy them, and yet the government is going to pay you to buy one,” Romney said.

During the question-and-answer portion of the event, January Walker, a candidate for Utah’s 4th Congressional District, told Romney she was concerned about national debt, asking if he would work to find technological solutions to tracking spending.

Romney agreed that the ability to track spending needs to be a higher priority, but wasn’t sure if technology was the answer.

“I don’t know that there’s something so simple in technology that allows us to do that,” he said. “The Social Security system does it pretty well. We don’t have a lot of Social Security fraud — we have some but not a lot. Other agencies aren’t very good at that. I would be happy to look at technologies that would prove our abilities to see where our money’s going.”

After addressing Walker’s question, he spoke to the audience as to how the nation has accumulated its debt.

“Two-thirds is automatic. It happens every year whether we vote for it or not. In the one-third is the military, the justice department and education are all in the one-third. The problem is the two-thirds that we don’t know about. It’s Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security,” Romney said. “That money far exceeds what they put in and it grows much faster than the economy. We can’t keep spending a vast more than we take out.”

Romney introduced the TRUST Act in April which is designed to create congressional rescue committees for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Federal Highway programs. According to the bill, committee members would be responsible for, “Recommendations and legislation to improve the program for which it was established, including by increasing the duration of positive balances of the federal trust fund established for the program and providing for the solvency of the federal trust fund established for the program during a 75-year period.”

Thor Mongie, a chiropractor with Balanced Health of Payson, asked what Romney plans to do about the nation’s health care “crisis.”

“I actually have a health care plan I would like to see adopted by the nation.” Romney replied. “My view is we will be in a much better setting if we give individuals, as opposed to the government, more say in their health care choices. I’d say let’s take the money we are spending on Obamacare and return it to the states to craft their own systems for what they think is best for their own people.”

In 2015, Romney said that the health care plan he put into work as governor of Massachusetts was the precursor to the Affordable Care Act. “Without Romneycare, I don’t think we would have Obamacare. So, without Tom a lot of people wouldn’t have health insurance,” he said in an obituary to Staples founder Thomas Stemberg.

Jamon Andelin, representing Compass Insurance Advisors, wanted to know how much Romney considers the want of constituents opposed to what he believes is the right thing to do, and how he reconciles those differences.

“It really depends on the nature of the topic,” Romney said. “In many cases, given the fact we are a representative democracy, people choose their representatives and then expect them to do what they believe is right, and that’s what I do. I do what I believe is right. Then there are some things where I take things up because it’s what our constituents want.”

He went on to say that he tries to apply to his best judgment to every decision and “if people say, ‘I didn’t like his judgement on that,’ then you vote me out.”

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