On this week's episode of Drunk Tank: A Mug Club, the crew talks about the Inflation Reduction Act, the Israeli military's training to become a veteran, and why we should all be a fire pit instead of the IRS. Plus, comedian Dave Landau joins us on the show to talk about his upcoming comedy tour, The Rebels With a Cause Comedy Tour.
00:05:05.000Before we move on to the IRS, because I want to get into that, I don't know if you guys have seen this, this is a woman who wants the university to police speech so that she does- and if you think this doesn't matter, it does, because unfortunately these people, we view them of course as psychopaths.
00:05:22.000They are seen as not only mainstream, but these people wield undue influence.
00:05:28.000And this is something that's important.
00:05:29.000When people say, hey, comedy, you shouldn't punch down.
00:05:32.000I don't think you're punching down when you're simply pointing out people who have influence that flies in the face of science, biology, and not to mention the First Amendment.
00:05:42.000So here, this woman is complaining about her university not policing speech so that she doesn't get misgendered.
00:05:48.000Today has been day four of law school and I spent the morning with the Dean of Diversity and Inclusion because I have been misgendered so many times by the faculty of this university, which claims to stand on progressive principles.
00:05:59.000And so I go to this dean and this dean tells me that I need to exercise grace and patience in the small things.
00:06:05.000Like, listen, lady, this is not a small thing.
00:06:17.000And she's like, okay, well, you can escalate it to the Title IX director.
00:06:21.000I'm like, listen, the Title IX director was on a webinar yesterday misgendering people.
00:06:25.000To which this lady had no solutions for me on where to go next.
00:06:28.000And if this hasn't been A learning experience about how broken our system is and why policies need to change and how much bureaucracy there is and how much the system is set in its ways and why we need really good attorneys that I don't know what is.
00:06:43.000I love how she bitches about bureaucracy and then says we need more bureaucracy and attorneys to enforce it.
00:06:48.000I love how she looks like Steve Martin and uh, not Steve Martin, but uh, Martin Short playing Alfalfa.
00:06:55.000By the way, she's going to regret it because she's a pretty lady.
00:06:59.000Statistically, she'll probably regret the transition.
00:07:01.000A lot of people do when you change it.
00:07:21.000But if you meet somebody... It's impossible to do correctly.
00:07:23.000If you meet somebody on the street, or if you meet somebody on campus and you have never met them before, do you have to stop and ask everybody their pronouns?
00:07:29.000Or can you just go, oh hey, I'm actually he.
00:07:32.000I know I look female on the outside, but I am male.
00:10:16.000Okay, so what is wrong with this bill?
00:10:18.000There are actually some things that are good in this bill, but not many.
00:10:22.000And the good things are actually things that Donald Trump had done that were undone by Former Vice President Joe Biden, and he read it in a less effective way.
00:10:29.000So, let me give you my primary gripes, and I encourage you to go and read this bill for yourself.
00:10:33.000All references are available at LotOfCounter.com.
00:10:35.000I'm just giving you the synopsis because I know that most of you aren't going to go read the bill unless it's a five-page green new deal.
00:11:36.000272 million dollars to Native American communities for reducing inflation.
00:11:43.000Okay, there's two billion dollars in grants for domestic production of green vehicles.
00:11:48.000Alright, okay, I understand that, but again, this is not the free market.
00:11:51.000There's a four thousand dollar credit to buy a used clean car.
00:11:54.000Now, to be clear, There used to be more of a credit, and there still is, I think it's $7,000 for a new green car, for a new electric vehicle.
00:12:03.000And that was capped at, once you sold 200,000.
00:12:05.000Tesla sold more than 200,000 vehicles because theirs didn't suck, and so they were no longer getting that credit.
00:14:19.000There's over 230 economists who say that it won't reduce inflation.
00:14:23.000By the way, when Chuck Schumer said they didn't know what they're talking about, when his own intelligence officials believe every word that they say, when there are neutral economists who have been doing this for a very long time, who by the way often lean left, and they say this is going to do nothing, they don't know what they're talking about.
00:14:38.000So let me give you one example according to a Penn Wharton budget model.
00:14:42.000The Act would very slightly increase inflation until 2024 and decrease inflation thereafter.
00:14:48.000Well, that'll help you with the pump today.
00:14:50.000These point estimates are statistically indistinguishable from zero, thereby indicating low confidence that the legislation will have any impact on inflation.
00:15:02.000I love how they are statistically indistinguishable from zero, thereby indicating here's what the economists want to say.
00:15:13.000By the way, that analysis was done prior to the marathon amendment session they had on Sunday to get this bill passed, so it could be far worse now.
00:15:23.000By the way, if you're trying to fix a problem where the government put too much money into the system and helped fuel inflation, if we're going to have some, that's fine, but they helped fuel it a little bit.
00:15:30.000The best way to solve that is by putting more money into the system.
00:15:35.000I also think we should just start printing more.
00:15:37.000Well that's true, just to pay off our foreign debt.
00:17:47.00081 was Reagan's supply-side oriented tax cuts that brought inflation down.
00:17:51.000When he came into office, 13.5% inflation.
00:17:52.000Then three years later, 3.2% inflation.
00:17:56.000By the way, a quick note about this, the $300 billion in savings that they're talking about, assume that some of the sunset provisions in the Affordable Care Act actually are allowed to expire, which we know, in politics, you're never going to let a subsidy go.
00:18:09.000Because if you do, the people that voted for you are going to be pissed off that they no longer get the free money.
00:18:14.000If they leave that in, which they expect it will be, it'll be under $100 billion in savings.
00:18:18.000But you'll not see that on CNN or anywhere else.
00:18:20.000You'll see $300 billion in budget deficit reduction because of this bill.
00:18:24.000You know what else you won't see on CNN?
00:20:56.000I have a nice Rube Goldberg's, when the IRS comes knocking and they pull the handle open, goes up through the mantle, there's a duck that dips into water, which causes a pool ball to go down a rod, and it pulls the trigger and my temper will be on the wall.
00:21:25.000This includes things like litigation, criminal investigations, investigative technology, digital asset monitoring, a new fleet of tax collector cars.
00:25:53.000And I've known some selfish rich people.
00:25:55.000But he says, rich people cheating on their taxes.
00:25:57.000If they're cheating on their taxes, and by the way, everyone technically cheats on their taxes, that's why you have the IRS and you just octupled their funding.
00:26:05.000What about poor people who cheat on their taxes?
00:26:09.000What about people who specifically under-declare income or don't work so that they can get more EBT card benefits, so that they can get more social safety net benefits?
00:26:19.000In other words, everyone can cheat in gaming the system, especially when you consider that 47% of Americans don't pay any federal income taxes.
00:26:26.000So that's my first problem with what he said there.
00:28:21.000But realistically, with all of this, it's not... I mean, you can obviously cheat on your taxes, but either these loopholes... That's Willie Nelson.
00:29:03.000Joe Biden was saying $3 billion there.
00:29:05.000I think in 2019 or 2020, there was $4 billion in litigation by the IRS.
00:29:09.000They ended up settling for $1.4 billion across all of those cases.
00:29:13.000So, way under half of that money that they said was going to come in actually came in, and 78 to 90 percent, that stat that we just looked at, that's mostly small businesses.
00:29:21.000People that own a small business, a grocery store or a convenience store or a small electronic shop, something like that, producing that kind of revenue or having two household income wage earners, $100,000 a year, mom and dad, $200,000 coming in.
00:29:54.000We've heard this a lot, especially from the young men who watch.
00:29:56.000And someone just wants to use the court system and extend it and extend it and extend it.
00:30:00.000And you'll have divorce cases that go on for three or four years Where you're just wasting money and you end up what you could have settled with, you know, using a paralegal in the first two weeks anyway.
00:30:07.000It's just the way the system is designed.
00:30:09.000And with the IRS, they just say, uh, you.
00:30:52.000This is just eradicating the middle class, though, and screwing people over and allowing the rich to get richer and the middle class to get poorer.
00:30:59.000Well, this is mainly allowing those in government to get richer.
00:31:19.000It's huge, it's sweeping, it will not reduce inflation, it will increase inflation, and it targets you, the average middle-class American taxpayer.
00:31:28.000Something else that's really interesting, I wasn't planning on talking about this, but the stock buyback.
00:31:32.000They put a law in there where you can't do stock buybacks, but it only takes effect, guess when it only takes effect?
00:32:17.000That's one of the few good things in the bill.
00:32:20.000Allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, that's actually a good thing, because government bureaucracy basically for a long time just said, all right, Medicare's going to pay this fee because that's what we declared.
00:33:12.000I found out when I was doing cash only, they said, by the way, and if you need to get a boot before you leave, if you want to do that, you know, if you go through the prices and stuff, they said, oh wait, you paid cash, it's free, it's included.
00:33:20.000I said, wait, how much would it have been if it was just a few hundred dollars?
00:34:42.000In the United States, it costs you $600.
00:34:46.000The drug companies would create their product and what they would invest into R&D, their business model was predicated on charging a certain price abroad while that subsidization would be burdened by the Americans.
00:35:01.000It was deliberately designed to say, well, we'll get money from these governments, and in the United States, we'll charge the average consumer more.
00:35:07.000So, when Donald Trump said, you're going to charge Americans, what is charged in other countries?
00:35:11.000That forces them to not just rely on government money and the American taxpayer, the American middle class.
00:35:16.000It was a very effective strategy that he used.
00:35:21.000And the cap on insulin at $35 monthly.
00:35:43.000Okay, so Donald Trump signed those executive orders.
00:35:47.000Then, February 2021, Biden decided to end those executive orders that were aimed at lowering drug prices, so that now, in this bill, he can claim, look, I'm allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices.
00:35:59.000But there were policies that already existed to lower the costs of drugs.
00:36:04.000It was one of the first things that former Vice President Biden did.
00:36:07.000He came into office, he ended those so that he could show you the skyrocketing costs of drugs.
00:36:13.000And then take credit for lowering them in a less effective way.
00:36:16.000Yes, Medicare should be able to negotiate drug prices.
00:36:19.000Donald Trump made sure that drug prices were more... For the first time in modern American history, remember that?
00:36:24.000For the first time, the average price of pharmaceuticals went down.
00:38:20.000So, um, this is what has been going on, uh, you know what, before, let's make sure this segment, what's really important, is not so much that, you know, Palestine gonna Palestine, uh, my problem is with the fact-checkers.
00:38:31.000We need to fact-check the fact-checkers.
00:40:07.000This is released everywhere, Al Jazeera, and I'll get to the tweets from all these politicians, those people who represent you, who are lowering inflation, running with a story that is verifiably untrue.
00:40:17.000And by the way, something like this, when you're verifiably and repeatedly, in a chronic way, misreporting a conflict, more people die.
00:41:30.000That's a separate point from the fact that Israel actually builds an Iron Dome, Israel protects their citizens, Israel sounds alarms so that their children can get to safe places, and Hamas or these other terrorist groups in Palestine launch their missiles, their rockets from...
00:41:57.000That's pretty important Al Jazeera they tweeted out Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed 29 people including six children and four women in the besieged Palestinian enclave Rashida Tlaib From good old Michigan, we know her well, Dave.
00:42:44.000According to Twitter's crisis misinformation policy, they should be tagged with a warning if they include, quote, false allegations regarding use of force, incursions on territorial sovereignty, or around the use of weapons.
00:42:57.000Neither of these tweets, or countless similar ones, have the warning.
00:43:01.000However, tweets like this, let me read it for you, a pressing question, why are they trying so hard to get every single person on the planet vaccinated with the ineffective vaccine, bring that up overlay D4, that has a misinformation label.
00:43:16.000So, people saying, why are they trying so hard to get every single person on the planet vaccinated with an ineffective vaccine, that's labeled as misleading.
00:43:26.000And by the way, this is, I believe, in the context of Joe Biden getting COVID for the 18th time?
00:43:38.000So, I mean, you said this, it's not okay to lie and it's not okay to put this kind of information out and not have people go, wait a minute, wait a minute, this isn't true because here's what's going to happen.
00:43:45.000That's going to get rolled into a promotional recruiting video for this group.
00:43:50.000And what's going to happen is some kid out there is going to be like, fine, this has happened in my neighborhood.
00:45:29.000And applying it to something that we say about COVID, quoting the CDC, but not applying it to Al Jazeera, an organization funded, known, by a known foreign caliphate, lying about the deaths of children.
00:45:42.000Hey, they say Sandy Hook, they lied about the deaths of children.
00:45:45.000Even then, you can get into gray territory there.
00:45:46.000It wasn't lying, saying that these children didn't die.
00:45:49.000It was talking about the media being Inconsistent.
00:46:21.000It's about being subservient and giving up all your money, working hard for something that's constantly being taken away from you, and completely giving the power over to people that don't deserve it.
00:46:31.000It's about just making the government more powerful.
00:46:49.000Well, I think it comes down to, and I've talked about this, I think with Dennis Prager, do you believe that people are inherently good or do you believe that they're inherently flawed?
00:46:55.000I believe that people are inherently sinful, inherently selfish.
00:46:59.000And if you believe that, you say, okay, what's the most effective system of checks and balances?
00:47:02.000That's the Constitution, that's freedom, that's a representative republic where we say, we know that people If left to make their own decisions, some will make good ones, some will make bad ones.
00:47:10.000But if you believe that my side is inherently virtuous, my side is inherently good, meaning the Democrats, Rashida Tlaib, Al Jazeera, I repeat myself, then of course they should have power.
00:47:22.000We should consolidate power to these people.
00:47:24.000Do you know who you want as president?
00:47:26.000Do you know who you want for as much crap as people give Rand Paul?
00:47:32.000You know, Rand Paul basically doesn't even want the job.
00:47:41.000You want someone who basically does nothing.
00:47:44.000It's better to have someone who does nothing than increases the size of their office, their government, their paycheck every single year because they don't have to do anything to earn it other than vote present.
00:47:56.000So if you believe that human beings are inherently good, but only on one side, then you want that power centralized.
00:48:02.000Well, you can also take that power, though, and the only way you get it is by hurting other people, and you have no problem doing that, which takes kind of a sociopath sort of a logic.
00:48:13.000Please point in history to the group of people that you think have been inherently good that we can go, oh, we ought to model ourselves off of them.
00:49:11.000It's the business- these are the people you want to go after, not The politicians who have suckled the government, the public teat for 58 years, not people whose stock and investment portfolios have grown 3,000% since they've been serving the public.
00:49:39.000And we need to make sure And if I serve no other purpose than to draw a very important line for you, it's because of your own selfish nature, it's very easy to appeal to it and to appeal to covetousness.
00:50:32.000So, in 2020, There are 19,000 approximately firearm deaths, not including suicides.
00:50:42.00042,000 people died in motor vehicle crashes in 2021, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
00:50:50.000There is an epidemic in the U.S., and it's called random car violence.
00:50:55.000It's out of control, and again, going back to those in power, I don't know if it's a conspiracy, but I think it goes from the top down, because there's a disproportionate number of our representatives who are engaged in these acts of violence, where I think it's almost deliberate.
00:52:39.000Between 2018 and 2020, the percentage of fatalities among children doubled from 5.8% to 11.9% while legislation went up to make vehicles more safe.
00:52:49.000And inevitably, it doesn't always really necessarily make them more safe.
00:55:09.000Who can forget Ted Kennedy, you know, infamously and allegedly killed, and by allegedly I mean absolutely killed, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechny after sending his vehicle off the Dyke Bridge, which is a funny name, on Chappaquiddick Island.
00:55:22.000So we have Beto, we have Pelosi, we have...
00:56:57.000And this is why I think that there is no legislation making it possible to sue manufacturers when someone wields one of these death machines against somebody else.
00:57:04.000When you have a company like Remington having to pay for Sandy Hook, I just want to know When good old Hyundai's on the hook because Beto O'Rourke mows down an entire fleet of people outside at the cafe.
00:57:42.000You're focusing on the wrong issue here.
00:57:44.000We're focusing not only on firearms, which is a very, very small percentage of deaths that occur annually in this country, but also focusing on rifles that make up even fewer of those deaths as it relates to firearm homicides.
00:57:58.000It's not even close as it relates to motor vehicles.
00:58:00.000And people say, yeah, well, I need a license to drive a car.
00:58:04.000Why don't you need one to use a firearm?
00:58:06.000Well, because one is an enshrined constitutional right.