Tea Party Convention
“Taking Back America”
Rockland County, NY
Feb. 15, 2010

Joe DioGuardi:

“Hello. Are you proud to be American?! Are you ready to take back America? My father didn’t come here to Ellis Island in 1929 to give this country to China and I’m sure your parents and grandparents didn’t either, right?

You know, when you look at what’s happening today it makes you sick. We’re in a state today that is dysfunctional. Look at Albany. Big shots are now being put in jail for doing stupid things. Laws are being passed finally and yet they’re not strong enough. We need accountability at all levels. Without accountability what are you going to get? More corruption, more manipulations, more finagling.  This country is too great for that and this state is too great for that.

I think about Ronald Reagan. Good man, right? You probably don’t remember word for word his great speech at the Republican convention when he took on Jimmy Carter. He said about government programs: “the closest thing to eternal life in Washington is a government program.” Once they’re in, you can’t get them out. It’s the same thing with taxes. Did you ever see a temporary tax? They keep adding to it.
So we’ve got really big problems …

If you didn’t get it yet, you want to get the update on my book [Unaccountable Congress]. I wrote this 17 years ago and I was like the Prophet Jeremiah. The title of chapter four was “The Big Apple and Washington: One bailout after the other.” I predicted that we would be insolvent and I can’t believe today we are in the shape we are. But I take you through the numbers …
Don’t forget I was the first certified public accountant ever elected to the U.S. Congress, House or Senate. Can you imagine that? When I got there I was shocked to find so many attorneys and not one other accountant. So no one is counting but everybody is spending! And they’re spending money they don’t have. So what do you do when you spend money you don’t have? You’ve got to borrow it. And who are we borrowing from today? Countries that don’t share our values, like China. We’re putting this country on a course of unsustainability–not just for our kids, its for us. It’s not 50 years away, it could be five years away.

Look at the debt that is being racked up on the books Obama himself has said he expects to add 10 trillion in the next ten years to the 12 trillion we just ended the last fiscal year with. That’s 22 trillion. Now, even if you could keep interest rates down to 5 pecent …
What’s the plan to come out of it? More spending? That means you’re going to have huge inflation … I don’t think we’re going to be able to keep interest rates to 5 percent. But lets say we did that: 22 trillion times five percent, that’s over a trillion dollar interest. That means all discretionary spending will be pushed out. That’s the worst tax in the world … and who are we sending it to? It’s going offshore. We’ve got to wake up. This is not rocket science. This is accounting, it’s not even difficult math.

But you get confused every day by these politicians that want to seduce you into thinking they have a program. They have no program! It reminds me of the story I heard about the little frog they put in the water. And they raised the temperature everyday a quarter of a degree. Guess what happened to that frog? It boiled to death!!! It didn’t know enough to jump out. You people have to be the ones who sound the alarm so that things happen. We don’t want to boil to death with what’s coming …

I left Congress in 1989 … I had the most liberal Democratic district in America. When I said I was going to run and leave Arthur Anderson after 22 years, people told me I was crazy. I took my immigrant parents on both arms and walked on every corner, in every store and some bars and got every ethnic democrat you could think of: Irish, Italian, Polish,  Portuguese, Ukranian … they understood my message ….

But it’s not about me … Anybody in America can succeed. We have to keep this country as the greatest opportunity society that it was and is today. But we’re not going to do this if we fritter away our capital borrowing money from others …

On the cover of my book, I put a credit card, the Congressman’s voting card. And it’s much worse than I could’ve believed today. The most expensive credit card in the world is a Congressman or Congresswoman’s voting card. Why? Because every time they put it into the computer to vote, they’re pushing up the national debt. That’s why we have deficits. So what did I put on the cover of my book: credit line unlimited, expiration date never, bill to future generations. There it is. That’s what’s going on today …

Let’s talk about the numbers: at the end of the fiscal year, Sept. 30, 2009 …
After a deficit of one trillion 400 billion, can you imagine, and this year they’re forecasting another deficit of one billion 500 trillion. But last year, the national debt at end of year was 12 trillion. You would think that’s bad. But you know what’s worse, we have Enron type accounting in the U.S. government and we have it in New York state.

What killed Enron? Special purpose entities. SPEs. They kept debt off the books, they kept the losses off the books, to keep the earnings high and to seduce shareholders to stay in. They made it an accounting Ponzi scheme. We’ve got it in Washington. They’re called GSEs, government-sponsored enterprises. Not on the books, not on the budget, but they can float bonds with the full faith and credit of the United States of America. And let me tell ya, there’s 28 of them: Fannie May, Freddie Mac, the post office, you name.
Now these organizations have deficits. They’re supposed to be self-sufficient. That’s why they were put off the books. Look at Fannie May and Freddie Mac. In my book I said, I think they’re going to be insolvent and we’re going to have a problem.
You know what the people told me 17 years ago? Joe, you’re smoking pot. We will never have to come behind those. I said, ‘yeah, but the government is saying if the go under, they’re backed by the U.S. that’s why the interest on those bonds is not that high.’ Oh, it’s never going to happen? It happened. And we had to come up with the money from the bailout …

What I’m telling you is we have a phony bookkeeping system in Washington. It’s not the one the SEC uses to protect the shareholders. We need to protect the taxpayers as well as the shareholders. You like that?

Now, Social Security and Medicare:
Lyndon Johnson fooled us in 1968. He wanted to disguise the cost of the Vietnam War so what did he do? He saw all these surpluses in social security, Medicare wasn’t there yet, it just started. He said why should I show a big deficit and wake up the peope as to what this war is really costing us.  Why don’t I just offset the surpluses in those trust accounts against the deficits in the rest of the government?
It’s called the unified budget. This is the biggest Ponzi scheme ever and it’s still being used today. So when you get the deficit of a trillion 400 billion its already been reduced by the surpluses in Social Security. So you don’t know how really bad it is. You talk about cooking the books.

We have 600 authorities in New York State. Are you reading about the MTA? 800 billion dollar deficit, do you know that’s not in the budget of New York State?  These are the slush funds. These are the SPEs like Enron. They’re all off the books …

I have a paragraph [in my book] saying we still don’t know what this bailout costs.
Now the Times editorials are saying, ‘we can’t figure out what the Fed has spent.’ And the Fed is lobbying so you can’t audit the Fed.
Now, we don’t want to mess around with monetary policy. But we should know what money is put out there and who we lent it to?  Shouldn’t we know which banks? The Fed is saying we cant tell you who got the benefits of these programs because maybe that’s going to hurt their business. C’mon! These are regulated industries. They take advantage of federal licenses that we give them. Federal licenses to become banks. We want to know who is bailed out and how much. Then we have to track to see what happened.

Look at the banks today. You know what they’re doing.  Many of them are borrowing for practically nothing at the discount window. They take the money instead of giving it to small business. They invest it in treasury bills at three and four percent.  And look at the profits they are declaring. It’s amazing. And what are they doing? Giving bonuses … listen, I don’t want to beat up on the private sector. Because its important to have a strong banking sector. Especially for us, this is New York.

The Port of New York is no longer, the bulk of it is in Port of Elizabeth … Now we’ve got all these paper industries. And God forbid they go under. You’re going to see a budget hole like you’ll never believe. Then you’ll see a real tax bill.”