Trump's Picks - ANALYSIS

A sitdown with SC Treasurer Curtis Loftis - powered by Disaster Plus

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
This is the Kelly Golden Show podcast powered by Disaster Plus.
On a Big Fail Friday.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
They treasur Curtis Loftus retiring. This is something I'm not
I got two years to get my head wrapped around, Curtis.
I understand that, but I am curious. Have you had
any moral lago meetings lately? You know, Trump's Treasury secretary
hasn't been announced yet.

Speaker 3 (00:25):
I'm holding out. The problem I have is the job
I wanted is the job Trump got President? Wow? Well,
I was looking forward to running for the hill, not
running for office.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Like I said, I know we have two years on that,
but you know you are great at what you do.
And I'm curious with all these breakdowns of the Trump
nominations in the financial sector. He just recently picked Canter
Fitzgeral CEO Howard Lutnik to be Commerce Secretary, and it
made me question because I know this guy's publicly, you know,

(00:58):
all in on Trump's tariffs, which she's kind of doubling
down on this time around. I mean, his general tariff
idea is ten twenty percent I think, on all imported
goods in order to pull investment into the US and
bolster the domestic economy, frankly here in America. And that's
many people saying that's a significant escalation of his first
term trade policies. So I'm just curious. I mean, I

(01:21):
understand that it's a tool for negotiating. How do you
feel about tariffs as our state treasurer?

Speaker 3 (01:25):
Well, what you just said was one hundred cent correct.
It is a negotiating tool. Terriffs are ancient, They're old, old,
old things, and they just have to be manis it's
that you can demonize the terriff, but the same people
who demonize tariff A love tariff B. Right, you know
what business are in. I have a lot of confidence
in President Trump, especially in this second term, and I'm

(01:46):
glad that he doesn't have a chance for a third
term because he's got four years to make things work.
And if you look at his appointees, they're all disruptors
because that's what we need in Washington, and I'm just
excited about them. I like them all, I know some
of them. The fact that they have people coming out
of the word work screaming at them, that's to be

(02:07):
expected that this is what the left does. They have
organized plans, they have conferences, they have comforts rooms in
hotels in DC where they have lawyers come in and
coach whistleblowers. I mean, they'll get hundreds of people ranking
public officials and bring them in and coach them what

(02:28):
you can say in what you can't say, what crosses
the line. That's why you end up with these charges
that don't mean anything and never go anywhere. But they
know exactly what they do. This effort's paid by a billionaire.
This is what they do. And so they're going to
be after every Trump employee. It doesn't matter who it is,
unless they appointed Kamala Harris, they're going to be after them.

(02:51):
We just have to know that. And we've got to
support Donald Trump and just Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott
I hope come on board exactly like they should. Let's
get these people in and if they don't work out
then changes to me they then, But we don't have
time to wait.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
We need to have someone in play that's going to
keep calm in the markets amid the quote unquote disruption
that you know, as you're saying here, the swamp will
just be apaplectic about.

Speaker 3 (03:18):
That's right. And speaking of disruption today, we see where
Russia file the intercontinental ballistic missile at Ukraine and hit them,
and then Ukraine returns fire with six long range missiles
that were given by Britain. If we're not careful, we're
going to be in World War three. Cares aren't going
to matter. But for some reason, the Left can't give Ukraine,

(03:40):
a country that I spent a lot of time in,
a country I love the people, I love the towns.
I still do humanitarian work over there, financed it, but
we can't give them enough money to destroy them. And
I talk to people from Ukraine on a regular basis.
I send money there on a regular basis. And we've
estimated that country. And what's going to happen is when
it's all over instead and done with every big name

(04:01):
you know from Blackrock, the Bank of America could be
there making zillions of dollars on what was one of
the most fertile and energetic places in Europe. And so
if we're not careful, we're going to have a war,
and it will not be a small war. It will
be a big war. And we get two or three
months here to get Trump in. It was a month
and a half. Two months because they're continually to fund

(04:25):
that war machine, and they're not going to stop until
the day he leaves office. Yeah, I'm in biding these
offices in that day. Then we could get sanity. But
we got to get to that point.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
Well, yeah, I guess as a financial question it would be.
I mean, Congress didn't vote for Warren, and I just
wonder if they have any power to get us out
of this mess that there are just you know, full
speed ahead launching us into.

Speaker 3 (04:44):
There's the craziest surrounded that nobody can explain. But if
you just said five years ago that there would be
intercontinental ballistic missiles being fired intra Europe, nobody would have
believed you. But that's where we are. And that's just
one thing. Let'sten and talk about Iran area in Erfield
and all that. So we've got a lot to worry about.

(05:04):
We need a new stake there to finish. We need
a new DOJA personal, we need a new FBI. We
need all of that and we need it now. And
we've got to figure out some way to get him
in place and get a moving because the Democrat playbook
is to stall, stall, stall, Stall, don't let him govern.
They don't believe in democracy. We won these elections, we

(05:25):
need to take take charge.

Speaker 2 (05:27):
State treasurer at Curtis Loftus put your state treasurer hat
back on here, because you just made me think of something.
You remind me of Trump and that you said he
has you know, not another term say, and you're retiring
and you've got two years You mentioned the rhads before
we went to air here. Don't we have a billion
dollar surplus, Treasurer Loftus, I want to know how that's
going to get spent the next two years. Is that

(05:47):
something we can talk about? Because we just had our
five twenty sixth initiative in Charleston fail on the ballot,
the roads referendum that failed. Can we use some of
that billion dollar surplus to finish our five to twenty
sixth project or no?

Speaker 3 (05:59):
Well, of course that the General Assemblies call and I
lament the condition of South Carolina in that we've had
each year we have more and more money. We have
a called extra money, and it's you know, a billion
billion a half dollars every year, and I don't think
that we're spending it in the most advantageous way. If

(06:20):
we had enough money to incentivize good behavior, like in
the schools, we don't incentivize good behavior with extra money.
We could have done that, and I pitched this idea,
and I'm not casting stones the general simbly because it
is a hard job to do a budget. You've got
so many special answers that you and hardly any of
them are conservative, by the way. The special interests are

(06:41):
almost always from the left, and they come at you
with every piece of paper that's this is the science,
this is the history of it, this is how you
do this, that and the other. This is what they're
doing and Wyoming, this is what they're doing in Florida.
You look into it. None of it is true our
It's just a sliver of is truth. But they control
the debate. They don't show me to overwhelm. It doesn't

(07:01):
got four or five months and they're in session and
they've got all this trying that they're trying to get done.
So it's people. We have to say, let's spend this
money on South Carolinians. That is going to improve our lives.
We don't care what somebody from out of states says.
We don't care what somebody from outside this country, like
the UN and all these people. What we care about

(07:23):
is how do we educate our people, how do we
repair our roads, how do we have a better health
care system. You know, our universities like Carolina, they want
to be world class universities. I suppose there are, But
is that helping eighty percent or seventy percent of our people?
Of course not. That's what we've got to change. And
with all this extra money we've had in year in

(07:43):
and year out, that's what we have to somehow incentivize.
I'm not the governor. I don't ever want to be governor,
but they have to take the leadership to say we've
got to look after us. And that doesn't mean more
growth necessarily. It doesn't mean bring another business necessarily because
we have to import workers. So we pay for a
business and then we import workers, or then we are

(08:05):
We had to go train people who we didn't train
them in the first twelve years of school. So we
had to go back to basics and look after shock
tell Indians, because it's just no incentive for either party
to say the eighty percent of the people out there
who work hard and get up every day. You're the
group of people who take a shower every morning before

(08:25):
they go to work and then have to take one
they go home at night because they've been working hard
all day. We don't look after those people. We don't
look after that broad working in middle class, and that's
where our budget needs to go. We mentioned earlier I
passed four construction projects. Two of them are road projects,
and two of them weren't the big other projects. One
was a university and one was a larger compartment complex.

(08:46):
They just shut down a major thoroughfare any time they want,
and nobody says a word. All the working people are
sitting there looking at them. And then I come to
the next to four blocks and there's a university where
they've taken all the penny sales tacks that were supposed
to go out all around Rishi and Camp. It's all
getting spit right downtown in Columbia for the university. You know,
that's why you when you go to the university you
see all these cobblestone roads and brick pavers for sidewalks.

(09:12):
That's a penny sales sect that was supposed to help
people out in Richmond County. Working people, poor people get
the dirt rose paved. So this is what we do.
We've got to get back to how do we look
at for tokkel Any's and not our big institutions in
Ridge people.

Speaker 2 (09:25):
Well, I know you have two years before you were retiring,
but I'm going to revisit that question about governor.

Speaker 1 (09:30):
Kay, you said you didn't want to be governor.

Speaker 2 (09:32):
But interesting, Curtis.

Speaker 3 (09:35):
We've got a lot to deal with here in these
next two years and then I hope to run for
the hills and I hope to find those hills.

Speaker 2 (09:42):
Well, wait, before you go, what hurdles and hills do
you want to get over? Is there anything that you'd
like to see get done before you go?

Speaker 3 (09:48):
Well, you know, we still have this big accounting audit
going on and it's just so complicated and there's so
many aspects of it, and we just bogged down. It's
not about but us, or the Senator says it's about
It's not about that at all. It's a much bigger issue.
And now instead of us going into it in a
way that made sense, that was you know, set up

(10:10):
by reasonable people to get a reasonable result. Everybody's under
time pressure. We spending millions and millions of dollars and
it don't have enough time to finish the project. Properly.
That's the kind of stuff we have to deal with
in Columbia. And so we're gonna be working on that,
not just through the time limit of that audit, but
just straighten out what doesn't get in the audit. And
it's gonna take us a long time. So this is

(10:31):
a boring stuff that nobody wants to hear about. That
he elected me to handle it right because it's just
complicated accounting and banking. We're getting to it, and we're
doing it. We'll report back and when we get through
with it, because it's important, it's your money. Thank you
very much for having me on. I appreciate it. And
this hope that the left would give Donald Trump a
chance to get started. They don't like it, wants to

(10:51):
get started and fine, but they owe him that they've
been preaching democracy and they've been preaching to us for
years that elections matter. Let's see if they'll give us
that courtesy.

Speaker 2 (11:02):
Thank you, treasure.

Speaker 1 (11:03):
This Big Fail Friday edition of That Kelly Golden Show
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Speaker 2 (11:09):
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