care. maybe they could have secured the borders. maybe they could have put forward a dynamic vision for the country. and now basically that s not going to happen. here s the interesting thing. we did have something we called the sequester. and it had a $63 billion cut in all this discretionary spending and both republicans and democrats got together and abandoned that about a year ago. we passed a new budget and said we re no longer going to have these cuts the one thing actually worked putting a little discipline in the fiscal process, right? i m hoping we re going to do better. i m in my caucus every day debating this and saying we need to do a better job. when we re in control let s pass every appropriations bill and let s put thousands of instructions in every bill to the president how to spend money. because next year we will control completely the power of the purse. and all i can say is we damn well better use it. you better use it and better
care. maybe they could have secured the borders. maybe they could have put forward a dynamic vision for the country. and now basically that s not going to happen. here s the interesting thing. we did have something we called the sequester. and it had a $63 billion cut in all this discretionary spending and both republicans and democrats got together and abandoned that about a year ago. we passed a new budget and said we re no longer going to have these cuts the one thing actually worked putting a little discipline in the fiscal process, right? i m hoping we re going to do better. i m in my caucus every day debating this and saying we need to do a better job. when we re in control let s pass every appropriations bill and let s put thousands of instructions in every bill to the president how to spend money. because next year we will control completely the power of the purse. and all i can say is we damn well better use it. you better use it and better
might qualify for a refund of $5,000. well, here comes a $4,000 check to you. so this is a program in which the government actually sends out billions of dollars to low income americans. bill: okay. important for them too, you know? let s face it, a lot of folks depend on this. but this is the cost that goes out, right? $63 billion in earned income tax credits. huge number. but the improper benefits totals $14,500,000,000. how does that happen? the biggest reason is the irs doesn t want to enforce it and crack down on fraud. we ve known for a long time that the earned income tax credit has a huge fraud rate. the fraud rate is now 24% according to this new report. what we didn t know is that the additional child tax credit and, remember, these are the two things that president obama says will now apply for illegal
this is money. a figure i saw today that because of the unrest, $63 billion in capital has left russia in this quarter alone. that s the kind of thing that is ultimately going to get vladimir putin s attention. is that for a guy who runs a one dimension economy, strong in one respect, fragile in other respects. when that you see that kind of capital flight, that is going to get hesitation and obviously the get his attention. the kiev sending in troops what happens if a couple of guys from kiev look at what the russias are doing, fire off a few round, kill a few russians, other russians fire back and then you have a little civil war happening. then what do we do? that s the danger that putin has unleashed here, is guess getting close to this line.
we agreed to do this four years ago but never implemented it because we agree to do things all the time we don t implement because we have this thing called the united states senate. so they re saying that this is not the right time to do it. now, there has never been a right time to do it over the past four years. the argument is that the imf, in order to be effective in ukraine and for our billion dollars to be effective in ukraine, needs this flexibility to have access to this $63 billion. but the tea party hates anything that smacks of foreigners, and so it is themed to be dead on arrival over on the house side. so the entire thing is getting caught up over this imf reform provision. so we re seeing, i mean, increasingly i don t want to call it necessarily belligerent, but at least increasingly sharply worded criticisms not just of russia but after the west, the united states inability to push vladimir putin around. conservative critique of what s happening now with russia is