West: Obama Policies Leading Country Toward 'Economic Slavery'

Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) marked Independence Day by saying on Fox News that President Obama’s policies are pushing the United States toward “economic slavery.”

“When you look at the fact that under this president’s ‘leadership,’ we have had a 46 percent increase in food stamp recipients in the United States of America — we have gone from 32 million to 46 million, 47 million. We even have a government that is using taxpayer money to run radio ads to promote people getting — going onto food stamps,” West said on Neil Cavuto’s show.

“We have almost seven million more Americans on poverty. We have close to nine million Americans now out there on Social Security disability. What we find happening is that we are creating an entitlement welfare state, where we`re starting to get more people wedded to the government by a subsistence check or by employment check,” he added.

The congressman said that the regulatory environment is also “crushing” small-business growth in the country.

“So, I have to say it as it is. We do not want to see economic dependency or economic slavery become the mantra for the United States of America. It should be economic freedom,” West said. “But the policies of this and this administration doesn’t lend that so.”

He advised that instead of Mitt Romney standing by his healthcare reform in Massachusetts, the presidential candidate “needs to talk about the fact that what he tried to do in the state of Massachusetts was him seeing what could be best for his state, but maybe it didn’t work out as well.”

“And he should feel very bad that the president thought that he could take that as a model and try to implement that for the entire United States of America,” West added.

“The president is going to continue to try to say that this was the paradigm that I used to implement the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. And I think that the governor needs to come back and reassess, really, what was his decision-making criteria for implementing his health care in Massachusetts.”