The Ben Shapiro Show - It’s Raining Cash | Ep. 980

00:00:00.000 The Senate unanimously passes a massive government spending plan, 3.3 million Americans are now out of work, and coronavirus begins to hit New York City hospitals.

00:00:08.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:09.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:10.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN News.

00:00:18.000 You have a right to privacy, so protect it at expressvpn.com slash Ben.

00:00:23.000 Now more than ever, check out expressvpn.com slash Ben.

00:00:26.000 All righty, so let's go right into the latest updates.

00:00:30.000 We now know that some 3.3 million Americans are out of work as of like this week.

00:00:36.000 The jobless claims have shot up massively this week, according to CNBC.

00:00:39.000 Americans displaced by coronavirus crisis filed unemployment claims in record numbers last week.

00:00:44.000 The Labor Department reported Thursday a surge.

00:00:46.000 To 3.28 million.

00:00:48.000 That is an increase of about 3 million people in the course of one week alone.

00:00:52.000 One week alone.

00:00:53.000 The number shatters the Great Recession peak of 665,000 in March 2009 and the all-time mark of 695,000 in October 1982.

00:00:57.000 And the all-time mark of 695,000 in October 1982, the previous week, was 282,000.

00:01:03.000 So we shot up 3 million lost jobs in one week.

00:01:08.000 So when people tell you, don't worry about the economy, this is all about saving lives, just understand the economy has some pretty real ramifications for the 3 million people who just lost their jobs.

00:01:15.000 No doubt most of those people are hourly workers, or blue collar workers, or people who are not making $150,000 a year.

00:01:22.000 Consensus estimates from economists surveyed by Dow Jones showed an expectation for 1.5 million at new claims, but individual forecasts on Wall Street had been anticipating a much higher number.

00:01:31.000 The surge comes amid a crippling slowdown brought on by the coronavirus crisis.

00:01:35.000 Well, to be fair, that is not brought on just by consumer activity.

00:01:38.000 That is brought on by state and federal governments and international governments everywhere telling people that they must stay in their homes.

00:01:44.000 It turns out that it's hard to shop and it makes you a little bit leery about spending your money when you're not sure if you're going to have a job in five minutes and also when you cannot go outside.

00:01:52.000 Turns out that really cuts down on the capacity of the economy to keep moving.

00:01:56.000 The four-week moving average, which smoothed out weekly distortions, was $1.7 million, an increase of $27,500 from the previous week's revised average.

00:02:05.000 The major stock indices did open higher, wiping out sharp earlier losses, and that is because Everybody sort of expected this was coming.

00:02:11.000 This is already priced in.

00:02:12.000 Everybody knew that when you shut down the economy forcibly from the outside, the way this has happened, that that means that there's going to be a major spike in unemployment.

00:02:20.000 That is why the Senate voted 96-0 yesterday for the largest spending bill in the history of the United States to determine whether this sort of government shutdown of all human activity was necessary.

00:02:31.000 One of the things that we're going to have to look at is the international scene.

00:02:34.000 We're going to have to at some point here make, and it makes a big difference too, to how the United States reacts from here on in.

00:02:40.000 What is the plan for reopening the economy?

00:02:42.000 What is the plan for getting back to some semblance of normalcy?

00:02:46.000 Was it the right move to shut down the schools?

00:02:47.000 Was it the right move to shut down all businesses?

00:02:49.000 Was all of this the right move?

00:02:51.000 Now, based on available information, the answer seems to be yes, because you don't want to turn into Italy.

00:02:56.000 But what if it turns out that Italy is the outlier and, for example, the UK is much more close to the norm?

00:03:01.000 What if it turns out that South Korea is a little closer to the norm and Spain is closer to the outlier?

00:03:05.000 We don't know the answers to these questions.

00:03:07.000 So in a second, we're gonna look at some of the international stories and where this thing is going because this thing is slowing down in Italy.

00:03:13.000 Now, it is possible to say both.

00:03:15.000 That yes, you needed the hard stop because Italy required everybody to lock down for like three weeks in order to start seeing a day-on-day decline in new cases.

00:03:22.000 It is also possible to say that maybe we should have taken the Swedish approach.

00:03:25.000 Sweden didn't shut down its economy nearly at all.

00:03:27.000 We're gonna get to this in just one second.

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00:04:46.000 Okay, so where do we stand right now domestically and internationally?

00:04:51.000 Well, domestically, we are all worried we're about to become Italy.

00:04:53.000 Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti warned of mass death and condemned false hope, presumably that false hope coming from President Trump, on Wednesday.

00:05:00.000 He told LA residents that they will be confined to their homes until at least May.

00:05:05.000 Okay, it is now, last I checked, March 26th.

00:05:07.000 So that means another month of people being confined to their homes.

00:05:11.000 Garcetti said, I think this is at least two months.

00:05:14.000 Be prepared for even longer.

00:05:15.000 Garcetti pushed back against what he called premature optimism in the face of COVID-19, saying that leaders who suggest we're on the verge of business as usual are putting lives at risk.

00:05:23.000 He says, I can't say that strongly enough.

00:05:25.000 He says, giving people false hope will crush their spirits, will kill more people.

00:05:29.000 Because it will instill a sense of normality, and people will start going back out and associating with one another, and then coronavirus will spike again.

00:05:36.000 He says this will not kill most of us, it will kill a lot more people than we're used to dying around us.

00:05:40.000 Garcetti said the city was anywhere from 6 to 12 days away from the fate of New York City, where a surge in patients with coronavirus is threatening to overwhelm the health system.

00:05:48.000 As of noon on Tuesday, LA County public health officials said that there were 662 confirmed cases of COVID-19, with 11 confirmed deaths.

00:05:55.000 The actual numbers are no doubt higher, with officials only recently beginning to roll out testing.

00:05:59.000 Those numbers are higher on both ends, meaning it is way higher than 662 people in all of LA County who have COVID-19, and probably there are more people who have died of it, but just haven't been identified as victims of COVID-19 because we weren't really testing for it.

00:06:12.000 Now, the bottom number, that denominator, is significantly larger than the numerator, meaning that the death rate on coronavirus I mentioned yesterday is likely an order of magnitude lower than what the WHO is saying the death rate is, mainly because there are tons of silent cases running around, people who have not even experienced symptoms and who have coronavirus and are passing it on to others.

00:06:33.000 With that said, if this thing is super, super duper transmissible, you can still swamp emergency rooms, you can still swamp ventilators and ICUs, if there are just tons of people who end up with it.

00:06:41.000 Right?

00:06:41.000 If the raw number is very large, even if the rate is very small, the ICUs are not based on percentages.

00:06:46.000 The ICUs are based on the raw number of beds available.

00:06:49.000 The ventilators are based on the raw number of ventilators available.

00:06:52.000 Garcetti says the main horrifying thing I keep thinking about, and every local leader is being kept awake, is the projection of how many people will get this, the projection of what the mortality rate will be, how many dead we will have.

00:07:02.000 Will we have hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands?

00:07:04.000 That's what keeps us up.

00:07:05.000 Okay, so, in New York City, there are already articles about apocalyptic surges at a New York City hospital, and it's important to sort of parse what here is apocalyptic and what is not.

00:07:16.000 Obviously, we're going to see hospitals that are crushed under the weight of this thing.

00:07:20.000 We're obviously going to see overcrowding.

00:07:21.000 So far, the ICUs have not been overcrowded.

00:07:24.000 What I mean by that is that they will be.

00:07:25.000 I mean, there's very little doubt that over the next week, two weeks, that there will be more people who need ICU beds than ICU beds available.

00:07:30.000 There'll be more people who need ventilators than ventilators available, although there's some new breakthroughs in terms of ventilator technology.

00:07:36.000 that have been put out there and that are pretty fascinating and could actually ratchet up the number of ventilators available in fairly short order, which would be supremely important, obviously.

00:07:46.000 But with that said, the crisis right now that you're seeing in the New York Times is them saying there's not enough morgue space.

00:07:54.000 Okay, not enough morgue space is a bad thing, but you can make morgue space pretty easily.

00:07:57.000 And everybody sort of acknowledges that that just requires a federal go ahead.

00:08:00.000 The morgue space is not the big issue here, because those people, Not to be coarse about this, but those people are already dead.

00:08:06.000 I mean, what we really need are the resources to keep the people who are alive, alive.

00:08:09.000 And so the question is, when do we hit that point?

00:08:11.000 We were already hearing that by Tuesday, the system was going to be overwhelmed.

00:08:15.000 You remember Andrew Cuomo said that.

00:08:16.000 He said that by earlier this week, the system was already going to be overwhelmed.

00:08:19.000 That doesn't mean the system won't be overwhelmed.

00:08:21.000 It doesn't mean that the system won't be put, you know, basically peddled to the metal, but it does mean that It has not quite yet done this, right?

00:08:30.000 And Andrew Cuomo is even admitting as much, right?

00:08:33.000 Andrew Cuomo says that they have in fact dramatically slowed the rate of increase already, and this thing has only been locked down for like a week and a half, right?

00:08:41.000 Here's Andrew Cuomo suggesting that the rate of increase in New York City has been decreased fairly dramatically.

00:08:47.000 Westchester, we have dramatically slowed what was an exponential increase.

00:08:55.000 So again, on the good news side, can you slow the rate of infection?

00:09:01.000 Yes.

00:09:02.000 How do you know?

00:09:03.000 Look at what we did in Westchester.

00:09:05.000 That was the hottest cluster in the United States of America.

00:09:10.000 We closed the schools, we closed gatherings, we brought in testing, and we have dramatically slowed the increase.

00:09:20.000 Okay, Bill de Blasio, the awful mayor of New York, he says half of New Yorkers will be infected, but the question isn't how many people will be infected.

00:09:25.000 You have to assume tons and tons of people will be or already have been infected with coronavirus.

00:09:30.000 The real question is, over what period of time and do we have the medical resources necessary to deal with those people? 0.98

00:09:35.000 Here's idiot communist mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, who was going to the gym five minutes ago while telling everybody else they couldn't go to the gym five minutes ago. 1.00

00:09:41.000 Groundhog killer Bill de Blasio. 1.00

00:09:43.000 Probably more than half of all New Yorkers will be infected with this disease.

00:09:49.000 Thank God for the vast majority.

00:09:52.000 It will be a very limited, mild experience, but for a lot of other people, it's going to be really tough.

00:09:57.000 And we're going to lose some people.

00:09:59.000 And our job is to make sure that we save every single New Yorker we can.

00:10:05.000 Okay, so that amounts to slowing the transmissions, as Cuomo was talking about, and it amounts to ratcheting up the number of ICU beds and ventilators available.

00:10:12.000 What'll be really interesting to see from a social science perspective and from a data perspective is, in the end, how many ICU beds do we end up needing?

00:10:19.000 How wrong are the models, or how right are the models?

00:10:21.000 In a second, we're going to examine The possibility that some of these models are supremely wrong about the number of people who are going to end up needing ICU beds.

00:10:29.000 I have an example from the UK.

00:10:31.000 I mean, this is optimistic, right?

00:10:32.000 Maybe not.

00:10:33.000 Maybe, maybe this is totally wrong.

00:10:34.000 Maybe we do get hit like Italy gets hit, but maybe not.

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00:12:09.000 Okay.

00:12:10.000 As I say, in New York City right now, there's a lot of talk about the hospitals being full.

00:12:15.000 They're getting close to full, but they've not been overwhelmed as of yet.

00:12:18.000 And we were told they were going to be overwhelmed earlier this week.

00:12:20.000 Again, this does not mean that they're not going to be overwhelmed in the next week and a half.

00:12:23.000 It does mean that we are ramping up supplies.

00:12:25.000 We are ramping up ventilators.

00:12:26.000 We are ramping up ICU beds.

00:12:28.000 So according to the New York Times, which is already, you know, pulling the trigger on everything is apocalyptic, they say 13 deaths in a day, an apocalyptic coronavirus surge at a New York City hospital.

00:12:37.000 Okay, first of all, let's just point out, lots of people die at hospitals.

00:12:40.000 Lots and lots of people die at hospitals.

00:12:41.000 That does not mean a surge didn't happen at this hospital.

00:12:44.000 It does mean that 13 deaths in a day at a hospital is actually not a supremely large number.

00:12:48.000 Where you start to pull the parachute, where you start to pull the panic button and hit the panic button, is when you're seeing 50, 60 deaths a day from one source at a hospital.

00:12:57.000 In several hours on Tuesday, Dr. Ashley Bray performed chest compressions at Elmhurst Hospital Center on a woman in her 80s, a man in his 60s, and a 38-year-old who reminded the doctor of her fiancé all had tested positive for coronavirus and had gone into cardiac arrest.

00:13:10.000 All eventually died.

00:13:12.000 Elmhurst is a 545-bed public hospital in Queens has begun transferring patients not suffering from coronavirus to other hospitals as it moves toward becoming dedicated entirely to the outbreak.

00:13:20.000 And this is what you would expect, right?

00:13:21.000 Outlying hospitals are now being inundated with patients who do not have coronavirus so we can shift resources to urban centers where coronavirus is likely to hit the hardest, which makes perfect sense.

00:13:30.000 This is what Italy did not do.

00:13:31.000 Italy got overwhelmed because Italy did not have the capacity to bring other patients from Northern Italy to other areas of Italy, and this ended up with massive levels of overwhelm in the system.

00:13:40.000 This is why if you go to Southern Italy, the death rates from coronavirus are nowhere near the death rates from coronavirus in Northern Italy.

00:13:46.000 Why?

00:13:47.000 They're part of the same country.

00:13:48.000 Presumably tons of people are still getting coronavirus in Southern Italy and in Rome.

00:13:51.000 Well, perhaps the reason is because the medical system in Northern Italy was not prepared for this and they could not shift resources fast enough.

00:13:58.000 Also worth noting, by the way, Italy is a unique country in that a huge percentage of people who live in Italy live with their parents, and that makes an enormous difference in terms of transmission rates.

00:14:08.000 In fact, if you look at the countries that are being hardest hit right now, the share of the population aged 30 to 49 living with their parents, Italy it's 23%, and in the US it is 6.4%.

00:14:16.000 Which is closer to Germany or the UK.

00:14:18.000 Which means that infections of the elderly are going to be less prevalent in places like the UK, Germany, the US, Sweden, France.

00:14:26.000 The prevalence of elderly people getting this thing is going to be a lot lower than in Italy where pretty much 1 in 5 people aged 30 to 49 lives with their parents.

00:14:33.000 Meanwhile, the New York Times continues.

00:14:36.000 A refrigerated truck has been stationed outside to hold the bodies of the dead.

00:14:39.000 Over the past 24 hours, New York City's public hospital system said in a statement, 13 people at Elmhurst had died.

00:14:44.000 It's apocalyptic, said Dr. Bray, 27, a general medicine resident at the hospital.

00:14:50.000 Across the city, hospitals are beginning to confront the kind of harrowing surge in cases that has overwhelmed other healthcare systems in China, Italy, and other countries.

00:14:58.000 Okay, they're confronting it, but Does that mean that they are overwhelmed yet?

00:15:04.000 Not necessarily, right?

00:15:05.000 Cuomo said that that social distancing that has been effective in tamping down the growth, he said that it's almost too good to be true.

00:15:13.000 He said this week the state's hospitalization estimations were down markedly from a doubling of cases every two days to every four days, which is a dramatic slowing.

00:15:20.000 Hospitals are under siege, says the New York Times.

00:15:22.000 New York City's hospitals run the gamut from prestigious teaching institutions catering to the elite to public hospitals providing care for some of the poorest communities in the nation.

00:15:30.000 Regardless of whom they serve, few have been spared the impact of the pandemic.

00:15:33.000 A flood of sick and fearful New Yorkers has besieged emergency rooms across the city.

00:15:39.000 But again, nowhere in this article does it say that the system has yet been overwhelmed.

00:15:44.000 Now, again, I keep saying this.

00:15:46.000 It could be, right?

00:15:47.000 We could see it overwhelmed.

00:15:48.000 All of the more than 1,800 ICU beds in the city are expected to be full by Friday, according to a FEMA briefing obtained by the New York Times, and patients could stay there for weeks, limiting space for newly sickened people.

00:15:57.000 But every day we buy in order to Create more ICUs in order to create more ventilators is a day that less people are going to die.

00:16:05.000 Because again, until those beds are full and we have overwhelm like in Italy, you're not going to see the sorts of mass death you see in Italy.

00:16:11.000 Cuomo said he hoped that officials could quickly add units by dipping into a growing supply of ventilators.

00:16:16.000 The federal government is sending a 1,000-bed hospital ship to New York.

00:16:19.000 It's not scheduled to arrive until mid-April.

00:16:21.000 Officials have begun erecting four 250-bed hospitals at the Javits Convention Center in Mintown, Manhattan.

00:16:26.000 That could be ready in a week.

00:16:27.000 Also, officials are discussing converting hotels and arenas into temporary medical centers.

00:16:32.000 Now, again, talking about how they are filling up morgues, that's not the end of the world.

00:16:36.000 Buried deep in this article talking about the apocalypse is a spokeswoman for the city's office saying, quote, we have significant morgue capacity in our five citywide sites and the ability to expand.

00:16:44.000 So, the notion that everybody has been completely overwhelmed at this point, and that people are dying in the waiting room in the same way that has been happening in Italy, so far, not true.

00:16:56.000 So far, that is not true.

00:16:58.000 So, again, could be true, but we're buying time right now.

00:17:02.000 Now, why does this make me a little bit more optimistic?

00:17:04.000 Well, because there's a report out of the UK, according to NewScientist.com, The UK, according to the experts, now has enough ICU units for coronavirus patients.

00:17:15.000 So, one week ago, they were saying that the UK was going to get hit with like 230,000 deaths, that the UK was going to get completely overwhelmed, that the system was going to be completely overloaded, and lo and behold, a week later, they're like, oh no, actually, we have enough ICU beds.

00:17:28.000 Neil Ferguson at Imperial College of London, that is the source of the study, by the way, that suggested that 2.2 million people would die if there was no social distancing in the United States.

00:17:36.000 He gave evidence today into the UK Parliamentary's Select Committee on Science and Technology.

00:17:40.000 He said that expected increases in NHS capacity and ongoing restrictions to people's movements make him reasonably confident the health service can cope when the predicted peak of the epidemic arrives in two or three weeks.

00:17:50.000 UK deaths from the disease are now unlikely to exceed 20,000, he said, and could in fact be much lower.

00:17:56.000 Well, that's only an order of magnitude off from what the Imperial College study originally suggested.

00:18:00.000 Now, it is easy to say, OK, that's social distancing.

00:18:02.000 It's shutting down the economy.

00:18:03.000 But if that is the case, then that's going to bear some serious questions as to whether you actually needed to have this complete shutdown in the same way or, alternatively, how soon we can get out from a complete shutdown.

00:18:14.000 Because here's the reality.

00:18:16.000 Right?

00:18:17.000 Sweden didn't do any of this stuff.

00:18:18.000 And Sweden is not experiencing the same sort of overwhelm that Italy is.

00:18:22.000 It turns out that different countries are different.

00:18:24.000 By the way, even in Italy, this is a good piece of news, even in Italy, while the deaths continue to be extremely high, like 683 new deaths in Italy yesterday, the spread does keep slowing day on day.

00:18:34.000 This has been happening for about four or five days.

00:18:36.000 For the fourth day in a row, the total number of cases in the country was rising at a slower pace than usual.

00:18:43.000 This is the flattening of the curve beginning to actually happen in Italy, which is the country hardest hit by all of this, and by a large margin, the country where most people have died.

00:18:53.000 Confirmed contagions rose by 6% from Tuesday to reach 57,521 in Italy.

00:18:58.000 The total number of recovered patients is already over 9,000 in Italy.

00:19:02.000 We're going to get to Sweden in just one second because, again, we need comps.

00:19:05.000 We need to compare.

00:19:06.000 Where is the United States on these various curves?

00:19:09.000 What measures are we taking?

00:19:11.000 Were we going to be Italy or were we always going to be closer to the UK or France or Germany or Sweden?

00:19:17.000 They're very different.

00:19:18.000 There are lots of different variations in the treatment and in the transmission because people associate differently in different countries, right?

00:19:24.000 Italy has been particularly hard hit.

00:19:26.000 Spain is being hard hit also.

00:19:27.000 Their medical systems Nationalized healthcare systems, by the way.

00:19:31.000 Not very good.

00:19:32.000 Really, not very good.

00:19:33.000 They've got some serious problems over there.

00:19:34.000 We'll get to more of this in just one second.

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00:20:39.000 So as I say, Good piece of news from the UK.

00:20:41.000 They're not gonna get overwhelmed.

00:20:42.000 They're now saying Imperial College, right, that was the source of the study that said hundreds of thousands would die, is now saying under 20,000 people will probably die in Great Britain, which is, in fact, a flu season.

00:20:51.000 Okay, now, that does not mean this was like the flu.

00:20:53.000 Okay, we shut down in a way we never have for the flu.

00:20:55.000 And we're gonna get flu-like numbers anyway.

00:20:57.000 But it is indicative of the fact that some of the rates, the death rates, that were originally put out there were just not true.

00:21:02.000 And it is indicative of the fact that A full-throated public debate is going to need to be had in the future about how we deal with this kind of stuff without completely shutting down the world economy.

00:21:10.000 Because look at Sweden, okay?

00:21:11.000 According to the Financial Times, Sweden has become an international outlier in its response to the deadly coronavirus outbreak.

00:21:16.000 They kept their schools open.

00:21:18.000 They adopted few other restrictions.

00:21:19.000 The Scandinavian nation has been embarking on what one health expert called a huge experiment.

00:21:23.000 This is according, again, to the Financial Times.

00:21:26.000 Since the UK went into lockdown on Monday evening, Sweden is now the largest European country with the fewest limits on where people can go and what they can do.

00:21:34.000 By the way, remember, the UK only went on full lockdown like this week and they're already saying...

00:21:39.000 That in order of magnitude, less people are going to die than they predicted in that Imperial College study.

00:21:43.000 Schools for children up to the age of 16 remain open.

00:21:46.000 Many people continue to go to work.

00:21:47.000 Packed commuter trains and buses were reported this week in the capital of Stockholm.

00:21:51.000 Sweden stands out at the moment, said Carl Bildt, the former prime minister.

00:21:54.000 Swedish authorities have banned gatherings of more than 500 people.

00:21:57.000 They closed universities and higher education colleges.

00:21:59.000 They advised workers to stay home if possible.

00:22:02.000 Authorities on Tuesday ordered restaurants and bars only to serve people at tables rather than at the bar so that they could create some sort of social distancing.

00:22:09.000 Local media have been full of stories of thousands of people gathering at Swedish ski resorts, which until Saturday were completely open.

00:22:14.000 The virus has been spreading easily in mountain resorts in Austria and Italy as well.

00:22:19.000 Johan Carlsen, the head of Sweden's public health agency, last week defended Sweden's approach, said the country, quote, cannot take draconian measures that have a limited impact on the epidemic but knock out the functions of society. 0.70

00:22:28.000 So presumably the Democrats would accuse the Swedish health minister of favoring dollars over human lives because this is the stupid political game we play in the United States where we pretend that public policy is not about balancing risks and rewards.

00:22:41.000 It's all about if you can save one life. 0.99

00:22:42.000 Which, by the way, is the last refuge of the political scoundrel.

00:22:45.000 If you can just save one life.

00:22:46.000 And before you say, but you're anti-abortion.

00:22:49.000 That's not about saving one life.

00:22:50.000 That's about the deliberate killing of a human being.

00:22:52.000 That's not quite the same thing as deciding a public policy risks and rewards.

00:22:56.000 Carlson conceded the 90,000 figure for the number of people who die annually in Sweden would increase significantly if the healthcare system became overburdened, but there have been just over 2,000 reported COVID-19 cases in Sweden and 33 deaths, compared to 6,000 deaths in Italy, Europe's worst affected country.

00:23:11.000 Sweden's state epidemiologist, he said the future still looks manageable.

00:23:14.000 He argued schools should stay open because otherwise you have kids who transmit the disease who are home with parents and grandparents, which by the way is 100% true.

00:23:23.000 A number of Swedish health experts disagree.

00:23:25.000 It's always easier to say that everything should be shut down and then certain things should remain open.

00:23:28.000 So Sweden's going to be a fascinating case study.

00:23:30.000 If it turns out that Sweden is less hard hit than a bunch of countries that have been issuing nationwide lockdowns, it's one thing to do this in Italy where the thing's already hit, right?

00:23:38.000 It's another thing to do this preemptively in the UK.

00:23:41.000 And then four days later, you're saying, by the way, we do have enough ICU beds and we have enough ventilators.

00:23:45.000 I mean, unless they dramatically secretly ramped up ICU beds and ventilators, that means that the original estimates were quite wrong.

00:23:51.000 And again, none of this is to argue that in the United States we don't need a full stop, given what we knew about the epidemic when we knew about the epidemic.

00:23:57.000 It does mean that all of these estimates that we're going to have to keep the economy completely shuttered until June or July are kind of crazy.

00:24:04.000 They're kind of crazy based on what we currently know.

00:24:06.000 Now, again, all of that could change.

00:24:08.000 This is incredibly fluid.

00:24:09.000 We could see the system begin to be overwhelmed.

00:24:11.000 I keep hedging my bets here because I am not afraid of saying the three words that apparently every other person on this subject is afraid of saying.

00:24:16.000 I don't know.

00:24:17.000 You don't know.

00:24:19.000 Nobody knows.

00:24:19.000 So, I'm giving you a wide variety of data so that you can make the best available judgment about what's happening.

00:24:26.000 One of the things that has happened here is that we started off with the possibility of extreme economic loss balanced against the possibility of extreme loss of life.

00:24:33.000 Right?

00:24:33.000 That was the initial assessment.

00:24:35.000 And we said, okay, the possibility of extreme economic loss takes a backseat to the possibility of extreme loss of human life.

00:24:41.000 Totally on board with that.

00:24:42.000 What happens when it's the possibility of extreme loss of human life?

00:24:47.000 And that's diminishing.

00:24:48.000 Because as we get more data in, it looks a little better than we thought it was going to.

00:24:51.000 We were bending the curve in New York.

00:24:52.000 We're bending the curve in Washington state.

00:24:54.000 And that possibility of extreme economic loss is no longer a possibility.

00:24:58.000 It is a hard reality with millions of people losing their jobs.

00:25:01.000 If you're talking about a 100% possibility of a Great Depression for the United States economically versus a 10% possibility of a pandemic that was in line with any of the original estimates, at what point do you start to say, OK, we may need to tailor our policies a little bit differently?

00:25:17.000 Is it 1% possibility?

00:25:19.000 Is it 0% possibility?

00:25:21.000 And what if the best available estimates at this point are in fact an order of magnitude lower than they were even a week or two ago when data were still coming in, when it looked like Italy could not flatten its curve, when it looked like the UK might be hit with hundreds of thousands of deaths?

00:25:34.000 What if it turns out that in the United States, what we're talking about is not a million point one deaths, as some epidemiologists were originally suggesting.

00:25:40.000 I thought that was way overblown immediately, but let's say it's not 1.1 million deaths.

00:25:44.000 Let's say that what we're actually talking about in the United States is something like Great Britain, meaning that we're talking 50 to 100,000 deaths.

00:25:51.000 OK, now that's a horrible, horrible number.

00:25:54.000 It also happens to be that you're talking about the loss of millions upon millions of jobs.

00:25:59.000 And that does have a pretty significant impact on people's lives.

00:26:02.000 You're talking about the complete shutdown of the world economy. 0.85

00:26:04.000 And to pretend that that is not a counterweight is silly.

00:26:07.000 Also, you have to determine whether the difference that you're talking about making in completely shutting down society makes the difference between, say, 50,000 deaths and 500,000 deaths, or whether you're talking about the difference between 50,000 deaths and 70,000 deaths.

00:26:19.000 I know it's forbidden to talk about this stuff.

00:26:21.000 You're not allowed to talk about this stuff.

00:26:23.000 Every public policy decision comes down to talking about this stuff.

00:26:26.000 I'm not saying I have an answer.

00:26:28.000 I am saying that if you're not asking the questions, and if our public policymakers are not asking the questions, they are not doing their job.

00:26:33.000 This is literally their job.

00:26:35.000 Their job is to determine the various costs and benefits of various public policies.

00:26:39.000 We do it every single day, and to not do it in the midst of, one, a global pandemic, and two, the greatest economic shutdown in the history of mankind.

00:26:47.000 Okay, that's what this is right now.

00:26:48.000 The greatest economic shutdown in the history of mankind? 0.99

00:26:51.000 That would be absolutely foolish.

00:26:53.000 And I don't care what sort of bumper sticker sloganeering you suggest, you know, the, the, we can't even ask these questions because now you're taking human life lightly. 0.97

00:27:02.000 I'm absolutely not taking human life lightly.

00:27:04.000 I'm also not taking anybody's economic livelihood lightly.

00:27:06.000 I'm not taking people's jobs lightly.

00:27:08.000 We have to take all of this seriously.

00:27:09.000 And if you're not taking one aspect of this seriously, it's because you're not a serious person.

00:27:13.000 Sorry, you're not.

00:27:14.000 If you just say, okay, everything is justified in order to stop the number of deaths from being 50,000 plus one versus just 50,000, that's because you're not a serious person.

00:27:23.000 You're not.

00:27:24.000 Okay?

00:27:25.000 Because maybe the cost is worth it, and maybe the cost is not.

00:27:28.000 We make those decisions every single day in American public policy.

00:27:32.000 We do.

00:27:33.000 And meanwhile, as I say, Washington State case growth has declined.

00:27:37.000 We are seeing the Italian curve being flattened, and fairly dramatically, by the way.

00:27:41.000 It's been declining fairly steadily in terms of the rate of growth for days on end, for actually weeks now.

00:27:48.000 It's had some up and downs, but the trend line is fairly clear at this point.

00:27:52.000 We'll get to more of this in just one second.

00:27:54.000 We'll talk about the economic impact, which of course has been absolutely dramatic on American society.

00:27:59.000 As I say, the certainty of economic loss is very real now.

00:28:01.000 Now the possibility of loss of American life is still uncertain.

00:28:05.000 We don't know what the percentages are, and no one apparently in the public health world is being honest about their assessments.

00:28:11.000 They won't give us any numbers on what percentage chance you think it is that it's actually $500,000 versus what percentage chance that it's $20,000.

00:28:17.000 Where's the sliding scale here?

00:28:19.000 Without that data, it's very difficult to argue for a reopening, but maybe that's the whole point.

00:28:23.000 We'll get to more of this in just one second.

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00:29:27.000 So, as I say, the economic Certainty of loss is now quite real, okay?

00:29:32.000 And the possibility of mass death, it's still out there, but we don't know exactly how high it is.

00:29:37.000 This is what I've said.

00:29:38.000 Over the next two weeks, what we need from the federal government is a metric.

00:29:41.000 We need some sort of formula, right?

00:29:43.000 We don't know what the numbers are going to be for number of deaths versus number of cases.

00:29:46.000 We don't know any of that stuff yet, but we need a formula for when the number of deaths over the number of cases hits a certain rate, then step A kicks in and some of us go back to work.

00:29:55.000 And if that number declines further in terms of death rate and number of cases, then step B, more of us go back to work.

00:30:00.000 Like we need a plan at this point to get out of this because this is utterly unsustainable and because this is quickly turning into a political fight where some people are arguing that this is temporary and we need to do what we can to hold up the economy so that we can get back to work.

00:30:13.000 And other people are arguing we need to make this permanent. 0.90

00:30:15.000 And this is where crap gets seriously ugly. 0.97

00:30:17.000 OK, what we are in right now is global pandemic. 0.98

00:30:19.000 It's unprecedented in the history of Western, in the history of modern Economics.

00:30:25.000 This is unprecedented.

00:30:26.000 A forcible global economic shutdown.

00:30:29.000 Never happened before.

00:30:30.000 And some people are using this as an opportunity.

00:30:33.000 They're using it as an opportunity to talk about the permanent growth of American government. 0.68

00:30:37.000 And that is disgusting.

00:30:38.000 Okay, if you have turned this into your case for permanently growing the size and state of American government, not for getting through the crisis and going back to, you know, the greatest functional economy in the history of the world, that is because you're being a political hack.

00:30:50.000 And that is what we are watching right now in real time.

00:30:53.000 And that's like, I don't want to get political about this, but I'm not the one who made it political.

00:30:56.000 I thought we were all on the same page.

00:30:58.000 When the house is on fire, you put out the fire, but And when you got coronavirus, then maybe you need the hydroxychloroquine.

00:31:05.000 But there are some people who insist that it's not sufficient for us to take the hydroxychloroquine and the azithromycin and the zinc.

00:31:11.000 There are some people who are insistent that we down the fish tank cleaner.

00:31:15.000 You take the hydroxychloroquine now, but we need to make that permanent.

00:31:18.000 From now on, you're going to have to down a little bit of fish tank cleaner every day and destroy the American economy forever. 0.99

00:31:22.000 That is the direction that I'm seeing some people push when they talk about endless spending, when they talk about endless unemployment benefits, when they pretend that dealing with a crisis is the exact same thing as dealing with a non-crisis, and that the goal of this thing isn't to move us past what's going on right now.

00:31:36.000 We all agree on this.

00:31:37.000 That Senate bill last night passed 96-0.

00:31:40.000 There is no disagreement that we need to do something now to stop complete economic meltdown.

00:31:45.000 The question is, how many people out there are saying, well, now's the opportunity for us to completely shift our way of life because no crisis can go to waste.

00:31:53.000 So, how bad is the economic downturn here?

00:31:56.000 I mean, it's horrific.

00:31:57.000 The economic downturn is unprecedented, as I say, in American history and in human history.

00:32:01.000 We're looking at a 30% decline in GDP in one quarter.

00:32:04.000 Okay, that's nuts, obviously.

00:32:07.000 We have seen the local percentages of businesses open has dropped by 43% across America.

00:32:12.000 The percentage of hourly employees working has dropped by 55% across America.

00:32:16.000 So when people say, by the way, That we're just doing this to, when you talk about reopening the markets, it's to save the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

00:32:22.000 I promise you, Warren Buffett's still making money.

00:32:23.000 Jeff Bezos, doing okay.

00:32:25.000 People who are still wealthy, guess what?

00:32:27.000 They're still wealthy.

00:32:27.000 They didn't sell their stock.

00:32:29.000 They're still wealthy.

00:32:29.000 You know who's getting absolutely shellacked by this, by this forcible economic downturn?

00:32:33.000 Every small business owner, people who are operating on thin margins, every hourly employee of those businesses.

00:32:38.000 What do you think is happening to all the waiters?

00:32:40.000 What do you think is happening to all the cooks right now?

00:32:42.000 What do you think is happening to all the people who staff up all the local small businesses that you cannot go to anymore?

00:32:47.000 So when we say that, how dare you weigh all of the factors in determining public policy, why are you leaving those people out to dry?

00:32:55.000 Why are you pretending that those people's livelihoods and lives are completely a non-factor in how you determine public policy here?

00:33:04.000 I mean, obviously this stuff does matter and it should matter.

00:33:08.000 I mean, a huge percentage of US small businesses are going to run out of cash soon, which is why this was so necessary.

00:33:14.000 That's why it passed 96-0 in the Senate bill.

00:33:18.000 Over 20% of American businesses had enough cash to last a month, less than a month.

00:33:25.000 Between one and three months, almost 35% of American businesses, so over half of U.S.

00:33:31.000 small businesses say they would completely die within three months if sales stopped completely, which is exactly what is happening.

00:33:38.000 Almost no businesses can last up to a year without dying, without running out of cash, if they don't get a shot in the arm soon.

00:33:46.000 And you're seeing this with U.S.

00:33:48.000 home sales.

00:33:50.000 Bottom line here is that the economic realities are in fact realities, and that's something that we have to take into account.

00:33:56.000 And we have to take that into account along with all of the new data that's being brought in from the UK.

00:34:00.000 Again, I've yet to hear anybody in the federal or state government explain, when do we have enough ICU beds, that that's enough?

00:34:06.000 And the answer is that maybe they don't know.

00:34:08.000 We're gonna know in the next week or two.

00:34:10.000 And to pretend that we can't make those calculations or start to make those calculations is absolutely foolhardy.

00:34:16.000 Also, and at least a piece of good news, warm, humid weather could slow the coronavirus, according to new research, as Andrew Friedman and Simon Denyer reporting over at the Washington Post.

00:34:24.000 Apparently, the research on how the coronavirus behaves in various temperatures and humidity levels is demonstrating that upcoming changes of the seasons may actually slow this thing.

00:34:33.000 Multiple early studies provide evidence of statistical ties between temperature and humidity ranges and the geographic regions where the virus has thrived.

00:34:40.000 By the way, if this thing dies over the summer, even if we're hit with it cyclically, that would give us enough months to build up the ICU and ventilator capacity to handle it by, you would hope, September, October, right?

00:34:50.000 That would be the goal, right?

00:34:52.000 Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, he was out there saying this thing could be cyclical, right?

00:34:58.000 We could be hit with a wave now, and then it could die off during the summer, and then it could hit again.

00:35:02.000 But the cyclical nature of the thing means that you could send a lot of people back to work, and in the meantime, get your ass in gear and produce the masks and the ventilators and the beds that we need.

00:35:11.000 Here's Anthony Fauci yesterday saying this thing could in fact be cyclical.

00:35:14.000 Would this possibly become a seasonal cyclic thing?

00:35:18.000 And I've always indicated to you that I think it very well might.

00:35:22.000 And the reason I say that is that what we're starting to see now in the Southern Hemisphere, in Southern Africa, and in the Southern Hemisphere countries, is that we're having cases that are appearing as they go into their winter season.

00:35:37.000 And if, in fact, they have a substantial outbreak, it will be inevitable that we need to be prepared that we'll get a cycle around the second time.

00:35:47.000 Okay, but that gives us some time to actually build up the resources.

00:35:50.000 Plus, we're going to know in fairly short order, I think, how many people have already had this thing.

00:35:54.000 And then we'll actually have some real data.

00:35:55.000 There are microbiology labs that are already developing tests to detect if somebody has already been hit with coronavirus and is thus immune and can return to work.

00:36:03.000 Meanwhile, Deborah Birx, who's heading up the president's efforts on coronavirus, headed up the AIDS effort by the U.S.

00:36:08.000 government years ago.

00:36:09.000 She says the media are absolutely frightening people with salacious numbers.

00:36:12.000 The numbers they're putting out, the studies they're putting out, number of people dead, it's not going to look anything like that.

00:36:16.000 Here's Dr. Deborah Birx again. 0.99

00:36:18.000 Not President Trump, Dr. Deborah Birx making this point yesterday.

00:36:21.000 The numbers that have been put out there are actually very frightening to people.

00:36:27.000 But I can tell you, if you go back and look at Wuhan and Hubei and all of these provinces, When they talk about 60,000 people being infected, even if you said, oh right, well there's asymptomatics and all of that, so you get to 600,000 people out of 80 million. 0.78

00:36:47.000 That is nowhere close to the numbers that you see people putting out there.

00:36:51.000 I think it has frightened the American people.

00:36:53.000 I think on a model that you just run full out, you can get to those numbers if you have zero controls and you do nothing.

00:37:02.000 And we know that every American is doing something.

00:37:06.000 Okay, so all of that is true.

00:37:07.000 And again, the models that have been used and the ones that have been put out by the media, the ones that scare the living crap out of everybody, those models, like that Imperial College model, that was the one that went viral, not the Oxford University model that said that this thing was going to peter out fairly quickly and that it was an order of magnitude less deadly than we have originally been told.

00:37:21.000 The Imperial College model is totally wrong.

00:37:23.000 The British epidemiologist, I talked about this a moment ago, that British epidemiologist has admitted it was totally wrong.

00:37:28.000 UK will have enough beds.

00:37:29.000 It's on the order of 20,000 dead in the UK, not 200,000, not 2 million.

00:37:34.000 Okay, that is a major screw up, like a serious, serious screw up.

00:37:38.000 Now, does that mean it's time to get out there and go out partying?

00:37:41.000 No, it does not mean that.

00:37:42.000 It does mean that as the data comes in, we are going to have to consider how we get this thing back on the rails.

00:37:47.000 And that is, it is of priority.

00:37:51.000 Distress debt balloons to near $1 trillion near the 2008 peak.

00:37:55.000 According to Bloomberg, the amount of distress debt in the United States has quadrupled in less than a week, reaching levels not seen since 2008, as the collapse of oil prices and the fallout from coronavirus shutters entire industries across the globe.

00:38:06.000 The total is probably even higher.

00:38:07.000 The calculation does not include the debt of small to medium-sized companies whose loans trade rarely, if at all.

00:38:13.000 This has caused the worst sell-off since the global financial crisis and deepened stress in credit markets.

00:38:18.000 Okay, so obviously all of this is a huge problem.

00:38:21.000 Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary, says that the United States is going to take stakes in airlines in exchange for grants.

00:38:26.000 That in order to bail out the airlines, basically, they are going to take a government share of the airlines.

00:38:32.000 So it looks a lot like the auto bailout of 2008.

00:38:35.000 But the Senate has now approved the largest spending package in the history of the United States.

00:38:39.000 The Senate bill has now been approved 96 to nothing.

00:38:42.000 It sits with Nancy Pelosi now, who has been holding it up because she's awful in every possible way.

00:38:47.000 And this thing, like, I don't know what her leverage is.

00:38:49.000 Every single Democrat voted in favor of this bill.

00:38:52.000 Steny Hoyer says that the House will consider the stimulus bill as of Friday.

00:38:55.000 I can't imagine that it will be held up anymore.

00:38:57.000 It should be passed before the weekend.

00:38:59.000 So what exactly is in this thing?

00:39:01.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, $250 billion to make unemployment insurance available to more categories of workers and to extend the duration of benefits to 39 weeks from 26 weeks, typical in most states.

00:39:10.000 It would also provide an extra $600 a week for four months.

00:39:14.000 $301 billion in direct payments to households.

00:39:17.000 $349 billion in loans to small businesses with the amount spent on payroll, rent, or utilities converting into grants that don't have to be repaid.

00:39:23.000 $500 billion for loans, loan guarantees, or other aid to businesses, states, and municipalities, including the possibility that the government will take direct equity stakes into stressed companies.

00:39:33.000 That, by the way, companies are going to reject this.

00:39:36.000 Companies are just going to not do it.

00:39:37.000 Boeing already said, if you try to take a stake in us, we just won't take the loan.

00:39:41.000 And so the government absolutely caved, and the Congress just created an exception for Boeing.

00:39:45.000 They said they were a national security institution.

00:39:48.000 $32 billion in grants to cover wages at passenger air carriers, cargo air carriers, contractors, $150 billion in direct aid to states, $221 billion in tax benefits for businesses, $340 billion in supplemental spending.

00:40:00.000 By the way, all sorts of money for like public transit?

00:40:04.000 Which I don't know why that's necessary.

00:40:06.000 Also, just a bunch of pork is in there. 0.98

00:40:09.000 The Kennedy Center got tens of millions of dollars.

00:40:13.000 The National Endowment for the Arts got tens of millions of dollars.

00:40:15.000 The Corporation for Public Broadcasting got tens of millions of dollars. 1.00

00:40:19.000 Listen, on any normal level, this bill's a bunch of crap. 0.99

00:40:22.000 On any normal level, it's a bad bill. 0.98

00:40:24.000 Given the fact that the alternative is either a pork-laden bleep show or nothing, and this is going to allow businesses to continue to operate for the next three months, okay.

00:40:35.000 But here is the problem.

00:40:37.000 And Lindsey Graham makes this point, right?

00:40:38.000 Senator from South Carolina.

00:40:39.000 He had held this up last night because one of the provisions of the bill that needed to be clarified is it seemed from the bill You would actually get more money from being on unemployment insurance than from being employed, which would create an incentive for employers to throw people out of work and throw them to the unemployment lines.

00:40:54.000 I mean, that was in the bill.

00:40:56.000 And so a few senators, Ben Sasse among them, several senators, Lindsey Graham, they said, we need to get that corrected.

00:41:01.000 They did get that corrected.

00:41:02.000 And so the bill passed.

00:41:03.000 Lindsey Graham said, listen, I don't love everything in this bill, but we need to do something.

00:41:06.000 So here is Graham saying, I can tolerate some bad to do some good here because we have no choice.

00:41:10.000 There's a lot of good in this bill.

00:41:11.000 I'm going to vote for it.

00:41:12.000 There are medical supplies that nurses and doctors and hospitals need. 0.99

00:41:16.000 Mnuchin's done a good job, very much, trying to keep the Democrats from putting their Green New Deal into the bill.

00:41:23.000 But here's what we've done.

00:41:25.000 In the name of doing good, we're going to make it hard for the next four months for employers to find workers, and we're going to incentivize people to leave the workforce, because the first time in my lifetime, America will pay you more not to work than work.

00:41:40.000 I can tolerate some bad to do some good.

00:41:43.000 I've made deals.

00:41:44.000 I know what it's like to negotiate with the other side.

00:41:47.000 But really, do we need to be giving PBS more money now when people are dying?

00:41:53.000 Of course, none of that is necessary.

00:41:55.000 We shouldn't have to do any of this stuff.

00:41:56.000 But here's the point.

00:41:58.000 This is not going to stop.

00:41:59.000 Now is when the real political battle begins.

00:42:01.000 Right now you've got unanimous support to do something to shore up the economy because the government has forcibly driven a car through your living room. 0.99

00:42:06.000 But there's an entire side of the political aisle that not only wants to make a lot of this crap permanent, but wants to expand on this crap. 0.90

00:42:13.000 And you can see this break out into the open over specifically the provision that Graham is talking about. 0.94

00:42:17.000 There was a provision in the bill that basically suggested that you should get $600 plus whatever salary you were making at your company.

00:42:24.000 In order to be unemployed.

00:42:25.000 And Graham was like, uh, no, that doesn't make any sense.

00:42:28.000 If you're trying to maintain jobs, then what you don't do is pay people more to stay out of work than to stay in work.

00:42:33.000 That doesn't make any sense.

00:42:34.000 Enough people are going to be fired already without incentivizing people to be thrown off the payroll.

00:42:38.000 Instead, you have Nancy Pelosi out there saying, no, no, no, we're talking about $600. 0.78

00:42:42.000 What do you care?

00:42:44.000 We're spending a lot of money anyway.

00:42:45.000 Why not incentivize people to be thrown out of work?

00:42:47.000 This from the same lady who just a few years ago was suggesting openly that we need to make a national health insurance system something akin to a national health insurance system so that people don't have job lock, right?

00:42:57.000 So that they are not stuck in their jobs in order to gain health insurance.

00:43:00.000 So Nancy Pelosi has long been on board with the idea of paying people to be unemployed. 0.99

00:43:03.000 Here's Nancy Pelosi talking about all of this.

00:43:06.000 The fact is, is that there is an imbalance in our country in income and therefore the unemployment benefits.

00:43:13.000 But Lisa described it very well.

00:43:14.000 It's complicated.

00:43:16.000 It's complicated to make it calibrate for every state.

00:43:19.000 So just call it $600 around the country.

00:43:22.000 At a time when the fact is that we are a consumer economy and that we really need people to put money in people's pockets so they can then spend, inject demand into the economy, grow the economy, and that's a good thing.

00:43:37.000 Okay, first of all, everything she's saying there is crap about how this economy is going to recover.

00:43:40.000 It's not going to recover because you just put money in people's pockets.

00:43:43.000 You think anyone right now is spending extra money?

00:43:45.000 You think people are going out and buying?

00:43:46.000 They're not.

00:43:47.000 Where are they going to shop?

00:43:48.000 Okay, it's not a real thing until the coronavirus thing is solved.

00:43:50.000 I mean, this is basically along the same, it's the democratic version of, what if we gave a tax cut to everybody and then they went and spent the money?

00:43:56.000 Like, I'm all in favor of tax cuts, but that ain't going to inject demand into this economy.

00:44:00.000 That is not a thing that's going to happen right now.

00:44:02.000 There is no demand because nothing's open because the government shut everything down.

00:44:06.000 Then you had Bernie Sanders doing the same routine.

00:44:07.000 Bernie talking about how, how could Republicans be so upset about expanding unemployment benefits beyond what they wanted originally?

00:44:15.000 It's a very good thing!

00:44:16.000 We should have permanent unemployment! 0.97

00:44:17.000 Okay, first of all, good rule of thumb. 1.00

00:44:19.000 If Bernie's for it, it's a bunch of garbage. 1.00

00:44:21.000 Second thing. 0.99

00:44:22.000 The point here is not that Republicans weren't expanding unemployment.

00:44:24.000 It was their proposal to do so over the weekend.

00:44:26.000 The point is, how long is that going to last and incentivize people to stay out of the workforce artificially on the basis of debt that we cannot even float at this point because no other country has the capacity to buy our debt?

00:44:37.000 But here's Bernie Sanders grandstanding and being rewarded for it on Twitter. 0.99

00:44:40.000 Twitter, by the way, is the dumbest place on earth. 0.95

00:44:42.000 I've spent less and less time on Twitter over time. 0.99

00:44:44.000 There is a reason for that. 1.00

00:44:45.000 It is because it is a repository of idiocy and malice and just ridiculous garbage. 1.00

00:44:51.000 Anyway, here is Bernie Sanders, who again was trending on Twitter. 0.99

00:44:54.000 Thank you, Bernie, for suggesting that people are greedy for not trying to float unemployment benefits seven months out at the employment wages that they are earning right now.

00:45:04.000 Now I find that some of my Republican colleagues are very distressed.

00:45:08.000 They're very upset that somebody who's making 10, 12 bucks an hour might end up with a paycheck for four months.

00:45:18.000 More than they received last week.

00:45:21.000 Oh, my God!

00:45:22.000 The universe is collapsing.

00:45:25.000 Imagine that.

00:45:26.000 Somebody who's making 12 bucks an hour now, like the rest of us, faces an unprecedented economic crisis with the 600 bucks on top of their normal, their regular unemployment check.

00:45:41.000 Might be making a few bucks more for four months.

00:45:45.000 Oh my word!

00:45:47.000 Will the universe survive?

00:45:50.000 The point here is that when you incentivize millions of people to stay out of the workforce after the crisis.

00:45:50.000 Okay, no.

00:45:54.000 We're talking about after the crisis.

00:45:55.000 And this has been my point here.

00:45:57.000 My point is not that we shouldn't have done something.

00:45:59.000 We should have done something.

00:46:00.000 My point is, what you do should be geared towards solving the crisis.

00:46:03.000 Okay?

00:46:04.000 It should not... Take the hydroxychloroquine for the...

00:46:08.000 For the prescribed coronavirus.

00:46:09.000 Take the amount.

00:46:10.000 Don't drink the fish tank cleaner.

00:46:12.000 Bernie wants you to drink the fish tank cleaner economically.

00:46:14.000 Okay, the Democrats want to drink the fish tank cleaner economically.

00:46:17.000 This is what they want.

00:46:18.000 They want never-ending spending.

00:46:19.000 They're trying to make this all permanent.

00:46:20.000 I'm going to get into more of this in just one second.

00:46:23.000 I'm going to demonstrate to you that now this has become political.

00:46:25.000 It started off as apolitical.

00:46:26.000 It should remain apolitical.

00:46:27.000 It is no longer apolitical, nor will it be apolitical in the upcoming weeks as the economy remains closed.

00:46:33.000 And that's ugly.

00:46:33.000 We need to be talking about how we Get enough ICU beds, enough ventilators, enough resources, mobilize so we can all go back to work as soon as possible.

00:46:41.000 Instead, we're going to get debates over a fourth round of stimulus, a fifth round of stimulus, based on money that doesn't exist, based on debt that we cannot sell, based on economies around the world that are not working.

00:46:51.000 We'll get into more of this in just one second.

00:46:52.000 First, if you haven't had a chance to see some of our new content called All Access Live, you should head on over to dailywire.com and check it out.

00:46:58.000 Jeremy Boring and I kicked it off last week.

00:47:00.000 It is massively popular.

00:47:01.000 People are loving it.

00:47:02.000 We're going to continue all this week at 8 p.m.

00:47:04.000 Eastern, 5 p.m.

00:47:05.000 Basically, it's an informal hangout where one of our hosts sits down with you and we just hang.

00:47:05.000 Pacific.

00:47:10.000 We just we just chat it up and have a party and I play random music for you and answer your questions or Jeremy talks about religion or Michael just jabbers about I have no idea about what like Cigars and smoking jackets or something.

00:47:23.000 The show's intended for our all-access members, but during this national emergency, this time of isolation, we know that everybody just needs to hang out and chill out.

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00:47:44.000 Conway are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.

00:47:47.000 Okay, this is the largest spending bill in the history of the United States.

00:47:57.000 And Democrat after Democrat after Democrat after Democrat is saying, we need more.

00:48:01.000 We need more.

00:48:02.000 Okay, now listen, if you can make the case for why the more is going to shore up the businesses that are going to die, love to hear it. 0.99

00:48:08.000 But if this is just you prioritizing your garbage priorities that you couldn't get past in a normal time, and you're doing it under cover of night in order to take advantage of a crisis, that's you being a crap person. 0.90

00:48:18.000 It's a bad crisis, and so your immediate response is, but what if we could get a Green New Deal? 0.99

00:48:22.000 What if we could do that?

00:48:24.000 And it's a universal call from the Democrats.

00:48:26.000 Shocker, shocker, shocker.

00:48:27.000 Kirsten Gillibrand, Senator from New York, says we need to spend more.

00:48:30.000 We literally just spent $2 trillion.

00:48:34.000 The entire normal budget of the United States in a year, in which we'll run a $1 trillion deficit, is $4 trillion.

00:48:40.000 We just took that and multiplied it by half, added it to the budget, For basically a two to three month period, because that's what we're talking about here.

00:48:48.000 We all hope and pray.

00:48:49.000 And in all likelihood, it will be two to three months.

00:48:50.000 We had on yesterday, Dr. Marty McCary from Johns Hopkins University.

00:48:53.000 He says this thing is going to wane by May.

00:48:55.000 Okay, so for two to three months, we're talking about this?

00:48:59.000 Fine.

00:48:59.000 Okay, but you're talking about making it permanent.

00:49:01.000 We need to spend more and more and more and more.

00:49:03.000 Why it's almost as though you're attempting to confirm your political priors by referring to a crisis that should be temporary and that we should be looking to get out of, not to exacerbate.

00:49:14.000 Here's Christian Gillibrand.

00:49:14.000 We need to spend more.

00:49:16.000 This bill is very helpful, but it's just the first step.

00:49:20.000 This is going to be a very long-term crisis.

00:49:22.000 It's going to take months and months to get out of it.

00:49:24.000 And frankly, I don't think our economy is going to return to where it was for a long time.

00:49:29.000 More than months, perhaps years.

00:49:31.000 And so the truth is our job is to Duke triage.

00:49:36.000 Right now we needed to get real dollars into the hands of real people.

00:49:39.000 This is not intended to make all states whole.

00:49:42.000 It couldn't possibly do that.

00:49:44.000 But it's intended to get us through the next four weeks and hopefully the next four months in terms of the coverage of employees.

00:49:52.000 The easiest thing to do as a politician, by the way, is to shout that you need more money.

00:49:56.000 Always to shout that you need more money.

00:49:57.000 The question is, how do you draw the balance between what we actually need right now and running up that credit card forever?

00:50:03.000 Because guess what?

00:50:04.000 You want to depress the economy?

00:50:05.000 You want to ensure that we actually can't do any of the things that we need to do as an economy?

00:50:08.000 You want to raise taxes dramatically?

00:50:10.000 Because here's the reality.

00:50:11.000 At a certain point here, we're going to have to pay back these bonds.

00:50:13.000 At a certain point here, you're going to have to raise taxes in order to pay for this stuff and sink the economy in the process.

00:50:18.000 So, you are taking a short-term hit right now, but turning it into a long-term hit, a permanent hit, forever.

00:50:23.000 Two trillion dollars you're spending right now, and you're watching Democrats immediately claim that they need to spend like 30 trillion bucks because of the two trillion, right?

00:50:30.000 Joe Biden, who's barely a sentient human being at this point, I'm not sure that he's alive.

00:50:33.000 Joe Biden, yesterday, He said, well, in the next round of negotiations, maybe there'll be a Green New Deal in the next round, like another Green New Deal.

00:50:41.000 Okay.

00:50:42.000 Alexander Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal was set to cost, what was it?

00:50:45.000 It was something like $90 trillion over the course of the next 30 years or something.

00:50:48.000 It was something insane.

00:50:49.000 It's something completely crazy.

00:50:51.000 And Joe Biden's like, well, maybe we'll do a Green New Deal.

00:50:52.000 Really?

00:50:53.000 Is everybody begging for solar panels right now?

00:50:54.000 Last I checked, everybody just wants to go back to work.

00:50:57.000 Everybody just wants to be healthy and go back to work.

00:50:58.000 Those would be the two priorities.

00:51:00.000 And Joe Biden's like, what if we could have a windmill?

00:51:02.000 Like a windmill.

00:51:03.000 You know, like when I was a boy back in the 1930s, you know, I used to have one of those little, you know, like not a windmill, but like one of those things you blow on it, it spins, it spins like, it was really pretty, like a kaleidoscope.

00:51:15.000 Go Joe Biden.

00:51:16.000 We're going to have an opportunity, I believe, in the next round here to use my Green Deal to be able to generate both economic growth consistent with the kind of infusion of monies we need into the system to keep it going.

00:51:35.000 One of the ways to make sure these jobs are available that may get lost or hurt in the meantime is to provide the kind of jobs that are prevailing wages where people are making $45, $50 an hour plus benefits by building new infrastructure.

00:51:50.000 Remember that time that the Obama administration tried this with shovel-ready jobs and then created zero jobs?

00:51:55.000 Remember that?

00:51:56.000 Remember that time they tried this with green jobs?

00:51:58.000 Remember they had a green jobs czar named Van Jones, and remember they created no jobs? 0.58

00:52:01.000 Van Jones admitted they could not actually peg down one green new job that had been created.

00:52:04.000 Remember that?

00:52:04.000 So now Joe Biden's doing the same thing on the back of this.

00:52:06.000 He's just, uh, yeah, I wanna, yeah, maybe we'll do like, um, you know what I'm saying?

00:52:06.000 But Joe Biden isn't done.

00:52:08.000 You know what I'm saying?

00:52:15.000 You know what To help the folks this bill leaves out, including young people.

00:52:21.000 This bill doesn't include student loan forgiveness, which would go a long way to providing immediate relief for those who need it the most.

00:52:29.000 I support forgiving at least $10,000 in student loan debt per person now.

00:52:36.000 It doesn't include the cost-free treatment for the COVID-19 Whatever the costs are related to that, it should be cost-free.

00:52:50.000 Okay, guys, when I say this is going to turn into a political battle, this is what I mean.

00:52:53.000 And this is what I've said before.

00:52:54.000 You know, there are a lot of things that I'm not fond of about President Trump.

00:52:57.000 One thing I'm fond of is the man does not want to destroy the American economy on the basis of a crisis.

00:53:02.000 If the Democrat were president right now, they'd be nationalizing everything in sight.

00:53:04.000 They already would have nationalized the health supply industry.

00:53:07.000 They already would have been pushing for a Green New Deal. 0.81

00:53:10.000 They've been pushing for permanent federal jobs.

00:53:12.000 That's what they're doing over at Salon.com, by the way.

00:53:14.000 There's an entire piece at Slate called, The Senate Coronavirus Bill Is Not Going To Be Enough by Daniel Carpenter.

00:53:14.000 Or Slate, rather.

00:53:19.000 What is he suggesting?

00:53:20.000 Well, aside from hiring up some federal workers for the CDC and the FDA, which is totally fine, and hiring up some new people at the unemployment office, he wants there to be permanent hiring in the transport infrastructure industry.

00:53:31.000 What the hell does that have to do with anything?

00:53:32.000 He wants permanent hiring in the alternative energy infrastructure department.

00:53:36.000 He says planning and rollout for a more expansive grid of electric cars, solar panels, and wind farms necessitates hiring workers.

00:53:42.000 What the hell does that have to do with coronavirus?

00:53:43.000 What are you even talking about?

00:53:46.000 He says, if the economic and health reasons for stimulus through public sector hiring are not enough, consider two other benefits of government hiring.

00:53:51.000 First, an infrastructure plan that relies largely or entirely on contractors will likely exacerbate the social and economic inequality that have torn our country apart.

00:54:01.000 Government jobs provide solid benefits.

00:54:03.000 Oh, so it's like you're... Why, it's almost as though you're looking for a government jobs program like Bernie Sanders wanted in the first place, and you're using a crisis in order to try and guarantee that.

00:54:14.000 Listen, you got all of us on board because we had to.

00:54:17.000 Some of us are not super happy about a $2 trillion spending plan.

00:54:20.000 We wonder whether that $2 trillion is actually what is fully necessary, or whether $1.5 trillion would have done it, or whether there should have been zero interest loans rather than grants, or whether they should have been funneled through the banks that were already guaranteeing the loans and you up unemployment insurance on the other side for the people who legit are thrown out of jobs.

00:54:35.000 Maybe some of us think there was a better way to do this deal, but knowing what was going on, the deal had to be done.

00:54:40.000 Fine.

00:54:41.000 And now your immediate claim is that we have not done enough and that we need to spend more money?

00:54:46.000 You need to spend more money?

00:54:47.000 Why, it's almost as though this is a political agenda-driven, nonsensical thing that you guys are pushing here.

00:54:55.000 It has nothing to do with reality.

00:54:57.000 Almost as though.

00:54:58.000 Almost as though.

00:54:59.000 Is it time for some things I like and some things that I hate?

00:55:02.000 Let's do some things I like and some things that I hate.

00:55:04.000 So, you know what?

00:55:05.000 We will skip things that I like today.

00:55:08.000 Let's do a thing I hate instead.

00:55:10.000 So the intrepid reporter Mark Fisher, Washington Post senior editor, the author of Trump Revealed, he has a tweet today.

00:55:25.000 Here's the tweet.

00:55:26.000 Scott McMillan, a 56-year-old lawyer, tweeted that it's more vital to revive the economy than to save people who are not productive, like the elderly and infirm.

00:55:33.000 So I called his parents.

00:55:36.000 Okay, so he's a lawyer.

00:55:39.000 He expressed a public policy position that is really unpopular, and in my opinion, wrong.

00:55:44.000 And you called his mommy?

00:55:47.000 Like this is absolute journalism of highest quality.

00:55:51.000 A rando said a thing you don't like so you called his mommy as a reporter for the Washington Post.

00:55:56.000 Wow, our journalistics, I trust them so much.

00:55:59.000 I trust those UK experts who revised their initial estimate down from 510,000 deaths to 20,000 deaths over the course of one week.

00:56:06.000 And their estimate for coronavirus has spread from 12 months to two weeks.

00:56:09.000 I'm like, the peak is going to happen.

00:56:11.000 I trust all experts.

00:56:13.000 I trust them so much.

00:56:14.000 I trust them so much.

00:56:14.000 And I trust our journalistic experts to bring us nothing but truth.

00:56:17.000 I trust democracy dies in darkness, guys.

00:56:21.000 This is what the article says.

00:56:23.000 He urged saving the economy over protecting those who are, quote, not productive from the coronavirus.

00:56:27.000 Then he faced America's wrath.

00:56:30.000 Scott McMillan had had it with being cooped up, with the whole country being closed, with the collapsing market and the isolation, the constant worry, the politicians who didn't take coronavirus seriously when they could have.

00:56:38.000 On Sunday night, McMillan, a 56-year-old lawyer in La Mesa, California, near San Diego, saw President Trump's tweet about how we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.

00:56:46.000 The lawyer took to Twitter to add his own two cents.

00:56:48.000 He tweeted, the fundamental problem is whether we're going to tank the entire economy to save 2.5% of the population, which is one, generally expensive to maintain and two, not productive.

00:56:59.000 Okay, well that is a very poor way of putting this thing because number one, we don't want any of those old people to die. 1.00

00:57:04.000 And number two, he's expressing basically that you have to take everything into consideration but in a very gauche way.

00:57:10.000 I mean, that would be the best way to describe what he is doing.

00:57:13.000 He's saying that obviously every public policy is balanced.

00:57:15.000 It's the same thing that happened with the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick. 0.98

00:57:19.000 People are expressing the need to balance priorities in the dumbest possible way.

00:57:22.000 But the overall point, which is that obviously public policy takes into account both the risk to human life and the risk to economics, which, again, is real life for millions and millions of people who are waking up without a job today.

00:57:33.000 Right?

00:57:34.000 That is a thing that we have to take into account.

00:57:36.000 Now, he puts that in a gauche way, and so the Washington Post called his mommy.

00:57:40.000 Seriously. 0.93

00:57:42.000 People called him a liberal and a white right-wing nut, even a Nazi.

00:57:45.000 They threatened his livelihood, his family, his home.

00:57:46.000 Polite people told him about their elderly parents who teach their grandchildren Latin and music and produce more happiness in their golden years than most working people do in their entire careers.

00:57:54.000 The mean people who are not shy on Twitter invoked a full array of lawyer jokes, soiling green in the Holocaust to convey just how awful McMillan was for implying that old or infirm people should be put aside to allow America to get back to work.

00:58:06.000 MacMillan told the Washington Post, I'm not a cold-hearted monster.

00:58:08.000 Nature does this every so often.

00:58:09.000 It wipes out a bunch of us.

00:58:11.000 MacMillan was not the first person to express the idea.

00:58:13.000 It's more important for the country to get back to work than it is to do everything possible to protect the elderly and the infirm.

00:58:18.000 In the anxious political and personal struggle between doing whatever it takes to avoid a wicked, sometimes lethal virus, and doing what is needed to revive a suddenly dormant economy, MacMillan's tweet became a lightning rod.

00:58:27.000 So, Washington Post immediately jumped into the story.

00:58:30.000 And instead of saying, this is a random dude on Twitter who said a dumb thing, instead, the Washington Post decided, you know what would be great? 0.67

00:58:35.000 We will call his mommy. 0.89

00:58:37.000 We'll call his mommy! 0.80

00:58:39.000 As the blow black grew fierce, the lawyer took down his own tweet, took down his website, screened his calls. 0.97

00:58:43.000 He was miserable.

00:58:44.000 He took his chloroquine, the anti-malaria drug Trump kept talking up, hoping it might protect him against the virus, though there is no evidence it will. 1.00

00:58:50.000 It makes him feel like crap. 0.96

00:58:51.000 He lowered his dose but keeps taking it because he said, maybe it does work. 0.99

00:58:54.000 Okay, so this guy's kind of nutty anyway, right?

00:58:55.000 He doesn't have coronavirus and he's taking chloroquine. 0.81

00:58:57.000 And so you picked on a guy who seems like he is semi-nutty and you called his parents.

00:59:02.000 He remained unapologetic on Twitter.

00:59:03.000 He wrote that his approach, whether you like it or not, is the analysis that will be performed by our political leaders and our medical personnel.

00:59:08.000 Look at Italy.

00:59:10.000 He said, I don't want to take out the old people. 1.00

00:59:11.000 I don't want the kids coming up today to be akin to the depression kids.

00:59:14.000 The longer this drags on without people working, the worse it's going to be.

00:59:17.000 We can't allow our society to collapse over this.

00:59:20.000 So here is what the Washington Post did in their quest for democracy, not dying in darkness.

00:59:26.000 Scott's father, Jim McMillan, is alive.

00:59:27.000 He's 78.

00:59:28.000 Scott's mother, Gloria, is 75.

00:59:29.000 They're well.

00:59:31.000 They are, by Scott's measure, not productive.

00:59:32.000 Jim's a retired lawyer.

00:59:33.000 Gloria's a retired high school English teacher. 0.91

00:59:35.000 They've been especially not productive since February 23rd, which is the last time they left their house in San Diego when they went to the LA Opera to watch a performance of Euridice.

00:59:43.000 Well, the last time, except for 10 days ago, when Jim said he was going to the Home Depot to get a light switch to replace the one that went on the fritz.

00:59:51.000 He said he went out, not bothering with gloves or mask, and then he stopped by Walmart to look at canned goods.

00:59:55.000 He bought some coolant, and his wife yelled at him.

00:59:58.000 Since the Walmart trip, they've continued their not-productive life at home.

01:00:01.000 Their main activity is watching news, says Gloria.

01:00:04.000 Jim and Gloria like to argue about the virus, the president, pretty much anything they argue about, whether they argue it about who wins.

01:00:10.000 They agree with their son, Scott, that Trump dallyed too long and failed to act.

01:00:13.000 They agree with their son, Scott, the president is right to push now to restart the economy.

01:00:17.000 And they agree with Scott that businesses should reopen, even if it means putting old folks and people with underlying illnesses and other non-productive types into quarantine for an extended period.

01:00:26.000 So, I guess that they called his parents and his parents were like, okay.

01:00:30.000 How the hell is that a story?

01:00:32.000 Okay, so not only is it not a story what the guy said on Twitter, it is also not a story when you call his mommy and daddy.

01:00:36.000 And it is super not a story when they're like, yeah, fine, whatever.

01:00:40.000 That's called not a story.

01:00:41.000 The Washington Post devoted several thousand words to this.

01:00:45.000 Several thousand words to this nonsense.

01:00:48.000 Well done, Washington Post.

01:00:50.000 Our journalistic betters, keeping us informed every single day.

01:00:55.000 Incredible.

01:00:56.000 Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content, hopefully some more good news for you.

01:00:59.000 Otherwise, we'll be back here tomorrow.

01:01:01.000 Make sure to check out our all-access live by going to dailywire.com.

01:01:04.000 Andrew Klavan's on tonight, hanging out with you.

01:01:05.000 I'll be back a little bit later this week, I think tomorrow, hanging out with you.

01:01:08.000 So, go join up at dailywire.com, become part of our community.

01:01:11.000 You're listening to The Ben Shapiro Show.

01:01:17.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas.

01:01:19.000 Directed by Mike Joyner.

01:01:21.000 Executive producer Jeremy Boring.

01:01:22.000 Supervising producer Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.

01:01:25.000 Assistant director Pavel Lydowsky.

01:01:27.000 Technical producer Austin Stevens.

01:01:29.000 Playback and media operated by Nick Sheehan.

01:01:31.000 Associate producer Katie Swinnerton.

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01:01:43.000 Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.

01:01:46.000 You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon has turned to blood.

01:01:52.000 But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.

The Ben Shapiro Show - March 26, 2020

It’s Raining Cash | Ep. 980

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