Mr. GLECKMAN: Well, there would be no more money for highways. There'd be no more money for mass transit. There'd be no funds for the national parks. There'd be no subsidies for small businesses. We talked a lot about how important small business is or the Small Business Administration and the assistance that it gives to small businesses would go away.
We complain that it's not enough food safety. Well, there would be no food safety in this kind of an environment. There'd be no National Institutes of Health to do research in cancer and other diseases. The government, as we know it, would simply disappear.
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Mr. STOCKMAN: No, I don't think you can. And that's why I think, as I said, the plan's half right but also half baked. They're being disingenuous when they say right in the second or third page, I see here, that we will exempt seniors, that's all Social Security and Medicare, I presume, and federal retirement and so forth that will exempt veterans, will exempt all of defense, Homeland Security and you have to pay the interest on the debt.
Well, that happens to add up to 2.4 trillion or almost two-thirds of the budget. So if you're exempting two-thirds of the budget and you're focusing only on non-defense discretionary, which actually is only about 500 billion or 15 percent of the budget, it's pretty obvious you can't get the job done.
And when you're talking only about freezing non-defense discretionary, again, maybe you save a hundred or rolling that back to 2008, maybe you save 100 billion. But how does that really answer the challenge and the threat of 1.5 trillion hole in the budget? So, therefore, the plan just doesn't measure up.
