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April 18, 2010 - Dan Bidondi Show
10:26
RI BLACKSTONE VALLEY TEA PARTY PART 2
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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.
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.
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