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Feb. 20, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
27:21
Should The Government Mail You $5,000?

Trump Advisor Elon Musk has proposed that the American people should benefit from DOGE's savings, suggesting that US taxpayers be sent a $5K "refund" check. Will this work? Also today, Sen. Paul makes a critical point about how to preserve and expanding DOGE savings.

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Time Text
Why Not Cut Foreign Policy? 00:06:49
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning into the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Very well, and I'm looking forward to it.
I wonder if I'll be on that list.
Am I going to get $5,000?
You're going to get $5,000.
Yeah, I'll take it.
We better round up some people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that's been in the news.
They talk about it.
And I'm in a way disappointed.
It's too much gimmickery in this.
I don't understand it.
So the proposal is that Trump and Musk says that we're saving so much money.
We ought to give it back to the people, which sounds very good.
So just cut taxes, you know, let them keep it.
But no, they want to issue the checks and taxpayers have $5,000 of checks.
And because they're going to save so much more, they're not even going to use up all the saving.
But to count the savings that they might get from cutting back, you know, by firing a few people, it's not an iron stone.
How many court arguments are going to be?
How many court cases will there be?
So there's a lot to be heard.
And I think that, you know, it doesn't make us, I'll study it and try to talk myself in and say, hey, this is great.
They're just going to send me $5,000.
But what they're doing is they say they save $100,000 on something.
And they take it.
They're not going to have to pass out $100,000 because they don't have these salaries to pay.
But they're going to take that $100,000 and send it to a taxpayer.
And that in their eyes, and maybe so, they're more deserving.
But there are some people who are less deserving.
And the one thing they do not know is what people will do with that $5,000.
They might be so far behind on their credit cards and what's going on, but they don't have an idea of what the consequence will be.
And that's, it's not neat enough for me.
I want the spending cuts and I want the taxes to go down.
But this idea that they're going to, you know, increase the support for this program of cutting by people being promised they're going to get $5,000.
I'd be hesitant to say, hey, that sounds like a good idea.
Everybody's going to support Trump now and this sort of thing may introduce a much more vicious argument between the political parties.
Yeah, let's look at this.
This came out yesterday and it's kind of gaining some momentum today.
And this is Zero Heads wrote it up.
Trump and Musk discuss sending U.S. taxpayers $5,000 checks using Doge savings.
Billionaire Elon Musk said on February 18th that he will discuss with President Donald Trump a proposal to send U.S. taxpayers rebate checks representing a portion of the money saved by the Department of Government Efficiency.
You know, the idea is that they will save a bunch of money and they will take a portion of that money that they've saved.
Now, the idea is we'll save $2 trillion.
We'll take a portion of that and give it back to each household, taxpayer, household, and that dividend should be around $5,000 per household.
That's the idea.
But my first thought is, what's that going to do to the deficit?
Is the deficit going to go down?
And it may, but I don't think that's the way to do it.
You have to be really upfront.
These people are not productive employees.
They're doing things in an agency of government.
It's unconstitutional.
We're just banning it.
Get out of it and save the money.
And if that increases revenues, of course, the budget will get balanced and will the deficit, the debt be shrinking.
I'm optimistic about some of these things going on, but I don't see this as enhancing what had been already contributed to us, and that is exposure, audit, how horrible this is.
And the people are really upset about this.
And it represents a system of bankruptcy.
But I don't see this emphasizing that particular point.
And actually, if you're going to save umpteen billions of dollars on spending, the budget, well, the spending has to go down.
The interest rates have to go down payment.
And then the debt has, the deficit and the debt that exists has to go down.
And that's a big undertaking.
I don't see how this will add to it, but the two guys working on this are a lot richer than we are.
So maybe they know something.
We don't know.
Maybe that is.
Yeah.
Well, when it came out yesterday, I posted my personal exit account.
I said, why not just pay down some of the debt?
And I don't think I've ever been as bombarded by people telling me that I'm out of my mind, using some very creative language to tell me that.
And I think if I could sort of summarize the mood of people who responded negatively toward me was, it's my money and I want it back.
You took it to do dumb stuff that I don't want done.
It's owed to me and I want it back.
So what would you say to that?
I would say, why don't you, if you're going to do that and cut in order to give you a tax benefit, why don't you start with one of the biggest monsters we have to deal with and we see it kills millions of people is reassess our foreign policy, you know, and just quit this warmongering.
Because every time you look at these pictures, whether it's the Middle East or Ukraine or Afghanistan or whether our hands are in it, and you could say, you know, you won't be tinkering around with a thousand here, a thousand there, enough to send back.
It should be a big deal.
I mean, theoretically, I believe that you could make, we could make a case that if we had a constitutional government, the government would shrink by 80% and we wouldn't have to have this argument.
But you know, it's not going to happen.
People are already after the most libertarian, free market-oriented group and saying, Daniel, why don't you do this?
But I think that's, you know, something it reminds me of Leonard Reed.
He says, everybody's for cuts, but.
Facing the Crisis 00:05:49
But.
Everybody has a but.
But, you know, I mean, I don't think that I don't want to speak for you, but I don't think that we are absolutely thinking it's the worst idea in the world, you know, this whole, this whole idea.
It's, this seems, as you said, gimmicky.
Maybe what Musk is trying to do is to create the sense of being stakeholders in the cutting process.
I think you sort of alluded to that when you started out by saying this, that we all feel like some sort of ownership in this process of cutting government.
So if that's a psychological, you know, benefit of doing it, maybe it's not a terrible idea to do to give us all sort of, okay, well, we're cutting government and you're benefiting from it in a way.
You know, I don't know.
We'll learn a lot in the near future because before the year is over, first year of this administration, there is going to be a major problem pop up.
It could be a hurricane.
could be some type of a financial crisis.
You know, we've had quite a few financial crises in these last several decades, and they have been big.
Does anybody remember QE because it was uncontrollable?
And they were dealing the QEs and those problems come from all the policies of the past.
So this does nothing.
Well, that wouldn't be fair.
It does something, but it's not much compared to what has to be done.
So I wish them well, but we still have to deal with the collision of how this system is liquidated.
The mess that we have is the admission and working out of a bankruptcy.
And nobody wants to get too involved in solving it because they don't know the results.
And it's so hard to do it.
Somebody said, well, Ron, we'll make you Federal Reserve pro chair, but you'll cut, you'll stop it.
You will no more monetizing a debt.
There's going to be one explosion in the world.
It'll all be your fault.
Why did we ever put that Ron Paul in there?
And it's been the spending since 1913.
This has been building for a long time.
So we have to face up to that crisis.
And then once that big crisis comes, which I strongly believe will, this won't look like all of a sudden this, they're going to be dealing in trillions of dollars of credits that they have to expand.
And we've been fortunate enough to, fortunate enough, or we were tempted enough to use our power, military power, and the power of our currency to tide people over by having more debt.
And that's why we're at $37 trillion.
I mean, there's a positive aspect in that it's tied directly toward cutting.
That's a positive thing.
If you remember back during COVID, when we had the stimulus checks that they were sending out, now Thomas Massey, good friend of ours, board member of our Ron Paul Institute, he made, and I don't have it in front of me.
I wish I had cut it, but I didn't.
But he made a great calculation about how this quote-unquote stimulus money that you're going to get is actually going to cost you more than you'll have in your pocket to spend through inflation, through special interest getting more than you're getting and all these number of things.
So, and it actually played out exactly like he said, and I don't have it in front of me, but he made that good point.
My guess is that he will be similarly skeptical about this money.
Well, that's a good point because let's say they get their way and next week they're going to start it.
They don't have money in the bank.
So if they're going to live up to their promises and they have to start sending these checks out, they have to print the money, which invites more inflation.
And the prices go up and people, well, I'm not any better off.
Yeah, you'll get your 5,000, but then eggs will quadruple.
Yeah.
And that's why people are really upset and they're not getting the honest answers about why it comes about.
It's debt and the Fed monetizing that debt.
And even reducing it is going to be very difficult.
Let's say the Fed is going to be limited to how many treasury bills they can buy per day.
And that would panic the whole cycle, the whole system of finance worldwide.
But you know what?
You might see the conclusion being bricks all of a sudden becoming more powerful.
People shouldn't forget about that.
But can you imagine a crisis like that?
And that's the thing that I'm concerned about and think that will undo us until we tighten our belt and decide this system isn't working.
You can't get away with it.
Nobody's gotten away from endless inflation of a currency and thought, we'll doctor it over.
And yet our currency has been doctored up for a good many decades and have gotten away with it.
But it all ends badly when the only way you can get out of a bad situation is just print more money faster.
And it won't work.
So I think you would say, yeah, you should get your money back, but the best way to have that happen is for them not to spend it in the first place.
Yeah, that's because you can set that aside.
Yeah.
Well, let's move on to the next one.
And I genuinely, I read this this morning and I thought I'd like to see what you think about it.
I think you'll be in favor of it.
If you go to the next clip from Reason Magazine, good article came out.
If we go ahead a little bit more, one more, we're going to skip all this stuff.
So here's someone that we recognize, both of us do and have big respect for.
Senator Rand Paul's Take 00:09:20
That's Senator Rand Paul.
And this is an article that just came out, I think, today in Reason.
Eric Bohm wrote it.
Rand Paul wants Doge to build a $500 billion rescission package for Congress to approve.
And he said the only way you can get less waste is to give them less money to spend than the libertarian adjacent senator.
Is that what it says?
Adjacent senator from Kentucky.
So he, and it goes on, if you go to the next one, you know, he's known for his ideas of cutting government, but he has, he's saying that for this to be a real deal, really permanent, can't just be the executive branch.
The legislative branch has to be part of it.
You know a little bit about this topic.
Yeah.
And, you know, when they passed this bill, I believe it was at the time that it was interpreted that if a administration spent some money or wrote a regulation that looked really bad, they were putting it at a particular point, then the Congress could cancel it, which is reasonable because the executive branches always want to overstep their bounds.
But Congress has, and I think this is right along that line, is Congress is the one that can stop this stuff.
But I think many years ago, somebody was telling me about this that was more informed.
He said, that's been there for all the time, but no Congress has ever used it.
So I imagine, you know, there'll be a lot of arguments.
There's a lot of legal arguments going on already.
But it does make sense.
But the real crime, though, is how do the people get to the point?
Because it was immediate benefits coming.
If the president, the executive branch is more powerful, they can get us a bonus check much faster.
And they can lobby them.
They don't have to lobby 435 members of Congress to get something passed.
So they want to mess with that.
So it is a real mess.
And I think, and Rand helps make the point.
There's responsibility in a Congress to do this.
Whether or not it's constitutional or not, if Congress writes a bill and says, spend this money and it's on an unconstitutional welfare project and a president wants to stand up to them.
Well, I think when 174 is saying they can't, they have to spend the money.
But can they, that's an interpretation of the Constitution.
What if a president said, you told me to spend $14 trillion on ABC and to fight some war?
And I'm not going to spend it.
And in a way, the presidents can do that, sometimes even good, because eventually when they get sick and tired of the wars and the people are sick and tired of the war, they get exhausted and they do quit spending.
But that's also the people that tell them about it and people and the Congress usually gets engaged in that.
But a president, a president should be able to say, no, I can't do this.
Where do you get the authority for this?
I don't have any authority for this.
And it's very clearly stated in the Constitution, if you don't have explicit authority to do it, it's returned to the states to do that.
If you want to have government schools, I'm not going to spend the money again.
And fortunately, they're talking a little bit that way.
There's a healthy debate going on on the Department of Education, and we have to give Trump and Musk credit for that.
Absolutely.
Well, this goes back to, and it's in the recent article.
It goes back to the Congressional Budget Control and Empowerment Act of 1974, which states that if Congress appropriates this money, the president is obligated to spend the money.
And I guess I don't know the history of it.
I'm sure you probably know it, but they probably had decent intentions.
But as with the war powers resolution and many other resolutions like this, when they try to solve a problem, they actually end up creating two problems.
And so that says that with Congress sending you money, you have to spend it.
And that's a big problem.
That is it.
And what happens, though, in democracy, you know, let the dictatorship of the majority and the majority is not represented by, you know, an honest election.
What it is, the majority are the money people in the special interest, the NGOs and all these other things.
They create the system where the people want it.
And as long as we're not crashing into even further debt and problems and we're getting by, the people aren't going to stand up and say, hey, 20 years ago, we wouldn't be where we are.
The things are so bad that I think what Trump and Musk is doing is symbolic of how bad it is.
And they're desperate.
And I think they themselves recognize that there are ups and downs with this and there's going to be resistance because somebody is going to say, oh, yeah, you're cutting my money.
And that's the difference.
Yeah.
So I'm going to go a little bit through a little bit of this recent article.
Now go to the one where it starts, if you want to have real savings.
I think it's the next clip because this, here we go.
So here's Senator Paul.
He says, if we want to have real savings, they're going to have to send this back to Congress.
And Congress is going to have to approve spending less money.
And I think this is an important point, Dr. Paul, because what Senator Paul is saying here is Congress has to get involved.
This is all well and good, but it's almost sitting on a house of sand right now.
And so he goes, and the recent article goes on saying, during a weekly meeting of Republican senators early on Wednesday, Paul encouraged Vice President JD Vance to have the Trump administration draw up a rescission package, which is a special type of bill that formally withdraws spending that Congress had previously authorized.
That would allow Congress to make the Doge spending cuts stick.
Even better, a rescission bill can pass the Senate with a simple majority.
And Paul believes there would be enough support, even though a similar maneuver failed during the Trump administration last time, et cetera, et cetera.
And Paul said, Senator Paul said, I'd love to see a $500 billion rescission package.
Republicans right now in the Senate are actually agitating to increase spending.
I'd rather be voting on a bill to reduce spending rather than increase spending.
And I think that's a very, very good point.
See, this is an effort to reclaim proper authority by the Congress.
The theoretical answer now is, why didn't we have individuals in Congress obeying the Constitution to start with?
So they do this and they want to spend these monies on unconstitutional projects.
And then when it gets so bad, nobody wants to give it up.
So, and Rand's doing exactly the only thing he can do right now.
Look, you shouldn't have done it.
You've done it.
And the Congress shouldn't have pretended they had this authority.
And if you have a president just, you know, spending the money that the Congress gave him, you know, but a president could stand up to this as a long time ago.
I'm not going to do it.
This is not, I don't have the authority to support this program.
And now, though, people are saying, you know, this is financially because I think what Rand's doing is reclaiming the proper authority of the Congress that Congress is supposed to, I think the founders would be outraged to think how far did this get?
And, you know, it's a mixed blessing.
We have been blessed because we have had a good system.
We've had a maximum amount of freedom compared to other countries.
We've had tremendous resources.
And now said that, you know, we can spend money forever.
You know, and then we end up with the currency.
I mean, it was an ingenious decision to make after World War II.
How are we going to get control of the world's money?
And we can spend and deficits don't matter.
And it worked for a few years.
And those few years have run out.
And we can be sure that this discussion is going to go on for a while.
Yeah.
I wanted to point out one other thing to Senator Paul, one other point that he made in this article.
It's related, but not exactly about this rescission of spending.
And go to the one.
Meanwhile, Paul shrugged off another criticism.
If we can cue that one up, here we go.
So meanwhile, Paul, as in Rand Paul, shrugged off another criticism of Doge's efforts so far that trimming a few billion from the federal budget is insignificant in the face of a nearly $7 trillion federal budget.
Outrage Over Spending Abuse 00:03:24
And that's a reasonable point and people make it.
But here's what Senator Paul said to that.
He said, why would we still not start with the most egregious stuff to get rid of it?
Ultimately, how do you get to better spending?
You get better people in government or you give them less money.
I don't think we can really expect to get better people, less bureaucrats in government.
The only way you get less waste is to give them less money to spend, he said.
And I think that is a great point.
And the other thing I would add to it is that by doing this, by grabbing the low-hanging fruit that may not necessarily, we said it before, may not necessarily in dollar terms be the greatest waste.
But by grabbing this low-hanging fruit, in my opinion, it starts to normalize the idea of cutting government.
It's always been adding, adding.
This makes it more normal to subtract and cut.
And that's what we've been fighting for.
You've been fighting for decades.
This is an argument for more exposure, audit, whether it's the Federal Reserve or the DOD or whatever, just finding out it because by its very nature, people, individuals, politicians, and governments are very likely to abuse their powers.
And so the whole thing is, is the auditing system is broken down.
The oversight is broken down.
But I think this is maybe what I'm hoping is this is a turning point.
There's a lot of refining to do exactly how you get the people behind it.
But the people are going to have to do it because this price inflation is a lot worse than they're willing to admit.
And people are going to get angrier and angrier.
And the worst part of that is the people who can benefit from this are the very wealthy and the middle class suffer.
So it's still there.
It's going to get worse.
And I think it's that political dissension that's coming on, you know, class warfare that we see.
So I think we live in many ways economically, very dangerous times.
Yeah.
Well, I'm going to close out, Dr. Paul.
I think we've probably covered these two fairly well.
We'll keep an eye on them.
A shout out to Daniel Hamo, who again kicked in a little bit of money for today's show.
We appreciate you pretty much every day doing that.
That's great.
Remind everyone that the conference is coming up.
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Over to you, Dr. Paul.
I'm going to finish by bringing up the subject that we talked about originally.
And that has to do with passing out money for political reasons or maybe very sincere economic reasons, whatever.
But they think it's going to do a lot of good.
But it reminded me of the time when George McGovern was in a primary race for the president.
I think it was 72.
He was running against Nixon.
And he came up with this idea of everybody gets $1,000.
George McGovern's $1,000 Idea 00:01:47
Even then, it was already.
I think, matter of fact, there was more outrage over that than there's an outrage over thinking, well, $5,000, maybe, maybe this is a gimmick or something.
But the one person that wrote about this was Tom Wicker.
He was with the New York Times, but I always thought of a conservative libertarian journalist.
And Tom Wicker, the associates, has called Walthava rich and poor a major cause of violence.
We in America are not going to escape much longer the meaning and the consequence of the situation, which 1% of our total population holds 28%.
So he was concerned about that.
And you know what?
His speech and his activity, and when it does settle a little bit, the whole idea of $1,000 to people, that probably might be like $10,000 now.
I mean, that's 40 or 50 years ago.
So the thing disappeared real fast.
People, people, it was over the top and people didn't believe it.
But it looks like if you got a phone call, it said, Daniel, why are you doing this?
And it's probably less money and probably a sounder position than what happened back there.
I'm sure George McGovern was just going to write a check and not worry about it.
But George McGovern was the one, I think, after he left the Senate.
He's the one that I think had a job in a business.
He was running, you know, like a restaurant or something.
He says, if I ever knew how bad these regulations are, I would never have voted for.
I hear the famous quote.
So we'll finish on that report.
And I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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