All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 11, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
54:28
Eat The Rich | The Ben Shapiro Show Ep. 894
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax is a full-scale disaster, Bernie campaigns with AOC, and Democrats open up those public impeachment hearings.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
Stand up for your digital rights.
Visit expressvpn.com slash Ben.
They really are great.
Check them out.
Expressvpn.com slash Ben.
Okay.
Well, I have a lot to get to today.
We're going to be talking about the latest in impeachment, but I really do want to talk about this attack on billionaires.
Ooh, the evil billionaires.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, if you're looking at the way that the left is attacking free market capitalism right now, if you're looking at the way that the left is attacking laissez-faire and your ability to keep your own wealth, and you're thinking, okay, if Elizabeth Warren becomes the president of the United States, God forbid, she's just going to start playing around with all the mechanisms that allow wealth to grow.
Maybe you're thinking, maybe I shouldn't invest in the U.S.
dollar right now.
Maybe I should invest instead in something a little bit more solid, like gold.
Well, a lot of other people are thinking the same thing.
Gold is right now sitting at its five-year high.
I've been telling you for years that gold is a safe haven against uncertainty and chaos in the markets.
Well, Democrats are certainly going to exacerbate all of that.
This is why you should try out Birch Gold.
Birch Gold will go to work and make things simple.
I'll have a conversation with you.
You can determine if precious metals make sense to include in your portfolio.
Again, it makes sense for my portfolio.
You should be diversified at least a little.
I'm not talking liquidate all your assets and buy bars of gold.
I'm talking take some of your money, put it in precious metals.
It helps balance out your portfolio.
I trust the folks at Birchgold.
I've been working with them for years.
If I didn't trust them, I wouldn't work with them.
Text Ben to 474747 today to see how simple and straightforward a move into precious metals can be for you.
Again, that is Ben to 474747.
When you speak to them, be sure to ask what promotions they're currently offering.
Text my name Ben to 474747.
Okay, so...
The ramping up of attacks on wealth in this country, it's happening at an extraordinary rate.
And it starts off as these attacks on quote-unquote billionaires.
And then pretty soon the left realizes that there's not enough money with the billionaires to just attack the billionaires.
Then it turns into an attack on millionaires.
Then pretty soon it turns into an attack on people who make more than $500,000 a year.
Then pretty soon it turns into an attack on people who make more than $2,200,000 a year.
What you will see is that the bar for becoming rich in this country is going to continue to decline.
Obviously, if you're a billionaire, a millionaire, someone making half a million bucks a year, you're doing fine.
But, the fact is, that to support the kind of social spending that Democrats want, to support the kind of market regulations that Democrats want, tax rates don't just have to be high on wealthy people.
They have to be exorbitant on people who are middle class.
Which is why, if you go over to all the Scandinavian countries that the left loves to cite as socialist havens, even though they are capitalist countries with heavy social safety nets, if you go over to Norway, if you go over to Denmark, if you go over to any of the places that the left truly loves, massive middle class tax rates.
Hi, middle class tax rate.
Now, Bernie Sanders will tell you this.
Elizabeth Warren will not.
And Elizabeth Warren is getting away with lying about all of this by talking about her so-called wealth tax.
Well, she's just going to tax the people who are the billionaires.
It's going to be the billionaires tax.
People who are worth $50 million and more, those people are going to experience a wealth tax.
And if you look at the polls, this polls pretty well.
Why?
Well, because the natural human instinct is to say, well, those people have enough money.
What's the big deal if we just take all their money?
If we just take more and more of their... And it's not all their money.
It's 2% of their wealth every year.
Why is that a big deal?
Well, right now I want to explain to you why all of that is a big deal, and why this is a very stupid idea, why it's an unworkable idea, why it's a counterproductive idea, why it will actually hurt the economy for you.
Not just for billionaires, not just for people who are very wealthy, but for you.
Because the fact is that tax policy is intimately involved with the future growth of the United States economy.
Now, the left seems to think That you can just run into wealthy people's houses, steal all their stuff, and that this will, like, every year do it, and that this is not gonna have any impact on the American economy or the global economy, on investment rates, on tax avoidance.
They don't seem to understand the elasticity in markets, that when you change the incentive structure for people, their behavior also changes, that if you seize wealth from people, the way that they behave changes, the way they invest changes, and that has impacts that ripple out beyond whether Bill Gates can buy his 100th car.
And they seem to believe that you can just confiscate wealth and that wealthy people will act exactly the same, that it doesn't change the nature of the economy at all.
It's a fixed pie, so if we just grab more from the rich people, what's the big deal?
How does that affect anything?
Okay, well, let's go through the wealth tax and let's talk about Elizabeth Warren's proposal, which, by the way, it used to be 2% per year, the wealth tax.
But then when she made her Medicare for All proposal, she ramped that up to, I believe, 6% per year in wealth tax.
So first of all, let's distinguish a wealth tax from other kinds of tax.
An income tax is based on the amount of income you make.
I get a salary.
I make a certain amount of income.
I have a business.
I take a certain amount of income.
And now, I pay a certain amount of tax on that income.
There's graduated income tax rates.
Once you get to the top tax rates, you're paying something like 35% in top tax.
If you're in the state of California, you're paying 35% plus 12% is the top tax rate.
So you're paying a lot of money.
You're paying a lot of money.
And the talk of how people at the top of the income tax bracket are not paying a lot of money is just a lie, okay?
The idea that rich people are not paying their fair share is absolutely untrue.
Richard Epstein, who is a law professor over at University of Chicago, and he also writes for the Hoover Institute, he says the fraction of total taxes paid by the 90% of the population has shrunk over the last 35 years.
The bottom 90% of the population.
So you keep hearing that it's the middle class bearing the burden of taxes these days.
Absolutely false.
Complete lie.
90% of the population Their tax burden has shrunk over the past 35 years from about 50% of the total tax burden to about 35%.
That means 90% of the population is paying 35% of the total tax.
Currently, about 40% of all total taxes are paid by the top 1%.
So those 1%ers, those evil 1%ers, they are supporting 4 in 10 tax dollars.
1%ers, they're supporting 4 in 10 tax dollars.
4 in 10.
4 in 10.
Top 1%.
And you say, well, maybe they have all the income.
They don't, okay?
They're earning about 20% of the income.
So, they earn 20% of the income, the top 1%, and they pay 40% of the total tax burden.
If you pile on top of that a massive wealth tax, that's a pretty big deal.
Especially because when you're talking about taxing wealth, you are not talking about taxing income.
Okay, first of all, there's this lie that has to be debunked very quickly, which is that the people at the top are getting very wealthy and everybody else is getting poorer, and this is not true.
As Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, who are Elizabeth Warren's basically official economists, and they're not very good at their jobs, point out, the yearly increase in wealth for the top 0.1% between 1980 and 2016 has averaged about 5.3%, but the general average in the United States is 2.5%, so everybody has been increasing, it's just the people at the very top have been increasing, then people lower down.
Okay, so the question becomes, why is that innately a horrible thing?
Just because somebody is doing better than you doesn't mean that you are doing poorly.
Stop looking over your shoulder at the guy who lives next door.
As I've said before, if you own the mansion next door to Bill Gates, there's a tremendous amount of income inequality between you and Bill Gates.
But you're still living a pretty good life.
I mean, you're living next door to Bill Gates.
I assume you're not living in a box, right?
You're probably living in a very nice house right next to Bill Gates.
Okay, so, the difference between a wealth tax and the income tax is that the income tax is measured by your income.
A wealth tax takes your entire asset base and then forces you to have that assessed every single year, and then they take 2% of your wealth base.
So, let's say that you are a business owner.
You're not somebody who is cashed out of your businesses and you just have stocks.
You're a business owner, okay?
In your business, it's an $80 million business, and you are the sole owner of that $80 million business.
Now, does that mean that you're making $80 million a year from that business?
No, it absolutely does not.
It absolutely does not, right?
Because the fact is that if you own a business, the vast majority of the money in your business is poured back into running the business.
But let's say that you own a business that is valued at $80 million.
How would you value that?
Well, maybe you value it by using a three times EBITDA.
Right?
Earnings before interest tax and interest in taxes.
Right?
Let's say that you value it that way.
And let's say that now that it is assessed at $80 million.
Well now, you're gonna have to pay presumably 2% of that amount.
So you're paying, let's see, $1.6 million.
$1.6 million to taxes.
That could be your entire profit margin on that business.
Right?
That you're paying.
Because again, you're valuing the wealth and then you are taxing the wealth.
That's very different from you have a certain amount of stock and the stock is publicly traded and we know how much that is worth and so we force you to liquidate some of that stock.
Even that is a bad idea.
Because again, you haven't sold the stock.
You haven't realized the gain.
You haven't realized the loss.
So imagine for a second that you have tons and tons of stock.
And let's say that it's 2008 and the stock market has just plummeted.
You haven't actually realized the value of the stock, right?
You've taken a hit, but you haven't actually sold, right?
Warren Buffett was once asked, how much money did you lose during the Great Recession?
And he said, I didn't lose any because I didn't sell my stock, right?
It's only a loss that is realized when you sell your stock.
But according to the wealth tax, every single year, Warren Buffett's stock would have to be valued, and then you would take a portion of that value and you would assess that as a tax.
Even though he has not actually sold the stock, right?
He's not actually realized any gain from the stock.
It's just sitting there.
But every single year they would take a percentage of that value.
Okay, how about your property?
Your property would be reassessed every single year.
And then, by what, Zillow?
And then, you would have to pay a percentage of what that property is worth, 2% per year.
Okay, the same thing would go true for all of your other stuff, right?
It'd be true for, let's say you own a painting.
Let's say you own the Mona Lisa and it's worth $50 million, or is it worth $100 million?
Who knows?
Because at the upper end of the art market, there's a tremendous amount of vagary in terms of what things are worth.
After all, there aren't that many buyers at the upper end of the market.
So it could be worth 50, it could be $100 million.
Well, that's a pretty significant difference in terms of what you're paying in tax.
The costs of compliance on this sort of thing are extraordinary.
This is why the estate tax, which, by the way, is immoral.
The estate tax is immoral.
The reason that it is immoral is because you paid taxes on this stuff your entire life, and just because you die and hand it to your kids, which was the purpose of you handing wealth, now the government pries open your safe and just takes your money.
They walk over your dead body to take your money so your kids can't have it, even though you've paid taxes on that income your entire life.
Elizabeth Warren is doing the same thing.
It's confiscatory, right?
You pay taxes on all of this income for your entire... You paid 35, 40% taxes, right?
I pay very high tax rates.
At a certain point, presumably, I won't be running this business anymore, right?
I'll retire.
And then I'm gonna have to pay taxes again for the sin of what?
Having run the business and paid taxes for years and years and years on end?
On a basic moral level, this is immoral.
But on an effective level, it's also stupid.
The reason that it's stupid is because you know how much it takes to actually Do the compliance with a liquidated wealth tax this way?
You have to have every value item that you have assessed every single year.
Now, in the case of the estate tax, maybe that makes sense.
At least then, the estate taxes are like up to 40%, so the government is making a bunch of money, so it makes sense to force you to do all that stuff.
But for a 2% total, as Warren is proposing, The amount of compliance that the IRS would have to check would probably cost more than the amount of money that they would get from the tax itself.
This is what Richard Epstein points out.
He says the administrative costs of imposing a 2% wealth tax on persons whose net worth is, say, $55 million would surely surpass the $100,000 the tax would generate.
Just imagine how much it will cost the IRS to process 75,000 tax returns that Saez and Zucman predict will be filed annually.
Also, as Epstein points out, when you are very wealthy, and then you don't take that money and you don't invest it, because why would you possibly invest it?
Because they're just going to assess you, and then they are going to take money away from you, so why wouldn't you just leave it in cash, presumably, or stock it in overseas assets, or move overseas altogether?
This would have an impact on GDP.
It would have an impact.
You're gonna force people to liquidate their businesses.
You're gonna force people to sell their businesses.
This happened in France.
Rich people were forced to sell their businesses because the profit margin they were making from the business was not enough to outstrip the actual tax that they were paying from the business.
So instead, they sell the business.
Or let's say that you have a stock.
Let's say that you're Jeff Bezos and you own a ton of Amazon stock.
And every year, you're gonna be forced to liquidate 2%, $2 billion worth of your stock, for example.
So you sell it on the open market because you have to liquidate it to pay the tax.
What do you think that does to the price of the stock?
You're now flooding the market with Amazon stock.
What do you think that does to the Amazon stock?
It sends it down.
You have now increased the supply without increasing the demand for the stock.
So what exactly are you doing?
You're lowering the price.
Well, it turns out Jeff Bezos isn't the only investor in Amazon, guys.
It turns out there are a lot of 401ks tied up in the stock market.
As Richard Epstein points out, a 1% decline in GDP of $200 billion could largely wipe out the supposed revenue gain of the wealth tax.
Most rich people do not idly count their wealth sitting under palm trees.
They continue to reinvest it in new projects that require both equity and debt capital.
When a wealth tax of $5 or $10 million comes due, it could require an entrepreneur to liquidate part of his business or to divert his assets from investment and business growth To the payment of taxes.
And guys, this isn't speculative.
I'm gonna give you real world examples in a second of how the wealth tax has actually been a giant fail before.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, let's talk about something sweeter.
Something that everybody likes, okay?
This is something everybody likes.
Billionaires, millionaires, people who are not earning that much money.
Everybody likes cookies.
They're the best, right?
Okay, so this is the easiest sell of all time.
The holidays are coming up, and that means it is time for Mrs. Fields Cookies.
When Debbie Fields started Mrs. Fields Cookies 40 years ago, she won over cookie lovers everywhere with the gooey chocolate chip cookies, melt-in-your-mouth brownies, passion for sharing the joy of baked goods.
Mrs. Fields, oh man, it's solid stuff.
Nowadays, you can have the cookies sent right where you want them without visiting a bakery.
Which is amazing, right?
I mean, you don't have to even leave your house and suddenly you've got this amazing stuff just arriving at your door.
With gourmet gift tins and baskets filled with fresh baked cookies, you know that your order will arrive fresh and flavorful.
Ordering is easy, they can ship your cookies anywhere across the country.
And if you are ordering as a gift, which you should, you can add a personal custom message, company logo, or family photo.
Best of all, Mrs. Fields offers a 100% customer satisfaction guarantee.
You know why they can do that?
Because 100% of their customers are basically satisfied.
If you're not satisfied by a Mrs. Fields cookie, You're Stalin.
I don't know what to tell you.
Mrs. Fields' cookies are the best.
To sweeten the deal, our listeners get 20% off your entire order when you go to mrsfields.com and enter promo code SHAPIRO.
That is 20% off any gift at mrsfields.com, promo code SHAPIRO.
mrsfields.com, promo code SHAPIRO.
Your cookies are on the way, which is amazing.
I don't care what kind of a mood you're in.
You should be in a better mood now, right?
mrsfields.com, promo code SHAPIRO.
Get 20% off any gift.
I mean, woo, that's good stuff.
Alrighty, so.
We've had some experience with the wealth tax.
The wealth tax has been tried before.
It was tried in France.
It was a giant fail.
David Andelman wrote for CNN, about 42,000 millionaires left France between 2000 and 2014.
According to the financial paper, less echoes.
Many of them decamped to other countries like Belgium or Portugal, which boasts a flat tax of just 28% on income from interest in investment for expatriates and no wealth tax.
Eugenio Carrera, a French accountant, pointed out to me that an estimated 15,000 French expatriates have taken up residence in Portugal, many of them eager to flee the French tax system.
One French tax consultant, Eric Pinche, estimated that the wealth tax earned the government some $2.6 billion a year, but it cost more than $125 billion in capital flight every single year from 1998 to 2006.
Because if you're rich, you know what you can afford to do?
Move.
You can't.
Now, the way that Elizabeth Warren intends on stopping this is she intends on grabbing like 40% of your total wealth if you try to move.
Which, by the way, you're now creating an economic Berlin Wall.
We are actually going to confiscate your wealth if you leave.
That's how you know you're running a crappy economy is when you're saying to people, and if you try to leave, we're going to grab all your wealth.
That's pretty terrible stuff.
You know, like, this is the policy, generally, of dictatorships.
And when dictatorships try to confiscate everybody's wealth, and they're like, okay, and if you leave, we're gonna grab all your crap, and you're not gonna take any of it with you.
That's bad stuff.
That's bad.
By the way, if you think billionaires can't see this coming, you are wrong.
If Elizabeth Warren is elected, people will move the next day.
Not like a year from now, not two years from now.
They will all do it like now because they will figure the chances that Elizabeth Warren passes this sort of thing are not horrible.
Now, it is unconstitutional.
I mean, it is worth noting that the wealth tax is unconstitutional.
The 16th Amendment specifically allows the income tax, but the fact is that Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution says that no capitation or other direct tax shall be laid unless in proportion to the census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.
In other words, if 30% of the population lives in New York, 30% of the tax money is supposed to come from the state of New York under the original Constitution.
The income tax was an explicit exception, and that was passed in the 16th Amendment.
One of the worst Republicans move in history, by the way.
The 16th Amendment only passes because Republicans want tariffs.
So they traded to the Democrats.
We'll get tariffs and you get the income tax.
Oh, the worst.
I mean, just the worst deal since the trade of LeBron.
It's just it's just the worst deal ever.
Wow.
But here's the big problem, putting all of that aside.
You think that rich people aren't going to leave?
A study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that past attempts to tax wealth quote, frequently failed to meet their redistributive goals and encountered significant administrative problems.
And again, the people who are most disadvantaged by this are actually not the people who own massive publicly traded companies like Zuckerberg or Gates or Bezos.
The people who really get screwed are the people who are the people who own active businesses that are not publicly traded.
Because then your business is assessed every single year, and you can't defray the costs through public ownership.
Meaning right now, Jeff Bezos doesn't pay all the bills.
The investors, the shareholders pay all the bills.
But if you are the sole owner of a large business, then you pay all the bills, you may not take a profit this year, you may take a loss this year, and you're still paying an exorbitant wealth tax on the quote-unquote value of the business.
So what is this really about?
It's very easy.
This is really about class warfare.
It's really about Elizabeth Warren playing this game where she pretends that the rich people are the villains in our society.
And it's disgusting.
I'm sorry.
It truly is.
Mark Cuban slammed Elizabeth Warren as well he should.
The owner of the Dallas Mavericks.
He had a whole tweetstorm about Elizabeth Warren.
He said, The reality for Elizabeth Warren is that this is as much to divert attention from her income and net worth as anything else.
Other than Steyer, she's the wealthiest of all the Democratic candidates.
By far.
It's amazing, by the way, that nobody's pointing this out.
How is it that we are now eight months into the Elizabeth Warren campaign, and nobody has pointed out that she's worth $12 million?
She is worth $12 million.
The rich people are ruining the earth.
Okay, the difference between some people worth $12 million is that they've created a bunch of jobs.
Elizabeth Warren has not created a job, so far as I'm aware, other than the job that she created at Harvard Law for herself by falsely claiming she was Native American, allegedly.
Cuban says, according to her filings, she made $900,000 last year, which means her family earns more than two times the amount needed to be a one percenter.
She paid 25.5% of that in taxes, which is less than the percentage I paid in taxes, 29.85%.
By the way, that's because Mark Cuban is making some money off of his capital income investment.
The fact is that I am, last I checked, I think last year I paid a 48% effective tax rate.
Mark Cuban says Forbes says her net worth is north of $12 million.
That's being rich.
Filthy rich.
I'm sure it's richer than she ever imagined she would be.
Good for her.
She earned it.
It puts her millions above the threshold for being part of the richest 1% by net worth in our country.
That is 100% right.
Okay, Mark Cuban is correct.
The fact that Elizabeth Warren is misdirecting to rich people are really bad?
Yeah, lady.
Why don't you take a look in the mirror?
Sure, I'm very old.
Sure, I may be out of touch.
I mean, that is arrogant.
My favorite thing is Bernie Sanders and AOC.
So Bernie Sanders is now campaigning with AOC.
He's like, sure, I'm very old.
Sure, I may be out of touch, but here is a hip young woman who knows how to dance.
And AOC's like, he's like a father figure.
I mean, it's really bizarre.
Like she actually did a video where she was like, I didn't know my own worth until I saw Bernie Sanders.
Really?
You didn't know your own- Really?
That guy?
Like the old socialist who's never accomplished anything and has been living off taxpayer bucks for his entire adult life?
You saw him and you're like, oh, now I feel a sense of self-worth.
Now, now I feel as though I am really, truly a valuable human- Okay, so, for an exercise in weird quasi-Freudian Bizarro world campaigning.
Here is Bernie Sanders campaigning alongside AOC with Bernie Sanders saying that Michael Bloomberg, right?
Michael Bloomberg declared last week.
Michael Bloomberg is very bad, by the way, according to the left.
Not because of stop and frisk, right?
There's some people at the New York Times who don't like him over stop and frisk.
But the real reason Michael Bloomberg is bad is because he's a billionaire.
And we know billionaires are very bad.
The New York Times is saying this today also.
The New York Times has an entire piece today From Michael Tomasky, I'll get to in a second, talking about how billionaires are the worst among us.
I don't know when they transformed into being the worst, right?
They were okay before, like they're the same person when they were making 50 grand living in the garage and putting together the business.
Now they're just real rich.
But apparently there's, I've always been looking for this from the left.
Where's the dollar threshold where you cross over from being a person who's striving to make it to being an evil wealthy person?
Where is that dollar threshold?
Is it like when you make more than $100,000 a year and you get to $100,001 and then boom, Satan grabs you, and suddenly you are inhabited by the spirit of the demon, and suddenly you just hate everyone, you wanna fire everyone, you're a rapacious capitalist who pollutes the rivers.
It's a very stupid and puerile sense of what human nature is.
But in any case, here's Bernie Sanders blasting Michael Bloomberg, saying that it's arrogant for him to run.
You can't buy this election, Michael Bloomberg.
I love that Bernie Sanders says it's arrogant.
Okay, I'm just gonna point this out.
Bernie Sanders has not accomplished a thing, one, like zero things has he accomplished his entire life.
Anything.
He's not passed a single major bill.
He has not been behind a single major initiative that has passed in any way.
He's been wrong on nearly everything in his adult life.
When he wasn't campaigning shirtless in the USSR, he was backing the Venezuelans.
I mean, like, there is nothing Bernie Sanders has done that is worthy of praise, and yet he is a leading presidential candidate, and he's ripping on Michael Bloomberg?
Like, I ain't a Bloomberg fan, man.
The guy wanted to take away soda, and he had all these regulations about cigarettes, and he had all of this crazy big government nonsense.
But at least Bloomberg has achieved something in his life.
For Bernie Sanders to say, I should run the country on the basis of never having accomplished anything.
And he's like, Michael Bloomberg is a very arrogant man.
How dare he run just because he has money?
Well, Michael Bloomberg has actually done a thing or two.
You've done nothing except be old and rant at the moon.
Your entire career, and when he was 30, he was old, ranting at the moon.
Here's Bernie Sanders ripping into Michael Bloomberg with AOC at his side to provide him a hip, young cover, because she can dance.
Part of the reason why he's considering entering this race is because he doesn't think anyone can do the job that is currently in the field, not even you.
Not even me.
Well, you know, that is the arrogance of billionaires.
You see, when you're worth $50 billion, I guess, you don't have to have town meetings, you don't have to talk to ordinary people.
What you do is you take out, I guess, a couple of billion dollars and you buy the state of California.
But I happen to believe the American people are sick and tired of the power and arrogance of a billionaire class which increasingly controls not only the economic life of this country, but the political life of this country.
The power and arrogance of the billionaire class?
AOC has accomplished zero things in her life aside from getting elected to Congress in a pure blue district.
That is, Nancy Pelosi said, a bag of crap with a D on it could have gotten elected in that district.
Bernie Sanders has accomplished zero things in his life.
And he says, it's the powerful billionaires.
He wants to run a government that controls nearly every aspect of your life and taxes the living hell out of you.
But it's Bloomberg who's arrogant?
Now listen, I don't think that Bloomberg has a lack of ego.
But again, at least Bloomberg can make the case he's done a thing.
Like, a thing.
And yet, the idea that career government bureaucrat employees who've never accomplished anything, that these are the people who are not arrogant.
Oh, they've devoted their life to public service.
Bernie Sanders has devoted his life to living on the dole.
To living on the taxpayer dole in Vermont.
Real difficult life for you there, Bernie.
Thank you for accomplishing zero things and creating zero jobs.
But don't worry, he's gonna create, he says according to the Green New Deal, 20 million new jobs.
He's never created a job, but he's gonna create 20 million new ones.
How?
By confiscating wealth from the people who actually are responsible for having that wealth by creating jobs.
In a second, I'm gonna get deeper into the attack on billionaires.
And again, I don't think billionaires are an actual quote-unquote class of people because I don't class people by income.
I think there are good people and there are bad people.
Some are rich, some are poor.
I don't think that the amount of money in your wallet makes you a bad person or a good person.
I think there are some billionaires who are just complete terrible people and I think there are some billionaires who are wonderful people.
I think this idea to classify all billionaires as among the people who are trying to control our country and trying to ruin your life All of that is Robespierre garbage.
It's just French revolutionary, take them out in the street and behead them garbage.
It's nonsense.
It's just ridiculous.
But this is what the entire Democratic Party apparently is now going to buy into because it's very convenient to condemn all the people who actually hire a huge percentage of the people in this country.
In a second, you know, you keep saying, why are you defending billionaires?
What, what, what do you have in it?
Why are you defending billionaires?
The reason I'm defending billionaires is because the reason that a lot of billionaires are billionaires, not people who inherited wealth, the vast majority of people who are billionaires are people who are billionaires because they created businesses and hundreds of thousands if not millions of jobs.
I'll explain in just one second.
First, Let's talk about how you can manage your family's online time.
So, you know, the fact is that you should set limits on how much your kids are interacting with screens.
There have been a bunch of new studies out recently showing that small kids interacting with screens really bad.
In my house, until you're two years of age, you don't get to interact with screens at all.
Even I, look, I'm a parent, and that means that sometimes the kids are just making trouble, and you sometimes feel like, okay, I gotta plop them down in front of a TV and let them watch True on Netflix for a second just to get a break.
But the fact is that as your kids get older, You don't actually have control over their screen time as much as you do when they are young kids, and this is why you should have Circle.
With Circle Home Plus and Circle app, parents can filter what content is allowed, set limits for screen time, and monitor history and usage.
You can keep track across every connected device, from laptops, phones, and tablets, to smart TVs, streaming devices, and video game consoles, all from one app.
Each family member has a profile that is fully customizable to their needs, age, and maturity.
You'll never stop worrying about your kids, but with Circle, you'll have one less thing to worry about.
Right now, our listeners get 30 bucks off of Circle Home Plus when you visit meetcircle.com slash Ben and enter Ben at checkout.
There's a significant link between kids having a lot of screen time and being unhappy, having other problems in their social life, accessing material they shouldn't.
Help stop all of that with Circle.
Get 30 bucks off when you visit meetcircle.com slash Ben and enter Ben at checkout.
That's meetcircle.com slash Ben.
Enter Ben to save 30 bucks at checkout.
Again, meetcircle.com slash Ben.
Okay, so.
There's the Bernie Sanders attack on billionaires and the Elizabeth Warren attack on billionaires is cynical and disgusting.
It really is disgusting.
It is.
I'm sorry.
Elizabeth Warren is worth $12 million.
And there she's like, these rich people, these rich people, they must be stopped.
And then you got Bernie Sanders, who is basically a giant welfare queen living off the government for the last 30.
What is he now?
He's 78 years old, living off the government for 50 years of his life.
And he's like, oh, well, you know.
We can't let any of these people who actually earn their wealth run anything.
They shouldn't run for office.
Only I should.
I've been useless my entire life.
So useless, I was kicked off a commune.
So you got Bernie ripping into billionaires.
And then you got Michael Tamasky over at New York Times saying, Bill Gates, I implore you to connect some dots.
He says, the billionaire class has begun unloading on Elizabeth Warren.
You see, it's a class now.
It's a class.
Now, just to recognize a fact, Bill Gates is basically a lifelong Democrat.
Warren Buffett is a lifelong Democrat.
A lot of these quote-unquote billionaire class members are lifelong Democrats, people who have given tons of money to left-leaning causes, but they're a class now.
You see?
This is pure Marxist speak, where you are judged by the basis of your income, by the basis of your wealth, not by what you think, or what you do, or how you vote, or any of that sort of stuff.
Like, George Soros is a billionaire.
George Soros gives a lot of money to exactly the kinds of people that Jamie Dimon doesn't like, so treating everybody as a class based on their income is really stupid.
In any case, this dumb columnist for the New York Times says, The billionaire class has begun unloading on Elizabeth Warren.
A few days ago, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, at just $1.6 billion in net worth, a comparative piker, said Senator Warren vilifies successful people, which is true.
Then Bill Gates, $107 billion, in an onstage interview with the Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin, Mused about what his tax bill might be in a Warren presidency, and left the door open to voting for Trump should Democrats nominate Warren.
Which makes sense, because her wealth tax proposal is baptly baloney.
And then Michael Bloomberg, $52 billion, who had previously criticized Warren as anti-corporate, signaled his intention to jump into the race obviously out of concern at her eyes.
I'm not expert enough to judge the wisdom of Senator Warren's proposed wealth tax, Well then what are you writing about?
Like this entire thing is about her wealth tax.
Because I know there are questions about its constitutionality, and that several European nations tried a similar approach and found it unworkable, though four countries still have it.
I don't get why the candidates aren't simply proposing to increase marginal income tax rates on dollars earned above some very high figure.
That seems a lot more straightforward to me.
The reason, God, the ignorance, the stunning ignorance of New York Times columnists, the reason, not to justify Elizabeth Warren, the reason she's proposing a wealth tax is there isn't enough money at the upper end of the income bracket in terms of income earned every year to pay for her proposals.
The wealth tax is a confiscatory, nasty tax designed to pay for her garbage proposals that amount to $52 trillion in spending over the next 10 years.
That's why she's going for the wealth tax.
Hey, you can increase the marginal tax rate, it ain't gonna pay for this stuff.
It isn't.
But this guy says this column is not a brief for Ms.
Warren's wealth tax or for her candidacy.
I don't have a preferred candidate.
Instead, I want to make a simple plea to the country's billionaires.
Multi-billion dollar fortunes are often called excessive and decadent.
But here's something they're rarely called but ought to be.
Anti-democratic.
These fortunes will destroy our democracy.
So let me get this straight.
You earn a billion dollars because you have a bunch of consensual economic transactions with people, and that's anti-democratic.
What is democratic is for the government to come and seize the results of those voluntary transactions.
Jeff Bezos has not seized wealth from anyone.
You want the government to do that.
Who's more anti-democratic?
Bill Gates has not seized wealth from anyone.
In fact, he's provided jobs to hundreds of thousands of people, and indirectly to probably millions of people.
You want to seize the wealth he has earned on the basis of those voluntary economic transactions.
Who's more anti-democratic, you or Bill Gates?
This guy says, why is it anti-democratic?
Why would it matter to our democracy whether Jeff Bezos is worth $113 billion or $13 billion?
Because any democracy needs a robust and thriving middle class.
And we have spent the last 30 years or so transferring trillions of dollars from the middle class to the people at the very top.
And then he just quotes the favorite Elizabeth Warren economist, Gabriel Zucman, the 400 richest Americans now own more of the country's riches than 150 million adults in the bottom 60% of the wealth distribution.
The 400 share has tripled since the 1980s.
Well, what happened to the people at the bottom?
Are they all getting poorer?
No, it turns out that the middle class is getting richer too.
By statistics, the middle class has largely become upper middle class.
This notion that it's only people at the top who are living better, I love the sort of hazy, sepia-toned vision of the 1950s where every man was a king and every man was wealthy.
Well, first of all, you're leaving out a lot of black folks, okay?
If you're going to start with the 1950s and the economy of the 1950s, you should recognize there was a permanent underclass created by segregation in the South.
Then, and not having to do with the qualities of black people, having to do with the racism of white people in the 1950s South.
So, those two things are somewhat intertwined.
Also, you're going to have to point out one of the reasons that the American economy was a full employment economy in the 1950s is because the rest of the world was literally destroyed in World War II.
By the 1960s and 70s, when the rest of the world was catching up, American unemployment started to rise.
So, On a comparative level, that's true.
And then, look at the lives of people in the 1950s.
It's so funny to hear all of these people who are professors at Berkeley talk about how wonderful jobs were in the 1950s.
Really?
Would you like to go and rivet for 12 hours a day?
Is that your idea of a good time?
We talk about these office jobs.
Oh, you live in an air-conditioned office.
You might get sciatica from that chair.
You might get sciatica from it.
We have a 3.6% unemployment rate in this country, by the way, which is the lowest it has been.
It's a full employment economy.
We have more job openings than people who are seeking jobs at this point.
But your idea is that in the 1950s, you had a union job, and you used to go into the Ford factory and rivet all day.
That sound like a great job to you?
Yeah, it's because you've never done any riveting.
It's a really rough job.
It's a really, really hard job.
It is a back-breaking job.
And yet the idea is that the 50s were somehow better than they are now, than we are now economically.
Really, then why does everybody have an air conditioner?
Why does everybody have a TV?
Why does everybody have a car?
Why does everybody have a microwave?
I'm talking about people under the poverty line.
It's just a perverse view of how the American economy works.
But the idea is that people in the middle class are repulsed by great wealth.
Wealth has shifted to the top.
It has been taken away from the middle class.
There is no evidence this is true.
There is zero evidence that the wealth coming at the top is coming from the middle class.
Because that is not how economics works.
Do you believe that the rich... How did the rich people get the wealth from the middle class?
Explain it.
Really, explain how that transition happened.
Did they go to middle class families, put a gun in their face and say, turn over those bucks?
Is that what Bill Gates did?
Or did he offer a product a lot of middle class people bought and then used to make their lives better?
How many of the people?
This Dolt, I'm sure that he wrote this thing on some version of Microsoft Word.
So all of this is just a rip on billionaires.
But the fact is, billionaires are billionaires because they created voluntary economic transactions.
They did.
And when you rip on quote-unquote big companies in the United States, recognize that you are ripping on the companies that provide a plurality of employment in the United States.
According to the New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants, quoting the Wall Street Journal, 36.7, this is before 2008.
Using census data, the Wall Street Journal calculated that 36.2% of people worked at either a large company or a very large company.
Large would be at least 2,500 employees, very large would be 10,000 people or more.
Versus 38.9% of people who worked for small companies and 24.9% who worked for mid-sized companies.
Hey, even a mid-sized company is a pretty large company.
100 employees or more, so Daily Wire would classify probably as a mid-sized company.
Since 2014, the latest year for which there is census data, according to, again, the CPAs of New York, this is no longer the case.
At this point, 39.2% of Americans are employed at either a large or a very large company, while 26.5% worked at mid-sized companies, and 34.3% worked at small companies.
So that means consolidation, big companies, they're hiring you.
And you know who tends to own rich companies or big portions of rich companies?
Big companies?
Billionaires!
You know why?
Because the company's successful!
We're gonna get more into this in just one second because the vilification of wealth in this country is insane, counterproductive, and stupid.
And by the way, it's a violation of the 10th commandment.
If you're just gonna go on a moral level, it's a violation of the 10th commandment that you shouldn't covet your neighbor's property for you to suggest that Bill Gates' wealth must be taken away from him on the basis that you don't like Bill Gates being wealthy.
That's you being a bad person.
It is, I'm sorry.
If it's about your jealousy level, it's you.
And I hear from people on the floor, if you could just take one billion away from Bill Gates and heal homelessness, wouldn't you do it?
First of all, you're assuming two things.
One, that if a homeless person breaks into Bill Gates' house and steals a billion dollars, that somehow that's morally acceptable, which it is not.
Two, that you can solve the homelessness problem by throwing money at it, which I think that Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco have proved how stupid that idea is.
Okay, we'll get to more of this in just one second.
First...
Let's talk about you saving time and money in your own life.
Stamps.com.
They bring all the services of the U.S.
Postal Service directly to your computer.
Whether you're a small office sending invoices, an online seller shipping out products, or even a warehouse sending thousands of packages a day, Stamps.com can handle it all with ease.
You simply use your computer to print official U.S.
postage 24-7 for any letter, any package, any class of mail, anywhere you want to send it.
Once your mail is ready, just hand it to that mail carrier or drop it in a mailbox.
It's incredibly simple.
It's no wonder over 700,000 small businesses already use stamps.com.
And with stamps.com, you get 5 cents off every first class stamp and up to 40% off priority mail.
And you don't have to go to the post office.
Like, I like the post office.
It's great.
Lots of services.
Last time I went, got a parking ticket.
You gotta wait in line.
It's an expenditure of time that you just can't afford if you're running a small business.
Go check out stamps.com right now, especially during holiday season when you don't feel like schlepping those packages down to the post office.
There is no risk.
With my promo code Shapiro, you get a special offer that includes a four-week trial, plus free postage and the digital scale.
No long-term commitments or contracts.
Using our code, you'll be saving money and supporting the show.
Go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage, type in Shapiro.
That is stamps.com, enter Shapiro.
Stamps.com, never go to the post office again.
Okay, in just a second, we're gonna get to more of the attack on success in this country, which is really what this is about.
We're gonna get to that in just a second.
First, if you're not already a subscriber, you are missing out.
Head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
For as little as $10 a month, you get our articles ad-free, access to all of our live broadcasts, our full show library, select bonus content, and our exclusive Daily Wire app, which is a pretty great feature if you haven't checked it out yet.
If you choose the new all-access plan, you'll get all of that, plus the legendary Leftist Tears Tumblr.
Ooh!
Ah!
And our brand-new Ask Me Anything-style discussion feature that allows you to engage our hosts, writers, and special guests on a weekly basis.
So, stop depriving yourself.
Come join the fun over at dailywire.com, where the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
Okay, a few more stats for you, okay, with regard to billionaires, the evil, evil billionaires who are ruining your life and controlling democracy, supposedly.
First of all, I'm confused.
If billionaires are controlling our democracy, then why is Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, why are they doing well in these primaries?
Shouldn't it be like Michael Bloomberg doing amazing in the primaries?
Shouldn't Tom Steyer just be dominating the primaries?
I'm constantly confused by the idea that billionaires run our political system when in fact major unions outspend billionaires regularly.
When the fact is that billionaires are not the ones who are actually, like Donald Trump did not, there are plenty of billionaires who were given money in the 2016 election cycle in the primaries.
None of them gave money to Trump so far as I'm aware.
Money is not what's in control.
Your control of the media is basically what the test is at this point.
And media members who are benefiting, by the way, from billionaires like Carlos Slim owning the New York Times, and then cashing the check from Carlos Slim, it is definitely of benefit to them that a billionaire owns the New York Times.
In any case, There's this weird idea that billionaires don't actually create jobs.
They're just taking that money and sucking it away.
There's only one problem.
First of all, how you define billionaire is basically, in many cases, like Jeff Bezos, he doesn't have $100 billion in cash.
He has stock in Amazon.
And as he provides goods and services to people, that stock rises or falls.
That's why you'll see headlines like, Mark Zuckerberg lost a billion dollars in a day.
No, he didn't.
He didn't lose any money that day.
His stock prices went down.
If he sold that day, he'd lose the money.
He didn't lose any money because he didn't sell the stock.
Same thing with Jeff Bezos.
So just understand that when you're talking about somebody's wealth, when you're talking about somebody's wealth, you're talking about not just cash assets.
In any case, the idea that billionaires have not created jobs, that somehow they're the ones who are a problem, that Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, who have not created, so far as I'm aware, a single job in the history of their employment.
Not one.
Bernie Sanders' jobs have all been created by staff or by campaigns.
Hey, Elizabeth Warren, she had some aides paid for by Harvard Law School, maybe some teacher's assistants.
That's pretty much it.
But they know how to create jobs.
They are the great job creators.
You know, it's so funny.
Elizabeth Warren was one of the leaders in the, you didn't build that routine.
And she was the one who came up with that.
She and Deval Patrick, I think in Massachusetts.
I think she was the first one to use it and then Obama hijacked it.
That you didn't build that.
If you built something, it was created by the people who created roads.
Yes, because it was the road that made Amazon happen.
Yes, it is obvious that using public resources is one aspect of living in a large republic.
It is also true that you know what didn't create Amazon?
The road.
That would be necessary but not sufficient.
You're missing a large element called Amazon in that particular... It's so funny to me, people from the government telling you, you didn't build that.
You know who really didn't build that?
The members of the government.
They didn't.
They provided you with a necessary piece That, in all likelihood, you probably could have come up with, in coordination with others, would have been more expensive, in many cases.
But, the notion, the proper response to, you didn't build that, is, no, you didn't build that.
Elizabeth Warren has built nothing.
Nothing.
So far as I'm aware.
Bernie Sanders has built zero things.
Ever.
And yet we're being told, you didn't build that?
Who?
Who is you?
Because if this is a comparative thing, if you want to say, like, let's try and ballpark this thing.
If you're saying that it's roads and firefighters and police, and because those things exist, you can have a company in the United States?
And so you didn't build that?
Let's try to ballpark the percentage responsibility for building a business.
Yeah, you're right.
Without the road, without the police, without the firefighters, it'd be difficult to build a business.
Absolutely correct.
You know what percentage of building a business that represents?
I don't know, what do you think?
2%?
3%?
It sure ain't 60!
Not 100!
A rule of law is necessary, but not sufficient.
People have to create businesses off the top of that.
And so the idea that you're gonna be paying exorbitant levels of money to the government for roads, it's not going for roads.
We know it's not going for roads.
So stop pretending.
Even if you wanna make the case, you didn't build that and it was the roads and it was the police and the firefighters, fine.
You know what that would represent in terms of the tax rate?
Like nothing, like close to zero to pay for those things that supposedly contributed to you building the business.
I'll tell you what didn't build the business.
Welfare dollars, typically.
Social Security didn't build the business.
Medicare, Medicaid didn't build the business.
Now, you wanna make the case for those things?
Go ahead and make that case.
But don't make the case that you owe the money for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid because, quote-unquote, you didn't build that.
That's absolute... It's a complete non sequitur.
The two things have nothing to do with one another.
Okay, in any case...
How many jobs are quote-unquote billionaires in the United States creating?
According to Karen Blankfeld over at Forbes.com, the top 12 billionaires in America as of October 2016 had created a minimum of 2.3 million jobs.
The top 12.
That's a lot of jobs, guys.
A lot of jobs.
2.3 million.
And that is just direct jobs.
People who directly work for their companies.
If you know anything about economics, you also understand that they've created a lot more indirect jobs.
So for example, Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank were fired from their jobs at a hardware store in 1978 and then they opened Home Depot.
Today, Home Depot has more than 385,000 workers in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
But let's be real about this.
Home Depot provides a lot more jobs than that indirectly.
Because they provide all sorts of great products at great prices.
How many plumbers?
And handymen, and contractors, and construction workers, and real estate moguls have made their fortune based on the fact that they get to use materials that are brought to them by those 385,000 workers at Home Depot.
The economy is interconnected.
You hear the same complaint about like Mark Zuckerberg over at Facebook or Google, because there are only about 15,000 jobs at Facebook or 40,000 jobs at Google, right?
But how many businesses are reliant on Facebook or Google in order to do their business?
The entire media is reliant on Google.
That's tens of thousands of jobs.
The entire media, many practical businesses are reliant on Facebook to get out the word about their businesses.
These are value-added propositions.
So why are you angry at value-added propositions?
And then you're angry, again, you're gonna have to explain to me how Mark Zuckerberg seized his wealth from the middle class.
You're gonna have to explain to me how Jeff Bezos, who has made your life better in practically every way, because now we live in a magical world where you can hit a button and something arrives at your door in like two days, from anywhere on earth.
That's insane.
And then you're telling me he's the bad guy here?
Not Elizabeth Warren, who wants to confiscate his wealth?
And yours, by the way?
That Bernie Sanders isn't the bad guy?
A lifelong leech who's accomplished nothing?
That he's not the bad guy?
That Jeff Bezos is the bad guy?
Yeah, spare me.
Spare me.
This routine gets real old, real quick.
Okay, speaking of the media defending Elizabeth Warren, it is pretty incredible.
The media continue to defend Elizabeth Warren, no matter what.
And the way they're defending her is, of course, claiming, wait for it, wait for it, that any attacks on her are sexist.
If you point out that Elizabeth Warren is worth $12 million, that her policy proposals are garbage, that they don't hold together, that she's intellectually dishonest, that she has switched nearly every position she ever held, and that she has lied repeatedly about her past, it's because you're sexist.
If you point out that she campaigns on anger, and that she is divisive, and nasty, Then this is apparently a reflection of your sexism.
Because I would never say anything like divisive, nasty, combative crap proposals about somebody like Bernie Sanders.
Oh wait, I just did, because he is.
But apparently if you say it about Elizabeth Warren, you're a sexist, naturally.
So the New York Times, rushing to Elizabeth Warren's defense with all the chivalry required to defend a woman.
They have a piece today titled, Biden's Attacks on Warren Turned Personal, Drawing Some Complaints of Sexism.
Oh, you mean people are complaining?
That's news.
I love when, this is one of my favorite tricks of the media, is when they say, some complain of X. Right, who are these some?
Would they work for the Warren campaign, perhaps?
Or maybe, it's you.
Maybe it's you.
Maybe when you say some, it's you.
It's funny, Trump will sometimes do the same thing, right?
You'll hear President Trump say things like, People are saying.
People are saying.
And what he really means is I'm saying.
But people.
Who are these people?
People.
Right?
And the media do it.
They rip Trump for doing that, and then they do it a thousand times more.
They'll be like, some say Biden is a sexist.
Who are these some?
Probably the reporters at the New York Times, I would guess.
Because it's sexist to point out that Elizabeth Warren is a liar.
They say, Senator Elizabeth Warren is instructing voters on what to believe.
Her policy vision smacks of an academic exercise.
Her advocacy style is, quote, my way or the highway, and she has displayed an elitist attitude.
In ways overt and subtle, Joe Biden, his campaign and his allies have begun mounting personal attacks on the most formidable rival in the 2020 primary race, portraying her as embracing a rigid condescending approach that befits a former Harvard professor with an ambitious policy agenda.
It is a politically risky case to make against a leading female candidate Ooh!
Ooh, she's got a vagina.
That means you can't say that she has a rigid policy approach, even though she has a rigid policy approach and has suggested that all of her opponents are not sufficiently ambitious.
I mean, obviously this has to do with the fact that she's got a couple X chromosomes.
That's why Biden's doing this, clearly.
And then you've got the, and then you've got the Washington Post trying to pretend that Ayanna Pressley endorsing Elizabeth Warren is some sort of huge thing.
The Ringo star of the squad.
Ooh, Ayanna Pressley said a thing.
Ooh-hoo-hoo-hoo!
Wow.
That changes everything.
According to the Washington Post, last week, Elizabeth Warren picking up endorsement from a congressional rising star and a new group composed of black women and gender non-conforming people.
Wow, that has completely changed the race.
You mean that gender non-conforming women of color are endorsing Elizabeth Warren online?
Well, I don't think all of them.
I think mostly it's just like this small group, right?
And Ayanna Pressley is like a nobody except that she hangs out with the squad and kind of hangs onto their coattails.
Last I heard of Ayanna Pressley, she was suggesting that you have to think a certain way in order to be a proper Hispanic or a proper Muslim or a proper black person was last I checked with Ayanna Pressley.
But apparently it's a very, very big move.
The media grandstanding in favor of Elizabeth Warren is pretty astonishing.
Okay, I have to give you the very, very brief ImpeachmentGate 2019 update where I have been remiss today.
So that is because today, Begin the public hearings.
Public hearings.
And the media?
The media are already calling on themselves to make sure that they twist this exactly the way Democrats want to.
Margaret Sullivan, a media columnist for the Washington Post.
She has a piece today titled, Media Beware.
Impeachment hearings will be the trickiest test of covering Trump.
What she means by that is that you should never ever suggest that maybe Republicans have a point.
You gotta be very careful.
Don't say Democrats say this and Republicans say this.
Say Democrats say this and Republicans lie.
That's Margaret Sullivan's point.
She says...
The national media's shortcomings have been all too obvious in recent years as Donald Trump has gleefully thrown the norms of traditional journalism into a tizzy.
They've trafficked in false equivalents, allowed President Trump to play assignment editor, gotten mired in pointless punditry.
Granted, it's been a mixed record.
Journalists have done a lot right.
They've pointed out lies, dug out what's really happening, skillfully explained and analyzed.
But on Wednesday, as televised impeachment hearings begin in the House of Representatives, journalists need to be on their game.
The stakes don't get much higher when it comes to fulfilling their core mission, informing citizens of what they really need to know.
And what they really need to know is that Trump needs to be impeached.
So stop trying to present both sides.
Stop trying to say, on the one hand and on the other hand, stop trying to be objective.
Instead, just say what you want.
Trump's a liar, and he committed a crime, and he should be impeached.
That's how the media are going to cover this thing.
By the way, there is something delicious about the fact that even as the media insists that Democrats have a foolproof case against President Trump, members of the Democratic Party are saying that Hunter Biden certainly, certainly should not be called.
The reason Republicans want to call Hunter Biden is they want to point out that Trump had legit questions about Hunter Biden and Burisma, and he got AOC out front saying, I'm all for transparency, but why should Hunter Biden be called?
He's a nice man.
Why?
I don't think he's an appropriate witness.
And not only that, but I think that the reason they're calling for these witnesses, these new witnesses, is because they want to make a spectacle and a circus out of this entire proceeding.
They want to distract the American people.
These witnesses that they are calling are politically motivated.
Republicans are turning this into a partisan issue, and I'll tell you, if a Democrat did what Donald Trump did, I would be calling for that Democrat's impeachment as well.
Oh, really would you?
Really would you?
Hmm.
I remember her loudly calling for Barack Obama's impeachment when the IRS started targeting conservatives.
I remember that.
My favorite thing is that Bernie Sanders is just spacing out there.
He's just like thinking, maybe if I think about Putin, this interview will be over soon.
Alrighty, time for a thing I like and then a thing I hate.
So things that I like over the weekend.
You know, if you want to have some, if you want to have a good deal of enjoyment, check out the work of Paul Johnson.
I'm a big Paul Johnson fan.
He's the historian, British historian, and he has a really fun book called Humorists about various sort of humorous figures in British and American history.
And it's really kind of a kick.
It's a bunch of short bios of people ranging from Hogarth to Benjamin Franklin to the Marx Brothers.
It's not necessarily the names that you would think of, these sort of highfalutin names, but it is a lot of fun.
There's some good one-liners that you'll be able to quote to your friends.
It's kind of a kick.
So check it out.
Humorous by Paul Johnson.
As I say, I'm on a bit of a Paul Johnson kick right now.
I've been going through a lot of his work.
So this is just the latest in a series.
Humorous by Paul Johnson.
Go check that out.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
Well, the New York Times is on it.
It's on it.
Apparently, there's a library.
There's a library in Idaho.
And it turns out somebody at the library in Idaho is hiding the anti-Trump books.
And the New York Times is on it.
This is a national story.
It's in their national section.
Right, a library in Idaho.
Some rando is switching the books around.
This, it must be covered by the New York Times.
Now, let me be real about this.
I've had, I've written, what, eight, nine books.
I can't even remember at this point, because I've ghostwritten so many too.
I've written a lot of books.
I can't tell you the number of times I will go in a bookstore and somebody has hidden my book behind another book.
It happens a lot.
It is a real thing.
It happens at bookstores on a routine basis.
It happens at libraries on a routine basis.
Never has this been a national story.
But apparently, it's a national story now because someone is hiding books in Idaho.
Hmm, let's get Encyclopedia Brown on the case, gang!
Who's hiding the books in Idaho?
According to the New York Times, from her office next to the public computer terminals, Bette Amann finds herself peering through a window to watch patrons moving through the Cure d'Alene Library's non-fiction stacks.
Someone has been hiding books lately.
Specifically, those that explore politics through a progressive lens or criticize President Trump.
They wind up misfiled in out-of-the-way corners where readers will not be able to find them.
Amann says, The Mystery Book Relocator actually left a note.
It's an actual Encyclopedia Brown case.
Maybe it'll turn out to be like a villain from Scooby-Doo.
I wouldn't have got away with it if it weren't for those darn kids!
In any case, the Mystery Book Relocator says, I'm the ghost of the library, so I'm going to continue hiding these books in the most obscure places I can find to keep this propaganda out of the hands of young minds.
Your liberal angst gives me great pleasure.
For decades, Cure D'Alene has navigated a delicate political landscape in northern Idaho, a conservative corner of the country where some have sought refuge from political and social changes elsewhere.
The incidents over the past year, including a missing book that was discovered only this week!
We're not the first time books have mysteriously disappeared.
30 years ago, the library lost so many books on human rights to theft, they had to be placed in a locked cabinet.
The latest works to be targeted cover a wide range of topics from gun control and women's suffrage to LGBTQ issues and how people of color fare in the criminal justice system.
About half the books specifically deal with President Trump.
Well, none of the books appear to have been stolen.
Some have been hidden in ways that make it nearly impossible to find them when patrons wanted to check them out.
They've been discovered inexplicably filed in the wrong sections, hidden behind a row of Stuart Woods novels or shelved with the spine facing inward.
Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo!
Okay, so, is this a stupid- Like, don't do this.
Don't hide books at the library, you idiots.
Like, don't do that.
It's a bad thing to do.
Don't do it.
Also, is this a national news story?
I'm amused to find that the New York Times, which has a city filled with bookstores where people hide conservative books.
I mean, this is a routine complaint I get from fellow conservative authors.
They've never, ever... Like, you want to do a full-scale investigation?
How about this?
They should do an investigation into which books actually get placed at the front tables of Barnes & Noble.
Like, that actually would be an interesting one, right?
Because that actually makes a lot more difference than where a book gets filed in Idaho.
Bookstores across the nation, those front-facing tables, some publishers will pay a super-fee to get their books up front.
But very often, it is editorial judgment of the people managing the bookstores that decides which books are placed where.
And nearly universally, those books are books that represent the left.
I mean, this is just a thing.
It's been true for a very long time.
I look forward to the New York Times reporting on this when they are done finishing the case of who moved?
Who moved the Al Franken book?
Who did it?
New York Times, really solid work there.
The journalism we've all been waiting for.
All right, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive Producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior Producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our Supervising Producer is Mathis Glover.
And our Technical Producer is Austin Stevens.
Assistant Director, Paweł Wajdowski.
Edited by Adam Sajewicz.
Audio is Mixed by Mike Koromina.
Hair and Makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
Production Assistant, Nick Sheehan.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon has turned to blood.
But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.
▲
Export Selection