by Donald Trump
Next, we need a president who realizes that your money belongs to you, not him. A real president should take pride in saving and spending your money wisely, not funneling it to his cronies and political backers in the form of so-called “stimulus.” But unfortunately, that’s not the kind of president we currently have in the Oval Office. This guy wouldn’t save the American taxpayer $100 million if it landed on his front doorstep. I should know. I tried to make a $100 million gift to the United States government, but Barack Obama wouldn’t even return my phone call.
My $100 Million Gift to the U.S. Goes Uncollected
If you want a small example of just how uninterested your government is in saving and spending your money wisely, read on. One day I was watching television and I saw that President Obama was hosting a dinner for various leaders at the White House. But every time they had one of these events, I noticed that they put up an old, broken, rotten-looking tent out on the White House grounds that they probably paid some local guy a fortune for every time they needed it. That’s no way for America to host important meetings and dinners with world leaders and dignitaries. We should project our nation’s power and beauty with a proper facility and ballroom. If there’s one thing I know how to build, it’s a grand ballroom. At my private Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, I built what many consider to be the single greatest ballroom in the world . . . but I own many beautiful and very successful ballrooms.
So I called up the White House and they put me on with President Obama’s top senior strategist, David Axelrod. We had a very nice conversation, and I told David that “I will build you, free of charge, one of the great ballrooms of the world so that the president and all future American presidents can host events at the White House in a proper manner. To do it to the highest standards, it will cost anywhere from $50 to $100 million. I will cover the expenses and give the ballroom to the U.S. government as a gift. What I will do is I will hire the top ten vying architects in the world—I hope they’ll be American architects, but I’ll hire the best, whoever they are. We’ll then have a review committee set up. We’ll pick the architect that everybody agrees on, because it’s a little delicate in that it’s the White House we’re talking about. And I will build the greatest ballroom there is, even better than the Mar-a-Lago ballroom, so that Americans can be proud when our presidents host world leaders on the White House grounds.”
“Wow,” Axelrod said. “That’s very interesting.” He then said he would talk it over and get back to me. No one ever called back. And that’s what’s wrong with this country. When Rush Limbaugh invited me to come on his show I told him that story, and Rush said that they probably didn’t get back to me because I’m a lifelong Republican. Rush is probably right, but I’m sure it is just the way business is done in Washington, billions of dollars are squandered and people just don’t care. I really thought David would take me up on my offer but it is not too late. My offer still stands. If someone wants to give America—a nation that is flat broke—a nice gift, you call them back, regardless of what party they belong to. It’s just one small example of how the Obama administration isn’t fiscally wise and certainly doesn’t care about taking advantage of ways to give Americans the most for less. To the Obama administration, saving money isn’t the point—expanding government and spending more taxpayers’ dollars is. Sometimes they call it “investment” or “stimulus,” but a lot of it is sheer unadulterated waste.
We need a dealmaker in the White House, who knows how to think innovatively and make smart deals.
As an example, in a fairly recent well-documented Florida deal, I purchased a house in Palm Beach at a bankruptcy sale (sadly, a very rich man lost everything) for $41 million and everybody thought I was crazy. But I knew better. It was a great parcel of land fronting the ocean—and a short time later I sold it to a Russian for approximately $100 million. Had I listened to all the geniuses I wouldn’t have made that deal. It’s all about seeing the unseen. This is the kind of thinking we need to turn this country around—and fast.
We also need someone who can save money through common sense. When I opened Trump National Golf Club at Rancho Palos Verdes in Los Angeles, I was immediately told that I would need to build a new and costly ballroom. The current ballroom was gorgeous, but it only sat 200 people and we were losing business because people needed a larger space for their events. Building a new ballroom would take years to get approval and permits (since it’s on the Pacific Ocean), and cost about $5 million. I took one look at the ballroom and saw immediately what needed to be done. The problem wasn’t the size of the room, it was the size of the chairs. They were huge, heavy, and unwieldy. We didn’t need a bigger ballroom, we needed smaller chairs! So I had them replaced with high-end, smaller chairs. I then had our people sell the old chairs and got more money for them than the cost of the new chairs. In the end, the ballroom went from seating 200 people to seating 320 people. Our visitors got the space they desired, and I spared everyone the hassle of years of construction and $5 million of expense. It’s amazing what you can accomplish with a little common sense.
Washington Wastes Your Money
To have a government we can afford we need to eliminate the tremendous waste clogging the system. Almost every week a new story comes out reporting another gross example of government waste. The GAO reports that every year the federal government spends billions of dollars on dozens of wasteful overlapping programs. One simple fix—streamlining and consolidating 2,100 data centers—would save $200 billion over the next decade.6
Another example of federal government incompetence with your money: over the last five years, the Office of Personnel Management sent out $601 million in retirement benefits to people who are dead!7 The list of insane federal expenditures is almost endless: in 2010, $700,000 of your tax dollars went to research cow burps, $600,000 was spent on creating a wolf video game, and $250,000 was spent to research Internet romance. 8 And of course who can forget the $1,442,515 that the National Institutes of Health has allocated to be spent from 2008 to 2012 to study male prostitutes in Vietnam.9 On and on it goes. Your hard-earned money blown on ridiculous junk as far as the eye can see.
Obama doesn’t respect the fact that the money he wastes belongs to us. He thinks that the wealth you create belongs to the government. That’s why he doesn’t care whether it gets wasted or mismanaged. I, on the other hand, think wasting money is offensive and foolish. That’s why I make lots of money—I manage projects tightly and put a premium on efficiency.
Case in point: the Wollman Ice Skating Rink in Central Park. My apartment in Trump Tower overlooks the skating rink, which is more than an acre in size, making it the largest man-made ice skating rink in the United States. For seven straight years, the rink was closed on account of New York City’s management fiasco. The city of New York wasted seven years and $21 million and was still unable to get the rink open—it was a political nightmare and a great embarrassment to the city.
Essentially, all this bureaucracy and wasting of taxpayers’ money really got to me, so I asked to take over the project and even put up the construction money myself. Furthermore, I said that if the project went over budget, I would personally pick up the overruns. I told the city I would have Wollman Rink finished in six months. I was wrong. I did it in four. And I only spent $1.8 million—and a big portion of that was demolishing all of the incompetent work that was done before I took over. Am I an expert in building ice skating rinks? No, I build luxury towers, hotels, clubs, etc. But I’ve never forgotten what my father used to tell me. He said, “Know everything you can about what you’re doing.” So I went out and found the best ice skating rink builder in America and then managed the details to a successful completion. To this day, it remains a case study in many of the leading business schools on private versus government projects. Better still, Wollman Rink provides thousands of children, families, and visitors to our great city a wonderful experience that brings lots of smiles and great memories. That’s what can happ
en when you actually work to save, not waste, money.
Crack Down on Massive Fraud
Beyond eliminating the wasteful spending, we need to get tough in cracking down on the hundreds of billions of dollars we lose from the massive fraud committed in government programs every year. The FBI estimates that Medicare fraud alone costs you the taxpayer between $70 billion and $234 billion every single year!10 Typically, this fraud involves fake billing scams. For example, in September 2011, officials uncovered a Medicare fraud ring involving 91 individuals charged with filing $295 million in phony billings.11 In 2010, Medicare paid out more than $35 million to 118 “phantom” medical clinics that were allegedly created by criminal gangs as part of a reimbursement racket. As 60 Minutes revealed, South Florida has become “ground zero” for Medicare fraud because so many elderly people live there. It’s become so bad down there that law enforcement says Medicare crimes have now replaced cocaine as the number one criminal enterprise in South Florida.12
Now stop and do the math. If the FBI’s top estimates are correct, that’s $2,340,000,000 in Medicare fraud over a decade—or 16 percent of America’s entire national debt! And by the way, we haven’t even started with Obamacare yet—a trillion dollar government boondoggle sure to unleash unbelievable corruption and criminality on the American taxpayer.
Then there’s the disability racket. Did you know that one out of every twenty people in America now claims disability? That adds up to $170 billion a year in disability checks. Between 2005 and 2009, it is estimated that $25 billion were eaten up in fraudulent Social Security Disability Insurance filings.13 Then there’s the $116 million in fraud from the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program.14 And the $112 million the Internal Revenue Service doled out in tax refunds to prisoners who filed fraudulent tax returns. On and on, scam after scam it goes . . . as always, taxpayers are the ones getting stiffed.
Negotiate Smarter
A lot of Republicans I know look at all this waste, fraud, and abuse and wonder why the GOP hasn’t been better at reforming the system and getting America’s fiscal house in order. Well, the sad truth is some Republicans in Congress are clueless when it comes to negotiation. Now I know this will ruffle some of my fellow conservatives’ feathers, but I’m going to say it anyway. I’m sure Congressman Paul Ryan is a nice guy, but I can tell you this much: he is one lousy poker player. In an effort to talk about how he would balance the budget and rein in Washington’s spending addiction, he came out with his plan to overhaul Medicare. It was an absolutely unbelievable blunder . . . I’m talking about his total lack of negotiating skills.
Congressman Ryan and the Republicans committed two fatal errors. First, anyone who knows anything about negotiation knows that you always make the other guy go first. Republicans should have waited the president out and forced him to go first in naming where cuts would come from and how he planned to get the budget under control and protect America’s credit rating. But he didn’t. Instead, Congressman Ryan committed a major mistake. He went out and put a huge target on Republicans while Obama sat back and let the GOP commit political suicide. The second mistake Ryan made was that he scared the heck out of seniors. Like it or not, the majority of seniors love Medicare. And I like it for them. When you start talking in ways that make older Americans nervous, it’s bad politics.
So what did the Democrats do? They turned Paul Ryan and his Medicare proposal into a punching bag, and Republicans lost a special congressional election in upstate New York that they should have won handily. The Democratic candidate, Kathy Hochul, bludgeoned her Republican opponent Jane Corwin with a Mediscare campaign of TV ads that featured an old lady in a wheelchair being shoved off a cliff. The ad explained that the reason grandma was being tossed over the ledge was because of “Paul Ryan and his friends in Congress.” Unfair? You bet. Good politics? Absolutely. The GOP needs to learn how to get tough and out-negotiate Obama and his big spending allies in Washington. They also need to learn the art of using the right tone and language.
That’s certainly the case when it comes to the debate surrounding how best to fix and save Social Security. Conservatives have to be smart in the way we speak. Using crazy language that terrifies seniors accomplishes nothing. It simply hands Democrats another weapon with which to demonize Republicans as heartless and stingy. Again, when someone has worked for forty years and seen the government deduct 6 percent out of each of the 480 paychecks they received over those years, it’s perfectly understandable that they would want the money they are owed. It’s only fair.
So the first thing we need to remind seniors is that their Social Security is safe, secure, and will not be touched in any way whatsoever. Period. We have the funds to pay them the money they are due, and we will. Then, we need to look at the next seventy-five years and address the projected $5.3 trillion shortfall. The Democrats’ solution is the same solution they have for everything—tax, tax, tax. Just one problem: it doesn’t work! All that ends up happening is the government big spenders raid the Social Security trust funds and blow the dough on junk programs we don’t need. Bottom line: raising taxes to shore up the funding gap isn’t the way to give America a government it can afford, but making the economy strong again is.
The Solution
So what should we do? The first thing we need to realize is that, thanks to advancements in medicine and health, Americans live and work longer than in the days when Social Security began. In fact, since Social Security was created in 1935, Americans’ life expectancy has increased to seventy-eight, up 26 percent, whereas the retirement age to receive full benefits has only gone up only 3 percent, to sixty-seven.15 Today people work well into their seventies, which is absolutely wonderful. So if we slowly increased the full retirement age to even just seventy, one-third of the $5.3 trillion shortfall would be eliminated right away. And don’t do it now, do it in the future.16
The fastest way we can start saving Social Security is to get Americans back to work. More citizens earning a paycheck means more workers paying into the system. It also means that we will save on the explosion of unemployment benefits we’ve seen under Barack Obama. For example, extended unemployment benefits in just the next two years will cost American taxpayers $34 billion.17 If the goal is getting our deficits and debt under control, the quickest road to get there is to spark economic growth and let job creators do what they do best—create jobs.
The final part of restoring fiscal sanity to America is the most obvious, and that’s to control Obama-style runaway spending. It’s hard for most folks to wrap their minds around just how out-of-step and radical this president truly is when it comes to spending. Here’s how the Wall Street Journal tried to paint the picture:As for the deficit, CBO [the Congressional Budget Office] shows that over the first three years of the Obama Presidency, 2009-2011, the federal government will borrow an estimated $3.7 trillion. That is more than the entire accumulated national debt for the first 225 years of U.S. history. By 2019, the interest payments on this debt will be larger than the budget for education, roads and all other nondefense discretionary spending.18
The economic idiocy of this presidency has been truly astounding. And that’s why America desperately needs a president who understands and appreciates the businesses and entrepreneurs that create opportunity and jobs. But Obama spits in the face of job creators every chance he gets. Just look at the absurd tactics the Obama administration unleashed on Gibson Guitars. They raided the guitar company factories to see if they were using certain types of wood that Obama doesn’t want them to use. Is this seriously how we want America to operate? Allowing the federal government to treat businesses like drug dealers because someone may have filled an order improperly is ridiculous. It’s also a terrible misuse of limited resources. The fact that it only took three years for this guy to blow a hole in the national debt that’s equivalent to the debt accrued in 225 years of American history shows just how radical and outside the mainstream Barack Obama is.
That said, let me b
e clear: I was very, very critical of President George W. Bush. I thought he betrayed his principles of fiscal conservatism by spending excessively. Furthermore, I thought that his mismanagement of Hurricane Katrina was horrible, and I questioned his judgment in launching the war in Iraq that cost us trillions in dollars and, worse, thousands in lives. But President Bush’s spending excesses were nothing compared to Obama’s. In just three years, Obama has exploded our debt so that we have to borrow $4 billion every day. By comparison, under President George W. Bush, over all eight years in office, that figure was $1.6 billion a day.19 Not great, but a lot better.
Of course, anyone who was paying attention in 2008 should have known that Obama wasn’t interested in debt and deficit reduction. But the fact that he completely ignored his own debt commission’s findings in the Bowles-Simpson Report proves that this president has no shame and has no intention of slowing down his spending spree. Every American, regardless of party, needs to think long and hard about what another four years of Barack Obama would mean to the national debt and the solvency of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. If he had no shame in adding more to the national debt in three years than almost all other United States presidents combined, can you imagine the kind of damage he would do if given another four years without the worry of reelection? It’s a horrifying thought for anyone who loves our country and wants to see her survive and thrive again.
Look, here’s the deal: Barack Obama has been a total disaster. He has spent this country into the ground and destroyed jobs and economic growth. If something isn’t done soon, programs Americans depend on, like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, are going to go up in flames. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can return America to her former greatness if we get tough and act smart.