Monetary theory spend as much as you’ve got borrow as much as you can and somehow we’re going to combat the influence of china by borrowing more money from china it doesn’t really seem to make a lot of sense but that’s where we are so we have before us a bill that will
Simply add to the debt we will go further in debt you might make the argument that we’re actually less strong as a nation the more in debt we are where’s the opposition now there’s no opposition on one side of the aisle and on the other side there is feigned opposition
Republicans will feign opposition to the debt and they will say well yes we care about the debt and the other side spends too much and borrows too much you hear republicans throughout the land campaigning against the debt only to come to washington and vote for
Most of the debt so what we end up with is a 28 trillion dollar debt we actually borrow more in a month than we used to borrow in a year in march of this year we borrowed 660 billion dollars in one month the proposals for spending are alarming
We have spent and borrowed more in the last two years than we did during world war ii there are going to be repercussions of so much borrowing in such a short period of time we are seeing a misallocation of capital throughout the economy we are seeing a grossly inflated stock
Market we are starting to see inflation throughout the supply chain throughout the economy there are going to be repercussions the question we have to ask ourselves are are we willing to look at the example of countries like venezuela or zimbabwe that completely destroyed their currency people say that couldn’t happen in
America it largely hasn’t happened because we’ve been the reserve currency of the world we’ve been fortunate people describe it as having the cleanest shirt in a closet full of dirty shirts the dollar is weakened by such extravagant spending and yet people still cling to the dollar because the other currencies are weaker
But this bill simply adds more to the debt and we say we’re going to combat china through this bill but we’re going to combat china by increasing a department of government the national science foundation that is actually probably one of the most wasteful agencies in government william proxmeier was a conservative
Democrat from wisconsin back in the 60s and 70s he started an award called the golden fleece award one of the first awards he gave order in the chamber please one of the first awards that william proxmeyer gave the golden police award was an award for a study
About what makes people fall in love you’d think with the lampooning through the years the ridiculous lizards on treadmills of panamanian frogs that after a while people would say instead of giving this agency that is so full of waste and ridiculous studies maybe instead of giving them more money
We should give them less money so perhaps if we wanted them to reform we would say to the national science foundation instead of increasing your budget 68 why don’t reduce their budget 10 percent and say behave better why don’t we reform how they pick their committees
So for example if you want to study you need order in the chamber if you want to study cocaine and you want to study japanese quail using cocaine and you want to know if they’re more sexually promiscuous do you know how you get approval for your funding you call up your other
Buddies that study cocaine and animals and you say hey i’ve got this great new study would you guys like to join in it and and be my peer review committee so it’s actually the ridiculous studies that we discover they’re being voted on by people who are selected by the people doing the studies
So what they do is they select other people with ridiculous studies they say we’ll vote for yours if you vote for mime so how do we get you know a half a million dollars spent studying panamanian frogs they want to know whether or not the mating call of the country frogs in
Panama is different than the mating calls of the city frogs well coming from a rural state i can tell you the mating cause of the country folk is always different than the city folk we could uphold the audience our co our quail more sexually promiscuous on cocaine
I think we could have polled the audience so the thing is there could be some reforms so for example as much as i’m opposed to government spending there are some important diseases let’s say alzheimer’s cancer diabetes heart disease why wouldn’t we make the committees for the national science foundation
Why wouldn’t we make the committees have someone on there from one of the big five diseases why wouldn’t we put a taxpayer advocate on there what would we have some sort of inspector general process so this doesn’t happen you know we have to review this this is an academic point
We’ve now discovered that the nih was funding the wuhan lab so we should have oversight on what happens but after 50 years of abuse at the national science foundation we’re still studying will people eat ants to combat climate change seriously that was a study how many ants will people eat and how
Many ants do you have to eat to reduce the global warming by one degree it’s a lot of ants but the thing is is that’s the kind of studies that we’re having coming out of here and we don’t make it any better by increasing their budget
If you are a wasteful agency and we give you more money we’ll get more waste if you want less waste and this goes not only for this it goes for the military because for any other agency of government if you give any agency more government money
You’ll get more waste you won’t get less so the the the cocaine was actually nih not nsf nih has got some of the same problems one of the ones from the nih in recent years was two million dollars to see if someone in the in the buffet line when you’re going through the
Buffet or luby’s cafeteria and someone in front of you sneezes on the food are you more or less likely to eat the food 2 million bucks now look if you want to come to me and say we should study alzheimer’s disease i’ve got open ears heart disease diabetes but if you want
To study whether somebody sneezing on the food makes you more or less likely to eat the food that’s just ridiculous the american people know it’s ridiculous if the american people could see what we’re voting on and say oh we’re going to combat china by giving more money
To the most wasteful agency in the world and where’s the money coming from is it out of a surplus can we go over to the federal reserve and open this big safe there’s a big case of money is there a rainy day fund is there a savings account that we can
Tap into to say we’re going to have government-funded research to combat china well no we have to borrow the money from china think of the irony we borrow the money from china to put it into technology we complain about chinese socialism which is the government running everything and spending all the money
And so what are we going to do the same thing we’re going to borrow the money from china and then we’re going to have government-directed research that we all say oh socialism is the government directing this then we’re going to do the same thing we’re going to be stronger than china
A good example of how and this is sort of a technical detail of how the committee process works and how grant funding works there was 700 000 allotted from the national science foundation for autism look i i know parents who have kids with autism i can be convinced that the
Federal government can be involved in some way but the seven hundred thousand dollars that was allotted for autism was then taken and subcontracted to a bunch of eggheads who wanted to listen to a tape of neil armstrong on the moon so if you’re as old as me you can
Remember being in school and seeing the crackly black and white pictures coming back from the moon and hearing neil armstrong say one small step for man one giant leap for mankind or did he say one small step for amen so group of researchers and i used the term loosely
At the national science foundation got seven hundred thousand dollars of autism money to study one word the preposition a did neil armstrong use the letter a or the word a or did he not so they studied and they were diligent they listened to this 20-second clip
Over and over and over again i think it took him a year of listening to this they wrote reports and and and had findings and you know what their conclusion was in the end we just don’t know we just don’t know was it one small step for a man or one
Small step for amen so this is something you could fix before throwing and heaping more borrowed money on the national science foundation maybe we could say you can’t subcontract money that was meant for alzheimer’s to ridiculous research how would you stop it maybe you would have a committee that reviews the grants
That has someone on the committee from one of the big five diseases that actually says should we be spending the money on autism or should we spend the money on neil armstrong statement on the moon should we be spending it on this versus diabetes see everything’s a trade-off everybody
Comes to washington and if you ask them you know the people who advocate for alzheimer’s or diabetes or cancer are you getting enough money when i tell them the autism parents that their money went to study neil armstrong you know what i get dropped jaws and people going you’ve got
To be kidding me my mother or father is dwindling away from alzheimer’s and they spent money studying neil armstrong did he say one step giant step for man or one small step this is uh lizards on the treadmill dr coburn was a senator here for a long
Time and he liked to talk about waste as i do and so this is a decade ago maybe more that senator coburn was on the floor and he would talk about lizards on a treadmill i think his was lizards underwater on a treadmill or no no it was it was shrimp on a
Treadmill i think but they’ve got lizards on treadmill they’ve got shrimp they’ve got crawfish on treadmill but think about it really we are a big proud country but we are a trillion dollars in debt before we get to all the extra stuff before we get to all the coven bailouts
We’re a trillion dollars in debt just from the institutional expenses of the country so we bring in about three trillion dollars in revenue and we spend about four trillion of the money that we bring in three trillion is a lot we could spend that on a lot of good things but
We we can’t simply just say we’re going to spend it on you know lizards on a treadmill that somehow we have enough money to do that so of the expenses that we have most of the money is consumed by medicare medicaid social security food stamps and the military and then a
Variety of welfare programs but that consumes a trillion dollars more than comes in so we’ve been meeting over the last year and just spending extra money beyond the trillion dollar deficit so we have a trillion dollar deficit just from our ordinary expenses and then we add to that
You know a couple trillion here for covid last year a couple trillion more we’re going to do a couple trillion more for free college free day care free this free that but it’s not free there’s no such thing as a free lunch there is nothing in this world that you
Will get for free you will either have the future paying for it order in the chamber you will either have the future paying for it our kids and our grandkids paying for it or you will pay for it through inflation or you pay for it through default
And you can default in a dramatic way through the destruction of a currency or you can default in a gradual way through price inflation as it is we’re starting to see the price inflation take off there are people concerned about inflation that’s already in the stock market
And where this goes from here but i don’t think this bill makes us stronger in fact i think the chinese sit back and you know hold their hand up and sort of tinder and laugh at america thinking they’re going to be stronger by borrowing more money from china so i
Just don’t think it makes us any stronger at all i think it makes us weaker and it would be one thing if it weren’t being so horribly wasted lizards on a treadmill so they get the lizard on a treadmill and then they have active x-rays to look
At its joints they were curious as to why lizard waddles so have you ever seen a lizard or an iguana they walk funny they wad also why do they waddle you know what do their joints look like in x-rays and so we spent you know 1.5 million dollars studying lizards on a treadmill
One of the perennial problems in the third world is the black market we have it in our country it’s sort of a function of when taxes and regulation in the official economy become so onerous that you need to escape the official economy that’s what the black market is
So a good example is new york city the taxes on cigarettes are so high in new york city that you have a black market in fact the death of eric garner the sad death of eric garner being choked to death in new york city had to do with taxes and some people
Were offended by this echoes police brutality of course it was but it was police brutality based on exorbitant taxes that caused this man to be selling cigarettes loose cigarettes in order to try to make a living but that’s what happens when government becomes so big so in parts of africa uganda in particular
There’s a big black market and so god knows why or why in the world we’re spending our money studying this we decided to study gambling in uganda so we spent 30 thousand dollars studying gambling in uganda well it turns out the black market develops because they don’t have good title to their land
They don’t have good rule of law they don’t have the things that have made our country great but instead of sort of exporting think tank ideas on how great capitalism is we waste it through government grants studying why ugandans gamble it kind of is reminiscent going back to the wuhan lab
People say and this is what dr fauci’s been saying dr fauci says well who wouldn’t want to study the sars virus well yeah we should but then again why would we pay the chinese to do it well there’s all these viruses in china what are the chinese destitute
I think we’re here because the chinese are kicking our butt in trade and everybody wants everybody’s worried about china so we’re going to do all this stuff to combat china and yet we send money to a chinese lab now we’ve recently voted to change that but it’s been going on for decades
In fact dr fauci in committee the other day said he still trusts the chinese the chinese scientists seems oblivious to the fact that perhaps there’s a military influence in these labs and perhaps the scientists don’t do anything without permission of the chinese military perhaps that there was a militarization
Of the virus going on oblivious to that so there’s a space camp in alabama my kids went to it one year it’s a great camp and i’m all for it i you know would like to see more americans go if some american kids you know don’t have the means it’d be
Nice if we could help american kids go to space camp but i’m not so sure you know while we would borrow money from china to send kids in pakistan to space camp in alabama or to dollywood you know 250 000 we also spent over a million dollars in afghanistan
Doing an anti-drug program unfortunately really the drugs problems in our country they grow it they grow it like corn it’s a crop for them the problem is the demand comes from us we spent a million dollars on a public relations television programming in afghanistan and it was to convince the afghanis not to
Use drugs it was in english so the vast majority of them couldn’t understand or you know most of them don’t have television sets anyway but this is the kind of thing that runs rampant throughout our government so you know we talk about where would we find the resources to be a strong
Country again to do the things that we could do to combat what happens in china when we look at that and we say where could the money come from well we spend 50 billion dollars a year in afghanistan on the war it’s been going on 20 years
The war is 18 years past having any useful mission at all the mission was over probably once the taliban was defeated there was still some mission for bin laden but didn’t really require uh necessarily troops on the ground in nation building but we’ve been doing nation building in afghanistan
So our nation crumbles we worry about china you know the threat of the ascendants of china and yet you know what are we doing we’re borrowing money from china to build roads in afghanistan one of the things they did in afghanistan years ago is they were going to build a natural gas
Gas station this was to reduce the footprint of afghanistan the carbon footprint so this is the absurdities we sometimes go to with climate change this is a country that cooks their food on open fires often there’s a country with an average income about 800
Most people do not have a car so what do we decide to do for afghanistan to reduce their carbon footprint we decided to build a natural gas gas station so the natural gas gas station was built it was supposed to cost eight hundred thousand dollars but you know sometimes
Government’s not that efficient so they had a few cost overruns 83 and it ended up costing 45 million dollars so my question as i heard about this natural gas gas station was how many americans have a car that runs on natural gas i think there’s a handful people are
Really into it have converted their cars into running on natural gas there’s a trucking company i’m aware of you know it’s not a bad idea but it’s a bone-headed idiotic idea to build a gas station for natural gas vehicles in afghanistan they don’t have cars much less cars that run on natural gas
But we did it we spent 45 million dollars in afghanistan on it so my staff was over there looking at the waste and they said to the military can we go see the the famous natural gas gas station and as they they wanted to go see it the
Marines said well it would take two uh helicopters full of 30 marines in each helicopter to take you to the gas station so we were told it was too dangerous and we didn’t want to insist on something it was that dangerous so we spent 45 million on a gas station
That we can’t visit because too dangerous to serve up natural gas that nobody has a car that runs on natural gas and my imagination goes to the gas station all i can imagine is sort of copper tubing sticking out of the ground people running off with copper tubing we
Built major highways over there but one of the biggest problem is no cars but the other problem they have in afghanistan is people put their their camels and their tents and so if you ever want a car to go up and down the road you’ve got to shoo the
Camels and the tents off the road we decided to build luxury hotels see this is part of our national defense i think it was the overseas investment bank or whatever we spent 90 million dollars on a hotel in kabul well we didn’t quite get finished the the contractor built about half the
Hotel he built the shell of the hotel with no walls i think he completed one room so he could send pictures home to say he’s making progress the hotel was never built the guy ran off with like 60 million of the 90 million the hotel still sits there
And guess what it’s a shell of a building our people are worried about the taliban crawling up in it and shooting down into our embassy so the next thing is i’m surprised it’s not in this bill maybe who knows what’s in this bill they need another 250 grand to destroy the
What’s left of the hotel the guy ran off with the money and we have the shell of ability it’s a danger to our embassy so we need to tear it down so really you know we should have an amendment to put more money in this bill
To tear down the hotel the luxury hotel that we subsidized in afghanistan the list goes on and on and on the frustration of the american people is why does it never change william proxmoyer is talking about this in 1972 studying why people fall in love why do people date
Government’s doing dating apps studying why people are happy or unhappy studying whether or not if you take a selfie of yourself smiling and look at it later in the day whether or not that’ll make you happy seriously half a million here a million there is there anything in this bill that will
Stop that from happening so it’s been happening for 50 years you know we didn’t even authorize these things they just go on and on there’s no oversight you ask any questions nobody wants to give you any answers and it goes on and on now this isn’t just one party
Both parties do it and both parties are going to vote for this bill but i guarantee if you put up the different waste things that are going on in our government and you said that this is the agency the studying the mating call of the panamanian frog these are the agencies studying whether
Someone sneezes on your food do you think the american people would be with you they’re only with you because they don’t know what you’re doing today they don’t know that you’re wasting more money that you’re shoveling good money after bad they don’t know that this is more of the same
That this has been going on for 50 years and nobody republican or democrat is fixing the problem we’re just shoveling more money out the door we’re destroying our country we’re destroying our currency right now it’s a little bit at a time it’s coming to inflation but inflation’s out there it’s lurking
People are talking about it but there’s also another way you can destroy your country if you look at the 20th century and you look at the the decline in the stock market most of it’s in like seven days so those who think that we couldn’t have a precipitous correction
That there couldn’t be a precipitous correction where all of a sudden everybody wakes up in the marketplace and says oh my goodness the emperor has no clothes we’re 28 trillion dollars in debt and we have companies that have you know 200 to one price to earnings ratio we have companies that are worth
Hundreds and hundreds of dollars thousands of dollars and yet what is their profit some of them don’t make profit is there going to be a day where people wake up and say oh my goodness the stock market the emperor has no clothes and there’s a massive sell-off
I don’t know but i do worry that the stock market is grossly inflated i do worry when we pass out 1400 checks which we did not have we give them to everybody and what do the young people do with their checks buying gamestop so gamestop goes through the roof makes
No profit it’s a dying company and it goes through the roof because everybody gets giddy on it because everybody’s got all this free money there is no free money ultimately the fourteen hundred dollars we gave to people will be lost as wages don’t keep up with inflation it happens even as we speak
Inflation has been low but over the last decade the dollar lost 17 percent of its purchasing power do you think everybody in america got a 17 percent gain see this is sort of the difference between the scene and the unseen frederick bastiat was a a philosopher parliamentarian in france in the 19th century
And he talked a lot about this he wrote a book called the law and he talked about the scene and the unseen the it’s also the intended and the unintended people i call it the big heart small brain syndrome of washington everybody wants to help somebody we have
The same compassion we want to help those out of work but if you give people too much not to work then they won’t work if people don’t work for a long period of time they won’t be hired again this was illustrated when we extended unemployment to 99 weeks
It was done out of compassion but as we extended unemployment to 99 weeks what happened anybody who stayed out of work 99 weeks and came in looking for a job if there was another worker that had been out of work less guess who got hired every study showed this so if if an
Employer is faced with two employees one’s been out of work 10 weeks and one’s been out of work 99 weeks guess who gets hired one’s been out of work 10 weeks and so when you institutionalize unemployment when you pay people more from the government not to work than to work
You get a permanent class of unemployed and there comes a point at which they are not employable now what does that do to a people what does that do to a person see i think our self-esteem is tied up in what we do for a living and i think there’s self-esteem in every
Job from cleaning the floors to designing the carpet to creating the carpet to laying bricks to being a doctor a lawyer your self-esteem comes from being proud of your work but it comes from work you cannot get self-esteem without work and you can’t be given self-esteem we have some
Newfangled ideas in school that we just give it you know johnny can’t spell but we’re going to pat him on the back and give him a trophy because it’ll help his self-esteem know you have to earn self-esteem but if we get a whole class of people who doesn’t work it’s a problem
The lack of self-esteem the the worry and the concern that comes from this the the lack of what it takes to be a robust person is part of the problem with the sinking into despair and addiction that we have as a problem in our country this is another waste product project
This comes out of our state department so you know we fund the state department for diplomacy i’m for that but we end up funding things in the state department you wonder if they’re useful for diplomacy or whether they’re just pork barrel politics this was 850 000 that was given to a for-profit
Afghan television station to support the development of a national cricket league really so our state department which you know we have to pay ambassadors we got to pay assistant ambassadors we got to pay you know all the different personnel those protecting the ambassador in our embassies we’ve got to pay for
The embassies the electricity all that stuff we have to do i’m for that where do we get the money to pay for a cricket where is it the business of the u.s government but here’s the point does it ever get better did someone go my goodness someone stuck this little ear mark in
For the national cricket league does someone ever say oh my goodness we did this and we reform the process and say never again no we give them more money every year every agency and government gets more money if you think there is a waste problem in government and you want to fix it
It won’t get better if you give people more money you would have to give them less so what i do is i’d give everybody 99 of what they had last year if it’s a terrible agency like the national science foundation i might give them 50 of what they had
Last year and i would say to them prove to me that you’re not going to do this again so they were studying dating back in 72 in prox meyer lampooned them 50 years later they’re studying selfies they haven’t learned their lesson if you look at the process they pick
The people they want to approve their projects you scratch my back i’ll scratch yours you do cocaine studies hey me too we’ll you approve my cocaine study i’ll approve yours that’s what goes on with the national science foundation close to home and you may have seen it
Uh we call it a street car named waste uh it’s about a couple blocks from the capitol over on h street and it’s a streetcar they spent millions of dollars on and for years there was nobody on and for years it didn’t go anywhere it was a street car to nowhere basically
But we spent uh 1.6 million dollars on this and basically you could see it as a basically a trolley car with with nobody in it sort of this nostalgia it’s one thing to preserve something but it’s nothing to create some sort of thing that hasn’t existed for 50 years and nobody
Rides but that costs us a million six and often you’ll see it sitting vacant or not in use at all now we’ve decided that uh i don’t know why they even think they need this anymore because i think climate alarm alarmism is really perforated or penetrated all of our
Education but just in case there’s a child in the country that’s not afraid that the oceans will rise and cover the land that we’re all going to drown and that the polar bears are going to drown we need to make sure they know it through a special video game so we spent
A half a million dollars on a video app uh to try to convince our kids that the polar bears are drowning sometime soon and that the end order in the chamber around the corner will the chair uh inform me how much time i have rain 28 and a half minutes all right
I think uh at this point i would reserve the remainder of my time do you want to you ready
