Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a milestone in our country, and it is not a good one. We are rapidly approaching $30 trillion in debt. We are accumulating debt like we never have at any time in our history. We are actually…
Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a milestone in our country, and it is not a good one. We are rapidly approaching $30 trillion in debt. We are accumulating debt like we never have at any time in our history. We are actually accumulating debt at the rate of over $2 million per minute.
Now, some say deficits don't matter. Some on the left say they have this new monetary theory: We can just print it all up. You can all have free stuff. There will be manna from Heaven. And nothing could go wrong; we are just going to give you money. If not $1,400 checks a month or a year, why don't we give you monthly checks?
That is part of the new plans. The new plans of the $3\1/2\ trillion that we are facing down at this point--that will all be borrowed--is to give people free money; to give people free this, free that. But I think people are smarter than that. I think people know that, ultimately, you don't get anything in life without hard work; you don't get anything in life, really, for free.
Isn't there some kind of ramification to so much borrowed money? When someone comes to you and says or they call you on the phone and they say ``Here is a thousand dollars; all you have got to do is sign up for this,'' most people immediately recoil and they say ``Well, that might be a scam. Somebody is going to be ripping me off to say that.''
Well, that is sort of the bait-and-switch of the politics we face now. People are saying: We are going to give you free college, free cars, free cell phones, free this, free that. Everything in life will be free. You won't have to work anymore.
The problem is, there are ramifications. Money doesn't grow on trees. Money has got to come from somewhere. So either we borrow it and we become more indebted to foreign countries, we tax people for it, or ultimately the way we fix a lot of our deficit problems is we simply print the money.
So when the Federal Reserve prints the money, as we increase the money supply, the money that we have becomes worth less and less; it loses its purchasing power. This is the insidious tax of inflation.
The interesting thing about it is that inflation is a regressive tax. It doesn't affect everyone the same. In fact, the tax of inflation actually affects the working class, the people of lower incomes, and those on fixed incomes and pensions, retirees--it affects them much worse because they don't have the ability for their income to go up.
So, right now, we are facing 5 percent inflation because of the massive borrowing that, really, both parties instituted in the last year. They decided that the result to the pandemic would be to close everything down, destroy the economy, and then give everyone free money. And, to a large extent, both parties actually did this last year.
Now, this year, the decision has been made by Republicans to say: Whoo, this is so much. We have got to stop. We have got to get people back to work and let the economy recover.
So it has primarily been Democrats this year, but both parties have a certain responsibility to this--at least some members of both parties. But, as the inflation occurs and as this effect is being transmitted to the economy, you find that those who suffer are those who cannot raise their incomes, those who have fixed incomes or low incomes.
One of the things you see here is that, if we have 5-percent inflation, what does that mean?
You say: Well, I don't know. It means I lose my purchasing power by 5 percent next year.
But what if it happens year in and year out for a decade, and you have lost 50 percent of your purchasing power?
It means, to make up for that, you really have to have a 50-percent increase in your wages.
So will wages keep up with inflation?
The dirty little secret is that, in some ways, wages will rise, but maybe they rise an equivalent amount or a little bit less, and you say a decade later: I am not any better off.
And there become people mired and more dependent on government as government gets larger and larger. They think they are getting free stuff, but it is not really free. The allure of something for nothing-- this is the allure of socialism. This is a false allure. It is the idea that you are going to be able to get something and you are not going to have to pay for it.
So we have accumulated $30 trillion in debt. Interest payments have been fairly low over the past decade or so. Interest payments are at about, you know, 1, 2, 2.5 percent, but now interest rates are rising. Even at the low interest rates, our interest rate that we pay each year has grown to about $300 billion a year.
So, with $300 billion a year, people say: Well, there is a debt ceiling. If the debt ceiling doesn't come up, we will default, and Wall Street will become hysterical, and there will be a collapse of the stock market.
Well, there doesn't need to be. Nobody is really for spreading discalm or spreading, you know, chaos among the marketplace. We all want the marketplace to be calm.
How could we calm the marketplace?
Well, what we would say to the marketplace is, we will pay our bills and we are not going to default on our currency. And the way you can pay for your bills is to pay for them with income. We bring in $3.8 trillion a year in tax revenue. The interest payment is $300 billion. It is less than we bring in in 1 month. So the annual payment on interest is less than what we bring in in tax revenue in 1 month.
Why can't we pay the interest? Why would we ever not pay the interest on our debt? Why?
Because we are overdrawn and because all the rest of the spending is crowded out by the interest.
We have got plenty of money to pay for the interest. We just don't have enough left to pay for the cocaine studies with Japanese quail. That is, you know, about a million bucks.
You say: Oh, it is only a million bucks.
Well, they studied Japanese quail to see whether or not Japanese quail on cocaine are more sexually promiscuous.
How did we get to a $30 trillion debt?
Because there are studies like that littered throughout the budget. In fact, the group that does these studies, the National Science Foundation, we just increased their budget by two-thirds. It was mostly the Democrats, but, once again, many of the Big Government Republicans voted for this too. So we have exploded the National Science Foundation.
Now, was there any warning that the National Science Foundation was one of the most wasteful parts of our government?
Well, yes, since 1972.
There was a Senator at the time named William Proxmire. He was a conservative, or a maverick, Democrat from the Midwest, and he started an award. He called it the Golden Fleece Award. The first award he gave was for a study from the National Science Foundation. It was over a study that was $50,000. That was when $50,000 was a lot of money. And the study was to see what makes people happy.
Really?
People were aghast that we were spending $50,000 on it. He complained, and he gave them a booby prize and a Golden Fleece Award.
And, lo and behold, we are still doing it. The same organization, last year, did a million-and-a-half-dollar study that if you take a selfie of yourself while smiling and then look at the selfie later on, does it make you happy? That cost a million-and-a-half bucks.
Why do people like each other? Why do people fall in love?
These aren't studies for taxpayer dollars. But these are small ticket items. They say: Oh, you could never balance the budget on that.
Well, what about the $70 million spent on a hotel in Kabul, and the contractor ran off with the money, and it was never built?
What about a $48 million gas station--no; strike that--natural gas gas station in a remote area of Afghanistan?
Well, very few, if anybody, in the United States has a car that runs on natural gas.
Why was the U.S. Government building a natural gas gas station in Afghanistan?
Because we have gone ``woke'' on the green climate. We are for the green climate. We have got to combat climate change and reduce the carbon footprint of Afghanistan.
Really?
I thought the military was supposed to kill the enemy and defend the country, but we are reducing the carbon footprint in Afghanistan.
Somebody put this up--I think it was Rod Dreher--the other day. It was a little video clip. It was tragic, but somewhat hilarious in its tragicness.
He said: This is when we lost the Afghan war.
It had a picture of a urinal. I think it was by Marcel Duchamp, some Dadaist artist back in, like, 1917, and I guess he thought it would be really hilarious to put a male urinal in a museum and call it art. I don't know if it was really art or if it was a joke, but the thing is they were having these Afghan men and women in robes and veils and everything studying Dadaist art--a male urinal--and asking them what they thought of this. You could see a couple of women just sort of shaking their heads with utter incomprehension.
When we are spending money sending Ph.D.s over to Afghanistan to teach Dadaist art--that a male urinal is somehow art--I think that is why some of them think that we are actually the culture that is in decay, not theirs.
But the thing is we are spending money right and left. The right spends it on military adventures, and the left spends it on welfare, and the compromise that always happens around here is that right comes together with left, and they all agree: Well, you know, we might as well just spend it on both.
So everything goes up. The military budget went up. We already spend more than all of the countries. More than 10 countries combined is our military budget--$750-some-odd billion. Republicans and Democrats just raised it $25 billion more.
In the midst of ending a war, where is the peace dividend? What happened?
We ended a war. I thought we would have a little more money left over.
So, today, I tried to take $6 billion that is supposed to go to the Afghan Reconstruction Fund, to the old Afghan Government. There is no Afghan Government. They have been overrun by the Taliban.
I would love for Americans who are watching this to call me today, at my office, and tell me why the Taliban should get money.
I asked that we take that money away, put it back in the Treasury, and spend some of it on the Iron Dome for Israel, and it was objected to by the Democrats because, by golly, they will spend money, but they don't want to offset it with any spending cuts.
Well, really?
We should have zero dollars being sent to any government in Afghanistan.
I asked Secretary Blinken about this, and his response was: Well, I can't guarantee it, and if they--you know, if they are meeting expectations and they are acting and behaving properly, they might get this money.
Really?
I don't see a scenario or a world in which U.S. taxpayer dollars would be going to the Taliban. It makes utterly no sense at all.
But we have spending that is literally out of control. The only time I have ever heard a Democrat--most of the time, they are honest in that they don't care about the debt. But the only time I have ever heard them say anything about it is when they say: Well, you know, it happens because you cut taxes.
Well, you know, it is verifiably false. You can go back to the Reagan tax cuts, when the rates went from 70 to 50, and then from 50 to 28.
Do you know what happened?
The government got more revenue because, when you tax people less, when you let them keep more of their own money, guess what. Their incentives to produce go up, and the economy grows by leaps and bounds. So when Reagan cut taxes dramatically, the economy responded and grew tremendously.
When we cut taxes in 2017, it was the same thing. It was the same thing: Revenue didn't go down. Revenue went up.
So how did the deficit get worse? Why did the deficit get worse? Was it because we cut taxes in 2017?
No. It was because we piled on the money. We just were spending money like there was no tomorrow.
So, before we got to the extraordinary times we have now, where everything is about COVID and we are just going to spend money like there is no tomorrow, we were borrowing $1 trillion a year. The main segments of government--Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, other welfare, and military--probably comprise three-fourths or more of government.
If you look at that on an annual basis, before you get to the extraordinary binge over the last 2 years, we were already $1 trillion short every year--$1 trillion short. So, last year, we added a couple trillion more, and our deficit for the year--for 1 year--was $3 trillion. We have never, ever borrowed that much.
There are going to be ramifications. You are already seeing some of the ramifications. You are seeing the prices in the grocery store go up; you are seeing the prices at the pump go up; you are seeing sometimes wages go up. But you are also seeing prices rising faster than wages, which often happens in an inflationary cycle.
Some people have trouble comprehending these numbers.
What is a billion? What is a trillion?
Reagan had an analogy he did. He said: If you want to know how big ``a billion'' is, take thousand-dollar bills and put them in your hand, and when you have them about 4-inches high, you have got $1 million. But if you want to know how much or how tall a stack of $1,000 would be if you had $1 trillion, it would be 60 miles high--over 60 miles high.
That is what kind of money we are talking about. That was to get to a trillion.
So we have $1 trillion of institutional debt that is added every year, but now we are talking about a time when they are talking about adding, in one bill, $3.5 trillion. The bill that they have before us has $1 billion in spending for every page. Every page of the bill has an extra billion dollars in spending. It is extraordinary. We have never, ever seen anything like this.
What happens when a country destroys its currency?
We have examples in history. In Germany, in 1923, the money was starting to lose its value in about September. A loaf of bread might have cost 100 mark when, before, it cost 1 mark. Two weeks later, it was 1,000 marks, but then 2 weeks later, it was 10,000 marks, and then it was a million, and then it was several million. This happened in a 2-month period of time.
People say: Oh, when it comes, when the currency unravels, it will be gradual.
In Germany, it happened in a 2-month period.
In Venezuela, the currency is completely worthless. It is the same in Germany. It is almost better to burn your currency for fuel or warmth than it is to spend it. This is what happens when you have runaway spending and out-of-control deficits. Venezuela is one of the richest countries in South America. They have more oil underground than Saudi Arabia, but, frankly, socialism doesn't work. Socialism is this borrow and spend. It has this alarming tendency to want to offer everybody everything and say it is going to be free. Many of these things backfire.
For the last year, we have been saying: Oh, gosh. We feel sorry for workers, so we are going to pay them while they are unemployed.
But guess what. If you pay them more than the market wage, more of them will choose unemployment, and more of them will choose unemployment, and more of them will stay unemployed for a longer period of time. We found this out in the 2008 recession.
During the 2008 recession, we extended unemployment. It is normally 26 weeks, paid for by a tax, and it largely works within the confines of a State-run program. We extended it to 99 weeks--almost 2 years.
But do you know what the studies found?
This is part of the syndrome we have around here. It is sort of the ``big heart, small brain'' syndrome. I think many of these people want to help people; they just don't understand that what they are doing is actually hurting the same people they are trying to help.
So if you extend unemployment to 99 weeks, and then, all of a sudden, the guy, at 99 weeks--or woman--says, ``I need to get a job,'' and they go to the employer and say, ``I have been out of work for 99 weeks, and I have been on unemployment,'' and the other person who is applying for the job says, ``Well, I have been out of work for 10 weeks, and I am looking for a job,'' who do you think the employer hires?
Every time, it is the person out of work for 10 weeks.
As for the person who hasn't worked for 99 weeks, they are like: There might be something wrong here. We might have gotten to the point where we have lost the work ethic.
So what have you done to the people who you try to help?
You have actually kept them out of the workplace so long that they become unemployable.
After they become unemployable, what do they become?
They become the permanently unemployable, the nonworking part.
Do you wonder who this is?
Sixty-two percent of the country is in the workforce, and 38 percent is not. These are people who are permanently out of the workforce. These aren't people who can't work. These are just people who, for one reason or another, are no longer in the workforce.
Now, some of them really can't work, and we have sympathy for that, but many of them are people who just stayed out of work too long or took the wrong incentives or became addicted to drugs or alcohol because they weren't working.
So there are things we can do in our country, but if we are not careful, it is going to slip away from us. I don't want our country to be Venezuela, and I don't want our country to destroy its currency, but what we are offering is a more difficult sell because the other side is going to give you free college and free daycare and free cars and free cell phones.
What we are offering is opportunity. What we are offering is the freedom to try to strive. We are offering equality before the law, not equality of outcome after you have done your work, after you have tried to participate--equality before the law.
One of the interesting things that I think isn't often grasped by people is that if you want equal outcomes, if you want everybody to be the same and you want to equalize everybody, you actually have to treat them unequally.
In our country, it took a while, but we have gotten to the point where people truly believe in the concept of equality before the law. But if you also want to believe in equal outcomes at the end, realize you can't believe in both. They are mutually exclusive. You cannot believe in equality before the law if you want equal outcomes.
If you want this so-called equity at the end, you want everybody to be equal at the end, you have to treat them unequally because some people are either born with more talent, born with more money, born with more sense, luckier, work harder--there are a lot of reasons.
If you put 100 people in a room and you give them all 5 bucks, within an hour, somebody will have more. Somebody had some cigarettes. Somebody really wanted to smoke, and they have a dollar. The money spreads around the room. They have done these experiments. Money doesn't stay in one
place, but it is by and large, in a free society, based on work. But once the government becomes in charge of things, it becomes less of a meritocracy and becomes more of a society based on who you know.
There are rich people--don't get me wrong. When you look at socialism, there are rich people: Maduro, Chavez, Castro--incredibly rich people. They own their own islands. They have billions of dollars. Their relatives are all rich.
So instead of a society mostly based on merit--we talk about the greatness of America. One of the most important things about capitalism and freedom and what happened in America is, for the first time, it wasn't based on who you were; it wasn't based on royal lineage. For the most part, Europe was, you know, longtime landowners and royalty, and a very small percentage of the public did very well.
In fact, before 1820, before the Industrial Revolution, virtually everybody in the world--96, 98 percent of the world lived in extreme poverty. A bare subsistence level. Barely enough to eat. There was no obesity because there was barely enough food. You just scraped by. That was 98 percent of the world.
Fast-forward to today, after we have adopted what Adam Smith talked about as far as trade, division of labor, and capitalism, do you know what we have now? When you look at poverty--less than $2 a day in the world--it is less than 10 percent of the world. You won't find this on television. There is not going to be any good news on television or in the newspaper. The poorest people in our country actually are equivalent to the middle class in most countries. We are a huge success, but we are a country misguided and led astray by media that aren't honest.
For example, if you watched CNN, you would think that nobody is getting vaccinated, and it is a complete disaster, and, whoa, we are stuck in this rut because no one is vaccinated. It is completely untrue. Over 90 percent of people over 65, who are the most vulnerable, are vaccinated. Now, sure, there are a lot of younger people who aren't vaccinated, and there are some older people, but 90 percent is a pretty good success. Over age 50, it is like 75, 80 percent of people. People are informed. They know this is a disease that can affect any age but affects primarily the older ages.
For example, the one truth you won't be told is that an 85-year-old has a 10,000 times greater chance of dying than a 10-year-old. Now, you think we should treat them the same? If you were their doctor, do you think a 10-year-old should get the same healthcare and the same prescriptions for what they need to do as an 85-year-old? That makes no sense at all.
I see 10-year-olds and I see 5-year-olds out on the Mall--my wife and I were walking down to the Lincoln Memorial the other day, and I saw 5- year-olds in groups, led by teachers, wearing masks outside. There is no science to that.
We have Dr. Fauci spreading mistruths across the country, saying we have to forcibly vaccinate the kids? There is no science behind any of that. In fact, England is rejecting what we are doing. In England, because of the age skew, because of what they are seeing--that the people most at risk are of an older age--they are actually saying: Instead of forcibly vaccinating children, why don't we try to make the vaccine doses available for the elderly? Why don't we target our care to those who are at highest risk?
We have a problem in our country. We have people who have so politicized science that there are people struggling and dying every day because they have never heard about monoclonal antibodies. We have people dying every day because the government, at the behest of Dr. Fauci and a few other people, has said: You can't get monoclonal antibodies if you are in the hospital.
I talk to people every day who really have not yet heard of monoclonal antibodies, who get COVID again after being fully vaccinated or sometimes not being vaccinated and are not getting the treatment because Dr. Fauci says: If you are in the hospital, you don't get it.
So we have medicine that is coming from on high, from a central authority like the politburo, and doctors are afraid to prescribe. This has never happened in our country before. Doctors were able to make their own decisions based on their own experience, based on studies, based on real-life examples, but using their own discretion. Now doctors are afraid to prescribe monoclonal antibodies, and many of them are disallowed from prescribing it to an inpatient.
Realize the ridiculous nature of that. You are in the emergency room. You are sick, and you are coughing. You might be dying from COVID. You get to the emergency room. You don't know what to say. You can barely talk. Your spouse has to be able to tell the doctor ``Please stop'' in an emergency room. Give them the monoclonal antibodies before they are admitted because once they are admitted, we won't treat them. It is the same way with symptoms. You have to have symptoms within the first 10 days. If you don't have symptoms--if you are on day 11, you won't get monoclonal antibodies. It is completely arbitrary, it is capricious, and it has to do with government-mandated guidelines.
Let's take some of the other truths or mistruths that are out there.
I have said over and over again that cloth masks don't work because they don't. Peer-reviewed studies have shown time and time again that cloth masks don't work. But when Dr. Fauci tells you that all masks work, when he comes in all draped with three masks on himself with little insignias, clever insignias of different sports teams, he is actually spreading a mistruth that causes lives to be lost.
Why? Let's say you have a 75-year-old woman and she gets COVID, and her husband is taking care of her. Do you think the advice to go into the room to feed her, bathe her, help her get in and out of her clothes while she is sick, while wearing a cloth mask is a good idea or a bad idea? It is malpractice. Yet, for some reason, the leftwing media has lauded this man as the second coming, and what he is telling you is absolutely verifiably dangerous to your health.
The only mask that really works of any real value is the N95 mask. The surgical masks have some value but not very much. Most of the air is going around the mask. They just aren't of value. But you have to submit. The man is telling you to do it; you got to do what you got to do. But the thing is, when you tell people something is safe, they tend to react to that and have behavior, and in their behavior, they are in favor of something that may well actually be risky behavior for them.
The vaccinations--because we ignore natural immunity, we directed the vaccine to the wrong people and still are. For example, because of Dr. Fauci's lead--India is accepting his lead as well, and India does not have enough vaccine. They have a billion people. They can't vaccinate enough people fast enough. So if you have a billion people and you have 200 million doses of vaccine, who do you think you should give it to? Should you give it to the 10-year-old the same as the 85-year-old? No. That is ridiculous. But what about two 65-year-olds and one of them has had COVID and one of them hasn't?
The studies are plentiful. The studies are throughout that say that if you have already had it, you have natural immunity to COVID, as good or better than the vaccine.
Do you think it makes good public health policy to say that everybody who is 65 should get it instead of saying: Have you had it? Why don't we check you for antibodies if you think you have had it? Maybe you should wait until we have vaccinated every 65-year-old who doesn't have immunity.
These are real things. These are real discussions. But if you have these, unless it is on the Senate floor--actually, that is not even true. You can say this on the Senate floor, and YouTube will take it down. I have had it happen. I have given speeches on the floor that YouTube takes down.
So this is a world in which people need to realize and get back to the ideas of classical liberalism where we debated things. Classical liberalism was about skepticism; it was about you having your opinion and me having my opinion. But the difference between the elitist or the collectivist point of view and the individual right point of view is, I believe you have every right to your opinion.
But if you are a collectivist and you believe that, from the very top down, all medical decisions come from Dr. Fauci, and if he doesn't want you to
fly, you don't get to fly--see, it is different from individual liberty because I think if you have a differing opinion, you are welcome to your opinion.
If an airline has a policy I don't like, maybe I choose not to fly, but the idea that we are going to restrict everyone's behavior based on what they decide to do--what is next? People eat too many cheeseburgers. We are not going to give them a heart stent because we think they haven't behaved and haven't listened to the doctors on what they should be eating?
There is no end to this. But in the end, if we are not careful, we are going to spend this country into oblivion. COVID is a big cause of the extra spending we have now, but I can tell you, there are ramifications that are coming quick. They are coming in the form of higher prices. But there is no reason in the world for us to default. We have plenty of money. We should simply pay for the interest based on what comes in every month.
With that, I would like to reserve my time and turn it over.
Sure.
I guess ``surprised'' is not the word I would choose; I would say disappointed.
You know, the tea party movement--we had 100,000 people on the Mall out there. People were concerned about the debt. They were concerned about constitutional government.
I remember you and I meeting for the first time and talking about how we needed to reverse some of these terrible precedents that had allowed government to grow large and that the courts need to reform government, as well as government be reformed from its elected officials.
But, yes, we had a great debate that summer. In the summer of 2011, we said we wouldn't raise the debt ceiling without reform.
Without any reform.
Yes. I remember when, a couple of years after that, we actually became that--our economy was equal to our debt. So the gross domestic product--how much everything is worth that is produced in the whole country--was about 17 or 18 billion at the time, as the debt sort of crossed that.
We are now, depending on how you measure it, some say at like 140 percent of our GDP, and the interesting thing is, that is about where Greece was when Greece began to declare its bankruptcy and was unable to pay its bills.
It is alarming. It is foolish and unwise for us to say: Oh, there are no consequences. I think there will be consequences, and the No. 1 thing that we are seeing now is inflation.
Yes. And I think that you are right. Having the world's currency allows us--you know, many countries trade in dollars. You will go into marketplaces all around the world, and what they are actually exchanging is dollars. So as we have bought more goods than we have exported, we import more than we export, we paid for that in dollars. Some have described that as being able to export our inflation.
People have also said: Well, the dollar isn't perfect. It is a fiat currency. It is being inflated.
But everybody else is so bad that we are sort of the cleanest shirt in a closet full of dirty shirts.
So, yes, I think being the reserve currency has allowed us to last longer, but there are immutable rules of economics that eventually catch up to a country, and I think we approach those. I don't think anybody can predict exactly when we get there, but I think we are approaching a time--and it may not be a gradual unraveling. You know, if you look back at the history of our marketplace, we have had these black swan events. We have had these events where the marketplace, in 7 or 8 days in our history, most of the losses have happened calamitously.
Even in 2011, when the market went down, there was a debate. They said: Oh, it is because we risked the debt ceiling.
Well, many of us thought that the marketplace went down at that time because we actually continued to borrow without reforming the process.
It is based on faith, and so when does the faith end? Faith is not something particularly--it is hard to determine faith in the dollar. One way you can determine it is, will people buy our bonds. One of the indications that people lose faith in our currency is that when, to borrow money, you see your bond prices rise; you see interest prices rise. I think that is coming.
You know, we are already seeing inflation at a 5-percent rate. Typically, you will see the interest rates rise as well. And there is going to be a time there are going to be repercussions. I fully believe that you cannot continue to borrow at this rate without ultimately suffering, perhaps, an economic calamity. And I want to stop that for our country.