Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax is a full-scale disaster, Bernie campaigns with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Democrats open up those public impeachment hearings. Ben Shapiro breaks it all down, and explains why it's a bad idea. He also explains why you should be diversified in precious metals, like gold, silver, and the dollar, to make sure you don't get hurt by the left's attacks on your wealth. The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN, which stands up for your digital rights. Visit ExpressVPN.org/BenShapiroShow to get a FREE stock like Apple, Ford, or Sprint to help you get a better deal on your first round of your 401(k) or college savings plan. Use the promo code: "ELT" at sign up to receive $5 and contribute $5 to the Green New Deal, which helps you get 10% off your first month of your first year of free college tuition. You can get 20% off the first month with discount code: BONUS. Use promo code "BONUS" at checkout at checkout to save $10.00 and get a discount of up to $150.00! You'll get a 20% discount when you sign up and get an ad-free version of the show, which includes a two-week VIP membership when you redeem your choice of the Audible membership, and a complimentary copy of Audible Prime membership trial. FREE PROMO AND Vimeo membership! Subscribe to the show Podcoin! Learn more about your ad choices and other VIP membership options. Connect with Ben Shapiro on his new book: Ben Shapiro's newest book, The Biggest Deal of the Biggest Thing That Will See You Win It All? Subscribe To Ben Shapiro s New York Times and Other Places That Will Hear Him Say It's Gave Me Great Things That I'm Gelling It Better Than That Will Be My Best And I'll Hear More Like That And More Will He's Gotta Have It That And I'm Also Hear Him In That & More Will Be More Than That And He'll Hear It And More And More On This And More In His Story And More At That And So Much More On That And A Few Other Things That He Gets It And I Will Hear It & More And A Less Than That & A Few Places That He Will Hear That & I Will Also Hear That And Others Will Be A Few Things Like That
00:00:00.000Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax is a full-scale disaster, Bernie campaigns with AOC, and Democrats open up those public impeachment hearings.
00:00:33.000First, if you're looking at the way that the left is attacking free market capitalism right now, if you're looking at the way that the left is attacking laissez-faire and your ability to keep your own wealth, and you're thinking, okay, if Elizabeth Warren becomes the president of the United States, God forbid, she's just going to start playing around with all the mechanisms that allow wealth to grow.
00:00:51.000Maybe you're thinking, maybe I shouldn't invest in the U.S.
00:00:53.000Maybe I should invest instead in something a little bit more solid, like gold.
00:01:46.000The ramping up of attacks on wealth in this country, it's happening at an extraordinary rate.
00:01:53.000And it starts off as these attacks on quote-unquote billionaires.
00:01:56.000And then pretty soon the left realizes that there's not enough money with the billionaires to just attack the billionaires.
00:02:00.000Then it turns into an attack on millionaires.
00:02:02.000Then pretty soon it turns into an attack on people who make more than $500,000 a year.
00:02:06.000Then pretty soon it turns into an attack on people who make more than $2,200,000 a year.
00:02:10.000What you will see is that the bar for becoming rich in this country is going to continue to decline.
00:02:15.000Obviously, if you're a billionaire, a millionaire, someone making half a million bucks a year, you're doing fine.
00:02:18.000But, the fact is, that to support the kind of social spending that Democrats want, to support the kind of market regulations that Democrats want, tax rates don't just have to be high on wealthy people.
00:02:28.000They have to be exorbitant on people who are middle class.
00:02:30.000Which is why, if you go over to all the Scandinavian countries that the left loves to cite as socialist havens, even though they are capitalist countries with heavy social safety nets, if you go over to Norway, if you go over to Denmark, if you go over to any of the places that the left truly loves, massive middle class tax rates.
00:03:16.000Well, right now I want to explain to you why all of that is a big deal, and why this is a very stupid idea, why it's an unworkable idea, why it's a counterproductive idea, why it will actually hurt the economy for you.
00:03:25.000Not just for billionaires, not just for people who are very wealthy, but for you.
00:03:29.000Because the fact is that tax policy is intimately involved with the future growth of the United States economy.
00:03:35.000Now, the left seems to think That you can just run into wealthy people's houses, steal all their stuff, and that this will, like, every year do it, and that this is not gonna have any impact on the American economy or the global economy, on investment rates, on tax avoidance.
00:03:49.000They don't seem to understand the elasticity in markets, that when you change the incentive structure for people, their behavior also changes, that if you seize wealth from people, the way that they behave changes, the way they invest changes, and that has impacts that ripple out beyond whether Bill Gates can buy his 100th car.
00:04:06.000And they seem to believe that you can just confiscate wealth and that wealthy people will act exactly the same, that it doesn't change the nature of the economy at all.
00:04:14.000It's a fixed pie, so if we just grab more from the rich people, what's the big deal?
00:04:18.000Okay, well, let's go through the wealth tax and let's talk about Elizabeth Warren's proposal, which, by the way, it used to be 2% per year, the wealth tax.
00:04:25.000But then when she made her Medicare for All proposal, she ramped that up to, I believe, 6% per year in wealth tax.
00:04:31.000So first of all, let's distinguish a wealth tax from other kinds of tax.
00:04:35.000An income tax is based on the amount of income you make.
00:04:58.000And the talk of how people at the top of the income tax bracket are not paying a lot of money is just a lie, okay?
00:05:04.000The idea that rich people are not paying their fair share is absolutely untrue.
00:05:07.000Richard Epstein, who is a law professor over at University of Chicago, and he also writes for the Hoover Institute, he says the fraction of total taxes paid by the 90% of the population has shrunk over the last 35 years.
00:05:52.000They're earning about 20% of the income.
00:05:55.000So, they earn 20% of the income, the top 1%, and they pay 40% of the total tax burden.
00:06:00.000If you pile on top of that a massive wealth tax, that's a pretty big deal.
00:06:04.000Especially because when you're talking about taxing wealth, you are not talking about taxing income.
00:06:10.000Okay, first of all, there's this lie that has to be debunked very quickly, which is that the people at the top are getting very wealthy and everybody else is getting poorer, and this is not true.
00:06:18.000As Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, who are Elizabeth Warren's basically official economists, and they're not very good at their jobs, point out, the yearly increase in wealth for the top 0.1% between 1980 and 2016 has averaged about 5.3%, but the general average in the United States is 2.5%, so everybody has been increasing, it's just the people at the very top have been increasing, then people lower down.
00:06:39.000Okay, so the question becomes, why is that innately a horrible thing?
00:06:44.000Just because somebody is doing better than you doesn't mean that you are doing poorly.
00:06:47.000Stop looking over your shoulder at the guy who lives next door.
00:06:49.000As I've said before, if you own the mansion next door to Bill Gates, there's a tremendous amount of income inequality between you and Bill Gates.
00:06:55.000But you're still living a pretty good life.
00:06:56.000I mean, you're living next door to Bill Gates.
00:06:58.000I assume you're not living in a box, right?
00:06:59.000You're probably living in a very nice house right next to Bill Gates.
00:07:02.000Okay, so, the difference between a wealth tax and the income tax is that the income tax is measured by your income.
00:07:09.000A wealth tax takes your entire asset base and then forces you to have that assessed every single year, and then they take 2% of your wealth base.
00:07:18.000So, let's say that you are a business owner.
00:07:21.000You're not somebody who is cashed out of your businesses and you just have stocks.
00:08:12.000Because again, you're valuing the wealth and then you are taxing the wealth.
00:08:16.000That's very different from you have a certain amount of stock and the stock is publicly traded and we know how much that is worth and so we force you to liquidate some of that stock.
00:08:29.000So imagine for a second that you have tons and tons of stock.
00:08:33.000And let's say that it's 2008 and the stock market has just plummeted.
00:08:36.000You haven't actually realized the value of the stock, right?
00:08:38.000You've taken a hit, but you haven't actually sold, right?
00:08:40.000Warren Buffett was once asked, how much money did you lose during the Great Recession?
00:08:44.000And he said, I didn't lose any because I didn't sell my stock, right?
00:08:46.000It's only a loss that is realized when you sell your stock.
00:08:48.000But according to the wealth tax, every single year, Warren Buffett's stock would have to be valued, and then you would take a portion of that value and you would assess that as a tax.
00:08:57.000Even though he has not actually sold the stock, right?
00:08:59.000He's not actually realized any gain from the stock.
00:09:46.000The reason that it is immoral is because you paid taxes on this stuff your entire life, and just because you die and hand it to your kids, which was the purpose of you handing wealth, now the government pries open your safe and just takes your money.
00:09:55.000They walk over your dead body to take your money so your kids can't have it, even though you've paid taxes on that income your entire life.
00:10:01.000Elizabeth Warren is doing the same thing.
00:10:16.000Having run the business and paid taxes for years and years and years on end?
00:10:19.000On a basic moral level, this is immoral.
00:10:21.000But on an effective level, it's also stupid.
00:10:23.000The reason that it's stupid is because you know how much it takes to actually Do the compliance with a liquidated wealth tax this way?
00:10:31.000You have to have every value item that you have assessed every single year.
00:10:36.000Now, in the case of the estate tax, maybe that makes sense.
00:10:40.000At least then, the estate taxes are like up to 40%, so the government is making a bunch of money, so it makes sense to force you to do all that stuff.
00:10:46.000But for a 2% total, as Warren is proposing, The amount of compliance that the IRS would have to check would probably cost more than the amount of money that they would get from the tax itself.
00:10:56.000This is what Richard Epstein points out.
00:10:58.000He says the administrative costs of imposing a 2% wealth tax on persons whose net worth is, say, $55 million would surely surpass the $100,000 the tax would generate.
00:11:07.000Just imagine how much it will cost the IRS to process 75,000 tax returns that Saez and Zucman predict will be filed annually.
00:11:15.000Also, as Epstein points out, when you are very wealthy, and then you don't take that money and you don't invest it, because why would you possibly invest it?
00:11:21.000Because they're just going to assess you, and then they are going to take money away from you, so why wouldn't you just leave it in cash, presumably, or stock it in overseas assets, or move overseas altogether?
00:11:39.000Rich people were forced to sell their businesses because the profit margin they were making from the business was not enough to outstrip the actual tax that they were paying from the business.
00:12:14.000Well, it turns out Jeff Bezos isn't the only investor in Amazon, guys.
00:12:17.000It turns out there are a lot of 401ks tied up in the stock market.
00:12:21.000As Richard Epstein points out, a 1% decline in GDP of $200 billion could largely wipe out the supposed revenue gain of the wealth tax.
00:12:28.000Most rich people do not idly count their wealth sitting under palm trees.
00:12:31.000They continue to reinvest it in new projects that require both equity and debt capital.
00:12:35.000When a wealth tax of $5 or $10 million comes due, it could require an entrepreneur to liquidate part of his business or to divert his assets from investment and business growth To the payment of taxes.
00:13:01.000Okay, so this is the easiest sell of all time.
00:13:04.000The holidays are coming up, and that means it is time for Mrs. Fields Cookies.
00:13:07.000When Debbie Fields started Mrs. Fields Cookies 40 years ago, she won over cookie lovers everywhere with the gooey chocolate chip cookies, melt-in-your-mouth brownies, passion for sharing the joy of baked goods.
00:14:24.000David Andelman wrote for CNN, about 42,000 millionaires left France between 2000 and 2014.
00:14:31.000According to the financial paper, less echoes.
00:14:33.000Many of them decamped to other countries like Belgium or Portugal, which boasts a flat tax of just 28% on income from interest in investment for expatriates and no wealth tax.
00:14:42.000Eugenio Carrera, a French accountant, pointed out to me that an estimated 15,000 French expatriates have taken up residence in Portugal, many of them eager to flee the French tax system.
00:14:51.000One French tax consultant, Eric Pinche, estimated that the wealth tax earned the government some $2.6 billion a year, but it cost more than $125 billion in capital flight every single year from 1998 to 2006.
00:15:03.000Because if you're rich, you know what you can afford to do?
00:15:07.000Now, the way that Elizabeth Warren intends on stopping this is she intends on grabbing like 40% of your total wealth if you try to move.
00:15:14.000Which, by the way, you're now creating an economic Berlin Wall.
00:15:17.000We are actually going to confiscate your wealth if you leave.
00:15:19.000That's how you know you're running a crappy economy is when you're saying to people, and if you try to leave, we're going to grab all your wealth.
00:15:28.000You know, like, this is the policy, generally, of dictatorships.
00:15:31.000And when dictatorships try to confiscate everybody's wealth, and they're like, okay, and if you leave, we're gonna grab all your crap, and you're not gonna take any of it with you.
00:15:56.000I mean, it is worth noting that the wealth tax is unconstitutional.
00:15:59.000The 16th Amendment specifically allows the income tax, but the fact is that Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution says that no capitation or other direct tax shall be laid unless in proportion to the census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.
00:16:13.000In other words, if 30% of the population lives in New York, 30% of the tax money is supposed to come from the state of New York under the original Constitution.
00:16:21.000The income tax was an explicit exception, and that was passed in the 16th Amendment.
00:16:26.000One of the worst Republicans move in history, by the way.
00:16:28.000The 16th Amendment only passes because Republicans want tariffs.
00:16:43.000But here's the big problem, putting all of that aside.
00:16:46.000You think that rich people aren't going to leave?
00:16:48.000A study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that past attempts to tax wealth quote, frequently failed to meet their redistributive goals and encountered significant administrative problems.
00:16:59.000And again, the people who are most disadvantaged by this are actually not the people who own massive publicly traded companies like Zuckerberg or Gates or Bezos.
00:17:08.000The people who really get screwed are the people who are the people who own active businesses that are not publicly traded.
00:17:13.000Because then your business is assessed every single year, and you can't defray the costs through public ownership.
00:17:19.000Meaning right now, Jeff Bezos doesn't pay all the bills.
00:17:21.000The investors, the shareholders pay all the bills.
00:17:24.000But if you are the sole owner of a large business, then you pay all the bills, you may not take a profit this year, you may take a loss this year, and you're still paying an exorbitant wealth tax on the quote-unquote value of the business.
00:18:10.000The rich people are ruining the earth.
00:18:12.000Okay, the difference between some people worth $12 million is that they've created a bunch of jobs.
00:18:16.000Elizabeth Warren has not created a job, so far as I'm aware, other than the job that she created at Harvard Law for herself by falsely claiming she was Native American, allegedly.
00:18:25.000Cuban says, according to her filings, she made $900,000 last year, which means her family earns more than two times the amount needed to be a one percenter.
00:18:31.000She paid 25.5% of that in taxes, which is less than the percentage I paid in taxes, 29.85%.
00:18:38.000By the way, that's because Mark Cuban is making some money off of his capital income investment.
00:18:42.000The fact is that I am, last I checked, I think last year I paid a 48% effective tax rate.
00:18:48.000Mark Cuban says Forbes says her net worth is north of $12 million.
00:19:37.000Like the old socialist who's never accomplished anything and has been living off taxpayer bucks for his entire adult life?
00:19:42.000You saw him and you're like, oh, now I feel a sense of self-worth.
00:19:45.000Now, now I feel as though I am really, truly a valuable human- Okay, so, for an exercise in weird quasi-Freudian Bizarro world campaigning.
00:19:58.000Here is Bernie Sanders campaigning alongside AOC with Bernie Sanders saying that Michael Bloomberg, right?
00:20:08.000There's some people at the New York Times who don't like him over stop and frisk.
00:20:10.000But the real reason Michael Bloomberg is bad is because he's a billionaire.
00:20:13.000And we know billionaires are very bad.
00:20:15.000The New York Times is saying this today also.
00:20:17.000The New York Times has an entire piece today From Michael Tomasky, I'll get to in a second, talking about how billionaires are the worst among us.
00:20:25.000I don't know when they transformed into being the worst, right?
00:20:27.000They were okay before, like they're the same person when they were making 50 grand living in the garage and putting together the business.
00:20:44.000Is it like when you make more than $100,000 a year and you get to $100,001 and then boom, Satan grabs you, and suddenly you are inhabited by the spirit of the demon, and suddenly you just hate everyone, you wanna fire everyone, you're a rapacious capitalist who pollutes the rivers.
00:20:58.000It's a very stupid and puerile sense of what human nature is.
00:21:01.000But in any case, here's Bernie Sanders blasting Michael Bloomberg, saying that it's arrogant for him to run.
00:21:05.000You can't buy this election, Michael Bloomberg.
00:21:07.000I love that Bernie Sanders says it's arrogant.
00:21:17.000He has not been behind a single major initiative that has passed in any way.
00:21:21.000He's been wrong on nearly everything in his adult life.
00:21:24.000When he wasn't campaigning shirtless in the USSR, he was backing the Venezuelans.
00:21:27.000I mean, like, there is nothing Bernie Sanders has done that is worthy of praise, and yet he is a leading presidential candidate, and he's ripping on Michael Bloomberg?
00:21:36.000The guy wanted to take away soda, and he had all these regulations about cigarettes, and he had all of this crazy big government nonsense.
00:21:44.000But at least Bloomberg has achieved something in his life.
00:21:46.000For Bernie Sanders to say, I should run the country on the basis of never having accomplished anything.
00:21:50.000And he's like, Michael Bloomberg is a very arrogant man.
00:21:53.000How dare he run just because he has money?
00:21:56.000Well, Michael Bloomberg has actually done a thing or two.
00:22:00.000You've done nothing except be old and rant at the moon.
00:22:04.000Your entire career, and when he was 30, he was old, ranting at the moon.
00:22:08.000Here's Bernie Sanders ripping into Michael Bloomberg with AOC at his side to provide him a hip, young cover, because she can dance.
00:22:14.000Part of the reason why he's considering entering this race is because he doesn't think anyone can do the job that is currently in the field, not even you.
00:22:21.000Well, you know, that is the arrogance of billionaires.
00:22:24.000You see, when you're worth $50 billion, I guess, you don't have to have town meetings, you don't have to talk to ordinary people.
00:22:30.000What you do is you take out, I guess, a couple of billion dollars and you buy the state of California.
00:22:36.000But I happen to believe the American people are sick and tired of the power and arrogance of a billionaire class which increasingly controls not only the economic life of this country, but the political life of this country.
00:22:48.000The power and arrogance of the billionaire class?
00:22:50.000AOC has accomplished zero things in her life aside from getting elected to Congress in a pure blue district.
00:22:55.000That is, Nancy Pelosi said, a bag of crap with a D on it could have gotten elected in that district.
00:22:59.000Bernie Sanders has accomplished zero things in his life.
00:23:03.000And he says, it's the powerful billionaires.
00:23:05.000He wants to run a government that controls nearly every aspect of your life and taxes the living hell out of you.
00:23:19.000And yet, the idea that career government bureaucrat employees who've never accomplished anything, that these are the people who are not arrogant.
00:23:26.000Oh, they've devoted their life to public service.
00:23:28.000Bernie Sanders has devoted his life to living on the dole.
00:23:31.000To living on the taxpayer dole in Vermont.
00:23:33.000Real difficult life for you there, Bernie.
00:23:35.000Thank you for accomplishing zero things and creating zero jobs.
00:23:37.000But don't worry, he's gonna create, he says according to the Green New Deal, 20 million new jobs.
00:23:41.000He's never created a job, but he's gonna create 20 million new ones.
00:24:01.000I don't think that the amount of money in your wallet makes you a bad person or a good person.
00:24:04.000I think there are some billionaires who are just complete terrible people and I think there are some billionaires who are wonderful people.
00:24:10.000I think this idea to classify all billionaires as among the people who are trying to control our country and trying to ruin your life All of that is Robespierre garbage.
00:24:20.000It's just French revolutionary, take them out in the street and behead them garbage.
00:24:25.000But this is what the entire Democratic Party apparently is now going to buy into because it's very convenient to condemn all the people who actually hire a huge percentage of the people in this country.
00:24:33.000In a second, you know, you keep saying, why are you defending billionaires?
00:24:38.000The reason I'm defending billionaires is because the reason that a lot of billionaires are billionaires, not people who inherited wealth, the vast majority of people who are billionaires are people who are billionaires because they created businesses and hundreds of thousands if not millions of jobs.
00:24:51.000First, Let's talk about how you can manage your family's online time.
00:24:56.000So, you know, the fact is that you should set limits on how much your kids are interacting with screens.
00:25:00.000There have been a bunch of new studies out recently showing that small kids interacting with screens really bad.
00:25:05.000In my house, until you're two years of age, you don't get to interact with screens at all.
00:25:08.000Even I, look, I'm a parent, and that means that sometimes the kids are just making trouble, and you sometimes feel like, okay, I gotta plop them down in front of a TV and let them watch True on Netflix for a second just to get a break.
00:25:17.000But the fact is that as your kids get older, You don't actually have control over their screen time as much as you do when they are young kids, and this is why you should have Circle.
00:25:25.000With Circle Home Plus and Circle app, parents can filter what content is allowed, set limits for screen time, and monitor history and usage.
00:25:31.000You can keep track across every connected device, from laptops, phones, and tablets, to smart TVs, streaming devices, and video game consoles, all from one app.
00:25:38.000Each family member has a profile that is fully customizable to their needs, age, and maturity.
00:25:42.000You'll never stop worrying about your kids, but with Circle, you'll have one less thing to worry about.
00:25:46.000Right now, our listeners get 30 bucks off of Circle Home Plus when you visit meetcircle.com slash Ben and enter Ben at checkout.
00:25:51.000There's a significant link between kids having a lot of screen time and being unhappy, having other problems in their social life, accessing material they shouldn't.
00:26:59.000Now, just to recognize a fact, Bill Gates is basically a lifelong Democrat.
00:27:03.000Warren Buffett is a lifelong Democrat.
00:27:06.000A lot of these quote-unquote billionaire class members are lifelong Democrats, people who have given tons of money to left-leaning causes, but they're a class now.
00:27:14.000This is pure Marxist speak, where you are judged by the basis of your income, by the basis of your wealth, not by what you think, or what you do, or how you vote, or any of that sort of stuff.
00:27:25.000George Soros gives a lot of money to exactly the kinds of people that Jamie Dimon doesn't like, so treating everybody as a class based on their income is really stupid.
00:27:32.000In any case, this dumb columnist for the New York Times says, The billionaire class has begun unloading on Elizabeth Warren.
00:27:37.000A few days ago, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, at just $1.6 billion in net worth, a comparative piker, said Senator Warren vilifies successful people, which is true.
00:27:45.000Then Bill Gates, $107 billion, in an onstage interview with the Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin, Mused about what his tax bill might be in a Warren presidency, and left the door open to voting for Trump should Democrats nominate Warren.
00:27:56.000Which makes sense, because her wealth tax proposal is baptly baloney.
00:28:00.000And then Michael Bloomberg, $52 billion, who had previously criticized Warren as anti-corporate, signaled his intention to jump into the race obviously out of concern at her eyes.
00:28:08.000I'm not expert enough to judge the wisdom of Senator Warren's proposed wealth tax, Well then what are you writing about?
00:28:14.000Like this entire thing is about her wealth tax.
00:28:16.000Because I know there are questions about its constitutionality, and that several European nations tried a similar approach and found it unworkable, though four countries still have it.
00:28:23.000I don't get why the candidates aren't simply proposing to increase marginal income tax rates on dollars earned above some very high figure.
00:28:29.000That seems a lot more straightforward to me.
00:28:31.000The reason, God, the ignorance, the stunning ignorance of New York Times columnists, the reason, not to justify Elizabeth Warren, the reason she's proposing a wealth tax is there isn't enough money at the upper end of the income bracket in terms of income earned every year to pay for her proposals.
00:28:45.000The wealth tax is a confiscatory, nasty tax designed to pay for her garbage proposals that amount to $52 trillion in spending over the next 10 years.
00:28:53.000That's why she's going for the wealth tax.
00:28:55.000Hey, you can increase the marginal tax rate, it ain't gonna pay for this stuff.
00:29:35.000Bill Gates has not seized wealth from anyone.
00:29:38.000In fact, he's provided jobs to hundreds of thousands of people, and indirectly to probably millions of people.
00:29:43.000You want to seize the wealth he has earned on the basis of those voluntary economic transactions.
00:29:47.000Who's more anti-democratic, you or Bill Gates?
00:29:51.000This guy says, why is it anti-democratic?
00:29:52.000Why would it matter to our democracy whether Jeff Bezos is worth $113 billion or $13 billion?
00:29:57.000Because any democracy needs a robust and thriving middle class.
00:30:00.000And we have spent the last 30 years or so transferring trillions of dollars from the middle class to the people at the very top.
00:30:05.000And then he just quotes the favorite Elizabeth Warren economist, Gabriel Zucman, the 400 richest Americans now own more of the country's riches than 150 million adults in the bottom 60% of the wealth distribution.
00:30:15.000The 400 share has tripled since the 1980s.
00:30:18.000Well, what happened to the people at the bottom?
00:30:20.000No, it turns out that the middle class is getting richer too.
00:30:23.000By statistics, the middle class has largely become upper middle class.
00:30:27.000This notion that it's only people at the top who are living better, I love the sort of hazy, sepia-toned vision of the 1950s where every man was a king and every man was wealthy.
00:30:39.000Well, first of all, you're leaving out a lot of black folks, okay?
00:30:41.000If you're going to start with the 1950s and the economy of the 1950s, you should recognize there was a permanent underclass created by segregation in the South.
00:30:48.000Then, and not having to do with the qualities of black people, having to do with the racism of white people in the 1950s South.
00:30:54.000So, those two things are somewhat intertwined.
00:30:56.000Also, you're going to have to point out one of the reasons that the American economy was a full employment economy in the 1950s is because the rest of the world was literally destroyed in World War II.
00:31:05.000By the 1960s and 70s, when the rest of the world was catching up, American unemployment started to rise.
00:31:09.000So, On a comparative level, that's true.
00:31:11.000And then, look at the lives of people in the 1950s.
00:31:13.000It's so funny to hear all of these people who are professors at Berkeley talk about how wonderful jobs were in the 1950s.
00:32:56.000And when you rip on quote-unquote big companies in the United States, recognize that you are ripping on the companies that provide a plurality of employment in the United States.
00:33:04.000According to the New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants, quoting the Wall Street Journal, 36.7, this is before 2008.
00:33:15.000Using census data, the Wall Street Journal calculated that 36.2% of people worked at either a large company or a very large company.
00:33:23.000Large would be at least 2,500 employees, very large would be 10,000 people or more.
00:33:27.000Versus 38.9% of people who worked for small companies and 24.9% who worked for mid-sized companies.
00:33:34.000Hey, even a mid-sized company is a pretty large company.
00:33:36.000100 employees or more, so Daily Wire would classify probably as a mid-sized company.
00:33:40.000Since 2014, the latest year for which there is census data, according to, again, the CPAs of New York, this is no longer the case.
00:33:47.000At this point, 39.2% of Americans are employed at either a large or a very large company, while 26.5% worked at mid-sized companies, and 34.3% worked at small companies.
00:33:58.000So that means consolidation, big companies, they're hiring you.
00:34:02.000And you know who tends to own rich companies or big portions of rich companies?
00:34:12.000We're gonna get more into this in just one second because the vilification of wealth in this country is insane, counterproductive, and stupid.
00:34:18.000And by the way, it's a violation of the 10th commandment.
00:34:20.000If you're just gonna go on a moral level, it's a violation of the 10th commandment that you shouldn't covet your neighbor's property for you to suggest that Bill Gates' wealth must be taken away from him on the basis that you don't like Bill Gates being wealthy.
00:34:33.000If it's about your jealousy level, it's you.
00:34:35.000And I hear from people on the floor, if you could just take one billion away from Bill Gates and heal homelessness, wouldn't you do it?
00:34:41.000First of all, you're assuming two things.
00:34:42.000One, that if a homeless person breaks into Bill Gates' house and steals a billion dollars, that somehow that's morally acceptable, which it is not.
00:34:49.000Two, that you can solve the homelessness problem by throwing money at it, which I think that Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco have proved how stupid that idea is.
00:34:55.000Okay, we'll get to more of this in just one second.
00:35:02.000They bring all the services of the U.S.
00:35:03.000Postal Service directly to your computer.
00:35:05.000Whether you're a small office sending invoices, an online seller shipping out products, or even a warehouse sending thousands of packages a day, Stamps.com can handle it all with ease.
00:35:12.000You simply use your computer to print official U.S.
00:35:15.000postage 24-7 for any letter, any package, any class of mail, anywhere you want to send it.
00:35:19.000Once your mail is ready, just hand it to that mail carrier or drop it in a mailbox.
00:35:38.000It's an expenditure of time that you just can't afford if you're running a small business.
00:35:41.000Go check out stamps.com right now, especially during holiday season when you don't feel like schlepping those packages down to the post office.
00:36:03.000Stamps.com, never go to the post office again.
00:36:06.000Okay, in just a second, we're gonna get to more of the attack on success in this country, which is really what this is about.
00:36:12.000We're gonna get to that in just a second.
00:36:13.000First, if you're not already a subscriber, you are missing out.
00:36:15.000Head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
00:36:18.000For as little as $10 a month, you get our articles ad-free, access to all of our live broadcasts, our full show library, select bonus content, and our exclusive Daily Wire app, which is a pretty great feature if you haven't checked it out yet.
00:36:27.000If you choose the new all-access plan, you'll get all of that, plus the legendary Leftist Tears Tumblr.
00:36:34.000And our brand-new Ask Me Anything-style discussion feature that allows you to engage our hosts, writers, and special guests on a weekly basis.
00:36:40.000Come join the fun over at dailywire.com, where the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:36:46.000Okay, a few more stats for you, okay, with regard to billionaires, the evil, evil billionaires who are ruining your life and controlling democracy, supposedly.
00:37:00.000If billionaires are controlling our democracy, then why is Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, why are they doing well in these primaries?
00:37:05.000Shouldn't it be like Michael Bloomberg doing amazing in the primaries?
00:37:08.000Shouldn't Tom Steyer just be dominating the primaries?
00:37:10.000I'm constantly confused by the idea that billionaires run our political system when in fact major unions outspend billionaires regularly.
00:37:20.000When the fact is that billionaires are not the ones who are actually, like Donald Trump did not, there are plenty of billionaires who were given money in the 2016 election cycle in the primaries.
00:37:29.000None of them gave money to Trump so far as I'm aware.
00:37:36.000Your control of the media is basically what the test is at this point.
00:37:40.000And media members who are benefiting, by the way, from billionaires like Carlos Slim owning the New York Times, and then cashing the check from Carlos Slim, it is definitely of benefit to them that a billionaire owns the New York Times.
00:37:50.000In any case, There's this weird idea that billionaires don't actually create jobs.
00:37:54.000They're just taking that money and sucking it away.
00:38:22.000So just understand that when you're talking about somebody's wealth, when you're talking about somebody's wealth, you're talking about not just cash assets.
00:38:29.000In any case, the idea that billionaires have not created jobs, that somehow they're the ones who are a problem, that Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, who have not created, so far as I'm aware, a single job in the history of their employment.
00:39:23.000That would be necessary but not sufficient.
00:39:26.000You're missing a large element called Amazon in that particular... It's so funny to me, people from the government telling you, you didn't build that.
00:39:32.000You know who really didn't build that?
00:39:35.000They provided you with a necessary piece That, in all likelihood, you probably could have come up with, in coordination with others, would have been more expensive, in many cases.
00:39:44.000But, the notion, the proper response to, you didn't build that, is, no, you didn't build that.
00:41:22.000How many jobs are quote-unquote billionaires in the United States creating?
00:41:24.000According to Karen Blankfeld over at Forbes.com, the top 12 billionaires in America as of October 2016 had created a minimum of 2.3 million jobs.
00:42:09.000And handymen, and contractors, and construction workers, and real estate moguls have made their fortune based on the fact that they get to use materials that are brought to them by those 385,000 workers at Home Depot.
00:42:23.000You hear the same complaint about like Mark Zuckerberg over at Facebook or Google, because there are only about 15,000 jobs at Facebook or 40,000 jobs at Google, right?
00:42:32.000But how many businesses are reliant on Facebook or Google in order to do their business?
00:42:36.000The entire media is reliant on Google.
00:42:48.000So why are you angry at value-added propositions?
00:42:50.000And then you're angry, again, you're gonna have to explain to me how Mark Zuckerberg seized his wealth from the middle class.
00:42:56.000You're gonna have to explain to me how Jeff Bezos, who has made your life better in practically every way, because now we live in a magical world where you can hit a button and something arrives at your door in like two days, from anywhere on earth.
00:43:25.000This routine gets real old, real quick.
00:43:28.000Okay, speaking of the media defending Elizabeth Warren, it is pretty incredible.
00:43:32.000The media continue to defend Elizabeth Warren, no matter what.
00:43:35.000And the way they're defending her is, of course, claiming, wait for it, wait for it, that any attacks on her are sexist.
00:43:39.000If you point out that Elizabeth Warren is worth $12 million, that her policy proposals are garbage, that they don't hold together, that she's intellectually dishonest, that she has switched nearly every position she ever held, and that she has lied repeatedly about her past, it's because you're sexist.
00:43:51.000If you point out that she campaigns on anger, and that she is divisive, and nasty, Then this is apparently a reflection of your sexism.
00:43:59.000Because I would never say anything like divisive, nasty, combative crap proposals about somebody like Bernie Sanders.
00:44:54.000Probably the reporters at the New York Times, I would guess.
00:44:57.000Because it's sexist to point out that Elizabeth Warren is a liar.
00:45:01.000They say, Senator Elizabeth Warren is instructing voters on what to believe.
00:45:03.000Her policy vision smacks of an academic exercise.
00:45:06.000Her advocacy style is, quote, my way or the highway, and she has displayed an elitist attitude.
00:45:11.000In ways overt and subtle, Joe Biden, his campaign and his allies have begun mounting personal attacks on the most formidable rival in the 2020 primary race, portraying her as embracing a rigid condescending approach that befits a former Harvard professor with an ambitious policy agenda.
00:45:25.000It is a politically risky case to make against a leading female candidate Ooh!
00:45:32.000That means you can't say that she has a rigid policy approach, even though she has a rigid policy approach and has suggested that all of her opponents are not sufficiently ambitious.
00:45:42.000I mean, obviously this has to do with the fact that she's got a couple X chromosomes.
00:45:48.000And then you've got the, and then you've got the Washington Post trying to pretend that Ayanna Pressley endorsing Elizabeth Warren is some sort of huge thing.
00:46:01.000According to the Washington Post, last week, Elizabeth Warren picking up endorsement from a congressional rising star and a new group composed of black women and gender non-conforming people.
00:46:11.000Wow, that has completely changed the race.
00:46:13.000You mean that gender non-conforming women of color are endorsing Elizabeth Warren online?
00:46:20.000I think mostly it's just like this small group, right?
00:46:21.000And Ayanna Pressley is like a nobody except that she hangs out with the squad and kind of hangs onto their coattails.
00:46:26.000Last I heard of Ayanna Pressley, she was suggesting that you have to think a certain way in order to be a proper Hispanic or a proper Muslim or a proper black person was last I checked with Ayanna Pressley.
00:46:35.000But apparently it's a very, very big move.
00:46:36.000The media grandstanding in favor of Elizabeth Warren is pretty astonishing.
00:46:40.000Okay, I have to give you the very, very brief ImpeachmentGate 2019 update where I have been remiss today.
00:46:46.000So that is because today, Begin the public hearings.
00:47:21.000The national media's shortcomings have been all too obvious in recent years as Donald Trump has gleefully thrown the norms of traditional journalism into a tizzy.
00:47:28.000They've trafficked in false equivalents, allowed President Trump to play assignment editor, gotten mired in pointless punditry.
00:48:01.000Trump's a liar, and he committed a crime, and he should be impeached.
00:48:04.000That's how the media are going to cover this thing.
00:48:07.000By the way, there is something delicious about the fact that even as the media insists that Democrats have a foolproof case against President Trump, members of the Democratic Party are saying that Hunter Biden certainly, certainly should not be called.
00:48:18.000The reason Republicans want to call Hunter Biden is they want to point out that Trump had legit questions about Hunter Biden and Burisma, and he got AOC out front saying, I'm all for transparency, but why should Hunter Biden be called?
00:48:28.000I don't think he's an appropriate witness.
00:48:30.000And not only that, but I think that the reason they're calling for these witnesses, these new witnesses, is because they want to make a spectacle and a circus out of this entire proceeding.
00:48:41.000They want to distract the American people.
00:48:43.000These witnesses that they are calling are politically motivated.
00:48:49.000Republicans are turning this into a partisan issue, and I'll tell you, if a Democrat did what Donald Trump did, I would be calling for that Democrat's impeachment as well.
00:49:23.000He's the historian, British historian, and he has a really fun book called Humorists about various sort of humorous figures in British and American history.
00:50:57.000According to the New York Times, from her office next to the public computer terminals, Bette Amann finds herself peering through a window to watch patrons moving through the Cure d'Alene Library's non-fiction stacks.
00:51:10.000Specifically, those that explore politics through a progressive lens or criticize President Trump.
00:51:15.000They wind up misfiled in out-of-the-way corners where readers will not be able to find them.
00:51:20.000Amann says, The Mystery Book Relocator actually left a note.
00:51:24.000It's an actual Encyclopedia Brown case.
00:51:28.000Maybe it'll turn out to be like a villain from Scooby-Doo.
00:51:30.000I wouldn't have got away with it if it weren't for those darn kids!
00:51:34.000In any case, the Mystery Book Relocator says, I'm the ghost of the library, so I'm going to continue hiding these books in the most obscure places I can find to keep this propaganda out of the hands of young minds.
00:51:45.000Your liberal angst gives me great pleasure.
00:51:49.000For decades, Cure D'Alene has navigated a delicate political landscape in northern Idaho, a conservative corner of the country where some have sought refuge from political and social changes elsewhere.
00:51:58.000The incidents over the past year, including a missing book that was discovered only this week!
00:52:02.000We're not the first time books have mysteriously disappeared.
00:52:05.00030 years ago, the library lost so many books on human rights to theft, they had to be placed in a locked cabinet.
00:52:10.000The latest works to be targeted cover a wide range of topics from gun control and women's suffrage to LGBTQ issues and how people of color fare in the criminal justice system.
00:52:17.000About half the books specifically deal with President Trump.
00:52:21.000Well, none of the books appear to have been stolen.
00:52:23.000Some have been hidden in ways that make it nearly impossible to find them when patrons wanted to check them out.
00:52:28.000They've been discovered inexplicably filed in the wrong sections, hidden behind a row of Stuart Woods novels or shelved with the spine facing inward.
00:54:16.000Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
00:54:19.000You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon has turned to blood.
00:54:25.000But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.