Justice Stephen Breyer heads for the exits before the midterms, as Joe Biden considers which Black woman to pick, and the Federal Reserve announces it will raise interest rates soon. Today s show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.Do you like your web history being seen and sold to advertisers? No? Me neither. Get ExpressVPN right now at expressvpn.com/get-free-with-enrollment to get 3 months for FREE. That's 3 months of 3-Vpn for FREE! That's ExpressVPN, the first major VPN provider to engineer all of their VPN servers to run in RAM, which makes it impossible for their servers to store any data, including logs, of any ExpressVPN customer. And you don't have to take my word for it. Check out ExpressVPN for their no-logs claim, they even had one of the biggest assurance firms, PricewaterhouseCooper, audit their technology to make sure they weren t keeping logs of what you do online. And sure, sure, they don t have to do that, but who cares about that anyway? Ben Shapiro is a writer, comedian, podcaster, and podcaster. He's also the host of the podcast and a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, where he hosts a weekly podcast called . He's not here to talk about anything else, is he? And he does it because he's here because he loves to do it, right? In this episode, Ben explains why Kamala Harris should be the next Supreme Court nominee, and why she's a good one. Ben also explains why he thinks she's the best choice for the Democratic presidential candidate, and also why she should be running for re-election, not because she's good at it, at least she's not good at anything else. And why she needs to be better than she's actually good at something like that. Plus, he also explains how much she's better than he's not even counts that she isn't good at that, and she s not good, but she's just not good enough, right, at that s really good, really is not enough, is she really is, really she really does, really not, right is she is not, she s good, right or she s just not enough? Ben explains it all, and he also talks about it, really does it, he really does... And more.
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00:01:37.000Alrighty, so yesterday, Justice Stephen Breyer announced that he would be leaving the Supreme Court at the end of the current term, but he really didn't announce it.
00:01:46.000It was just sort of announced for him, and apparently he was kind of ticked about all of this.
00:01:50.000There were multiple reports yesterday that he had planned on announcing this, but it sort of leaked before he was ready for it, according to Shannon Bream.
00:01:57.000According to Breitbart.com, many reports indicated that Breyer was surprised and caught off guard about the announcement.
00:02:03.000Neither Breyer nor the Supreme Court has issued a public announcement about his supposed retirement.
00:02:07.000The White House and President Biden have refused to comment on the news, which was first reported by CNBC.
00:02:12.000Biden said there's been no announcement from Justice Breyer.
00:02:14.000Let him make whatever statement he's going to make.
00:02:49.000When the Democrats cannot have her as the nominee, should Joe Biden go down, they're like, let's just stick that lady over at the Supreme Court.
00:02:55.000She'll be a reliable vote for anything that we need.
00:02:56.000And sure, she sucks at everything, but who cares about that?
00:02:59.000Here was Jen Psaki refusing to answer the question yesterday.
00:03:02.000When you were asked about the vice president possibly being selected as a Supreme Court nominee, you said you're not going to speak to any considerations.
00:03:10.000Does that mean she is being considered?
00:03:13.000Again, Peter, I'm not going to speak to the reports of a Supreme Court justice retirement that hasn't been announced.
00:03:20.000So theoretically, would someone who's- Theoretically?
00:03:25.000Just wondering, hypothetically, theoretically, would someone who was an attorney general of a large state and who served with many key Senate votes be an attractive candidate to the president for an open Supreme Court seat?
00:03:41.000But the President has every intention, as he said before, of running for re-election, and for running for re-election with Vice President Harris on the ticket as his partner.
00:03:53.000Okay, so, of course, that's probably right.
00:03:56.000They're not going to nominate Kamala Harris.
00:03:59.000First of all, Kamala Harris is the tie-breaking vote.
00:04:01.000She'd have to, presumably, resign from her seat as Vice President of the United States in order to be considered for the Supreme Court.
00:04:09.000He'd have to select a new Vice President, and at that point, that person would be the tie-breaker because she'd have to not vote on her own nomination.
00:04:15.000So, that's really kind of ridiculous and insane.
00:04:18.000So, Kamala Harris is not going to be the nominee.
00:04:21.000It is hilarious that the left was so nervous about the 2022 elections that they basically just bodily threw Stephen Breyer off the Supreme Court.
00:04:27.000So you remember that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the notorious RBG, heroine to the masses, the person that the left worshipped.
00:04:34.000I mean, they made documentaries about her and they had votive candles of her, and she was the most important justice on the Supreme Court, despite the fact that she really wasn't all that important a justice in the grand scheme of things.
00:04:43.000There were very few Extraordinarily important decisions over her tenure at the Supreme Court.
00:04:48.000She was just a reliable vote for the left.
00:04:50.000Just as Ruth Bader Ginsburg made the crucial error of thinking that Hillary Clinton was going to win the 2016 election, and so she didn't step down despite some pressure to do so.
00:04:58.000And then Donald Trump won, and then Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat was filled by Donald Trump.
00:05:02.000Which meant that the court shifted from basically even to now a 6-3 Supreme Court, because Donald Trump got three picks while he was President of the United States, and at least two of them were swings, right?
00:05:13.000One was a Ginsburg seat, and one was the seat for Justice Kennedy.
00:05:18.000So you'll remember that Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020 while Trump was president.
00:05:23.000She thought Hillary was going to be president, and Hillary wasn't.
00:05:25.000So that meant that Trump got to replace her.
00:05:27.000Democrats want to avoid that this time.
00:05:29.000Democrats also want to avoid the situation they had when Justice Scalia died, because Justice Scalia died while there was a Democratic president, but there was a Republican Senate.
00:05:37.000And what they were afraid of here is that Breyer would pass away or would leave while the Republicans controlled the Senate, and Republicans could just prevent a Democratic pick from taking the seat.
00:05:46.000So they basically just announced it for him.
00:05:47.000He's sitting over there in the corner.
00:05:48.000He's like, yeah, I'll probably, you know, go whenever.
00:05:53.000You're leaving now, which is why he's kind of pissed off.
00:05:56.000According to NBC News, President Biden and Breyer are scheduled to appear together at the White House on Thursday as the Supreme Court justice is set to announce his retirement.
00:06:03.000Breyer is one of the three remaining liberal justices.
00:06:06.000His decision to retire after more than 27 years on the court.
00:06:08.000Allows Biden to appoint a successor who could serve for decades and in the short term maintain the current 6-3 split between conservative and liberal justices.
00:07:01.000Now, who is Joe Biden going to replace Stephen Breyer with?
00:07:05.000Well, we know the answer to this one because Joe Biden said it back during the campaign.
00:07:08.000During the campaign, Joe Biden kept pledging that every Open position was going to violate federal civil rights law.
00:07:14.000He was just going to select a black woman for everything, for his vice president, for the Supreme Court justice, for dog catcher, did not matter.
00:07:19.000It was going to be a black woman no matter what.
00:07:21.000Here was Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign saying that he would pick a black woman to fill the Supreme Court seat.
00:07:27.000Because again, by the way, this violates federal civil rights law.
00:07:30.000There's no other area of American life where you could say I want a white male for X seat.
00:07:35.000It's literally a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution of the United States.
00:07:39.000You're not saying, as one factor among many, I want a woman who has the experience of a black woman, right?
00:07:45.000First of all, that's a ridiculous assertion on its face, because not all black women have the same experiences, but put that aside.
00:07:51.000Even if you use the multifactorial analysis that the Supreme Court has been fond of with regard to affirmative action programs at universities, as we talked about the other day on the show, Even if you threw that aside, Biden didn't even say that.
00:08:05.000Okay, there is no other area of American legal jurisprudence where you could say, I want a person of this specific race and this specific sex to fill this particular role and that not be a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.
00:08:17.000Here was Joe Biden pledging to do it back in 2020.
00:08:20.000I committed that if I'm elected president and have an opportunity to appoint someone to the courts, I'll appoint the first black woman to the courts.
00:08:28.000It's required that they have representation now.
00:08:35.000Okay, so that is an insane contention right off the top.
00:08:40.000And the fact that we all sort of accept this as rote is wild.
00:08:43.000That presidents of the United States can now just say things like that.
00:08:47.000That they can just go out there and be like, I want a person of this particular race and this particular sex, and it doesn't matter anything else.
00:08:53.000But this is the way that the left views the court, by the way.
00:08:55.000The left views the court as two things.
00:08:57.000One, a place to put people of particular races and particular sexes.
00:09:00.000And two, that person has to reliably vote for the left.
00:09:03.000Hey, this has nothing to do with qualifications.
00:09:05.000Now, some of the people who are being considered for the seat have the usual qualifications for a Supreme Court justice, namely an Ivy League school and a clerkship, maybe a few years as a judge.
00:09:16.000That sort of stuff is sort of de rigueur for the seat.
00:09:40.000It's this really stupid game, where in their hopes of getting somebody through the Senate confirmation process, they pick somebody who's sort of a cipher.
00:09:46.000And they pick John Roberts, who's been on the D.C.
00:09:48.000Circuit Court of Appeals for a little while.
00:09:50.000has never written a controversial decision, has never been at the eye of the hurricane, and so tends toward the pragmatist and the political, and they never just pick somebody who is overtly conservative, right?
00:10:01.000You never see the conservative movement or the Federalist Society or the President of the United States selecting somebody who is the lawyer for the National Right to Life Fund.
00:10:46.000The left gets this right and the right gets this wrong.
00:10:48.000The left selects justices based on what they will do.
00:10:51.000The right should select justices based on what they will do, not on the basis of political persuasion per se, but based on the reality that the Supreme Court has been a political body and has made political decisions that are wildly unconstitutional.
00:11:05.000It seems to me a legal litmus test whether a justice will vote to overturn Roe.
00:11:09.000If you will not vote to overturn Roe, you should not be sitting on the Supreme Court, certainly not as appointed by a Republican president of the United States.
00:11:16.000Roe v. Wade is wildly unconstitutional.
00:11:19.000Roe v. Wade is a ridiculous decision on its face.
00:11:22.000And any justice who sort of is unwilling to say that openly should not be nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States by Republicans.
00:11:28.000The Republicans are always going for consensus.
00:11:30.000They're always looking for, we need 60 votes, we need 70 votes.
00:11:53.000So this ridiculous notion by Republicans that when they select somebody for the Supreme Court, they have to pick somebody who has wide support.
00:12:01.000Democrats don't make the same mistake.
00:12:03.000Democrats just assume that Republicans will admit their people to the Supreme Court so long as Democrats have the majority in the Senate.
00:12:10.000Many of them will just vote for it, and they'll go along to get along.
00:12:13.000And then they select people who are overtly left-wing.
00:12:15.000Democrats, when Joe Biden says he wants a black woman for the Supreme Court, it does not matter to Democrats whether that black woman is Keitanji Brown-Jackson or whether it is Cardi B. It does not make any difference.
00:12:25.000One of those people has the normal resume qualifications.
00:12:29.000One of those people absolutely does not, but it does not matter.
00:12:32.000So long as Cardi V voted the right way, first of all, they would say that Cardi B is a genius, right?
00:12:37.000They would say that if you had questions about her qualifications, this made you a racist because this is the game the left loves to play.
00:13:01.000And then you say, well, what should we do with regard to, for example, The Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its violation of freedom of association.
00:13:10.000And you might get a bunch of different answers because there are a bunch of different answers on the right to these questions.
00:13:33.000Where the left sits, all they care about is that a Supreme Court justice does what they want that justice to do.
00:13:39.000It does not matter whether that justice is being asked to wildly exceed their own authority.
00:13:45.000So that is why Joe Biden can say things like, I want a black lady.
00:13:49.000That's why they can say that, because what they really mean is, and we all know this, they don't mean, I am looking for a person with the black female experience, or a black female to rectify discrimination in the past.
00:14:01.000They mean, we want somebody who fulfills all of our political priors and happens to please a particular political constituency.
00:14:08.000So they can overtly discriminate against people, which is really an amazing shift.
00:14:11.000By the way, it's an amazing tonal shift in American politics.
00:14:13.000You wouldn't have heard Bill Clinton doing this in the 90s.
00:14:29.000If you're a politician like Joe Biden, you know that in order to please political constituencies, you have to overtly pledge to be a racist in advance.
00:14:36.000You have to say in advance, I will select a black woman so that black people supposedly, this is the way the left thinks about black voters.
00:14:43.000That they can be bought with something like that.
00:14:45.000And if you say that, then you'll win their vote.
00:14:47.000And then you have to hold to the pledge.
00:14:48.000And this is how Kamala Harris ends up as Vice President of the United States, despite being just a gas bag of terribleness.
00:14:55.000We'll get some more on this in just one second.
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00:16:15.000Okay, so With all of this said, the people that Joe Biden is considering, he has a few people on the table, and some of them, as I say, are just overtly left-wing picks.
00:16:24.000The most likely person is this woman named Katonji Brown-Jackson, who is 51 years old, so she'll be on the court for the next 40 years.
00:16:38.000She clerked for three federal judges, including Justice Breyer himself, from 1999 to 2000.
00:16:43.000If nominated and confirmed, according to the Washington Post, Jackson will follow the same track as Brett Kavanaugh, who also clerked for the justice he ultimately replaced.
00:16:50.000And also, Jackson is coming directly from the D.C.
00:16:52.000Circuit Court of Appeals, which is typically seen as the sort of feeder circuit for the Supreme Court of the United States, right?
00:16:59.000Circuit is where you get appointed before they put you into the Supreme Court of the United States.
00:17:06.000The other picks that are being considered, one of them is Cheryl Ifill, who is the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
00:17:13.000Again, this is something Democrats will do.
00:17:15.000Democrats will actively go to constituent groups, and then they will be like, who's your best lawyer?
00:17:19.000Let's just put that person on the court.
00:17:21.000Imagine if a conservative president Went to Cato Institute and was like, we need Ilya Shapiro, just get it.
00:17:26.000Or imagine if they just went to Daily Wire and they were like, we need Ben, right?
00:17:29.000Like, this would never happen on the right because the right doesn't have the stones for this.
00:17:33.000But the left absolutely has the stones for this because for the left, again, the Supreme Court is just another political branch so they can do whatever the hell they want.
00:17:50.000If the left is going to treat the Supreme Court like a political body, The right should overtly treat the Supreme Court like the political body that it is.
00:17:58.000That does not mean that they should treat it exactly the same way, because when I say that the Supreme Court should be treated like a political body, what I mean is that the left has decided rules of constitutional interpretation do not apply.
00:18:08.000This means the right can no longer afford to play footsie in future judicial picks.
00:18:12.000We cannot have picks like Justice Roberts.
00:18:15.000We cannot have picks Like Brett Kavanaugh.
00:18:20.000Okay, you can't have picks not knowing which way they're going to go.
00:18:22.000You have to have people who have gone through the wars, who have gone through the battles, and if you have to pass them through with 51 votes, you pass them through with 50 plus 1.
00:18:29.000That's what Democrats are going to do right here.
00:18:32.000Right now, the real reason, by the way, that Breyer stepped down is, of course, because Democrats are about to get their asses kicked in 2022.
00:18:38.000Come November, it's not going to be a Democratic Senate anymore.
00:18:40.000Just like Justice Scalia died and then Merrick Garland was nominated by Barack Obama to fill his seat, but Mitch McConnell held up the seat, they're afraid the same thing could happen here with Stephen Breyer.
00:18:48.000So that's why Breyer is stepping down before November.
00:18:50.000What people really should read this as is not any sort of shock.
00:18:53.000Or any sort of surprise, because it's not.
00:18:54.000They should read it as, Stephen Breyer isn't an idiot, and so Stephen Breyer decided, I'm leaving before November.
00:18:59.000Which underscores just how dumb Ruth Bader Ginsburg was not to step down while Barack Obama was president, waiting instead until the age of 87.
00:19:06.000She died in 2020, and of course her seat was then filled by Donald Trump.
00:19:10.000So right now, according to the New York Times, Democrats could confirm a successor to Justice Stephen Breyer without any Republican support under Senate rules that shields a Supreme Court nomination from a filibuster, but would have to hold their bare majority together to do so.
00:19:22.000So basically they have to rely on Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin in order to ram this through.
00:19:26.000I can't imagine that Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin won't go along with the Democrats on this one because Harry Reid broke this thing a long time ago.
00:19:33.000Harry Reid broke the idea that you could filibuster a judicial nominee.
00:19:37.000And that is what has created the current standard, which is that any sheer majority can just pass through whomever they want, right?
00:19:44.000Mitch McConnell then used that in order to ram through a bunch of Trump's judicial nominees.
00:19:49.000According to the New York Times, the announcement of Justice Breyer's imminent retirement on Wednesday set off a sprint by top Democrats to prepare for a coming confirmation fight over Biden's nominee to succeed him.
00:19:58.000It also prompted a collective sigh of relief from the party and its progressive allies, who had worried that a Senate takeover by Republicans in the coming midterm elections could block the president from filling any vacancies.
00:20:07.000Senator Chuck Schumer, of course, said that Biden's nominee will receive a prompt hearing in Senate Judiciary Committee and will be considered and confirmed by the full U.S.
00:20:50.000Okay, but just pointing out the wild inconsistency from the left right here, because the left's inconsistency here is truly amazing, right?
00:21:23.000Democrats quickly called on Biden to follow through on his promise to nominate the first black woman to the court.
00:21:28.000Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the number three Democrat said, I trust President Biden to move forward an exceptional nominee who will uphold all Americans' rights and liberties, including protecting voting rights and reproductive rights.
00:21:37.000See, they don't even bother with the legal jargon here.
00:21:41.000They're just like, yeah, we need abortion and we want the Voting Rights Act back in place.
00:21:45.000So whoever you can nominate to do those things would be great.
00:21:48.000I'm ready to move as quickly as possible, she says, to consider and confirm a highly qualified nominee who will break barriers and make history as the first black woman on the Supreme Court.
00:21:56.000Overt racism is totally fine, according to the left.
00:21:59.000And that really is the astonishing thing.
00:22:00.000We'll get to more of that in just one second.
00:22:02.000First, let us talk about the fact that you are spending too much money on gas.
00:22:05.000With the crunch in inflation, with the fact that we have supply chain issues, this means the price of gas is just too high right now.
00:22:12.000You could be saving $0.50 per gallon on your first tank of gas and $0.25 per gallon on every gallon after that if you head on over to GetUpside.
00:23:32.000What she really means is I'd be overjoyed to see somebody who looks like me and thinks like me on the court, right?
00:23:37.000Because it's not sufficient to look like you.
00:23:40.000First of all, I think it's an absurdity that we even talk like this generally in American politics.
00:23:44.000It's never occurred to me that I need somebody who looks like me on the court.
00:23:47.000I need somebody with a yarmulke on the court.
00:23:48.000Why would I care if there's somebody with a yarmulke on the court?
00:23:51.000I'm perfectly happy with somebody who does the job.
00:23:53.000Not according to the left, however, because they have ditched Martin Luther King long ago for early Malcolm X, and here's Laura Coates.
00:24:00.000I would be overjoyed and thrilled to know that somebody who looks like me and has the mental prowess that each of these women have, and the credibility, the capability, the distinction of having served as judges and as extraordinary lawyers over their time, would finally, and I emphasize the word finally, finally be given the opportunity to sit on the highest court in the land.
00:24:25.000Well, I mean, that's the important thing, is that you have somebody who looks like you.
00:24:50.000Eli Mistall over at MSNBC, he's like 108 of the 115 justices have been white men.
00:24:55.000Yes, and they had a wide variety of dispositions towards the law, as you may have noticed.
00:24:59.000I really care what goes on more in the gray matter than in the melanin level of the skin.
00:25:04.000Also, I do like how you lump together all of the Jewish justices who were considered minority justices when they were appointed at the Louis Brandeis of the world.
00:25:13.000But none of that matters, according to the left.
00:25:15.000Okay, meanwhile, bad news for the Biden administration, because there's no good news on the economic front for the Biden administration.
00:25:20.000The Fed has signaled that it is about to wildly increase the interest rates over the course of the year.
00:25:27.000According to the Wall Street Journal, the Federal Reserve signaled it would begin steadily raising interest rates in mid-March, its latest step toward removing stimulus to bring down inflation.
00:25:34.000Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said on Wednesday the central bank was ready to raise rates at its March 15th to 16th meeting and could continue to lift them faster than it did during the past decade.
00:25:43.000He said in a news conference, quote, this is going to be a year in which we move steadily away from the very highly accommodative monetary policy we put in place to deal with the economic effect of the pandemic.
00:25:52.000Here was Jerome Powell announcing all of this yesterday.
00:25:55.000Supply and demand imbalances related to the pandemic and the reopening of the economy have continued to contribute to elevated levels of inflation.
00:26:03.000In particular, bottlenecks and supply constraints are limiting how quickly production can respond to higher demand in the near term.
00:26:11.000These problems have been larger and longer lasting than anticipated, exacerbated by waves of the virus.
00:26:19.000Well, that means that they're about to radically ramp up the tapering and they're about to radically ramp down the inflation.
00:26:26.000Well, what that means for Joe Biden is probably a slight spike in unemployment.
00:26:31.000It also means less investment just because there's less cash floating around.
00:26:34.000So you're going to see some stock market dips.
00:26:35.000That's exactly what happened immediately.
00:26:37.000Stocks sold off while Jerome Powell was speaking, reversing big gains from earlier in the day.
00:26:41.000By the way, You know, there are certain areas of American life, to many areas of American life, where we are just too reliant on quote-unquote experts, administrative experts, to run things.
00:26:50.000And when it comes to our daily lives, we are now reliant on nine justices in Supreme Court robes, right?
00:26:56.000People in black robes telling us what to do.
00:26:58.000So we have to determine whether we get to keep employing our employees based on whether Justice Stephen Breyer has a ballot movement that day, right?
00:27:07.000We should not be relying on the Supreme Court of the United States to determine our liberties and our freedoms.
00:27:12.000And the founders actually never conceived of that sort of thing, that the Supreme Court was going to be the ultimate guardian of all freedoms and that everybody else would abdicate their responsibility on this level.
00:27:20.000So you'd have unelected Justice is determining our freedoms.
00:27:23.000And then the administrative state does the same thing, right?
00:27:25.000We have entire administrative bureaucracies that are specifically designed to control all aspects of your life.
00:27:30.000Thousands of pages of regulations every single year.
00:27:33.000Tens of thousands of pages written by faceless, nameless bureaucrats with essentially lifetime appointments who it's nearly impossible to fire.
00:27:40.000And then you have the Federal Reserve, and we all react in the stock market based on what Jerome Powell decides to do today, whether his finger is in the wind that day.
00:27:49.000This is not how economies should work.
00:27:51.000This is why the idea of a gold standard was a good thing, because it took out of the control of the federal government the monetary supply.
00:27:59.000We should not have the government determining whether we have inflation or not.
00:28:02.000We should not have the government determining Whether the taxpayer is going to be buying assets from the market at large.
00:28:10.000This sort of thing is absurd on its face.
00:28:11.000The fact that this is how the stock market reacts.
00:28:13.000You sit around waiting for Jerome Powell to make an announcement and then you trade stocks based on it.
00:28:40.000It is faceless, nameless bureaucrats you've never heard of who are determining every aspect of your life, from the financial, to your rights, to how you get to flush your toilet.
00:29:34.000Regulatory disincentives, tax disincentives, the Federal Reserve deciding whether or not people invest in your business based on how much money they blow into the economy or take out of the economy.
00:29:43.000These headwinds are faced by actual business people every single day.
00:29:47.000When the government gets control of every aspect of the economy this way, then what you are left with Is a bunch of people attempting to read tea leaves and then trade your stocks based on them.
00:29:57.000The stocks sold off while Jerome Powell was speaking, reversing big gains from earlier in the day.
00:30:21.000He said, I don't think it's possible to say exactly how this is going to go.
00:30:24.000I think there's quite a bit of room to raise interest rates without threatening the labor market.
00:30:29.000Pell's remarks led investors in interest rate futures markets to fully anticipate a March rate increase of at least one quarter percentage point and nearly 70% chance of a second rate increase by the Fed's meeting after that in early May.
00:30:40.000Pell suggested the Fed wasn't likely to offer any forward guidance, the term used for the central bank's statements describing its intentions with interest rates over the next few years.
00:30:48.000Forward guidance has been a central feature of Fed policy.
00:30:50.000So now they're not even going to give you any sort of guideposts for the next several years.
00:30:54.000So if you're an investor, one of the things that you search for is a solid investment that is going to give you return for the next several years.
00:31:00.000And in order to know that, you have to know what the Fed is going to do.
00:31:03.000Now the Fed is like, well, we could change on a dime.
00:31:23.000When you are investing, You should think of investing as adding new information to a phone line.
00:31:29.000If there's a lot of static on the phone line, the new information may not get through.
00:31:33.000So the goal of the financial regulators should be to have a static-free phone line.
00:31:37.000In other words, the conditions don't change on the ground very fast, you have a lot of notice if the conditions are going to change, and that way you don't have a lot of sort of garbled interference from the top levels.
00:31:47.000And yet now the Federal Reserve is overtly announcing there's going to be a lot of garbled nonsense from the top levels.
00:31:52.000You're going to get staticky interference on that line.
00:31:57.000In 2015, according to the Wall Street Journal, the Fed prepared markets for a mild path of no more than one rate rise every quarter by saying increases would be only gradual.
00:32:04.000Pressed twice Wednesday on whether the Fed would follow that approach, Powell pointed to how the economy is much different now with high inflation and very tight labor markets.
00:32:11.000The takeaway, said Christina Hooper, chief global market strategist at Invesco, is that this is not the last tightening cycle.
00:32:17.000We need to be prepared for it to be faster and for more substantial moves to be made over the course of the year.
00:32:21.000Relying less on forward guidance means that you risk unhinging market expectations about interest rates.
00:32:26.000Said Vincent Reinhart, former Fed economist, who is now the chief economist at Mellon.
00:32:31.000So what this means is that you can't rely on what the Fed is going to do next, which means uncertainty, which means people take money out of the market.
00:32:37.000When people are scared, they take money out of the market, they start investing in things like bonds.
00:32:43.000They don't invest as much in mortgages.
00:32:45.000They just don't invest in as many things.
00:32:46.000You're about to see a tightening because of the Fed getting involved this way.
00:32:50.000And that was brought about by the insane spending bidge embarked upon by both parties, but especially the Democratic Party over the course of the last year and then over the course of the last two years.
00:32:59.000During the pandemic, there was this idea that we could pay people to stay home.
00:33:02.000That might have been a decent idea in the first couple of months.
00:33:05.000Beyond that, once we knew the data, it made no sense whatsoever.
00:33:09.000We blew trillions and trillions of dollars into the economy.
00:33:12.000There are people who ended last year with more assets than they had at the beginning of the pandemic, and they hadn't been back to work.
00:33:19.000Because we blew so much money into the economy, and now the Fed is forced to tighten interest rates and do so unpredictably.
00:33:24.000Meanwhile, the Fed released a separate one-page statement that spelled out high-level principles to guide a process for significantly reducing its holdings.
00:33:31.000The central bank in 2020 cut short-term interest rates to near zero and started buying bonds to lower long-term rates as the coronavirus pandemic hit the U.S.
00:33:38.000economy, triggering financial market volatility and a deep, short recession.
00:33:42.000Officials pledged to hold interest rates near zero until inflation was forecast to moderately exceed two percent.
00:33:47.000Pell indicated that he and his colleagues believe those goals have now been met.
00:33:50.000And so now they have to divest themselves of the, I believe, something like nine trillion dollars in assets that are being held by the Fed.
00:33:58.000Okay, all of this is bad news for the immediate future of the economy, but it's pain that has to be gone through because once you go on a spending bid, you wake up the next morning with a hangover.
00:34:06.000And that's really where we are at this point.
00:34:09.000Okay, in just one second, we'll get to the continuing panic over COVID that is completely unjustified by the available data.
00:34:15.000First, Let's talk about keeping your home safe.
00:34:18.000I'm sure we all know about the Ring Video Doorbell.
00:34:19.000I've talked to you about it a thousand times, but there is something you may not know, which is that Ring also makes an alarm.
00:36:47.000This means you're able to listen to all your favorite daily where content on the web and the DW app.
00:36:51.000Listen is here to make soaking up our content as convenient as possible with a limited ad audio experience.
00:36:56.000Whether it's catching morning wire with a morning cup of coffee, taking in the latest hot takes from your favorite hosts, or exploring our growing radio theater, you'll get all the content you love.
00:37:04.000And if you get interrupted, no worries, you can pick up right where you left off with continue listening.
00:37:55.000I remember fairly recently, I was dealing with an organization where there were some COVID rules that were being applied at this organization.
00:38:02.000And all we kept asking for is, when do the COVID rules change?
00:38:05.000We need actual metrics, we need actual dates.
00:38:06.000And they kept saying, we can't give that to you.
00:38:08.000If we give that to you, you might hold us accountable for it.
00:38:11.000Here is the second greatest of all doctors after Jill Biden explaining that there are really no metrics to determine when the pandemic is over.
00:38:19.000Where we want to be, Okay, well that's not a metric.
00:38:24.000I've noticed that you're not giving a metric.
00:38:25.000like we did with smallpox, that's unreasonable.
00:38:28.000Not necessarily elimination, like we've done with polio and with measles by mass vaccination campaigns, but a level of control that does not disrupt us in society.
00:38:43.000I've noticed that you're not giving a metric.
00:38:45.000By the way, Americans are picking up on this.
00:38:48.000According to the Associated Press, early in the pandemic, Ryan Wilson was careful to take precautions, wearing a mask, not really socializing, doing more of his shopping online.
00:38:56.000The 38-year-old father and seafood butcher from Castleberry, Florida, says he relaxed a bit after getting vaccinated last year.
00:39:01.000He had a few friends over, saw his parents more, still making sure to mask up at places like the grocery store.
00:39:06.000The recent virus surge hasn't caused him to change his behavior much because he's vaxxed and has read that the variant causes less severe illness.
00:39:12.000And like many, Wilson has come to believe COVID-19 is probably never going fully away.
00:39:16.000It'll become endemic and we'll be stuck with it forever.
00:39:18.000It's frustrating, but what can you do about it?
00:39:19.000Many Americans agree they're going to be stuck with it forever, at least for a long time.
00:39:23.000A poll from the AP shows that few, just 15%, say they will consider the pandemic over only when COVID-19 is largely eliminated.
00:39:30.000By contrast, 83% say they will feel the pandemic is over when it's largely a mild illness, which, by the way, is correct.
00:39:37.000However, what is not correct is how many Americans believe that it's not a mild illness.
00:39:43.000The poll shows 59% of Americans think it's essential they be personally vaccinated against COVID-19 to feel safe participating in public activities.
00:39:51.000But underscoring what authorities call alarmingly low COVID-19 vaccination rates in the United States, children ages 5 to 11, just 37% of parents consider it essential that their kids are vaccinated before they return to normal, which of course is true.
00:40:04.000Okay, and only 47% of Americans think they need to get a booster.
00:40:08.00064% of Americans now say they are always or often avoiding large groups.
00:40:12.00065% say they are wearing face masks around others.
00:40:26.000According to Newsweek, Denmark Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen announced on January 26th that Denmark would be throwing out most COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, including mask mandates.
00:40:36.000Restrictions currently in place are for the public to wear masks on public transportation, in restaurants, shops, and people entering healthcare facilities and retirement homes.
00:40:43.000However, following the February 1st change of restrictions, masks will only be required in hospitals, healthcare facilities, and homes for the elderly.
00:40:51.000Frederiksen said, we say goodbye to the restrictions and welcome the life we knew before.
00:40:56.000As of February 1st, Denmark will be open.
00:40:59.000According to the health minister, Magnus Heunicke, Denmark's recent cases of COVID were more than 46,000 daily on average.
00:41:48.000I mean, the reason it's based on bad data, by the way, is because, again, a huge number of Americans have natural immunity to this thing, and we've just ignored it all the way down.
00:42:15.000According to the Hollywood Reporter, we want all the world's music and audio content to be available to Spotify users, said a spokesperson.
00:42:21.000With that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators.
00:42:25.000We have detailed content policies in place.
00:42:27.000We've removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to COVID since the start of the pandemic.
00:42:31.000We regret Neil Young's decision to remove his music from Spotify, but hope to welcome him back soon.
00:42:36.000Young had said on January 24th, I'm doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines, potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation spread by them.
00:43:03.000I love that people keep running up against the iceberg that is Joe Rogan's show.
00:43:07.000People on the left keep saying over and over that they want to get Rogan booted, and then it turns out that Rogan is making too much money for Spotify.
00:43:15.000Again, the best revenge, folks, as always, is success.
00:43:18.000No one cares about Neil Young, but Joe Rogan has 11 million listeners to his podcast every episode.
00:43:23.000Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
00:43:27.000In the meantime, Make sure to go check out the Michael Molls show that is available right now.
00:43:32.000Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.