Dan Bidondi Show - RI BLACKSTONE VALLEY TEA PARTY PART 2
Aired: 2010-04-18
Duration: 10:26


=== Pension System Flaws (08:30) ===

[00:00:00]  10% of the people on medical assistance live right in Woonsocket, in this state.
[00:00:05]  And by trade, I'm a pharmacist.
[00:00:09]  And I've got so many stories of fraud and abuse in the welfare system.
[00:00:14]  It's incredible.
[00:00:16]  I was working in Woonsocket, and a woman on medical assistance wanted to get a six-month supply of their medicine.
[00:00:24]  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.
[00:00:30]  She didn't like that idea, so she went home and called her social worker.
[00:00:34]  The social worker called me about an hour later and said, now you have to give her a six-month supply of her medicine.
[00:00:40]  So I did, and come to find out the reason she wanted a six-month supply of her medicine.
[00:00:45]  She was spending the winter in Hawaii.
[00:00:48]  And you paid for that.
[00:00:53]  The state employee pensions and job security.
[00:00:57]  When the E-1 government tries to cut state pensions, what happens is the guy at the top never gets hired.
[00:01:05]  It's always the last guy hired that's at the bottom that gets cut, because of funding.
[00:01:10]  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.
[00:01:20]  The guy making $80,000 gets bumped down to the $60,000 job.
[00:01:24]  And it goes all the way down to the new guy that just got hired three months ago.
[00:01:30]  He's probably doing a great job and makes $26,000 a year.
[00:01:34]  There's no accountability.
[00:01:35]  Unions, it's almost impossible to hire somebody that's in a union.
[00:01:42]  There's no incentive to excel in the union.
[00:01:44]  There's no merit pay.
[00:01:45]  Everything, the whole, all unions are based on years service.
[00:01:50]  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.
[00:01:59]  The guy that's been there twenty years is going to make more than you do.
[00:02:02]  It doesn't happen that way in the real world.
[00:02:07]  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.
[00:02:15]  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.
[00:02:28]  And then it's their money.
[00:02:30]  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.
[00:02:40]  Nobody can afford to do that.
[00:02:41]  I don't think there's a single company that has a private pension plan like that.
[00:02:46]  So we have to change from a defined benefit plan where they guarantee that 80% of their last three years pay.
[00:02:53]  And remember a few years back when the General Assembly changed, we voted constitutionally to change general offices for four years.
[00:03:01]  They said it was going to save money in campaigns.
[00:03:04]  It didn't save any money in campaigns.
[00:03:06]  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.
[00:03:18]  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.
[00:03:29]  And they get that $100,000 a year job for four or five years.
[00:03:34]  It's basically your pension is based on the last three years.
[00:03:37]  So there's people in Rhode Island collecting pensions.
[00:03:39]  They've paid probably $30,000 into the pension system, and they're collecting $70,000 pensions for life.
[00:03:48]  And that's-- it's just insane.
[00:03:50]  And not only that, people were living so much longer.
[00:03:53]  When Social Security was first set up, the average lifespan in the United States was 47 years old.
[00:03:58]  And they set the retirement age at 62.
[00:04:03]  And there were, I think there were 32 people working for every person that was collecting.
[00:04:08]  Now it's almost down to two to one.
[00:04:11]  So two people are working today, money comes out of their pay, goes right to somebody on Social Security.
[00:04:18]  Social Security is one of the biggest Ponzi schemes ever.
[00:04:22]  You would have been so much better off if the money went into a private investment of your own.
[00:04:27]  If they had done that with your money, your employees match, you would have ten times as much money.
[00:04:33]  So instead of getting that $1,200 a month check from Social Security, you get $12,000 in turn.
[00:04:41]  That's what would have happened if it would have been kept in an account with your name on it.
[00:04:44]  Social Security returns like a .9% return a year.
[00:04:48]  And nobody would stand for that.
[00:04:49]  The welfare state.
[00:04:54]  Since 1964, the United States has spent $7 trillion on anti-poverty programs.
[00:04:59]  Has it solved anything?
[00:05:02]  No.
[00:05:02]  Basically, before 1964, private charities took care of everybody that really needed help.
[00:05:07]  There was very little fraud, abuse, waste.
[00:05:10]  Because the people who really needed private charities, the Red Cross, churches, Salvation Army, they knew who needed help and who didn't.
[00:05:18]  But now we've just grown this huge bureaucracy of social welfare programs.
[00:05:25]  And they keep calling it a safety net.
[00:05:26]  It's more like a trampoline.
[00:05:31]  I mean, just... Could you take the microphone in your hand?
[00:05:37]  Can you step to the side of the river?
[00:05:39]  Yeah, we can't see the full screen.
[00:05:42]  Oh.
[00:05:42]  Thank you.
[00:05:50]  OK, I mean, this is part of the problem of the Obamacare plan.
[00:05:54]  Whenever anything's free, it's overused.
[00:06:00]  People will use something that's free.
[00:06:02]  I mean, have you ever gone to any kind of organization where they're handing out something free and let it not be used?
[00:06:10]  They're adding 30 million people to the rolls for healthcare.
[00:06:14]  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.
[00:06:23]  So this Obamacare is just going to be complete train wreck.
[00:06:27]  I don't know about you, but I'm kind of tired of people making bad decisions and then we pay the bill.
[00:06:36]  I mean, whether it's drug addiction, alcohol abuse, have multiple children.
[00:06:42]  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.
[00:06:53]  You'd see one woman's name on it, with eight children, with four different last names.
[00:06:59]  I mean, it's just totally irresponsible behavior.
[00:07:02]  And I think it's about time that we stop paying for it.
[00:07:04]  If private charities want to pay for it, fine.
[00:07:07]  And they learn the behavior from one generation to the next.
[00:07:10]  There's just no incentive.
[00:07:12]  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.
[00:07:23]  My family used to have a drugstore in Attleboro, and we used to sell lottery tickets.
[00:07:29]  And of course, the first of every month, when the welfare checks came out, we'd sell a lot of water to tenants.
[00:07:36]  So, that's where a lot of the money goes.
[00:07:38]  Of course, the government doesn't mind that, because they want to get it back.
[00:07:43]  And that's six months supply of your meds.
[00:07:47]  So, how do we get through this mess?
[00:07:50]  Units, the whole job of public service unions is to expand government.
[00:07:55]  They want more jobs, which means more union jobs.
[00:08:02]  They have a vested interest in not doing anything efficiently.
[00:08:07]  If they don't do it efficiently, then we have to hire more people to do the same job.
[00:08:12]  And like I said, there's no incentive to do a good job.

=== Studies on Head Start (02:09) ===

[00:08:17]  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.
[00:08:31]  The bad employees stay because they need the protection of the union.
[00:08:36]  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.
[00:08:46]  So the whole union system just, there's no incentive to do anything well.
[00:08:54]  Every government program, whenever it fails, the first thing they do is say they're understaffed and underfunded.
[00:09:00]  How many times have you heard that?
[00:09:02]  Every time there's a failure of any government system.
[00:09:05]  So the politicians give him more money.
[00:09:06]  Give him more manpower.
[00:09:08]  And then, two years later, something else happens.
[00:09:13]  And it fails.
[00:09:14]  A couple of examples.
[00:09:16]  Head Start.
[00:09:18]  Everybody talks about what a great program Head Start is.
[00:09:21]  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.
[00:09:29]  But after that, there's absolutely no difference.
[00:09:31]  We're spending billions of dollars on Head Start, and it doesn't do anything?
[00:09:35]  It's basically a glorified babysitter service.
[00:09:39]  The D.A.R.E.
[00:09:40]  program.
[00:09:41]  How many... does Cumberland & Lincoln have D.A.R.E.
[00:09:43]  programs?
[00:09:46]  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.
[00:09:51]  program.
[00:09:52]  11 of them said that it accomplished absolutely nothing, and one said it actually increased drug use by introducing kids to drugs.
[00:10:01]  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.
[00:10:10]  So it was basically just a political payoff.
[00:10:13]  You can't have a doctor, a nurse, or a pharmacist go into a school under the DARE program and talk about drug abuse.
[00:10:21]  There was probably at most three qualified people to do it.
[00:10:24]  But it has to be a police officer in uniform.