All Episodes
Previous Next
March 29, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
47:38
Chris Rossini Introduction and David Stockman

RPI's Chris Rossini opens the America in the Age of Trump 2.0 Conference with some remarks on the first few months of the new Administration. He is followed by David Stockman, "Bring the Empire Home - Save $500 Billion Per Year."

|

Time Text
Thanking Our Host Committee 00:06:58
Good morning, everyone.
Welcome to Ron Paul Country.
It's great to have you here, beautiful Lake Jackson.
My name is Chris Rossini.
I'm a senior fellow at the Ron Paul Institute and co-host on Fridays.
You may recognize me on the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
So it's great to have everyone here today on this beautiful morning.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I want to start off by thanking our host committee because they literally make this possible.
This is their conference as much as it is ours because they helped to finance getting us all in this room and all the work that Daniel and my colleague Adam do in the months prior.
But the host committee really makes this possible.
We do not have big corporations that tell us, hey, go on stage, say these things, and we'll take care of you.
You'll never have to worry about money again.
We don't have that.
We have regular people that support our ideas, Ron Paul's ideas.
And because of that, we are able to sit here and spend a few hours together.
So thank you, the host committee.
I also want to thank our speakers.
We have a great lineup.
The way we do our speakers is we want to hear them too.
We not only want to bring them up on stage for you, but we love them ourselves and love to sit and listen to them speak and share their brilliant ideas.
We have a brilliant lineup today.
We hope that you enjoy it, and we look forward to each and every one of them.
And last but not least, everyone else that is here from all over the country.
Last night we had a dinner and people from all over.
It's so, it pulls on the heart to hear somebody, I traveled across the country to come see you guys because our work is over the internet.
We're on cameras.
There's no one in front of us.
So to hear people that will take time, spend money, to go across the country to come see you is very special.
So thank you to each and every one of you for taking the time on a Saturday to come here to listen to these ideas.
Thank you again.
So today we're talking about Trump 2.0.
And what an amazing guy.
Trump is a fascinating individual.
There's no one like him in politics in my entire lifetime, probably in everyone's lifetime.
He really is different.
And he's fascinating.
There's something about him that not many people can go through what he went through to become President of the United States and everything prior to that.
It's been a constant struggle for this guy to get to where he is today.
And that, in and of itself, is very admirable.
He's a very controversial individual.
There are extremes that we all know of.
There's people that hate everything about him, no matter what he does.
They just hate him.
On the other side, there's people that love him, and he can do no wrong.
And here at the Ron Paul Institute, Ron Paul Liberty Report, we're not on a team.
We admire the good about him, but we will criticize the bad because, I mean, we work for Ron Paul.
We can't keep our mouths shut.
So, yeah.
So he brings out so much emotion in our country.
But we love praising the good.
He's doing things that Ron Paul, if he were president, would do.
It would be ridiculous to sit back and to ignore that and just because you hate him.
I mean, just recently, he wants to cancel the Education Department.
he's done with Doge.
The border, I believe it was 93% of people less are crossing the border.
That could have been done for years, and he's done it.
So you can't just sit and be silent because you don't want to show that you like the guy.
Also, from our perspective, we're not fans of his foreign policy.
So we can't just have blinders on and say everything is brilliant.
He can't make a mistake.
Despite everything he went through, even being shot at, I mean, he is a human being.
He can make mistakes.
He made mistakes in his first administration.
So we have to treat him as a human being, not as a superman.
So we will talk about his foreign policy and the stuff that we don't agree with and that we hope that he would change and reverse course.
But our intention is to cheer him as much as possible because this is our country.
We love our country.
I believe he loves our country.
I don't think he's acting.
He's doing what he believes is best.
So we want to cheer as much as possible.
We don't want to criticize.
But in good conscience, we have to criticize if we have to, if we feel that we have to.
So with that being said, I want to bring up our first speaker.
He's a brilliant economist.
And that may be too narrow of a description.
He's really a brilliant mind, in my opinion.
He's a former representative, Republican representative from Michigan.
He was a former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, who I remember I was growing up, Ronald Reagan.
He was a great president as a kid.
He's a best-selling author.
And if you've never read The Great Deformation, please go get yourself a copy.
And he has a new book out that he's going to discuss today.
It's called How to Cut $2 Trillion Dollars, and it's a blueprint for Doge.
So it's a great, timely book that he has.
And please go to his website, David Stockman's Contra Corner.
You won't be disappointed.
He's very prolific.
It's my pleasure to introduce to you David Stockman.
Well, thank you, Chris, and good morning.
I'm really glad to be here again.
I think I spoke to this conference six or seven years ago.
So when I got Ron Paul's invitation to be a speaker this time, I was really delighted because it's the first time anybody ever invited me to come back.
So that was, but it reminded me that, you know, Ron Paul and I go back a long way, 50 years, in fact, when I was a congressman from Michigan and he was a congressman from here.
Debt And The Gold Standard 00:04:37
And it was a different time.
And we sometimes get discouraged about how bad things look today.
But even way back then, 50 years ago, we thought everything was going to hell in a handbasket.
And, you know, we're still here.
So somehow we struggle through this.
But I can remember that we often sat on the floor of the House in the back benches, just the two of us, you know, commiserating about the circumstance at the time.
There were 285 Democrats in the House, 140 Republicans.
Of the 140 Republicans, 70 of them were rhinos, so they were kind of useless.
And the other and 68 of the remainder were basically good, solid, small government conservatives on the domestic side of the Potomac, but they were big government empire firsters, Cold Warriors on the Pentagon side.
So there was basically two of us left there.
We often sat in the back wondering, could we make a difference?
What should we do?
Because we had so many views that were similar, almost identical.
And one day we decided instead of being spread out all over the lot to somehow concentrate our voices, could we find one issue that we would prioritize, both of us would go after, we would become a team, we would work on it together.
And we narrowed it down to three things: anti-war, the gold standard, and the public debt.
And as we thought it through at the time, this is the mid-70s, we said, well, probably we'll let the anti-war thing go by because by that point it looked like the anti-war people were winning.
We were out of Vietnam.
People learned a big lesson.
We were out of Cambodia.
The church committee had held its hearings and the CIA was on the run.
Nixon had gone to China, opened up the dialogue with Mao.
He had gone to Moscow to negotiate with Brezhnev.
So we said it's a really important issue, but it looks like the battle has been won from our side.
And so we said, well, the other two, you know, the gold standard really is important.
The central banking is the ruination of capitalism and a lot of side effects in terms of making it so easy for Congress to spend and borrow.
But, you know, at that time, Keynesianism was so dominant that even Nixon, some of you may remember this, said we're all Keynesians now.
So we said, that one's too hard.
We're just not going to make too much headway there.
Let's go after the debt.
That should be an easy one.
That should be the one that we take on.
And I only mention that because here we are today.
At the time, the public debt was $800 billion.
The total debt was $800 billion.
And by the turn of the century, it was $5 trillion.
By the time Trump was elected the first time, Trump 1.0, it was 20 trillion.
Trump 1.0 took it to 28 trillion.
So these are big numbers, but if you do 8 trillion of more debt in four years, that's quite a feat.
We should be aware of that because it took the first 43 presidents, 216 years, to get our first 8 trillion.
And Trump was able to match that in the four years that he was in.
So there were some issues that we need to be concerned about.
But the point is, here we are today with the public debt already at 37 trillion.
If you look at CBO's baseline, which is really rosy scenario, they think nothing's ever going to go wrong in the world for the next 10 years.
We'll be at 70 trillion early in the 2030s.
And by mid-century, and I know that sounds a long time away, but it's not really because it's 25 years from now.
Everybody here probably can remember 25 years ago, Y2K, 2000, all that.
We'll be at $150 trillion of public debt.
Well, I don't think we'll ever get there because $150 trillion of public debt will just crush the economy, the financial system, and everything that we really believe in in terms of capitalist prosperity, constitutional liberty, and so forth, would be long gone if we continue down the road in that direction.
So somehow we thought back then that this was a problem that could be taken on, and here we are today, still struggling with it.
Y2K Missteps and Debt Anxiety 00:05:56
But nevertheless, I appreciated everything that we did together during those days back in the Congress.
And then what Ron Paul has done as kind of a beacon of fundamentally right things about how we should conduct government in a constitutional democracy that is almost unparalleled, unique, unusual among all the political figures that at least I've had the experience of encountering during all of my time at this.
But in any event, we're here today to talk about the era of Trump 2.0.
And I think a lot of us are probably feeling a bit of whiplash as we go through this pell-mail process because from day to day it goes from good to really good to bad to horrible and to pointless.
I mean, what is this Greenland thing all about?
And do we really need the Panama Canal back?
And, you know, he gets sidetracked on a lot of things.
And he's dead wrong on some, such as this whole terrible regime of reciprocal trade that he's coming up with.
We're going to see that on April 2nd.
I think it's going to be a disaster, but that's a topic for another day.
Because when you look at the whole picture, you know, I sort of describe our circumstance in Trump 2.0 as libertarians as the best analogy I can think of was remember the movie, I think it was 30 years ago, Forrest Gump.
And you remember Forrest Gump said on the park bench and he said, you know, the world is like a box of chocolates.
You never know what you're going to get.
And I think that's basically what we have with Trump.
We never know what we're going to get, the good, the bad, and the indifferent.
And as Chris said, what we need to do is support as strongly as we can all the good, and we need to not hesitate to be critical or dissent when some of the bad things come along.
But there's been a lot of good things.
The appointments, I think, were just astounding.
You know, Bobby Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, tremendous.
I never would have believed at least four, five, six months ago that people with those kinds of sturdy views of the world and what Washington should be doing would be appointed to these strong positions, including especially, I think, Tulsi Gabbard at the DNI, Director of National Intelligence.
I mean, she has dissented for the last 20, 25 years from the whole sort of neocon foreign policy.
And, you know, they actually went after her, as many of you remember, in the hearings, because she went to Syria to meet with Assad because allegedly he was such a bad guy that you shouldn't even get near Damascus.
Well, Assad is gone, and now we have the real jihadist in.
And I think she's proved that she was right all along.
Our whole policy of regime change in Syria after all the other failures, Libya, Iraq, and we could go on down the line, make it clear.
Now, there were other bad ones, too.
I don't know how we got Marco Rubio.
I mean, he was like, you know, little Marco Rubio, as Trump once called him.
I mean, he was right out of Neocon Central Casting, and that's unfortunate.
And there's a lot of other bad appointments.
But still, when you look at everything, the way that Trump in that State of the Union address went after DEI and the way they're cleaning it out of the agencies and departments in Washington.
You know, Woke is on the way out.
It's in retreat.
The Green New Deal.
Finally, someone said this damn climate crisis is a hoax.
And we're going to say that.
Now he's got a Secretary of Energy who's actually willing to say it out loud: that we're going to produce all the energy we can at the lowest price that we can get in order to help our economy get back on its feet and grow.
So there, and then, of course, the whole Doge thing.
I don't know if Trump really thought it through or how he got to Elon Musk.
I guess he wanted to be buddies with a real centa billionaire.
I mean, he's just a billionaire, but he wanted to be buddies with a real, but he put the right guy in because, you know, Elon Musk is doing a tremendous job of just reopening the whole fiscal debate about, you know, the nonsense and the waste and the destructive, counterproductive activity that is insinuated everywhere in these departments and agencies.
And, you know, getting the goods out and exposing the nonsense that the USAID and our foreign aid was just a good way to get started.
And, you know, I was glad to see they went after a couple days ago the Department of Education.
Well, you know, you have to stick to things because I went after the Department of Education in 1981.
And we were going to abolish it then.
And lo and behold, Washington protects its own.
So there was never a reason for the Department of Education.
That was always meant in our constitutional scheme of things to be a job for state and local and school districts and parents and not for the central state to be attempting to impose policies and uniform curriculums and so forth in the education sector.
Happening in the World 00:04:18
But in any event, no one said boo about that after Reagan failed.
Reagan didn't, the president didn't fail.
They appointed a Secretary of Education who was all for keeping the department.
That was in the Reagan administration.
So you're always being infiltrated by the Republicans who want to get along, go along in order to get along.
But anyway, he's done an enormous amount of good.
And on the foreign policy front, obviously it's mixed, but I kind of think behind all of it, on Ukraine, we really had what I call the snit that shook the world about two weeks ago when Little Zelensky ambles into the Oval Office and starts lecturing the president.
And it's the problem you have with alliances generally: that we're the hegemon, we're the giant protector, keeper, policeman of the world, keeper of the order.
Yet all the little guys all around the world, Taiwan, Ukraine, Latvia, Montenegro, you can go on, behave in ways that they would not vis-a-vis their neighbors if they didn't have Article 5, which is we'll go to war if you start a war with your neighbor.
They would not be poking the bear like they like to do in Poland and Latvia and Estonia from time to time.
There would be a totally different view of Russia in Western Europe for crying out loud.
They had a good thing going.
Russia had all this cheap hydrocarbon supply.
It was coming through these pipelines that had been built over decades.
And yet the neocons in the Washington war machine talked these people into destroying their own economy.
I mean, look what's happening to Germany today.
It's falling apart because its whole export machine and its strength in the world market was based on cheap energy, and the cheap energy is gone, and not because it was exhausted geologically or there was some kind of economic collapse, it's because they elected to cut off the Russian supplies.
Anyway, there is a lot of good things coming out of the administration on foreign policy.
And I'm thinking, you know, you're wondering, well, Trump talks in all kinds of different directions.
One day he's huffing and puffing and warning someone like the Iranian Ayatollahs that they're going to be blown to smithereens if they don't shape up.
And the next day, he's talking in, I think, pretty persuasive and almost emotional terms about the killing has to stop in Ukraine.
Why are tens of thousands of people on both sides being sent into this meat grinder for no reason of peace of the world or security of the United States?
So it's a little hard to figure out where he's coming out, but I think I figured out what's driving him.
And this is just speculation, but you could consider it.
I think he really has got a big case of Nobel Peace Prize envy with Obama.
And of course, Obama didn't deserve it.
I mean, Obama installed all these neocons and got us into the mess that we're in today.
But he did get the Nobel Prize.
And I think Trump wants the Nobel Peace Prize.
And to do that, he has to be a peacemaker, and at least he can't start any more wars.
So, although there's a lot of touch and go right now in the Middle East, and it's kind of, you all know how bad things are there and the stupidity of what we're doing.
But when Push comes to shove, I think he's going to find some way to maybe get his friend Putin to intermediate, to get some kind of dialogue going with the Iranians so we don't end up with what some of the hawks want to do.
How to Cut 2 Trillion 00:11:07
Well, in any event, all of these things are happening.
They're happening quickly.
A lot of them are for the good.
There's a lot of things to worry about.
You know, he's unleashed the mad dogs of spending cuts, which I'm all for.
But they don't really have a fiscal policy that's going to get us out of the mess that's leading to these massive deficit figures that I've mentioned a moment ago.
So in order to do my little part, once I heard that Elon Musk is going to head this new department called Doge, and that he wanted to cut $2 trillion, so I quickly wrote a book, which you can get out in like three weeks.
It's called How to Cut 2 Trillion.
And it's a blueprint about department by department, sector by sector of the budget, how to get there.
And the point I want to make here is that for some of you who've read my other books, it's only 158 pages long.
So you could probably actually get through it.
I was talking to someone last night who told me that they had been reading the Great Deformation, which, you know, it's 700 pages.
Okay, and Chris, thanks for mentioning it.
And it was kind of a revisionist history of how we got to the mess we're in going all the way back to the New Deal.
But anyway, it's 700 pages, and this very nice person I talked to said, I said, well, how did you like it?
And she said, well, you know, it's really fascinating.
It's a good book.
I'm about a third of the way through.
Well, I wrote this in 2013, so I figured out quickly that she'll be done by 2052 at the rate that she's going.
But anyway, this one won't take you till 2052.
Now, what I'd like to do in the time I have is to talk about that issue, the budget issue, the fiscal issue, everything that Doge is trying to do, and maybe simplify it because when I sat down to put this together, I said, you know, the budget is $7 trillion.
It's heading towards $9 trillion a year.
And if you look at it on a trend basis, which you have to, you can't get everything done overnight, spending in the next decade, which is the time capsule or timeframe they use, is $85 trillion, okay?
And revenues under current law are only $62 trillion.
So you got a gap there of $23 trillion, $24 trillion.
So how do you get your arms around this?
How do you convey in a way that the attentive public at least, and maybe a few attentive members of the House and Senate can track?
So I came up with the idea that how do we parcel out $2 trillion of savings per year?
This isn't over 10 years or longer, but you've got to do it in two years because otherwise we're going to be running $3 trillion, $4 trillion deficits as interest rates go up and the debt service explodes.
It's already a trillion a year now.
It'll be $2 trillion by the middle of the 2030s.
How do you put this in a package that can be tracked?
So I said, okay, there are three things in the fiscal realm.
There's fat, there's muscle, and there's bone.
And let's figure out how we can get $2 trillion out of fat, muscle, and bone.
And I ended up to abbreviate this a little bit, with $400 billion of fat, $500 billion of muscle, and $1.1 trillion of bone.
Now, what do I mean by fat?
Well, by fat, I mean everything that Doge is after, everything that you're reading about in the daily papers, all the excess staffing, all the waste, some agencies and departments that we shouldn't have never should have been there in the first place, like the Department of Education or big viper pits of waste like foreign aid.
So I said, in the fat area, let's understand one thing.
It's important to do.
Fraud, waste, and abuse is a problem.
You have to go after it, hammer and tong.
You can't tolerate it if we're ever going to get back on track.
But don't think that that's going to solve the whole problem.
And I tried to prove that in this book by a simple analysis.
If you take all of the civilian employees of the federal government, there's 2.3 million.
And if you recognize that they get paid a lot for doing very little, as we all understand, and then when you look at the fully loaded cost, which is all the pensions and the medical and all the leave days they get and so forth, the fully loaded cost per federal employee is $160,000.
Now, that sounds like a big number, but when you do the multiplication, it tells you that the entire payroll, civilian payroll, will get to military with the muscle.
The entire payroll is only $300 billion.
So if we were able to cut 40% of that, which is a pretty tall order, we would only save $150,000, $180 billion.
And the target, and it's an honest to goodness target.
You have to get to $2 trillion or this doom loop that I describe with the budget.
In other words, deficits adding to debt, interest rates rising, interest costs rising, you know how that math will compound.
So if you don't get to $2 trillion, you're in trouble.
And yet, if you look at the federal government and you hear people always say, and this is an error I think that people on our side ought to understand, that government isn't a business, okay?
The government is a war machine.
which costs $1.4 trillion a year, and it's a massive transfer payment agency, which costs $5 trillion a year.
And until you address those, the war machine being the muscle and the big transfer payment system being the bone, you just can't make any traction.
But in any event, what I did in the book was I said, well, let's go back to the budget that we had in 1981, because that was the Reagan attack on big government and the welfare state and so forth.
And let's see how many of those agencies that we cut survived.
And the answer was all of them.
And so I said, let's put them back on the chopping block.
So I took 16 agencies all the way from the Department of Education, foreign aid, and then the FBI, which I don't think we need national at the national level, and the OSHA, and a whole bunch of others, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Legal Services, all of those activities that shouldn't even be in the budget.
Let's get rid of all of those.
And then I took another nine agencies, you know, like the SEC, the IRS, the EPA, NASA, FAA, and so forth.
I said, we're going to cut those by 50% because there's that much excess or unneeded missions there.
And we'll cut the rest of the agencies, civilian agencies, by 50%.
And by that, I included some of the big ones like Homeland Security, Social Security Administration, and so forth.
Now, the point that I try to make in the book is after you do all that, you really are taking out a sledgehammer or a machete or fiscal machete or whatever you want to call it.
And the effect of it would be to reduce federal civilian employment by 530,000 people, which is well more, you know, upwards of 30% of the total payroll.
You would only save about 80 billion a year.
Now, I don't mean to say only 80 billion is chicken feed.
It obviously isn't.
But if the problem is $2 trillion big, 80 billion is 4%.
That doesn't get you very far.
And then if you recognize that if you were able actually to reduce the federal payroll by 500,000 plus in all of these agencies that I've just been mentioning, if you were able to do that, you will get rid of some other related costs like travel and IT costs and occupancy and the rest.
So the total effect of doing this across the board shrinkage of the payroll, which is what people think about in terms of efficiency and too much bureaucracy, would be $130 billion.
Well, again, that's a good start, but $130 billion is a long way away from the $2 trillion target.
So I said, what else is there in the nature of a broad definition of fraud, waste, and abuse and excess government intervention or unnecessary or counterproductive government programs?
And I said, okay, how about we get rid of all the energy subsidy programs, either the tax credits or the direct spending, the green energy, the black energy, the old energy, the new energy?
Why is the government even involved in energy?
I said this back in 81.
We got rid of a lot of carter stuff, but much lasted.
Then they came up with this phony global climate crisis, and it was all back.
But I said, let's get rid of all of it because the one thing that the market can do, the free market can do, better than almost anything else is allocate investment in energy, the production of energy, the distribution of energy.
We don't need a single federal bureaucrat or dollar involved.
So that would save $60 billion.
So I put that in the bank.
And then I said, well, when you're thinking about a sector of the economy that is totally on government action and budgets and spending and borrowing is totally unneeded, well, the same thing is true of agriculture.
And I was from an agriculture district and somehow I survived.
I voted against every one of the farm bills.
I guess they weren't paying close attention or something.
I don't know.
But in any event, I said, let's get rid of all those farm subsidies.
You know, why are we subsidizing the crop insurance for farmers?
You know, there's an insurance market out there.
The rates might be a little higher.
But why should the bus driver in Milwaukee be putting money in the till so some farmer in Texas, let's say, can get cut rate weather insurance?
Strategic Deterrent Costs 00:14:39
And you can go on, but the point is there's $40 billion there, so I put that in the bank as well.
It shouldn't be there.
I mean, this is a leftover relic of the New Deal, where Franklin Roosevelt had this whole theory that if we could just pump agriculture back up again to the level it was at during the middle of World War I, where we were the greenery of the world, then everything would be solved.
We got all these programs, they're still here, get rid of them, $40 billion.
I said, well, we're at it.
What the hell do we have the Small Business Administration for?
There is more capital available in our economy today than ever before from the venture capital world, from the private equity world, from just this booming stock market that we've had.
I mean, the whole idea that we need an agency to give cut rate loans to small businesses.
Nuts, same is true, even worse, with Export-Import Bank.
Why does GE need cut-rate loans in order to sell airplanes around the world?
Anyway, put all this together, and I was able to come up with another $130 billion of fraud, waste, and abuse.
But still, all of that, cutting the agency, shrinking the headcount, getting out of all of these different activities I've mentioned, got me $400 billion.
So therefore, I had to go to the muscle.
And when you go into the muscle, it's a pretty interesting story, which tells you why you have to bring the empire home.
When I go through the budget, what I see is that we have 950,000 soldiers in the Army.
These are full-time.
Oh, that includes the National Guard and the reserves.
950,000.
The annual budget is about $60 billion.
The total budget of the Army is $210 billion or so a year.
And why the hell do we have them?
Our foreign policy doesn't require us to have forces in Europe, even though we, a good foreign policy wouldn't, even though we have 60,000.
News to them, you know, World War II ended 80 years ago.
We still got 50,000 forces in Okinawa and Japan.
We still have 30,000 or so, 25,000 in South Korea.
We have a huge army in order to carry out a neocon aggressive foreign policy of invasion and occupation all around the world where our security, our homeland security, doesn't need any of that.
We need a America First or what I call a Fortress America defense policy, that is an invincible strategic deterrent, and a residual military force that defends the airspace and the shorelines of America, and that's it.
Well, you don't need an army to keep the Chinese Navy, which has got three aircraft carriers, by the way, two of which are rust buckets purchased from the old Soviet Union.
So you can imagine they're not all that lethal.
You don't need an army to keep them off the shores of North Carolina or California.
In today's world of advanced technology and drones and every kind of cruise missile and intercontinental missile ballistic missile, if anybody ever tried to invade America, they would end up in Davy Jones's locker, you know, weeks before they got even near the shoreline.
So what the hell is the Army doing?
It's way too big.
It's just a residual leftover thought from a Cold War period where we had this whole theory that we needed collective security, we needed alliances and allies all over the world.
And to help that, we had to station, have, you know, 750 installations and bases and, you know, all of these people both stationed abroad as well as in reserve here.
Well, you don't need it.
So as I went through this, I basically said you could cut this $200 billion Army budget by 70%, have a residual force that's here for mop-up operations if they ever got even close to the New Jersey shore.
But the rest of it isn't needed if you don't think you're policemen for the world and if you don't think that we should be invading, occupying, because we now know that every one of these efforts have failed.
I mean, I started as a Vietnam war protester in 1968.
I signed a We Won't Go thing, and the FBI then put me in a red file.
And it was kind of amazing.
12 years later, I was in Ronald Reagan's cabinet, and some reporter found that I had a red file, and they asked him, you know, do you realize your budget director was a radical and that there's a big file at the FBI, a big fat red file?
He said, yeah, we were all young once.
In other words, you're idealistic when you're young.
But in any event, we don't need an army that big.
Then I went, I looked at the Navy.
There's about 600,000 people in the Navy.
Another, you know, the manpower budget alone is $660 billion or so.
The total Navy budget is about $250 billion.
But when you look at it, what we need is a strategic deterrent.
And we have three legs, the so-called triad, the submarine-based, high-class submarines, there's 14 of them.
The B-2-based stealth bomber-based part of the triad, and the Minutemen whistles.
And that is so overwhelming with the 1,700 active warheads that we have any minute that it is a strategic deterrent that will stop anybody in the known universe, this world or Mars for that matter, from either attacking us in a nuclear attack or attempting to blackmail us.
Now, the reason I mentioned this, not to get too detailed, is that that entire triad strategic deterrent, which is truly invincible today, costs $75 billion a year, even when you allow for replacement and upgrade of the submarines, of the missiles, and of the long-range bombers.
Well, that's 7% of the budget.
The heart of what keeps the homeland secure only costs 7% of the budget.
And then as you go through the other services, armed services, as I've just done, and say, what do we need for the second part of homeland security, which is defense of the homeland, the airspace, the coastal waters, and so forth.
And you don't need what's left.
You don't need $800 billion for all of that.
And that was the reason that I carefully went through the analysis.
But when we looked at the Navy, that just gave you a clear indication of how out of kilter, how displaced the whole thing is.
If you take the strategic deterrent and the Navy's part of it, which is the Ohio-class submarines, which are all over the oceans of the world, 12 are on duty at any given time.
Nobody's going to ever find them.
It's really the heart of our defense.
But it only involves 10,000 Navy personnel.
And then if you look at the attack submarine force that we might need to defend the coastline and the homeland, it's another 30,000.
So of the 550,000 personnel, you can find 40,000 that are at the heart of what we really need for one, the invincible strategic deterrent, and two, for the homeland defense.
So the rest of them, there's 140,000 personnel involved in the 11 carrier battle groups, aircraft carrier battlegroups.
They're sitting ducks.
Why do we even have them today?
The only purpose of an aircraft carrier is to conduct wars of invasion and occupation, to meddle and muck around in the Middle East or to huff and puff in the Far East at China because we think somehow that Shang Kai-shek shouldn't have lost the war in 1949 and we have to keep the state, the artificial state that he created alive.
Well, that's what this is about.
It's all about power projection.
It's all about hegemon, the global hegemon.
It's all about empire.
So if you strip down the Navy to a non-empire homeland defense-based operation, you can save another huge, huge amount, somewhere in the range of $140 billion.
And then I went through the Air Force, and a lot of the Air Force would be needed, but it would be redeployed.
We'd take it out of the bases in the Persian Gulf and the Far East and in Europe, and you would keep it based here in North America.
If anybody headed in this direction, you would have a lethal Air Force that would take them out.
But overall, there is a step-by-step plan based on bringing the empire home and having a foreign policy that's based on Fortress America and an invincible strategic deterrent that would save $400 billion a year.
We get rid of the foreign aid, who needs that?
That's all designed just to buy allies that we don't need.
That's $50 billion.
And then the other thing in there that I think I just want to make one brief comment on is: if I look at the total what I call warfare state budget, it's $1.4 trillion, but $370 billion of that a year is for veterans' benefits.
And they deserve it.
I'm not even going to argue about the veterans, but what I'm going to say is all along, the veterans' budget has been kind of the unpaid-for part of the national security.
Because today we have 5 million people, men and women, on disability benefits from all of these wars that have been set where they've been sent into harm's way and now have lifetime disabilities that need to be supported, going all the way back to Vietnam and everything in between.
We have 9 million people that are in some way or another being treated by the veterans' health care system.
So if you piece it all together, there's an astounding number.
One out of every 30 adult Americans is a beneficiary of the Veterans Administration because we've had so many wars.
That's the deferred cost of all the forever wars.
That's the deferred cost of the empire that we've had since the Korean War in 1950 going forward.
So you've got to stop that as well if you're ever going to get things under control.
Finally, I went to the bone because now we've talked about all this $400 billion sweeping slashing of the fat and $500 billion that you could get out of a radically repositioned national security policy, and we didn't even get halfway to the target.
So then you have to look at the big transfer payment machine, the $5 billion a year or $5 trillion a year that goes to every kind of entitlement from Social Security all the way down to food stamps.
And I just want to use one example.
I came up with $1.1 trillion of savings or about 20% that would be justifiable, that could be done, that would be practicable if you could only find some politicians courageous enough to talk about it.
But I want to mention just one illustration to show you, yeah, to show you how serious this is.
We now spend $1.1 trillion a year for just the means-tested entitlements, Medicaid, food stamps, housing subsidies, and so forth.
Back in 1981, when we were fighting the same battle, it was $200 billion in today's dollars, not those dollars, in today's purchasing power.
So you've gone from $200 billion to almost $1.2 trillion just since Reagan took on the entitlements in 1981.
And so someone could say, I'll just go through this quickly: well, we've been a huge increase in the poverty population, and that explains it.
Well, it doesn't, okay?
There's been no increase materially in the poverty population.
So if you go back then, we were spending about $6,000 in today's money per poor person in the United States.
Today it's $26,000 per poor person in the United States.
But the joke of the matter is the poverty line for an individual is $14,000.
So back then it was half of the poverty line.
Today it's 150% of the poverty line.
And they say you can't cut the safety net because we need every dime of it.
Well, you don't.
And I, in the book, I lay out that we could put it into a block grant, send 75% of the money back to the states, save $250 billion, move along.
Welfare should be handled by the states and localities anyway.
Well, that's some of the things that are in here.
Now that you've heard it all, you don't have to read it.
But it is only 170 pages long, and it's only $11.
So that's a real bargain.
Export Selection