The Weekly Standard's own Jeremy Peters and Charles C. W.W. Cook join host Megyn Kelly to discuss President Joe Biden's State of the Union address. They discuss what they liked and didn't like about the speech, the Biden-Harris relationship, and whether or not Biden should run for re-election in 2024.
00:07:41.520And, you know, you are looking for a little drama.
00:07:43.480I mean, I agree with the barn animal comment that it was absurd to see that moment with Marjorie Taylor Greene was about her.
00:07:53.700She tried to she's trying to get ink in Jeremy's paper and your paper and my on my show that she wants attention.
00:08:00.840That's why, like, they were already, you know, sort of booing him and they didn't they didn't they were showing that they disagreed with what he was saying.
00:08:40.660In all seriousness, though, what that moment demonstrated more than anything else, I think, is the difficulty that Kevin McCarthy is going to have with this conference and corralling his members to to extend Charles's barnyard animal analogy.
00:08:56.640There it really is going to be difficult for him to keep members like Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene and some of these other hecklers in line because they showed last night that they are about this kind of performative politics more about that than they are about actual policy.
00:09:18.540I mean, this is it's a politics of performance.
00:09:22.700And they're quite good at creating spectacles.
00:09:25.320I mean, there's a reason why Marjorie Taylor Greene was, if not the most prolific fundraiser, one of the top two or three fundraisers in the Republican Party last election cycle.
00:09:36.240This is this is what a large swath of the Republican base likes to see.
00:09:40.580They like to see people who are willing to to be irreverent and, you know, to stick it to the powers that be often in their own party.
00:09:48.440And and they will be rewarded for challenging not just Joe Biden, but challenging leaders like Kevin McCarthy.
00:11:11.960Let me tell you what he meant when he was talking about Social Security.
00:11:13.860He was talking about Rick Scott, senator from the state of Florida, who submitted this proposal to take aim at Social Security, Medicare, which within two seconds of it hitting the printing press was rejected by Mitch McConnell, the guy who's actually in control of the Republican agenda.
00:11:27.540That's all he's referring to this guy.
00:11:31.620And so and in the moment they just decided to make a spectacle about it.
00:11:35.360I'll play the I'll play the moment just so the audience who missed it, who was wisely eating dinner like I was, knows what we're talking about.
00:12:50.140So I'm not bothered per se by people pushing back.
00:12:54.440But this is not the British Parliament.
00:12:57.540And if I go back to where I started, we're supposed to have separation of powers in this country.
00:13:04.200We're supposed to have a system in which each branch jealously protects its prerogatives.
00:13:09.240The very fact that we allow the President of the United States to go into the legislative chamber in the first place, I think, is a mistake.
00:13:18.500We don't have a fused system, as in Britain.
00:13:22.060We don't even have an adversarial system.
00:13:28.040We're supposed to be more cooperative than that.
00:13:31.820So the idea that the President would, in the first place, be put in a position in which he could lecture another branch of government that is run by the opposite party is, I think, absurd.
00:13:43.000And a reason we should get rid of the State of the Union.
00:13:45.280But if that chamber, if the Speaker of the House of Representatives is going to invite, which he has to, the President to address the chamber, then the members of that chamber should not behave like that.
00:14:00.940And that doesn't excuse Biden for lying throughout, demagoguing throughout, which he did.
00:14:05.800But I don't like this idea that we need a bit more of this in our politics like the British.
00:14:11.340The British have a different system than we do.
00:14:13.140And if you're going to have the President there making his case, then let him do it.
00:14:18.200One thing about that exchange, Jeremy, was that the booing, the jeering, did get him to back off a little.
00:14:24.880Like, I have to give them that point that he then was on his heels and said, oh, well, it's not the majority of you.
00:14:33.920And it left the audience, at least me, asking myself, then why are you raising it?
00:14:39.020If this isn't really a big push by the Republicans, why did you start off with that sweeping sentence, if not just to scare the bejesus out of the old people who he knows votes?
00:14:49.320It was a moment, Megan, that I found kind of odd, like many other in the speech, where the President kind of expressed a lack of self-confidence.
00:15:01.600He would take these kind of self-deprecating shots at himself and his leadership and say, well, you know, I know that, you know, you don't think I'm capable of or you don't think I've done X, Y or Z.
00:15:11.460I don't know why he chose to back away from that.
00:15:17.040I mean, look, was that particular line in the speech a little disingenuous?
00:15:23.240As you say, this is Rick Scott's proposal, and it's about sunsetting all federal legislation.
00:15:29.960And that would, of course, include Medicare and Social Security.
00:15:32.900But the vast majority of Republicans roundly rejected it when it came out.
00:15:38.300So this is the kind of trick that people in both political parties do.
00:15:44.320I mean, let's not pretend that Biden is the only one that has ever taken a sliver of a policy white paper, a sentence, a clause even, of a proposal from the other side and exaggerated it.
00:15:58.020I mean, this is why attack ad makers make millions and millions of dollars.
00:16:02.080This is unfortunately how many important issues in our politics get debated.
00:16:08.040And it leaves the public, I think, with a lack of real understanding about what's truly at stake here.
00:16:14.020But, you know, there were moments in Biden's in his delivery, like we saw in this this this excerpt, where he's he was a little unsure of himself.
00:16:25.220And I think that that's probably because he's looking at the same numbers that we are.
00:16:30.160And he's seeing that the vast majority of Americans feel like the country is on the wrong track and that many, many Americans, including those in his own party, don't think that he should run again.
00:16:42.260Look, he doesn't get very high marks at this point in his presidency.
00:16:46.400That doesn't mean that voters dislike him or find him distasteful, but it does mean that they have questions about his leadership and his ability to take the country in the direction that it needs to go if we're going to pull ourselves out of the slump.
00:17:01.720And that's where Republicans that I talk to believe that Kevin McCarthy and their colleagues should be attacking the Biden administration on.
00:17:11.640It's on the economic conditions, his economic record, because that's what's mattering most to people at home, not these kind of theatrical sideshows where you have Republican members of Congress heckling him from from the crowd.
00:17:26.460Mm hmm. What do you make of that, Charles? Because I, of course, I am not woke and I am fully engaged in the in the culture battle over, you know, the racialization of everything and the radical transgender ideology being shoved on young children.
00:17:42.440It's like I'm in those wars as a pundit. And so what Sarah Huckabee Sanders said after the fact appealed to me.
00:17:49.740But but when you look at the polls and what really matters to voters, it is the economy, stupid. It really is.
00:17:56.500And those numbers that are driving Joe Biden's polls down so low, 42 percent, I think, of the lowest the latest approval rating and 66 percent of the population thinking the country's in the wrong direction.
00:18:08.700That's the real clear politics average, 66 percent saying wrong direction. It's much higher than that.
00:18:13.680Many polls and a majority of Democrats saying they don't want him to run again.
00:18:18.300It's all very, very linked to the economy. And so what of the culture war response versus just zeroing in on those economic numbers and pounding them relentlessly?
00:18:30.500Yeah, I suspect that Joe Biden was underconfident in that moment because he knew what he was saying was a lie.
00:18:41.820He would like it to be true that Republicans wanted to get rid of Social Security and Medicare because those programs are really popular.
00:18:49.580It's not true. He knows that it's not true.
00:18:52.180He knows also that the weird social policies that his party seems to be advancing are not popular.
00:19:02.620And that's why he barely mentioned them yesterday at all.
00:19:06.140I think from the other side, Sarah Huckabee Sanders made the same mistake inverted,
00:19:13.340which is that she decided to focus on the thing that people don't care about as much as the economy.
00:19:22.180And she did so with a lot of hyperbole as well.
00:19:27.040My instinct here is that Biden is in one sense showing us that he is the Democrats' best candidate,
00:19:37.340because not all of the people who might replace him have that grasp of what matters to people.
00:19:45.620I mean, I thought the speech was wildly dishonest.
00:19:48.220I thought most of the narratives were false.
00:19:50.000But he does seem at one level to understand the best cards that he can play.
00:20:18.120I think it is just a national disgrace.
00:20:20.620And I include Republicans in this, that we spend minutes of that speech yesterday listening to complaints about ticketmaster and resort fees and not about our massive $31 trillion debt,
00:20:34.180our endless budget deficits, our total unwillingness to talk about Social Security, Medicare and other entitlements,
00:20:41.960other than to have stupid, meaningless, irrelevant, out-of-touch fights about whether we want to end them or not, which nobody does.
00:23:40.040And I don't see it working for them again.
00:23:43.840This is why it's so important of Republicans I speak to believe to talk about the economy.
00:23:49.740People know the economy isn't working for them.
00:23:52.440They know that the country doesn't feel like it's at its best and that it's moving in the right direction.
00:23:58.160So to the extent that Republicans hammer those points instead of focusing on what gets them cable news time or gets them applause from Twitter.
00:24:10.660I mean, you know, the Ron DeSantis playbook here.
00:24:13.580I don't know that anybody really can replicate that.
00:24:16.640And to Charles's point, Sarah Sanders attempt to do that last night really fell kind of flat.
00:24:24.820And that's because when all is said and done, people are going to be more concerned about the economy.
00:24:32.300And that's Biden's it's that's where he can make the most effective case for his reelection.
00:24:39.320It's also his biggest vulnerability because the economy is not good right now.
00:24:43.460What he needs to be able to do is tell people, look, you should trust me and the Democratic Party over these Republicans who, frankly, didn't look like they were in much of a position to govern last night with all of that catcalling and hooting and hollering from the House floor.
00:25:00.660Well, if I could take the China question.
00:25:07.640And this is why I hate most of those speeches.
00:25:10.440The constitutional responsibility is to update the legislature.
00:25:14.780Foreign policy is a role the president legally is obliged to spearhead.
00:25:22.260He doesn't get to decide whether or not we go to war.
00:25:24.680But outside of that, he is instrumental in our foreign policy.
00:25:28.740I know that he doesn't want to talk about China.
00:25:33.140I know that he knows as well as anyone else that the American public is not as interested in China as it should be.
00:25:41.640But I think he had a responsibility to address what happened last night, whether he wanted to or not, whether it made him look good or not, whether it would fit into a campaign speech or not.
00:25:53.120I think he should have spent some time explaining where we are with China, what the balloon they sent represented, why he decided to shoot it down.
00:26:04.900That is the point of the State of the Union.
00:26:21.260I think it would have been a good use of his time to make for two, three, four minutes a case for why we are sending them so much money and getting involved and slowly escalating up the chain with what we're sending them.
00:26:38.080That would have been a public service.
00:26:40.560And, of course, I'm not naive enough to think this is going to happen.
00:26:43.940But I think the same thing is true on entitlements and should be under Republican presidents as well.
00:26:50.660It would be a public service for a U.S. president to say to the country in a primetime address like this and to the legislature that controls the budget, here is the problem we have with Social Security.
00:27:02.760Now, you can argue all day as to how we should fix it.
00:27:05.880You can say if you're a Democrat, we have to raise taxes.
00:27:08.580You can say if you're a Republican, we need to reform or cut or not.
00:27:12.960Many Republicans don't want to reform or cut.
00:27:15.040They want to either do nothing or raise taxes or a combination of the three or run away.
00:27:19.800But it would have been a public service.
00:28:18.500But you're right, because as much as he wants to say, I get it, I get it.
00:28:22.760Then don't be afraid to go to the difficult topics and show us that you actually do get it and you're wrestling with it.
00:28:28.920The thing about Social Security, Medicare is a great one, Jeremy, because, you know, I've been talking about these issues long enough on the news that I remember the whole generation when I first joined Fox in 2004.
00:28:39.060That was a lot younger than and they were talking about these things are going to have to be managed.
00:29:14.320It's it's a crushing problem that we're facing on the horizon here.
00:29:18.200But it's it's not just that Republicans don't want to talk about this anymore.
00:29:22.980It's that the ones who were front and center in the debate over public entitlement spending.
00:29:28.680I'm thinking of former Speaker Paul Ryan were driven out of the party and they were replaced by the likes of Donald Trump and Republicans who were much more comfortable.
00:29:37.200Saying they wanted to spend more money on Social Security, on Medicare.
00:29:42.880And remember, Trump, that he famously said, I mean, he said this over and over.
00:29:47.680I remember interviewing him once when I was writing my book and we talked about his position on entitlements.
00:29:52.900And he told me about the time he told Paul Ryan that he thought Republicans had a death wish for continuing to pursue cuts to these really popular programs.
00:30:02.340Now, politically, of course, he was correct.
00:30:04.900The question of what that means for the future stability of our economy is another thing altogether.
00:30:11.300And you're right to point out it is a very real problem.
00:30:14.420But at a time when political courage is really lacking in in our leadership in Washington, I wouldn't expect anyone in either party to do anything about this anytime soon.
00:30:25.480Courage. What you saw, the courageous moment last night was with the woman in the casino coat, Howard Stern.
00:30:31.760He's right. That was the most courageous moment we had last evening, unfortunately.
00:30:36.500When we come back, I wanted to spend a minute on the media.
00:30:38.960You mentioned it in passing, Jeremy, that, you know, the greatest ever.
00:31:53.480Well, I think part of the issue is that Republicans have set the bar so low, the expectations for Biden so low.
00:32:01.760As one of them said to me, they spent the last couple of weeks talking about how Biden was basically going to fall off the stage.
00:32:11.100And then when he doesn't do that, he ends up looking OK.
00:32:15.260I mean, I don't think the delivery was was great.
00:32:18.940There were moments when he seemed to slur his words and he ran one sentence in to the next.
00:32:26.240But it certainly wasn't as devastating a performance, as much of a bomb, as many on the right were hoping that it would be.
00:32:35.600I mean, I was listening to your friends, Megan, who do the Ruthless podcast, you know, Josh Holmes and his buddies, Mitch McConnell's former chief of staff.
00:33:01.380And if Republicans keep talking about him like he is, I think he's going to continue to beat the spread here on nights like this and in debates.
00:33:09.460I mean, remember, one of the moments when he really rebounded in in the 2020 campaign was after that first debate when everybody expected him to be this doddering, you know, stammering old fool.
00:33:24.880So I think Republicans, again, would be wise to stop talking about some of these more superficial issues and get on to substance and attack the Biden administration over its policy.
00:33:40.500I don't think this is a question of expectations.
00:33:44.740And I also don't think for what it's worth that Republicans and conservatives and anyone who doesn't like Joe Biden pointing out his age and inability to speak is a problem.
00:33:55.980If you look at the quotes that we just heard in the clips that were played, the argument being made was not Joe Biden did better than expected.
00:34:07.660Joe Biden was supposed to blow this and didn't.
00:34:11.020Joe Biden was more on the ball than some anticipated.
00:34:15.280The argument was this was objectively a terrific speech.
00:34:20.200This was, I think Wolf Blitzer said, the best speech he's ever given, the best speech he's given in 80 years, during which time he's been vice president.
00:34:29.900He's been a senator since what, 1973, 4?
00:35:08.54028% of Americans think that he is capable of being president of the United States.
00:35:13.040They think that he is able to do the job at his age.
00:35:15.90028%, less than a third, think that he can do it.
00:35:20.74031, I think, said that he would be able to handle his job in a crisis.
00:35:25.200You can't con people into thinking that.
00:35:27.420If Republicans had said that Barack Obama was incapable of doing the job in a crisis, that he was too old, that he was too senile, that he was too ineloquent, no one would have believed it because it wasn't true.
00:35:38.480They didn't go down that road because it would have been unprofitable to do so.
00:35:42.860But I think it's really important for people to say this because it's correct.
00:35:47.700It's really clear that that is getting worse as he proceeds.
00:35:52.100And to pretend that the press did that what we saw last night was a masterclass, I think it's farcical and irresponsible.
00:35:58.620Can I tell you, this is reminding me a little bit of, forgive me for this sidetrack, but Madonna looked bizarre the other night at the Grammys.
00:36:08.380She's clearly done something to her face that she's crossing over.
00:36:11.600She looks like the cat lady right now and just like so much filler.
00:36:14.640And her response has been on Instagram to say that is ageist.
00:36:19.480I'm sick of this ageist society in which we live.
00:36:21.740And that is not I'd be the first to say that it's ageist.
00:36:24.700If it's not, it's no one has a problem with her age except for Madonna, clearly, who's doing bizarre things to herself to avoid looking 64, which she is.
00:36:34.700But this the criticisms on Joe Biden and his moments of senility are not about people object to his age, per se, that he's 80.
00:36:52.080And he's four or six years older than Joe Biden.
00:36:56.020It's not about Joe Biden's age or his stutter as the media was, you know, the other side of the media, Jeremy, like the Republicans are like he's going to fall down and split his pants.
00:37:03.980But a lot of these Democrats, well, he's got a stutter going into last night.
00:37:07.680Like, remember, he's worked hard to overcome it.
00:37:09.980Right. It's like, no, it's not about his age and it's not about his stutter.
00:37:14.060It's about him. And he's clearly losing his grip.
00:37:31.980I mean, nothing I said earlier is should suggest that I don't know for a fact that Democrats are very worried about this.
00:37:42.700And in Biden's own focus groups, what Democrats have seen in their poll numbers, they know that his age is a major concern for a lot of voters.
00:37:52.520And that when they see it, when Americans see him speak, they don't feel comfortable when he wanders off topic, when he slurs his words, when he can't finish his sentences, because it reminds them that, yes, he is in his 80s.
00:38:08.060And that is something that, you know, it's why we didn't see him a whole lot in 2020 on the campaign trail, as one Republican strategist put it to me, that this was a really effective Democratic strategy, because all Biden really needed to do was issue a proof of life video every six weeks or so.
00:38:26.560And he was probably going to beat Trump anyway.
00:38:56.540work because voters don't like being told that they're stupid.
00:39:00.140Well, you raise a good point, which is the Democrats know, too, they're not going to run and say it out on the air, but they know, too.
00:39:06.220And they would love, according to these polls, to exchange him for somebody else.
00:39:10.360But they don't want Kamala Harris, according to your newspaper, which had a fascinating report this week on her called Kamala Harris is trying to define her vice presidency.
00:39:26.000It goes on to talk about how her critics and detractors alike acknowledge the vice presidency is intended to be a supportive role.
00:39:32.400But the painful reality for Ms. Harris is that in private conversations over the last few months, dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill and just around the nation, including some who helped put her on the ticket, said she has not risen to the challenge of proving herself as the future leader of the party, much less the country.
00:39:50.660Even some Democrats, whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes, confided privately that they had lost hope in her.
00:40:00.560They use the term quiet panic setting in among key Democrats.
00:40:06.500Because it doesn't seem like it seems like for The New York Times to write this kind of article says something.
00:40:13.460It's interesting because you picked up on the key sentence, the one that I was going to mention.
00:40:17.560And I'm glad you did, is that the people that her office suggested New York Times reporters get in touch with, people who were presumably going to vouch for Kamala Harris and say what a good job she was doing and how she wasn't getting the benefit of the doubt.
00:40:32.260Those people privately told my colleagues that they have lost faith in her and that they don't think that she's doing a great job.
00:40:40.620That's significant in and of itself, but it also speaks to the lack of competence that she and her staff project.
00:40:50.400And people across Washington that I talk to have picked up on this.
00:41:15.400What I found most interesting was not necessarily the article itself, but what I read in the comments from New York Times readers about Kamala Harris.
00:41:25.960And it was overwhelmingly almost to a person, hundreds and hundreds of people, New York Times subscribers and readers who said, we don't think she's doing a good job.
00:41:38.820And that tells you about where, you know, a certain core constituency, presumably of Kamala Harris's and the Democratic Party, you know, a New York Times reader that tells you what they really think of her and that her standing among, you know, people who are left of center is actually pretty low.
00:41:58.420What are they going to do about this problem, Charles?
00:42:01.000Because if Biden, I mean, he's expected to announce that he's running, but maybe he won't.
00:42:06.720And even if he does, there's significant fear that he won't be able to serve out a second term were he to win one.
00:42:13.900He's got a couple of years left on that.
00:42:15.580And the Times points out accurately that some did not feel she could win the presidency in 2024, but some felt the party's biggest challenge would be finding a way to sideline her without inflaming key Democratic constituencies that would take offense.
00:42:30.400Which leads me to what Ron Klain told the paper, the president's departing chief of staff, which I think is just so telling.
00:42:36.820He talks about how she carries the expectations that are upon her as the first, you know, vice president who's a female, who's a person of color, who's got she checks a bunch of identity boxes.
00:42:48.720She carries these expectations, not as a burden, but with grace and an understanding of how much her history making role inspires others.
00:43:00.060I mean, my layperson interpretation of that is it's enough that she's diverse.
00:43:13.580Well, that was my favorite part of the piece, because I think that it is deliciously awkward and it shows the limits and the well-deserved limits of identitarian politics, which judges people based on their immutable characteristics.
00:43:31.040What that essentially means is that if the Democratic Party wants to defenestrate Kamala Harris, it's going to have to tell a whole bunch of people why it was profoundly inspiring to have a half black, half Indian woman as vice president.
00:43:51.420But it wouldn't be inspiring to elevate that person to the nomination for president.
00:43:56.800Now, you can say if you want and should say it's because she's not good enough.
00:44:01.280But then you have to admit that that was true all along on the question of who could succeed Joe Biden.
00:44:12.980I was asked at an event I did recently, how can it be in a country of 330 plus million people that Donald Trump and Joe Biden seem to be the frontrunners for the presidency?
00:44:27.960And the answers are actually very different between the parties.
00:44:31.440The answer for Trump is that Donald Trump has a hold on primary voters.
00:44:36.360They've rejected the Republican parties that previously existed, and they're attached to Trump.
00:44:40.820I personally don't think Trump's going to be the nominee.
00:44:43.240I think that that attachment is dwindling.
00:44:45.620But if he is, it will be because he came in and reformed the party and the primary voters liked it.
00:44:53.080The reason that Joe Biden is the frontrunner is that the Democratic Party's bench has been chopped up over and over and over again for 10 to 12 years.
00:45:10.820And to a lesser extent in 2020, even though Biden won the presidency, Democrats did not do as well as they had hoped in the Senate, in the House and in the states.
00:45:22.200The simple answer there is there isn't really anyone else.
00:45:55.060And that's why you're seeing this panic.
00:45:56.700And it's also why you're seeing people tell The New York Times that Kamala Harris isn't up to it, because they're aware that they may not get the choice to re-nominate Joe Biden.
00:46:05.020And they're going to have to start thinking about what they're going to do instead pretty quick.
00:46:09.620My favorite part of the piece was the Times discussing the challenges posed by having a woman VP, foreign leaders wanting her to meet with first ladies.
00:46:18.940But talking about how she's even revolutionizing the office chair, her top or her recently stepped down communications director, saying he learned that the desk chairs in the office needed to be changed to suit her.
00:46:30.620She's only five foot two instead of average male height like her predecessors.
00:46:36.020She forces us, quote, to recalibrate our assumptions by being short.
00:46:41.860OK, I'm sure we can do better than that.
00:46:44.160Quickly, before we go, why people should not be mouth kissing ever, if it's not your husband or your mouth or your spouse.
00:46:53.000Here's Kamala's husband and Joe Biden's wife kissing on the mouth.
00:47:55.400Well, I mean, presidents always take credit for the economy, whatever that is, unless it's bad.
00:48:05.300And it's not really their fault one way or the other.
00:48:10.320So this president, and generally speaking, Washington's pretty much out of touch with what's going on with real people.
00:48:19.760And so for a president to stand up and say things that indicate that he's out of touch is not unusual.
00:48:25.500And to take credit for things that he didn't do is not unusual.
00:48:28.720But in my opinion, President Biden took that to a whole new level.
00:48:33.600He's extremely out of touch and completely just looked to me like he was just making up numbers.
00:48:40.220I don't know where they got these ideas.
00:48:43.300One of the things he was doing was talking about all of the jobs he created, right, that he created more jobs in two years than any president has created him for.
00:48:53.660And to me, even, you know, from my post, which is not exactly as an economist, it made no sense because I understand he inherited an economy in which businesses were shut down.
00:49:04.800So saying that they can start up again isn't really job creation.
00:49:18.740The only thing a president can do is to, you know, cast a vision over the country, give the country a belief that things are going to go well.
00:49:27.900And then in the environment of strong leadership, stable, predictable leadership, then business people will create jobs.
00:49:36.960But government has never created a job ever except a government job.
00:49:41.480And he didn't create 12 million government jobs.
00:49:44.160We know that 80,000 extra IRS people, apparently, but not 12 million.
00:49:52.180I mean, nobody, my governor in Tennessee, I got a great governor here, is a friend of mine, but he doesn't create the jobs.
00:49:58.740He just creates an environment where those of us that hire people actually create the jobs.
00:50:04.520And so what of that, though, because even his policies, like it ties together with another beef I had with the remarks, which was he kept saying how COVID shut things down.
00:50:46.620I mean, we just ran the COVID, whatever element of truth was around COVID and whatever element of mythology was around COVID that caused a, the greatest economic shutdown in the history of the United States.
00:51:02.800It's never happened before, and I pray it never happens again, that we all willingly go along with these idiots and do this again, ever.
00:51:12.200But the flattening of the curve and all the garbage we went through.
00:51:15.620And, yeah, to reopen after that is, no, you didn't create anything.
00:51:23.140And you didn't, you know, where was the part where you did us a favor?
00:51:26.980Again, we just got back, business people, we just get back to going what we do, which is run businesses.
00:51:31.760And thank God we're able to do that again.
00:51:34.880But the COVID ran its course, whether the mythology ran its course, our unwillingness to comply ran its course, or the actual disease ran its course.
00:51:49.880It's, you know, and no one gets to take credit for that.
00:51:53.320But the only thing we can do is learn from the thing that happened and look back and go, going forward, are we ever going to be willing to be told to comply like that again?
00:52:06.200I was thinking of a woman named Ashley Graham.
00:52:09.980She goes online by a Patriot Barbie, and she was at the Capitol on January 6th.
00:52:15.580She did not storm the building, but she was, sorry, Lindsey Graham.
00:52:18.700And she was storming the, she should not storm the Capitol.
00:52:22.340She was just there to attend the Trump speech.
00:52:24.600But this is a woman who was a single mom, a new mom, and had a chain of businesses she had built.
00:52:38.340But she had like maybe five or six small shops that she had recently opened, and they were doing pretty well and was told to shut them down during COVID.
00:52:48.600And I think she was living in the state of Oregon, blue state, you know, extreme measures.
00:52:54.140And because I was kind of going in depth with her on what brought you to the Capitol on January 6th.
00:52:59.760And she, well, though she didn't storm, she was a believer that somehow they were going to reinstate Trump, you know, like they were going to reverse, you know, she did sort of get sucked down the rabbit hole.
00:53:09.360And what the government did to her in the shutting down of her business and basically making it impossible for her to support her new baby and her lifestyle is what drove her there.
00:53:21.100She started to lose her tether on what was real, what was appropriate for her and her position as this mom, and got there, got spun up.
00:53:30.500This woman was hurt by politicians who made bad decisions that directly affected her.
00:53:38.680And she is, I guarantee you, not sitting there feeling grateful to Joe Biden for now creating jobs by letting her salvage what's left of her business, if she even can.
00:53:48.360She moved, I think, to Arizona after all of this happened.
00:53:50.900Well, and I mean, it's, it's old news, but we can very, it's easy to look at the correlation between who opened up and when, uh, and the correlation does run down political lines.
00:54:08.460And so, you know, you, the, the most draconian and longest shutdowns were in blue states, uh, and red states opened up faster.
00:54:19.780I mean, you can argue about why, or you can say, I don't like them because of that, or I do like them because of that.
00:54:26.020But the actual data is there that, you know, California stayed shut down, Oregon stayed shut down, Michigan stayed shut down, Tennessee opened up, Florida opened up, uh, New York stayed shut down, Texas opened up.
00:54:39.380And so you can run it right down the lines of what happened there.
00:54:44.880So in that sense, politicians do, uh, if they're driving something like the quarantine, um, or, or the shutdown or the draconian measures or whatever, whatever we want to name that stuff in that sense, they're, they are, uh, not creating anything, but they're creating the problems.
00:55:02.420And when they finally get out of the way, I don't know why you get to take credit for that.
00:55:06.820Right. No, it's true. Um, forgive me. I just wanted to mention this one moment to the audience, Dave, this isn't exactly in your wheelhouse, but I did think it was worth mentioning while we're on the subject of January 6th.
00:55:18.820There was a moment in which Joe Biden, once again, referred to that as the greatest threat our nation has faced since the civil war.
00:55:28.100All right. 3000 Americans died on nine 11, but this was the greatest threat we faced since the civil war.
00:55:33.680Jan six, he said it. And when he said it, house speaker, Kevin McCarthy did not clap for that.
00:55:41.380I'll show you the moment. Here it is. First, here's the moment. So at six.
00:55:44.240Two years ago, democracy faces greatest threats in civil war. And today, though bruised, our democracy remains unbound and unbroken.
00:56:03.740Now you can see in the background, Kevin McCarthy did not stand. Kamala Harris did stand.
00:56:07.360And here was CNN, uh, Jamie Gengel, I think, uh, reacting to that later in the evening. Listen to this.
00:56:15.220I do want to point out one thing. Uh, when he spoke at the beginning of the evening about January 6th, and he said, our democracy faced the greatest threat since the civil war, Kevin McCarthy sat there and he did not.
00:56:33.280Yeah. He did because it's asinine clap clap. Yes. Clap. It's asinine. I mean, you can say it's a horrible event and you can put drama on it, but, uh, and you, if you're going to say civil war, you should fully enunciate your words so we can hear them. Don't sound like you've got mush in your mouth, but the, that's just horrible. It's just, again, it's just this drama queen version of, of politicians.
00:57:02.280Politicians. And, and the problem with that back to where, you know, it does have an impact on things like the economy because a business leader is sitting and saying, this guy can't shoot down a balloon.
00:57:16.180And he's, he's got this ridiculous set of the greatest threat since the civil war. I mean, that's an, that's a ridiculous. So that, that does not elicit confidence saying, okay, in the next three years, my business is in a stable environment. I can make forecasts and predictions and higher into that. Instead. I'm like, Oh God, what are we in for next?
00:57:41.760I know. Like what bit bigger than like world war one or world war two, like bigger. Okay. Um, all right. I was, it does make you ask how I'm supposed to take these people seriously. Are these people are not getting the buffalo hat is our biggest threat. I mean, seriously.
00:57:56.580Bigger than like Hitler, Stalin. Okay. Um, the unemployment rate, let's talk about that because it's, it is at a historic low 3.4%. It was at 3.5%. I think when he, under president Trump, uh, and then COVID. Um, and so he was definitely taking a victory lap on that. You're welcome.
00:58:17.660You're welcome. Historically low job, uh, unemployment rate. Is it true? Does he get credit for the unemployment rate and for at least helping to create a climate in which it could be so low?
00:58:29.020Well, again, um, Washington takes credit for things, both sides of the aisle do it all the time that they're not responsible for. And so, uh, what we've got is number one, we have a problem with how we measure unemployment.
00:58:43.940The unemployment rate as we measure it today is the statistical processes from the 1930s and it's missing so many elements now. So it creates a false picture. So, uh, yes, we have a full employment. No question about it. Actually, we have a labor shortage. That's very dramatic right now. Uh, but what is that from?
00:59:07.300Well, it's from the labor pool having an existential crisis during COVID during a quarantine that says, Oh, uh, not only they might just shut my job down at any moment, uh, and people might comply to that on not only that, but on top of that, I might die. And I never thought about dying before.
00:59:26.140And so now I'm going to go do work that I want to do. I'm not going back to a job or a boss I hate. So we've had the great resignation and the great movement. Uh, we've got a great work from home movement that has exploded, uh, and, uh, employers have complied to, uh, but also the thing that nobody's talking about in the mix of this is, and Mike Rowe, my buddy's been dirty jobs has been covering this a bunch and several other people have picked up on the research that's out there on it.
00:59:54.500We currently have about 6 million unfilled jobs and that the unemployment statistics, the way we do them now doesn't cover the fact that for the first time in American history, we have 7 million able-bodied males between 25 and 54 that are not looking for work.
01:00:20.080So they're sitting on the couch playing video games for whatever reason. And someone else is supporting them, whether it's the government, their girlfriend, their mother, but someone else is supporting them and they're not looking for work. And we've got a shortage of labor. This is affecting the economy in a different way than unemployment would affect the economy.
01:00:43.820So there's, there's all this stuff is mixed into this right now. And again, it does come off the back of, uh, the psychological reaction to COVID this existential crisis. People said, I'm not working there anymore. And we've had the largest level of resignations from companies, from jobs in the history of keeping records in the last two years. And, uh, and it has slowed down finally, but all of that is enters into this.
01:01:11.880So it's a, it's, my point is it's an incomplete picture to say, Oh, 2.7%, which most economists would call full employment. We're there. Great job. The economy's booming. No, there's all kinds of problems under that.
01:01:24.260You know, I was talking to a friend of mine who's a doctor. The other day was saying that in New York city, if you take a job as a nurse in the ICU, you make about a hundred thousand bucks between the 80 and a hundred thousand bucks. Um, this doctor was trying to hire somebody to work at his front desk. You don't have to work overnight at the ICU. You don't have people thrown up on you. You don't have people dying all the time. You work nine to five and it's great benefits and it's controlled and it's air conditioned and all that's, you know, great stuff.
01:01:51.340And he was paying something like 125. Couldn't get anybody to take the job. Could not find anyone to take that job. And he was speculating that this problem is basically going to lead potentially to the end of cities. You know, like there are no restaurant workers anymore in New York that you can't find the nurses.
01:02:12.080You can't find the cab drivers. Their businesses were wiped out during COVID. And now we have all these people staying at home and not wanting to go into the office. Like all of these little things are erosions in the way we used to live.
01:02:24.820And really we're at the beginning or maybe slightly past the beginning of this massive sea change that I don't know that we willingly wanted or accepted or even that we're walking into it with eyes open.
01:02:35.800Well, it's the unintended consequences of overreach by government help. I mean, government tried to step in. Trump did it and so did Biden and help people during the quarantine.
01:02:49.800And they just started throwing government money, throwing checks at them, checks at them, checks at them. Biden bucks, we called them. But there were Trump bucks, too. Both of them did it.
01:02:57.180And the unintended consequences. People got used to that. Not working and getting money. We conditioned segments of each generation to no longer want to work.
01:03:10.600And instead of trumpeting success and controlling your own destiny and hustle and grind and hard work is where success comes from.
01:03:20.080And, you know, nothing of gain of great value comes to anyone unless they're willing to get up, leave the cave, kill something and drag it home.
01:03:30.420Instead of trumpeting that kind of a thing, we said, hey, listen, we'll take care of you.
01:03:34.800And people sat on their couch and it's going to be it's going to it's going to take a little bit of leverage to get them back up off their couch.
01:03:41.760Well, the fact that it's still ongoing is so interesting, right?
01:03:46.360When the checks were still being doled out, it made more sense to me.
01:03:50.100OK, I get it. They don't want to work. They want to sit on the couch and take the paycheck.
01:03:53.320Wouldn't have been my choice, but not everybody's like me.
01:03:56.780The fact that now there's no more money being handed out, the government's not still handing out those checks to people and they're still sitting on the sidelines.
01:04:04.800I don't understand. First of all, how are they paying their bills?
01:04:07.440Like who who is supporting those seven million guys?
01:04:11.580But I also think there's a deeper societal problem going on here.
01:04:16.500And I think it has to do with what we're doing to American men.
01:04:20.680You know, the lectures on how they're toxic, the elevation of women over men.
01:04:25.660It's it wasn't enough to get equality.
01:04:27.300Now it had to be something like subjugation of men and demonization of men in many cases.
01:04:36.860You don't matter unless you're, quote, diverse, unless you're a woman or you're a person of color or you're trans or your sexuality is in the minority.
01:04:46.640One of those things. And if not, you don't matter.
01:04:49.940In fact, you're probably something close to the devil.
01:04:52.940In fact, you're so awful just by your skin color and your maleness.
01:04:57.220We're going to start wiping you off of the syllabi in college courses.
01:05:01.560And we're going to tear statues down of people who look like you.
01:05:07.160These guys have got to be feeling kind of depressed and accepting the message that maybe maybe I don't matter.
01:05:13.860Maybe this isn't a society that wants me.
01:05:15.340Well, we have the highest level of obesity.
01:05:20.180We have the highest level of anxiety, depression, suicide that we've ever had in the history of record keeping.
01:05:31.320And and it's because they don't we don't do anything, whether it's because you're demotivated by being called the devil all the time or whether you're demotivated by the fact that someone else is carrying you.
01:05:46.960You've been coddled and, you know, we don't do anything.
01:05:50.660We don't have any calluses on our on our minds and we don't have any calluses on our hands, men and women out there today.
01:05:57.360And so instead of worrying about identity, whether it's white maleness or worried about being demonized or whether, you know, someone minority of some sort getting their rights, it would be a nice change to shift back to the idea that we're going to respect you for what you do.
01:06:17.280We're going to respect you for what you accomplish.
01:06:20.240We're going to compensate you for what you do and what you accomplish, not what your identity is.
01:06:26.280We're not going to spend any more time on your identity, whatever it is, or whether you are, you know, you know, discriminated against because you're a Christian or persecuted against.
01:06:38.440I'm not going to spend any time on that.
01:06:40.340Let's just start talking about, hey, we need to get back to respecting accomplishment.
01:06:45.880We need to get back to respecting and paying for, you know, anything but identity.
01:06:52.600Let's go back to if you move something down the road, that's what we're going to be excited about.
01:07:13.600This reminds me of the debate, not directly between them, but sort of between them, between Michelle Obama and Sheryl Sandberg, who is COO of Facebook.
01:07:22.640And Sheryl written that book, Lean In, and it was basically about work hard, you know, get get your seat at the table and fight for your seat at the table.
01:07:30.160And don't be afraid to volunteer, despite the fact that you have other things pulling at your time.
01:07:34.760And then Michelle Obama felt the need to take a shot at it, you know, saying that shit doesn't always work, right?
01:07:41.520Better to lean back and claim that you're a victim and that bad things happen to you because bosses are mean.
01:07:47.780That's a better place rather than Sheryl's book, which whatever, I'm sure it wasn't perfect.
01:07:52.220But it was a more empowering message of like, lean in, get to work, do it.
01:07:57.300If you're going to change your life, you need to do it.
01:08:06.540And it feels like Michelle Obama has won.
01:08:10.400Well, with a portion of the 7 million people sitting on their couch, I mean, you know, definitely.
01:08:17.320And the loud, squeaky wheel minority, you know, having a voice on social media that they wouldn't have normally had a voice otherwise in other cultures, in other time frames.
01:08:56.500And there's a dirty little secret that there's a section of Gen Z that is absolutely the most productive and amazing young people I have seen in years.
01:10:03.420It never always works perfectly, and it might not work this time, but it works better than the other thing, which is doing nothing.
01:10:13.540So, this idea that you work your butt off, you become excellent instead of embracing your mediocrity with quiet quitting.
01:10:21.540And I'm going to sit back and I'm going to let, you know, the way I'm going to fight a toxic boss is I'm going to stay on his payroll or her payroll and do nothing and quiet quit.
01:10:31.900And instead of going, wait a minute, this is a jerk.
01:10:36.340I'm going to go work for somebody that gets it, and I'm going to give my excellence to a different place in the marketplace.
01:10:41.860And instead of trumping that or trumpeting that on Tic Tac, we go the other way, right?
01:10:48.740And we go, oh, we're going to worship the victim.
01:10:51.100And so, again, it's just messaging and narratives that are flowing through the culture, and the concern is that when we get a State of the Union address that doesn't lift us into our best version of ourselves, instead, all we can do is point fingers and act like, okay, we got you.
01:11:43.660Like, sometimes you just need to get a job, and sometimes it's not your dream job.
01:11:48.440It's not giving back to society in any profound way that was going to change the world, but it's an honest day's work, and it helps pay your bills, and it will have the day-to-day effect of making you feel good about yourself and like a responsible citizen.
01:12:03.320And before you know it, your mood has improved, and you're with other people, which is also important to happiness.
01:12:09.900Like, this younger generation, I think it's the younger ones, who are thinking, I've got to wait until, like, the perfect job that checks all the boxes comes along to get off my couch are really misguided.
01:12:22.960You know, the idea of apprenticing for something rather than just starting to do it as a master craftsman is beyond a lot of people.
01:12:31.460And that's, you know, like, we're supposed to skip all the steps of the hard part and only get to the good part.
01:12:36.600No, the hard part, you know, you need to embrace the suck.
01:12:39.360There's part of this that there's a journey here, and that's when you develop your world-class talent.
01:12:46.740You don't start out as a world-class talent.
01:13:14.140The only reason I got to stay on the air is a bankrupt radio station, and I was working for free.
01:13:18.720Any good broadcaster would have thrown me off.
01:13:21.720But thank God I got to hang around and got better and got better and listened to my own tapes, and they were horrid, cringeworthy, horrible.
01:13:30.640I'm like, who is listening to this hillbilly?
01:13:32.840No one's going to listen to this hillbilly.
01:14:15.340She had a college degree, and she was a teacher of young kids when she was working.
01:14:19.960And she did not want to take a job in retail.
01:14:24.580You know, like, this is post a lot of her troubles.
01:14:26.320And she felt like, oh, if I take a job, you know, at whatever, you know, just work in the stand at the Sunoco, you know, or, like, at the little shop that sells the mugs and the frames and all that.
01:14:39.720And it's somehow a surrender of my prior life as a teacher, like I'm giving something up, and maybe it's beneath me, and I, you know, if I could just work harder and get back to the teaching role, I'll feel better about myself.
01:14:51.380And we urged her to think about it differently.
01:14:53.540And ultimately, she did, and she took a job at the grocery store, you know, as a cashier in the checkout aisle.
01:14:59.080And it was honest work, and her mood improved, and she did lick her addiction issues.
01:15:28.800Yeah, there is a dopamine release when you engage in activity versus sitting around discussing engaging in activity.
01:15:39.720And it's one of the problems that we're seeing with the screens, too much time on the screens.
01:15:47.240There's tons of research coming out that the screens are, not only do you have friends on Facebook that aren't real friends, but you're having experiences that aren't real experiences.
01:16:10.060But your brain is fooled into thinking it is and gives you a dopamine experience or release.
01:16:16.180But also, if you go into the marketplace and you embrace something, anything, whether you're driving for Uber, whether you're working as a cashier, whether you're digging a ditch, whether you take a job in the trades and learn to take an apprentice position so that you can become a master craftsman.
01:16:33.740Whatever it is you're embracing, when you engage in that activity, there's all kinds of chemical release.
01:16:42.380Everybody's talking about this versus the fake release that the screen fake life creates.
01:16:49.260And so the real release there, we see depression go down.
01:16:53.500We see anxiety and panic attacks start to move away.
01:16:56.760And I guess it's probably tied back a little bit to the common sense of you're actually doing something about your life rather than discussing it.
01:17:05.900But also, there is just this simple thing of when you start doing something, your brain fires off and you feel better.
01:17:15.380That sets you up for the next thing versus sitting on your couch discussing it with someone in your Facebook group does not set you up for the next thing.
01:17:24.120Uh, I remember when we were growing up, mom and dad owned a real estate company and we went to a nice steakhouse and we had this waitress that was unbelievable.
01:18:22.160Um, and I will also just put a period on it with this.
01:18:25.040Part of the reason some of those 7 million are at home is most likely drugs and alcohol, which shot through the roof during the pandemic, drug and alcohol use and overdoses and so on.
01:18:35.620And, and, and it's yet another reason to just get busier, you know, addictions, one thing, but a lot of these folks are not addicted.
01:18:41.640They're just abusing and getting out there and getting busier and getting into a job like sitting for eight hours at the cashier.
01:18:47.740You know, you can't, you can't, you can't booze it up all day.
01:18:50.240So it's just a one small way of taking care of that issue too, which so many fell into.
01:18:56.100It affects drug and alcohol use recreational or otherwise work does work affects obesity work affects your mental state.
01:19:06.760It affects anxiety and when you take the dignity of work away and you make it evil to be working and accomplishing things, instead you say, take the victim role.
01:19:18.580You're setting up a society that looks a lot like the problems in our culture right now.
01:19:24.000That's such an interesting discussion.
01:20:46.400The gross domestic product, the total of all goods and services produced in the U.S., it can actually go down and still have this level of employment.
01:21:11.760They're waiting to see, A, what inflation does, and B, what some of these other political nightmare things are going to do, and whether the stinking Fed is going to continue to monkey with this economy or not.
01:21:26.740And so we don't – I mean, the problem is economics is really psychology at its core.
01:21:33.140People react based on what they believe, how they feel about the future.
01:22:01.040They're not feeling bright and sunshiny.
01:22:04.640And so that's the definition of a good economy.
01:22:07.620When there's a sense of prosperity in the air, a sense that this is my time, that we can go out into the marketplace and, you know, create new products, create new services.
01:22:19.800And very few businesses are doing that right now.
01:22:23.080So that is what leads us towards a recession, because if they're not creating that movement, then we don't have an increase in the gross domestic product.
01:22:34.300So, you know, is it going to be a deep, dark recession?
01:23:57.420And when you create extreme shortages, because all the factories are not producing cars, they're not producing wire, they're not producing drywall, they're not producing lumber, 100% of the time the commodities are going to go up.
01:24:20.080There's a shortage of labor, like we've just been talking about for the last 30 minutes.
01:24:25.500And so, why has inflation calmed down?
01:24:28.700It calmed down because it was caused by extreme shortages, which drove prices up.
01:24:33.780Now, once the shortage, once people went back to work and the factory started producing again, the drywall is starting to come out, the wire is coming off the line, the mines are open, the lumber, you know, mills are running again.
01:25:07.100We still have enough of a shortage that gas has created this, but that's an artificial shortage created by a pro-green administration that wants to cut the gas prices off.
01:25:19.040So, that sticker on your gas pump with Biden's picture says, I did that, is actually accurate.
01:26:35.160So what he said last night, we talked about a new tax on billionaires, a sharp increase on a current tax, on corporate stock buybacks.
01:26:42.780And what the buzz on this is, Dave, is that there are a few details, but it sounds kind of close to the plan that he revealed last March when he called for a 20% hike on Americans who take in at least $100 million a year and said that rate would apply both to income and to unrealized gains.
01:27:01.780Like the future measure of your unsold gains, like you haven't cashed in the stocks, but on paper you've earned.
01:27:08.900And now you have to start paying taxes on it.
01:27:11.160It's impossible to administer, so it's not going to occur.
01:27:17.180I mean, when the wonks get down into that legislation, they're going to explain to him, there's no mathematical way to figure that out.
01:27:45.720When you're not rich, you're like, yeah, get them.
01:27:48.660Yeah, but I mean, how's that fix the economy is my point.
01:27:51.520Because where, what piece of historical data do you have anywhere in the history of the United States that increasing taxes caused the economy to boom?
01:28:09.820Now, we have increased taxes periodically and decreased them periodically, but you cannot find a single example in actual data that says Washington, or for that matter, a state, increased their taxes.
01:28:26.600And the economy boomed as a result of increasing taxes of any kind, property taxes, income taxes on the rich, capital gains taxes on the rich, taxes on everybody.
01:28:40.460You can't find any increases ever that caused, that followed, the thing following it was a booming economy.
01:29:22.300This is an example of the self-fulfilling prophecy I was talking about a while ago, that economics is psychology.
01:29:27.680So what happened was everyone said there's going to be a housing collapse.
01:29:32.120Everyone being Washington started yakking and yakking and yakking.
01:29:35.720Oh, and interest rates go up and interest rates go up and interest rates go up.
01:29:38.520And we've gone from this white hot economy on housing where if you put your house up for sale, what, two years ago, you got 87 offers over one weekend.
01:29:49.440Well, that has never happened in the history of real estate, except for one little short period of time, and that was two years ago.
01:29:58.180So now what has happened is the market has slowed, and it's kind of normal right now.
01:30:06.100House prices continue to go up, but very little.
01:30:10.640Four or five percent is probably what we're going to see in 23.
01:30:13.260And when you put a home on the market today, there's still a shortage of houses.
01:30:19.720There's still a shortage of inventory versus the number of buyers that are out there, even though the number of buyers are diminished right now.
01:30:26.160A lot of them are sitting on the sidelines.
01:30:27.960But still, when you put a house on the market, it's selling right now, national averages, 90 to 120 days.
01:30:34.360I got my real estate license in 1978, 90 to 120 days to market a single family residence in a metro area has been the standard since 1978, except for a short time when it was white hot.
01:30:48.520But we got used to this white hot, huge jumps in prices and, you know, huge numbers of offers coming in.
01:30:57.160And so now, I mean, it's kind of like when you're driving down the road, if you ever get like in a wonderful car and there's no one around and you can get out there and you get up to 100 miles an hour and you let it run for about 30 minutes at 90 or 100, and then you slow down to 55, it feels like you're crawling because of what you were doing before.
01:31:15.440This is not an experience I've had, Mr. Ramsey.
01:31:16.860No, no, I am not a thrill seeker in that way.
01:31:19.280But anyway, the bottom line is it was running 100 miles an hour and now we're at 55 and it feels slow.
01:32:13.500If you're getting ready to sell your house, you need to put it on the market and you put it on the market at a price that's reasonable and you need to expect it to sit there for 90 to 120 days.