Glenn Beck and Stephen Moore on Budget Bill

GLENN BECK PROGRAM
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

GLENN: Stephen Moore from the Wall Street Journal, how are you, Steven?

MOORE: Hi, Glenn.

GLENN: How are things?

MOORE: A little poorer today after the budget passed yesterday.

GLENN: You know, this budget is -- what an outrage this thing is. Just loaded, loaded with pork. When are these guys ever going to get it?

MOORE: Well, we've got, first of all let's start with the fact that we now have America's $3 trillion, that's trillion with a T, dollar budget, something I never thought I would see in my lifetime.

GLENN: You know what, Stephen, I'm going to have to have you over at the house. A guy came up to me in line. I get some of the nicest gifts when I go out. Guy came up to me in line in Charleston and he handed me this big beautifully framed newspaper, the Charleston Observer, I believe it was, from 1795, and it's the front page of the newspaper and it's real. And he said, read the first two columns. And the first two columns was the federal budget in its entirety.

MOORE: Right. That's amazing. I'd love to get a copy of that.

GLENN: Oh, it's fantastic. It's fantastic.

MOORE: Hard to believe, you know. You look at what the budget was like in those early years because most of the things that the federal government spends money on today in my opinion, Glenn, are not even constitutional. I mean, let me give you a few examples of the things that your tax dollars are spent on in this budget. There's $700 million for a Minnesota bike trail, $113,000 for --


Stephen Moore

GLENN: Wait, wait, wait, wait. $700 million?

MOORE: For a bike trail.

GLENN: $700 million? Almost a billion dollars? Our embassy, which is the size of the national mall in Iraq was $750 million.

MOORE: Unbelievable. $113,000 for rodent control in Alaska.

GLENN: For what?

MOORE: Rodent control in Alaska.

GLENN: Leave the doors open in the back room. The rodents will freeze to death, Alaska.

MOORE: Then there's a million dollars for this energy project in the Louisiana Democrat William Jefferson. He is the one facing trial for bribery. He got in additional funds. And the amazing thing here is you may recall that when Nancy Pelosi, you know, said that she wanted to be speaker of the house so they could clean up the slop in Washington. Remember that last year? And that they were going to end all of this earmark spending. Well, it turns out there are just short of 13,000 of these special interest projects. I mean, we could go on and on for the full three hours that you are on going over these projects, but the point is that there are more pork projects than ever, it's cost the federal taxpayers about $15 billion a year and the waste goes on and on and on.

GLENN: Stephen, it's not just the Democrats that are doing this. The Republicans, right?

MOORE: Oh, yeah, it's Republicans, too. This is bipartisan, folks.

GLENN: So how do you stop that, Stephen?

MOORE: Well, I think one thing you have to do is I would have liked to see President Bush veto this budget. You know, the President has to be the one that guards the federal treasury and protects our pocket books and President Bush has agreed to sign this bill even though it has 13,000 of these projects.

GLENN: Why? Why?

MOORE: Why?

GLENN: Yeah.

MOORE: Because I think, well, for one thing he wanted the funding for Iraq and what the Democrats were doing was saying unless you give us our bike trails and our museums and post offices and parking garages, we're not going to give you the money to fund the troops.

GLENN: See, this is why, this is -- America would respect someone with a spine. They would respect somebody with a spine. Stand up against it. We don't negotiate with terrorists.

MOORE: I couldn't agree more. And that's what congress was doing. I mean, how despicable is that that they are basically saying unless you give us our pork spending so we can get reelected, we're not going to fund the troops, we're not going to give them, you know, the kinds of ammunition and the guns and the support that they need to fight this war. I mean, thaws outrageous.

GLENN: I had Ron Paul on TV last night for an hour and he said something, and I'm paraphrasing here, but I can't believe this is true. He said he wants to abolish the IRS. And I said, okay, so what do you replace it with? And he said, nothing. What? I mean, how do we raise taxes? And he said, if we abolish the IRS, if we eliminated the income tax, we would still as a government be taking in the same amount that we did ten years ago. Is that even possible?

MOORE: Well, you know, I'm all in favor of getting rid of the IRS. I mean, I would love to stick a stake right through the heart of the income tax system. I think I've always said the 16th amendment which passed in 1913 which authorized the income tax was the most evil act that has passed in 100 years. And I also think that if you didn't -- I mean, imagine that we didn't have any income tax in this country and we just had something like a sales tax. I mean, my God, it would be like rocket fuel for the U.S. economy and nobody could -- the Chinese, the Japanese, nobody could compete with us.

GLENN: Yeah. So you didn't answer the question. Do you know if that's true?

MOORE: Oh, is it true that if you eliminate the income tax --

GLENN: Yes. Just on all of the other taxes that we are taking in.

MOORE: Right.

GLENN: We would have the same amount of money as we did ten years ago. His was --

MOORE: Well, you have to include the payroll tax. If you kept the payroll tax, that would be true. But, you know, the payroll tax right now for most workers today, Glenn, is a bigger burden on most workers than the income tax is. So I'd like to see the payroll tax and the income tax eliminated.

GLENN: I love you, Stephen.

MOORE: I mean, I would get rid of these things. It's a 15% tax on the first dollar that you earn up to $100,000.

GLENN: But you are not -- first of all, they are going to expand that to no longer have any kind of cap to it.

MOORE: Right.

GLENN: And second of all, you can't stop if they keep spending like this. I mean, I did the story yesterday about how the deficit of promised spending used to be, four years ago, $26 trillion.

MOORE: Right.

GLENN: It's now $40 trillion something and that's just because of additional spending and because of the interest rate that we're paying.

MOORE: Right.

GLENN: It's just, it's compounding like crazy.

MOORE: If you look at these special pork barrel projects, the earmarks in the budget, there are something like 22 slices of bacon for every congressional district in America. We just can't afford this, folks. I mean, they are spending us to bankruptcy.

GLENN: How long do we have before the economy just cannot take it? How many more things do we have to put on the table before the table leg gives way? Or how much more time before it just kills us?

MOORE: I think that the debt and the overspending in Washington is already having a negative effect. I mean, the fact that the economy is slowing down, I think all the new taxes, all of the new spending is sending all of the wrong signals when you've got the rest of the world that's trying to get leaner budgets and lower taxes and the American government is growing every year. I mean, this budget is $3 trillion.

When I came to Washington, Glenn, in 1981 with Ronald Reagan, the federal budget was $500 billion. Today it's $3 trillion, six times bigger, six times bigger in just 25 years.

GLENN: It's unbelievable. It's absolutely unbelievable.

All right. This is the lead editorial in The Wall Street Journal today. Stephen, you know what I'd love to have you do is go through this budget and find some of the things in the budget and bring them to television tonight like the bike trail.

MOORE: Will do. You know that's going to be a hefty task because 3500 pages long.

GLENN: Do you also know what's buried in this omnibus bill is a taking apart of the border fence.

MOORE: Yeah, yeah.

GLENN: They did it again.

MOORE: Yeah.

GLENN: It's in there yet again and they have taken apart. We had the financing, we have the bill, it passed, it's law and I mean, have you read this part of it yet, Stephen?

MOORE: I'm about halfway through with it. I mean, it's unbelievable. There are 600 pages of these earmarks and you are right. The two things that they didn't fund was the border security and the war in Iraq.

GLENN: Unbelievable.

MOORE: Those are the things the Government is supposed to spend money on.

GLENN: Absolutely unbelievable. Steven, we'll talk to you tonight. Bye-bye.