"We Even Send Money To Dead People": John Kennedy Calls Out "Wasteful" Government Spending

senator from louisiana mr president thank you mr president mr president this body does not have to automatically raise taxes to pay for infrastructure now i know some of my colleagues disagree with me uh so some want to raise uh the gasoline tax uh but the the president well i think he wants to raise every tax known to man and beast um to spend on infrastructure and other things and and that's he's the president he's enti and he's an american he's entitled to his own opinion but but i don't think we spent nearly enough time looking at our current spending and asking ourselves if we could could re-prioritize some of the ways that we're spending taxpayer money let me put it another way mr mr president no person with a an even even a casual relationship with the federal budget and or an iq above a root vegetable believes that every single penny being spent today in the united states government's budget is being spent efficiently i mean it's just not mr president you know that you've run a state before you've you've put together a budget for it's not for example we waste 144 billion dollars a year every year on improper payments um we send checks to people who are not entitled to receive them for for the earned income tax credit for example we spend money to on people who don't exist or aren't qualified to receive medicaid um we even send money to dead people and they cash the checks or at least their relatives do now i'm not naive i know we will never ever an organization as large as the federal government will never be able to avoid a hundred percent of improper payments i understand that but we ought to at least try particularly on sending the checks to dead people and even if we could reduce that 144 billion dollars by 10 percent or 20 or 25 we're talking a very about a very large amount of recurring revenue a very simple solution i've suggested this to the white house which hasn't responded but we have passed legislation in this body as you know to try to stop sending checks to dead people there's just one problem it was made effective three years from now i had to agree to it in conference to get the bill passed there's no good reason for it other than some lobbyists insisted on it president biden right now i think could could pick up at least 10 billion maybe more we're not sure how much by just saying effective immediately my administration is no longer longer going to send checks to dead people i mean who's going to get mad who supports sending money to dead people american people don't number two we could repurpose the money a lot of the money that we've already appropriated i've lost count of how much money we have appropriated for for the coronavirus not just on public health but also for our economy and look i voted for many of the bills i didn't vote for the last one because i thought the last one was unnecessary it was too expensive and it really wasn't about the coronavirus but i think all fair mounted people can agree right now num on two things number one a lot of the money we appropriated in the last caron virus bill has not yet been spent and number two we're no longer in an economic crisis the main crisis we have right now is our small business women and small businessmen can't find workers so we're currently not in an economic crisis and i i think we can go back and take some of that money in my state in louisiana it's going to take some aspects of my state government it'll take them 10 years to spend all the money we sent to them in the last bill and i can tell you given the option to my state they're going to choose to spend that money on infrastructure and not on what congress sent them the money uh to spend it on um number three there's a there's a very interesting study by the cbo uh between taking the years i think it was 2013 to 2017 the cbo took the entire federal non-military workforce on which we spend about 220 billion a year because we have to have workers and they took every job in the federal government and compared it to every job the every equivalent job in the private sector it's a massive study so it's apples to apples and the federal government or rather the cbo found that the federal government on average pays a federal worker 17 more annually than we pay the same worker in the private sector now i don't begrudge anybody in living but what if we could reduce that to 15 or 12 percent what what if we could just not automatically fill every vacancy what if we actually stopped and asked ourselves if this position has been vacant for eight months maybe we don't need it i think there are enormous savings to be had and um the the final thing i'll point out mr chairman doing is better than having doing is better than having and and and you're happier when you're when you have earned something than when somebody has just given it to you and we have we're the most generous nation in all of human history we american people spend about a trillion dollars a year at all levels of government helping our neighbors and and some folks who aren't our neighbors who are less fortunate than we are but we have we spend about 75 76 billion dollars a year on medicaid and on food stamps for adults who are able-bodied who are 55 years of age and younger and who don't have children and many of them could work now i know there are obstacles to them being able to work maybe they need help looking for a job maybe they need employment counseling maybe they need help with transportation but we could save enormous amounts of money and our citizens our people our neighbors who are receiving this money would be better off if they had a job we don't have to reinvent the wheel all we have to do is look at to denmark denmark does an extraordinary job they're very generous in denmark with their payments for unemployment but they also have an infrastructure set up in government which we could do which works with people to get them a job to get them off welfare and denmark has saved an enormous amount of money let me say it again doing is better than having am i saying we could save 100 of that 75 billion no i don't know how much we can say nobody else does either because we've never tried now in about i don't know seven minutes i've just given given you four or five ideas i'm not i'm not suggesting that that this is anything uh i'm not pretending that i just discovered gravity or something this isn't earth shaking i mean you can find this with just a cursory uh amount of research just call the folks over at at the congressional budget office and ask them how are some ways we can save money in our federal budget and and i just think we would all feel so much better i know the american taxpayer would feel a lot better if just for a little while as we talk about the importance of infrastructure true infrastructure roads bridges broadband if we if if we just spend a little while as we talk about the infrastructure how how to pay for it without putting our hand even further deeper and more frequently in the taxpayer's pockets because it can be done i watched you do it mr president colorado i mean i i i've seen i've seen too many public officials do it and i think we need to at least try with that mr president i suggest the absence of a quorum the clerk will call the role ms baldwin senators in a quorum call

Channel: Forbes Breaking News

Views: 226,257

Keywords: Sen. John Kennedy, Democrats, President Biden

Id: Z9b1zyFu_l4

Length: 10min 40sec (640 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 28 2021