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June 27, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
25:23
Trump’s Got The Media In A Tizzy | Ep. 327
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Remember that time Seattle Socialist City Councilmember Shama Sawant pressed for the city to increase its minimum wage to $15 per hour?
I actually debated Sawant on the issue.
I asked her if she'd be in favor of raising the minimum wage to $1,000 per hour.
She misdirected, obviously.
Seattle actually ended up embracing $13 per hour, raising the minimum wage from $9.47 in 2014 to $11 in 2015 to $13 in 2016.
Under the theory that an increase wouldn't throw people out of work, wouldn't encourage part-time hiring, and would inflate salaries enough to allow more affordability in the Seattle housing market.
A new study demonstrates that, as usual, central planning of the economy leads to precisely the reverse of the results the central planners seek to achieve.
According to a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, quote, using a variety of methods to analyze employment in all sectors paying below a specified real hourly wage, we conclude that the second wage increase to $13 Reduced hours worked in low-wage jobs by around 9%, while hourly wages in such jobs increased by only around 3%.
Consequently, total payroll fell for such jobs, implying that the minimum wage ordinance lowered low-wage employees' earnings by an average of $125 per month in 2016.
Evidence attributes more modest effects to the first wage increase.
We estimate an effective zero when analyzing employment in the restaurant industry at all wage levels, comparable to many prior studies.
In other words, restaurants didn't fire anybody.
They just put them on part-time shifts and cut back their hours.
That shouldn't be a surprise since that's exactly what happens every time the government places an extra burden on employers.
One of the great myths of minimum wage movement, and the central planning movement as a whole, is that Business owners aren't operating at a slim margin, but raking in dollars to hide in their Scrooge McDuck money bins, depleting the potential income of their employees.
But that's not true.
Thanks to competition, and competition is fierce in industries that employ minimum wage workers, profit margins are never enormous.
Even in 2013, a booming year for the restaurant business, Capital IQ estimated the average profit margin for restaurants at 2.4%.
Profitability varies by chain as well and by local franchise.
Even leftists were taken aback by Seattle's sizable minimum wage increase.
Jared Bernstein of the Leftist Center on Budget and Policy Priorities derided the minimum wage increases in Seattle as quote, beyond moderate.
Extreme, in other words.
But he admitted, you don't know what the outcome is going to be.
You have to test it.
You have to scrutinize it, which is why Seattle is a great test case.
Or you could leave the market alone, since testing markets by cramming down interventionism puts people out of work at least part-time.
Here are the facts.
Seattle barely had any jobs under the $11 threshold before the legislation passed.
But that wasn't true of $13-an-hour jobs.
And the regulations essentially priced a good deal of full-time, low-wage labor out of the market.
Furthermore, the economy right now in Seattle is strong.
What happens during a downturn, when businesses have to shed costs?
Government intervention isn't the answer to the free market.
The free market is the answer to the free market.
But don't expect the left to admit they're not merely punishing evil businessmen, they're skewing the entire labor market and hurting a broad swath of people, including minimum wage employees.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So many things to talk about.
The Supreme Court has come down with a number of rulings today.
Some are really good, some are really not so good.
We'll talk about all of them.
Plus, the media are desperately upset about the fact that the Trump-Russia collusion thing is falling apart.
Democrats don't know how to handle it either, and we'll talk about Trumpcare.
But before we get to any of that, we first have to say thank you to our sponsors over at texture.com.
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Okay, so let's begin with the big news of the day, which is that President Trump's travel ban has largely been upheld at the Supreme Court level.
So the Supreme Court issued a ruling on Monday morning that would grant petitions for certiorari and grant stay applications in part on President Trump's travel ban.
So basically here's what happened.
President Trump had his travel ban.
His travel ban said that he was going to ban travel for indefinitely from these six majority Muslim countries and put a 90-day hold on immigration so that he could get a better handle on vetting procedures.
That 90-day Period has basically expired by now, and we're supposed to get a plan anytime now.
But the travel ban was designed really to prevent the importation of Syrian refugees.
It was designed to prevent the importation of people from countries like Yemen, where we don't know anything about the people.
And the courts, the lower courts you recall, had ruled that this was improper, that it was discrimination based on religion, which is asinine, because again, You do not have constitutional rights if you live outside the United States and are not a United States citizen or green card holder.
So if you're some random dude on a hilltop in Yemen, you do not have the right to enter the country.
And you'll recall the rulings were so stupid that they went back to the campaign and they quoted Trump's tweets and they said, really what this is, it's an impermissible attempt to ban Islam.
Well, now it gets to the Supreme Court level and the Supreme Court says, listen, We'll have a full hearing on the travel ban in October, but for now, all these lower court rulings are really dumb.
So the court consolidated the various cases on the travel ban for hearing in October, and the court relieved temporary injunctions issued by those lower courts regarding people attempting to enter the country who, quote, lack any bona fide relationship with people, with a person or entity in the United States.
So, there were two types of people who had filed injunctions against this particular travel ban.
Injunction seeking person number one, was the guy who has a mother-in-law in Yemen and he wants her to come in from Yemen.
So the court says that person still has an injunction.
So that person can still bring mother-in-law in.
But the people who did not get an injunction are the universities.
So universities sued and they said, well, if we can't draw from Yemen, then we're really going to just destroy the diversity of our universities.
We need more people from Yemen who are unvetted.
Otherwise, how the hell are we going to staff up this engineering department?
It was always a silly argument, but the courts basically said this is a super silly argument because You may think you have an interest in bringing in unvetted immigration, but the government has the power over immigration.
You don't.
And so you can't just say, random person from Yemen who might or might not apply needs to come into the country so that we can let him in.
That's not the way that this works.
So effectively, this means the court tossed the cases brought by the universities, but left in place specific injunctions against preventing importation of relatives of American citizens from abroad.
So basically, Trump's travel ban has been vindicated in the main.
There's no standing for the vast majority of people who are suing.
The travel ban is probably going to remain.
Even the leftist judges didn't have much to say about, oh, Trump is obviously an Islamophobe, and that's what all this is about.
So Trump ends up with a win on the travel ban.
A bit of a surprise result, given the fact that all the lower courts had been using this as a club to wield against Trump.
Now, there are a lot of people today who are saying that Justice Gorsuch on the Supreme Court is the swing vote in a lot of these cases.
He is not the swing vote in virtually any of these cases.
So he replaced Justice Scalia, obviously.
The swing vote is still Justice Kennedy in the vast majority of these cases.
So that was case number one.
Very, very good for the Trump administration.
That is a win for the Trump administration.
They are rightly crying about it today as well.
They should, because the lower courts are ridiculous.
The lower courts were always ridiculous.
So, good for the Trump administration for standing by its second executive order, and good for the court, mostly, for ignoring all of the stupidity of the lower court.
So that is ruling number one.
That was the big news this morning.
Then there is ruling number two.
This one is also good news, but not quite as good news as some people on the right are saying.
This is a ruling seven to two.
that says that states cannot prohibit public funding to churches simply because they're churches.
So in this case, there's a case surrounding a playground at Trinity Lutheran Church Child Learning Center over in Mississippi.
And there's a law on the books in Mississippi that said that churches cannot apply for public funding because of separation of church and state.
The Supreme Court says you can't discriminate against churches that way if the funding is available to everyone.
Just because there's a religious institution or person— That doesn't mean that you can discriminate against that religious institution or person.
The opinion was delivered by Chief Justice Roberts.
It had concurrences by Justice Thomas and Gorsuch.
Only the far-left Justice Sotomayor and Ginsburg dissented.
That means that Kennedy and even Kagan voted on behalf of the idea that churches should be allowed to receive public money for a playground, which is what this was.
This church applied for a rubberized playground.
When the state said, no, even though you're a good applicant, we're not going to allow you because you're a church.
And so the court said, no, you're not allowed to do that.
The key line in the decision says the exclusion of Trinity Lutheran from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified solely because it is a church is odious to our constitution and cannot stand.
So people are very excited about this case.
There are a couple things that make me less excited about the case.
One, there's significant limitation on the case's scope.
So footnote three to this case is a bizarre footnote.
And it says, this case really only applies to playground resurfacing.
So it doesn't apply to anything else.
It doesn't apply to, for example, your church.
You want public funding for a religious outreach program.
Or, even easier, you want school vouchers so that you can fund student education.
And as part of that education, there's some religious education.
The court did not rule on that, and the court refused to rule on that.
Which is a problem, because the court should rule on that.
This is a very easy, obvious thing.
If vouchers are available to you to go wherever you want, why should we exclude religious institutions from that?
Judge Gorsuch's concurrence hits on precisely this point.
point, he says, the court leaves open the possibility a useful distinction might be drawn between laws that discriminate on the basis of religious status and religious use.
Respectfully, I harbor doubts about the stability of such a line.
Is it a religious group that built the playground or did a group build the playground so it might be used to advance a religious mission?
So again, Gorsuch's main concern here is the court is going to come back with school vouchers and say, well, sure, we don't really want to discriminate against churches, but the church is trying to push religion and we can't foster the church in pushing religion.
So no school vouchers.
That's what the court is leaving the door open to.
Gorsuch says, and this is the most important line of his concurrence, Gorsuch, by the way, is terrific.
Listen, I said he was terrific at the time.
I mean, as soon as Trump appointed him, I wore a freaking MAGA hat on the show.
Gorsuch says the Constitution, quote, guarantees the free exercise of religion, not just the right to inward belief.
Generally, the government may not force people to choose between participation in a public program and their right to free exercise of religion.
I don't see what it should matter whether we describe that benefit, say, as close to Lutherans by status, Or close to people who do Lutheran things by use.
It is free exercise either way.
There's also another issue that is related and that's because the Supreme Court is about to take it up.
So the Supreme Court is about to take up another case and this is the gay baker, the gay wedding cake case, right?
So there's a bakery that in Colorado That will not cater a gay wedding and the Colorado government has tried to persecute that bakery and the bakers say well that's a violation of our freedom of religion so Gorsuch is concerned and you can see that he's concerned that the court is about to decide Whether businesses can operate in a religious manner congruent with free exercise if they don't serve gay couples cakes, for example.
So Gorsuch's point is that the court is leaving the door open to arguing that a state is not discriminating against a religious person, but only against doing religious things.
Right, so just like in this case, the court is saying, well, the church was not doing a religious thing, so they can apply for the grant, they would also say, well, you know, when you operate a bakery, you're not doing a religious thing, and therefore we can crack down on you.
That is dangerous logic, because the fact is that religion does pervade all the things that religious people do.
Okay, here is the fact.
As a religious person, everything I do in my life is pervaded by a certain religious sensibility and mission.
Okay, because that's true of everyone who's religious.
If you're a secularist, then your motivating ideology is secularism, and what you do is motivated by your secularism.
If you're a religious person, especially if you're a practicing Jew, for example, every time you eat, every time you serve food, every time you say thanks and grace for serving food, you know, does that mean that you are now doing something that is forbidden or at least the government can bar because it's a religious activity?
I'm not discriminating against you as a religious person, I'm just saying you can't be religious outside of the church.
That doesn't wash, and that's what Gorsuch is saying.
The left, by the way, would like to steamroll all religious practice into private.
Justice Kagan is trying to say, well, running a playground isn't religious anyway, so it's a moot point.
But the pedal is going to hit the metal when it comes to actual religious belief dictating how you behave, which is true of the vast majority of religious people.
Okay, so.
Then there is a third Supreme Court case, and this one's getting a lot less attention, but this one is just totally crazy.
So, on Monday, the Supreme Court declared that birth certificates were no longer designed to list the biological parents of children.
So over in Arkansas, they had a law that says that a married husband and wife, or the biological parents of a child, are listed on the birth certificate.
The reason a married couple, husband and wife, are listed on the birth certificate is because they are presumably the biological parents of the child and because of that there's a provision in Arkansas law that says that if there's artificial insemination we make an exception and we allow the non-biological parents but the married parents to be listed on the birth certificate Now, there's a couple of lesbian couples, and they got their birth certificates.
They were able to list their names on the birth certificates under the artificial insemination portion of the law, right?
They were allowed to.
That portion of the law that applied only to men and women was struck down.
They said that this is, it's obvious that if we can list non-biological parents for artificial insemination, we will do that for heterosexual couples and for gay couples.
But that wasn't enough for the lesbian couples.
The lesbian couples wanted to get their birth certificates not under the guise of the artificial insemination criteria but under the guise instead of normal biological parenting ideas.
So the state of Arkansas rightly pointed out that the state of Arkansas had already issued valid birth certificates listing each child's biological mother and her spouse and that the artificial insemination statute applied to same-sex couples but that wasn't enough.
So Arkansas, based on the rules of human biology, had determined that heterosexual spouses were typically the biological parents of their children.
In fact, In Arkansas, quote, where a court determines that someone besides the spouse is a child's father or alternatively, the mother, husband and putative father attest that the putative father is the child's biological father.
That putative biological father must be listed on a child's birth certificate.
So if they find out in a court proceeding or something that the child is not the paternity of the child is in question.
They actually list the biological father.
Why?
Because the purpose of a birth certificate is not just a marriage certificate.
It is not a legal guardianship certificate.
A birth certificate is designed so that a child can later go back and look up who are the biological parents.
That is the purpose.
Why?
Because, for example, my good friend Andrew Breitbart, right, when he died, it turned out that he had a congenital heart defect.
Well, he would have known that if he had looked at presumably his California birth certificate, which supposedly was supposed to list not just his mom, but also his dad.
I don't know if it listed his dad, but he didn't know who his dad was.
Presumably his dad had some sort of congenital heart defect.
One of the purposes of having a birth certificate is that children can go back and look at the health issues that have impacted their parents.
And that is one of the reasons for a birth certificate.
But the court says, no, it hurts the feelings of gay people and therefore we have to issue birth certificates to same-sex spouses regardless of biological parentage, not under the artificial insemination statute, but under the general birth certificate statute.
Court certificates are basically just another legal guardianship document now, or a second marriage certificate with a kid's name on it.
Justices Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas, the three conservatives on the court, they dissented as well they should have.
One of the things I hate, just as a general note, is I hate these term-ending decisions.
It's just monarchic.
It's aristocratic, and I hate it.
This idea that the Supreme Court gets to sit there on high And then determine your rights and my rights is really stupid.
We talked about the issue of judicial review and the idea of this infallible Supreme Court.
We discussed that a couple of weeks ago on Big Ideas on Thursday.
But the fact is that there's a much better case the legislature should be allowed to do more and the Supreme Court should be allowed to do less rather than we sit around and wait to hear whether Justice Kennedy took his brand this morning, which is basically what the Supreme Court amounts to.
There's this monarchic crap where All of the media outlets line up to get the dicta from the Supreme Court, to get the opinions from the Supreme Court, and they line up and then they just wait eagerly to hear what these all-wise beings have to say about the Constitution.
There's a reason that separate officers of the court and of the legislature and the president all swear an oath to the Constitution, that is, that the Constitution was not supposed to be the sole repository of the Supreme Court.
Unfortunately, that's what it has become.
Okay, so.
Before we continue here, I want to talk about the media's frustration with the fact that Trump is continuing to get some policy things done.
Like, now he's actually starting to get some policy things done.
At least the travel ban was now upheld by the Supreme Court.
It looks like Trumpcare is going to move through the Senate.
And the media is frustrated because they don't know how to handle all of this.
Like, Trump is unpopular, but they don't understand why that isn't stopping.
The EPA from rolling back regulations.
We'll talk about that in just a second.
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Okay, so the media is obviously frustrated because despite all of their focus on Trump-Russia, they haven't been able to stop anything.
And it's funny, three weeks ago when there was a lot of news about Comey and Trump-Russia and all this stuff and Fox News was ignoring the news, then the ratings for Fox News went down.
CNN, lately, has been ignoring the real news that's happening in the universe in order to continue to focus on Trump-Russia, and their ratings are now down.
The rule of the story is, as we here believe at The Ben Shapiro Show, is you cover the news, you don't decide what news is important based on who you would like to win.
There is news that is important, and there is news that is not important, and that news remains important, despite your own political partisan interests.
CNN doesn't understand that.
So, CNN is very frustrated, they're very angry, because Fox & Friends had an interview with Trump, and granted, it's a typical Fox & Friends interview, it's just a softball interview with President Trump.
Brian Stelter at CNN, who hates Trump, he came out and he said this is just an infomercial.
The bottom line is that you might look at this and see propaganda from Fox.
I prefer to think of it as an infomercial.
Fox and Friends is selling a product.
Of course, it's in the guise of a news talk show.
Just like something on QVC or HSN or all those channels.
Now hey, it's a free country.
But viewers should recognize what product Fox is selling.
Okay, so obviously, Brian Stelter, very, very upset about this.
Of course, all of us here on the right are saying, well, where were you for eight years while the media was just puckering up for Obama?
I mean, here's a flashback montage of just some of the questions that Obama was asked during his time as president.
You've racked up a lot of wins in the last few weeks that a lot of people thought would be difficult to come by.
Are you ready to call yourself the comeback kid?
It seems that you've built up some political capital for the remaining months of your presidency.
I'm curious how you want to use it.
What hard things do you want to tackle at this point?
During these first 100 days, what has surprised you the most about this office, enchanted you the most about serving in this office, humbled you the most, and troubled you the most?
Let me write this down.
Golf.
What does it do for you?
First of all, I'm terrible.
I'm horrible.
No.
Worst thing I ever started.
Best thing I've ever done.
In this fatherless world, where did you learn to love?
In the race for the White House, punching the President is par for the course.
Republican hopefuls take shots at Mr. Obama in their debates.
Barack Obama.
Barack Obama.
He's better than Barack Obama.
But when President Obama is asked to respond, he often settles on this well-rehearsed line.
I am going to make a practice of not commenting on Whatever is said.
It's crazy.
I mean, obviously, you all remember the media bias was just insane in favor of Obama.
Now they're mad that there's media bias in favor of Trump, because they think you have to universally be on the anti-Trump page in order to make all this happen.
And that's why they're so bewildered, because after months and months, after a year of coverage, almost, on the Trump-Russia stuff, it turns out there is nothing there.
And not only is there nothing there, it turns out that the blowback is actually affecting the guy who they loved, President Obama, Adam Schiff.
Representative Schiff from out here in California who's been hot and heavy on the Trump-Russia stuff, even he is now being forced to acknowledge that it's Obama who blew it on the Russia investigation, that if really there was a problem of Trump-Russia, Obama should have announced it much earlier.
They're so mad.
They can't help it.
It's a big problem for them, and I'll explain why in a second.
Did Obama fail in his duty to this nation?
I think the Obama administration should have done a lot more when it became clear that not only was Russia intervening, but it was being directed at the highest levels of the Kremlin.
And indeed, Senator Feinstein and I were repeatedly trying to make that case to the administration, initially when they didn't want to make attribution, they didn't want to publicly talk about Russia's role.
And later, after we issued our own statement, and they did attribute the conduct to Russia, I was urging that they begin then the process of sanctioning Russia, the administration talking more forcefully.
Given the seriousness of this, I think the administration needed to call out Russia earlier and needed to act to deter and punish Russia earlier.
Okay, so now he's mad at Obama.
And this is the way that this is going to work all the way through, right?
So the Democrats were talking Trump-Russia, Trump-Russia, Trump-Russia, and then it turns out that Obama knew about Trump-Russia and didn't say anything about Trump-Russia for two reasons.
One, he felt he didn't have enough information yet, supposedly, and two, because he was afraid that if he said anything it would blow back on Hillary because there'd be suggestions that Obama was trying to rig the election for Hillary Clinton.
In any case, the Democrats are just in complete disarray over the Trump-Russia stuff, but One wing of the party has no choice but to continue talking about it.
I'll explain why in a second, but for that, you have to go over to dailywire.com and become a subscriber.
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