This is a rush transcript from "Glenn Beck," April 12, 2011. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO, GUEST HOST: Does the government work for us or do we work for the government? Would you hire an employee who claimed he was saving you $38 billion, when in reality he was costing you more money than in the previous year of your business and you still needed to borrow $1 trillion just to stay afloat? You know what's coming.
Tonight, the federal government and your money. Here we go again. I know this sounds ridiculous, but you should not be surprised.
Shortly before midnight last Friday, President Obama, House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner and Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that the White House and the Congress had reached a stunning deal on cutting the federal government budget by $38 billion.
The president grumbled that the cuts were too deep, but he could live with them. Speaker Boehner grumbled that the cuts were not deep enough, but were deeper than he originally sought. Sen. Reid dispatched his favorite attack dog -- that would be the personality-challenged New York Sen. Chuck Schumer -- to threaten that the Democrats would cut no longer, since the Republicans were controlled by extremists. That's the same Sen. Schumer who revealed in a telephone call with reporters -- that he didn't know was being taped -- that the Senate Democratic Caucus -- which is all of the Senate Democrats -- had instructed him to refer to Tea Party Republicans as extremists.
The begrudging announcement that a government shutdown had been averted came as a surprise at the last minute, and conventional wisdom has it that when you settle a dispute like this, and each side is unhappy, you probably did a good job.
But there is nothing conventional about this agreement.
First, a little background. According to the Constitution and federal law and a 230-year-old tradition, the president proposes a budget sufficiently in advance of the fiscal year in which he wants to spend the money and the House of Representatives approves, modifies or disapproves. Then, whatever the House has voted on goes to the Senate, then back to the House, then to the president for his signature.
The process is supposed to produce a budget months in advance of the fiscal year so that federal agencies, so that people who sell things to the government, so that the financial community will have time to prepare for what the government will spend.
There is currently before the Congress two budget proposals.
One is for the remainder of this current fiscal year, which ends on September 30, 2011 and the other is a budget for the fiscal year that begins the next day, on October 1. As you can see, the government is woefully late for the 2011 budget, since we're halfway through that fiscal year. It is for the remainder of this 2011 fiscal year that the so-called deal that cut $38 billion was struck.
So, what did they cut $38 billion from? They cut it from what the president wanted to spend. And he wanted to spend far more in 2011 than he did spend in 2010. Thus, even with the so-called cut, spending for the remainder of 2011 will increase, not decrease.
As Sen. Rand Paul told me on this show last night, "Only in Washington can a budget that spends more than it did a year before, [and] with a larger deficit, be portrayed as cutting." He's right. And the Republicans who boasted that they cut $38 billion and the Democrats who condemned them for doing so are all playing a shell game.
America, we are on the precipice of a very deep abyss. It is an enormous hole that needs to be filled with $14.3 trillion and the president just wants to dig that hole deeper. Since Barack Obama became president he has increased the debt by $4 trillion. In the next six months, he wants to increase it by another trillion. And in the 2012 fiscal year, he wants to borrow another 1.7 trillion.
America, the White House and its enablers in Congress are out of control. They have tricked even well-intentioned folks into believing that the economy will collapse if we don't borrow more. That's nonsense. The economy will tank if we do borrow more. And it is utterly immoral, illegal and unconstitutional for the government to borrow when it has neither the intention nor the means to repay the loan.
Let me modify that. The government does repay its loans. It just does so with more loans.
Would you hire the people who run the federal government to run your business or your household or even your checkbook? The answer is obvious. And that leaves another obvious question: Why are these people running the government?
Content and Programming Copyright 2011 Fox News Network, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Copyright 2011 CQ-Roll Call, Inc. All materials herein are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of CQ-Roll Call. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home