Marjorie Taylor Greene has been attacking the President of the United States for months. Finally, over the weekend, the President retaliated. Plus, we ll talk about the affordability crisis, why Democrats are continuing to put pressure on Republicans to spend even more on Obamacare, and how to fix it.
00:00:39.000Go to dailywire.com/slash lifetime to get all the details or to secure your place in Dailywire history right now.
00:00:46.000Well, over the weekend, the long-simmering feud between Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and the president of the United States finally boiled over.
00:00:53.000So, Marjorie Taylor Greene has been attempting to run essentially her own knockoff version, her T-Moo version of MAGA.
00:01:01.000She's been out retailing it to The View.
00:01:04.000She's been out retailing it to CNN and MSNBC.
00:01:07.000She's become the hot new thing in the legacy media.
00:01:10.000You know, the Jewish space leaders lady, that lady is the hot new thing with regard to legacy media.
00:01:16.000They now have strange new respect for Marjorie Taylor Greene because she has decided that she is going to attack Trump full-time.
00:01:23.000Well, the president finally noticed, and President Trump put out a statement over the weekend slamming Marjorie Taylor Greene quite properly for trying to undermine his actual administration.
00:01:35.000He said on Truth Social, lightweight Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Brown, green grass turns brown when it begins to rot, betrayed the entire Republican Party when she turned left.
00:01:47.000This is following Marjorie Taylor Greene's repeated attacks on President Trump, particularly over Jeffrey Epstein.
00:01:54.000Back on Friday, Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested on CVS that actually the president of the United States was attempting to protect the American people deserve to see transparency from their government.
00:02:08.000Rich, powerful people should not be protected.
00:02:12.000And it's the message to victims everywhere, victims of human trafficking and children who are trapped in terrible situations that the government will not protect the predators, that we will work hard to protect the victims.
00:02:30.000Now, again, it is ridiculous to suggest the president of the United States is trying to protect predators.
00:02:34.000And finally, the president of the United States had enough.
00:02:36.000This line, of course, has been retailed by a wide variety of people who are supposedly allies of President Trump, who have turned on President Trump using the Epstein files as a way of getting at him.
00:02:46.000We'll get to that in a moment because MTG is part of a broader kind of splinter effort inside MAGA to take control of MAGA because they are angry at the president's policy decisions.
00:02:56.000And now they've decided to use Epstein as a wedge.
00:03:00.000And so the president withdrew his support for Marjorie Taylor Greene on Truth Social, suggested that he might, in fact, back a primary opponent to Marjorie Taylor Greene.
00:03:07.000Again, she would only be famous for her dumb Facebook post if it had not been for the president of the United States touting her, treating her as an ally, building her up.
00:03:18.000And then, of course, she got very angry because she wanted to run for Senate in Georgia.
00:03:21.000And he pointed out to her she was going to lose by 20 to John Ossoff if she ran for Senate in Georgia.
00:03:28.000So President Trump finally lost it at her on Truth Social.
00:03:34.000He said, I'm withdrawing my support and endorsement of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of the great state of Georgia.
00:03:40.000He said, all I see wacky Marjorie do is complain, complain, complain.
00:03:44.000He said, it seemed to all begin when I sent her a poll stating she should not run for senator or governor.
00:03:48.000She was at 12% and didn't have a chance.
00:03:50.000Unless, of course, she had my endorsement, which she wasn't about to get.
00:03:53.000She has told many people that she is upset that I don't return her phone calls anymore.
00:03:56.000But with 219 congressmen and women, 53 U.S. senators, 24 cabinet members, almost 200 countries, and an otherwise normal life to lead, I can't take a ranting lunatics call every day.
00:04:06.000He then added, I understand that wonderful conservative people are thinking about primary Marjorie in her district of Georgia, that they too are fed up with her antics.
00:04:12.000And if the right person runs, they will have my complete and unyielding support.
00:04:15.000She has gone far left, even doing the view with their low-IQ Republican hating anchors.
00:04:20.000So Marjorie Taylor Greene was excited about this because she's attempting, again, to run an anti-Trump campaign inside the Republican Party.
00:04:26.000And so she responded by saying, President Trump just attacked me and lied about me.
00:04:32.000Always playing the victim, Marjorie Taylor Green.
00:04:35.000I haven't called him at all, but I did send these text messages today.
00:04:37.000Apparently, this is what sent him over the edge: the Epstein files.
00:04:40.000And of course, he's coming hard after me to make an example to scare all the other Republicans before next week's votes to release the Epstein files.
00:04:47.000It's astonishing, really, how hard he's fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out, that he actually goes to this level.
00:04:52.000But really, most Americans wish he would fight this hard to help the forgotten men and women of America who are fed up with foreign wars and foreign causes, are going broke trying to feed their families and are losing hope of ever achieving the American dream.
00:05:03.000I have supported President Trump with too much of my precious time, says Marjorie Taylor Greene, too much of my own money, and fought harder for him, even when almost all other Republicans turned their back and denounced him.
00:05:11.000But I don't worship or serve Donald Trump.
00:05:35.000What she is saying here, that the president is trying to cover up the Epstein files, the president made absolutely clear actually on Sunday that that was not the case.
00:05:43.000He put out a truth social in which he said, as I said on Friday night at Board Air Force One to the fake news media, House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files because we have nothing to hide.
00:05:52.000And it's time to move on from this Democrat hoax perpetrated by radical left lunatics in order to deflect from the great success of the Republican Party, including our recent victory on the Democrat shutdown.
00:06:01.000The Department of Justice has already turned over tens of thousands of pages to the public on Epstein, are looking at various Democrat operatives, Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, Larry Summers, et cetera, and their relationship to Epstein.
00:06:11.000And the House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are legally entitled to.
00:06:15.000All I do care about is that Republicans get back on point, which is the economy, affordability, where we are winning big, our victory on reducing inflation from the highest levels in history to practically nothing, bringing down prices for the American people, delivering historic tax cuts, gaining trillions of dollars of investment into America, a record, the rebuilding of our military, securing our border, supporting criminal, illegal aliens, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:06:35.000Let's start talking about the Republican Party's record-setting achievements, said the president on Truth Social, and not fall into the Epstein trap, which is actually a curse on the Democrats and not us.
00:06:59.000What do you think is the reason for this?
00:07:05.000Unfortunately, it has all come down to the Epstein files, and that is shocking.
00:07:12.000Okay, and then she went on in the same interview to slam President Trump for calling her a traitor, even though, again, she has spent the last several months just beating up on President Trump over and over and over.
00:07:24.000The most hurtful thing he said, which is absolutely untrue, is he called me a traitor.
00:07:30.000And that is that is so extremely wrong.
00:07:33.000And those are the types of words used that can radicalize people against me and put my life in danger.
00:07:44.000Okay, so again, the new line that's being retailed by people like Marjorie Taylor Greene is that criticism of her puts her life in danger.
00:07:52.000Okay, the president of the United States disagrees.
00:07:54.000Here's the president responding to that particular idea.
00:08:00.000Her life could be a danger because of the rhetoric.
00:08:12.000I don't think, frankly, I don't think anybody cares about her.
00:08:16.000All right, coming up more on Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massey, Steve Bannon, the collective of people who are attempting to hijack President Trump's MAGA movement first.
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00:10:39.000Okay, so again, this is the idea from Marjorie Taylor Greene is that President Trump has basically betrayed MAGA because of Epstein, but also has betrayed MAGA because she has a different definition of MAGA.
00:10:51.000And this brings us to what's actually going on under the surface here.
00:10:54.000Marjorie Taylor Greene started caring about the Epstein files in a serious way with regard to President Trump about the time that she got angry at President Trump's foreign policy with regard to the Middle East.
00:11:05.000She, Thomas Massey, and a wide variety of commentators seem to get very exercised about President Trump and the Epstein files by claiming that President Trump is in fact enthralled to Israel and that what is happening with the Epstein files, that it's some sort of Mossad agency operation.
00:11:21.000And what made them mad is that President Trump actually is not anti-Israel the same way that they are.
00:11:27.000And this is met with mainstream media approval, of course.
00:11:30.000I mean, listen, Marjorie Taylor Greene is making pretty clear what she thinks is happening here.
00:11:34.000Here she was blaming Israel for Jeffrey Epstein.
00:11:41.000I'm all in favor of all Jeffrey Epstein files being released, all of it.
00:11:45.000The reason I think the president didn't want all of that released is because he was tired of talking about it and because his own FBI had told him there was no there there.
00:11:52.000But I'm all in favor of more transparency on the Epstein files.
00:11:55.000And anybody who was involved, if in fact there was, as the sort of most ridiculous suppositions, evidence-free suppositions suggest, some sort of intelligence agency operation to underage people in order to blackmail people, which is the theory here.
00:12:10.000If that's true, whoever engaged in it is evil.
00:12:18.000But again, the evidence-free nature of this thing is the reason why it is being trafficked by people like Marjorie Taylor Greene.
00:12:25.000We saw Jeffrey Epstein with ties to Ahud Barak.
00:12:29.000We saw him making business deals with them, also business deals that involved the Israeli government and seems to have led into their intel agencies.
00:12:41.000And I think the right question is to ask is, was Jeffrey Epstein working for Israel?
00:12:49.000Okay, so again, she's just putting that out there.
00:12:51.000No evidence whatsoever because she doesn't like Israel and also because she has some peculiar views, shall we say, about Jews.
00:13:00.000She, of course, believes that the United States is enthralled to the Israelis, particularly President Trump.
00:13:04.000She thinks that President Trump is somehow controlled by the Israelis.
00:13:08.000Steve Bannon, of course, is on the same side of this argument because he, too, would like to seize control of the MAGA movement.
00:13:14.000There is a thing that is happening in the Republican Party, an assumption that President Trump is no longer president and no longer the head of MAGA.
00:13:20.000And now there ought to be a fight over the pieces of MAGA.
00:13:23.000That basically the ship is rudderless and somebody is going to grab control.
00:13:27.000Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks she is that person.
00:13:30.000Here she is suggesting that the president of the United States is somehow being manipulated by the Israelis.
00:13:38.000Six months in, C, and here we are turning back on the campaign promises.
00:13:43.000And we bombed Iran on behalf of Israel.
00:13:50.000Well, I mean, that's kind of a strange supposition given the fact that, again, Israel was doing the vast majority of the bombing.
00:13:57.000And it's always funny, all the people who suggest that the president of the United States was being pushed into that by the Israelis, like full-on pushed into it, that the Israelis got all their heart's desires from President Trump.
00:14:08.000Well, no, I assume that the Israeli government would have been fully on board with the idea of toppling the Iranian regime.
00:14:17.000And these are the same people who suggested that bombing the Fordo nuclear reactor was somehow going to lead to World War III and full-scale American involvement in Middle East warfare, which, of course, never happened.
00:14:27.000And again, it's not just Marjorie Taylor Greene.
00:14:29.000It is also Thomas Massey, who takes the same viewpoint.
00:14:31.000This is the reason why they're focused on Epstein.
00:14:39.000None of these people were screaming bloody murder about the Epstein files when Joe Biden was president of the United States.
00:14:43.000President Trump comes on the scene, doesn't do the foreign policy they want.
00:14:46.000And suddenly they start screaming at the top of their lungs about the Epstein files.
00:14:50.000Thomas Massey, of course, objects to many parts of the Trump agenda, which is why the president would like to primarily Thomas Massey as well.
00:14:56.000Here is Massey also accusing President Trump of some sort of cover-up on Epstein.
00:15:02.000You know, I've never said that these files will implicate Donald Trump, and I really don't think that they will.
00:15:08.000I think he's trying to protect a bunch of rich and powerful friends, billionaires, donors to his campaign, friends in his social circles.
00:15:17.000And that's my operating theory on why he's trying so hard to keep these files closed.
00:15:24.000Again, this is all part of an attempt to turn MAGA into something it isn't.
00:15:27.000And let's be clear about what MAGA is.
00:15:41.000That means that many people who voted for President Trump disagree with him on a lot of stuff that he does.
00:15:45.000You've heard me on this program disagree with the president of the United States quite frequently on matters ranging from foreign policy to domestic policy.
00:15:58.000Now, you can say that there's a new movement afoot to try and cobble together pieces of Trump's coalition moving forward into something different, but to sort of claim the mantle of Trumpism without Trump is a bizarre move and a ridiculous move in a set sense.
00:16:12.000But that's one of the things that's happening here.
00:16:14.000One of the other people trying to grab control of the Trump movement is, of course, Steve Bannon.
00:16:18.000Steve Bannon, sloppy Steve, as the president has called him in the past, who has glomed, he spends his entire career just glomming onto more powerful people and then using them as essentially a raft in order to jump on a bigger raft.
00:16:30.000That is Steve Bannon's entire career trajectory.
00:16:34.000Well, now he has become sort of the most quoted man in media because the media love to use Bannon as a sort of Darth Vader figure hidden behind the scenes and manipulating Republican politics.
00:16:44.000Now, the media love a good false narrative.
00:16:46.000In any case, here was Steve Bannon over the weekend, for example, praising Nick Fuentes.
00:16:50.000Again, the reason this is happening, we should point out, is because there is an attempt to glaze pretty much everybody who is on the anti-Israel and, yes, anti-I mean, Fuentes is just an anti-Semite, anti-Semitic side in order to shift policy priorities away from what President Trump is attempting to do.
00:17:11.000Alex Jones had a debate with Nick Fuentes and Dinesh D'Souza.
00:17:16.000And you cannot, you see right there the laziness, the lack of argument, just their attitude that they just own this.
00:17:26.000Fuentes takes this guy apart brick by brick.
00:17:42.000Dinesh goes back and it shows you this old guard who has nothing.
00:17:48.000Again, it's fascinating to watch as all these people make quasi-allies of people like Nick Fuentes, who, again, stumped against the president of the United States in the last election cycle.
00:18:50.000So, again, that's the thing that President Trump is fighting back against when he is slapping at Marjorie Taylor Greene.
00:18:55.000This attempt to basically declare his administration a lame duck administration and then grab control of MAGA as a movement and then pretend that the president is somehow betraying MAGA in some fundamental way.
00:19:08.000That is a unique claim, but it's a claim being made softly and not so softly by a wide variety of figures on the quasi-right, tearing apart the Trump coalition for their own particular purposes.
00:19:18.000And again, there's a difference between criticizing the things President Trump does.
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00:21:42.000Okay, meanwhile, concerns about affordability continue to plague the administration.
00:21:48.000According to the Wall Street Journal, a proposal to give Americans direct payments of $2,000 or more, an antitrust probe into allegations that meatpacking companies are colluding to drive up beef prices, a new plan to lower tariffs on coffee, fruit, and other popular products.
00:22:00.000President Trump and his advisors are rushing to try to lower prices for American consumers after voters sent a warning shot to Republicans this month over the high cost of living.
00:22:09.000Following the recent election, Trump's aides have urged the president to focus on affordability.
00:22:14.000Now, as I pointed out for weeks and legitimately my entire career, the only way to achieve affordability truly is to have a robust economy built on private property and free market economics.
00:22:24.000That is the way that affordability becomes a thing.
00:22:27.000It is why products that are subject to private property rights and to open competition reduce in price and improve in quality.
00:22:35.000That is the chief hallmark of a capitalist economy.
00:22:38.000Any attempt by the government to intervene in the economy directly to quote-unquote make things cheaper is likely to achieve precisely the opposite effect.
00:22:47.000And unwillingness to acknowledge that is likely to lead to pretty poor outcomes.
00:22:51.000So the president of the United States has put out there that maybe there will be $2,000 tariff checks that come back to people.
00:22:57.000He gave an update on that Friday night.
00:23:00.000I'll be giving back $2,000 or so to middle-income people, low-income people, everybody but the rich.
00:23:08.000How soon can Americans see those checks?
00:23:10.000Will that be in time for Christmas, public shopping?
00:24:17.000What it says is that prices temporarily increase and then demand levels off and then begins to decline as there is job loss and inability to pay for the inflated prices, and then the prices decline.
00:24:28.000So, yes, it turns out higher unemployment and deflation is typically the result of tariff policy, which is bad.
00:24:38.000Like you will get a temporary price spike, and then because things are more expensive, your people can afford them, and then your demand goes down.
00:24:45.000And when your demand goes down, your price goes down.
00:24:48.000But the problem is that people are losing their jobs because they no longer have jobs in industries that require the inputs that tariffs have now made more expensive, and now they can't pay for anything, and you enter a deflationary spiral.
00:25:01.000But that's not the report that is being promoted by Breitbart and by the Trump administration, which is that tariffs somehow magically lower prices.
00:25:09.000That would be, as the kids say, huge if true.
00:25:28.000What that means is that as demand craters, what you end up with is an inflationary spiral.
00:25:33.000Tariff hikes raise unemployment, lowers economic activity, and lowers inflation.
00:25:39.000I'm not sure the president wants to lower economic activity.
00:25:42.000I'm not sure that's what he's looking for.
00:25:44.000So the argument that it lowers inflation by destroying the economy, I don't think that that's the thing that you're looking for.
00:25:51.000Quote, regardless of our identification approach, we obtain the same results.
00:25:55.000A tariff hike lowers CPI inflation and raises unemployment.
00:26:00.000Higher tariffs lead to lower economic activity and lower inflation in the short run.
00:26:06.000That is not, in fact, against the prediction of standard models.
00:26:10.000Tariff shocks appear to act as aggregate demand shocks, moving inflation and unemployment in the same directions.
00:26:16.000I'm not sure why this person labeled this anti-sort of traditional economics.
00:26:21.000No, traditional economics says that a tariff will, in the immediate term, spike prices, and then the demand will go down, and then the prices will go down.
00:26:28.000So, yes, it turns out that government intervention in the economy leads to unworkability.
00:26:34.000Meanwhile, Scott Besson, the treasurer of the secretary, he says that the costs are going to come down.
00:26:39.000Here he was explaining on MSNBC's Morning Joe over the weekend.
00:26:47.000We have slowed the price increases down, and they are going to continue to slow down, and that real working class wages will go up, and that that will address the affordability issue.
00:26:58.000There are many aspects of affordability that have gotten better under President Trump.
00:27:03.000They're going to continue to get better.
00:27:05.000I mean, unbelievably, Bloomberg had an article yesterday that said, oh, mortgages, mortgage rates aren't down that much.
00:27:12.000Well, on an inauguration day, a 30-year mortgage was 7.8%.
00:27:28.000Okay, so again, maybe the prices come down, but in order for prices to truly come down, you need less government involvement in the economy.
00:27:52.000That policy drives up prices in education, in housing, yes, in food.
00:27:58.000You subsidize all those things, the prices go up.
00:28:00.000And then, when somebody cuts back and they say, Hey, we can't afford all of this, it's actually creating economic unworkability.
00:28:05.000Then you step in and say, If you won't subsidize it, then you're making people's lives worse.
00:28:08.000We actually need more government funding.
00:28:11.000This is the magic opiate that is government spending.
00:28:14.000Once you get people used to a certain level of government spending, then it starts to flatten, the effect starts to flatten out, and you need more government spending in order to achieve the same high.
00:28:23.000This is what's currently happening with food stamps.
00:28:26.000According to Politico, millions of Americans greeted the end of the government shutdown with relief, but others are learning they could soon lose federal food aid permanently.
00:28:33.000Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins directed USDA staff during the record-setting 43-day shutdown to continue ushering states toward compliance with Republicans' signature tax and spending law, which is projected to kick millions out of the nation's largest anti-hunger program in the next few months.
00:28:47.000Those changes, combined with other provisions in the new law, will represent the most significant cuts to the social safety net in decades.
00:28:53.000And it all comes as low-income families are confronting stagnating wages that aren't keeping up with the skyrocketing cost of living.
00:28:58.000Now, again, one of the things that contributes to the skyrocketing cost of living are gigantic food subsidies, which is what SNAP is.
00:29:05.000That's also why wages stagnate, by the way.
00:29:07.000SNAP, effectively speaking, is a subsidy to low-wage enterprises like, for example, McDonald's.
00:29:13.000McDonald's can afford to pay people $8, $9 an hour because SNAP is filling in the other side of what the salary would have to be if SNAP didn't exist.
00:29:22.000The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program provides an average of $6 per day for nearly 42 million people, which is, again, an insane number.
00:29:31.000It has only grown dramatically under Joe Biden.
00:29:34.000And this is the game that Republicans keep playing, and it's a stupid game.
00:29:50.000At a certain point, people are going to get tired of the diluted drug of government spending from Republicans and instead turn to the full-scale, uncut stuff from Democrats.
00:30:02.000If the only distinction between Republican policy and Democratic policy is the dollar amount, and the Democrats can outbid you like on the price is right, then you're going to lose.
00:30:14.000And again, this is the Democrats' game.
00:30:15.000They design programs that are bound to fail unless you have to keep the subsidies up.
00:30:19.000And then the minute the subsidies go away, they blame you.
00:30:21.000Tim Kaine, the senator from Virginia, he's doing this with regard to Obamacare.
00:30:24.000Of course, the costs of Obamacare have risen dramatically ever since the implementation of Obamacare, one of the worst government programs in existence.
00:30:32.000But here is Senator Tim Kaine saying that Republicans now have to sign off on larger subsidies or be blamed for the fallout from a failed Democratic program.
00:30:41.000It would be political malpractice of the highest order for the House to not take up a bipartisan bill coming out of the Senate.
00:30:48.000And if they don't take it up, I'll give you a prediction.
00:30:50.000The November 2026 elections are going to look a whole lot worse for Republicans than the November 2025 elections did when we just swept Virginia in a historic way and won big races in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Georgia, California, all over the country.
00:31:08.000Americans will see who's standing with them and who's standing them against them on affordability of health care.
00:31:29.000I don't believe you because Obamacare was supposed to fix it and it didn't fix it.
00:31:36.00040 days in, the Republicans were saying, we know we need to talk about health care, but we will not engage on health care until government is reopened.
00:31:46.000Now, it's fair to test somebody's red lines, and we tested them over and over again in October, and they didn't budge from that.
00:31:52.000So, frankly, I viewed the situation last weekend as we had no path, none to a health care fix until we reopened government.
00:32:01.000Now, we have a path, not a guarantee, but we at least have a path.
00:32:07.000Okay, well, yes, we'll see how your path goes.
00:32:09.000Meanwhile, Chris Murphy, Democrat from Connecticut, he doesn't even want to do that path.
00:32:14.000He says that the Democrats never should have reopened the government unless they got more government spending from the Republicans.
00:32:21.000I thought it was a mistake for Democrats to give up what was real political advantage coming off the elections that could have allowed us to reduce these premiums.
00:32:30.000In the end, I thought we had a real shot to get a continuing resolution passed that would have lowered prices for people.
00:32:37.000And I also worry that by capitulating, we have empowered Donald Trump, that Donald Trump is going to act even more brazenly and more lawlessly in the future because of how this vote turned out.
00:32:49.000Now, when it comes to Obamacare, there are actually real ways to lower prices in the healthcare industry.
00:32:55.000One of them is a plan by President Trump that is a good plan, which is to actually just give people money in their health savings accounts and let them use that how they want.
00:33:05.000It allows them to decide how much health care they actually want.
00:33:08.000Democrats are upset because they say that that will death spiral the ACA, the Obamacare marketplaces, because essentially what the Obamacare marketplaces are, are forcing young, healthy people to buy comprehensive plans they don't need in order to subsidize older, sicker people with pre-existing conditions.
00:33:25.000Trump instead would like to return power to the people by allowing them the elective ability to buy health care of their choice, and Democrats don't want that.
00:33:33.000According to the Washington Post, the scenario smacks of deja vu, with lawmakers and experts acknowledging the seemingly interminable battle around the 15-year-old health law.
00:33:41.000Republicans long struggled to deliver an AC alternative that can pass Congress and the return of a dynamic from Trump's first term that repeatedly ended in failure.
00:33:49.000Again, Democrats are always going to have an upper hand here as long as we're talking about subsidized marketplaces, always, because they can always outbid everybody.
00:33:59.000And Americans have an unfortunate habit when it comes to the polls.
00:34:02.000They're constantly saying they want to cut spending and cut the debt and cut the deficit.
00:34:05.000And then when asked if they want to spend money from the government on stuff that they want, the answer is always yes, which is why, according to the Washington Post, about three quarters of Americans say Congress should extend the enhanced tax credits for people who buy their own insurance through the ACA marketplaces, including half of Republicans.
00:34:23.000According to the CBO, permanently extending the subsidies would increase the number of insured people by nearly 4 million across the next decade at a cost of $350 billion to taxpayers.
00:34:32.000Now, the question that we should be asking, of course, is whether your coverage through ACA, particularly if you're young and healthy, improves your health outcome.
00:35:12.000And so I asked our sponsors and friends over at Comet, which is a project of perplexity, when did the U.S.'s healthcare spending per capita begin to exceed competitors based on GDP per capita?
00:35:22.000According to our sponsors of our comet, U.S. healthcare spending per capita began to consistently exceed that of comparable wealthy countries, both in absolute terms and as a share of GDP, starting in the 1980s and rapidly accelerating through the 1990s and 2000s, far outpacing GDP per capita growth and competitor nations spending.
00:35:40.000So I then asked, how much does Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare, how much do these contribute to this dynamic?
00:35:49.000Medicare and Medicaid have been major contributors to the growth and high level of U.S. healthcare spending, each accounting for a sizable share of national health expenditure since their inception, while the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, has had a complex effect, dampening spending growth rates in some areas, but increasing total coverage and thus increasing costs.
00:36:05.000Medicare represented about 21% of total U.S. healthcare spending as of 2023.
00:36:10.000That is up from 10% in 1970 and 19% in 1990.
00:36:16.000Medicaid accounts for about 18 to 19% of total national health expenditures.
00:36:21.000Medicaid expansion since 2014 increased access and reduced some uncompensated care, but also contributed to higher overall spending, especially in states that adopted expansion.
00:36:31.000So if the costs have risen disproportionately from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s on, might that have to do with the gigantic government expenditures that have eaten up a bigger and bigger portion of our healthcare spending overall?
00:36:43.000And so the question becomes, as always, how do you generate lower prices?
00:36:47.000And the answer to generate lower prices is more supply, not higher demand, which is what everyone keeps focusing on.
00:36:53.000What if we create higher demand with subsidies?
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00:39:47.000So there's a lot of talk about the word affordability, but nobody actually wants to discuss what actually needs to happen in order to achieve affordability.
00:39:54.000That is particularly true in the realm of healthcare, where Democrats seem to have played a wonderful trick on the American people.
00:40:00.000They said they were going to solve the affordability crisis in healthcare with Obamacare.
00:40:04.000And then it turns out that the prices of health insurance skyrocketed.
00:40:08.000People don't have the coverage that they want.
00:40:10.000And now they're saying that if they don't get further subsidies, then obviously affordability will be very, very difficult.
00:40:14.000So it's always this constant spiraling blackmail game where if you don't give them more money, then they say there's an affordability problem.
00:40:21.000And then you give them more money, it fails.
00:40:22.000And then they require more money in order to make that more money work.
00:40:26.000So how do we actually change, obviously, the healthcare system in the United States, a mixed healthcare system.
00:40:31.000It's got its good aspects and its bad aspects.
00:40:32.000I want to start with, before we get to what needs to change, I want to ask you, there's a lot of talk about how much Americans spend on healthcare.
00:40:39.000Do we actually spend a wildly disproportionate amount per household on healthcare compared to, say, other developed countries?
00:40:50.000Not only do we spend way more on healthcare than other industrialized countries, but we actually subsidize healthcare more per capita than any other country in the world.
00:40:59.000So when you hear people on the left say, well, the problem with healthcare is we don't subsidize it enough.
00:41:04.000Actually, the subsidies per capita, the government subsidies of healthcare in the U.S. are way higher than any other industrialized nation.
00:41:12.000So the answer that'll be given by members of the left is, well, that's just because of the evil insurance companies and their profit motive.
00:41:18.000So how do we actually bring down the prices?
00:41:22.000Well, that's a big topic and we don't have as much time for that broader topic of healthcare costs.
00:41:29.000But the one thing I'll say, the one core element of this, Ben, that your listeners can appreciate, the one thing we did that is the original sin of why American healthcare is more expensive than every other country in the world is what we did in World War II and its aftermath.
00:41:44.000So I think you know this story, Ben, which is that we imposed wage and price controls in World War II because we're worried that with all the men off to war, there wouldn't be a labor force and there would be spiraling wages and that would lead to inflation.
00:41:56.000So the Roosevelt administration literally passed a schedule where if you were a mechanic, you could make this much an hour.
00:42:02.000If you were a barber, you could make that much an hour.
00:42:04.000But the loophole was employers figured out they could offer health insurance to people and that would evade the wage controls.
00:42:11.000And then after the war was over, the wage controls were lifted, but the Eisenhower administration decided that they were going to exempt from taxation the value of your health insurance.
00:42:21.000So if you made $100 in wages, that you pay income taxes on Social Security taxes, Medicare taxes, state and local taxes.
00:42:28.000But $100 in health insurance would have no taxes.
00:42:32.000All of a sudden, all these things that never used to be categorized as covered by health insurance got covered by health insurance.
00:42:37.000And you as a worker didn't know how much you were paying for your health insurance because your employer bought it for you in theory.
00:42:43.000Of course, it's still being taken out of your paycheck.
00:42:46.000But that system, that 80-year-old system of your employer being the middleman of buying your health insurance instead of you buying it for yourself, that was the fundamental distortion that has led to every other problem in the healthcare system.
00:42:59.000So when you look at the healthcare system now, President Trump has been suggesting something that has been suggested by Republicans probably as long as I've been alive, which is the better use of health savings accounts instead of sending money directly to insurance companies via your employer.
00:43:12.000Instead, what we really should be doing is allowing particularly younger people to decide on where they want to spend their money.
00:43:18.000How would that impact healthcare in the United States?
00:43:22.000Frankly, not much because unless you reform the insurance system alongside with health savings accounts, health savings accounts can't really work.
00:43:30.000So let's say every American had $2,000 in a health savings account.
00:43:33.000That's great for your mammograms and your annual checkups and your lab tests.
00:43:37.000But if you get hit by a bus or you have a stroke or you have a $100,000 hospital bill for whatever reason, that $2,000 health savings account is not going to go very far.
00:43:45.000So you still need something like insurance.
00:43:48.000And the big problem, the thing that Obamacare did that was the most damaging of all the things Obamacare did was it created a one-size-fits-all federal regulatory architecture for insurance that people buy on their own.
00:44:02.000Remember, I mentioned that most people get insurance through their employer.
00:44:04.000A lot of people through Medicare and Medicaid get insurance through the government.
00:44:08.000But there's about 30 million people or so and 50 million in theory who could buy insurance individually, just like they buy car insurance or homeowners insurance or what have you.
00:44:17.000That's the spine, the foundation of a free market healthcare system is people buying their own insurance.
00:44:23.000And that requires you to deregulate Obamacare.
00:44:27.000And the trick there is you cannot deregulate Obamacare without 660 votes in the Senate because the regulatory aspects of Obamacare require a fillerbuster proof majority to reform.
00:44:41.000And so this is a core of why my strategy has differed from what a lot of other people are talking about when it comes to how should we deal with the current situation.
00:44:52.000So what is your strategy for dealing with the current situation given all the concerns about affordability?
00:44:58.000So we have these, as you mentioned, we have these Biden era enhanced subsidies.
00:45:03.000So there were subsidies originally in the so-called Affordable Care Act that were enacted.
00:45:08.000It was passed in 2010, but they didn't go into effect until 2014.
00:45:12.000And those have been trucking along and defraying the cost for some people of the high premiums in Obamacare.
00:45:18.000But during COVID, the Biden administration with the Democratic Congress passed these enhanced subsidies that basically allowed a lot of wealthy people to be eligible for Obamacare and also decreased the cost sharing or the amount of premiums that lower income people had to pay.
00:45:33.000Those, that was supposed to be temporary.
00:46:00.000But here's the strategic point that I'm trying to make is that if we want to reform these regulations in Obamacare, we need 60 votes in the Senate.
00:46:08.000In the current Senate, that means we need all the Republicans, 52, and we need eight Democrats.
00:46:12.000So can we get eight Democrats to help us reform some of the regulations in Obamacare?
00:46:18.000And I pitched an idea in the Washington Post about a month ago where we trade a temporary extension slash phase out one to two years of those enhanced subsidies in exchange for that 60 vote form of deregulation of Obamacare because the deregulation would be permanent because to reenact it, you'd have to get 60 votes again to change it again.
00:46:41.000And it would be a temporary win for the Democrats on the subsidy side.
00:46:46.000And in that way, we can actually make the individual market for health insurance more affordable.
00:46:50.000And if you want a free market healthcare system over the long term, that again has to be the foundation.
00:46:55.000If we can't help people buy insurance on their own, we're never going to have a free market system for everybody.
00:47:02.000And I think that that is the biggest point here is that our system is a mess.
00:47:06.000It is a mixture of nationalized health care through Medicare and Medicaid and heavily subsidized health care through Obamacare and then actual private health insurance, which has been made very difficult to actually obtain, employer-based health insurance.
00:47:20.000And basically, the only way to unwind it is going to have to be piecemeal, piece by piece, with hard due regulatory work that is unrewarding in the short term and perhaps more rewarding in the long term.
00:47:29.000Abik Roy, thanks so much for taking the time.
00:47:34.000Meanwhile, Zorn Mamdani is pledging over in New York that he will not work with ICE officials.
00:47:40.000According to the New York Post, if ICE or other immigration agents go out of bounds, the place to fight them is the courts and off the streets.
00:47:46.000And New York politicians from mayor-elect Zorn Mamdani on down are courting chaos if they play the issue otherwise.
00:47:52.000This is according to the Post editorial board.
00:47:54.000Consider city councilman Sean Abreu, Smear Wednesday, posting an inflammatory video he claimed showed Homeland Security officers pulling a migrant out of an SUV in Washington Heights without due process.
00:48:04.000Abreu blasted the arrest as, quote, deeply disturbing and part of a despicable pattern of intimidation, huffing that agencies, quote, carrying out President Trump's agenda of detaining people without due process have no place in our city.
00:48:15.000In actuality, the person who is being arrested was a person who hopped the border in 2021 and had gotten due process and had a removal order, actually.
00:48:25.000Mamdani continues to promise to resist removals of even violent criminal, illegal immigrants, calling ICE a rogue agency and vowing to stop it from enforcing the law with deportations.
00:48:39.000According to Axios, Homeland Security is launching its operations in Charlotte and now has New Orleans in its sights.
00:48:47.000Operation Midway Blitz, which targeted undocumented immigrants in the Chicago area, resulted in 3,000 arrests, according to Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noam.
00:48:56.000And now, apparently, they're going to escalate in places like Charlotte and also New Orleans.
00:49:02.000Here is the Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks talking about the effect of all of this.
00:49:09.000Our recruitment numbers are through the roof, Griffin.
00:49:12.000You know, imagine that when you have an administration like President Trump and Secretary Noam that actually support the men and women of U.S. Border Patrol, allow us to go out there and do our work.
00:49:20.000People want to be a part of this mission.
00:49:24.000Border security is national security, and our recruitment numbers are through the roof.
00:49:28.000We've put over 1,000 new agents on the ground this year, have 1,000 at the academy, and plan on tripling that next year.
00:49:36.000Yeah, and the president's immigration policy, particularly on the southern border, has been wildly successful in terms of internal deportations.
00:49:43.000ICE has been doing good work, but that was always going to be more dicey.
00:49:47.000They have been largely targeting criminal, illegal immigrants, meaning illegal immigrants who are here and then have committed other crimes other than the illegal immigration.
00:49:54.000And, you know, all the talk about mass deportation, millions and millions of people being deported from the interior of the United States, that is very unlikely to happen, but you are getting some level of what Mitt Romney used to call self-deportation, people who believe that they will be arrested and thus are going back to their home countries.
00:50:08.000Meanwhile, Hunter Biden is back and he's better than ever.
00:50:14.000He's back to compare President Trump to Adolf Hitler because we haven't had enough of this.
00:50:21.000It is the same thing that we sat as students of history and wondered like I think everybody does is how did the German people, how did the German people allow that to happen?
00:51:52.000Okay, so, yeah, it must be the sexism.
00:51:55.000Again, the Democratic whining, I'm not sure this is a strategy for them, but we'll see how it works out.
00:51:59.000Michelle Obama also had comments about black women's hair.
00:52:03.000Now, I understand this is a frequent complaint.
00:52:05.000This has been a thing for a very long time.
00:52:07.000The talk about how black women are expected to straighten their hair as opposed to wearing their hair naturally when they go into their jobs.
00:52:14.000This may have been an issue 30 years ago.
00:52:17.000I would love to see some stats on whether it is an issue today.
00:53:00.000Number two, you're sitting there with straight hair.
00:53:01.000I feel like if Michelle Obama wanted to make a statement, she probably should not do that, correct?
00:53:05.000I mean, if that's submission to white people, then Michelle Obama's pretty powerful and she's on a stage filled with people who love her.
00:53:12.000She could wear her hair however she damn well chooses.
00:53:14.000I assume she prefers her hair that way, which is why she's wearing it that way, unless there is some unseen white hand forcing her to straighten her hair.
00:53:21.000Michelle Obama running around the country complaining.
00:53:24.000I mean, truly, our country has a lot of complainers.
00:53:27.000I will say that a lot of people complain about this country a lot, who really should not be complaining about this amazing place to live.
00:53:34.000Meanwhile, new details emerging in the case of Thomas Crooks.
00:53:38.000He, of course, is the would-be assassin against President Trump, who ended up actually murdering somebody who is behind him.
00:53:45.000He murdered Corey Comperatori, as you recall, the firefighter, volunteer firefighter, and seriously wounded a couple of other people who are sitting in the bleachers behind Trump at that Butler, Pennsylvania rally.
00:53:56.000According to Miranda Devine writing for the New York Post, there are now new details emerging regarding the background of the shooter.
00:54:04.000Well, thanks to an enterprising source who uncovered Crooks' hidden digital footprint, we can see that actually the FBI misled Congress by omission because they left out an entire section of Crooks' online interactions from January to August 2020 when he did an ideological backflip and went from a rapidly pro-Trump to rapidly anti-Trump and then went dark, never seeming to post again.
00:54:25.000Among the 17 accounts uncovered by our source were ones on YouTube, Snapchat, Ben Moselle, GroupMe Discord, Google Play, QuizletChess.com, and Quora.
00:54:33.000Apparently, in his sort of original iteration, he loved Trump.
00:54:41.000He wrote on December 12, 2019, murder the Democrats in all caps.
00:54:45.000But apparently, in early 2020, he flipped and became incredibly critical of President Trump.
00:54:53.000The first time he criticized Trump was on January 23rd, 2020, when he commented on a video of law professor Jonathan Turley talking about Trump's first impeachment.
00:55:02.000Crooks wrote, keep in mind the only reason we may know about any of this is because of Trump's stupidity.
00:55:06.000And then he started calling Trump's supporters a cult and called Trump a racist.
00:55:10.000So the question is, what exactly changed?
00:55:14.000Well, fascinatingly, one of the aspects of Crooks' background that is coming out here in Miranda Devine's reporting, Crooks appears to have been interested in furries and exploring gender identity.
00:55:27.000He described himself with the pronouns they them on the platform DeviantArt, which is one of the biggest online hubs for furry art and the furry community.
00:55:35.000Two accounts linked to Crooks' primary email were found on DeviantArt under usernames with Epic Microwave and The Epic Microwave.
00:55:43.000The account suggests he had an obsession with scantily clad cartoon characters sporting muscle-bound male bodies and female heads.
00:55:50.000So could this be another situation like the alleged murderer of Charlie Kirk?
00:55:58.000In other information that we now have, apparently one of the people Crooks interacted with online was a Willie Tepis, a member of a Norwegian neo-Nazi group, the Nordic Resistance Movement, which has since been designated a terrorist organization by the State Department.
00:56:10.000Apparently, he encouraged violence and Crooks' extremism using the Maoist phrase, political power comes from the barrel of a gun.
00:56:19.000So the question as to what the FBI knew and when they knew it, that remains out there.
00:56:24.000The FBI obviously should reveal as much information as humanly possible about all of this.
00:56:30.000My understanding is that the president has been reticent to release this because, kind of like the Epstein files, the president just doesn't like distracting stories.
00:56:38.000But I think what the president should get at this point is that there is a streisand effect to everything, everything online.
00:56:44.000That if you say, I don't want it out there, there is likely to now be significantly more coverage than if you had never said anything about it at all.
00:56:52.000Apparently, the Secret Service told Susan Crabtree, an investigative reporter for Real Clear Politics, that Crooks was not a person of record at the U.S. Secret Service in 2020 and was not known until Butler.
00:57:06.000So, again, it is worthwhile just revealing all the files, seriously, at this point.