As he continues his longshot bid to become the GOP presidential nominee, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum is focusing on the economy, energy and national security.
Though he has been polling at the lower end among the GOP contenders, Burgum managed to secure a seat for the second national televised debate Sept. 26.
The former software executive recently visited the offices of NH Business Review to appear as a guest on our Down to Business podcast, available at nhbr.com and on all podcast platforms. Here are edited highlights from the half-hour talk.
Q. We want to look at your three pillars that you’re focusing on your campaign: the economy, energy and national security. What strategies will you be implementing on a national scale that might benefit businesses here?
The economy, energy, national security — these things are all interrelated. Right now, our economy is crawling when it should be sprinting. Interest rates at record highs. Home ownership, the American dream, is getting out of reach for a lot of people with these high interest rates.
Inflation is choking every American family. Specifically, around food and energy, we’re paying too much — too much for gas at the pump, too much for electricity and the fuel to heat your homes, especially here in New Hampshire. And we’re certainly paying too much for food.
Food prices are up because energy prices are up, because energy prices drive the price of fertilizer up. It drives the price of fuel up for farmers. We’ve got a set of very inflationary policies the Biden administration has put in.
The Inflation Reduction Act is actually the Inflation Creation Act. You can’t jam trillions of dollars of spending towards ideological approaches and expect not to have inflation, because even with high interest rates, you could choke out private investment and you could stop private building and housing, for example.
The energy policy that we have in this country is really also highly inflationary, because we’re trying to kill the U.S. energy industry and trying to kill it again for ideological reasons. There’s a belief that somehow that if we can go to all electric vehicles … that somehow we’re going to save the environment.
If you do that and you buy every battery from China … they’re the world’s largest polluter. They’re also the world’s largest importer of oil, over 10 million barrels of oil a day.
And the U.S. is the one nation that’s done the most in terms of CO2 carbon reduction. And we can continue to drive carbon down. In North Dakota, we have we’ve set a goal of being carbon neutral by 2030. Not one new mandate, not one new regulation. It’s all through innovation. It’s innovation, not regulation, which has solved every problem that’s ever faced our nation.
Q. We’re going through a housing crisis. What do we do about that as a nation? What do we do about that here in New Hampshire?
If you keep raising interest rates, you’ll stop every new home construction in this country. We’re getting close in some states where there’s no new home construction. We have a shortage of housing.
The private sector is not building housing. Why aren’t they building housing, not single-family homes and not multifamily? Why not? Because the interest rates are too high.
We have to get back to where the market can help solve that, because I’ll tell you, I’m sure they’re going to say, ‘Oh, we got to fix the problem. Oh, we’ll put more money into housing now. We’ll start subsidizing certain types of housing.’ But if the housing is going to have to be built with these kinds of rules, it’ll keep driving the cost up. You can’t solve these problems of supply and demand with government intervention. You actually make it worse.
Q. Before the pandemic, the unemployment rate in New Hampshire for about five years was under 3%. For a good long while now it’s been about 2%. How do you deal with workforce issues in this country?
Demographically, we’ve got a challenge.
We’ve got more baby boomers retiring than we’ve got new workforce entering. Politicians can claim that their policies are so great because they’re helping get unemployment down.
But it’s just a structural demographic issue we have. And we’re going to have chronic low employment for perhaps the next decade.
That’s going to also drive inflationary pressures up because there’s going to be a labor shortage. You have to solve that in two ways. You have to solve it with increases in productivity so there’s less demand for labor. And again, using innovation, not regulation, to allow that productivity to occur.
Q. How does your entrepreneurial background inform the way that you would lead a whole country?
We’ve got to make sure that small businesses and entrepreneurs have the ability to innovate, to get the government off their back, get red tape off their back. Those are the people that I’m really focused on, because they’re the ones that are really driving. They may not be in the news every day, but they should be because they’re the heroes to me.
Q. You pretty much came out of nowhere with no political experience and won the governorship in North Dakota. How are you going to do that to become president when you’re an unknown quantity?
“We’re spending a lot of time in Iowa and New Hampshire, and we’re getting to know people on the ground. We have one disadvantage, that we’re unknown.
We have another advantage, which is when people meet us, they’re like, ‘Wow, we’ve been sitting around saying, Hey, how come we don’t have somebody normal?’ I hear that all the time from voters in New Hampshire. ‘We want someone normal. We want someone with common sense.’
Q. When we talk about being united against China and (Vladimir) Putin, it’s easy to see with Putin and what’s going on in Ukraine. With China, it’s so much more complex, because our economy is so intertwined. How do we get past that?
Winning the Cold War with Russia in the 1980s, which is what Ronald Reagan did, does require us to have strong deterrence, meaning we have to have to strong military deterrence, and we’ve also got to have a strong economy. That’s how we win that, so we need to have a strong economy.
But when we were doing that, Russia’s economy in the 1980s was very small and they weren’t intertwined. Now we’ve got the No. 1 economy in the world, U.S., No. 2, China. And they are very intertwined.
One of the things that we have that they don’t have is energy. We’ve got energy. They are desperate. Why does China now have the world’s largest navy?
They built the world’s largest navy because they have got to protect the sea lanes to get all that energy coming in. The 10 million barrels of oil a day has to be offloaded. They also have to protect the sea lanes for food. They don’t grow enough food to feed the 1.4 billion people.
They’re doing that and they know the way we beat Japan in World War II. China understands history. ... They’ve got a long view. That’s why they’re building this big navy that they’re building.
But we have we have a card to play, and we’re not playing it, because we’re trying to shut down the U.S. energy industry.
Q. How do you see the role of the president in general? Right now, we’re in a very a divided period. What do you do about that?
The executive branch has got to be the uniter. I’ll never be a senator. I’ll never run for Senate. I’ll never be a congressman. I have zero interest of putting on a jersey and just lobbing bombs at everybody.
I think the nation is getting more and more frustrated with the divided nature and the ineffectual results that come from a super-divided Congress, where they can’t agree on anything without the drama, the shutdowns. All these things that everybody goes back and forth and takes sides on.
We have to understand we’re in a proxy war right now in Eastern Europe. We’re in a cold war with China.
There’s a discrete set of things the federal government is supposed to do around economy and energy and national security. The rest of the stuff’s got to be left to the states and the people. I will, as your president, actually understand what the job description is of the federal government.
The states, like New Hampshire, the 13 states, created the federal government. They delegated certain responsibilities. It’s in the 10th Amendment.
That’s what the federal government is supposed to do. The government is not supposed to be in everybody’s life all the time on every topic.
I mean, let the school board decide, the library board, the city commission, the state legislators or the parents. Let the parents decide.
You know, maybe the individuals decide. We don’t need as much government as we have. We’ve got to thin that down.
As your president, I’d be very focused on trying to talk about what’s right about America, not what’s wrong. I’ve met with people here from small startups that are doing amazing work in recovery.
The first lady of North Dakota (is) courageously sharing her story that she struggled with addiction for two-and-half decades, and now she’s in recovery.
We try to meet with these small groups doing amazing work on recovery wherever we go. They are just nonprofits.
They’ve never gotten a federal dime, and they’re changing and saving people’s lives.
This is happening every day in America, where neighbors are helping neighbors and people that care deeply about their communities are doing amazing stuff.