Newt Gingrich | Fox News Channel's Fox & Friends | January 23, 2023

NEWT:

Well, I think it's very hard to switch parties if you have spent your entire lifetime either as a Republican or a Democrat. My good friend Miller spoke at the Republican convention in 2004, endorsed George W. Bush just couldn't quite bring himself to leave the democratic party where he had earned a living his whole life. So, Manchin has a lot of ties. On the other hand, I think Manchin is seeing the democratic party go further and further to the left, further away from the values of West Virginia. And I suspect he is a serious guy and I thought it was a very important signal that he called speaker McCarthy and said, you're right, we ought to be negotiating, let's find a way to cut spending and work together. So, I don't want to prejudge what he'll do. It will be very hard to win the democratic nomination because is he so much more conservative than the current democratic party. But he would be a significant force in the country, and I think, you know, he is a serious man. He wants to make a difference. And I think this is a big first step. And he has a few other people like senator Sinema, for example, from Arizona. All of a sudden there could be a McCarthy alliance with common sense senators that could really make a big difference.

NEWT:

First of all, there is a lot of money out there that's never been spent. That was passed during the covid emergency period. I suspect you can get hundreds of billions of dollars just by not spending. There is an amazing amount, over $600 billion was stolen during the covid period. $20 billion in California unemployment alone. And I suspect recapturing clawing back some of that would be a piece of it. And then, frankly, go through a list of what the government spends money on. We have a multi-million dollars project for example to improve Tunisian tourism. Why would the American taxpayer at a time of a huge deficit want to send millions of dollars to Tunisia. I understand improving tourism in Florida or improving tourism in California. Why are we encouraging people to go to Tunisia when there are U.S. there are billions of programs like that we can cut.

NEWT:

You have bureaucrats who are paid full time to do nothing but sit around and think of ways to spend money. They are being very creative. They have been assigned the job of helping these countries. And so, they come up with whatever they can think of. But we have -- if you want to go through the list of things we pay for both at home and abroad that are nonsense, you could save billions of dollars. And remember, every dollar you save today is multiplied over the next 10 years by the interest you're not paying on the debt. Because you didn't spend the money. So, it actually has a multiplier effect that's bigger than say if I save a billion dollars. I have probably saved about 1,300,000,000 over the next 10 years. I think in the house Republican party, there's a huge commitment to a balanced budget I think senator Manchin is the first break moving towards helping speaker McCarthy achieve that.