00:00:32.800I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
00:00:38.180Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?
00:00:41.940If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
00:00:48.300War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Vann.
00:00:54.360Okay, welcome. It's Saturday, 11 March, Year of the Lord, 2023.
00:00:58.300We have Richard Stern from the Grover Herman Center for the Federal Budget over at Heritage.
00:01:06.480And I just got to say, Kevin Roberts, what he's done with this new team over at Heritage, is pretty amazing.
00:01:11.660Richard, I want to have you on because I've got to ask you, you know, we've been covering the details of the budget.
00:01:17.240We've had you on before, talk about how you get to a balanced budget.
00:01:19.660I want to make sure everybody in this audience, because our audience is the head of the creditors committee of this of the country and about the debt ceiling and all that.
00:01:29.320You know, I don't study the federal budget for a living.
00:01:37.880You know, we have it up here on the show.
00:01:39.880I think I'm pretty knowledgeable about it, pretty knowledgeable about capital markets, given my former profession.
00:01:45.020But that's what I wanted to have you on to ask you.
00:01:50.200When we were sitting here and we're talking about, are you going to are you going to negotiate?
00:01:53.980No, he's not. He's pretending to say, you know, you've got to have the full faith and credit.
00:01:57.640And and I'm not even going to talk to McCarthy.
00:01:59.580And these MAGA Republicans are so radical.
00:02:01.440We're talking about the budget and the CBO puts out this report that we're going to have along the current track.
00:02:07.540It'll be 19 trillion dollars added to the 32.
00:02:10.080We won't take one penny off at 30, 30, over 50 trillion of debt next 10 years.
00:02:16.680And Biden comes out with a budget with a top line of six point eight trillion dollars.
00:03:30.340Let's go back to it, because we can talk about the like, as you know, I'm a populist.
00:03:36.820So some of the tax increases against our betters that hate us, I may not have a problem with what I do have a problem with.
00:03:44.120And correct me if I'm wrong, when they say he's bringing the deficit down three trillion or five trillion, there is no evidence in the math they showed us that shows you he's bringing the deficit down by any cuts in spending.
00:04:23.860When you look at all that new spending that's in there, most of that are handouts to those elite groups.
00:04:28.860So what they're doing is they're putting taxes on the board that hit everybody, and then they're putting subsidies on the board that make up for those taxes to their friends that are pushing their agenda and all of this other stuff.
00:04:44.420I want to go back when the CBO – how do you compare – the CBO thing was shocking enough, and I think that gets people's attention because that's not heritage.
00:04:52.640Bridge or Breitbart or, you know, they're center-left, and I think it rattled people because it showed you, in fact, they are going to have $2 trillion kind of in perpetuity deficits.
00:05:03.740This is going to have to be financed by just printing money because there's no other way to finance it, and you get to $19 trillion.
00:05:10.600Is there – is this put us on a steeper – because I've seen New York Post and some other analysis have come out.
00:05:15.460Does this put us under a steeper – even a steeper slope to have even more than another $20 trillion added to this?
00:05:25.220Because you know these tax increases are not going to – because a lot of these are Democratic donors.
00:05:31.480So the tax increase is not going to go.
00:05:32.860With his spending, how bad can it get as you look at this?
00:05:49.460All of that is the economy, not just here but also across the globe, crying out to governments, not just ours, but all of these elitists, saying stop.
00:05:58.520Stop printing money and devaluing our savings or paycheck.
00:06:09.240That extra spend that he's put in there, it just pushes us much further to the fiscal cliff.
00:06:13.260When you do the math out, what you see kind of on paper is we've got 20, maybe 25 years left until we are absolutely out of ability for the government to just suck the oxygen out of the economy.
00:06:25.640But people aren't dumb, contrary to what Biden and the left thinks.
00:06:30.140No one is going to give the government 20 or 25 years to actually take all the oxygen out of the room.
00:06:34.740The inflation, the interest rate spikes, that's already the market already adjusting to the reality that politicians in D.C. are right next to the cliff and happy to push it off of us.
00:06:45.240So the truth is I don't know when that end is coming, but this extra trillions of dollars he's spending that you're talking about pushes us dangerously close to that level.
00:06:54.760Who knows when the market will just pull the rug out from under us?
00:06:59.120So I want to go to your work because you've got the bid and the ask, right?
00:07:03.820But you've seen what Biden's put forward, which is six point eight trillion dollars in this fiscal year, which is, quite frankly, mind boggling, almost seven trillion dollars.
00:07:49.580But we actually don't have to go through and slash and burn.
00:07:51.920All you have to do is slow the growth rate, put in good reform so these programs actually make sense and get rid of the programs.
00:07:59.560They're just giveaways to the rogue left, to their establishment, to bureaucrats, giveaways to every industry group that supports Biden's and gets liberals elected to Congress.
00:08:09.000Doing that alone is enough to cut that kind of spending level.
00:08:11.760So not only does that balance the budget, not only does it avoid the fiscal cliff, but it actually allows us to put three and a quarter trillion dollars of tax cuts in our proposal on top of that.
00:08:24.420Reforms that mean that when Americans work hard, when they dream, when they build a business, when they want to build assets for the future for their children, they can.
00:08:32.760And that we have an economy that grows for everybody and gets back to that kind of dynamic economic environment that built this country and built the American middle class.
00:08:52.060If you've in the 60, if they propose three to five trillion, right, of tax increases and you're proposing three trillion of tax cuts, that's a pretty big spread.
00:09:07.340How do you how does that work in that you're able to additionally take 16 trillion dollars of spending out and get to a balanced budget, which they don't even come close to doing.
00:09:18.060Right. Because they're three to five trains still leaves you, what, 15 trillion short.
00:09:22.560And with their spending increases, it'll be much more.
00:09:28.480Are you are you assuming higher growth rates given the tax cuts you got?
00:09:32.580Is there some mathematical formula here I'm missing?
00:09:35.180So we're actually not even doing that.
00:09:37.840But to your point, we actually think that if you did the things we did, the economy would probably grow by 10 percent or more over a 10 year period of time.
00:09:45.680That's, by the way, 10, 15 grand, something in that ballpark of higher annual income on average for households in America.
00:09:53.000But we're not even using that when we say that we balance.
00:09:55.520So one thing is by cutting that much in spending for the programs, you save a lot on interest costs, right, because you're not loading up this debt.
00:10:03.460You're not having interest costs are going to eclipse the defense department in just a couple of years, things of that nature.
00:10:09.620And then beyond that, beyond kind of that straight math on it, absolutely, by cutting taxes, by letting people keep the money that they earn, by giving them a tax system that actually rewards saving, that rewards building a business, you're going to get a vastly larger economy.
00:10:24.820You're going to get more natural revenues that way, but at the lower tax rates in a way that is actually respectful of everybody's God-given rights to life, to liberty, to their property, to the things that they worked hard over.
00:10:35.540So that's our plan, and that's how it works that way.
00:10:38.020I mean, it's not just to make the federal balances pocketbook look good.
00:10:43.240It's to allow Americans rights to what they worked hard to produce.
00:10:49.180Besides just the math, and you've got the woke and weaponized funding in here, isn't their concept – and this is the thing I think the American people have to pull the camera back and kind of grasp – their concept is an all-pervasive – this is the administrative state mathematics.
00:11:08.020Because this is an all-pervasive federal government that just now is feeding on itself as far as growth.
00:11:16.700Is that what they show when they said – they show us a 6.8 train this year and with these kind of growth rates they've got in federal spending with not one cut, sir?
00:11:27.580This is putting, to your point, that leviathan, the government bureaucracy in the driver's seat of the entire U.S. economy and really all of U.S. society.
00:11:35.900The numbers on the page we look at for budgets, whether it's ours, whether it's what the Republican State Committee puts out in Congress or the Freedom Caucus or President Biden's, the numbers portray something else, which is the values of the people that write to the budget.
00:11:49.340So the numbers may look cold on paper, but those spending creases you're talking about, that weaponized woke bureaucracy that they're funding, that will permeate into every aspect of our lives, our values, our morals.
00:12:00.060It will drive the campaign they've been pushing to separate parents from children and to have the state replace parents as the people that are raising our children and directing society.
00:12:09.860The way to do this is we're going to have to have – I mean, this is going to lead to a political confrontation, there's no doubt, because Biden's saying right now there's nothing to negotiate.
00:12:22.860You guys can't mess with the full faith and credit.
00:12:25.220There can't be anything but a clean lift to the debt ceiling.
00:12:29.440But here, this throwdown – I mean, you can't do this because they're not rational.
00:12:33.780I said it in the show yesterday on Friday.
00:12:37.380You're not dealing with serious people.
00:12:38.940Do you agree with me before we go to break that this is not the work of serious people?
00:12:43.660This is a political document that's just up in your face about what they're trying to accomplish, the overarching, because you can't take it – given the financial crisis we're in, you can't take this seriously?
00:13:10.680The other side, the conservatives, people that I work with at Heritage, we have done the serious work of demonstrating how you respect Americans, how you grow our economy, and have a government that does the things the government's supposed to do, and only that.
00:13:23.160What they've put out is exactly what you're talking about.
00:13:25.160It's a non-serious bid to just cause chaos, to sow distrust, and to throw us into a panicked situation.
00:13:32.160And then the really thing, they're trying to do a class war, but it's against the working class and middle class by this kind of donor class, and then they've got the fake taxes, which will never pass.
00:13:43.980I mean, I told some guys – we had guys up here on Thursday when this thing first came out.
00:13:47.880I had some Congress people and some other guys who I was sitting down with, and I said, McCarthy ought to go and call Congress in, the House in, pass every one of the tax cuts they want, every one.
00:13:59.140Or tax increases. Pass them all, send it to Schumer, and dare him to pass it, because he won't, because there's all the – it's totally performative, a lot of it, right, just to sit there, because they're not going to pass these.
00:14:10.720The ones that are going to pass are in the middle class.
00:14:13.120Richard, can you hang on for a second, because I want to get down into the practicality of how we take your work and inform – one of the things I'm concerned about, I don't see consistency in messaging from the House Republicans now.
00:14:25.740And one of the reasons I don't see consistency in messaging, I'm not sure they fully grasped the totality of this, and that's why you're so important over at Heritage.
00:14:34.540We're going to take a short commercial break.
00:14:36.660Richard Stern is going to join us on the other side as we try to get our arms around, really, as we've done all day today on the show, the coming Third World War.
00:14:46.580It's not a gathering storm. The storm is here, and a lot of that storm is represented, manifested in these numbers, in Biden's budget that he put up in your grill on Thursday.
00:14:59.160War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Vance.
00:15:02.600Okay. I want to show you a tweet from yesterday, from Friday, President Biden, and this is how – and Richard, I'd like to get your response to this.
00:15:18.680This is from the President of the United States, quote the President of the United States, the head of the illegitimate regime, as we say here in the War Room.
00:15:24.900And I'm just going to quote from his tweet, Extreme MAGA House Republicans are showing us what they value, tax breaks for the rich.
00:15:35.660They demand the biggest Medicare benefits cut in decades, ship jobs overseas, defund law enforcement, devastate our national and border security.
00:15:48.580Brother Stern from Heritage, is there any word, comma, anything of truth in that tweet from Joe Biden, sir?
00:15:58.780I believe he protests too much, as they say. All of that is probably a better description of what he believes in.
00:16:05.240So for everyone watching and listening, I want to make it very clear.
00:16:08.760Biden's Social Security plan is a 23 percent, almost a quarter cut in benefits for everyone on the program.
00:16:15.540His plan for Medicare is insolvency and bankruptcy, which is also his plan for the rest of the country.
00:16:21.540There's no truth to that tweet. I'm glad you brought it up here.
00:16:24.600What it highlights here is that the thing that Biden does have is confidence to boldly walk out to the American public, lie between his teeth, and throw under the bus.
00:16:33.380They're trying to do the hard work of actually doing the things that would save the country.
00:16:37.300I do have the complicated situation we're in right now.
00:16:44.980And look, there are many not conflicting, but clearly the populist nationalists have a have a difference of opinion slightly on the margins with some of our more conservative brethren on economics.
00:16:58.700But what I've noticed is that they march in unison, right?
00:17:03.960And that's where they can put up a six point eight trillion dollars with no cuts up in your grill.
00:17:08.740And everybody gets in back of that message.
00:17:10.960And they put out a complete line of that every line, letter, word and comma and period in there's a lie.
00:17:17.180But they all get in back of it in the business media, the corporatist business media and in MSNBC and CNN and The New York Times all fall in like a phalanx and support it.
00:17:27.900On our side, I think we have a messaging problem.
00:17:31.240But most importantly, I keep telling people, I think we have a comprehension problem because we're at a scale of this problem.
00:17:37.600And I talk to people, good people, and they want to go into a program and cut out, you know, the waste, fraud and abuse or some of the woken weaponized, which I realize it's got to do.
00:17:46.420But it misses the totality of what we're talking about in the scale of what we're talking about.
00:18:26.040They don't understand that what's happening is this unified front, as you say, from the inside that isn't just padding on waste, fraud and abuse.
00:19:34.880Because I'm going to get to the negotiation part of it with Biden and McCarthy.
00:19:38.220What is your recommendation to people to actually get everybody on board, right?
00:19:44.380And not that they have to totally agree about every item in here, but they actually understand that to get to a balanced budget, we have to, we have to thwart this in negotiations.
00:19:52.820But here's what we're going to have to do programmatically.
00:19:55.980And there's going to be some pain, and this is no doubt about it.
00:20:07.600So I think the most important thing, honestly, is what we were just talking about.
00:20:11.040We need to get conservatives to understand what's at stake, right?
00:20:14.280So a lot of this is hard, but frankly, you said this before.
00:20:17.720Democrats will put up tax increases they would never actually vote for because they have that much conviction in the underlying values that went forward
00:20:27.020We will lose if conservatives don't understand that they are conservatives, that that means being there as a champion for traditional American values,
00:20:34.700for hardworking Americans that keep what they produce.
00:20:41.280It's the deep kind of math of where the government spends on this or that.
00:20:44.260The truth is you can slow the rate of growth of federal spending and not cut massive parts of the government and still get to balance.
00:20:51.460I would like to cut large parts of it because those parts are just handouts to the woke, to the CRT kind of left, the Green New Deal left.
00:20:59.740But you don't even need to do it to balance.
00:21:01.740We need to inspire conservatives to stand for the values, to stand for those hardworking Americans that every dollar federal spending has taken from forcibly.
00:21:13.200Particularly people under this is most disturbing people under 35 that lean and support.
00:21:18.440And it's obviously it's it's it's much bigger than the MAGA movement, much bigger than the conservative movement that support this in buying six point eight percent.
00:21:28.060If you six point eight trillion, if you pass this and what goes afterwards, you're going to crush growth, not just the crowding out of capital.
00:21:37.680You're going to have growth under two percent in perpetuity.
00:21:41.660You're going to have the lost decades that Japan has had.
00:21:45.320And you're people under 35 or 40 years old are essentially going to be Russian serfs because the millennials, the debt is exploding.
00:21:52.900I think it's nine trillion dollars today to debt today.
00:21:55.480And you see these interest rates, it's going to eat them alive.
00:21:59.120How do we convince people that this spending is not to your benefit?
00:22:03.980In fact, if you go down this path, you're going to just take away the basic vital energy and animal spirits of the American economy.
00:22:10.860And we're going to end up like places like Japan that have, you know, high interest rates, low growth, you know, the classic kind of stagflation recession continually.
00:22:20.940And you can never break out of it because now you've actually walked into the trap where you've got to continue to spend.
00:22:26.700How what's the best way to convince particularly young people?
00:22:29.940Because if these budgets get passed, it's it's game over.
00:22:43.960This is definitely the linchpin moment.
00:22:47.060So the thing we've got to do is deconstruct the left's narrative and really at the heart of it, their entire philosophy comes down to one thing.
00:22:55.680If you listen to all of their messaging, what they're saying is that humans destroy the land, steal the resources, ruin the climate, take from each other.
00:23:03.840If you listen to them, what they tell you is elect us, a group of philosopher kings that know everything.
00:23:09.600They can run your life better than you can.
00:23:11.220And what's happening, to your point, is the younger generations are falling victim to us.
00:23:16.060They're being indoctrinated in the universities and the media that are getting government handouts from these world bureaucracies.
00:23:21.860They're teaching people that they can't do, that they can't build.
00:23:25.840To your point, and we were talking about this earlier, the U.S. was built by people that understood the exact opposite, that understood the reality.
00:23:32.160Everything we have was something that was done by a person who worked hard, who dreamed, who innovated, who figured out how to do things that weren't good,
00:23:39.240not just for themselves, but good for all of society.
00:23:42.500Things like nuclear families, our religious institutions, all of these are under attack because the left has slowly but surely created this narrative that people are the problem.
00:23:53.380We have to go back to these people and say, no, you can build, you can dream, you can do.
00:23:57.760What they are trying to do is sap you of your strength, of your God-given right, to be who you want, to produce what you want, and to build the future you want.
00:24:06.600You don't have to listen to the bureaucrats.
00:24:08.460You don't have to listen to their warped moral structure.
00:24:11.540You know best how to run your own life.
00:24:13.840We need to say that, but I'll tell you the other part of this.
00:24:16.000It's not just about convincing them that.
00:24:17.800It's about convincing conservatives in office that that's true.
00:24:21.420They go out there and have these lacking in confidence statements.
00:24:43.340How do we get people's confidence up and an understanding of the math and back of that that gives them more confidence that we're on the right path?
00:24:52.400So one of the things that I'm sure will come to no surprise to you, Heritage Foundation, my team in particular, knows a lot of people that are congressional staffers.
00:25:00.120We talk to a lot of members directly, and we say these sorts of things.
00:25:03.160We give them these kind of talking points.
00:25:05.120One of the things that we were honored to do is we've been talking to congressional staff from both the Republican Study Committee and the House Freedom Caucus, as well as many others, talking through with them some of those leaders that are putting out good, solid statements to this effect.
00:25:18.100We've been honored to work with them on shaping part of that and being involved in the process, and that's how you do it.
00:25:23.660And again, of course, we've got public publications that go out to everybody, but it's also that work inside the halls of Congress to help beef up the members and the staff as well.
00:26:19.320So now you actually can have an informed debate.
00:26:22.340It's not going to be perfect because nobody totally agrees on these numbers, but at least directionally you can.
00:26:27.140Richard Stern from Heritage, he's the head of the Federal Budget Project over there.
00:26:32.040He's going to walk us through how we try to sort this mess out.
00:26:35.440And let me just tell people, this is going to be one of the battles of the ages because Biden and these guys are not going to back off one inch.
00:27:06.720I want to bring in Congressman Matt Rosendale.
00:27:09.960Congressman, we're going to get back to Richard Stern in a second.
00:27:11.760Sir, we've been talking this morning about the geopolitics, world events, what's happening, obviously, with Saudi Arabia, Iran, the Chinese Communist Party putting it together.
00:27:59.420No, they're just not going to go along with this, Steve.
00:28:01.700There's no way that you can go from 2019 numbers, which included about four point four trillion dollars in spending with three point three, three point five trillion dollars in revenue coming in.
00:28:16.880And now over the last four years, increase that to six point eight trillion dollars in spending.
00:28:22.560One thing I do find interesting, actually, is the fact that revenue has grown to four point nine trillion dollars over the three point five trillion, which was a revenue at the exact same time that the Democrats all screamed.
00:28:38.340You're giving tax cuts and there's no way that you can generate more revenue when you're cutting taxes.
00:28:43.400And this once again proves that that is exactly what happens.
00:28:46.800You stimulate the economy and it's and it's a good thing.
00:28:51.020Right now, what we are looking at is what they're requesting is another one point nine trillion dollars to be added to the national debt, which would put us up in the neighborhood of about thirty three and a half trillion dollars.
00:29:06.280And that hole is getting so big that I just don't have an excavator large enough to fill it back up again.
00:29:27.300You just mentioned the deficit is one point eight point point nine.
00:29:29.880I mean, you do the CBO math and on Biden's plan, even with this tax increases, if they went through, which they would never go through because the Democrats even lying about that.
00:30:15.820We're going to try and bring them back to reality.
00:30:18.060I think what you will see is when we return to Congress in about two weeks, that we're going to have a list of places where we're going to be able to claw back some of the outrageous and outlandish money that was put aside for covid spending that was never utilized.
00:30:35.580We're going to go through the agencies and find all these duplicative programs.
00:30:40.900We're going to find the new green deal programs.
00:30:43.320We're going to we're working on those lists right now.
00:30:46.440And so we're going to present that as a group.
00:30:49.360It'll probably be the same 20 that you're becoming very familiar with, headed by the six who you're very familiar with that are going to propose that and try to lead the country into a place of sanity and reality.
00:31:04.340Of where the things that we have to address and the things that money is being spent on, we're going to highlight it, things that money is being spent on that the average taxpayer is just not going to agree with.
00:31:14.860And they will support us in removing that spending from the budget.
00:31:20.020And what we're hoping, Steve, is that's going to put us in a place where the debt ceiling doesn't have to be increased anytime soon.
00:31:27.140And then we can have this discussion about the appropriations bills and we will deliver the 12 appropriation bills this year.
00:31:36.300And that's where you're going to have a discussion about where where money really needs to be spent.
00:31:40.920OK, so you're saying the Magnificent Six, which you're part of, that saved the country in the first four or five days of the new year and the mighty 20, your guys back up, that you guys are going to come up with a plan and convince McCarthy in the conference that, hey, we got to come in hard on this thing.
00:31:57.860I'm breaking news here that this is essentially in the next couple of weeks.
00:32:01.760You guys are going to come back because Biden specifically talked about you in Philadelphia.
00:32:06.280You are the radical MAGA Republicans that want to destroy the nation.
00:32:10.360So you guys are going to come back and convince McCarthy and these guys to put some steel on their spine?
00:32:15.840Oh, I think that they're looking for us, too.
00:32:17.720I think it puts them in an outstanding position to be able to say that a segment of the conference has developed this plan and it is realistic.
00:32:27.240A lot of the country is going to support it and it makes it easier for them to try and embrace it.
00:32:34.900We can have conversations about where we need to make some changes.
00:32:38.080But we are absolutely going to change the trajectory of where this country is going when it comes to spending and deficits.
00:32:46.080Richard Stern has dedicated his professional life now and Russ Fodor with some of these two individuals who have dedicated with their teams to get us to show us how we get to a balanced budget.
00:32:58.380Will your proposal that you get McCarthy to sign off on in the conference that we engage with the Democrats on, will it be something that shows us a path to a balanced budget, sir?
00:33:07.740It will, Steve, but I will tell you what I'm more focused on.
00:33:12.120The balanced budget is always this far-reaching 10-year plan.
00:33:17.300And what we have control over is the next two years.
00:33:20.700And that's why instead of making promises about where we're going to have adjustments and cuts and reductions in year nine or in year 10,
00:33:30.220we're going to propose those in year one and year two so that people really know that it's going to happen.
00:33:38.200So you're saying, hey, right out of the box, we're going to show you we're going to have real cuts, not slowing growth rates of a federal, right out of the box.
00:34:07.600Tell us the importance of that vote, because honestly, I'd listen to the watch the whole thing.
00:34:11.680And I heard McCall, and particularly Commander Zinke, who I think very highly of personally, I was quite disappointed in the lack of intellectual rigor in their arguments to continue to participate in that.
00:34:24.080Can you walk us through your thinking and your vote?
00:34:30.220We have seen over the last several decades the consolidation of power, and this is the exact same argument that we had about the speaker's race
00:34:38.580and about the rules that we needed to get reformed so that the floor would have proper conduct, that everyone could participate, to reclaim Congress's power.
00:34:49.240And so I look at this in the exact same way.
00:34:51.400Number one, the founders never intended for us to get in these conflicts around the world.
00:34:57.400We are not supposed to be the world's policeman.
00:34:59.860We are supposed to be engaged in a conflict if the American citizens or our interests are in danger.
00:35:10.260And so to continue to get engaged in conflicts around the world is wrong.
00:35:14.840So what they have done, Congress developed this other tool that they have transferred this authority over to the executive by issuing these authorization to use military force, AUMF.
00:35:28.020And so when they don't feel like voting to authorize or declare a war, they utilize this other tool, authorization to use military force.
00:35:38.620And it allows the executive to make decisions about what level of force, where it's going to be utilized, and how much money is going to be spent on it with a little bit of support from Congress.
00:35:49.700And so what it does is it allows the executive to engage in these operations around the world for extended periods of time, and they're wrong.
00:35:59.240And that's why Congress needs to reclaim that authority back as well.
00:36:05.080Your constituents up in eastern Montana have a number of patriots, veterans, parents of kids that are serving in our armed forces.
00:36:15.940Do they have your back on this, do you think, sir?
00:36:19.480I've heard from veterans across the entire state, Steve, and what they do is understand that we are not supposed to be engaged in these conflicts.
00:36:29.240Montana was voted the most patriotic state in the nation last year, okay?
00:36:33.640Nearly 10 percent of my entire population is veterans.
00:36:38.560The tribal communities have an even larger per capita basis of veterans that are serving.
00:36:44.900This is an incredibly patriotic group of individuals that live in Montana.
00:36:50.780But I'm telling you that they know that we're not supposed to be engaged in conflicts around the world, and they know that the president is not supposed to be able to engage in these by executive fiat.
00:37:02.340This is a preamble or an appetizer for the real one, which is Ukraine.
00:37:09.180When is the House Republicans going to force Biden to come?
00:37:13.980And I'm not saying the War Powers Act is constitutional.
00:37:17.280That should be, to me, fought in the courts.
00:37:18.660But at least to have him come forward with what is the plan in Ukraine, what is the objectives in Ukraine through some sort of War Powers resolution?
00:37:26.640When are we going to have this same debate about – you had it about Syria.
00:37:29.840I thought we won the debate hands down.
00:38:20.900So right now I'm on two great committees, the Technology Modernization Committee, which looks at all the IT programs, the electronic health record system.
00:38:29.080And I'm also serving on the Oversight Committee and investigations.
00:38:35.580And right now the Veterans Administration receives $300 billion.
00:38:52.000And so we're performing a lot of oversight to make sure that all of these dollars are being used properly.
00:38:58.720And we are uncovering places where they're not being used right.
00:39:02.520I know that you saw the story that came up just last week.
00:39:05.280It's a minor side story, but it demonstrates some of the problems with the Veterans Administration.
00:39:10.140As I had one of the veterans go into one of the facilities and was declined to be able to have his service because his health care taken care of because he refused to wear a mask.
00:39:35.120And so I contacted the Veterans Administration and said that we want to have all of these mandates removed.
00:39:42.200We want our service members to be able to go in there and our veterans to get their health care treatment without being harassed like this.
00:42:26.580Buy one, get one free on the new launch of the MyPillow 2.0.
00:42:32.020Also, you know, we talked over the – this morning earlier, we talked obviously at the end of the week about the situation with Persia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, with the Chinese Communist Party to really get off the U.S. dollar.
00:42:45.040I've just put out the third installment with Birch Gold.
00:43:29.620Is Matt – is Congressman Rosendale right?
00:43:31.480We've got the balanced budget you guys have worked through.
00:43:33.260Is the way to do it, come in punching, get the MAGA Republicans in the House, come in and show some absolute real dramatic cuts in this budget to go counter what Biden's doing and just get into the negotiations then?
00:43:46.040Do you think that's a logical way to pursue this, sir?
00:43:52.820And the only way that we're going to be respected by Biden or inspire confidence among American voters – and as you say, the chairman of the Creditor Association that bankrolls all this – is if we lead, if we demonstrate conviction, it's the only way to do it.
00:44:05.500So to his – to the congressman's point as well, which I loved in that last segment, he's right.
00:44:10.560The dramatic increase in spending has largely been this – the government using the emergency to grow its own powers.
00:44:17.720When we talk about dramatic cuts to get back to that, they're not really dramatic cuts at all.
00:44:22.340It's just going back to the government we had prior to the pandemic.
00:44:27.360Even that was filled with this left-wing bureaucracy.
00:44:29.760And by the way, I will say as well, the staff on my team, myself included as well, have done a lot of that work already helping people – congressional staffers, a lot of people that the congressman was talking about – to get those lists together, the programs we could cut entirely or cut the rate of growth they're spending on.
00:44:44.560Remember, on Friday – on Friday, and we called this on Thursday, we said it was going to happen.
00:44:53.140On Friday, California regulators went in before the Fed and basically seized Silicon Valley Bank.
00:45:00.260It is the second biggest bank failure in the history of our nation, okay?
00:45:05.640And part of that's the Biden economy on the implosion of Silicon Valley because this is the premier bank, the premier bank of Silicon Valley, all the tech guys.
00:45:12.840But as importantly was the losses they took from government securities because of the Biden plan.
00:45:23.860Richard Stern is not a guy that goes to hyperbole.
00:45:27.180He's not a guy that has his hair on fire.
00:45:29.420When he says the work of Mad Men, it is absolute insanity what they propose given what is going on in the capital markets of the world and with this economy.
00:45:37.600And this is why it's got to be fought and it has to be fought now.
00:45:40.380Now, Richard, I want to thank you for taking all the time this morning to go through this with us.
00:45:44.340I want people to get immersed in all the work you guys are doing at Heritage about this because, hey, when the MAGA group that follows the boardroom, the posse, is the chairman of the creditors committee in this bankruptcy of our nation.
00:45:56.880They've got to make tough calls, and we want to make sure they have all knowledge and a fully immersive experience.
00:46:02.560Where did they go to find out more about you and your team's work over at Heritage, sir?
00:46:06.200Well, you can find me on Twitter at Rich A. Stern.
00:46:09.800You can find my team as well there as well.
00:46:11.640And if you go to heritage.org, you'll find all of our bios there, the Herman Center, all the stuff they put out, all the publications we put out.
00:46:18.860And I want to thank you as well for your focus on this.
00:46:20.900And again, we talked about this last time I was on about the Fed, about the left just printing money, devaluing everything you've worked your life for just to bankroll more of this stuff.
00:46:39.040Look at Iran in Saudi Arabia doing a deal with the Chinese Communist Party on these output deals to get off of the dollar as the prime reserve currency.
00:46:47.760Because they understand what the government's doing right now and this insanity with the 6.8 is going to be rolling devaluations on your money.