(From the Oct. 28, 2009, edition of "Glenn Beck")
BECK: Well, to pay off the $105 trillion government debt, and to take care of this whole mess and clean it up, here's what I think they're doing. Look at the debt clock once again. They're only saying almost $12 trillion at the top, but the whole number is about $343,000 per citizen. There's no way to pay that off.
So, conjecture on my part, how about we just print enough money to pay off the debt over time. Sure, I mean, it will be worthless, but we'll be able to honor our agreement. We'll be able to give the Chinese their money back, and the rest of our debtors. That way, the people that we owed get their money, and if we sold some stuff to 'em, well, they can come and take those assets.
But then what's left? Because, see, there's got to be somebody who has thought this through. How do you restart the country? You got to have something left. You have to have something to back the currency -- gold -- gold would be a good one, huh?
There are $200 trillion in investable assets in the world. There are only $800 billion in gold. That's why we went off the gold system in the first place. We need more money. There is not enough gold.
Well, you can't go back to the gold standard for very long, and you need something to buy stuff with. You can't barter forever, what are you going to do?
Well, if you have to have money, and you got to base it on something. So, let's go back in history and look at the people and what they taught in last century -- when there's out-of-control money supply problems, who do you turn to? Well, the people who did it last time, the Weimar Republic in Germany. What did they do? How did they get their economy back on their feet?
Well, after their currency had become so worthless that they had printed $2 trillion mark bank notes, their economy collapsed. They dumped the mark. The got rid of it. They just printed it up, paid off their debts, and then they switched to the Rentenmark.
Now, what did they back it up with? Not enough gold. Look, your answer is right here. The answer is right here. They can back it with real estate, land. That's what they did in Germany.
And there's certainly enough land and resources in America that we could back our currency with. I mean, the government -- the government though, would have to own all of the land -- oh, my gosh, I just thought of something, between Fannie and Freddie, the government already owns half of all of some of the U.S. mortgages and they're about to buy more. And if you couple that with federal land and the grab for parks that they're doing now and did you hear "The polar bears are too crowded and endangered" so they just gave, what was it, 200 square miles there -- that's great.
Oh, and all the oil that we currently not drilling for and coal that we're not mining. Gosh, if you took all of that, I bet you could base a new currency off of that. Oh, and I bet China could come and help, because you probably wouldn't be happy with a system like that taking all the land because that's one of our real rights that we had in our Constitution. [Fox News, "Glenn Beck," 10/28/09, transcript via Nexis]
