00:00:04.000We tell the truth about the federal debt and deficit, and we talk about how Social Security is something that is really tough to talk about.
00:00:55.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:54.000We are heading towards a fiscal and financial apocalypse.
00:01:58.000And people said, oh, yeah, you know, that's good thinking.
00:02:03.000Well, now, 11 years later, as Turning Point USA has grown and strengthened into the most powerful organization, one of the most, if not the most powerful organization in the country, definitely with young people, but potentially overall, the national debt is over $33 trillion.
00:02:23.000So we went from $12.7 trillion to $33 trillion, a near three times a tripling of the national debt in a decade.
00:03:02.000If you were to summarize many of our comments here today, big government needs cheap money.
00:03:07.000It needs the ability to turn on the printing press, allow it to go.
00:03:10.000Because if you target the money, and to the libertarians' credit, I disagree with them on basically everything else.
00:03:17.000This is something that I agree 100% on.
00:03:19.000If you are able to have the money be sound, it's a lot harder to finance the foreign wars, a lot harder to pay for the warfare state and the welfare state.
00:03:30.000We have a warfare state and a welfare state that work in harmony right now, that finance Zelensky's regime, that financed the war of Iraq and Afghanistan, that finance all these domestic programs that bleed the American taxpayers dry.
00:03:48.000Cheap money allows big government to grow bigger and bigger and bigger.
00:03:55.000Now, we tried to warn people, and we were just a bunch of high school and early college kids in 2012 and 2013, that we have to stop the spending, balance the budget.
00:04:06.000But that means you would have to live within your means.
00:04:11.000And quite honestly, many people do not want to see any cuts at all to government programs.
00:04:20.000Now, if I were to say this, and I'm not even, I don't believe it.
00:04:23.000I believe every person is obligated to receive Medicare and Social Security.
00:04:27.000But if I were even to say that we need a slight cut in Medicare or Social Security, something I don't believe, I would receive 5,000 emails of very angry listeners.
00:04:55.000But if I were to say, we don't want to close some of these domestic welfare programs, a different portion of the population would send me a bunch of emails.
00:05:01.000So we have grown addicted to the party, the carnival of getting drunk with cheap money.
00:05:13.000In 2012, a $12.7 trillion debt felt manageable compared to where we are now.
00:05:20.000We thought we were drowning in debt, that our generation was not going to be able to survive.
00:06:59.000But the debt should be one that transcends all political lines.
00:07:04.000But there's a cohort of Republicans and Democrats that believe the lie of Keynesian economics.
00:07:11.000An economist by the name of John Maynard Keynes, if you do not know that name, you should educate yourself on it.
00:07:16.000He believed that deficits don't matter.
00:07:18.000He said, quote, we are all dead in the long run.
00:07:21.000He believed in the national debt actually being in some ways an asset to a country.
00:07:28.000John Maynard Keynes, contrasted with the Austrian economists and Milton Friedman, believed that the state can fix all economic problems, that you have boom and bust cycles, and you just need to turn on the quantitative easing.
00:07:45.000And we have become a quantitative, easing, dependent society.
00:07:50.000Now, part of this all started at 9-11.
00:07:52.000Talked about how our country reacted so poorly post-9-11.
00:07:57.000After 9-11, remember the green span put, turned on the guzzle, can't have the stock market collapse, can't have the stock market collapse.
00:08:06.000Then, after the 2008 financial crisis, when we saw Lehman go under, we saw so many of these other banks in a fragile state, we turned on the guzzle and we made a decision post-2008.
00:08:19.000Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner, who was running the Treasury Department in 2007 and 2008, well, 2008, 2009, under Barack Hussein Obama, they made a decision.
00:08:29.000The Goldman Sachs gang of Geithner and Paulson, they said, we are going to love cheap money.
00:08:36.000They said, look, we need to spend money we don't have because if we borrow against ourselves, then only we have to pay for it.
00:08:46.000And that's what most people don't understand about our national debt.
00:08:48.000If you were to go on the street and you say, hey, who do we owe this money to?
00:08:52.000Yeah, we owe a fair amount to China, about a trillion dollars.
00:09:03.000What this does, though, it's an IOU that if interest rates were ever to go up, which they are, just the interest payments on the debt alone to service the debt, the price of previous borrowing could cripple the federal budget.
00:09:19.000And this is not a Democrat blame session.
00:09:23.000Republicans have been just as much, if not more guilty of fiscal irresponsibility over the last decade, of allowing budgets to grow.
00:09:39.000You could actually go back and find those tweets, Andrew Orion.
00:09:42.000We were one of the few people in public life that said zero stimulus, zero spending, open up the economy.
00:09:49.000I think the Senate voted 97 to nothing for all of this deficit spending, 97 to nothing, because DC saw it as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to grow the leviathan, to strengthen the machine, and to make the beast untouchable.
00:10:05.000From $11 trillion to $33 trillion in just a decade.
00:10:09.000We'll talk about it as this continuing resolution fight looms and we have become a debtor nation.
00:10:17.000I want to talk about relieffactor.com.
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00:10:54.000For current beneficiaries, none of your obligations should be touched.
00:11:01.000If you're receiving Social Security, if you're receiving Medicare, if you look at the composition of the federal proposed budget, a lot of it, though, and I don't like this word entitlement.
00:12:16.000I'm willing to strike a deal so that people in their 20s are going to get next to nothing for future Social Security if it means we can balance the budget.
00:12:26.000If I were to say that about people in their 50s right now, there would be a revolt at our studio of all the issues that if I were to even touch, even allude to saying that a 1% adjustment of Social Security or Medicare, it would be a riot.
00:12:42.000I get it because a lot of people depend on it and a lot of people, you know, live on it and they expect it.
00:12:49.000And look, you have to understand, you work many decades to pay into it and you're made a promise and the government says, oh, you know, not so fast.
00:12:58.000I will say there's a lot of lying around the Social Security or Medicare issue, a lot of lying, where it is used as a political football.
00:13:07.000Now, I will say that for future retirees, people under the age of 45, we should absolutely raise the retirement age.
00:13:14.000I'm going to say something very provocative.
00:14:03.000But you say, Charlie, I'm just going to retire and I'm just going to go golf.
00:14:08.000I think what a waste of the gifts that God has given you.
00:14:10.000What a waste of the wisdom that you have been given just to kind of just watch TV and to golf.
00:14:18.000No, there are young people that need you as a mentor.
00:14:21.000You know how many turning point USA chapters would be blessed by people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s to mentor them, to pour into them, to give them advice.
00:14:31.000So we take money from people who need it the most, young families in their 20s and 30s, and give it to those who need it the least.
00:14:39.000Now, we could easily just go back to pre-COVID spending, easily.
00:15:28.000You'd make a lot of people uncomfortable.
00:15:31.000But just the interest payments alone are $789 billion.
00:15:37.000Just the interest alone to service our debt.
00:15:40.000So that is paying the price for previous generation spending, soon to be $1 trillion.
00:15:46.000If you have a grandkid out there, they're going to be spending the rest of their life as a debt slave to pay for the stuff that we paid for five years ago.
00:15:57.000It makes the country less free and it allows totalitarianism and tyranny to dominate.
00:18:44.000Then next is defense discretionary, $885 billion.
00:18:50.000Now, almost none of the insiders in Washington, D.C. want to touch the defense budget.
00:18:55.000If we were serious about how we contract things, serious about reining in the globalist American empire and stopping endless wars, we could probably prudently get that down to $600 billion, probably even less, $500 billion.
00:21:17.000Even that, with these kind of very, these would be considered severe cuts to the Uniparty and the regime.
00:21:23.000That would get us $1.2 trillion in cuts, which means we would still run a trillion-dollar deficit.
00:21:31.000That means if I take out my fiscal hawk sword and I start slaying and slaying and slaying, they might say, Well, Charlie, then what is your solution?
00:21:41.000All those cuts are helpful, but we need to change the methodology of how we budget.
00:21:47.000We need to get rid of baseline budgeting.
00:21:50.000Do you know the way that Washington, D.C. works?
00:21:52.000Is they never do zero-based budgeting in any functioning business, in any functioning family, they start at zero and you have to justify every expenditure from zero to five to ten to twenty-five, et cetera.
00:22:05.000The federal budget starts at the previous number, it starts at 150, it starts at 250, it starts at whatever, and the increases are on autopilot built into the rate of inflation.
00:22:18.000So, why is it that these budgets are so out of control?
00:22:21.000It's because the inflation rate, 6%, 7%, is automatically exploding the federal budget without any sort of debate or discourse on the issue.
00:22:33.000And these buckets of spending, I'm curious, what in the fresh heck is other mandatory spending for $1.3 trillion?
00:23:29.000The major drivers are the following: the interest, you can't touch that.
00:23:33.000The Social Security and Medicare, we shouldn't touch that for future current retirees.
00:23:38.000And the third one, which is really important, is the automatic growth of the bureaucracies.
00:23:45.000To give you an idea of how much money we are spending that we do not have, we could delete the entire military and our deficit only cuts in half.
00:23:58.000Somebody says here, Charlie, you're sounding like a rhino when it comes to Social Security.
00:24:02.000First of all, who are you to decide what everyone else should do in retirement?
00:24:05.000I'm getting some of the nastiest emails just because I have even teased the idea of future retirees getting some sort of adjustments.
00:25:23.000Matt Gates on Washington being given a blank check, Play Cut 46.
00:25:27.000Mr. Speaker, I'm not voting for a continuing resolution.
00:25:31.000I'm not voting to continue the failure and the waste and the corruption and the election interference.
00:25:37.000And in some cases, the efforts that could lead this country into World War III.
00:25:42.000I oppose the CR authored by my friend and colleague from Florida, Byron Donalds.
00:25:47.000The Donald CR continues the Ukraine policy negotiated by Speaker Pelosi and Mitch McConnell in the omnibus that conservatives were against.
00:25:57.000My friends, we are approaching the days where we're facing $2 trillion annual deficits atop a $33 trillion debt.
00:26:06.000And just to continue things with some facial 8% cut over 30 days that will lead to no programmatic reform is an insult to the principles we fought for in January.
00:30:23.000I think the government is going to rob, steal.
00:30:25.000Remember, it's the same government that you guys are trusting that lied about the vaccine and lied about Ukraine and lie about the border and lie about masks.
00:30:33.000So don't put your, there is no money there, everybody.
00:30:55.000You've been lied to is the message I'm trying to tell you.
00:31:00.000If you are a carpenter, a welder, if you're in the muscular class and you sweat for a living and you shower before work and after work, the insiders have been taking your FICA.
00:31:12.000They've been taking your Social Security payments and they've been spending it on other stuff.
00:31:27.000In fact, actually, if there was no Social Security and you put it in a moderately managed money market account, you would actually have a far bigger retirement parachute than what the government does.
00:31:40.000What Social Security basically is, understandably, is state-centrally managed retirement accounts is what it is.
00:31:49.000Now, again, all that's in theory and it scares people.
00:32:13.000You realize it's the most suicidal, alcohol-addicted, drug-added generation in history.
00:32:16.000They need people in their 70s and 80s to counsel them, mentor them, pour into them, pray for them, volunteer at a church, volunteer at a synagogue, substitute teach, help out a local charity.
00:32:32.000And I would say, by the way, I'm not going to back down by this.
00:32:35.000I'm going to be very clear about my position.
00:32:37.000But don't shoot the 29-year-old messenger that's telling you the country is about to collapse because we're spending money we do not have and the currency is about to fall apart.
00:32:47.000Remember, debts and deficits deteriorate the currency because the only way you then can get out of a $2 trillion debt, you can cut spending, we're not going to do that.
00:32:54.000Raise taxes, we're not going to do that, or you can inflate your way out, which is what we are doing right now.
00:33:00.000And if you inflate your way out of it, then there's no purchasing power whatsoever.
00:33:08.000To tell you the truth, your leaders have lied to you.
00:33:11.000They have stolen your money and called it Social Security, made a promise they can't fulfill, and now we are in a debt crisis because of it.
00:33:21.000Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:33:22.000Email us as always freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:33:25.000Thank you so much for listening and God bless.
00:33:31.000For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.