Debt ceiling crisis continues to rage on. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says it s time to get rid of the debt ceiling once and for all. And Joe Manchin continues to crush progressive dreams. Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Thousands of my listeners have already secured their internet access at ExpressVpn. Join them at expressvpn.org/joinnow to get 20% off your first month with discount code SHAPIRO. You will get $5 off the first month and 50% off the second month if you upgrade to ExpressVPN, which is free and includes a 30-day, risk-free guarantee, so you literally have nothing to lose! You can get a $5 credit when you upgrade, and you ll save hundreds of dollars in the long-term. If you don t already have an ExpressVPN membership, you can get 10% off for as little as $99.99 when you become a patron! You ll get access to all of ExpressVPN's features, including the features and features you ve been asking for, like the fastest growing VPN service in the world, and get a FREE 3-month VIP membership trial when you sign up for $99! The best deal on the entire service is $29.99, which includes 3-months of unlimited fast-tracking, unlimited, unlimited and fast-track Prime membership, plus a 3-day credit and 2-months free! Allowing you to use ExpressVPN to access the fastest-only version of the service, which means you get 25% off, up to $99,99 a month, and a maximum of $99 a year, and 5% off a maximum, plus an additional $5,99 gets you an annual credit plan! Want to upgrade to a 5Gigabyte of 3GB of data and unlimited access to the fastest 4GB of service? You get 15GB of storage, unlimited 3GB, unlimited Wi-fi, and unlimited 3G and 1GB of 2GB of 3Gigare? Subscribe to PureTalk? Learn more about your ad-free version of The Ben Shapiro's newest podcast, The Daily Mail? Subscribe and comment on the show on Apple Podcasts, The FiveThirtyEight? Subscribe to my new podcast, Rate, review and subscribe to my podcast, become a friend on iTunes, and become a supporter of my podcast! I'm listening to my show on Audible, Podcoin, and more!
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00:01:23.000So, last night the Democrats were supposed to bring up the bipartisan infrastructure bill for a vote.
00:01:31.000They did not because they could not get the progressives on board.
00:01:33.000And they couldn't get the progressives on board because they couldn't get the Senate moderates on board for their $3.5 trillion boondoggle.
00:01:40.000Meanwhile, speeding down the tracks is the debt ceiling.
00:01:43.000So the debt ceiling is supposed to be hit in approximately the next couple of weeks.
00:01:47.000Democrats are trying to get Republicans to sign on to a debt ceiling increase.
00:01:50.000Republicans are saying, we are not going to allow you to take out a second credit card knowing that you're about to blow out the spending.
00:01:55.000And so why would we allow you to do that?
00:01:57.000We need a sort of restructuring deal here.
00:01:59.000We need to make sure that we get some sort of spending concessions from you at this point, which has led the Biden administration to make the argument that we should get rid of the debt ceiling once and for all.
00:02:08.000So to understand why the debt ceiling is kind of important, you have to understand the history of how spending has been done in the United States historically.
00:02:15.000So if you go all the way back to the founding for basically the first 130 years of the existence of the United States, any time Congress wanted to authorize the government to take out debt, they had to pass a specific bill that authorized exactly how that debt was to be taken out.
00:02:28.000Which seems like a pretty good idea, right?
00:02:29.000It puts the responsibility where the responsibility ought to be, with the legislature.
00:02:33.000Congress would actually have to authorize a loan, or they'd have to allow Treasury to issue bonds, for example.
00:02:45.000The executive branch is the executive branch.
00:02:47.000And then, in about 1917, Congress decided they were going to abdicate responsibility on this thing by creating the debt ceiling.
00:02:54.000The debt ceiling, the idea was that they would just tell the executive branch how much debt they were authorized to take out.
00:03:02.000Right now, attached to a war, it makes a certain amount of sense, you would assume, because the executive branch is running the war.
00:03:07.000The executive branch needs to take out more debt on a short-term basis because, obviously, there are battle contingencies.
00:03:12.000But in the middle of a not-war, getting rid of the specific authorization for taking out debt is really just a way for Congress to kick the can down the road without actually having to be held responsible for doing any of this stuff.
00:03:23.000Like, imagine that every time Congress passed a spending bill, they also had to pass a bill saying, we authorize the Treasury Department to take out this amount of debt on the open market.
00:03:33.000It would make everybody think for just a second, is this actually worth it?
00:03:36.000Congress doesn't want you to think, is it actually worth it?
00:03:39.000So instead, they pass these giant blunderbuss packages and they raise the debt ceiling at the same time.
00:03:44.000Hey, well, that was the rule up until about the 1970s.
00:03:49.000Okay, then in the 1970s, there was a problem, which was that the government kept running up against the debt ceiling.
00:03:58.000So Dick Gephardt created, Dick Gephardt was a former congressperson from Iowa.
00:04:03.000Gephardt imposed the so-called Gephardt rule.
00:04:06.000Hey, this was a rule that suggested the debt ceiling was automatically raised anytime a budget was passed.
00:04:11.000You didn't actually have to pass a separate debt ceiling bill.
00:04:13.000You would just pass the budget, and that itself would be the authorization for the government to take out additional debt.
00:04:19.000Then, during the Gingrich Revolution of the 90s, this was reversed.
00:04:22.000In 1995, Congress said, no, we're not doing it this way anymore.
00:04:25.000We are not going to simply pretend that every time we authorize spending, The federal government has the ability to go out and take debt.
00:04:31.000Instead, we do have to take some of the blame or credit for raising the debt ceiling.
00:04:35.000So we're going to bring back the debt ceiling debate.
00:04:38.000Now, in reality, we've got to go back to the original system.
00:04:40.000Congress ought to have to specifically authorize precisely what sort of debt instrument needs to be used by the executive branch every time they spend.
00:04:47.000The reason they really shouldn't have to do that is because again, they should be forced to consider the consequences of the spending that they do.
00:04:53.000But we have both a legislative branch and an executive branch that seem to want to just spend without any sort of end at all.
00:05:01.000And a lot of this is sort of a riff on modern monetary theory, which is this idiotic idea that the federal government can spend as much money as it could possibly want for literally the rest of time because nobody is ever going to see the full faith and credit of the United States as endowed.
00:05:17.000We are always going to be the world's strongest economy.
00:05:19.000We are always going to be the world's strongest currency.
00:05:21.000And if we aren't, well, we'll deal with that when we come to it.
00:05:24.000Jenny Yellen, who, remember, was the head of the Federal Reserve.
00:05:28.000The Federal Reserve was supposed to be a non-partisan, non-political board.
00:05:32.000It is their job to see that the inflation rates remain low and that employment remains high.
00:05:37.000So Jenny Yellen was supposed to be this non-partisan person.
00:05:39.000Of course, that Chinese fence, that Chinese screen between the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve was obliterated long ago, but Janet Yellen has made clear just how fast that was obliterated.
00:05:49.000She moved directly from the Federal Reserve to the Treasury Department, where she has been now advocating to get rid of the debt ceiling entirely.
00:05:55.000The idea being that any time Congress just passes something, it should automatically raise the debt ceiling so we can go out and we can borrow for it.
00:06:02.000And there will be no leverage to lower spending any time in the future.
00:06:05.000Remember, the debt ceiling instrument has been used a couple of times in the past 10 years in order to lower spending or in order to jar certain political items loose.
00:06:15.000In 2006, Nancy Pelosi actually held up the debt ceiling in order to try and pry concessions from the Bush administration.
00:06:22.000But most famously, the debt ceiling debate was hit during the Boehner time as Speaker of the House.
00:06:29.000And the result was sequestration, which was a lowering of the rate of increase in government spending in the federal government.
00:06:35.000It was pretty controversial because Barack Obama insisted that half the cuts come from defense if there were going to be any cuts because Barack Obama hated the Defense Department.
00:06:42.000But it was at least an instrument for attempting to lower the amount of money we spend.
00:06:45.000Now we have the executive branch saying we want to spend without end and we don't want any sort of congressional check on how much we can take out in order to pay for your spending.
00:06:55.000So this is breaking down a long partisan line.
00:06:58.000Frankly, you know, I'm at least mildly pleased that even Republicans are not on board with getting rid of the debt ceiling entirely.
00:07:03.000But here's Janet Yellen making the case.
00:07:06.000Would you support simply eliminating the debt ceiling so that we don't have to deal with this in the future and can focus on real crises?
00:07:16.000If, to finance those spending and tax decisions, it's necessary to issue additional debt, I believe it's very destructive to put the President and myself, the Treasury Secretary, in a situation where we might be unable to pay the bills that result from those past decisions.
00:07:44.000Okay, the debt ceiling is a natural constraint on the growth of government.
00:07:47.000It at least provides a leverage point for reducing the growth of government.
00:08:05.000So it's not as though this is unforeseeable.
00:08:06.000It is completely and utterly foreseeable.
00:08:08.000Not only that, when you ratchet up the spending, and at the same time you ratchet up the taxes and regulation, which is exactly what the Biden administration is seeking to do, all you end up doing is blowing money into an economy that is stagnating.
00:08:23.000You can get economic stagnation without inflation, that's Japan in the 1990s, when regulation and lack of entrepreneurship basically destroyed the Japanese economy for more than a decade.
00:08:34.000That is, I think, a high probability at this point, and even Biden is recognizing that.
00:08:38.000He's forecasting over the course of the next decade less than a 2% rate of growth to the American GDP, which is a really rotten rate of growth.
00:08:46.000But you get stagflation if you have that rapid, that terrible stagnation, plus the federal government attempting to pour money into the system via forced subsidies.
00:08:56.000The Wall Street Journal has a piece today titled Stock Market's September Slump Exposes Messy Underside.
00:09:01.000And again, the economy is not doing well right now.
00:09:08.000Again, we now not only have the COVID vaccines, but now we have reports that Merck is coming out with a once a day pill that reduces the possibility of hospitalization and death from COVID even if you get infected by 50%.
00:09:21.000So we're coming up with excellent new therapeutics.
00:09:24.000We already have a vaccine that is highly effective.
00:09:26.000This pandemic from a public policy perspective is now over.
00:09:30.000But the Biden administration can't let it go.
00:09:32.000And not just that, they are firmly committed to this fiscal policy which is really about the reorganizing of American life along social democratic lines, which has a cost.
00:09:41.000Even Sweden, which embraced the so-called Third Way, this vast spending, vast taxation initiative in the 1970s, they had to get rid of a lot of those taxes and a lot of that spending, specifically because it didn't pay for itself.
00:09:53.000I mean, there are studies by which the Nordic countries actually have freer business regimens and business markets than the United States does.
00:10:00.000They have more ease in beginning a business in many of these countries than the United States does at this point.
00:10:45.000Central bankers who were thinking this year's rise in inflation would wind up being a short-term phenomenon aren't sure how long transitory pressures will persist.
00:10:52.000Strategists who had predicted another strong quarter of economic growth are cutting estimates because of supply chain bottlenecks and the highly contagious Delta variant of COVID-19.
00:11:00.000Economic data have also been falling short of expectations.
00:11:02.000Citigroup's Economic Surprise Index, which tracks how much U.S.
00:11:05.000reports have been exceeding or undershooting estimates, fell this month to its lowest level since June 2020.
00:11:10.000The month proved a major setback for stocks, with all but one of the S&P 500's 11 sectors finishing lower in September.
00:11:16.000The S&P 500 is still up 15% for the year and managed to squeeze out a sixth straight quarter of gains.
00:11:21.000The index is just a few percentage points away from its record close hit in early September.
00:11:38.000Treasury note flitted above a narrow range for much of the quarter, only to stage a six-day rise above 1.5% between last week and Tuesday.
00:11:45.000That was the biggest such advance since June 2020.
00:11:47.000The move came after the Federal Reserve indicated it was ready to begin reversing its pandemic stimulus programs as early as November and considering raising interest rates next year, given a jump in inflation.
00:11:58.000Lizanne Saunders, Chief Investment Strategist for Charles Schwab, says even though there's all this discussion about the market being resilient, the churn under the surface has shown more weakness.
00:12:07.000Saunders attributes the swift rotations taking place in the market to a bevy of investor worry.
00:12:10.000She says you have concerns about the virus, you have concerns about the debt ceiling, you have mixed economic data, and you've got uncertainty about monetary policy.
00:12:17.000She says, I don't know that we're going to get out of this mode anytime soon.
00:12:21.000And then there's inflation, which is also hitting and not going away.
00:12:24.000Remember, we were told this was transitory.
00:12:48.000If they just brought up a debt ceiling increase, And voted along reconciliation lines without any Republican support to raise the debt ceiling they could.
00:12:56.000The reason that they won't do that is because they want to save that bullet.
00:12:59.000Understand, the reconciliation process can only be used three times a year.
00:13:03.000If they use it on the debt ceiling, they can't use it on some other piece of boondoggle legislation they would like to push.
00:13:08.000What they did do is they passed a short-term spending bill that averted a government shutdown.
00:13:13.000That extends for another couple of weeks.
00:13:16.000The Senate voted 65-35, the House 254-175.
00:13:20.000Lawmakers reached a deal, according to the New York Times, on the spending legislation after Democrats agreed to strip out a provision that would have raised the federal government's ability to continue borrowing funds through the end of 2022.
00:13:31.000The legislation keeps the government fully funded through December 3rd, which gives lawmakers additional time to reach consensus over the dozen annual spending bills that dictate federal spending.
00:13:41.000So, we are not going to get a government shutdown, at least for the next couple of months.
00:13:46.000But meanwhile, the underlying worries continue because the underlying economic theory of this administration is very, very wrong and very, very bad.
00:13:53.000And it's being driven by the progressive left, which has no understanding of economics, like none at all.
00:13:59.000So Nancy Pelosi is ripping Mitch McConnell.
00:14:01.000She says he's playing Russian roulette by not raising the debt ceiling.
00:14:22.000Yet that is exactly what he is doing, playing Russian roulette, interesting that he's playing Russian roulette, with our economy and with the financial security and the well-being She's so crazy.
00:14:39.000She does this now with everything, right, ever since the Russian collusion crap.
00:14:43.000Every time she says the word Russian, she's like, interesting that it's Russian, isn't it?
00:14:47.000Every time she goes to a restaurant, and the waiter's like, well, we do have this Caesar salad with Russian dressing, she's like, interesting, Russian, what mean you by this?
00:14:57.000Okay, but again, what this has to do with is an overall spending package and feeling toward how the economy ought to work, not in conjunction with reality.
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00:15:53.000All you need is a computer and a standard printer.
00:16:43.000It is frustrating to acknowledge that getting people vaccinated and getting Delta under control 18 months later still remains the most important economic policy that we have.
00:16:56.000And it's also frustrating to see the bottlenecks and supply chain problems not getting better.
00:17:03.000In fact, at the margin, apparently getting a little bit worse.
00:17:07.000And that's what has, we see that continuing into next year probably and holding inflation up longer than we had thought.
00:17:23.000But again, all of this has to do with a generalized Biden administration and democratic overlook, which is that spending money is an inherent good.
00:17:30.000Spending money is an inherent good and private investment is an inherent bad.
00:17:35.000The most obvious example of this perspective is something that I've talked about over the past couple of weeks, and that is the person that Joe Biden is trying to suggest as comptroller of the currency.
00:17:45.000According to the Wall Street Journal, President Biden checked off another progressive identity box last week by nominating Saúl Omarova as comptroller of the currency.
00:17:53.000Some Trump appointees were ridiculed for having supported the elimination of their agencies.
00:19:26.000Omarova thinks asset prices, pay scales, capital, and credit should be dictated by the federal government.
00:19:31.000In two papers, she's advocated expanding the Federal Reserve's mandate to include the price levels of systemically important financial assets as well as worker wages.
00:19:39.000She doesn't just want the Federal Reserve.
00:19:41.000Again, remember, it's the executive branch, not the legislative branch.
00:19:44.000First of all, the legislative branch should not have any power to do this either.
00:19:48.000Price and wage controls are not in the purview of the federal government.
00:19:51.000Frankly, they shouldn't be in the purview of the state government either, but they certainly are not in the purview of the federal government.
00:19:55.000Constitutionally speaking, nothing in the federal government's mandate of power, the Constitution of the United States, gives them the power to federally set wages or prices.
00:20:19.000Moderate old Joe Biden is selecting this person to lead the effort.
00:20:24.000In a recent paper, The People's Ledger, she effectively proposed the Federal Reserve take over consumer bank deposits, end banking as we know it, and become the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating financial resources in a modern economy.
00:20:36.000So the Federal Reserve would now become the lender to the American people.
00:20:43.000Now, if you think that the Federal Reserve has a great history of this sort of stuff, I suggest that you take a look at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from, eh, say 1999 to 2007.
00:20:52.000It turns out that when the government runs the lending programs, they bias toward the people who are more likely to be politically beneficial to them, and their top priority is not, in fact, profitability or any measure of the durability of the lending instrument.
00:21:05.000Instead, the only thing they care about is what it gets done politically.
00:21:12.000to create a central bank digital currency, FedCoin, to redesign our financial system and turn the Fed's balance sheet into a true people's ledger.
00:21:19.000She also believes that there should be a national investment authority with members overseen by an advisory board of academics to finance a big, bold climate agenda.
00:21:28.000So, you know, a giant infrastructure bank, green infrastructure bank.
00:21:32.000She wants a public interest council of highly paid academics with broad subpoena power to supervise financial regulatory agencies, including the Fed, without any constraints or requirements of the administrative process.
00:21:44.000If she were appointed comptroller, she would supervise about 1,200 financial institutions.
00:21:49.000She could punish banks that did not follow her diktat.
00:21:51.000Even Janet Yellen was like, this is too much for us.
00:21:54.000And Biden was like, well, I'm going to do it anyway.
00:22:01.000Speaking of which, in just one second, we have to discuss this $3.5 trillion plan, which is going to go down to flaming defeat at this point.
00:22:08.000At the very least, it's going to be cut down to size, whittled down about half.
00:23:12.000Okay, so one of the things that's fascinating to watch with regard to this debate over the $3.5 trillion spending bill, right?
00:23:23.000There's the infrastructure bill and there's the spending bill.
00:23:24.000The infrastructure bill is being held up right now by progressives in the House who want some sort of commitment from Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema that they will vote for Joe Biden's $3.5 trillion package.
00:23:33.000Manchin and Sinema are like, no, we're not doing that.
00:23:35.000So the progressives are like, okay, well, we will hold up the infrastructure bill until you do that.
00:23:41.000The reason that's not going to work is because Joe Manchin is from West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema is from Arizona.
00:23:46.000Kyrsten Sinema only won by about 3% in the last election cycle.
00:23:48.000The only chance she has of holding that seat is being a Maverick-style Democrat in the same way that John McCain was a Maverick-style Republican.
00:23:54.000Joe Manchin is in the reddest state in America.
00:23:56.000Donald Trump won West Virginia by 40%.
00:24:00.000I mean the margin of victory was 40% for Donald Trump in West Virginia, and yet they have a Democratic senator in Joe Manchin, which means that Manchin's actual political Sort of future rests on him standing in the gap and saying to Democrats, no, we are not going to spend this kind of money so he can go back to his constituents and say, listen, if you elect a Republican, they'll just be one more Republican among the rest of the Republicans.
00:24:21.000If you keep electing me, then I'm part of the Democratic coalition and I will stand up against the more rapacious aspects of the Democratic financial plan.
00:24:30.000And so this is a real holdup for the Democrats, no question.
00:24:33.000But I want to point something out, and that is how this debate is going.
00:25:51.000But that is not what you hear in the media.
00:25:52.000What you hear in the media is just the top line number.
00:25:55.000All that matters is the top line number, not the content of the bill.
00:25:57.000Now, normally, the way that you'd make a case for a bill like this is, here's a bunch of good stuff we want to do, and here's how much money it's going to cost.
00:26:03.000If you don't like the cost, it's because you want to stop the good stuff we want to do.
00:26:05.000No one is talking about that bill in these terms.
00:26:08.000They are just talking about that bill in terms of, if you want $3.5 trillion, you are good.
00:26:14.000If you want less than $3.5 trillion, you are bad.
00:26:31.000You could just helicopter this cash over the center of the United States and the Democrats would be happy. It does not matter what programs are actually effectuated with the cash, which is why there are not any negotiations that are really happening between the progressives and the moderates, where the moderates say, listen, we got to curb this particular plan right here because we don't think it's good enough. And the progressives are like, well, if you're going to do that, we need to up the game right here because here's what we're trying to accomplish.
00:26:52.000Nobody's talking about what they are trying to accomplish because the dirty secret is everyone knows what they're trying to accomplish and that is the maximization of government intrusion into your life via either subsidies or regulation.
00:27:03.000That is what they are trying to accomplish.
00:27:06.000The numbers are just a proxy for we want to run all aspects of your life and we want to fund all aspects of your life or we want to fund slightly less of your life.
00:27:22.000Again, normally when you talk about a bill, you talk about the contents of the bill.
00:27:24.000No one's talking about the content of the bill.
00:27:27.000Number one, because the formal bill has not yet been proposed.
00:27:29.000And number two, because no one cares about the content of the bill.
00:27:32.000Hillary, for example, is Ilhan Omar talking about how much money she wants.
00:27:35.000Again, it's all about how much money they want, not what they want to do with the money.
00:27:39.000We remain fully committed to passing the President's entire Build Back agenda and delivering on that transformative change that the President ran on and that helped deliver the House, the Senate, and the White House.
00:27:54.000Now, as you remember, the Senate sent us a budget resolution that had the 3.5 price tag.
00:28:05.000Do they want to cut child care for families that desperately need it?
00:28:09.000Do they want to not address the climate crisis for a future generation?
00:28:15.000Do they not want to have hearing, vision and dental care for the elderly?
00:28:23.000Do they not want to, okay, that sort of blackmail is not going to work.
00:28:26.000Because again, there is all this stuff available for all these people already.
00:28:32.000If you think that elderly people in the United States don't have any sort of way to get dental care, I don't know what world you are living in.
00:28:41.000That has been a thing for quite a while in the United States as it turns out.
00:28:44.000It's not that there are a bunch of old gummers walking around all toothless.
00:28:48.000The notion that the elderly population in the United States is in complete lack of dental and vision care, and that we need to pay for it with the federal government.
00:29:14.000David Brooks of the New York Times, who's being retweeted by Ron Klain.
00:29:17.000If you want to know what Biden is thinking, Biden's brain is not Biden, it is Ronald Klain, who's on Twitter basically tweeting out, a la Donald Trump, all of his interior monologues.
00:29:27.000So he tweeted out David Brooks' column today.
00:29:30.000David Brooks, who is one of the supposed in-house Republicans over at the New York Times, which is hysterical.
00:29:35.000He says, Have we given up on the idea that policy can change history?
00:29:39.000Have we lost faith in our ability to reverse or even be alarmed by national decline?
00:29:43.000More and more, I hear people accepting the idea that America is not as energetic or youthful as it used to be.
00:29:47.000I can practically hear the spirits of our ancestors crying out, the ones who had a core faith that this would forever be the greatest nation on the planet, the new Jerusalem, the last best hope of earth.
00:29:56.000My ancestors were aspiring immigrants and understood where the beating heart of the nation resided, with the working class and the middle class, the ones depicted by Willa Cather, James Agee, Ralph Ellison, or in the honeymooners, the best years of our lives and on the waterfront.
00:30:08.000There was a time when the phrase the common man was a source of pride and a high compliment.
00:30:12.000Over the past few decades, there has been a redistribution of dignity upward.
00:30:16.000From Reagan through Romney, the Republicans valorized entrepreneurs, CEOs, and Wall Street.
00:30:20.000The Democratic Party became dominated by the creative class who attended competitive colleges, moved to affluent metro areas, married each other, and ladled advantages onto their kids so they could leap even further ahead.
00:30:29.000There was a bipartisan embrace of a culture of individualism, which opens up a lot of space for people with resources and social support, but means loneliness and abandonment for people without.
00:30:39.000Four years of college became the definition of the good life, which left roughly two-thirds of the country out.
00:30:43.000And so came the crisis that Biden was elected to address.
00:30:46.000The poisonous combination of elite insularity and vicious populist resentment.
00:30:52.000The Democratic spending bills are economic packages that serve moral and cultural purposes.
00:30:57.000They should be measured by their cultural impact, not merely by wonky analysis.
00:31:01.000Okay, bottom line is, if we spend lots of money, this is going to make people feel good, is David Brooks' basic argument.
00:31:06.000You will feel better if we spend lots of money.
00:31:08.000I also enjoy the notion that the Founding Fathers would have been all on board with the federal government taxing us at exorbitant rates to fund every form of social welfare benefit they could possibly imagine.
00:31:18.000You know, precisely the stuff that they were rebelling against the British Empire for doing to them.
00:31:23.000I mean, they were literally rebelling against the British Empire because their taxes were too high and because they were concerned that their rights as Englishmen were being invaded because they did not have proper representation.
00:31:32.000What do you make of an executive government that basically regulates every aspect of your life without any input from you, as well as tax rates that would have made the British Empire blush?
00:31:42.000But he's not going back to the Founding Fathers, obviously, David Brooks.
00:31:44.000He's going back to the FDR vision of what the United States should be, namely a quasi-socialistic enterprise.
00:31:52.000Well, I mean, you can make that argument, but that's not going to be a very good argument.
00:31:57.000So anyway, Joe Manchin is standing in the breach because, again, his political motive here is to stand in the breach.
00:32:01.000If he does not stand in the breach, he loses his seat in West Virginia.
00:32:04.000So Joe Manchin came out yesterday, said my limit is $1.5 trillion, not $3.5 trillion, not $4 trillion, $1.5 trillion.
00:32:12.000No, no, my top line has not been. My top line has been 1.5 because I believe in my heart that what we can do and what the needs we have right now and what we can afford to do without basically changing our whole society to an entitlement mentality.
00:34:05.000Joe Manchin actually just dropped a PDF of a framework deal signed by Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin for $1.5 trillion in spending, not $3.5 trillion in spending.
00:34:19.000And by the way, again, Joe Manchin has already signed off this year on $1.9 trillion in spending earlier this year.
00:34:24.000This would be $1.5 trillion in spending.
00:34:25.000There'd be another $1 trillion in supplemental spending.
00:34:28.000By the time you get to the end of Joe Manchin's spending, the conservative guy, this year, you'd be at $5 trillion.
00:34:32.000OK, but he actually got Chuck Schumer to sign on to this.
00:34:35.000So Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi were going around being like, oh, that Joe Manchin, he's terrible.
00:34:39.000You signed this at the end of July, Chuck Schumer.
00:34:43.000So what does exactly this document say?
00:34:44.000It says the top line would be $1.5 trillion.
00:34:48.000The funds in the new legislation would not be dispersed until all funding from COVID legislation and ARP, the American Recovery Plan from earlier this year, has been spent.
00:34:55.000And one of the conditions was that the Federal Reserve would end quantitative easing.
00:34:59.000In other words, stop inflating the currency.
00:35:02.000It would require needs-based, means-tested guardrails and formulas on new spending, targeted spending caps on existing programs, no additional handouts or transfer payments, On climate, it would require spending on innovation, not elimination.
00:35:17.000So in other words, it would not be about eliminating coal because the man is from West Virginia.
00:35:22.000Also, any revenue exceeding $1.5 trillion would be used for deficit reduction.
00:35:26.000It would not be used for further spending.
00:35:28.000It would set the corporate tax rate not at 39% or 30%, it would set it at 25%.
00:35:33.000It would raise the top rate on ordinary income to 39.6%.
00:35:35.000That's the only area where there's broad consensus in the Democratic Party what they want it to be.
00:35:40.000It would raise the capital gains rate to 28% all in, right?
00:35:44.000Not 39%, which is what Biden was looking for.
00:35:47.000It would end the carried interest tax so-called loophole.
00:35:52.000And then it says, Senator Manchin does not guarantee he will vote for the final reconciliation legislation if it exceeds the conditions outlined in this agreement.
00:35:59.000He just dropped that bombshell directly on the head of Chuck Schumer.
00:36:02.000So yesterday was just Joe Manchin day, ripping the Democratic progressives apart.
00:36:07.000And he was pointing out correctly that inflation has real downstream effects for the person in the middle class.
00:36:11.000This is something David Brooks doesn't seem to understand.
00:36:14.000And neither does the entire Democratic Party, except for Joe Manchin.
00:36:17.000Inflation hurts the little guy the most.
00:36:19.000If you're a rich person, and you have lots of wealth and savings, you know what you're doing with that stuff investing in.
00:36:25.000If you're the person who's spent their entire life building up a little bit of a bankroll, and then the government just keeps inflating, All those savings are less are worth less than they were yesterday.
00:36:34.000Let's say that you're a retiree on a fixed income.
00:36:41.000I asked for the strategic pause because after that, then we basically had COVID coming back at us and we have all the unknowns right now, especially with what the financial fallout might be or the geopolitical fallout, excuse me, the geopolitical fallout that might come from the Uh, from the Afghanistan departure.
00:39:22.000This person will cut and assemble raw video footage using compelling storytelling skills to creatively support and emphasize subject matter in videos for various Daily Wire projects and shows.
00:39:32.000So, all the comedy-eating bros, they're all universal in their hatred for Joe Manchin.
00:40:02.000See, you know that you are in line with the common man when the folks at the top of the comedy hierarchy, your late-night hosts, who earn millions of dollars, are very angry at Joe Manchin, the senator from West Virginia.
00:40:13.000Is why, listening to David Brooks, who once suggested that he liked Barack Obama because of the way he pleaded his pants.
00:40:19.000I'm not kidding you, that's a thing David Brooks actually said back in 2008.
00:40:23.000David Brooks, who is like, the yuppie of all yuppies.
00:40:26.000Listening to David Brooks about the morality of spending this much money, while ripping on Joe Manchin, is just, it's peak democratic elitism.
00:40:34.000So, here you have the Daily Show ripping at Joe Manchin.
00:40:38.000Introducing Manchin, the politics game where everyone works together.
00:41:40.000You've got two senators, Joe Manchin, who's been called a kingmaker by fossil fuel executives and personally profits from the coal industry.
00:41:47.000And Kyrsten Sinema, who's raked in hundreds of thousands in donations from big pharma and has been raising money from business groups, holding up a bill that would tackle climate change and establish paid family leave, make community college tuition free, transform child care, and expand access to health care, among many other things.
00:42:30.000One, if we're going to talk about open bribery, the Democratic Party is so in hock to places like the teacher's unions that they will literally rewrite CDC standards in order to please the teacher's unions.
00:42:40.000Second of all, as a typical rule, you take donations from groups that are politically aligned with you.
00:42:46.000And if Chris and Sinema were presumably aligned the other way, you should be receiving donations from other groups.
00:42:52.000I mean, that's how politics typically works.
00:43:21.000Again, their basic idea here is we spend endless amounts of money forever, and there's no downside ever.
00:43:27.000And all we gain is more and more control over your life.
00:43:31.000Now, I would be remiss if I did not note that there is a new standard with regard to immigration.
00:43:37.000I mean, this administration is a bleep show in so many ways.
00:43:41.000The DHS has issued new arrest and deportation guidelines to immigration agents, right?
00:43:45.000This comes just a week after the DHS lied about its own agents by suggesting they were whipping immigrants, illegal immigrants, at the border.
00:43:56.000Now, the DHS is issuing new regulations.
00:43:58.000What do these regulations do, according to the Washington Post?
00:44:01.000Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued broad new directives to immigration officers on Thursday, saying the fact that someone is an undocumented immigrant, quote, should not alone be the basis of a decision to detain and deport them from the United States.
00:44:35.000Who could have predicted such a thing?
00:44:38.000The same time these people are releasing... There are 15,000 people under the bridge in Del Rio, Texas.
00:44:43.00010,000 to 12,000 of them, according to Mayorkas, entered the United States.
00:44:46.000I wonder why everyone thinks there's an open border here in the United States.
00:44:49.000Maybe because there's an open border here in the United States thanks to these tool bags.
00:44:53.000So now you're not just combining bad economic policy With inflationary policy and bad fiscal policy, you got bad economic policy, bad fiscal policy, endless welfare benefits, and an open border.
00:45:02.000I can't see how anything here is gonna be bad.
00:45:07.000Even Bernie Sanders used to be in favor of a closed border.
00:45:09.000He was in favor of a closed border because he made the perfectly plausible and rational argument that if you offer endless welfare benefits to people and leave the border open, you won't be able to pay for everyone.
00:45:18.000So much for that, we've got an administration that wants endless welfare benefits for pretty much everybody, and also an open border.
00:45:25.000An amnesty program is on the way for those who say, well, you know, illegal immigrants can't receive things like federal welfare benefits.
00:45:30.000First of all, they can receive in some states state welfare benefits.
00:45:33.000They receive free public education for their kids.
00:45:37.000The administration would very much like to make all these people citizens as fast as humanly possible.
00:45:42.000Does this look like a recipe for the success of the United States, or does it look like an attempt to gain ultimate power for the rest of time by the Democratic Party?
00:45:51.000Endless welfare benefits, endless bribery, endless spending combined with open borders is one hell of a combo.
00:45:57.000Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
00:45:59.000First, you can't forget to end your week by checking out The Andrew Klavan Show.