Jeff in Atlanta Wants a Debt Ceiling Petition… But What’s the Point?

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Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Audio and Transcript – Can you imagine a scenario that President Obama wakes up one morning and goes down to his briefing and he’s in there with Axelrod and that troll Valerie Jarrett and the rest of them?  “What’s this new petition that we can’t go over the debt ceiling?”  Axelrod whips out your petition and they read it and they go: “That’s funny!  That’s a good one!  Is there another one?  Can we hear it again?”  Not to undermine the effort, but that’s like if you get a bill from the IRS and call them up.  You say: Look, I took a petition in my neighborhood and we all agree that I shouldn’t have to pay this.  You think that will work? Check out the rest in today’s audio and transcript…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  We shall speak with Jeff in Atlanta, Georgia next.  Jeff, how are you doing?

Caller Jeff:  Hi, Mike.  Regarding the change of venue point you made on school violence, I think the idea is to have qualified armed security one minute away or two minutes away, not fifteen or twenty minutes away.  I think that’s the idea.  There’s no perfect solution.  It’s probably a matter of having somebody closer.  The other point about that violence is, the bigger issue than the guns may be what prescription drugs these people were on or what they’re getting off of and all that.  That’s sort of the hidden story here, the prescription drug issue in these shootings.  The point of my call is, if anybody is interested, there’s a petition at WhiteHouse.gov recently started to ask to freeze the debt, not to increase the debt ceiling.  I realize the petition will be ignored, but I’m hoping we can at least get as many signatures as the secession petitions, if only to send a message.  If we could somehow freeze the debt ceiling, that could obviously freeze spending.  Maybe it’s a longshot, but I think it would be a great message to send.

Mike:  This is just a petition, not an amendment?

Caller Jeff:  Yeah.  It’s a petition at WhiteHouse.gov that I put up a couple days ago.  It just says do not increase the debt ceiling.  When I thought about all the signatures you got on the secession petitions, I thought we should be able to get as many.  I can send you the link.  I think it would be a great message if we all signed that petition saying do not increase the debt ceiling.  The best case scenario is we somehow force Congress to live with the $4 trillion a year they currently collect or whatever the number is.

Mike:  As the old saying goes, you can want in one hand and poop in the other.  I’m glad you put the petition up, please don’t misunderstand.  Can you imagine a scenario that President Obama wakes up one morning and goes down to his briefing and he’s in there with Axelrod and that troll Valerie Jarrett and the rest of them?  [mocking Obama] “What’s this new petition that we can’t go over the debt ceiling?”  Axelrod whips out your petition and they read it and they go: “[laughing] That’s funny!  That’s a good one!  Is there another one?  Can we hear it again?”  Not to undermine the effort, but that’s like if you get a bill from the IRS and call them up.  You say: Look, I took a petition in my neighborhood and we all agree that I shouldn’t have to pay this.  You think that will work?

Caller Jeff:  We can’t expect them to grow a conscience or a rational thought.  At least we can send a message out to the world and maybe to the media.

Mike:  You’re talking to the media so you did send a message.  It always troubles me when people say, “We ought to get the message out to the media.”  What the hell do you think the Sirius Patriot Channel is?

Caller Jeff:  That’s why I’m calling you.  I’m reaching your audience and getting support for freezing the debt ceiling.

Mike:  Don’t say we ought to get the word out to the media when you’re on media.  You are getting the word out to the media.  This is not to say that the effort is not laudable, because it is.  The chance of success, as you know, you probably never dreamed that it would be successful.  It’s as laughable as the act is laudable.  You would probably serve yourself and get, I believe, as much support for this if you could convince the legislature of the State of Georgia and Governor Nathan Deal to not accept any moneys that they know were borrowed.  You may say: Mike, how are you going to do that?  It’s a very simple process.  Go through your state’s budget and look for the federal inflows.  They’re there.  They count as revenue, not just what they collect in sales taxes, gasoline taxes and income taxes.  Does Georgia have an income tax?  I believe you do, right?

Caller Jeff:  Yes.

Mike:  They know what they collect from the citizens of Georgia or those people that travel through Georgia, and they also know what they’re getting from the Feds.  You can say we’re getting $10 billion a year in Georgia from the feds.  That means you should only accept $5.7 billion of that because that’s the amount that’s not borrowed when 43 cents on every dollar is borrowed.

Caller Jeff:  It depends on how much they’re taking from us.  To some extent, we’re getting back what is taken from us.

Mike:  Now you’re back at the give/take state.  We did not form a union so that we would have productive and carrying states.  This is another part of the exercise that just proves the folly of continuing the union.  If you’re telling me that the existence of the union is predicated upon each state getting its fair share back from what it sends to the crime family in Mordor, why in the hell do you send it to the don to start with?  Is this an extortion ring?

Caller Jeff:  They shouldn’t take it in the first place, but depending how much money they take from the taxpayers, I guess the rationale is let’s get our money, not more than what we put in but at least what they took from us.

Mike:  Jeff, now we have a nice circular argument that never solves itself, don’t we?  It’s a paradox.  It is unsolvable, if you proceed from the catch-22 point of view that you just enunciated.

Caller Jeff:  Wouldn’t the next best thing be, if Congress could not increase the debt ceiling, wouldn’t that be the next best solution, if they could fail to increase the debt ceiling and they were stuck having to spend what they’re collecting?

Mike:  If you go to CompactforAmerica.org and read the proposal that my friend Kevin Gutzman helped author, the balanced budget amendment (BBA), which is cut and dry from start to finish, a single-issue convention.  Nothing else can come to the floor.  That is by oath and affirmation.  Congress doesn’t have anything to do with it other than saying we’ve got to say this resolution is passed. They’re going to have their convention in Kansas or somewhere and pass this amendment.  Then 26 states are going to have to overrule.  They’re going to have to say yes, you can go into debt this year because 26 of us think it’s worthy of putting our children into debt for you to borrow the money.  That’s one way around it.

The other way around it, or the other way to approach and tackle the issue, is to find out.  It doesn’t matter if your state is a giver or taker state.  You’re missing the point.  Find out what it is that you’re getting from the general government.  The idea of, [mocking] “We’ve gotta get our fair share back,” again, a paradox, a cyclical argument.  It can never be solved.  Let’s not have that one.  You can have this by declaration, as a ballot initiative — of course, the people won’t vote for it because they love debt spending, love it.  have it then that your state says as long as we have the previous year’s borrowing index that the Congressional Budget Office told us that the general government borrowed, 47 cents out of every dollar they spend.  For every dollar that they send us, we’re only going to accept 53 cents.  [mocking] “Mike, they’re just gonna spend it in another state.”  If you really want to solve the problem, then more than one state ought to do it.

Let’s just say, for example, that fifteen states decided to do it and the feds divvied the spoils up against the other states, not proportionally by the way.  Wouldn’t the fifteen states that had acted in this manner have a not so light and not so transient cause to say: Okay, we tried it, tried to make the compact work out.  You are in violation of it.  You will not abide it, obey by it.  We’re just saying we’re not going to send any more congressmen up there.  We’re calling our senators, too.  You people call me up and you throw these things at me with what I believe are impossible solutions.  There is no solution to the federal problem.  It’s too large.  I counter back at you with a much smaller and manageable proposal and it is greeted with [mocking] “That’s not fair.”  Is the current situation fair?  Is it equitable?  Is it something that you wish to continue in its current inequity?

End Mike Church Show Transcript