Newt Gingrich | Fox Business Channel | May 16 2022

NEWT:

Sure. It starts as a moral issue. If every American family has to balance their budget, if every small business has to balance its budget, then why shouldn't the politicians be held to the same standard? And furthermore, as you know if you don't balance the budget you're borrowing against your children’s, and grandchildren’s future so what right do you have to take away from them a better future? As you know we actually, and of course, we worked together to create the great economic boom, working for Ronald Reagan and with Ronald Reagan in applying all the practical common-sense things you're talking about. So, none of this is a theory. It's been done. When I was speaker, we led to four consecutive balanced budgets for the only time in our lifetime. And we did it by applying the exactly, same core principles. Get the growth rate up. People off of welfare into jobs, prune the federal government which is so badly run today that in California alone they lost at least 20 billion, not million, $20 billion in unemployment compensation that was stolen. I mean we've gotten so used to sloppy politics and sloppy government taking our money and throwing it away, and we can't afford it. So, you're exactly right. And I'm an optimist like you because again having served and worked with Ronald Reagan, having seen us come out from Jimmy Carter's combination of inflation and unemployment and seeing what good, solid policies can do I know that where we are one election away from turning this all around and I believe that election is going to be this fall.

NEWT:

Yeah. People can go to Gingrich360, and they will see, and they can also go to the American Majority Project.com. They will see the papers we're doing. I believe you can get 25, to 35% of the Democrats, between 60 and 70% of the independents and about 90% of the Republicans, that is an American majority. It is not a Republican majority. I think that is a very important distinction. Reagan always understood he had to appeal to far more than just the Republican party. When we did the contract for America, on the average vote for the 10 items in the, the average, we had 63 Democrats in the house voting yes. Because they would go back home, and people say they have to be for that. I think the Republican leadership, I talk a lot with Kevin McCarthy about this, because I think he will be the next speaker, I believe a Republican leadership that takes big ideas, that has huge support levels and drive them home will find a surprising number of Democrats after the election who decide that survival requires them to vote with us. Not necessarily that they love it, not necessarily that they can agree with it, not that they can go home to their voters if they consistently vote against them.

NEWT:

You know, by the time we got done debating welfare reform leading to a work requirement was so popular that we actually split the Democrats in the house even. We had 89 yes and 89 no. Literally half the democratic party helped pass welfare reform. And as a result, because parents went to work, their incomes went up, their children learned it was okay to get up on Monday and go to work and the result was the largest increase in children leaving poverty and having a better future in American history. For some reason the left is deeply anti-work. I don't frankly understand why. I think it is sort of crazy because Ronald Reagan said you know that work is the best social program and I agree with that. We ought to be encouraging kids to work, off the street, away from the drug dealers, back into having apprenticeship programs, back into programs where they learn how to show up, how to serve a customer, how to get a job done, all these things are really, really important. And they're especially important for the poor because the sooner the poor learn that they can work, they can take money home, they can have a better future, the more they change their behavior into one of trying to get to that better future and I think it's tragic that liberals, particularly in our biggest cities have so consistently crippled the culture of poor people and trapped them into systems that don't work and send all the wrong signals.

NEWT:

Sure. Look I think the fact is there are people out there who would teach us everything that doesn't work. Reagan used to say it wasn't what they didn't know that worried him it was what they knew that wasn't true. These are people, here is a simple example, these are people who believe if you put eggs in the freezer, you can get hard boiled eggs. No matter how often you and I tell them, no, you get hard eggs in a freezer, but they ain't boiled. They just don’t get it. And this is true across every single aspect of life.