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Sept. 3, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
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Joe Biden’s Presidency is Collapsing | Ep. 1333
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Senator Joe Manchin says it's time to hit pause on Joe Biden's spending plans as Biden's approval ratings crater.
The Afghanistan debacle has destroyed Biden's credibility and the Biden economy is flailing.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alrighty, well, we are very early on in the Joe Biden presidency, and it seems like this thing could be theoretically kind of over already.
It is pretty obvious that next year, Republicans have a solid leg up when it comes to the possibility of taking the House.
It now looks as though they have a very solid shot of taking the Senate, if polls are to be believed from places like New Hampshire, where John Sununu is now up something like seven or eight points on his Democratic opponents.
If Republicans take back Congress, Joe Biden effectively gets nothing done for the next couple of years, which means he has a very short window of time to ram things through.
Here is the problem.
In order for him to ram things through, he needs complete solidarity, particularly in the Senate, where he has a 50-50 split with the Republicans, with Kamala Harris, his vice president, breaking the tie.
Again, that wouldn't have happened if Donald Trump had not intervened in the Georgia Senate races and talked all about how Georgia's voting system was a complete waste of time and all of this.
Put that, be that as it may, put that aside.
The bottom line here is that he still has a very, very narrow pathway to getting things done in the United States Senate, and that requires solidarity among Democrats.
In order to cudgel people like Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin into doing what Joe Biden wants, He really needs to have some coattails.
Joe Biden himself needs to have coattails.
Because here's the thing.
When it comes to things like budget reconciliation, you can do this thing with 50 votes.
Pretty much everything else, you require 60.
Mansion and cinema, who are both from red states.
Cinema you might say is from a purple state, but one of the reddest states in the country is West Virginia.
Neither of them are going to break the filibuster.
They've made this very clear over and over and over, no matter how many times the activist media asks them about it.
So that means that basically everything has to get done through budget reconciliation.
Well, the giant omnibus packages that are being pushed by Joe Biden are not, on their face, particularly pleasant for either of those senators, for either Sinema or for Manchin.
They're not popular in Arizona.
They're not popular in West Virginia.
And remember, senators are not answerable to the quote-unquote national polling.
They are answerable specifically to the people who are in their own states.
So the chances are that Manchin and Sinema are not going to be super happy with these giant policy proposals, which means the only reason why they would do what Joe Biden wants is if they believe that Joe Biden's coattails are strong enough to carry them through, even in red slash purple states, that he's overwhelmingly popular, and therefore they will be able to go back to their voters and say, we did all of these things because Joe Biden told us to do all of these things, and therefore it is good that we did all of these things.
If Joe Biden's popularity craters, therefore, His chances of being able to ram through his agenda completely fall apart.
If he had a broader majority, maybe his approval ratings wouldn't matter so much.
But his approval ratings matter an awful lot, especially because waiting in the wings, and everybody knows this, is Kamala Harris, who's a deeply unpopular politician.
So if you're Joe Manchin, charting your political future, and thinking to yourself, am I still here in four or five years?
Do I get reelected?
Are you gonna hitch your wagon to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris?
Or are you gonna chart your own course?
Same thing for Kyrsten Sinema over in Arizona.
She has pretty good approval ratings.
The reason she has pretty good approval ratings is because she's seen as a sort of democratic version of John McCain.
She's sort of a maverick character willing to buck her own party and say tough things to the people inside her own party about, for example, the filibuster or about too much spending.
So this now puts enormous power in the hands of Joe Manchin, and that power only grows when Joe Biden is not good at his job.
So that means it matters an awful lot whether Joe Biden is liked or whether he is disliked on the national stage.
And that's why it matters that his poll numbers have been absolutely cratering.
Now, they're cratering for basically one specific reason and then one general reason.
So the specific reason is because of Afghanistan.
The general reason is because Joe Biden is a houseplant.
So he was elected because he was a houseplant, right?
But he was a houseplant who's supposed to provide stability.
The thing about houseplants is that they are barely alive, they cover the water stain, and they don't move around a lot.
You don't have to worry about the houseplant.
You leave the house for work in the morning, you come back, the houseplant's in exactly the same place.
Maybe it's grown a little bit.
That's pretty much it.
But Joe Biden, elected as a houseplant, is actually turning out to be the plant from Little Shop of Horrors, right?
He's eating everything else.
In terms of policy, he's very much alive, even though in terms of sentience, he is not.
And so if you voted for Joe Biden, or if you are somebody in the middle who's kind of warm to Joe Biden, you're kind of getting the worst of both worlds.
You're getting the non-sentience, non-charismatic president.
He's not like Obama in any of the Areas of charisma or magnetism or personal draw.
And you're getting the radical policy of Barack Obama, except on steroids, because actually Joe Biden's policies are way more radical than Barack Obama's were at this point, even in his presidency.
And Obama was really radical on policy this early on in his presidency.
And so every time Joe Biden now appears and seems to be doddering his way through a press conference, it hurts him rather than helping him.
If you were a moderate and you were doddering his way through, people would be willing to say that that's kind of a feature, not a bug.
All right, he's doddering, but the reason he's doddering is because we elected somebody to dodder.
The whole point is we wanted somebody who moved slowly, incrementally, somebody who is not going to be threatening.
But if he's threatening and also doddering, now it just seems like things are spinning out of control.
And so every press conference that he has where he seems incapable of holding it together is a serious problem for him.
That's why the Afghanistan debacle made so clear that he is just not in control, right?
Even when he makes a call, those calls are so incapable of meeting with any sort of good policy that this seems like an administration where the brakes have been taken off and you literally have an octogenarian in charge of the car driving directly at a crowd.
And everybody's kind of freaking out about that.
Which means that if you're a moderate on the fence, if you're Joe Manchin or if you're Kyrsten Sinema, you're like, I don't want to be in this car.
The future of this car is not good.
So let's go to the dottering of Joe Biden, and then we'll get to the policy of Joe Biden.
So when it comes to the dottering of Joe Biden, he just continues to lie and futz around.
It really is not good for him.
All of these things add up.
The way that people make decisions about politicians typically is that over and over and over, their preconceived notions about those politicians are either rejected or reinforced.
Joe Biden every day is reinforcing the fact that he is not with us.
That he is not with us.
That his policies are radical and he's not in control.
That this is a car careening out of control, no brakes, octogenarian at the wheel who should have had his license revoked at least five years ago.
Here was Joe Biden yesterday.
He was doing a kind of meet and greet.
with a bunch of so-called Jewish leaders.
I say so-called because a lot of the Jewish leaders that he was meeting with aren't particularly Jewish in any sort of religious sense.
And they kind of lead reconstructionist synagogues that don't reflect any of the principles of the Torah, that are not particularly interested in Jewish philosophy, but put that aside.
Joe Biden is speaking to them, and he starts just telling lies about visiting the Tree of Life Synagogue.
It turns out that he did not.
The Tree of Life Synagogue, of course, was the site of the white supremacist shooting a couple of years ago.
And he said he visited.
He absolutely did not.
He's just making things up.
I remember spending time at, you know, going to the, you know, the Tree of Life Synagogue, speaking with them.
Just as amazing, these things are happening.
Happening in America.
Okay, and then he started doddering through a story about his daughter's wedding.
He couldn't remember what was going on.
It's very awkward.
I mean, your grandpa is wandering off script.
It's reminiscent, I think it's a Mitch Hedberg joke, or a Jack Handy joke, that when I go, I want to go like my grandfather did, peacefully in his sleep, not like the passengers in his car screaming.
That's the Democratic Party at this point, right?
Here's Joe Biden, again, kind of wandering off script into the cornfield.
My daughter married a Jewish young man.
And I, you know, dream of every Catholic father that she marry a Jewish doctor.
But all kidding aside, he did, he's a great surgeon.
And they played, and my mind's going blank now, what's the song that is played where everybody is on the chair, everybody, you know, I can't remember it anyway.
And that's the song that was played.
So, you know, I don't know what the hell's going on here.
Inspiring stuff there from the President of the United States.
Very, very, very inspiring stuff.
And then he added on top of this, he says, you know, he starts talking about never again.
Now, this is where you move from the senile to the rather unforgivable.
Here's Joe Biden talking about never again, which of course is verbiage that is used surrounding the Holocaust, that we as the world will never allow this sort of stuff to happen again.
I have some questions for Joe Biden about this particular perspective coming out of his face, his doddering old collapsing face.
Here's the president of the United States.
I guess the point I want to make is that it just shows that if we walk away from never again, it's going to happen again.
It can't happen again.
And so I guess the point I'm making is that the attack in Pittsburgh, those attacks All anti-Semitic attacks aren't just a strike against the Jewish community.
They're a strike against the soul of our nation.
Okay, I'm just going to point out, when he says we cancel on Never Again to happen, this is the same president who is currently attempting to cut a deal with the genocidal Iranian regime to allow them a pathway to nuclear weapons.
Hey, this is the same president of the United States who is currently talking about opening a Palestinian consulate in Jerusalem, reopening the wounds of a process that has completely failed and incentivizing terror attacks in the region against Jews.
This is the same president of the United States who, on another front, you want to talk about never again, just abandoned 38 million people to today's Nazis, the Taliban, who are literally going to go around just murdering everybody they don't like.
This is already happening in Afghanistan right now.
This is the same president who's been making kind overtures to China, which has become increasingly aggressive.
Meanwhile, holding in Shenzhen 1 million Uighur Muslims in concentration camps.
So when this guy says, I'm anti, you know, never again means something to me, no, it doesn't.
It absolutely 100% is not.
It's a bunch of words that he thinks he has to say in front of people.
And here's the thing.
He has no credibility on these issues.
He just doesn't.
His own administration has completely... Afghanistan is a perfect case in point.
He literally just said, we're for human rights when we have to say things about it, but when we actually have to, you know, do something basic like leaving 2,500 troops there with no actual combat casualties, In a support role?
Then I won't do that.
He's so unwilling to stand up for human rights.
I mean, don't talk the language of human rights if you're literally unwilling to make even the most minute sacrifices on behalf of human rights.
Not just human rights, by the way, American interests in Afghanistan, but as long as he's going to be saying never again.
In the Jewish community, there's been talk for decades about why it was that the Allies didn't bomb the rail lines during the Holocaust.
Why didn't the Allies send a few planes and just bomb the rail lines that were connecting various cities to the concentration camps?
And the defense has always been, it was the middle of a war, you have to use those bombs where they are best utilized, namely against Nazi troops in more strategically necessary areas.
That's an open argument, historically speaking.
Hey, but here we are not even talking about even that kind of sacrifice.
We are talking about the United States of America leaving in place people who are already there doing the things they were already doing to prevent people from being shot in the face for walking in the street without a veil.
And Joe Biden wasn't even willing to do that.
So no, I'm not particularly interested in hearing about never again from this doofus.
It's just his credibility is shot.
It's shot.
Speaking of Afghanistan, The administration just has no defense for itself at this point.
Ned Price, for example, the State Department spokesperson, he was freely admitted yesterday that the United States left several hundred U.S.-funded journalists in Afghanistan.
How many of those USAGM employees were there, or contractors rather, and how many family members are there?
So I don't have a firm figure with me.
It has been reported publicly that there are several hundred involved in that group.
You must have some estimate of LPRs who are still there, who want to get out.
And if you don't, why not?
I'm just asking about green card holders.
are stuck over there. You just don't care about those people anymore, apparently.
You must have some estimate of LPRs who are still there, who want to get out. And if you don't, why not?
Well, Matt, let me first start with this issue of the 100 to 200.
I'm just asking about green card holders. Was there a decision made at some point?
To forget about those people and only allow U.S.
passport holders into the airport through your checkpoints and onto planes.
they'll eventually be through your checkpoints and onto planes because a lot of them feel like they frankly got screwed here and that they were lied to.
And of course they were screwed and they There are parades, by the way, of Taliban fighters who are walking around in suicide vests.
So these are our new allies over in the Middle East.
One reporter slammed the Pentagon's John Kirby, who again has become the Baghdad Bob of this particular operation, saying, you know, you keep saying this is a strategic success.
I'm wondering exactly how.
How can the Department of Defense go before the American people, those military service members, and those veterans and say that the mission was accomplished when people were left behind?
I think, Therese, that we've been very clear that we don't believe the effort has concluded.
The military mission of evacuation is over.
We know there are people that didn't make it out.
American citizens as well as special immigrant visa applicants.
And the U.S.
government is going to continue to look for ways to try to help them find safe passage out of the country.
Now the media predictably are beginning to spin on behalf of the Biden administration throughout all of this.
There's an entire piece in the New York Times today talking about how the Taliban are going to be pragmatic.
They're going to be awesome.
According to the New York Times' Max Fisher, as Taliban commanders exchange their guns for the reins of power, some 38 million Afghans can do little but hold their breath and wait to see how their latest conquerors will rule.
That uncertainty, also palpable in foreign capitals from Washington to Beijing, is compounded by the deep contradiction between the group's record of extremism and brutality during its prior reign, from 1996 to 2000, and its promises of moderation today.
There's no uncertainty.
They're lying.
They're not going to be moderate.
They're going to do exactly what they want to do.
By the way, Beijing has already said they're going to recognize the Taliban regime.
But, says Max Fisher, the Taliban are, depending on how one counts, something like the 6th or 7th rebel group to take over a country in the modern era.
While no two are exactly alike, certain patterns have emerged in how rebels rule.
Some learn to govern effectively, even to modernize.
Others collapse in chaos or renewed war.
Some grow crueler in power, lashing out at their subjects in fear and insecurity.
Others moderate, though mostly in search of legitimacy and foreign aid.
But all seem to share a few traits.
A tightly bureaucratic authoritarianism, albeit sometimes allowing a degree of political opening.
A focus on controlling or coercing elements of society seen as tied to the old order and a quest for foreign support and recognition as they strain to overcome the pariah status that tends to greet militants who shoot their way into power.
So we can we can expect them that probably they're going to be, you know, eventually they're going to turn into like regular ruling people seeking pragmatic Relations with the rest of... Or, alternatively, they are going to continue being the bunch of drug-running, which is how they supported themselves from 1966 to 2001, drug-running, Beijing-supported terror group that they've always been.
But, gotta swing that support back behind Biden.
By the way, the fact-checkers are doing yeoman's work on this.
It's amazing.
Like, if you just want to see what the Biden administration-assigned fact-checkers are doing today, check the right-hand side of the Twitter feed.
The Twitter feed every single day has some sort of fact check targeting a minor fact that was put out there that was wrong while ignoring the far broader narrative.
So there'll be a fact check about how, you know, there was a helicopter and it was flying a guy around who was a member of the Taliban wearing a harness and it looked like maybe a guy was hanging from underneath and people mentioned this.
That was not true.
That was not true.
Of course, the idea there is this is a very important fact check, super important.
We're not going to fact check the president of the United States saying he always had a plan for this.
We're not going to fact check the president of the United States saying no one expected that this thing was going to collapse as fast as it was.
You're not going to fact check the president of the United States when he says this is historic success.
Like none of those things are worthy of a fact check, but it is worth a fact check.
That the person hanging from underneath the helicopter this time was not the body of an enemy, it was just a Taliban fighter.
Which means now it's good that they have our Blackhawk helicopters, obviously.
The other fact check that made the rounds yesterday is the media attempting to defend Joe Biden for checking his watch repeatedly at the ceremony for the fallen at Dover Air Force Base.
The USA Today actually had to change its own claim.
They actually claimed it was outright false that Joe Biden checked his watch during the ceremony.
Originally, they claimed it was outright false.
Then it turns out there were multiple Gold Star family members who said, no, Joe Biden kept checking his watch over and over and over.
I checked it 5, 10, 13 times during the actual ceremony honoring the fallen.
So what did USA Today do?
Did they revise their fact check?
They only changed it to missing context.
I'm not kidding you.
They didn't say now that it's true that Joe Biden was checking his watch.
They literally changed it to missing context.
Here is their correction.
This story was updated September 2nd to note that Biden checked his watch multiple times at the dignified transfer event, including during the ceremony itself.
The rating on this claim has been changed from partly false to missing context.
I was missing context, you see.
It's amazing.
They'll never just say Joe Biden checked his watch.
By the way, the White House didn't even deny he checked his watch.
Jen Psaki was asked about it.
She avoided the question.
But the media are in full spin mode for Biden because this has been very, very damaging for him.
Don Lemon, who can always be counted on to defend the worst members of the Democratic administration, he said, you know, Biden's getting beat up too much on Afghanistan.
Man, it's not that big a deal.
I mean, it's not like he's unvaccinated or something.
You know, I think people should stop beating up on the administration so much because no matter how it ended, everyone wasn't going to be happy with the way it ended.
So...
If there's any silver lining in this, it's going to be what happens going forward.
You can't change the past.
You can't bring those lives back, as awful as that is.
And so, you know, I just think that sometimes, I think the administration is getting beaten up on this a little bit too much because there's a lot of blame to go around from four different presidents and who actually didn't have the guts to get us out of Afghanistan because they were afraid of this moment and what an exit might look like.
Man, that guy is just journalism-ing everywhere, all over the Biden administration, all over their head.
I mean, it's just wild, the levels of journalism that are going on right now there from Don Lemon.
It's really, really well done.
AOC, by the way, also defending the administration.
So when AOC is defending Biden, you know things have gone wildly wrong for the administration.
I don't know what the measure or expectation is of what a quote unquote successful withdrawal is.
But I hope people understand that this is what war looks like.
It is not neat and it is not pretty.
It is violent.
It is brutal.
And we're out here And we're out here expecting like this is supposed to be a cakewalk.
I mean, this this is war.
OK, this is the same person who will condemn the Israeli government every time a civilian is killed when you have terrorists hiding behind civilians.
This is the same person who will make light of riots in American cities.
But, you know, war is war, man.
If we got to leave a bunch of Americans behind in Afghanistan, that's what we'll do.
This is famed women's rights advocate AOC, who basically is just Okay, so we pulled out and there are 19 million women, most of whom are under the age of 25, living in Afghanistan.
They're just going to be subjected to vicious rape repeatedly.
But you know, it was rough.
It was rough.
So the defenses are not working.
And herein lies the problem for Joe Biden.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Okay, fine.
So all of this is having a pretty dire effect on Joe Biden's approval rating.
Because again, easy to be a houseplant when you're not doing anything.
When you're, as I mentioned, the elderly gentleman who should have had his license revoked 10 years ago driving a car directly into a crowd, this is a lot less charming.
And you can see it reflected in the approval ratings.
So according to a new NPR poll, Joe Biden's net approval rating is down 13%.
There is a new poll from NPR, PBS NewsHour, and Marist.
It shows that his approval rating is all the way down to 43.
So remember, Donald Trump was widely considered one of the most unpopular presidents while he was president in American history.
Joe Biden is now at those levels.
Joe Biden is down in the low 40s.
The problem is, Joe Biden ain't got a basement.
Okay, so Donald Trump had a floor.
His floor was a solid 40%.
No matter what he did, he was never going below 40%.
And probably no matter what he did, he was never going above about 48%.
Joe Biden has no ceiling, and he has no floor.
Right, so Joe Biden could be 60% approval, 70% approval.
Because there are times when he has been.
Or he could be 25% approval.
Because no one loves Joe Biden.
People merely tolerate the existence of Joe Biden.
He is a stand-in.
He was only voted for because he was running against Donald Trump.
The only person that Joe Biden could probably beat was Donald Trump.
Because he has never run a successful campaign for anything other than senator of a very small state.
He has run for president 83 times.
He lost all 83 times.
The only reason he is a famous person is because he was plucked from relative obscurity by young Barack Obama, who needed an elderly white man to accompany him on the ticket.
So now Joe Biden is president of the United States and nobody is a Joe Biden fan.
No one is out there being like, this guy is a great thinker.
He's a great speaker.
He has great ideas.
Everybody's just kind of watching him toddle over to the to the lunch counter at Denny's.
And they're like, that guy?
All right.
Let's see what he does.
Well, when he does bad stuff, that means that his approval rating is going to continue to crater.
And chances are that if things continue to go poorly for Biden, it'll get worse.
So he could now be in a cycle, right?
He could now be taking a nosedive because on the domestic front, his basic idea was, OK, well, we'll bring all the troops home.
I'll get a big boost from that.
And then because I get a big boost from ending the Afghan war, which was a big issue.
Now, here's the thing.
He misread the room.
It was not a big issue for anybody in America.
Democrats think that because in their cocktail parties, they themselves spend a lot of time talking about how the Afghan war is America's endless war.
Americans may agree that we should get out of Afghanistan, but that is not a top 175 priority for Americans.
Americans generally only care about foreign policy when there are serious losses attached.
If you ask Americans right now, what are your opinions on troop levels in South Korea?
Americans may have an opinion on that.
Maybe, in fact, they want some of the troops removed from South Korea.
Is that anything that has crossed their mind in the last 25 years?
Probably not.
The same thing was true about Afghanistan.
It had become another one of just America's protracted conflicts where we had troops on the ground and where we weren't suffering serious casualties and serious losses.
Joe Biden made it a top priority and he misinterpreted because he thought that by doing this he would be garnering some sort of public support and earning political capital he could then expend at home.
The problem is he actually lost political capital and now he's running a political capital deficit and he has no place to borrow from.
The bank is closed.
According to that poll, 71% of U.S.
citizens deem the U.S.
role in Afghanistan a failure.
61% disapprove of the president's handling of the withdrawal.
56% disapprove of his foreign policy as a whole.
Those are brutal ratings.
The president's approval rating dropped by six percentage points from Marist's August poll, in which Biden earned a rating of 49%.
His support from Democrats has dropped by five points by 10 among independents.
His approval rating has also dropped since July's approval rating of 50%.
His net approval rating was plus five in August, plus seven in July.
He is now at minus eight.
Since the U.S.
withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden has lost the support of the majority of independents, a key voting group Biden won in 2020.
So that is a disaster area for Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, in polls that are even worse for him, there's a poll out from ABC News, and it shows that a huge percentage of Americans now believe we are less safe.
So Americans believe many things simultaneously, some of which conflict with each other.
So, for example, a majority of Americans believe it is good to get out of Afghanistan, but then a huge majority of Americans also believe that we are now less safe because we got out of Afghanistan.
Now, maybe that's a risk they're willing to take.
I highly doubt it.
I think that Americans only respond to the question that is put in front of them.
This is one of the problems with polling.
It is also true that when people answer polls, It's true in every social science study.
Social science studies demonstrate that the worst kind of social science study is when people do a self-assessment.
This is why, for example, there was polling recently on how many people had taken the vaccine, and it went racial group by racial group, and it said in the poll that a huge number of black Americans had taken the vaccine.
Well, the CDC has actually measured who has taken the vaccine by race, and it turns out that black Americans are far less likely to have taken the vaccine.
Very often people self-assess in self-flattering ways.
This also happens with regard to foreign policy.
So if you ask people, Do you think that we are less safe now that we're out of Afghanistan?
People will say yes.
And if you ask them also, should we have gotten out of Afghanistan?
They might also say yes.
There's no obligation for them to be ideologically consistent.
Consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds.
Only 36% of Americans say the war was worth fighting.
There were 77% who support America withdrawing, but 60% of Americans disapprove of the way that Joe Biden actually handled this thing.
Now, the most I think important thing here is that when asked exactly whether they feel safer because of Joe Biden, which is the question for presidents, right?
It is not whether they think that what he did is quote unquote right or wrong.
44% of Americans think the withdrawal left the United States less safe from terrorism.
8% think the country is safer as a result.
I mean, that's pretty shocking, right?
44 to 8.
44% of Americans think that us withdrawing means that we are now less safe.
8% think we are safer.
All of those are immediate members of Joe Biden's family and Tony Blinken's family.
The rest see no difference, which means they don't care about the issue.
Because if you care about the issue, it's pretty obvious we're not as safe as we were when we had those troops on the ground and the Taliban hadn't just provided a new terrorist safe haven.
Okay, so what does this mean?
It means, again, Joe Biden has no leverage over his own membership.
None.
Which means that Joe Biden could be in some serious trouble here, which is why yesterday Jonathan Chait was writing angrily.
about how Joe Biden's presidency might be ended by Joe Manchin.
Why?
Well, Joe Manchin put out an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday titled, Why I Won't Support Spending Another $3.5 Trillion.
He says, the nation faces an unprecedented array of challenges and will inevitably encounter additional crises in the future.
Yet some in Congress have a strange belief there's an infinite supply of money to deal with any current or future crisis and that spending trillions upon trillions will have no negative consequence for the future.
I disagree.
An overheating economy has imposed a costly quote-unquote inflation tax on every middle and working class American.
At $28.7 trillion and growing, the nation's debt has reached record levels.
And by the way, it is amazing what the levels of national debt were going back historically.
I mean, I remember when George W. Bush was blowing out the national debt and everybody was freaking out about it.
And this is back in You know, 2000, 2003, we were spending tons and tons of money.
The federal debt held by the public as a percentage of GDP in like 2003, 2004 was about 30%, 35%.
Today, the U.S.
2004 was about 30%, 35%. Today, the US national debt as a percentage of the federal GDP is approaching it's well over 80% now it's approaching 90 or 100%. It's a these are shocking statistics, And if you look at kind of the 150-year view of the U.S.
national debt, you can see that we are now up to actually 98.2% of GDP.
Right, which is pretty unbelievable because of the amount of massive spending that we did last year and that we are about to do now.
So we are entering really dangerous territory in terms of the national debt.
Now, people on the left don't care because they think we can just print money forever.
Here's the reality about what you are doing when you continue to sell debt, which is basically what you have to do and inflate the currency in the process.
There's only a few ways out of this.
One is you pay people back with inflated currency.
You actually start digitally generating dollars and then handing those dollars to bondholders.
The second is that you just radically raise taxes on people, including middle class people.
There just are not enough tax dollars at the top of the income spectrum.
The United States has one of the most progressive tax systems on planet Earth.
People in the top 1% are paying a huge percentage of the taxes.
People in the top half are paying all of the taxes.
People in the top 10% of income earners in the United States are paying all net taxes, meaning they get no government benefits and they're paying all the taxes.
So you can't tax those people much more.
So if you really want to spend the money that we're spending right now, you really have to broaden the tax base, which of course is going to hamper economic growth.
So you can theoretically inflate the currency, you can theoretically raise your taxes, or you can get into a situation where you are defaulting.
Now the United States is basically hoping that we're still the best relative bet compared to the rest of the market, but this is also why the United States is not going to be in the future in favor of a lot of economic innovation, like Bitcoin being used as an alternative currency, because it debases the United States currency and makes it less likely that Americans are going to invest their money in things like bonds.
They're afraid that they're going to be paid back with inflated dollars.
So why would I want to be paid back in inflated dollars?
Why would that be something worthwhile?
All of this is... We are cruising for a financial bruising, I guess is the story here.
And Joe Manchin is correct about this.
He says...
Over the past 18 months, we've spent more than $5 trillion responding to the coronavirus pandemic.
Now, Democratic congressional leaders propose to pass the largest single spending bill in history with no regard to rising inflation, crippling debt, or the inevitability of future crises.
Ignoring the fiscal consequences of our policy choices will create a disastrous future for the next generation of Americans.
Those who believe such concerns are overstated should ask themselves, what do we do if the pandemic gets worse under the next viral mutation?
What do we do if there's a financial crisis like the one that led to the Great Recession?
What if we face a terrorist attack or major international conflict?
How will America respond to such crises if we needlessly spend trillions of dollars today?
This is right.
I mean, obviously, if you're going to fire financial bullets at crises, you should wait for an actual crisis.
We are now at the tail end of the pandemic.
There was a study came out today, it says probably upwards of 80% of Americans have some form of immunity to COVID, whether it's natural immunity or vaccine immunity.
So what exactly are we talking about spending $5 trillion for right now?
Says Joe Manchin, again, because he is a Senator from West Virginia and not a Senator from New York, instead of rushing to spend trillions on new government programs and additional stimulus funding, Congress should hit a strategic pause on the budget reconciliation legislation.
A pause is warranted because it will provide more clarity on the trajectory of the pandemic.
It will allow us to determine whether inflation is transitory or not.
While some of us have suggested this reconciliation legislation must be passed now, I believe making budgetary decisions under artificial political deadlines doesn't lead to good policy or sound decisions.
I've always said, if I can't explain it, I can't vote for it.
I cannot explain why my Democratic colleagues are rushing to spend $3.5 trillion.
Also, we must allow for complete reporting and analysis of the implications a multi-trillion dollar bill will have for this generation and the next.
Such a strategic pause, says Joe Manchin, will allow every member of Congress to use the transparent committee process to debate.
What should be fun?
What can we simply not afford?
He says, I, for one, won't support a $3.5 trillion bill or anywhere near that level of additional spending without greater clarity about why Congress chooses to ignore the serious effects inflation and debt have on existing government programs.
This is even more important now as Social Security and Medicare trustees Have sounded the alarm that these life-saving programs will be insolvent and benefits could be reduced as soon as 2026 for Medicare and 2033, a year earlier than previously projected for Social Security.
Establishing an artificial $3.5 trillion spending number and reverse engineering the partisan social priorities that should be funded isn't how you make good policy.
Undoubtedly, some will argue bold social policy action should be taken now, says Manchin.
While I share the belief we should help those who need it most, we must also be honest about the present economic reality.
Inflation is rising.
It is bleeding the value of Americans' wages and income.
More than 10 million jobs remain open.
Our economy has reached record levels of quarterly growth.
This positive economic reality makes clear the purpose of the $3.5 trillion in new spending is not to solve urgent problems, but to re-envision America's social policies.
While my fellow Democrats will disagree, I believe spending trillions more dollars not only ignores present economic reality, but makes it certain America will be fiscally weakened when it faces a future recession or national emergency.
As many in Washington have convinced themselves we can add trillions of dollars more to our nearly $29 trillion national debt with no repercussions, regardless of political party, elected leaders are sent to Washington to make tough decisions and not simply go along to get along.
For those who dismiss my unwillingness to support a $3.5 trillion bill as political posturing, I hope they heed the powerful words of Admiral Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who calls debt the biggest threat to national security.
So, Manchin is basically saying that Joe Biden needs to wait.
Well, if this thing waits, Do you think the conditions are going to get riper for people to vote for a $3.5 trillion bill?
This thing needs to happen now.
Everybody knows that it needs to happen now.
This is why Democrats are freaking out.
This is why Jonathan Chait has a piece titled, Joe Manchin has put Biden's presidency in mortal danger.
He says the mercurial senator calls for a pause when Democrats desperately need to move fast.
He says this is the most bearish indicator for Biden.
He says Manchin's rationale for demanding a pause is farcical, etc, etc, etc.
And it's really bad and it's super terrible.
But, he says, the compromise negotiated in the House requires an expedited schedule with an infrastructure vote by the end of the month.
The sequence is still workable because all of the factions have an understanding of what they'll include in the social spending bill.
Without that understanding in place, progressives have every incentive to vote down the infrastructure bill, which will in turn contribute to the impression of dysfunction and chaos.
So, in other words, There's a deal in place.
The deal basically was that Joe Manchin and Sinema would vote for the infrastructure bill and then Nancy Pelosi would immediately ram through a reconciliation bill.
Manchin is now saying hit pause.
So that means the timeline just got blown up.
This is what Jonathan Shade is pointing out.
He says, He helped create a demand for a fast infrastructure vote, which necessitates the scramble to speed up the second bill.
Indeed, the most reasonable demand House Moderates have is to not be forced to vote for a larger bill than Manchin ultimately agreed to.
His insistence on waiting freezes everything in place.
The danger is this pause sets off a cycle of failure.
Wealthy interests are belatedly mobilizing against the bill now.
The Democrats' best chance is to move as fast as possible.
Delay creates the impression of dysfunction, making Biden and Congress less popular, in turn reducing the popularity of any bill they pass, in turn making Congress more reluctant to support it.
Joe Biden has no coattails.
He can't force this thing through.
This is a serious problem for the Democratic Party.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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I'm telling you, October's gonna be a little different.
And awesome!
Instead of just tuning in from your home, you'll be able to see us live and on stage at the famous Ryman Auditorium in Nashville doing what we do best, making sense.
So, join me, Candace Owens, Jeremy Boring, Michael Knowles, Matt Walsh, and Andrew Clavin for a backstage like never before.
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Also, this Sunday, We have a special episode of the Sunday Special.
Obviously, next week marks September 11th, the 20th anniversary thereof.
We are leaving Afghanistan in ignominious defeat, handing the country back to the very people who helped perform 9-11.
Joining us to discuss all of that is Condoleezza Rice, who's National Security Advisor on 9-11 and then Secretary of State under George W. Bush.
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Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com, Apple TV, Roku apps, or on my YouTube channel, Ben Shapiro.
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It's something you're going to want to share with friends and family.
If you're a member at 9-11, and particularly if you know people who don't, it's a must watch.
You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
Alrighty, so in breaking news, by the way, the August jobs report is out.
Complete fail.
Complete, absolute, utter failure.
Which, of course, is not surprising because we are paying people to stay home.
And then we're talking about inflating more.
We're talking about more stimulus.
We're talking about, by the way, telling people that they must stay home because of the pandemic, when that is obviously not true.
If you're vaccinated, you should not be afraid of other people who are unvaccinated because you're vaccinated.
It's the whole damned point of getting vaccinated in the first place.
So, the reality, there's a reason why the states that are doing best in terms of the unemployment rate are all red states, and the states that are all doing the worst are the blue states.
There's a reason for that.
The August jobs report, how bad was it?
Economists had forecast 725,000 jobs being created.
Remember, there are 10 million open jobs in the United States right now.
725,000 jobs is what the economists had been forecasting.
The actual number of jobs created was 235,000 jobs.
They were off by a factor of three.
They're off by a factor of three.
That is a disaster area for the Biden administration.
And again, they keep missing the mark.
They keep missing it over and over.
They'll have like one good month, and then they'll have three terrible months.
That is because you have completely destroyed all of the incentive structures causing people to go back to work.
You've destroyed supply lines.
You're artificially boosting demand by pouring money into people's pockets.
But you can tell, by the way, that that sort of inflation is not actual price inflation.
It's not economic heating.
You know how you know?
Because if you look at the loan numbers, like whether people are actually taking out loans, the answer is no.
People are not taking out loans under these circumstances because they're afraid they're not going to be able to pay them back.
And that is because the underlying fundamentals that are being created by the regulate and spend and tax Biden economy are a lot weaker than the fundamentals of an economy that was much more laissez-faire under Donald Trump.
This is wild.
The Fed is now saying that the August jobs report was a failure, but because of that, they're going to keep buying assets.
Did it ever occur to them that the reason the jobs report is a failure is because you keep inflating the currency?
Is it because you keep paying people to stay home?
Is it because of unemployment benefits?
Is it because you're creating enormous pressure for businesses to spend more money than they are actually taking in on employees?
Like, this is all causing inflation, of course, but they're saying it's transitory, which is fine.
Terrible news for the economy.
Not a shock.
The unemployment rate fell to 5.2% in August from 5.4% before, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
There's a reason why Bitcoin, by the way, just rose past $50,000 per Bitcoin.
The reason for that is because people are now investing in some form of more solid asset than the United States dollar, given what the federal government is doing right now.
By the way, according to the Economic Report, there were job losses in certain sectors.
In the retail sector, almost 30,000 jobs lost.
In the restaurant sector, 42,000 jobs lost.
There were 36,000 jobs picked up in the entertainment sector.
That's probably going to take a nosedive considering that Joe Biden continues to shut down the economy.
That's amazing.
People in the media, they're going to attribute this to the Delta spike.
The reality is that the only reason that you are seeing shutdowns right now and tremendous fear right now is because the media have made it seem as though even if you are vaccinated, you should be afraid.
This goes back to a point I was making yesterday about COVID, which really is the salient point.
If you had to draw a chart of the worried and the unworried when it comes to COVID, I'm actually going to do it for you right now, okay?
Here we have a circle.
It's the worried.
Here we have a circle.
It is the unworried, okay?
These are the two circles of the American population.
Hey, the unworried contain some people who are vaccinated, right?
I'm unworried and I'm vaccinated.
So, some part of this circle Are the vaccinated, okay?
But the rest of the circle are the un-vaxxed.
The entirety of the people who are un-vaxxed are un-worried.
I say that because if they were worried, they would go get vaxxed.
It is the best solution to your worry is to get vaxxed.
Okay, but then if you look at the circle of the worried, the entire circle, the entire circle is vaccinated of the worried.
Okay, the entirety of the circle is vaccinated.
So right now, you have the Biden administration basically telling the vaccinated to shut down the economy, worry about the vaccinated, worry, worry, worry, worry.
Okay, but those are the people who shouldn't be worried.
We're now at the point where if you are a sentient adult in the United States and you don't have some unbelievably severe pre-existing condition in which your doctor says you shouldn't get a vaccine, you now have the option to do whatever the hell you want.
If the economy is shutting down, it's because of Joe Biden.
Joe Biden's credibility is shredded.
He said he was going to stop the virus.
He has not.
He said that he wasn't going to kill the economy.
He has.
He said that he was going to shore up our credibility on the international stage.
Not only has he not done that, he's destroyed our credibility on the international stage.
And now all the big hopes that he had for restructuring the nature of American government, they ride on Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
This is an unsuccessful failed presidency, and we are not even a year in.
That house plant is beginning to wilt in serious fashion.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
First, you cannot forget to end your week by checking out The Andrew Klavan Show.
Drew's show is every Friday.
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