00:00:01.000That used to be something that most Americans believed in.
00:00:04.000Actually, by the polling data, most Americans still do.
00:00:07.000But pretty much nobody in our political class does.
00:00:10.000Because the most seductive line in American politics is, it's not your fault.
00:00:15.000In just a second, I'm going to explain why our national debt is out of control, inflation is rampant, and there's no end in sight, and I'm going to do it with one clip.
00:00:22.000Plus, we'll get to Gavin Newsom's ex-mistress grabbing the spotlight and trying to revivify Me Too, Lindsey Graham's funeral, and Rosie O'Donnell singing about President Trump's dingling.
00:00:42.000Okay, so I'm going to play you a clip.
00:00:44.000This clip says, I think, most of the things you need to know about our current politics, actually.
00:00:49.000Now, this clip isn't really political.
00:00:51.000It's a clip from Caleb Hammer, who's a financial host whose main job consists in looking at people making terrible, terrible decisions on both a life and fiscal level and telling them not to do it.
00:01:02.000But this clip, I think, says a lot about our current political moment.
00:02:35.000The reason that Caleb Hammer is going nuts here is because, you know, I think a lot of people have the same reaction, the commonsensical reaction.
00:02:42.000What you eat, what you get at the supermarket is your decision, which means that if you choose to buy and eat crap, And are therefore more unhealthy.
00:03:25.000Instead, they will tell you that the reason that you've been eating unhealthy and the reason that you're overweight and the reason that you are, in fact, more unhealthy, it must be because food is expensive and therefore we need government run grocery stores subsidized by the taxpayer.
00:03:38.000Here is Zorhan Mamdani doing this routine a couple of days ago.
00:03:42.000In the wealthiest city, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, no New Yorker should have to worry about being able to afford to feed their family.
00:03:52.000Now, again, New Yorkers do not have to worry about feeding their families.
00:03:55.000We have SNAP, we have EBT, we have all sorts of government programs.
00:03:58.000It is true that food is more expensive than it was just a few years ago, but by any historical standard, food in the United States is not expensive.
00:04:06.000According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the USDA, in the early 1900s, families were spending roughly 40% of their income on food.
00:04:15.000Today, the average household in the United States will spend under 10% of its disposable income on food.
00:04:22.000People today spend roughly an equal amount on groceries as they do on restaurants on average.
00:04:29.000Now, again, if you look at just what we are spending, the answer is we are spending less on food than pretty much any time for any society in human history.
00:04:39.000Now, again, that does not mean that food isn't more expensive than it was just a couple of years ago.
00:05:11.000Maybe the chart that matters most when it comes to government policy, demonstrating the effect on prices when you dump money into items, when you subsidize them using the federal government.
00:05:22.000And what you see is all the areas where the government does not subsidize, say TVs, toys, computer software, cell phone services, clothing, the price has dropped fairly radically over time.
00:05:33.000However, in the areas where the government subsidizes the most, say hospital services or college tuition or childcare and nursery school or medical care services, Massive spikes over the course of the last 25 years.
00:05:48.000Now, again, why am I bringing this up?
00:05:50.000Because this is a matter of whether we consider it your responsibility.
00:05:53.000And again, those are the words that no one in politics will say in America your responsibility.
00:05:59.000The idea is that everything is everybody's responsibility.
00:06:01.000In fact, everything is nobody's responsibility.
00:06:03.000It's not everybody's responsibility, it's the government's responsibility.
00:06:07.000But let us be clear this idea that Zoran Momdani needs to locate grocery stores within a certain distance because you just can't get to a grocery store in Manhattan is not true.
00:06:18.000The distance between Momdani's East Harlem city owned grocery store and the local Costco is less than a mile.
00:06:25.000Here is the sad and real truth about life people make choices, and sometimes those choices are good, and very often those choices are not.
00:06:34.000There have been studies on whether, in fact, people are eating unhealthy because of so called food deserts.
00:06:39.000For a long time, there was this theory that impoverished areas people didn't eat kale because kale was unavailable because there was no local whole foods.
00:06:46.000And it turns out there's no local whole foods in impoverished areas because people in impoverished areas don't want to spend money on kale.
00:06:56.000According to the University of Chicago, they did a study a couple of years ago, and what they found is that so called food deserts, areas where you don't have a gigantic supermarket or grocery store with fresh produce, has no meaningful effect on eating habits.
00:07:08.000Exposing low income households to the same products and prices as those in high income households reduces nutritional inequality by only 9%.
00:07:17.000The remaining 91% of the nutrition gap is driven by difference in what shoppers prefer to buy, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper published recently.
00:07:26.000Households in food desert zip codes buy almost 90% of their groceries from supermarkets, the same as wealthier households.
00:07:33.000It's just that wealthier households, according to the study, tend to place a higher value on healthy foods and nutrients.
00:07:38.000Poorer households tend to value unhealthy ones.
00:07:42.000Low income households are willing to pay more for sugar and saturated fats, whereas high income households tend to want to pay more for veggies and fruits, for example.
00:08:57.000You could get healthy food for a family of four at Aldi's for a week, you'd have to shop hard, but you could do it for a little over 100 bucks.
00:09:03.000That would include things like whole chicken and ground beef and eggs, potatoes, milk, cheese, yogurt, rice, pasta, oats, et cetera.
00:09:12.000It's expensive by historical comparison, but it is not prohibitive.
00:09:14.000And again, if you were to buy a meal plan for that same family of four for a week, things like frozen pizza or frozen chicken nuggets, hot dogs and buns, sugary cereal, mac and cheese, soda, ice cream, the works, it would probably cost you in the same neighborhood.
00:10:12.000The left suggests that every decision is, in fact, a societal or governmental decision.
00:10:17.000Unfortunately, this is also bled over to the right.
00:10:21.000Take, for example, the evolution of the vice president.
00:10:23.000This is a really kind of telling evolution, and it says something about the broader right because it's not restricted to the vice president, of course.
00:10:29.000So back in 2016, the vice president wrote a book called Hillbilly Elegy.
00:10:33.000And in Hillbilly Elegy, he talks about eating habits.
00:10:36.000He says that when he was in the Marines, he changed his perspective on eating.
00:10:42.000Because he was grabbing dessert while at boot camp.
00:10:45.000And a drill instructor yelled at him, quote, you really need that cake, don't you, fat?
00:10:49.000And he says that experience pushed him to reconsider his eating habits.
00:10:53.000He writes that he began asking questions he never asked before, like, quote, is there added sugar?
00:10:57.000Does this meat have a lot of saturated fat?
00:11:01.000He says in Hillbilly Allegy that the greasy fried food from his ma ma's table, that was his grandmother, everything was fried, lost its appeal to him after that shift.
00:11:10.000He says in that book, quote, we eat Pillsbury cinnamon rolls for breakfast, Taco Bell for lunch, and McDonald's for dinner.
00:11:15.000We rarely cook, even though it's cheaper and better for the body and soul.
00:11:18.000So that was a fairly typical conservative perspective that you can make choices that better your life, nutrition, finance, career, like all over your life.
00:11:28.000But now things have changed because it's become popular in America to suggest that no decision is your own.
00:11:33.000Well, that was JD Vance's perspective on eating habits back during his hillbilly elegy days.
00:11:38.000As we'll see in a moment, things have radically changed for the vice president.
00:11:41.000But I'm going to tell you something that has not changed and is not going to change.
00:11:44.000The reality is the government, as we've been talking about, going to keep spending money.
00:11:48.000It's a thing that's just going to keep happening because all the systemic factors aim in this particular direction.
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00:12:53.000So now, the Vice President has a new book out.
00:12:56.000And again, I read political memoirs because it kind of tells you something about the person writing.
00:13:00.000So the vice president writes in his book communion, quote, I was the first in my family to attend a four year college and Ohio state immediately changed me into a college boy.
00:13:09.000Shortly after matriculating, I drove home for a weekend to visit my family.
00:13:12.000My nieces and nephew complained about not having anything for breakfast besides cereal.
00:13:15.000I raised this with my sister like an arrogant jerk.
00:13:18.000You know, that stuff is like pure sugar, right?
00:13:20.000My sister rightly took offense and we didn't talk for a week.
00:13:23.000Many other things like this popped up, demonstrating the ways in which I had unconsciously absorbed the biases of America's educated class.
00:13:32.000I was becoming detached from the culture that had made me who I was.
00:13:47.000Now, again, how he chooses to interact with his family is one thing, but it's also not even the real story.
00:13:51.000According to his first autobiography, his mind shift with regard to eating didn't come at Ohio State.
00:13:56.000It wasn't a college kid thing, it was a boot camp thing when his instructor said, stop being fat.
00:14:02.000And he stopped being fat and realized he should pay attention to his food.
00:14:05.000Trying to turn this into a class warfare issue is scoring cheap political points.
00:14:10.000But again, I'm not trying to pick on the vice president.
00:14:12.000This is so much of our politics, right and left.
00:14:14.000It's why the national debt is never going to go down ever, ever, ever because no one will ever say the thing in a free society, in a country where your vote is about your choice.
00:14:27.000And if we have a society where your choices don't matter and we pretend they don't exist and everything is society's fault, nothing is your fault.
00:14:34.000And then it's society's job and the government's Job to fix it.
00:14:38.000But here's the thing no matter how much government you throw out these problems, you can't fix personal choice this way.
00:14:44.000You can't fix personal choice this way.
00:14:46.000When Michelle Obama tried this with school lunches, I don't know if you recall this going back far enough.
00:14:50.000Michelle Obama, the wife of Barack Obama, if you go back far enough, she tried to fix the school lunches.
00:14:55.000So she pointed out correctly, by the way, that the school lunches were generally non nutritious.
00:15:00.000And so she decided she was going to put together school lunches that were more nutritious.
00:16:30.000One, the radical expansion of government.
00:16:31.000Because if you don't take responsibility for your life, then somebody has to take responsibility for your life and the government has to expand either by subsidizing you or bossing you around or both.
00:16:40.000Second, we treat the actual normal things that the government should be doing as secondary and the stuff that we personally should be doing as primary functions of the government.
00:16:50.000This is how you end up with the idiotic take that the government should spend not on defense, but should be spending on whatever the social program of the day is.
00:16:58.000And you end up with financial illiteracy, of course.
00:17:02.000Here he was talking with a member of the political left who was saying we spend more money on bombs than social programs in the country, which is absolutely false.
00:17:11.000But that is your perception if you believe that the government's job is not to do defense, but it is to take care of all the aspects of your life.
00:18:23.000And now, again, the point that she's making, and it is indicative of an underlying problem, right?
00:18:28.000This is a Couple that he's having on, it's like $5,000 in debt.
00:18:32.000When you believe that it's the government's job to take care of all your problems, this is what you end up with.
00:18:36.000That the government should not take care of our national defense, that we should be short on interceptors so that we can spend more on SNAP.
00:18:43.000When you consider all of the government's social programs with all of the heavily incentivized private benefits, like, for example, employer funded health care and 401k matches and tax credits, the OECD, as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, ranks the United States the number one global spender on social programs.
00:19:00.000Our net total spending, when you combine both the public safety net and private benefits, ranks us at number two behind France per capita.
00:19:06.000As we have been talking about, eating healthy is really, really hard to do.
00:19:10.000It's really important and it's your choice.
00:19:12.000But when we're talking about choices, that doesn't mean that every choice makes it easy.
00:19:16.000When it comes to packing lunches or, or trying to figure out what to eat or cramming those fruits and veggies in your dietary, that's actually hard.
00:19:37.000No gimmicks, no mystery ingredients, and no trendy buzzwords.
00:19:40.000I take those fruits and veggies capsules as part of my morning routine.
00:19:43.000They're an easy way to stay more consistent even on the days when my schedule gets away from me.
00:19:47.000Those freeze dried snacks, they become a favorite around our national office, which is saying something because there are a lot of snack options available around there.
00:19:53.000Back to school season is a good time to reset your routine.
00:19:55.000If getting more fruits and veggies is part of that plan, Balance of Nature makes it a whole lot easier.
00:20:00.000Head on over to balanceofnature.com, use promo code Shapiro for an additional 10% off any subscription.
00:20:08.000Okay, so the second thing, right, again, there are three things that result from this mindset.
00:20:14.000Thing number one is that the government radically expands and never stops expanding.
00:20:19.000Second, we start putting focus on the government not doing its core functions and doing all these other things that are not its core functions.
00:20:26.000And third, and most importantly, we become worse people because nothing is ever our fault.
00:21:03.000The entire 200 billion yearly SNAP budget is the problem, but not the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of subsidies that go to corporations.
00:21:11.000But yes, the little guys keep subsidies.
00:21:13.000Well, subsidies isn't money going to them typically, subsidies is usually.
00:21:47.000How much revenue did they generate and how much of that revenue was profit?
00:21:50.000You're telling me that they deserve a $700 billion deduction or subsidy or whatever you want to call it to grow their business when you make that much money.
00:21:58.000You can't fund your own business advancement.
00:22:01.000I don't know about necessarily deserve, but I would still rather have money go to something that does create jobs, which actually provides a benefit.
00:22:08.000I mean, the SNAP program can only buy food.
00:22:10.000Then people who literally do nothing sit on their ass and just get SNAP can only buy food.
00:22:15.000She also gets Medicaid and she gets the child tax credits.
00:22:39.000You want to know why people keep moving party to party, swiveling from side to side, wildly, crazily, because it turns out that if people promise you the world, they will come up short.
00:23:03.000There's a brand new Manhattan Institute poll that we talked about a little bit yesterday talking about support for SNAP work requirements.
00:23:09.000And it turns out that a broad majority of Americans strongly or somewhat support SNAP work requirements.
00:23:16.000They believe that people should actually work if they want some benefits.
00:23:20.000And when it comes to state responsibility for SNAP payment errors, for example, It turns out that 55% of all voters believe that states that have waste in the food stamps program should be required to cover part of the cost of that waste, that the federal government should not have to pick that up.
00:23:36.000But here's the thing on an individual level, people tend to buy this stuff because it tells us we all want to hear that, right?
00:23:41.000We all want to hear it's not your fault.
00:24:06.000Get rid of the basic idea of human nature that the founding fathers believed in.
00:24:09.000The founding fathers believed that we all had choices in front of us, good choices and bad choices.
00:24:13.000And because we all had the capacity for evil and the capacity for good, they said we needed checks and balances and we needed constitutionally protected freedoms because they believed that the capacity for choice was our highest human calling.
00:24:26.000That was the thing that mattered more than anything.
00:24:29.000Because if you're not exercising your choice in pursuit of the good, then what are you here on this planet for?
00:24:36.000But that's not actually the direction our culture is moving.
00:24:40.000And that's particularly true in the online world, where again, The online world incentivizes bad behavior.
00:24:57.000This is why Pope Leo, and again, I have my quibbles with Pope Leo politically, but when it comes to central values here, he happens to be correct.
00:25:04.000Here he is saying, you know, you might want to engage in some virtue again.
00:25:09.000Is it really possible to have joy in such difficult circumstances, we might ask?
00:25:16.000It is only possible if our life is founded upon our relationship with God as a loving Father.
00:25:23.000The joy St. Francis was speaking of cannot be found through electronic devices, spending hours in front of a screen, endlessly scrolling on social media every day.
00:25:35.000These activities often waste precious time that could be used for moments of silent prayer, of cultivating authentic friendships.
00:25:46.000Spending quality time with family, learning more about our faith, studying, or playing sports.
00:26:03.000It's good for your community, and it's good for the government.
00:26:04.000Otherwise, what you end up with is unending government.
00:26:07.000If the alternative to freedom is tyranny, and if freedom is built on the idea that your decisions are your own, then when you give up your decision making power and say the government ought to take care of everything, tyranny is usually what follows.
00:26:18.000What an amazing video you just watched!
00:26:21.000Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.comslash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.