| Time | Text |
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Pension System Flaws
00:08:30
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| 10% of the people on medical assistance live right in Woonsocket, in this state. | |
| And by trade, I'm a pharmacist. | |
| And I've got so many stories of fraud and abuse in the welfare system. | |
| It's incredible. | |
| I was working in Woonsocket, and a woman on medical assistance wanted to get a six-month supply of their medicine. | |
| And I told them, no, you can only get a month's supply at a time, and you can get a refill, so you have to come back every month. | |
| She didn't like that idea, so she went home and called her social worker. | |
| The social worker called me about an hour later and said, now you have to give her a six-month supply of her medicine. | |
| So I did, and come to find out the reason she wanted a six-month supply of her medicine. | |
| She was spending the winter in Hawaii. | |
| And you paid for that. | |
| The state employee pensions and job security. | |
| When the E-1 government tries to cut state pensions, what happens is the guy at the top never gets hired. | |
| It's always the last guy hired that's at the bottom that gets cut, because of funding. | |
| So, even if you're making $100,000, you're totally incompetent, you probably don't even show up for work, You still can't get fired because you get bumped down to the $80,000 job. | |
| The guy making $80,000 gets bumped down to the $60,000 job. | |
| And it goes all the way down to the new guy that just got hired three months ago. | |
| He's probably doing a great job and makes $26,000 a year. | |
| There's no accountability. | |
| Unions, it's almost impossible to hire somebody that's in a union. | |
| There's no incentive to excel in the union. | |
| There's no merit pay. | |
| Everything, the whole, all unions are based on years service. | |
| It doesn't matter whether you've been there two years, I mean, if you've been there two years and you're doing ten times as much work as the guy that's been there twenty years. | |
| The guy that's been there twenty years is going to make more than you do. | |
| It doesn't happen that way in the real world. | |
| And we all know that Rhode Island's pension system is underfunded to the tune of like $3 billion, because what they do is they just don't pay into the system. | |
| What they really need to do is change the whole pension system to like a 401 , where if so much comes out of a person's pay, it goes into an account with their name on it, and the state has to match that. | |
| And then it's their money. | |
| None of this nonsense about, no matter what happens to the investments, the taxpayers have to make up and guarantee that benefit that they're going to retire on. | |
| Nobody can afford to do that. | |
| I don't think there's a single company that has a private pension plan like that. | |
| So we have to change from a defined benefit plan where they guarantee that 80% of their last three years pay. | |
| And remember a few years back when the General Assembly changed, we voted constitutionally to change general offices for four years. | |
| They said it was going to save money in campaigns. | |
| It didn't save any money in campaigns. | |
| The whole reason behind it is, once they get in power, they're there for four years, they can give their buddies those $80,000 and $100,000 a year jobs, then they retire based on the three years pay. | |
| There's people that worked in the General Assembly when they were getting paid $300 a year, so they paid like $30 a year into the pension system. | |
| And they get that $100,000 a year job for four or five years. | |
| It's basically your pension is based on the last three years. | |
| So there's people in Rhode Island collecting pensions. | |
| They've paid probably $30,000 into the pension system, and they're collecting $70,000 pensions for life. | |
| And that's-- it's just insane. | |
| And not only that, people were living so much longer. | |
| When Social Security was first set up, the average lifespan in the United States was 47 years old. | |
| And they set the retirement age at 62. | |
| And there were, I think there were 32 people working for every person that was collecting. | |
| Now it's almost down to two to one. | |
| So two people are working today, money comes out of their pay, goes right to somebody on Social Security. | |
| Social Security is one of the biggest Ponzi schemes ever. | |
| You would have been so much better off if the money went into a private investment of your own. | |
| If they had done that with your money, your employees match, you would have ten times as much money. | |
| So instead of getting that $1,200 a month check from Social Security, you get $12,000 in turn. | |
| That's what would have happened if it would have been kept in an account with your name on it. | |
| Social Security returns like a .9% return a year. | |
| And nobody would stand for that. | |
| The welfare state. | |
| Since 1964, the United States has spent $7 trillion on anti-poverty programs. | |
| Has it solved anything? | |
| No. | |
| Basically, before 1964, private charities took care of everybody that really needed help. | |
| There was very little fraud, abuse, waste. | |
| Because the people who really needed private charities, the Red Cross, churches, Salvation Army, they knew who needed help and who didn't. | |
| But now we've just grown this huge bureaucracy of social welfare programs. | |
| And they keep calling it a safety net. | |
| It's more like a trampoline. | |
| I mean, just... Could you take the microphone in your hand? | |
| Can you step to the side of the river? | |
| Yeah, we can't see the full screen. | |
| Oh. | |
| Thank you. | |
| OK, I mean, this is part of the problem of the Obamacare plan. | |
| Whenever anything's free, it's overused. | |
| People will use something that's free. | |
| I mean, have you ever gone to any kind of organization where they're handing out something free and let it not be used? | |
| They're adding 30 million people to the rolls for healthcare. | |
| And 30% of the doctors in the country say they're going to quit their practices because the reimbursements aren't even worth keeping, keeping their practice open. | |
| So this Obamacare is just going to be complete train wreck. | |
| I don't know about you, but I'm kind of tired of people making bad decisions and then we pay the bill. | |
| I mean, whether it's drug addiction, alcohol abuse, have multiple children. | |
| I can't tell you the number of medical assistance cards, but back when they had them now, they had debit cards, so they don't even have to do anything. | |
| You'd see one woman's name on it, with eight children, with four different last names. | |
| I mean, it's just totally irresponsible behavior. | |
| And I think it's about time that we stop paying for it. | |
| If private charities want to pay for it, fine. | |
| And they learn the behavior from one generation to the next. | |
| There's just no incentive. | |
| I mean, I've seen three generations of the same family come in and get their, you know, they get their valium, get their painkillers, and it's just a continuous cycle. | |
| My family used to have a drugstore in Attleboro, and we used to sell lottery tickets. | |
| And of course, the first of every month, when the welfare checks came out, we'd sell a lot of water to tenants. | |
| So, that's where a lot of the money goes. | |
| Of course, the government doesn't mind that, because they want to get it back. | |
| And that's six months supply of your meds. | |
| So, how do we get through this mess? | |
| Units, the whole job of public service unions is to expand government. | |
| They want more jobs, which means more union jobs. | |
| They have a vested interest in not doing anything efficiently. | |
| If they don't do it efficiently, then we have to hire more people to do the same job. | |
| And like I said, there's no incentive to do a good job. | |
|
Studies on Head Start
00:02:09
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| Everywhere I work that has a union, the net effect of a union is the good people leave because they don't need the protection of the union, and the union pay isn't good enough because they're good employees, they can earn more. | |
| The bad employees stay because they need the protection of the union. | |
| And then the media employees say, well, I'll stay around because I like the job security, but that guy doesn't work hard, so I'm not going to leave it. | |
| So the whole union system just, there's no incentive to do anything well. | |
| Every government program, whenever it fails, the first thing they do is say they're understaffed and underfunded. | |
| How many times have you heard that? | |
| Every time there's a failure of any government system. | |
| So the politicians give him more money. | |
| Give him more manpower. | |
| And then, two years later, something else happens. | |
| And it fails. | |
| A couple of examples. | |
| Head Start. | |
| Everybody talks about what a great program Head Start is. | |
| Most of the studies that have been done on Head Start show that the first few years after Head Start, the kids have an advantage. | |
| But after that, there's absolutely no difference. | |
| We're spending billions of dollars on Head Start, and it doesn't do anything? | |
| It's basically a glorified babysitter service. | |
| The D.A.R.E. | |
| program. | |
| How many... does Cumberland & Lincoln have D.A.R.E. | |
| programs? | |
| All the studies that have been done, the University of Chicago, I think, has done 11 or 12 studies on the D.A.R.E. | |
| program. | |
| 11 of them said that it accomplished absolutely nothing, and one said it actually increased drug use by introducing kids to drugs. | |
| And basically, it was a political payoff to the police unions, because right in the federal legislation, it says the DARE program has to be taught by a police officer in uniform. | |
| So it was basically just a political payoff. | |
| You can't have a doctor, a nurse, or a pharmacist go into a school under the DARE program and talk about drug abuse. | |
| There was probably at most three qualified people to do it. | |
| But it has to be a police officer in uniform. | |