GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, HOST: You know, I'm sort of curious, we have only this snippet of [the tape of Mitt Romney], and I always want the whole thing so that I’m satisfied I can put it in context. But what's interesting is that what he said was in part, and I realize it's only part, “I think what we’re going to have to do is somehow resuscitate the notion that government actually can be effective at all.” In the last past four years has [Obama] resuscitated the notion that the government actually can be effective?

PAT BUCHANAN: No. Let's take one example. Food stamps. I grew up in D.C. 800,000 people here in D.C., born in the ’30s during the depression, grew up in the ’50s. Nobody in D.C. of those 800,000 was on food stamps. City’s now 600,000. One in every five people are on food stamps.

VAN SUSTEREN: What happened?

BUCHANAN: This is just it. The whole idea, we used to have, read FDR about, you know, relief being a narcotic – a subtle destroyer of the spirit. We got to get off this welfare is what he said. In that sense, if it's a narcotic, Barack Obama is a drug dealer of welfare. He wants permanent dependency, in my judgment, of all these folks on the federal, somehow getting benefits, benefits, benefits, and paying no taxes.

Now, I think you've got, Gov. Romney is the complete opposite. We believe in temporary help for anybody that's in trouble. You should have a floor of decency under any family. Unemployment should be temporary. Unemployment benefits should be. Food stamps should be temporary. What are we doing with 47 million people permanently have to be fed by the government?

VAN SUSTEREN: Well, it's much easier to move people off food stamps and move them off unemployment if the economy is revved up and going, so they had some place to go.

BUCHANAN: It is indeed, but look at what we did in the ’90s, the Republicans and Bill Clinton did. They said, okay, two years on welfare and then off. You got to get Workfair. You got to go get a job. I mean, you cannot, look, the society cannot carry forever a huge, vast, and growing class of folks who are permanently dependent upon the government of the United States and state and local government while you are shrinking the number of people that are contributing and paying the taxes. When the tax consumers outnumber the taxpayers, it is all over for the GOP, and it is all over, I think, for this republic.