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Dec. 22, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
53:14
A Covid Bill Crap Sandwich | Ep. 1162
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Time Text
A massive COVID relief bill includes billions in waste and nonsense.
Attorney General Bill Barr says he's not going to appoint an election fraud special counsel.
And Anthony Fauci says we should keep everything shut down, but also keep importing people from the UK, despite a possible new virus strain.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Slash Ben will get to all the news of the day in just one moment.
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Last night, the Congress passed overwhelmingly a $1 trillion COVID relief package.
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Okay, so last night, the Congress passed overwhelmingly a $1 trillion COVID relief package.
It actually passed by in the Senate a 92 to six vote.
The six Republicans who voted against, and this should give you an idea of exactly what's wrong with the bill, are Marsha Blackburn, Rick Scott of Florida, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Mike Lee of Utah, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Ted Cruz of Texas, which is to say the most conservative members of the Senate voted against the bill, mainly because the bill is, as all giant bills are, a crap sandwich.
And naturally, the media celebrate the crap sandwich.
So first of all, a couple of things are worthy of note.
A lot of the stuff that you're hearing about what the bill is for and how it doesn't provide enough relief to people, it's not actually true.
Okay, so you're hearing right now, for example, that people only got $600 in relief.
That is not correct.
Okay, stimulus checks.
Ernie Tedeschi, who's a former U.S.
Treasury economist, There's a good thread on Twitter pointing out that people are just getting this wrong.
They're saying, oh, well, you know, it's only $600 in relief.
That's all we get after all these.
OK, first of all, before we even get to the problem with that argument, let us point out that there is a solid case to be made that the federal government should not even be providing relief at this point, considering how widely disparate various states are in their lockdown regiments.
At the beginning, when everybody was locked down, When the federal government was encouraging all states to shut down, there was a good case to be made that maybe the federal government needed to bail everybody out.
We are now nine months into this thing.
Florida is wide open, okay?
Places like North Dakota are wide open.
There are lots of places that have said, you can still do business, like North Dakota right now.
Still has an unemployment rate of, I believe, well under 4%.
Meanwhile, places like New York have like a 15% unemployment rate because they shut down and they never started not shutting down.
The same thing happened in California.
So having North Dakota bail out California and New York based on their different shutdown regimens doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense.
The counter argument would be that the federal government is still encouraging place-by-place shutdowns, that this is based mostly on data, which I kind of don't believe, as opposed to politics.
But there's a solid case to be made that really, if California wants to increase its unemployment benefits and take out more debt in order to do that, it should go ahead and do that, and New York should do the same.
And that's a New York and a California problem that is not really like a Kansas problem.
Okay, but putting that Complaints aside, which I think there's some truth to that, and also putting aside the fact that what you actually want to do is encourage people to get back to work if they are young and they are healthy, and it has been insipid from the very start to suggest that the work rules should be the same for a 65-year-old person with diabetes as they are for a 21-year-old fresh out of college.
Putting all of those policies aside and talking about just what is in the relief bill and with the understanding that there are a ton of people who are out of work who should not be out of work and who do need the relief at least in this moment and this is sort of emergency spending.
A lot of the lies that are being told about this bill are in fact lies.
So for example, Again, people suggesting there's only $600 in COVID relief in this bill.
That is not correct.
Ernie Tedeschi says stimulus checks are only around one-fifth of the total bill.
Unemployment insurance in America typically pays around 50% of pre-layoff wages, though it does vary state by state.
With this extra $300 a week, that'll be about 85%.
There's unemployment insurance in the bill as well.
Okay, so you're mostly being filled in via your state unemployment as well as now the federal unemployment.
If you're unemployed, you get an extra $1,300 per month through mid-March.
If you're a gig worker or you've been out of work since early 2020, that's on top of having your unemployment insurance benefits extended.
The bill includes another $300 billion in In paycheck protection program loans, the PPP loans, which are essentially payroll support for small business, right?
In order for those loans to be forgiven, you have to just pass that money right through to employees, even if your business is not currently open.
I've actually thought that that was a bad idea from the start because you're basically using these various businesses as pass-throughs for direct aid.
Instead of just signing people checks, you're now telling a business that they have to keep on paying all of the expenses of employees who, when the economy recovers, may not be coming back at all.
But that isn't the bill.
If a business wants all of these loans fully forgiven, they essentially have to maintain their employment and wages, which is effectively the equivalent 100% payroll support.
So if you work at one of these places and you are getting money through PPP and you are also getting a check, then you're in many cases making more than you were when you were actually working at these places, according to Ernie Tedeschi.
He points out the problem with the U.S.
response originally was not its initial generosity.
We actually did a hell of a lot more than just $1,200 checks back in March.
Again, this is a very Twitter talking point, is the idea that over the course of the year, you only got $1,800 from the government since March.
That is not true in any way, shape, or form.
Unemployment insurance has been going for literally tens of millions of people in the United States since the beginning of the pandemic.
He points out we probably did more than any other advanced economy besides Canada, even adjusting for the preexisting safety net.
The problem instead is that the U.S.
leaned heavily on that unemployment insurance system to deliver aid, and that it was inconsistent, it was cranky, some people didn't get the checks when they needed to, right?
That is a problem with the general government aid system, but that is not a problem with what Congress did.
Okay, so, this was an awful lot of aid, right?
I mean, there was a lot of money in this particular bill.
And so, people who are complaining that there was not very much money in the particular bill are just wrong about this.
Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana points out correctly, he says, you know, you guys are complaining there wasn't enough money.
We're spending a trillion dollars, for goodness sake, and we spent like seven trillion dollars earlier this year.
Here's Kennedy on Fox News.
Is this real help, or is this just optics for senators in Washington to make it look like they're bringing real help to the American people?
Which is it?
Oh, it's real help.
It's a trillion dollars, for God's sakes.
What is that, $1,000 million?
And there is no money, Ferry.
We don't have this money.
We don't have 5% of it, Sandra.
We had to borrow it.
It's real help.
Will it be enough?
I think it will be, but we're just going to have to wait and see.
OK, so there are a couple of other things that were passed at the same time.
The continuing resolution to fund the government was passed at the same time.
There were also some defense bills that were passed at the same time as this giant bill.
Basically, in a last minute of legislation, Congress just passed through.
Thousands of pages of legislation, which is really the bigger issue with this particular passage.
There are problems with the bill for sure, and we're going to go through all of them.
The bigger problem is that there are problems now with every bill, because the only way legislation gets done is it basically gets done through a Congress that is generally constipated until there's a blowout.
That's basically the way it works.
You reach a deadline, and then Congress just, bleh, out, like a 5,000-page bill, and then everybody is forced to vote on it within about 30 seconds.
So they do nothing for six months, and then just, they have spastic colon, then bleh, out comes a giant, horrible bill that is filled with some good things, but a lot of crap, and then you are supposed to be like, oh, well, I'm so glad that Congress is here to save all of us.
One, by the way, quick notion, When I say that they passed a bunch of bills, including the continuing resolution to fund the government, as well as this giant trillion dollar relief package.
They also passed this defense bill, right?
That defense bill is the one that actually includes the foreign aid for Israel.
So you're seeing on Twitter this trending idea that $500 million in aid were contained in the COVID relief bill.
That is not true.
Congress passed a suite of bills, including COVID relief and the bill funding the Defense Department for 2021, which also includes foreign aid, as Yair Rosenberg of Tablet Magazine points out.
It doesn't matter.
A lot of the people who aren't super friendly to Israel on Twitter started passing that around so naturally it trended on Twitter last night.
It is worth debunking that notion thoroughly.
We'll get to more of the debunking in just a second.
We'll talk about what is in here and whether Republicans should vote for it.
There are people who are urging Trump to veto it.
He's not going to veto this bill.
I mean, that's just not going to happen.
Not when there are this many people who are hurting.
But we will get to this in just one second.
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Let's start at the beginning.
What exactly is in this COVID relief bill?
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Okay, so what exactly is, let's start at the beginning.
What exactly is in this COVID relief bill?
According to Emily Zanotti writing for the Daily Wire, Congress is set to pass two major spending bills on Monday, a nearly $1 trillion coronavirus relief bill and a $1.4 trillion omnibus bill in a record-setting vote that will fund hundreds of government programs.
And according to Lawmakers Assist, individual Americans struggling to make ends meet because of COVID-19 related restrictions.
The bill does, in fact, contain some help for those facing economic struggles.
In addition to providing a second round of direct stimulus checks to individual taxpayers, this time $600, the bill extends federal supplemental unemployment benefits, right?
That is the really big check.
It's not the $600 check.
It is the extension of federal supplemental unemployment benefits.
The jobless, as well as gig employees experiencing a slowdown in business, can now get an extra $300 per week through March, through mid-March.
So if you are on unemployment insurance, You're really talking about like an $1,800 check every month.
You're not talking about $600.
You're talking about $1,800.
And that is on top of whatever state aid you are getting as well.
The coronavirus relief package expands paycheck protection as well, opening up $248 billion in funding for loans to struggling businesses, even as evidence emerges that millions from the first round of PPP loans went to connected corporations.
This is, of course, the great risk of all of these bills.
I'm not sure it is worthwhile bailing out movie theaters, to be perfectly frank with you.
And this comes from somebody who loves movie theaters.
I love movie theaters.
This time around, the COVID-19 bill contains special grants for specific industries, $20 billion for businesses in low-income communities, $15 billion for struggling live venues, movie theaters, and museums.
I'm not sure it is worthwhile bailing out movie theaters, to be perfectly frank with you.
And this comes from somebody who loves movie theaters.
I love movie theaters.
My wife and I used to go on lots of dates to movie theaters before the COVID shutdown happened.
I love seeing movies in the theater.
I think it's a great tragedy that this may be a communal experience that goes the way of the dodo bird, but I don't know why we're spending $15 billion to bail out movie theaters.
Not given the fact that you've got places like HBO Max that have already explained that they are going to simultaneously release things in theaters and at home, which means that people are just not going to go to theaters.
I think that movie theaters are going to be the last thing to come back, and it's going to become more of a specialty thing.
I don't think you're going to see movie theaters There are a number of breaks for businesses, according to Emily, some of which haven't gone over well on social media.
The relief bill includes a two-year tax break for business meals.
This is a priority for President Trump, apparently, and rolls over a variety of temporary tax breaks known as extenders, some for multiple years.
The business meal deduction has been labeled the three-martini lunch deduction that very few people, aside from key Democratic legislators in major cities, are having many dine-in luncheons, as Emily Zanotti suggests.
The bill also helps renters.
There's a $25 billion assistance program and a continued eviction moratorium.
Under the COVID-19 relief deal, $13 billion will go to food benefits, $15 billion to a program for direct payments to farmers to assist in keeping American food production afloat.
Well, I wasn't aware that we had a problem in keeping American food production afloat, considering that demand is still kind of the same in the American food markets.
It's just going through different channels, just not going through restaurants.
There are big handouts in the bill.
Airlines get $15 billion.
Again, I'm not sure that that is worthwhile.
I'm not sure that the taxpayer should be paying out airlines who have experienced this shock And setback.
You don't want them going bankrupt.
You want them still existing, obviously.
But it seems to me that airlines, it's going to be a while before people are traveling in quite the way they used to.
People are not going to travel casually quite as easily for probably a couple of years, particularly if you're elderly.
Airports are going to get $2 billion.
Amtrak is going to get $1 billion.
So I guess that leaves Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg particularly happy.
Very, very romantic Amtrak.
Higher education.
Higher education is wildly overpriced.
It's been pushed up in the marketplace by federal loans in the first place.
There's a good case to be made that huge swaths of higher education should be left on the cutting room floor, including...
Many of the what we would call North Campus majors at UCLA, the liberal arts majors, should be left on the cutting room floor.
I do not know why we are dumping out $82 billion to higher education, particularly at a time when you are looking at places like Harvard that have billion-dollar endowments.
That makes no sense to me.
The U.S.
Postal Service also wins big.
Congress used the bill to forgive a $10 billion loan to the U.S.
Postal Service, a loan they gave to the service in an earlier coronavirus relief bill.
The USPS has no hope of ever paying back.
States will get $20 billion to help purchase vaccines and distribute them.
They also get $20 billion to help with expanding COVID-19 testing.
They don't get a bailout for the economic damage they've incurred during the extended virus lockdown.
Democrats pushed for that.
Republicans said no.
On the other hand, Republicans were pushing for a limit to legal liability for corporations based on COVID, right?
If they said you need to come to work if you're not sick, and then people came to work and they were sick, people were going to sue these corporations.
Apparently, they still can, theoretically.
There are further expenditures that are now coming to light.
Apparently, the final draft of the bill contains a number of handouts for Congress, including a provision paying for the additional pandemic expenditures incurred by the Congressional Day Care Center.
Ooh, sounds great.
And $5 million to protect members from the coronavirus by expanding testing and increasing the budget of the congressional physician.
Also, the Washington, D.C.
government got $38 million in reimbursements for its work controlling protests and providing security.
I just, why?
Did they do a good job with that?
Did I miss the part where the Washington, D.C.
government did a fantastic job controlling protests and providing security when people were literally running through downtown Washington, D.C., just breaking store windows?
That seems like a waste of money as well.
We'll get to more of what is in the bill and Why it is that Congress, again, has spastic colon when it comes to these bills.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so a couple of things to note here.
Nancy Pelosi was considered the master negotiator throughout this entire process.
She turned down a deal that was literally twice this size just a couple of months ago before the election.
Steve Mnuchin went to her and he's like, I will give you $1.8 trillion.
And she was like, no, there's an election.
And now she's out there championing the bill.
Because she's actually terrible at her job.
I mean, truly awful at her job.
Which is probably why only a bare majority of Democratic voters actually want to see her continue as Speaker of the House.
Here she was saying $600 in relief is significant.
So she's trying to gloss over the fact that she completely blew this negotiation.
We also have in the legislation direct payments, which were not in the Republican bill, to America's working families.
I would like them to be bigger, but they are significant, and they will be going out soon.
By the way, she was asked directly by the media this morning why exactly she didn't just go along with Mnuchin's $1.8 trillion bill, and she couldn't give a good answer.
We all know the answer.
She was trying to hold up COVID relief until after the election.
We all know why this bill got done now.
The reason the bill got done now is because Democrats believed from election night on that they could now pass the COVID relief bill without doing any damage to Joe Biden or helping Donald Trump.
They were afraid of passing the COVID relief bill before the election because it might alleviate people's financial fears and lead to more votes for Donald Trump.
So instead, they held up the aid that you needed for political purposes.
This is perfectly obvious.
Steve Mnuchin, for his part, the Treasury Secretary, he says the $600 payments are gonna arrive after Christmas.
As you know, we've been working on for months additional money for those parts of the economy.
And we couldn't be more pleased that we got this done in time before the end of the year.
The president wanted direct payments, so we will be sending out next week direct deposit.
I expect we'll get the money out by the beginning of next week.
Okay, so that is getting done.
Now, there's a bunch of crap in here, right?
And for the only time, this is where you have the online meme.
The worst person you know just made an excellent point.
Heartbreaking.
Alexander Ocasio-Cortez actually tweeted out something correct.
I know, it's shocking to me too.
Yesterday, she tweeted out, this is why Congress needs time to actually read this package before voting on it.
Members of Congress have not read this bill.
It's over 5,000 pages, arrived at 2 p.m.
today.
We were told to expect a vote on it in two hours.
This isn't governance, it's hostage taking.
She happens to be exactly correct about this.
Okay, this is right.
And you know who agrees with this?
She continued, she said, by the way, it's not just members who need to see the bill ahead of time, you do.
The public needs to see these bills with enough time to contact the representative to let them know how they feel.
Members are reeling right now because they don't have time to consult with their communities.
She, again, this is right.
This is correct.
You know who agrees with this?
Probably one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, Mike Lee from Utah.
of the United States Senate, Mike Lee from Utah.
He tweeted out, this is the spending bill under consideration in Congress today.
I received it just moments ago and will likely be asked to vote on it late tonight.
It is 5,593 pages long.
I know there's some good things in it.
I'm equally confident that there are bad things in it.
Here's the really sad thing.
We're being told there will be no opportunity to amend or improve it.
As a result, nearly every member of Congress, House and Senate, Democrat or Republican, will have been excluded from the process of developing this bill, which will cost American taxpayers trillions of dollars.
This process, by which members of Congress are asked to defer blindly to legislation negotiated entirely in secret by four of their colleagues, must come to an end.
It won't come to an end until it no longer works for those empowered by it.
That can happen.
But only when most members of both houses and both political parties stop voting for bills they haven't read and, by design, cannot read until after it's too late.
He happens to be right.
Also, this is not going to change.
It's not.
This is the way governance is done now.
And the reason that governance is done this way now, there are a couple reasons for this.
So, the more cynical have suggested that one of the reasons that you end up with these giant omnibus packages that nobody ever reads is because we got rid of what are called earmarks.
So, earmarks were the Atrocious congressional behavior whereby a bill would basically be put forward and then a bunch of members would say, okay, you know what?
I'm not voting for that bill unless you give me a little giveaway for my district, right?
The Robert Byrd Memorial Bridge in West Virginia, right?
This is how you get highways named after senators, right?
The senator would say, I'm not going to pass this Defense Authorization Act unless we put in this $100,000 grant for my local post office with my name on it.
Okay, that was not great, right?
It was a bad practice.
The problem is you get rid of that practice, and what you end up with is those earmarks back in the bill, but not as earmarks.
They used to be done as amendments, and the nice thing about doing it as amendments is that it would then be exposed to the light of day, is that you would have people offer an amendment saying, I want my $100,000 post office, and people are like, that's stupid.
You need to vote for it anyway.
But now, it just gets done behind closed doors.
So now, it's like they roll out a 6,000 page bill, And it has all the same pork, it's just not exposed to the light of day in quite the same way.
So you're getting the same amount of pork, it's just not being done as quote-unquote earmarks.
And so you don't get to see how the sausage is made.
And one of the nice things about Congress is you're supposed to see how the sausage is made.
It also happens to be the case that it's a long-standing congressional practice to now wrap everything up into a giant ball so that nobody is answerable for any specific piece of legislation.
People have asked me what sort of constitutional amendment would I favor.
I'm generally not in favor of giant wide-scale changes to the Constitution.
One constitutional amendment that I would favor is that every bill has to be five pages and it has to come with a codicil in plain language.
There actually has to be some sort of explanation of what exactly is going on.
You cannot have 5,600 page bills where nobody knows what's in it because it creates a perverse incentive.
On both sides.
So here is the perverse incentive number one.
Perverse incentive number one is if you don't vote for this relief package, then you are labeled, as Twitter is currently doing, somebody awful.
This is why AOC, you can tell the difference between those who are principled and those who are not on this particular issue.
AOC said, I don't like that they presented this bill to me.
Two hours before the vote, she then voted for the bill.
Mike Lee said, I don't like how they presented this bill to me.
And then he voted against the bill.
So on the one hand, what you get, and I understand both positions on that, by the way.
I do.
Like, I can't believe I'm turning into a bit of an AOC defender here, but it actually is kind of true.
The fact is, if you don't vote for the bill and the bill, quote unquote, does good things, they then use this in your future election as a way to browbeat you.
So unless you are in a deep blue district or a deep red state, You have to vote for stuff that you think is going to overall be a good deal.
So every sandwich is a crap sandwich.
Every single sandwich.
There has never been and will never be again just a plain good bill.
It's not going to exist.
Instead, you're just going to get these crap sandwich...
And you can see why.
Again, there's a long political history in the United States of people saying, you know what?
I think there's more crap than sandwich in this particular bill, so I'm gonna vote against it.
And then being ripped for voting against the bill.
The most obvious example being Barry Goldwater.
In 1964, he voted against the Civil Rights Act, and then he was ripped up and down.
And people suggested that he voted against the Civil Rights Act because he was a racist.
Barry Goldwater was not a racist.
Barry Goldwater was very much anti-racism.
Barry Goldwater objected to the titles of the Civil Rights Act that specifically applied to private accommodations and to private businesses.
And he said, overall, I have to vote against the bill because I don't like this provision.
Instead, people say, oh, well, that means he doesn't like civil rights.
That's the way the game is played in Congress.
You pass these giant bills that are called COVID relief.
And then if it includes a bunch of crap, then you are castigated.
If you don't vote for it.
So on the one hand, you're castigated if you don't vote for it.
On the other hand, if these bills earn widespread support, you also get to be the congressional free rider.
So to be perfectly cynical about this, I like all of this.
I know personally all of the senators who voted against this bill.
I totally understand why other senators voted for the bill, and it did provide them the leeway to actually vote against the bill.
I'll explain in just one second.
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Okay, so as I say, because this is the way that bills get done.
There is a sort of doubly edged bad incentive.
One is to vote for bad bills because you don't want to be castigated for not voting for it.
The other is to allow free riders to vote against the bill in order to uphold their purity of purpose to the rest of the Senate.
Right now, the way the bills normally were supposed to work, and always did, historically, at least for the first hundred years of the country, is that there would be a single-issue bill, the single-issue bill would come up, people would vote on the single-issue bill, it would either go up or it would go down, and that would be it.
And there was none of this, we're gonna package together 87,000 different topics, because, first of all, the executive branch was not capable of handling this stuff.
The bigger the government gets, the bigger the executive branch gets, the more Congress is going to be incentivized to blow out the spending.
And until the American people stand up and say, we don't like this, It's not going to happen.
And here's the problem.
The American people, they kind of do like this, okay?
The reality is, as much as Americans complain about Congress, as much as Americans bitch about how the sausage gets made, the reality is that when you ask Americans, would you like to see the American government spend less, they say yes.
And then when you ask them, would you like to see them spend less on X, people say, no, no, no, I like X.
Every single time.
Every single time.
Every poll shows this.
If you ever ask Americans, generally, should the American government be spending less?
And the American people are like, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, look at the taxes.
This is crazy.
We're spending $4 trillion a year on what?
On what?
And they're like, well, yeah, but do you want to see the federal government spend more on education?
People are like, yeah, that sounds good.
I like education.
Books are good.
I mean, nobody ever actually examines where all of this money goes in the end.
There are a few members of Congress who like to point this sort of stuff out, but typically it sort of gets ignored.
And the media, of course, cheer on all of this stuff.
The New York Times has this sycophantic piece today titled, A Dinner, A Deal, and Moonshine, How the Stimulus Came Together.
Top party leaders cinched a $900 billion relief deal after laying down their swords, but it took an empowered, bipartisan group of moderates to help bridge the divide.
No, what actually happened here is the election ended, and then Joe Biden told the Democrats, I don't want to come into office without a COVID relief bill in place, so please just surrender.
That's basically what happened here.
Okay, so in the end, for Republicans, this is a better deal for Republicans than it was for Democrats.
Okay, let's just put that out there.
This is a win by Mitch McConnell.
It is a negotiating win by Mitch McConnell.
As much crap as in there, Again, I'm just being realistic.
There is going to be an enormous amount of manure in every congressional bill from now until the end of time because the administrative state is too large, because the size of a government is too large, because the American people do not demand that their representatives only pass bills that they can understand.
And so this is just going to be the new normal, and it's going to be the new normal until the end of time.
Nonetheless, this thing gets passed.
The Democrats really don't get everything they are looking for here.
Senator Bernie Sanders, the progressive independent, according to the New York Times, had preemptively panned the emerging framework, in part because checks were not included.
He locked arms in the Senate with Josh Howley of Missouri, a conservative Republican in the House.
Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, made a similar stand.
She had texted Pelosi in early December, threatening her group would oppose the stimulus package if it didn't contain some form of direct payment.
Senator Pat Toomey had other ideas with less than 48 hours until the government was set to shut down.
Toomey stood firm on one demand.
The stimulus measure must not only end an array of programs the Fed had created to help businesses and municipalities during the pandemic, it must also bar the central bank from creating anything like them in the future.
But Republicans rallied around Toomey.
Congressional leaders agreed they would need to extend government spending another day to buy time to resolve the impasse.
They ultimately struck an agreement before midnight, haggling on the floor, and in Chuck Schumer's suite, it took 18 hours before McConnell walked down to the Senate floor and announced the deal.
Okay, but, you know, everybody goes home happy because they can spend everybody else's money and money that has not yet been created.
Now, I've talked about some of the good stuff that is in here and some of the stuff that, you know, sort of needed to happen, but I've also talked about the fact that there's an enormous amount of money that is just going to sort of random crap.
So, again, it was drafted behind closed doors.
Fraud and waste have not been meaningfully addressed, as Brad Palumbo writes at the Free Enterprise Institute.
He has an entire piece about this.
This is the first COVID-19 stimulus bill.
The $2 trillion CARES Act was corrupted by waste, fraud, and abuse.
The federal government sent more than a million stimulus checks to dead people and many more to random European citizens.
The expanded unemployment system it created lost more to fraud alone than the entire system paid out in 2019.
The Paycheck Protection Program was swamped with potential fraud as tens of thousands of ineligible companies received money and thousands more were overpaid.
None of these problems have been meaningfully addressed by Congress, and the latest stimulus effort pours hundreds of billions of taxpayer money into fraud-rife programs without addressing the problem.
And then there is the question as to whether any of this is going to actually be effective.
The fact is that, unfortunately, the only thing that is going to solve this is getting out of lockdown in the end.
And the Paycheck Protection Program, as I say, is not really directed at preserving businesses.
It's more being done as a pass-through.
But when we talk about just the pure amount of garbage in here, there are certain things that I think should be legislated on.
I just don't know why they aren't in a COVID relief bill.
So, for example, there's an entire section in this COVID relief bill detailing the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama.
That's not a joke.
Now, I actually agree with the policy here, because the policy here basically says that China should have no role in picking the next Dalai Lama, and also suggests that we should set up an embassy in Tibet.
I kind of like all of those anti-Chinese measures, anti-Chinese government measures.
I'm not sure what they have to do with COVID relief.
Also, according to Reason Magazine, The bill also instructs the Smithsonian Institution to create two new identity-based museums, one for women and one for Latinos.
The bill also takes a position on the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama.
By the way, I don't know why we need a women museum and a Latino museum.
I understand we have a National African American History Museum, which was rife with critical race theory to the point where they actually released An exhibit a little earlier this year that was full of gems like the suggestion that merit-based systems and individualism and coming to work on time were white systems of privilege and power.
I'm not sure why we need more racially segregated museums.
I'm not sure why that's an important thing to be done at the federal level.
Also, it attempts to normalize U.S.
relations with Sudan, criminalizes illegal streaming, and creates a plan for building a Teddy Roosevelt presidential library in North Dakota, all of which I think is vital for people who are out of a job.
The bill actually needed to be brought into the chamber on wheels because, again, it is some 6,000 pages long.
Other wonders.
The COVID relief bill lays the groundwork for a quote-unquote climate security advisory council, which is exciting stuff.
It also includes $10 million for gender programs in Pakistan.
It also makes it illegal to give racehorses painkillers before training or racing, which is exciting stuff.
It provides $40 million to the Kennedy Center.
Tom Elliott from Grabian Media has compiled this list.
The COVID relief bill creates a commission tasked with educating consumers about the dangers associated with using or storing portable fuel containers for flammable liquids near an open flame.
I mean, I wasn't aware that this was a problem that required a government solution.
It seems like if you don't know not to put, you know, like an open gas canister next to an open flame, then kind of you deserve what you get a little bit.
I'm not sure that an awareness program is going to be all that helpful, but I suppose you could put that in a COVID.
I mean, what does it have to do with?
Sure, I guess as.
No, it has nothing to do with COVID.
I got nothing for you.
Also, the COVID relief bill includes $1.5 million for the Appropriation Committee's Office of Diversity and Inclusion, as well as a bunch of money for reception.
So very, very important stuff.
Also, the COVID relief bill mandates hiring measures to ensure diversity in the intelligence community, because I deeply care whether an analyst is gay, bisexual, transgender, little person.
When they are analyzing incoming Arabic threats.
I definitely need to know the identity of the person who's actually doing all of that.
By the way, the COVID relief package also includes $8 million to support the Biden presidential transition as well.
So lots and lots of stuff in that COVID relief bill and in the COVID package.
Generally, the media are cheering this.
They wouldn't have been cheering if it had been passed under Trump because that is the rule.
We'll get to more of that in just one second.
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Okay, we're gonna get more.
into the COVID relief bill, the media's celebration of it, and then we'll get into everything COVID-related.
Anthony Fauci making some weird comments about keeping flights from the UK open.
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Meanwhile, obviously, the New York Times is chalking up the deal to, wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, Joe Biden.
Now, you gotta be asking yourself, what the hell does Joe Biden have to do with anything?
Trump's the president.
Mitch McConnell is running in the Senate.
Nancy Pelosi has been the Speaker of the House for a few years here.
What in the world are you even talking about?
Joe Biden is asleep in his basement.
He's been asleep in his basement for two years.
I mean, you talk about a Rip Van Winkle transformation.
Basically, Joe Biden went to sleep in 2018 and woke up president.
Or president-elect, supposedly, right?
I mean, that's where things stand.
The man pretty much was comatose, and then the Electoral College elected him, and he won the popular vote by 7 million votes, and he's gonna...
I guess, wake up in the Oval Office on January 21st, and he'll already have been given massive credit for everything that went on.
The media's desire to give credit to Joe Biden for things he has not done, it is matched only by their desire to give Barack Obama credit for a bunch of things that he never did either.
It must be wonderful to be a Democrat.
It's like, what did you do today, random Democrat?
Well, I breathed.
Oh, unbelievable breathing.
You did a great job breathing.
Joe Biden's main task throughout this campaign was to basically remain alive.
Right?
And we're not talking about, like, remain alive in the sense that he was, like, in the movie Die Hard.
We mean just remain physically alive.
That was his entire task during the campaign.
He accomplished this magnificent feat, and the media walked him.
Into election.
And now they're immediately attributing to him godlike powers to get done a COVID relief bill, even though he literally has nothing to do with it because he has no power because there's only one president at a time in the United States.
But according to the New York Times, Carl Pulse reporting, What do you mean, validated his belief?
He didn't do anything.
The hell are you talking about?
He's not even president yet.
What are you- what?
Like, huh?
Along with struggling Americans and businesses, the new president was a major beneficiary of the $900 billion pandemic stimulus measure that Congress haltingly but finally produced on Sunday and was on track to approve late Monday, which will give him some breathing room when he enters the White House next month.
Rather than face an immediate and dire need to act on an emergency economic aid package, Biden and his team can instead take a moment to try to fashion a more far-reaching recovery program and begin to tackle other issues.
I do love how every... Here's the way it works.
Whenever Congress passes a bill, And Mitch McConnell is the driving force behind the bill.
McConnell doesn't get the credit.
The Democrat gets the credit.
And then when it turns out that this bill was a wildly scaled down version from what Democrats were actually proposing, the media immediately say, well, this will provide a model for Democrats going forward because it's just the beginning of the ambition.
No, no, no, no.
You understand.
The bill went from large to smaller.
And now you are saying that in the future, these bills will go from small to larger.
Wrongo!
That is not how this is going to go.
If Republicans hold the Senate, if they win those two Georgia Senate seats, they will be stifling Joe Biden's agenda as well they should.
And yet the media are like, oh my God, look, they made a deal.
That means that they're going to be able to pass climate change legislation.
In media land, in the land of the New York Times, it is always heads, Democrats win, tails, Republicans lose.
According to the New York Times, the group of moderates was essential to the outcome, pushing Senate and House leaders of both parties into direct personal negotiations they'd avoided for months, demonstrating how crucial they are likely to be to Biden.
Again, this has nothing to do with Biden.
And Mitch McConnell all the way through was like, I'll negotiate with Pelosi.
And Pelosi was like, I'm eating ice cream.
I'll talk to you in six months.
I'm glad we forced the issue, said Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who, along with Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, were leaders of a months-long effort to break the impasse over pandemic aid, even as the virus exacted a growing economic and health toll on the country.
Given the slender partisan divides that will exist in both the Senate and House next year, the approach could provide a roadmap for the Biden administration.
If it hopes to break through congressional paralysis, especially in the Senate, and pass additional legislation, Biden has said another economic relief plan will be an early priority.
No.
No, no, no.
This is supposed to take us through March, right?
So, we don't need another economic relief plan.
We don't.
And Republicans would do well to note this now.
This was the last gasp.
No more.
There will be no more support from the conservative base for any more of these relief plans.
We understand a relief plan is necessary right now in many ways because of the COVID shutdown and because of the federal government's Unwillingness to actually open up particular areas because it is a state-based issue.
And we get that there are times and emergencies when people just need the support and this is sort of last-ditch effort.
Although again, I would have preferred if Congress had simply said to the states, this is on you guys.
You need to handle your own business here.
You're handling all of the rollout.
We're handling the vaccines because that's a national-level issue.
When it comes to unemployment insurance, really that should be a state-level issue.
Like, I wish that Congress had said that.
They didn't and they were never going to.
Which means that they were going to pass something here.
But if we get to March, right, and we have had hundreds of millions of people who have been vaccinated, and that has really started with the most vulnerable in our population, and we're still talking about COVID relief, that is not correct.
OK, so if The New York Times thinks the Republican Senate is going to go along with that, I think they have another thing coming.
Nonetheless, the New York Times using this as a basis to push further and further and further.
Mr. Biden on Sunday applauded the willingness of lawmakers to quote, reach across the aisle and call the effort a model for the challenging work ahead for our nation. He was also not an idle bystander in the negotiations. Yeah, he kind of was.
Mr. Biden on December 2nd threw his support behind the $900 billion plan being pushed by the centrist group.
The total was less than half of the $2 trillion that Pelosi and Schumer had been insisting on.
Yeah, I'm sure that Biden did throw his support behind that group, but what difference did that make?
I mean, as soon as the election was over, they were going to pass something, and Republicans had all the leverage because Republicans basically have nothing to lose at this point.
It wasn't like Republicans were going to lose the presidential election.
It's over at that point.
I love the New York Times.
But Biden's brave, guys.
Mr. Biden's move was not without risks.
If it had failed to affect the discussions, the president-elect risked looking powerless to move Congress before he had taken the oath of office.
But members of both parties said his intervention was constructive and gave Democrats the confidence to pull back on their demands.
So in other words, they're now suggesting that Joe Biden stepped in.
He said, I want something passed.
And so some of the more radical Democrats backed off.
And that was always going to happen.
Biden is not in control of his caucus.
OK, all that has happened here is that Biden recognized the reality and so did Democrats.
That is all that it doesn't matter.
Biden is the hero of the hour, even though he doesn't have any power.
It's amazing.
The New York Times is like, wow, what an amazing guy.
Michael Flynn should go to jail because he had an incoming conversation as incoming NSA with the Russians.
He should go to jail for that.
But Joe Biden is already impacting legislation, even though we are a solid month away from the inauguration in January.
Well done, everybody.
Okay, meanwhile, when it comes to COVID policy, Anthony Fauci is just saying things that I do not understand.
I seriously don't get it.
So Fauci has been suggesting that it's shutdown time.
Like across the country, we need lots more shutdowns.
We need to make sure that nobody travels during Christmas.
We need to make sure that if you get on a plane to be with your family, that's a really, really bad and dangerous thing.
Now, he is not calling for flights between the U.S.
and the U.K.
to close.
Now, the reason that people have been talking about this is because apparently a new COVID-19 mutation has been spreading in the U.K.
It is apparently up to 70% more transmissible than the original version.
Which is, I mean, this thing is pretty damn transmissible.
Right, so if you're talking 70% more transmissible, that basically means that you walk into a room with somebody, they breathe, and you get it.
And we know that it's broken out in the UK.
And already Fauci's like, we don't want internal Americans flying, like, from New York to LA or something.
And now he's like, you know what?
Maybe we shouldn't halt the travel from the UK.
How is he the expert?
Why?
I've talked to many people in the private sector, epidemiologists in the private sector, and many of them have said they do not get the worship for Fauci.
In fact, some of them were rather dismissive in the sense they said, well, he works for the public sector, which automatically means he's not as good as somebody who works in the private sector.
Like, if he were really good, he would be working for Pfizer.
He wouldn't be working for the NIH.
In any case, Fauci said yesterday that he would not shut down travel from the UK.
Which is like, what?
I don't understand.
He was saying that maybe it's because this strain is not more deadly than the strain that is currently in existence, or that the vaccinations are already rolling out.
Yes, but if everybody gets infected too fast for the vaccines, that's sort of the problem, right?
I thought that was the whole purpose of pushing these sort of time and place lockdowns.
In any case, here's Fauci saying something that is completely incoherent.
As researchers across the globe scramble to study the new variant, a growing number of countries have halted travel from the UK.
San Francisco and Santa Clara counties now require a 10-day quarantine upon arrival.
U.S.
officials still debating similar restrictions.
I think everything needs to be on the table.
Dr. Anthony Fauci advising against travel restrictions, telling CNN, the U.S.
must keep an eye on it, but don't overreact to it.
Um, what?
This is Captain Overreaction right here.
Like, he overreacts in every direction.
First it's like, no one should wear a mask.
Then it's like, everyone should wear a mask until the end of time.
First it's, you know, we should shut down everything.
Then it's like, well, we probably should open the schools.
And now it's like, well, we shouldn't shut down travel from China.
Well, I'm certainly glad we shut down travel from China, but we definitely shouldn't do it from the UK.
Like, what in the world?
What the hell is going on?
I am extremely, extremely confused by Anthony Fauci's view on this thing.
Meanwhile, to his credit, Joe Biden got the vaccine and he at least gave some credit to the Trump administration, which it seems like he should, considering that Operation Warp Speed is a Trump administration development.
I wish we had time to take you through the whole hospital when you see how busy and incredible you all are.
And, uh, we owe you big.
We really do.
And, uh, one of the things is that I think that, uh, the administration deserves some credit getting us off the ground with Operation Warp Speed.
Okay, so, you know, at least he's doing that.
Like, seriously, you give credit where credit is due.
I will give credit to Joe Biden for giving credit to Trump.
That is correct.
That is something that he should do.
Mitch McConnell also was vaccinated yesterday, and he said that the leaders of Congress should take the vaccine.
I mean, number one, they should take the vaccine because they're all 97 years old.
Like, Mitch McConnell is a rather elderly gentleman.
Nancy Pelosi is an old lady.
Like, yes, we should.
Yes, those people should be taking the vaccine.
I'm far more skeptical that people like Alexander Ocasio-Cortez should be taking the vaccine.
Here's McConnell talking about receiving the COVID vaccine yesterday.
I think it's important for the leaders in the country to step up, take the vaccine and help reassure the American public because polls indicate about half the public is either skeptical about taking the vaccine or doesn't want to take it at all.
That has to change because we can't solve this problem until large numbers of Americans are vaccinated.
As a polio victim myself, I fully understand the significance of vaccines.
It took decades to develop the polio vaccine.
This vaccine was developed in under a year.
A modern medical miracle.
And we need to take the vaccine.
Okay, McConnell should take the vaccine.
I'll tell you who should not be taking the vaccine is the young and healthy in Congress.
They're not more special than you.
They're not more special than I am.
They're not more special than anybody.
I don't understand what just because they're elected officials does not mean they should receive the vaccine first.
I don't know what's up with today's show, but this is the, like, agree-with-people-who-I-absolutely-despise show.
Ilhan Omar actually said something correct, right?
She actually went after other members of the squad.
She said it would make sense if it was age.
She's talking about members of Congress getting the vaccine.
She said it would make sense if it was age.
Unfortunately, it's of importance and it's shameful.
We are not more important than frontline workers, teachers, etc., who are making sacrifices every day, which is why I won't take it.
People who need it most should get it.
Full stop.
Wow, again, one of the worst people I know making an excellent point.
This actually happens to be correct.
Tulsi Gabbard said the same thing, by the way.
She said, I'm not going to take the COVID vaccine before the feds let the elderly take it.
That's just ridiculous.
Here's Tulsi Gabbard yesterday.
Members of Congress like me, we can get the vaccine before at-risk seniors can.
People like my aunt, who is imprisoned in her own home because of the danger that if she catches the disease, she could die.
This is immoral and bad health policy.
I had planned to take the vaccine but will now stand in solidarity with our seniors by not doing so until they can.
Okay, points to Tulsi Gabbard.
She happens to be absolutely correct about all this.
Okay, final piece of news before we break for the day.
So, Bill Barr, the Attorney General, he did say yesterday that he's not going to appoint an election special counsel to investigate voter fraud because he's not seen any credible allegations of widespread voter fraud.
Now, for all the crap that Bill Barr has taken from the left, this guy has at least tried to be honest.
I mean, this is right.
This happens to be correct.
If there had been widespread allegations of voter fraud in these states, it all would have been adjudicated in the court.
You know, again, there were cases brought.
The only one that I'm aware of that made serious allegations of voter fraud, it's still being adjudicated right now, are the ones in Georgia.
In many of these states, the Trump campaign did not even claim there was massive voter fraud.
That's, for example, Wisconsin.
The Pennsylvania cases did not allege massive voter fraud.
Here's Bill Barr saying there won't be a special counsel to investigate the election.
In other words, we're done here legally.
I think to the extent that there's an investigation, I think that it's being handled responsibly and professionally currently within the department.
And to this point, I have not seen a reason to appoint a special counsel, and I have no plan to do so before I leave.
OK, and not only that, this, I think, is worthy of note.
So Newsmax, which had really been pushing very hard a lot of these allegations of voter fraud and voter irregularities, Sidney Powell unleashed the Kraken on Newsmax when she was talking.
The former Trump lawyer and maybe future Trump lawyer had been talking about releasing the Kraken and all of this kind of stuff.
Well, now she said all that on Newsmax.
Newsmax kind of went along with it, particularly when it came to Dominion, because her Kraken was the Dominion, these voting machines that were hackable and all of this.
Well, Dominion sent a legal notice to Newsmax, and they said, we are going to sue you out of existence.
We were not hacked.
There are no serious allegations we were hacked.
Smartmatic software is not even on our machines.
We don't know what the hell you're talking about.
So you're going to have to retract that.
This led to this huge walkback by Newsmax yesterday.
Newsmax has found no evidence that either Dominion or Smartmatic owns the other or has any business association with each other.
We have no evidence that Dominion uses Smartmatic software or vice versa.
No evidence has been offered that Dominion or Smartmatic use software or reprogram software that manipulated votes in the 2020 election.
Smartmatic has stated that its software was only used in the 2020 election in Los Angeles, was not used in any battleground state contested by the Trump campaign.
Newsmax has no evidence to the contrary.
Okay, so just, that's a quick note.
Even Newsmax is saying that at this point, which means that Bill Barr...
That's Newsmax.
And again, Newsmax ain't in the business of prosecutions.
Then, you know, take Bill Barr and his comments somewhat seriously.
All righty, right after the show today, head on over to Michael Knowles.
He'll be discussing the COVID relief bill in more detail as well as actor George Takei suggesting that Republicans shouldn't receive the vaccine.
Later today, Matt Walsh, host of The Matt Walsh Show, he will be guest hosting this show's two additional hours of content.
Make sure to come tune in for that as well.
I am Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Our Supervising Producers are Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
Production Manager, Paweł Lajdowski.
Our Associate Producers are Rebecca Doyle and Savannah Dominguez.
The show is edited by Adam Sajewicz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
Hair and Makeup is by Fabiola Cristina.
Production Assistant, Jessica Kranz.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright 2020.
You know, the Matt Wall Show, it's not just another show about politics.
I think there are enough of those already out there.
We talk about culture, because culture drives politics, and it drives everything else.
So my main focuses are life, family, faith.
Those are fundamental, and that's what this show is about.
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