By Cliff Kincaid ——Bio and Archives--March 8, 2016
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Strassel: You have made a lot of promises and you have also—you’re the only candidate who has said he would not touch entitlements. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has estimated that your ideas would cost an additional $12 trillion to $15 trillion over the next 10 years and that we would have to have annual economic growth of anywhere from 7.7 percent to 9 percent annually to pay for them. Are you proposing more than you can actually deliver, at least not without big deficits? Trump: First of all, the—when you say I’m the only candidate, if you listen to the Democrats, they want to do many things to Social Security, and I want to do them on its own merit. You listen to them, what they want to do to Social Security, none of these folks are getting elected, okay, whether they can do it or not. I’m going to save Social Security. I’m going to bring jobs back from China. I’m going to bring jobs back from Mexico and from Japan, where they’re all—every country throughout the world—now Vietnam, that’s the new one. They are taking our jobs. They are taking our wealth. They are taking our base. And you and I have had this discussion. We’re going to make our economy strong again. I’m lowering taxes. We have $2.5 trillion offshore. We have $2.5 trillion that I think is actually five trillion because the government has no idea when they say $2.5, they have no idea what they’re doing or saying, as they’ve proven very well. We’re going to bring that money back. You take a look at what happened just this week. China bought the Chicago Stock Exchange, China, a Chinese company. Carrier is moving to Mexico—air conditioning company. Not only the ones I talk about all the time, Nabisco and Ford and—they’re all moving out. We have an economy that last quarter, G.D.P. didn’t grow. It was flat. We have to make our economy grow again. We’re dying. This country is dying. And our workers are losing their jobs, and you’re going… Strassel: But in terms of… Trump: I’m the only one who is going to save Social Security, believe me. Strassel: Okay. But how would you actually do that? Can I ask you? Because right now, Social Security and Medicare… Trump: Because you have tremendous waste. I’ll tell you… Strassel: They take up two-thirds of the federal budget, and they’re growing. Trump: You have tremendous waste, fraud and abuse. That we’re taking care of. That we’re taking care of. It’s tremendous. We have in Social Security right now thousands and thousands of people that are over 106 years old. Now, you know they don’t exist. They don’t exist. There’s tremendous waste, fraud and abuse, and we’re going to get it. But we’re not going to hurt the people who have been paying into Social Security their whole life and then all of a sudden they’re supposed to get less. We’re bringing our jobs back. We’re going to make our economy great again.Needless to say, Trump didn’t answer the question. But he’s going to make America great again. On the Democratic side, the group says that Senator Bernie Sanders’ plans would increase the size of the federal government by about 40 percent. That’s one charge Hillary Clinton has made about the cost of Sanders’s proposals that the committee says is true. “We estimate that all of Sen. Sanders’s proposals would increase government spending by between 36 and 60 percent, which is close to what Sec. Clinton estimated at 40 percent,” it says. Sanders wants to cut the defense budget to pay for more social spending. But Marc Goldwein, Senior Vice President and Senior Policy Director of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, says defense isn’t what’s driving the debt. “Of the $2.7 trillion increase in spending over the next decade, about $100 billion of that is defense—maybe $150 billion,” he notes. “That means that $2.5 trillion of the $2.7 trillion is not defense. It’s mostly Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest on our debt.” Dr. Tracy C. Miller, an associate professor of economics at Grove City College, told me recently in an interview that the massive federal debt cannot be sustained and will necessitate cuts to popular programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. “Commitments far exceed what can be raised in taxes,” he says. This is the truth you won’t find in the media or from the candidates. America is going broke but the media are making tons of money, mostly because of Trump.
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Cliff Kincaid is president of America’s Survival, Inc. usasurvival.org.