00:00:00.000Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk Show, the stimulus is a disaster.
00:00:03.000We're unafraid to dive into this topic and explain to you economically why this stimulus is such a bad idea and why it's quite honestly unnecessary.
00:00:12.000That and so much more is made possible thanks to all of your generous support at charliekirk.com/slash support.
00:00:19.000And I also want to say the Charlie Kirk Show is brought to you by ExpressVPN.
00:00:23.000Fight back against having your voice censored by both big tech and big government.
00:01:03.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:38.000What is the thought process behind all of this?
00:01:41.000This is something that really interests me, and I've done a considerable amount of research and thinking on this topic.
00:01:47.000I want to dive right into it because I think that everyone's premise in general when it comes to government-backed taxpayer-funded stimulus is wrong.
00:01:57.000There is a belief right now amongst both Republicans and Democrats that we must do something.
00:02:06.000The prevailing Washington, D.C. narrative, which is usually something that is wrong and designed to benefit the few and the well-connected, is that a massive multi-trillion dollar spending bill is needed and it was needed months ago.
00:02:44.000Far less people than what the models would show, far less people than what Dr. Anthony Fauci predicted.
00:02:50.000But yes, people are dying and hurting from the virus.
00:02:53.000However, more people are hurting because of the lockdowns than because of the virus.
00:02:59.000Our reaction to the virus, shutting down the entire American economy, preventing business transactions from happening, restricting commerce, that is having far greater damage than the epidemiological Pearl Harbor that China sent us, and they should be forced to pay for every single American death.
00:03:20.000So it's because of the lockdowns that we have tens of millions of people out of work.
00:03:24.000It's because of the lockdowns that restaurants are not able to pay their rent.
00:03:28.000It's because of the lockdowns that people have had the hardest year financially and economically of their entire life.
00:03:37.000But despite this, Congress met and passed, and President Donald Trump signed into law a $900 billion Chinese coronavirus relief bill, alongside a $1.4 trillion government funding bill.
00:03:55.000Within the Chinese coronavirus relief bill omnibus package, and they were passed side by side.
00:04:01.000So I'm going to basically describe them as one giant bill.
00:04:05.000Here's some of the spending that is within this bill.
00:04:08.000$8 billion for the overseas contingency operations and the global war on terrorism.
00:04:13.000$1.7 billion on USAID operations abroad.
00:04:18.000$26.5 billion for bilateral economic assistance abroad.
00:04:22.000So we're sending $26 billion around the world.
00:04:26.000Where's the $26 billion to go help inner-city families that are struggling to be able to get their children educated?
00:04:49.000$1.7 billion, strangely, for just the country of Jordan.
00:04:53.000$1.9 billion for international food aid.
00:04:56.000$35 billion in new clean energy initiatives to fight climate change.
00:05:00.000$9 billion for international security assistance.
00:05:04.000$5.9 billion for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.
00:05:08.000$950 million for basic education programs in foreign countries.
00:05:13.000$740 million for educational and cultural exchange programs in foreign countries.
00:05:18.000$1.5 billion for contributions to international organizations.
00:05:22.000$224 million for tax breaks for motorsports venues.
00:05:27.000$16 billion in tax credit for businesses that hire individuals facing, quote, significant barriers to employment.
00:05:33.000$1 billion tax credit for special expensing rules for entertainment productions.
00:05:38.000$13 billion in tax breaks for clean energy initiatives.
00:05:42.000$9 billion in tax credits for beer, wine, and distilled spirits producers.
00:05:47.000$2 billion to enable scientific information about the earth and its changing climate.
00:05:53.000$16.2 billion in excess funding for transportation, housing, and urban development.
00:05:58.000$19.2 billion in excess funding for Department of Labor and Department of Education and Health and Human Services.
00:06:04.000$6.9 billion in excess funding for energy and water development.
00:06:08.000And $12.3 billion in excess funding for Federal Emergency Management Agency.
00:06:14.000Just out of that list, over $203 billion.
00:06:20.000That's just the major pieces of waste.
00:06:23.000That does not include some of the crony corporate handouts that are within this bill, some of the massive corporatist funding within this bill.
00:06:32.000That's just the most outstanding pieces of what is called pork.
00:06:37.000In addition, there is a $600 provision for Americans that are just checks for people under a certain income threshold.
00:06:46.000Now, this is all under the guise that the economy is suffering, people are suffering, we must do something.
00:06:52.000But does stimulus actually help people?
00:06:53.000Is this the proper role of government?
00:08:38.000In this episode, I'm going to dive into great detail of what stimulus actually is, what inflation is, what is money, and why Congress, and yes, the president should have done nothing except reopen our country.
00:09:04.000Well, usually stimulus happens because of widespread suffering and economic depression.
00:09:11.000I have lived through two of the largest pieces of stimulus in American history after the Great Recession of 2008 and, of course, the Chinese coronavirus.
00:09:22.000Let us not forget earlier this year, Congress passed a multi-trillion dollar stimulus package that included $70 million for PBS, $85 million for national public radio, $300 million for refugee resettlement, hundreds of billions of dollars for crony corporate interests.
00:09:43.000The other major stimulus bill was back in 2008.
00:09:47.000President George W. Bush signed the Economic Stimulus Act to try to alleviate the effects and stave off the recession.
00:09:55.000That was $152 billion in a $600 tax rebate, followed, of course, by President Barack Obama's stimulus package, $1 trillion, back in 2009, which was around having green jobs, infrastructure, education, health, which provided zero stimulus to economic growth.
00:10:14.000Stimulus has never worked in the history of our country.
00:10:18.000Now, I'm sure a lot of you were educated incorrectly about the Great Depression.
00:10:23.000Many of you probably were taught that the New Deal was a successful government intrusion into the economy.
00:10:43.000We don't talk about that, but there was no major structural changes in unemployment, so they passed the Second New Deal of 1935 to 1936.
00:10:50.000It was a series of programs referred to as the Alphabet Soup.
00:10:54.000Of course, it was the Security Exchange Commission, the Federal Housing Authority, the Tennessee Valley Authority, but we don't talk about what happened a couple years later.
00:11:03.000In fact, one year later, the Great Recession of 1937.
00:11:09.000It was such a major recession that unemployment went to negative 18%.
00:11:17.000The only thing that got us out of the Great Depression was World War II.
00:11:21.000You know, it helps when your greatest economic competitors get bombed to smithereens.
00:11:27.000Really, no one else to compete against because of all the pent-up demand and the years of government-forced sacrifice in the years of 1940, 41, 42, and 43.
00:11:38.000What followed in the years to come was one of the greatest economic booms in American history, not because of the war, but the pent-up demand and the celebratory spending that came in years to come.
00:11:52.000In fact, despite what your history teachers might tell you, we actually cut government spending in the years after World War II.
00:12:00.000We dramatically cut military spending, and because of that, we saw massive economic investment in our country.
00:12:09.000Look, you guys have heard me talk about Good Ranchers before.
00:12:12.000Good Ranchers began with the standard of bringing top-quality, 100% American-born, raised, and harvested meat to families across America.
00:12:20.000This vision was instilled into them from their grandparents that owned community grocery stores and believed in trust, charity, and family values.
00:12:26.000Goodranchers.com partners directly with only American ranches from across the United States to bring the highest quality meat straight to your door.
00:12:34.000Look, if you guys want to sign up for Good Ranchers, I highly recommend it.
00:13:34.000They were actually at one time they owned Rockefeller Plaza and Center.
00:13:39.000The Imperial Palace in Japan was the most valuable piece of real estate on the planet.
00:13:45.000And then because of inflated asset prices and bad and malinvestment, Japan went through a massive economic recession and eventually a depression.
00:13:55.000And what is now known as the lost 30 years, Japan is still living through this, where Japan's debt to GDP ratio is 263.99%.
00:14:06.000They owe more money than they are actually worth.
00:14:08.000And what does Japan do in response to the Chinese coronavirus?
00:14:12.000They double down to deliver the world's biggest stimulus package.
00:14:16.000I suppose once you're so far into debt and you've already devalued your currency to such a great extent, what's another couple trillion dollars between friends?
00:14:28.000Japan is a perfect test case of what happens when a country starts to really find itself addicted to bad government spending and inflationary practices.
00:14:39.000Japan has lost the last 30 years of becoming an economic superpower because it decided to borrow against its own value in the 1990s, early 2000s, and even to today.
00:14:54.000Japan is a perfect example of what happens when you start to engage in over-the-top deficit spending and create money out of thin air.
00:15:06.000So this stimulus package, signed by President Trump and passed by a Republican Senate, inexcusably passed by a Republican Senate and by House Democrats, is at direct odds with the laws of nature.
00:15:19.000We don't fight the laws of nature, but for whatever reason, because of political expediency, because of the fear of getting called bad names by the Washington Post or the New York Times, we decide to fight the laws of economics.
00:15:35.000Here's a question that I'm sure that someone has not asked you recently: What is money?
00:15:43.000We talk about $900 billion, $1.3 trillion, $3 trillion.
00:16:38.000The double incidence of wants problem is that what if I don't want a wheel, but I want your oranges, and the only thing you want in exchange for your oranges is a wheel.
00:16:49.000Well, then I have to go find someone that has a wheel, find something they want, trade for that wheel to go find someone so I can get the basket of oranges.
00:17:21.000It also saved the retention of value problem, especially in agrarian economies when you had a certain harvest or a certain crop or a certain produce or a certain livestock, things die.
00:17:37.000And so instead of having to sell all of your crops at once or sell them for a fire sale, money allowed you to be able to sell your oranges to someone that's willing to pay a big price to them.
00:17:52.000Your value is just not in the perishing window of oranges or cucumbers or strawberries or whatever you might be growing.
00:18:00.000Money actually helped us break out of an agrarian economy and into a more industrial economy.
00:18:07.000It allowed you to have a couple very good years of harvest and then use that harvest not just for trading something for perishable good, for perishable good, but solving the retention of value problem.
00:18:21.000You were then able to use that money to maybe then buy a factory, to maybe then buy transportation so you can move your family or progress up the economic ladder.
00:19:05.000Let's get the Federal Reserve working for us.
00:19:08.000Printing more money doesn't make more stuff appear.
00:19:16.000I wish a politician would have the courage to say this.
00:19:19.000I wish a politician, one of the many members of the House of Representatives and U.S. Senate that asked for our help throughout the last couple of years, would have the courage to go on the House floor and say, you do know that creating all of this money, printing all of this money, it doesn't make more stuff actually magically reappear.
00:19:41.000What it does do is it spreads the value of the goods and services among a larger number of dollars.
00:19:51.000And then you get something called inflation.
00:19:57.000Take out a piece of paper, take out a pen, and write number of dollars, and then a line underneath it, and underneath that line, write goods and services.
00:20:07.000Here's how you calculate inflation, the number of dollars that are out there and goods and services that are being provided.
00:20:16.000What has happened because of the greatest government intrusion in American history through these lockdowns, we have more dollars than ever before, thanks to the stimulus and the foolish war against the laws of economics that our leaders have decided to wage over the number of goods and services, which is decreasing by definition.
00:20:37.000Over 200,000 small businesses have gone under since the beginning of the draconian lockdowns.
00:20:44.000But the number of dollars have increased.
00:20:47.000Now, to play devil's advocate against myself, the Keynesian economists, John Maynard Keynes, who of course wrote the general theory of employment, interest, and money, basically started something that is called the Keynesian revolution.
00:21:02.000He had the famous quote in the long run, We Are All Dead.
00:21:05.000He was a huge proponent of deficit spending.
00:21:07.000He helped flag the term liquidity trap, which is a bunch of nonsense.
00:21:15.000However, John Maynard Keynes would be the significant influence behind the economic school of thinking for the Democrat Party.
00:21:24.000And so John Maynard Keynes would argue that in a time of economic depression, economic stagnation, which we are living through, the solution would be, let's go inject trillions of new dollars.
00:21:36.000People will spend with those trillions of new dollars.
00:21:39.000Therefore, it will result in more economic activity.
00:22:22.000When we hire someone here on the Charlie Kirk show, we hire a researcher.
00:22:26.000I'm not spending money to hire a researcher.
00:22:30.000I'm investing money to hire a researcher, knowing that any dollar I put in will be delayed benefit to one day result in meaningful research.
00:22:42.000That means that I'll be able to deliver better podcast episodes in the future.
00:22:46.000Spending would be me just going out to have a meal, having immediate gratification, but not believing long-term there will be that much value from that meal.
00:22:59.000Spending is different than investment.
00:23:02.000You see, the Keynesian economists and a lot of our economically illiterate leaders in both parties, they choose to conflate the two.
00:23:11.000They say that this Chinese coronavirus spending package will increase spending.
00:23:49.000And we willingly, happily pay people for that.
00:23:53.000Sometimes those people game the system.
00:23:55.000They use crony corporate handouts to benefit themselves.
00:23:59.000Sometimes they buy out the competition.
00:24:01.000Sometimes they act in an overly corporatist mindset.
00:24:05.000We are heavily critical of those corporations here on this program.
00:24:08.000But generally, entrepreneurs in the small, medium, and sometimes on the bigger scale, they want to solve problems for you so that they can get personally and monetarily rewarded.
00:24:21.000I think it's a great thing when I see a new restaurant open up in Scottsdale.
00:24:47.000Doubling dollar bills simply doubles prices, especially when you don't have economic activity to correlate alongside the creation of that money.
00:28:17.000Like all big lies that are told by our politicians and our corporate elite, there's probably a nugget of truth.
00:28:24.000Because we are able to shop around quicker than ever before and compare prices without ever actually having to get in a car, you are able to save more money than ever before.
00:28:35.000But the way that we actually calculate inflation is very deceiving.
00:28:41.000And before we get into actually how we calculate inflation, the question should be, who benefits from this stimulus?
00:28:47.000Answer, the wealthiest Americans among us.
00:28:50.000Normal people are going to get crushed by this stimulus.
00:28:58.000The dollar bills that you have in your bank account actually don't even exist in real form.
00:29:03.000We don't have the physical capacity or capability to print the amount of money that is necessary to justify the digital currencies that are out there.
00:30:50.000They'll buy things that are finite, not infinite, like our current fraud of a fiat monetary currency system.
00:31:00.000And here's how inflation is actually measured.
00:31:03.000You have the price index, which is allegedly a basket of goods and services, which is a moving average of the CPI, which is the consumer price index.
00:31:11.000The inflation rate is a percentage change in the index.
00:31:15.000And so, for example, Venezuela year over year will have a 500% change in prices.
00:31:22.000Last 33 years, prices have about doubled.
00:31:24.000It's really more than that, because the way that we calculate inflation is incredibly deceptive.
00:31:28.000We don't take into account education, marginally take into account transportation.
00:31:33.000Housing is an outlier in a lot of sense.
00:31:35.000And so, because of that, we're told there's no inflation, there's no inflation.
00:31:38.000Meanwhile, working people see that the dollars that are represented in their wages are actually worth less than it was two years ago.
00:31:48.000So, why are so few people speaking out against this fraud of a stimulus?
00:31:55.000Why are so few people talking about what the actual stimulus should be, which is reopening the country and incentivizing investment and saving, not reckless spending?
00:32:08.000The economy is not going to magically turn around.
00:32:10.000You get your $600 and all of a sudden you go take your family out to a big steak dinner.
00:32:15.000Now, that might immediately help a couple waiters and waitresses in the supply chain, but that's not long-term investment.
00:32:24.000Answer number one: you don't demolish your currency.
00:32:28.000A country's currency represents the combined needs, wants, interests, goals, ambitions of its working class.
00:32:39.000If a worker does not feel as if the currency they are slaving over every single day to earn is worth anything, they will disengage and support Bolshevik Marxist socialist ideas overnight.
00:32:55.000The number one goal of any stimulus or any sort of relief package should be protect the currency at all costs.
00:33:06.000Our leaders have decided to betray plumbers, veterans, teachers, pipe fitters, and truck drivers.
00:33:16.000Instead, they're giving a wink and a nod to the caviar-eating champagne, sipping, private jet-flying ruling class from Malibu, Menlo Park, and Martha's Vineyard.
00:33:37.000But for the millions of young people that we touch every single month here on this program, you're going to get screwed by this.
00:33:45.000So, the first stimulus should be: we're going to protect our currency.
00:33:48.000While the rest of the world is going to engage in another long-term quantitative easing, central bank-subsidized creating money out of thin-air cycle, we're going to do the opposite.
00:34:00.000We're actually going to protect our workers.
00:34:03.000We are actually going to stimulate our economy by opening our economy.
00:34:08.000Our leaders don't have that kind of courage, so instead, we fight the laws of nature, not dissimilar than how the left does, where they decide to wage war on gender norms, biology.
00:34:21.000A human universal is when you subsidize bad behavior, you're going to get more of that behavior.
00:34:26.000We are subsidizing the lockdown states and taxing the free states.
00:34:32.000Another law of human nature, thanks to economics, is when you create something that is meaningless, you're not going to get something meaningful out of that.
00:34:42.000Every country and civilization that has decided to experiment with fiat currency crumbles.
00:34:54.000Now, I'm sure you're asking, well, Charlie, how's China dealing with all of this?
00:34:57.000Before China passed any sort of massive central bank quantitative easing Bank of China fraudulent scheme, whatever the Chinese Communist Party would bake up, they've opened their country.
00:35:07.000Now, how they were able to do that so quickly is something that I hope gets thoroughly investigated.
00:35:16.000But they knew that if they just created a bunch of money out of thin air without having correlating economic activity, then inflation would happen.
00:35:25.000Vladimir Lenin famously said, You want to break the backs of a working class?
00:35:33.000So when you have all of these massive announcements that we're going to spend a trillion dollars, which most of which is wasteful, being sent all around the world, $1.7 billion to Jordan, $30 billion to climate change.
00:35:48.000And when you do this and you expect economic activity to follow, you're intentionally deceiving people.
00:35:57.000The only way that we get back to the economy that we enjoyed under President Donald Trump earlier this year is by embracing therapeutics, understanding how to protect yourself against the virus if you're worried about the virus, and fully reopening the country.
00:36:12.000What Congress should have done is they should have said, here's the five things we know that work against the Chinese coronavirus.
00:36:29.000Instead, our leaders, being mostly cowardly and foolish, they said, we're going to pay states to stay closed.
00:36:37.000An inflationary bubble is what happens next.
00:36:42.000And I think a lot of this is because our leaders are afraid to actually have tough conversations.
00:36:48.000I think that many of our congressional leadership know these laws of economics.
00:36:53.000If I sat down with them and I asked them about the three biggest stimulus packages ever passed, 1932, 2008, and 2020, I think they know at a very personal level how bad this is for the country.
00:37:46.000You might as well invite the socialists to run our country, invite the corporatists to become endlessly wealthy instantaneously.
00:37:52.000The second thing is that you know how many good entrepreneurs that are trying to solve problems that will soon find their lifelong savings rendered useless.
00:38:03.000Basically, if you played by the rules your entire life and did not over-leverage yourself, did not borrow more money than you should have, you're getting penalized.
00:38:17.000Our entire country is basically structured on debt.
00:38:21.000From leverage buyouts from Wall Street to student loan debt to corporate debt, our whole country is built on the full faith and credit of the United States.
00:38:31.000Basically, our entire civilization is leveraged on our military might.
00:38:50.000And so our entire civilization, the last 30 years, post-1990, has been, how do we live a little bit larger and borrow on the limits even more while deteriorating our currency.
00:39:07.000You want to know why we have a record income wealth divide in our country?
00:39:11.000Central bank policies that have demolished your capacity to save and invest.
00:39:48.000And the place this will lead us is all of a sudden just no different than if you're listening to this and you have a pen, you have a bottle of water and you lift it and you drop it and you see that pen drop.
00:40:03.000You know that pen will stay there unless you push it.
00:40:06.000You know the laws of Newtonian physics that an object at rest will stay at rest.
00:40:11.000The laws of economics are going to come and hurt every single decent person in this country.
00:40:18.000And people with malevolent aims and objectives, socialists, Bolsheviks, Marxists, and the corporatists, they will benefit from this.
00:40:27.000The corporatists will be wealthier than ever before, and you'll have a smaller group of mega corporations that will have a form of corporate tyranny over us all.
00:40:47.000And you want to talk about the best possible economic circumstance for an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or a Bernie Sanders to all of a sudden demagogue their way to power?
00:41:01.000It's going to be hard to argue against them when all of a sudden they say, why does Bezos have $200 billion and you can't make your $200 a month rent?
00:41:14.000All of a sudden, if we just start using free market euphemisms, I'm going to stop myself and say, you know what?
00:41:19.000You're right, but you're right for the wrong reasons.
00:41:21.000You're only right because we did the instant gratification public policy measure of passing reckless stimulus when we knew we couldn't afford it, we knew we didn't have the economic activity to correlate with it, we knew that more dollar bills would not all of a sudden create new stuff.
00:41:42.000We knew we were subsidizing bad behavior.
00:41:43.000We knew that the country was going to stay locked down for more and more months beyond that.
00:41:47.000We knew that we weren't solving the retention of value problem.
00:41:49.000We knew we weren't solving the double incidence of wants problem.
00:41:54.000We knew that printing more money doesn't all of a sudden make all this beautiful new productivity occur or appear.
00:42:00.000We knew the opposite actually was the case based on the last round of stimulus.
00:42:04.000We knew that the creation of that money would only spread the value of goods and services among a larger number of dollars.
00:42:11.000We knew all of that, and we still decided to do that.
00:42:17.000Because we didn't want a bunch of people screaming at us.
00:42:19.000And let me be clear, a targeted relief bill, no more than $75 to $100 billion, could have been there for every single displaced business if it correlated with a proper reopening strategy and subsidizing the reopening of our country, demanding it.
00:42:59.000I remain an American patriot who does want to bring back American manufacturing, limit the supply of plastics flowing into our country.
00:43:10.000I believe that a form of tariffs and sanctions on our enemies might result in higher prices, but will help the American worker and with it, the fabric of our country.
00:43:24.000However, one thing that I have been fighting for since the beginning of Turning Point USA is to stop our country's addiction to a long-term debt cycle and to always look to the kingdom of Washington, D.C. to solve our problems.
00:43:40.000And what we did here and what we continue to do will only mean we're going to have to pass another stimulus in another six months.
00:43:48.000Rich people are only going to get richer.
00:43:51.000And AOC is smiling in a corner because she is planning her blame game to get her and her comrades into power.
00:43:59.000So people say, well, Charlie, what can I do about this?
00:44:01.000If you have any money, go buy stuff you can touch and feel.
00:44:06.000Because more than even inflation that is coming, conflict is coming.
00:44:09.000You can't all of a sudden create money out of thin air, subsidize bad behavior, send it all across the planet, and not act as if there will be professional politicians that will come in and place blame to go get themselves back into higher power.
00:44:24.000The other thing you can do is speak out against it and educate people on economics.
00:44:28.000The amount of economic illiteracy in our country stuns me.
00:44:32.000The amount of people that actually know economics that have no courage also stuns me.
00:44:37.000But we picked the tough fights here on the Charlie Kirk show.
00:44:40.000We know that you guys support us at charliekirk.com slash support to give you guys the truth, not to all of a sudden hide behind these nicely worded slogans.
00:44:54.000So we're going to keep on following this as it progresses.
00:44:58.000However, I could tell you right now that this is just another example of Washington, D.C. spending money on a bunch of nonsense, sending it all around the planet, and believing this lie that we must do something when the something is right in front of you.
00:45:32.000You guys can email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:45:35.000You guys can support us at charliekirk.com/slash support.
00:45:38.000If you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, where we play offense with a sense of urgency to win America's culture war, go to tpusa.com.