Freshman Congressman Jason Chaffetz from Utah is one of the few common sense people in the halls of Congress right now. One of the bills he's proposing would save taxpayers millions, and it's a great idea. Instead of hiring thousands of people to conduct the census, why not use another program that already has employees visiting houses each and every day -- the United States Postal Service. A common sense idea that makes so much sense it will certainly be shot down by Congress. Listen to Glenn's conversation with the Congressman:
Cot-Side Chat: Democrats Spend Taxpayer Money, Unchecked, Without Debate (Glenn Beck and Cong. Jason Chaffetz)
We have Congressman Jason Chaffetz on the phone who I have to tell you has come up with, you want to talk about common sense, here's common sense. The census is a nightmare and the census should not be ACORN or its subsidiaries or anything like it, they should not be getting money to do the census. And he brought up an idea in congress, and are you introducing this bill today?
CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: Well, I'll be introducing it later this week but we just unveiled it today. Yeah, I'm excited about it.
GLENN: Okay. Explain what it is.
CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: Well, on the one hand you have the census who is going to go out and hire some 750,000 people to count all Americans, and they are engaging with partners like ACORN to go out and find all these people to go and count everybody in America. But I also sit on the subcommittee that deals with the post office which is suffering from a huge financial crisis itself. Well, they happen to have 760,000 postal employees who are already charged with going to every home in America. So why would we be going out and getting, engaging ourselves with the likes of ACORN when we already have federal workers who already go to all these homes?
GLENN: May I total common sense. Now let me play Washington with you, okay?
CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: Sure.
GLENN: The unions will stop the postal workers from doing that.
CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: You know what, I laid the groundwork with the unions. They love this. There's attrition happening at the post office right now. Mail volumes are way off. They are upside down by billions of dollars. So for them to go through the training and the payment. Remember, the census was given some $11 billion in order to execute the census. That's money that they could use. Otherwise their membership is going to be depleted. They are going to have to lay people off.
GLENN: So in other words, we would be fixing two problems.
CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: Yeah.
GLENN: That's why this will never pass, Jason. You're a freshman this year. That's why you are making too much sense. That won't work. They will find some way.
CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: It's a little too simple. But I'm hoping that the freshman naivety will pay off. I can't imagine why we wouldn't do this.
GLENN: So this week you guys are going to vote in the house on cap and trade.
CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: Yeah.
GLENN: You sit there and you deal with all of the stuff going on with, you know, with the post office. Is it true that congress spends more time debating post office stuff than cap and trade?
CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: Oh, no, absolutely. I mean, we have post offices which are rightly named and it's per the Constitution, but we get 20 minutes to debate a post office. Most of this will happen with less than 5 minutes debate. Amendments that are offered on all these appropriations for the trillions of dollars we're going to spend, we're going to have one of the largest single tax increases in the history of the United States in this cap and trade and yet we're not given 20 minutes to debate that. It's insane. It is absolutely insane.
GLENN: Is it going to pass?
CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: I'm afraid that they have cut too many deals on the side with Democrats who are weak kneed and that it probably will. And there will be some Republicans in there as well, but I tell you, this scares the living daylights out, between this and the move on healthcare, that
GLENN: What is in this bill that scares you?
CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: Well, we were looking, for instance, at schools in Utah. They are going to have, it looks like $10,000 per school as a new cost for their energy. Now, at a time when we're losing jobs and we've got to make America more competitive and we've got to remember that manufacturing is a good thing in this country. This tax, it fundamentally changes the equation and hurts and harms America and our competitiveness on a global scale. It's a new tax. I want everybody to understand that the president said 95% of Americans weren't going to get a tax increase. 100% of Americans are going to get a tax increase with this.
GLENN: What do you mean that they are charging a new the schools have an energy
CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: Well, if you look at what the utilities are expected to do in terms of jumping up in their costs, I mean, it takes electricity to run a school and so we've gone back and taken the numbers and tried to do an analysis and figure out, well, what's it going to cost each school in Utah in their bills for just electricity, and it looks like it's in the neighborhood of, like, $10,000.
GLENN: What is it going to be for the average? What about the average person?
CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: Well, the average person is going to at least the analysis we did in the State of Utah, we're looking at hundreds of dollars per month in new expenses. I offered a bill that said let's require the utility companies to actually have to articulate on their bill what the cost of this increase is going to be because I mean, that's the goal. The goal of this bill is to raise energy prices. If you've raised energy prices, you use less. And but that is just the wrong formula for America.
GLENN: Jason, how do we survive, how do we no, no, I'm not going to waste time on that question. Let me ask you this: There are eight million people within the sound of my voice right now and yours, and they are tired of calling and being ignored. They don't feel like anybody in Washington is listening to them. What gets the attention in Washington? What can they possibly do? What should they do?
CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: Flush the toilet, you know? It's not everybody else's congressmen but yours. You've got to go look hard at your congressmen and your senators and figure out where they are on these issues and hold them accountable and work hard to make sure that you make a change within that district because
GLENN: What do they do for this Friday we're having the largest tax increase ever, according to your numbers, with the cap and trade. What do they do to stop it?
CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: They've got to bombard their members of congress with faxes and e mails and telephone calls that does get their attention. They have got to write letters to the editor and get it on the Internet and expose what this really is. They have got to wake up and actually take action. And it does have an effect. It really does.
GLENN: Okay. Jason, thank you very much. We'll talk to you again.
CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: Thanks, Glenn.
GLENN: Congressman Jason Chaffetz. Thank you so much, we'll talk again.
Hmmm… What a great idea, saving millions of taxpayer dollars; using a known reliable source to take the census instead of ACORN a questionable entity already under investigation on several fronts; and asking the one and only question that is the government’s business as part of the census… How many people live here…!!!
Source: GlennBeck.com
Posted: Knowledge Creates Power
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