Time to Get Tough (9 page)

The question is, how do we pay for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security when costs are ballooning and deficits are soaring? Here again, both sides fumble the ball badly. Democrats pretend that the answer is raising taxes. But anyone with a brain knows all that will do is kill economic growth. That's the exact opposite of what needs to happen. Economic growth is the secret to making the entire pie grow larger. When that happens, millions of new workers will become new taxpayers and revenues will rise. As Senator Marco Rubio of Florida put it: “Let's stop talking about new taxes and start talking about creating new taxpayers, which basically means jobs.”
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And that's what economic growth will do.

But many Republicans also miss the mark. They pretend we can just nibble around the edges by eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse and somehow magically make these programs solvent
and
pay off our massive $15 trillion debt. Neither side is being totally honest.

Our country doesn't need cowardice, it needs courage. Here's the first part of the solution: our leaders need to get tough with the big players like China and OPEC that are ripping us off so we can recapture hundreds of billions of dollars to pay our bills, take care of our people, and get us on a path toward serious debt reduction. We must take care of our own people—we must make our country strong and rich again so that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will no longer be thought of as a problem. We must save these programs through strength, power, and wealth.

As I explained earlier, China takes us for $300 billion a
year,
and OPEC is even worse. Washington is so busy squabbling over peanuts that they're completely missing the mountains of money staring them in the face. Obama and Republicans spent weeks bickering over $60 billion of spending
cuts in the president's budget. Excuse me, but we have a $15
trillion
debt. We need to get serious and get tough with the big rip-off artists who abuse this country regularly. If we do that first, the remaining cuts and reforms we need to make will be substantially smaller, more manageable, and much less painful.

Stop and think about it: even just leveling the playing field with China for a decade would be the equivalent of one-fifth of our national debt (and would have been one-third of our debt had we not elected the community organizer). You add in several hundred billion a year from putting OPEC in line, hundreds of billions from negotiating properly with the many other countries that are ripping us off, root out the hundreds of billions of incredible fraud that occur every year (more on that later), and now we have a debt problem America can manage—one where we can attack waste and abuse and whittle down the remaining debt to get our fiscal house in order. So that's the first step: bringing home the hundreds of billions of dollars that the petro thugs at OPEC and our enemy China steal from us every single year—and then go after all of the others.

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.

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.

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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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 happen when you actually work to save, not waste, money.

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!
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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.
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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.
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Then there's the $116 million in fraud from the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program.
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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.

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.