so government agencies actually disbursed $136 billion on prepaid cards. card issuers collected $190 million in fees. 6 0% of card holder fees came from the atms. when i found out we were doing it too, i was like what is happening here? and we did not fix that in regulatory financial regulatory reform. yeah. i think it s outrageous. first of all, what we are doing is institutionalizing another mechanism that s going to continue to create the structural inequality. we re creating two societies here in this country. and we re really waging this terrible war on low-income workers, which of course low-income workers are part of the working poor. and so here now we add these fees on top of that. these people are just barely making it. they re living on the edge. this could mean a meal or not right. $30. and then we re cutting the safety net. you should see this bill now, this sequester bill in terms of 20 billion cut in food stamps.
flying business community, but kids with cancer s. you re going to screw them. c mon. they asked for cuts, they got them. the president signed the sequester bill into law, but they re saying not for this one, maybe not for that coffee cup, maybe not for alex witt or tony fratto, but for get your head inside the interpreting i have a pox on all their houses view of it. we have a broken budget system, right? the only way i would love to say, yeah, we shouldn t be doing piecemeal. obviously we shouldn t be. it s almost like there s no other way to do it. i understand like the spirit of bipartisanship, pass around some s mores around the campfire and sing kumbaya. it s more extensive.
that even the pentagon budget has a little bit of fat. nicole, that s what democrats have been saying for decades. there s something what s interesting, though, is that in the senate and to this point that you were making, alex, about let the senate do it, there were three in the sequester bill that tried to come to the floor mitch mcconnell literally filibustered all three. two were a republican bill. there was a kelly ayotte bill. there was a republican bill that would have given more discretion to the executives saying you could actually do what you re saying, which is to trim it here, but not here, and give more discretion because right now there s no discretion. mitch mcconnell s filibuster and john mccain and lindsey graham were screaming for these because they were saying this is a national security emergency. at least give the executive more discretion. mitch mcconnell himself stopped both those bills along with the democratic bill. harry reid said i ll give you two rep
out our philosophies. i was talking to a senior senate republican aide yesterday who said what you can expect to see from us next week is a caricature of democrats, republicans feel like democrats successfully charactered mitt romney who favors the rich over the middle class, played him as a greedy republican. so they re going to flip the script a bit on democrats and say, hey, these are the guys who love big g. they love big spending, they can t get new, they can t find anything to cut in a trillion dollar budget? you have to be kidding me. we ll see a replay of these very stereo typical care ka turs that both parties like to trot out. that s why i believe there won t be a lot of movement, even as the senators bring their sequester bill to the floor that would avoid some of these kits. let me get your take on this quote in hans christian andersen terms, obama is the
substantive and sincere process for which spending is going to be on the table. because so far, we ve had a commission. we ve had a task force. we ve had a fiscal cliff. nothing has put spending on the table. and i appreciate ej s support here. but i want to make a point that he may not be as enthusiastic about. they have two vehicles. they have a continuing resolution which is at the end of march, and they have the sequester bill. now these are legitimate government spending bills. the debt ceiling is different because it triggers all of these international financial problems. and it triggers the credit of the united states. they don t have to say we re going to be wimps. i helped close the government twice. it actually worked. bill clinton came in and said the era of big government is over after two closings, not before. you also wrote in your memoir that you regretted it from the point of view that you relied too much on the enthusiasm of the activists and didn t factor in the d