Q: Please give us some idea of what government would look like in a Sauerbrey administration.
A: Throughout my campaign, I have used a quote from Thomas Jefferson that to me defines what government is all about.
"The sum of a good government is a government that restrains men from injuring one another but leaves us otherwise free to regulate our own pursuits in industry and self-improvement and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread that it has earned."
It was that freedom from government that allowed people to keep more of the fruits of their labor, that allowed savings and investments and expansion, the rapid expansion of the private sector economy that is the basis of the free enterprise system.
Over the last 50 years as government has become larger and taxed more heavily and taken away from people the ability to do those things, it has taken away incentives. If you tax people heavily enough, you get more people thinking that it's not worth working that extra day, taking that extra risk because there's not clear gain at the end of the day of work. If we're putting money into infrastructure, we're creating something that has economic payback.
But as we put more and more money into transfer payments for our welfare system to make people non-productive, you get very little return for that expenditure. We have seen a dramatic shifting away from the things that helped to grow the economy into things that have no real return.
Q: You've said there are a lot of government programs that people don't want, can't afford, and probably will never use. Could you elaborate on what you mean by that?
A: I guess one of the key concerns is about welfare, the amount of money that is going into the whole supporting of the welfare state.
I went into my grocery store in Jacksonville [a community in north central Baltimore County] two weeks ago, I was very surprised to see how vehemently the clerks were addressing this. But they stand on their feet all day long working and you know in what they consider to be their effort to support their families and have people coming in with the MD independence card buying shrimp and buying stuff they feel they can't afford themselves.
Q: You sense resentment of these programs?
A: Well, I think people that are working hard are very resentful of a growing number of people who are able-bodied who aren't working. And that number of people is growing generationally.
I don't think anybody, in any way begrudges the use of their dollars for a safety net for people who can't help themselves. I was talking about the developmentally disabled, and somebody said to me, "Well, I found your bleeding heart": people who are blind who are mentally retarded, mentally ill, people who cannot care for themselves. . . .
Q: What's your sense of the degree or the rate of ineligibility for welfare? How big a problem?
A: I don't know what the number is, but I look at the Department of Fiscal Services legislative auditor's report, and I think the last report I believe had 60,000 that they questioned.
I tried to address that the last two years with a bill to have laser fingerprinting. If our experience is anything like what they found in California with that system. I think we determined it was about a $10 million savings to us if we could eliminate people who were applying for welfare under multiple Social Security numbers or identifications.
But that's not the big ticket; the big ticket is that it's too easy to get on and stay on welfare for an extended period of time. If you look at Medicaid, the explosion of the Medicaid rolls from 1989 to today, the Medicaid rolls are up by 150,000.
Q: Isn't a lot of that recession-driven? Where people fall down below to such a low income level so that they're eligible?
A: Some of it is recession-driven. And some of it is the change in the federal eligibility income standard which has brought more children onto the rolls. But that's very small, if I remember correctly, only about 20,000.
And the question is, are the conditions of the state so much worse today than they were four years ago, or do we have a problem with getting people onto welfare that we don't get back off again?
Q: Do you have a proposal for welfare reform?
A: The first thing is for a woman to come onto welfare, she should have to identify the paternity of the child. With DNA testing, today you can establish paternity. Every effort has got to be made to find the father and make him support that child.
The second thing is that there should be a time limitation. A woman should be given two years, and some assistance in trying to get a job, and if at the end of two years, cannot get a job then she would lose her cash payments. . . .
Q: You sort of threw your hands up in the air when you said two years. What would you do then?
A: I would continue food stamps and Medicaid, but I would stop the cash payments. Other states are doing it.
Q: You would continue food stamps and medical coverage?
A: Yeah.
Q: For six months, a year?
A: In my mind I don't have that well defined, but I think that Medicaid particularly for the children, you know if you have a woman who has two children who's on welfare and you don't want to have children without health care or without food. So I think that would be a kind of a temporary means of easing people off, but I think you have to take away the crutches.
Q: And what would happen then?
A: Just like before we created this system. People used to take some responsibility for themselves and when there was a problem, families were there to help members of their family. But with the welfare system, families aren't even forming today. and if we have created a growing underclass of people that I think are trapped by their own internal lack of ever developing a sense of personal responsibility.
Q: You have suggested that these programs, in a sense, perhaps in a psychological sense, almost encourage crime.
A: When you've got 70 or 80 percent of children being born to a single woman with no family structure to support the child, no role model of a father that gets up in the morning and goes to work or shows a child what responsibility is supposed to be, who don't take care of their girlfriend, their wife, children are more apt to be getting into trouble.
That's kind of like the rogue elephant. So the child grows up with a woman who is getting her subsistance from the government. And there's not a structured environment, I'm not saying that welfare mothers don't care about their children, but too many of them don't take any responsibility for the child. We wouldn't see the problems with the kids not attending school, not getting vaccinated, you know if the mother was really involved with that child. There is no disputing the facts, if you look at the statistics, that the single greatest element that is a likely indicator of kids getting into a crime problem is not being poor, it's being in a family of a single woman on welfare.
Q: Is the remedy just to cut people off after a period of time, sort of a cold shower approach to personal responsibility?
A: You don't let teen-age girls get pregnant and be eligible for welfare to go out and set themselves up in an apartment. You say, "If you get pregnant you have to stay at home."
The thing that has happened to us as a society -- and it has !! taken us 30-40 years to get into the mess we're in and we're not going to cure it overnight -- but when when I was a kid, you heard of shotgun weddings. . . . That's gone today.
If, for whatever reason, the girl cannot stay in the family home, what I would do is start a group home so that you had a counselor who was staying and have some oversight of six, eight.
Q: How many of those homes would we need?
A: I don't know, but I don't think it would cost us any more than we're paying now.
Q: Beyond that, what would you do?
A: I think you stop paying women, I strongly believe in a family cap, you stop paying women to have additional children after they have gotten on welfare. And I think that that's going to
change behavior.
Q: You've said you would cut spending in part by cutting some entitlement programs. Which programs are you talking about beyond the ones you mentioned today, if any, and do you have any idea how much cutting you would do and where?
A: Well, I think the major thing that we have to go at to get real savings is in Medicaid and that eligibility for Medicaid comes TC with eligibility for welfare so that whole thing is closely entwined and I think we have to look at just what we have been talking about, fraud and getting people off the rolls that shouldn't be on the rolls.
Q: So, you would cut these programs across the board. Can you give me some specific targets that you would apply to each of these programs?
A: I'll tell you one specific. We are spending about $480 a month for managed care for a Medicaid receptionist and we're spending $250 or less for a state employee per month. Why?
Fundamentally, this whole issue to me comes down to jobs and having an economy that's producing jobs. If we are going to deal with the welfare system, we have got to have jobs for people to go to, . . . you have got to have revenue and it all comes from the economy growing.
Q: A recent poll showed that a large majority would like to have the 24 percent cut in income tax you propose. But only a very small minority thought you could do it. Why do you think that is?
A: Well, clearly there's tremendous cynicism on the part of the people about government. People don't believe, no matter who they elect, that things are going to change. They think government is out of control that is why people aren't voting, that's why you see this hostility to the political process and I think that in large measure it's reflected in the fact that they want me to do this but they are not convinced that maybe this isn't just a gimmick as has been charged by some.
Q: Do you think of yourself as a career politician or a career office-holder?
A: I guess since I've been there for 16 years in the legislature, it has become something that I never thought it would be when I ran for office. I really believe strongly in the citizen legislator, who comes for a while and goes home. If I was totally a career politician I guess I wouldn't be in this governor race.
Q: Because it is too risky, you mean?
A: I certainly had a very safe seat that I could have stayed for as long as I wanted to stay there. And if I had wanted a career, if that is why I was here, I wouldn't be running for governor.
Q: What's wrong with being a career politician? I know it's not a good thing in today's political climate, but what's wrong with it? If you didn't have what I am sure you regard as expertise in the budget -- gained over the years in office -- would you be in a position to make the proposal you're making?
A: I think what you have to weigh is the things that you give up with staying there too long. I think everybody becomes more cynical, less willing to think they can change things. . . . We are treated like queens and kings by lobbyists, people come down and they have fallen all over us and tell us how great we are and it's very easy I think to get caught up in your own self-importance in that kind of environment and in the best of all worlds I think that you stay there long enough too, the system lets you stay there long enough to be have some expertise, yes, but not so long that you become part of the problem.