00:01:22.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:30.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:42.000As you know, we have been devoting a lot of time on this program to defending the middle class.
00:01:49.000We even put together 10 ideas to reinvigorate the middle class and help family formation and marriages stay intact.
00:01:57.000Conservatives have struggled to address this topic for years, and quite honestly, a lot of conservatives even ignore this problem exists.
00:02:05.000Conservatives in the classic free market sense have always been, in some ways, blindly devoted to dogmatic market principles and the invisible hand.
00:02:16.000And yes, I love free market policies and principles and ideas.
00:02:21.000Milton Friedman is one of the most important thinkers that I look to that inspired me to get involved in politics in the first place.
00:02:28.000However, we have to acknowledge that there is real income and wealth inequality for the billionaire class versus the rest of America, and it's growing.
00:02:37.000Now, we have to ask ourselves first, why is it growing?
00:02:43.000And what are the more systemic issues that might arise from this sort of inequality that exists?
00:02:50.000So before we get into this and we talk about how President Trump addressed it over the weekend, I want to be very clear.
00:02:57.000I'm not someone who wants to admonish an individual just because they are able to create wealth.
00:03:04.000I've said this before on college campuses, and I'll say it again today.
00:03:09.000Just because someone got rich does not mean somebody else got poor.
00:03:13.000Just because somebody else is able to accumulate wealth does not mean that they did it by exploiting another person.
00:03:20.000In fact, most of the time when individuals are able to accumulate wealth, they did so by freely cooperating and trading with partners or people or individuals and were able to give value for value.
00:03:35.000The deeper I dive into what has happened since the pandemic, that still remains true.
00:03:41.000However, there are examples of certain individuals that are able to use their institutional incumbent advantage, a pseudo-monopoly, to be able to have such incredible amounts of market advantage that it begs the question, is it the best thing for the country?
00:04:00.000And if this is happening, what does the middle class think of it?
00:04:05.000Will they start to lose faith and hope in the system?
00:04:19.000I believe that someone should be able to take a risk in the marketplace and be rewarded for that.
00:04:24.000I think entrepreneurship is a beautiful thing when you are able to have a good idea, work hard at it, perfect it, take a risk, and then see that risk benefit yourself, the community, the country, and possibly the world.
00:04:39.000However, we are not honest with ourselves if we say that every single person on the planet is going to be an entrepreneur.
00:04:46.000There are millions of people that have no interest in being an entrepreneur.
00:04:52.000They want to go to work, raise a family, go to church, and live what I would call a stable and normal life.
00:05:02.000Well, it used to be the Democrat Party.
00:05:04.000And now the Republican Party kind of backed into the...
00:05:08.000Now the Republican Party kind of stumbled backwards into being a party that represents the American working class.
00:05:16.000The Democrats have made a very risky wager.
00:05:20.000You see, the Democrats, they basically want to represent America's elite and ruling class and America's permanent government dependent class, essentially the top 1% and the bottom 30 to 40%.
00:05:34.000Their pathway to political monopolization and power is to get unlimited amount of campaign contributions from the Silicon Valley elites and from Wall Street, and also grow the amount of people that are dependent on the government, and also shrink the amount of people that are independent of government control.
00:05:54.000Their vision for America is one where more people are on food stamps, not less.
00:05:58.000Their vision of America is where Google has more power, not less.
00:06:03.000And I want to dive into what President Trump said about this because it's very provocative, it's very interesting, and it caused a lot of headlines.
00:06:10.000But there's one thing that I know about home security companies.
00:06:13.000We're going to talk about crime later in this show.
00:06:16.000And we've talked about how there are rapists on the streets, murderers that are being released from prison.
00:06:31.000You've heard me talk about SimplySafe before.
00:06:33.000I've gotten tremendous feedback from our listeners that have used SimplySafe to secure their families, to create quiet and peaceable communities.
00:06:41.000SimplySafe has everything that you need to protect your home with none of the drawbacks of traditional home security.
00:06:48.000It has an arsenal, that's right, an arsenal of sensors and cameras to blanket every room, window, and door tailored specifically for your home.
00:06:57.000It has professional monitoring that keeps watch day and night, ready to send police, fire, or medical professionals if there's an emergency.
00:07:04.000You can set it up yourself in under an hour.
00:07:06.000Just peel and stick the sensors exactly where you need them.
00:07:44.000So, over the weekend, President Trump proved he is a champion of the American middle class and a disruptor in chief.
00:07:51.000He challenged traditional Republican orthodoxy and political establishment orthodoxy when he responded to a business insider video that showed the net worth of wealthy CEOs like Amazon's Jeff Bezos, whose net worth rose by an estimated $48 billion from March to June.
00:08:11.000Zoom founder Eric Juan, he saw his net worth increase by $2.5 billion.
00:08:16.000Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, he got $15 billion richer.
00:08:27.000This is the first time that President Trump has indicated that wealth disparity was an issue that needs to be fixed.
00:08:34.000The Business Insider video proposed ideas to combat the wealth disparity with ideas such as forming a pandemic profiteering oversight committee.
00:08:48.000Including an emergency 10% millionaire income surtax, a wealth tax, and a progressive estate tax.
00:08:55.000And a dramatic federal spending on charities.
00:08:59.000So the president was not endorsing these fixes, just that there is a problem.
00:09:04.000I mean, in 2020, we have seen Amazon stock go to record high, Walmart stock go to record high, Apple stock go to record high, Google's record high, Microsoft record high, Facebook record high, and the founders of these companies $168 billion richer this year.
00:09:20.000And U.S. small businesses, 22% of them are closed forever.
00:09:26.000So some of you might say, Charlie, what's the big deal?
00:09:28.000All these companies work hard, they provide products, they should be rewarded for it.
00:09:33.000In practice, I see something much more troubling, much more concerning.
00:09:39.000I see an ever-growing trend, and it's called the Matthew Principle, which is right out of scripture where much will be given to those who have a lot, and those who have nothing, everything will be taken.
00:09:54.000Essentially, in times of crisis, you get more of what you already have.
00:09:58.000In times of crisis, the extremes only get more pronounced.
00:10:03.000So Amazon, who has incredible access to capital, they are able to take advantage of a crisis.
00:10:10.000And I'm not saying taking advantage is all a bad thing, but they're able to take advantage of the crisis, which does hurt small businesses.
00:10:18.000And so if you are asking me where this is going, I'm very concerned about this.
00:10:23.000And I'll build out that argument in just a little bit.
00:10:26.000In a general sense, conservatives believe that billionaires are a good thing.
00:10:30.000Now, I want to be more clear about that.
00:10:32.000I wrote this note as I was preparing for the show.
00:10:34.000Conservatives believe that billionaires who had good ideas and earned their way to become billionaires are a good thing.
00:10:41.000We as conservatives believe that they became rich generally through hard work and convincing incredible amounts of people to buy their goods and services.
00:11:50.000President Trump was not advocating for any policy prescriptions to this.
00:11:54.000Instead, he was making the correct observation that if this goes left unmentioned, all of a sudden the American middle class is going to lose faith in the system.
00:12:05.000When your middle class loses faith in the very system that they live in, that is when economic and societal nihilism sets in.
00:12:14.000Nihilism, best described, is the belief in nothing, that nothing matters.
00:12:45.000That's why they find comfort and pleasure in destroying things that are not their own.
00:12:50.000That is why they find meaning and satisfaction in widespread urban arson.
00:12:57.000And so the president is rightfully pointing out a much more deeper philosophical, psychological, and cultural truth.
00:13:05.000When the American middle class is not allowed to go to church, when the American middle class is not able to host a 10-person religious ceremony, when the American middle class has seen their home values plummet in the last six months and their property taxes go up and their personal debt increase tremendously,
00:13:26.000when the American middle class is told that you can't go to work anymore, and then all of a sudden they see Jeff Bezos, someone who gives very little of his own personal wealth to charity, and his net worth go up by an extraordinary amount, the American middle class starts to wonder if the game is rigged.
00:13:46.000That is a very dangerous thought to allow to continue.
00:13:56.000Do I believe that it is more difficult than ever for working class families to get ahead?
00:14:01.000Yes, mostly because of left-wing big government policies, not because of the free market, not because of capitalism.
00:14:09.000My observation is I am in agreeance with the data that I see that the American middle class is struggling, but my policy prescription is completely different.
00:14:19.000I think that economic freedom, private property rights, entrepreneurship, stable families, allowing our manufacturing to come back to this country, all those things actually result in an American flourishing middle class.
00:14:32.000And speaking of the middle class, America is ready to get back to work.
00:14:36.000But to win in the new economy, you need every advantage to succeed.
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00:15:40.000Oren Cass, who is an economist, has this incredible statistic.
00:15:44.000In 1985, it took 35 hours of work per week to support a family of four.
00:15:51.000Now it takes over 53 weeks of work a year to support a family of four.
00:15:57.000So Oren Cass, the economist, he then postulates that means we get fewer family formations, we have fewer children because of the cost, which we'll get into later in the show.
00:16:10.000It's a lower quality of life, higher stress levels, a greater susceptibility of falling to socialism and even communism.
00:16:19.000This last point is the point that we as conservatives don't talk about enough.
00:16:29.000I have entire podcasts dedicated to how evil the ideas of Marxism, totalitarianism, and authoritarianism is.
00:16:38.000Too rarely in the conservative movement and in conservative circles do we ask ourselves the question, how does this Marxism actually formulate in a country that is very wealthy?
00:16:50.000It happens when the people that are the laborers, it happens when the people that are your workers, they see their net worth go down while they see the ruling class's income and net worth go up astronomically.
00:17:09.000It is a promise that you no longer have to work.
00:17:12.000It is a promise that things can be delivered to you free of cost.
00:17:16.000We must understand that freedom thrives with opportunity, freedom, and hope.
00:17:23.000The hope that you can have a vibrant and flourishing family.
00:17:27.000The hope that you do not have to depend on the government to find meaning.
00:17:33.000So as the income gap is growing, consider a few facts.
00:17:36.000According to Pew, in 2018, households in the top fifth of earners with incomes of $130,000 or more brought in 52% of all U.S. income, more than the lower four-fifths combined.
00:17:51.000In 1968, by comparison, the top 20% of earners of households brought in 43% of the nation's income, while those in the lower four-income quintiles accounted for 56%.
00:18:05.000Among the top 5% of households, those with incomes of at least $248,729 in 2018, their share of the U.S. income rose from 16% in 1968 to 23%.
00:18:18.000So to make sense of this for you, a smaller and smaller group of people are responsible for earning the most amount of money.
00:18:26.000Now, part of this is because of government dependence, and part of this is because people are not in the workforce the way they should be.
00:18:32.000But another way of measuring inequality is to look at net worth or the value of assets owned by a family, such as a home or a savings account, minus outstanding debt, such as a mortgage or student loans.
00:18:46.000In 1989, the richest 5% of families had 114 times as much wealth as families in the second quintile, one tier above the lowest.
00:18:56.000By 2016, the top 5% held 248 times as much wealth at the median.
00:19:05.000This trend accelerated after the Great Recession of 2007, 2008, and it accelerated during this pandemic again, especially for the billionaire class.
00:19:14.000This happens because we continue to print cheap money.
00:19:18.000Cheap money helps the ruling class, not the workers.
00:19:21.000We continue to pass bailouts for our massive mega corporations, such as our airlines and our banks, and the workers are left behind.
00:19:31.000Well, there's a number of different root causes.
00:19:35.000You see, the increased globalized nature of the economy has not been totally perfect for the American middle class.
00:19:43.000We were hypnotized and persuaded by so many people in the ruling class that this was the best thing that ever happened.
00:19:50.000The fact that we hollowed out our heartland and our industrial base.
00:19:54.000When we offshored our jobs to China and the developing world, we were told that this will make us richer.
00:20:00.000Now, mind you, this took millions of good paying jobs with it.
00:20:04.000And there's a half-truth of comparative advantage.
00:20:07.000I was always really confused, and I did not articulate this as well as I probably could of growing up, when people in the free market community, of which I have a lot of respect for these people, they said that comparative advantage and offshoring jobs, that it was nothing but a good thing for America.
00:20:37.000Because of course, when you shut down a manufacturing plant, there's no guarantee that all 600 of those workers are going to find meaningful work afterwards.
00:20:46.000They're not going to slip into drug addiction.
00:20:48.000They're not going to get on government dependence and lose meaning.
00:20:53.000Look, there's also a pure scalability of modern technology, which is a new dynamic we could never anticipate in previous generations.
00:21:01.000The scalability of standard oil, for example, was very massive.
00:21:08.000But those industries required far more manpower than modern technology.
00:21:12.000Now, consider Apple, which became the first company with a $1 trillion market cap in 2018, making it the, quote, largest company in the world, but only in terms of market capitalization, not in other key measures.
00:21:27.000Fortune magazine first created a roster of America's 500 biggest corporations in 1955.
00:21:33.000In 1955, with almost $10 billion annual sales, thanks to its 54% share of the U.S. auto market, General Motors, GM, topped Fortune's list that year.
00:21:43.000But GM was also big in every other way.
00:21:46.000Stock market valuation or market cap, where it was number one, assets, number two after ATT, and employment, number two, just after ATT, at 624,000 workers.
00:21:58.000For much of that post-war era, the biggest corporations were big in every way, and market cap was very highly correlated with revenues, employment, and assets.
00:22:12.000The post-industrial corporation of today, thanks to globalization and pro-China trade, is often heavy on market cap, but, like Apple, light on employment and hard assets.
00:22:24.000Apple doesn't own enormous factories to manufacture the iPhone or much of its products.
00:22:30.000Foxconn does, and they have a lease agreement with them.
00:22:32.000Apple does not have much in terms of hard assets relative to its total assets.
00:22:37.000Apple is not even among the top 50 largest employers in the United States.
00:23:28.000It's not a good thing when you're trying to build a sustainable middle class in a functioning country that doesn't allow a socialist revolution to occur.
00:23:37.000These are good paying jobs that we no longer have.
00:23:40.000These are jobs that were able to sustain a family, able to fund local churches, able to keep small businesses alive, able to fund a future.
00:23:49.000So look, we have to also acknowledge that government rules and regulations have contributed to an unequal playing field.
00:23:57.000This helps benefit larger companies to stay in power, to acquire competition early on when they are still cheap.
00:24:05.000They are able to write rules and regulations that protect them and lobby our feckless representatives to protect them.
00:24:15.000So take this, for example, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gave social media companies legal immunity from being treated as publishers of content.
00:24:24.000So if a user posts something libelous, Twitter or Facebook is not held accountable.
00:24:30.000They are treated as a platform, even though they are obviously a publisher.
00:24:34.000They have used this protection to amass massive amounts of influence and wealth.
00:24:39.000Meanwhile, they have soaked up a disproportionate amount of ad revenue, bankrupting local newspapers, for example.
00:24:47.000This has led to the concentration of reporting on the coasts, and therefore to more fake news and the liberal media establishment.
00:25:09.000Another way the government has meddled in the free market is through picking winners and losers through bailouts.
00:25:14.000I was incredibly opposed to the bailouts that came with the latest stimulus bill, and I remain opposed to big government bailouts.
00:25:24.000So the Business Insider video, and they did get everything right, but their observation, I think, is actually something that we as conservatives should not reject outright, points out that during the economic recession of 2007, 2008, the government spent over $750 billion on bailing out big banks and corporations.
00:25:42.000By contrast, only spent $75 billion on reducing interest rates for homeowners.
00:25:48.000That's one-tenth the money that went to normal middle-class Americans than what went to big businesses and shareholders.
00:26:03.000Would those companies going under be worse than keeping them afloat with taxpayer money?
00:26:09.000That's actually an entirely different question.
00:26:12.000I am not for government bailouts and stimulus in practice or in general.
00:26:16.000They almost always go to the ruling class elite, almost always, not to workers.
00:26:23.000The government's intervention, however, likely contributed to all the income disparities we see today.
00:26:30.000This is where we disagree with on the left.
00:26:33.000The left thinks that, oh, look, we are so unequal because of the free market.
00:26:37.000I say we are unequal, more so than I think is healthy.
00:26:42.000I think some inequality, of course, is helpful, of course.
00:26:44.000I'm not saying everyone should have the same income.
00:26:46.000I'm not saying billionaires shouldn't exist.
00:26:48.000But I think that the trend that we are going to is an untouchable economic elite and a permanent underclass.
00:26:56.000I say it's because of government programs that made this happen.
00:26:59.000That's where I disagree with the left fundamentally.
00:27:02.000You see, the asset holding class had liquidity to scoop up cheap stocks and other assets, and they were able to fully benefit from the recovery, and they did this again during this last crisis.
00:27:14.000As the Business Insider video pointed out, the S ⁇ P increased 462% during the decade-long bull market, while wages only increased 0.4% from 2009 to 2012.
00:27:28.000There are three other factors that we need to consider.
00:27:30.000Number one, Obamacare, which increased healthcare spending and cost for the consumer.
00:27:36.000This is a major cost of living, which is directly impacted for middle Americans.
00:28:23.000It's important to remember that under Trump's economy before the pandemic, many of these underlying root causes were actually dramatically improving.
00:28:33.000By empowering small business and through deregulation, the wages of the lowest 10% of earners were actually growing faster than the top 10%.
00:28:50.000We were seeing the return of manufacturing.
00:28:52.000We saw the onshoring of trillions of dollars that were once housed overseas.
00:28:57.000These are all positive steps in the right direction.
00:29:00.000And we talked about 10 ideas to save America.
00:29:03.000And I encourage you to go back in the archives of the Charlie Kirk show.
00:29:08.000And I encourage you to go back in the archives of the Charlie Kirk show and listen to the 10 ideas, the moonshot to help save the American middle class.
00:29:16.000It's one of the favorite episodes that I have done.
00:29:18.000And if we are honest with ourselves, it is government programs and government lockdowns that have hurt the American worker and the American middle class.
00:29:29.000And this is part of the reason why Donald Trump's poll numbers are going up, because they actually trust him with the economy.
00:29:35.000The middle class knows that Donald Trump will be their defender, which is why his tweet this last weekend was so important.
00:29:44.000And so before we get even deeper into some of the more underlying causes that are so troubling, who is your wireless provider?
00:32:13.000Just to give you an idea, the United States fertility rate in 2006 was around 2.1 children per woman, what demographers call the replacement rate, versus what 1.5 is for the European Union.
00:32:27.000Now, the United States rate is below 1.7, and that's no longer even assured.
00:33:05.000People don't think they can afford children anymore, and they're right.
00:33:08.000Look how expensive it is to have children.
00:33:11.000What we are up to right now is population collapse.
00:33:16.000If these trends continue and the entire world becomes some variation of Aspen, Colorado, where some homes are going for $2,000 a square foot, cash, where they're paying $28, $30, $40 million a home, and the underclass in Aspen, Colorado don't own anything and they can't have children, they can't take someone off, they can't take someone out to a date, let alone accumulate wealth.
00:35:00.000Does the mother have to go in the workforce immediately after having the child because of how much everything costs?
00:35:07.000If we do not have good answers to these questions, then we are not actually social conservatives and we are not Republicans that care about strong families.
00:35:15.000If we are nothing but just saying we need economic freedom for everyone all the time, corporate tax rates, I agree at those things, by the way, and we're okay with America having 500,000 less children, we are not going to have a country.
00:35:28.000By the way, there was a myth out there that, oh, the Hispanics are going to have more children and they will keep the birth rate up.
00:35:58.000And number four, it's, what's the point?
00:36:00.000So it's some sort of societal nihilism, which is just depressing and dangerous.
00:36:06.000This right here should be the headline that every American should know by heart: 500,000 less children are about to be brought into the world voluntarily.
00:36:18.000And you just look at the deeper numbers here.
00:36:21.000If you do not have a civilization that can continue to have a birth rate to sustain itself, then all of a sudden you're either going to have to supplement that through cheap immigration.
00:36:31.000What I mean by cheap immigration is low-wage immigration that brings down wages and brings basically cheap labor immigration is probably a better way to put it, cheap labor immigration, or through some form of incentive structure to have people have more children.
00:36:49.000And this is actually a perfect transition to how I want to end the program of something that President Trump signed that is terrific.
00:36:55.000See, the president understands the dangers of cheap labor immigration.
00:37:01.000President Trump just signed an executive order to protect American jobs from foreign labor.
00:37:06.000President Trump took action to prevent Americans from being displaced by foreign workers and offshore labor using federal dollars.
00:37:12.000The new executive order combats the misuse of H-1B visas.
00:37:16.000The U.S. H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows U.S. companies to employ graduate-level workers in specialty occupations.
00:37:24.000These jobs are supposed to require theoretical or technical expertise in specialized fields such as IT, finance, accounting, architecture, engineering, mathematics, science, and medicine.
00:37:33.000However, corporations have far too often exploited the H-1B visas to replace qualified American workers with low-cost foreign ones.
00:37:42.000The administration is finalizing guidance to close loopholes and stop employers from moving H-1B workers to other employers' job sites to displace American workers.
00:37:50.000This executive order directs all federal agencies to focus on hiring Americans for lucrative federal contracts.
00:38:00.000It also requires the only U.S. citizens to be appointed to the government's competitive service.
00:38:05.000This decision follows the news that the Tennessee Valley Authority TVA planned to outsource 20% of its technology jobs to companies based in foreign countries.
00:38:38.000This is the creativity and the bravery of President Trump.
00:38:43.000What other presidents would have done this?
00:38:45.000President Trump's poll numbers are going up because the president is restricting immigration, putting American workers first, and has a very clear vision of how the American middle class is going to succeed and thrive.
00:39:13.000This is an issue that concerns everyone.
00:39:15.000What could be more important than your children or your grandchildren?
00:39:18.000And for those of you that are listening that have grandkids, you should be very worried about the world that your kids are growing up and your grandkids are growing up in.
00:39:27.000If the birth rate is going down by 500,000 now, we are going to see population collapse.
00:39:35.000We must get serious about middle-class economics.
00:39:37.000We must get serious about why these trends are continuing.
00:39:40.000And if the Republican Party becomes the party of strong and stable families, becomes the party of middle-class workers, not just stock market gains, we'll win every election convincingly.
00:39:53.000Email me your questions on this podcast, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:39:58.000Type in Charlie Kirk Show to your podcast provider, Charlie Kirk Show, hit subscribe, give us a five-star review, screenshot it, and email us if you want to win a signed copy of the New York Times bestseller, The MAGA Doctrine.
00:40:09.000If you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com.
00:40:16.000Check out charlikirk.com/slash support, and please consider supporting our program.
00:40:21.000It goes directly to helping underwrite the cost of our entire production team, our travel, our research, and allows us to stay safe against threatened boycotts from the awful left.