“Rome Is Burning”: Congressman Randy Fine’s Warning on America’s Financial Collapse

In this episode, hosts Chuck Warren and Sam Stone sit down with Congressman Randy Fine for a powerful discussion centered on America's national debt crisis, the unsustainable federal budget, and his personal mission to push for fiscal responsibility in Washington.

Fine, a former Florida legislator and businessman, shares his deep concerns about the U.S. borrowing $2 trillion annually while even modest spending cuts face intense resistance in Congress. Reflecting on his work balancing budgets in Florida, he vows to develop a comprehensive zero-deficit plan during the upcoming legislative recess.

He stresses the need for serious economic growth, targeted spending cuts, and entitlement reform, particularly calling out Medicaid expansion and inefficient usage as major issues. Fine also criticizes foreign aid waste, welfare abuse, and what he describes as a lack of urgency among lawmakers, declaring, “Rome is burning and all you guys want to do is roast marshmallows in the fire.”

The congressman calls for a return to accountability, comparing Florida’s lean budget model to bloated states like New York and warning that the current trajectory threatens America's long-term survival.

This conversation is a wake-up call about unchecked federal spending, political inaction, and the need for bold leadership willing to confront tough financial realities.

Transcript

Chuck Warren: Let's switch over real quick here to the national debt. Boy, I'm not hopeful that – because I don't think the Democrats are going to be helpful at all in anything about trying to get our financial house in order. I just I don't think they have any plan. I mean, so, you know, for example, David Rubenstein of Carlisle Group came out this week and said, look, there's five ways that we can tackle this one. You can make spending cuts.

There doesn't seem to be an appetite for that, which, you know, I can blame Democrats all I want. But there's also lots of Republicans and independents who feel that way. Tax cuts. We don't like raising taxes. He said we can go to the IMF. But, you know, who knows how that would turn out?

We can just tell our creditors take a hike, which would be horrible. The fifth way is to grow out of it. You have a Harvard MBA. You've ran three businesses. You've had to balance your books. If you were in charge of this,

what is the plan that you feel you would push that you would think has a chance of passing and getting us on a proper trajectory of balancing our books?

Congressman Fine: So I will tell you, I've only been here for two months, and one of my goals over the next six months is to come up with my own detailed plan to balance the budget. I don't know that I could actually get anyone to vote for it, but I feel obligated to come up with a way to get us to zero budget. And pay this back detailed, a detailed day.

I was an appropriator in Florida, so I know how to do this where we did balance the budget. And that's going to be my project when we get to the August recess. I will tell you, it needs to be a combination of a couple of a number of these things. Growth is key.

We can grow our way out of it if the economy booms. But we also have to cut spending.

Chuck Warren: Well, let me stop you there for a minute. What's that growth rate have to be? Is it three percent?

Congressman Fine: I don’t know. It depends on what spending is. The higher the spending, the higher it has to be. So but but growth. I don't know that growth. I don't know that growth can solve the problem entirely.

Chuck Warren: Sure.

Congressman Fine: I'm saying I think that's the most. But growth is part of it. Absolutely. And then I think another thing is we have to cut spending. Look, we should we had it. This is. Yesterday we voted on the first set of rescissions from the president. It was $10 billion, which is a huge amount of money,

but not when you're borrowing $2 trillion a year. And literally all that $10 billion did was cut, was NPR, PBS, and like idiotic foreign aid decisions, like $6 million to fund Hamas media in Gaza, like lunacy stuff. And we could barely pass that. And I got so upset.

I've decided here I need to either, you know, get therapy or go give speeches on the floor. And I stood up in front of my colleagues and I said, Rome is burning and all you guys want to do is roast marshmallows in the fire. And if we can't cut this sort of stuff, we're done.

So but it's a combination. We're going to have to cut things. We should not be giving welfare to 25 year old men who do not want to work. We should not be giving anything to illegal immigrants. We should be rounding them up and we should be sending them home. We need to look at the Florida model.

This is how screwed up this country is. You know, more people live in Florida than there are in New York. Yet our budget is half the size of the New York state budget. To the New Yorkers who say give us salt tax cuts, I say move to Florida.

You don't have to pay state and local taxes in Florida. So we have got to cut and it is hard to do and people don't want to do it. But the other alternative is in the lives of our children. America will collapse. People need to understand this. We are on the road to the destruction of our country.

And I'm laying awake at night worried about this.

Sam Stone: Yes.

Congressman Fine: Because the problems that I've talked about my whole life, now I'm actually elected. I should be able to do something about it. And when I talk about people being willing to talk but not do anything, that's exactly what I'm talking about.

Sam Stone: And the people driving the left actually want the destruction of this country.

Chuck Warren: Well, they do. They want to bankrupt it.

Absolutely. I remember years ago, not years ago, it was four years ago, I was talking to a friend who's a chief of staff for Republican Assemblyman in California. And I'm asking about their debt and pensions. I go, well, how do you solve it? He goes, well, we just let it go bankrupt and a judge handles it.

That was literally the plan, right? And I don't want that to be a plan for my country. But here's the one question I have about this budget. So we have over 60% of it is entitlements, which means it's mandatory spending. And that's a big part of it. You guys only vote on a third of this budget, really.

So if you were going to tackle one entitlement in your first two terms to get it back on a path of solvency, which entitlement do you think is the easiest one – and none of it's easy, but the easiest one to tackle?

Congressman Fine: Medicaid.

Chuck Warren: Medicaid?

Congressman Fine: Yeah, Medicaid.

I mean, look, we didn't expand Medicaid in Florida and the state's doing just fine. We need to have a discussion about that. We also need to have a discussion about how money is spent. Look, when you're given something from the government for free, it's not yours.

And one of the things that makes me the angriest to Democrats when talking about we're going to take away people's health care. It isn't theirs. They didn't pay for it. They're being given it by other taxpayers. And we need to have a discussion about using that gift efficiently.

If you're on free government health care because you have no ability to support your own family. then you have an obligation to be grateful to the people who gave it to you. And that means you don't go to the ER if you can go to an urgent care.

It means you don't go to the urgent care if you can go to a neighborhood doctor. It means being efficient. It means taking care of yourself in order to not run up the bill on on taxpayers. I mean, Medicaid is supposed to be for the super vulnerable.

I don't have a problem with the government providing health care to a kid with autism. That's not their fault. But a lot of adults make bad decisions, and it's not the rest of us's problem to solve for that. And that's the one I would tackle.

Sam Stone: And one of the dirty secrets is that adjacent to that under Obamacare, it's the middle class who are stuck in the market without subsidies who are paying the freight on this in a brutal way.

Chuck Warren: I don't know anybody who's on an Obamacare plan who likes it. I had this conversation with my employees all the time. They hate it.

Congressman Fine: Yeah, no. And look, but Obamacare, the big evil of Obamacare, and I chaired health care in Florida for two years, so I worked on this stuff a lot. And the big problem in Obamacare is Obamacare outlawed health insurance in America. See, the problem is that insurance is supposed to be the pooling of risk to deal with a problem that you can't deal with on your own.

Sam Stone: And the competition is now gone. Congressman Randy Fine, thank you so much for being on the program today. We love having you.

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