Okay, my name is Manuel Angel Hidalgo. I'm 77 years old. I'm a retired Army officer.
I retired from the Army in 1980. I then started to sell insurance, but got canned
after about seven years because I wasn't any good at it.
I then started a business and one led to another and one led to another.
So I was a successful entrepreneur and I sold my last business five years ago.
I now am fully retired.
Okay, one of the major problems we have in this country is the national debt.
And you ought to ask your congressman what they're going to do to solve the debt.
What solutions do they have? There are many things you can do, but they go to Washington
with great ideas and all of a sudden they're taken over by the power.
They're just worried about getting reelected. But we have to solve the national debt.
If we don't, we're going to be a banana republic.
You can't add $800 plus billion to the national debt and not be in trouble.
Our national debt is already over $16 trillion.
So we have a problem there. So that's something you want to watch.
Get on your congressional list, get emails from them, find out what they're doing,
and keep asking about the debt. How are they going to solve the debt problem?
The other thing that you have to worry about the debt is the dollar is basically the world currency for trading.
65% of all trade is done using the dollar.
Now, the International Monetary Fund, though, does not want us to have that anymore.
They want to give that right to a bundle of currencies.
In other words, some German money, some Canadian money, make it a big bundle.
And then China, who's getting to be a big player, is signing separate trade agreements
to use their dollar, their won, with South Korea, Australia, and other far eastern countries.
So we have a problem. And if we lose that, we're going to have massive inflation.
And that's guaranteed. And how we're doing it, we're printing money.
We just can't keep printing money.
Now, energy is the next thing we want to talk about.
We've formed an energy department in the late 70s under Jimmy Carter.
The plan was to have an energy policy plan. We don't have one.
To this day, we don't have a fixed energy plan.
Now, we have something's happening in this country which is kind of neat.
We have something called fracking, which a lot of people are against.
But it's just a new technology for getting oil.
We have enough shale oil in this country and gas that we could be energy efficient probably within 10 years or less.
Not dependent on people that don't like us.
So I urge you to write your congressman and say, okay, let's approve this fracking and let's get on with it.
We have to do it. We have to accept the fact that fossil fuels will be the main source of energy for our economy for at least the next 30 years.
Now, after that, we can continue to work on wind power, solar panel, and whatever else.
But let's get it going. Let's have energy independence.
Wouldn't it be nice if we were exporting energy instead of just bringing it in?
Let's ask them to approve the pipeline. That would help too.
Social security is the next thing we want to talk about.
And we're in deep trouble.
Social security was passed in 1935.
The average life expectancy for men and women combined was roughly 63 to 64 years.
And you could never draw it until you were 65.
We've changed all those things. We've expanded social security.
The people getting disability payment has gone up five times the rate of the population increase.
So we need to look at that and review what we're doing on systems and see if we can get out of some of that stuff. We have to improve upon that.
The other thing on social security, in 1950, which is about close to I was in high school, you had 15 people to everyone collected social security.
Now we have three people for everyone collecting social security.
That's disaster. So what are we going to do about it?
There's no quick solution. For example, I'm a retired lieutenant colonel.
There should be a means test. Maybe I shouldn't get my full social security.
I don't know the answer to that, but we're going to have to make hard choices that's going to affect people.
Now there's a cap on income. If you make roughly $110,000, you pay FICA on that 110, but nothing above.
They want to raise the limit on that. There should be no restriction.
Also, we should make sure we're sending checks to people that are still alive.
I wonder how many checks were sent overseas to people that have been dead for years.
I think we should look at it. I don't know the numbers, but I know it's a significant number of people, so we need to do that.
And then we have to raise the age. No choice. The system is broke.
Now Medicare, there's no quick solutions to Medicare, but a little background.
Medicare started in roughly 1967-68. At that time, the federal government paid 50%, and the individual paid 50%.
Now I'm on Medicare. Now my part A, which is the part, it pays 75% now.
So that was an unfunded liability. Congress is good for doing unfunded liabilities.
So now you have a supplement. Everybody participates today, and then you buy a supplement to cover the rest.
But there's a lot of fraud in Medicare, so we need some penalties.
We have had two in this area, one for a million and a half and one for $500,000.
Well, if you're convicted of fraud of Medicare or Medicaid, there should be a mandatory 10-year sentence without parole.
No questions asked. I mean, we have to clean up the system.
Then we should look at the FAST Act and take the good things of the FAST Act, which I've identified roughly $500 billion in Medicare fraud that we can do something with.
It's all in the FAST Act. You can Google it, just read it. It's easy.
Now, when you look at Medicare, the FAST Act is great because there's so much of its preventive medicine because of tort reform.
The FAST Act will cover it. That'll give you some good ideas.
Now, we have to complement the government on something.
They recently reduced the payments to the health care providers that provide oxygen or CPACs and different things like that.
They've reduced their payments by 20%.
Well, they should have reduced them by 50% that you might suggest that because they've been ripping us off for years.
I have a CPAC, which is I wear because I have sleep apnea.
They have a little filter in there that's an inch by inch.
And I normally go to the hardware store and get an 8x10 sheet and cut them up.
Well, I broke my mask one time, so I had to get a new mask.
And the lady said, do you want some filters?
I said, yeah, I'll take a couple of filters.
So she gave me two filters and I just signed it. It was free.
Oh, I looked at it. They're getting $6 for each one of those filters.
If you break your leg and the orthopedic says you should get a cane, they're going to charge Medicare 120 to 130 bucks.
You can go to the drugstore and buy one for 20 bucks. That's going to work.
So those are the kind of things that you have to take care of in Medicare.
