Transcription
I'm going to start with some bad news. I'm going to give you some good news and then I'll give you some bad news and then I probably will give you some good news. Uh, but let me give you, let me give you some bad news. We're talking about the numbers of the uh debt, um, and our deficit. We just released some more numbers that, you know, were made-up numbers when I was a kid. We have just run a trillion dollar deficit in the first five months of this fiscal year.
Now, here's the good news. That's better than it was last year. So, we're making some progress. But buried inside of this report is another number that should wake us all up. And that is 79 billion in the first 5 months. 79 billion. That's what we paid in interest. Not in the first five months. We paid that uh in February. 79 billion we paid in interest on our debt that is now approaching 39 trillion. Just interest. That is, you know, that's that's more expensive than everything except three other categories: Social Security, income security programs, and healthcare. Okay? Any civilization that is borrowing money just to pay interest on money it already borrowed, at that debt, is not going to survive.
So, let me ask you. We're $39 trillion in the hole. We just paid 79 billion last month for just service of the debt. Let me ask you, those numbers are so huge. Is your life getting better? Do you feel like your life is getting better? Is your airport in your town brand new? How about your roads and bridges from all those infrastructure projects that we've done? Are they better? How about your hospital? Is it new? Is it expanded? Lots of extra room, you know, in the hospital. Are your children better educated in any way, shape, or form? We've spent $39 trillion. Can you tell me where that money has gone to make your life better? Cuz I don't, I don't see the result of it. I see it in the military. And that's it. That's it.
So, where's the money actually going? Well, let's step away from the spreadsheets uh here a bit and let's go just looking around, poking in cities like Los Angeles because the answer begins to emerge. And it is far uglier than most Americans are even prepared to admit. Maybe, maybe, or maybe they don't care. I don't know. But let me start with the hospice scandal that we talked about yesterday in Los Angeles County. This is one county. Investigators and journalists have now uncovered what appears to be one of the largest hospice fraud schemes in modern American history. Notice we're hearing it's the largest hospice. It's the largest uh uh uh, you know, uh autism scheme. What, what are all of these, what are all these schemes? The largest medical scheme, hospice care. You know, I feel a little guilty stealing from the hospice system. You know, final chapter of life, families gather, gather, pain is eased, dignity is preserved, and you're stealing from that. Wow. Okay. Medicare pays for that. No, let me rephrase that. You pay for that. Your tax dollars. And you pay for that because you have compassion. Okay. But in Los Angeles County, hundreds of hospice companies suddenly appeared almost overnight and nobody noticed. Many of them are run out of small little offices and storefronts and residential homes. Like 30, 30 of these comp companies in one little office, really. And they were enrolling patients who were not dying. In fact, they existed, but they didn't know they were enrolling in this. They weren't terminal. People had no idea they had been signed up for hospice at all. Once somebody is falsely enrolled in hospice, the money then begins flowing from Medicare to whom, where? Tens of thousands of dollars per patient. Some patients allegedly cycled through multiple fraudulent hospital providers or hospice providers like inventory. The dying turn into billing codes. The elderly turned into profit centers. Is this a victimless crime? Hospice fraud means that real care is denied. Pain medication is withheld. Proper treatment is delayed. Families misled. And it's not, it's not theft of just money. It is the theft of dignity at the end of human life. And when this scandal broke, all the response was predictable, wasn't it? Political response was finger-pointing, blame-shifting, anything except what the public deserves. And that is a ruthless house cleaning. Ruthless house cleaning.
Now, let's stay in Los Angeles just for a minute because the second story is just as revealing. City of Los Angeles, again, we went from the county now to the city. They have approved $106 million to a nonprofit organization that provides legal services to tenants facing eviction. So now, on the surface, helping people who can't afford legal representation sounds compassionate, right? But let's take a look a little closer. The organization receiving the money is LAFLA, the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. Over the next 3 years, they will receive $16,572,543.69 from the taxpayer. Okay. Lawyers connected to the same organization have repeatedly filed lawsuits that prevent the city from clearing homeless encampments. Encampments that are blocking sidewalks. Encampments that create unsafe conditions for residents. Encampments that make companies and storefronts that are actually paying tax dollars from being able to do business. Entire neighborhoods in zones of disorder. The city can't enforce its own municipal code codes codes because the lawyers are constantly suing the city and the city is paying for those lawyers. And those lawyers are billing $1,025 an hour. $1,025 per hour taxpayer-funded to obstruct the taxpayer. I mean, the system is a joke. It's a loop. Government tries to do its job. Government then funds the lawyers who want to stop it from doing its job. Lawyers sue the government. Government pays the settlement. Crisis continues. This is clouded in pivot and the bill just keeps growing.
Now, step back. Forget about the corruption in Minnesota or New York or Illinois or anywhere else. We're going to find, I'm telling you, we're going to find this all over the country. But just focus on the headlines of today. One story is hospice fraud targeting the elderly and the dying. The second is taxpayer money funding legal warfare that uh perpetuates urban collapse in the same city and county as the other fraud. And above both of them sits the third number: a trillion dollar deficit in five months. Interest payments that rival entire federal programs. That's the real story. Because if this level of corruption can happen in just one county, in just one city, in one set of programs, you have to ask the question nobody wants to actually ask. Reason why Elon Musk was chased out of town. What if Los Angeles is not the exemption or the exception? What if it is actually the rule? What if, what if Los Angeles is the model? We spend roughly $6.5 trillion every year. Do you feel that? Is your life getting easier? Let's just do the numbers. If just 10% of that is lost to fraud, waste, and corruption, that's $650 billion. If it's 20%, that's $1.3 trillion. That's the entire deficit. This is deeply unsettling. It should be. If, if what we're seeing in places like Los Angeles reflects the broader system, then 20%, maybe one-third of the federal deficit every single year may simply be because of corruption. Not policy disagreements, not things that they're funding that we all think are crazy, not defense spending, not Social Security. Corruption. It is robbery from you, the taxpayer. The quiet siphoning of money from you through programs that are meant to be compassionate, noble, necessary until you look closely enough and see the machinery underneath. And how many people were involved for this kind of corruption to happen? How many people turned a blind eye? How many people were told, "Sit down. Shut up, or you'll lose your job." This is the mob, and it's the moral condition required for it to continue. Hospice is stealing from the dying. Legal rackets profit from homelessness. Cities paying organizations to obstruct the enforcement of basic law and order. And what's the reaction from the public? Me. Shrug. A headline. Another day. What are you going to do about it? Got news for you. Republic's not going to stand with that level of indifference. It can't. Can't. Corruption doesn't begin with greedy officials. It begins when a society decides, eh, we don't need to look that closely. When voters stop demanding answers. When outrage is selective. When the most vulnerable people in society. Do you know how poorly history is going to judge us? When you have elderly patients, the homeless who are struggling, when, when you're, when you're stealing from the dying, and they become revenue streams instead of human beings. Oh my gosh, that's the real bankruptcy. Forget about our money. Financial bankruptcy. This is moral bankruptcy. Lot, lots of throughout history, lots of countries go bankrupt. They run out of money. Most of them run out of money because they ran out of virtue first. Rome had corruption. Late-stage empires always do. Rome's real problem was eventually the citizens just didn't care enough to stop it. They were fine with the circuses and the cakes. Are we fine with the circuses and cakes? What are the circuses that are happening in your life right now? What circuses are happening that the media is pushing? What circuses are you seeing on social media every day? Cuz we're all watching a circus and we're learning to live with it, and we're learning to accept it as the, as our treasury is being, your bank account is being robbed. Warning. A the world's largest robbery is happening right now. It is the warning flare so big it should be able to be seen from space. If hospice fraud can flourish in the shadows, if taxpayer money can fund legal warfare against you with your money, if billions can move through programs with no accountability, then the deficit we see on paper is only part of the story. The real deficit is something harder to repair. A deficit of courage, a deficit of attention, a deficit of moral clarity. And unless we rediscover those things really soon, gang, the most dangerous line in the federal budget will not be the interest payments. It will be that silent line item that's been growing for decades: the cost of looking the other way.