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Oct. 1, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:53
They’re Gonna Spend, Spend, Spend Until Daddy Takes The T-Bird Away | Ep. 1345
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Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says it's time to get rid of the debt ceiling once and for all.
And Joe Manchin continues to crush progressive dreams.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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So, last night the Democrats were supposed to bring up the bipartisan infrastructure bill for a vote.
They did not because they could not get the progressives on board.
And they couldn't get the progressives on board because they couldn't get the Senate moderates on board for their $3.5 trillion boondoggle.
Meanwhile, speeding down the tracks is the debt ceiling.
So the debt ceiling is supposed to be hit in approximately the next couple of weeks.
Democrats are trying to get Republicans to sign on to a debt ceiling increase.
Republicans are saying, we are not going to allow you to take out a second credit card knowing that you're about to blow out the spending.
And so why would we allow you to do that?
We need a sort of restructuring deal here.
We need to make sure that we get some sort of spending concessions from you at this point, which has led the Biden administration to make the argument that we should get rid of the debt ceiling once and for all.
So to understand why the debt ceiling is kind of important, you have to understand the history of how spending has been done in the United States historically.
So if you go all the way back to the founding for basically the first 130 years of the existence of the United States, any time Congress wanted to authorize the government to take out debt, they had to pass a specific bill that authorized exactly how that debt was to be taken out.
Which seems like a pretty good idea, right?
It puts the responsibility where the responsibility ought to be, with the legislature.
Congress would actually have to authorize a loan, or they'd have to allow Treasury to issue bonds, for example.
But it would be up to Congress.
Congress would actually have to authorize the executive branch to do this, which makes sense.
They are the legislative branch.
The executive branch is the executive branch.
And then, in about 1917, Congress decided they were going to abdicate responsibility on this thing by creating the debt ceiling.
The debt ceiling, the idea was that they would just tell the executive branch how much debt they were authorized to take out.
Right now, attached to a war, it makes a certain amount of sense, you would assume, because the executive branch is running the war.
The executive branch needs to take out more debt on a short-term basis because, obviously, there are battle contingencies.
But in the middle of a not-war, getting rid of the specific authorization for taking out debt is really just a way for Congress to kick the can down the road without actually having to be held responsible for doing any of this stuff.
Like, imagine that every time Congress passed a spending bill, they also had to pass a bill saying, we authorize the Treasury Department to take out this amount of debt on the open market.
It would make everybody think for just a second, is this actually worth it?
Congress doesn't want you to think, is it actually worth it?
So instead, they pass these giant blunderbuss packages and they raise the debt ceiling at the same time.
Hey, well, that was the rule up until about the 1970s.
Okay, then in the 1970s, there was a problem, which was that the government kept running up against the debt ceiling.
So Dick Gephardt created, Dick Gephardt was a former congressperson from Iowa.
Gephardt imposed the so-called Gephardt rule.
Hey, this was a rule that suggested the debt ceiling was automatically raised anytime a budget was passed.
You didn't actually have to pass a separate debt ceiling bill.
You would just pass the budget, and that itself would be the authorization for the government to take out additional debt.
Then, during the Gingrich Revolution of the 90s, this was reversed.
In 1995, Congress said, no, we're not doing it this way anymore.
We are not going to simply pretend that every time we authorize spending, The federal government has the ability to go out and take debt.
Instead, we do have to take some of the blame or credit for raising the debt ceiling.
So we're going to bring back the debt ceiling debate.
Now, in reality, we've got to go back to the original system.
Congress ought to have to specifically authorize precisely what sort of debt instrument needs to be used by the executive branch every time they spend.
The reason they really shouldn't have to do that is because again, they should be forced to consider the consequences of the spending that they do.
But we have both a legislative branch and an executive branch that seem to want to just spend without any sort of end at all.
And a lot of this is sort of a riff on modern monetary theory, which is this idiotic idea that the federal government can spend as much money as it could possibly want for literally the rest of time because nobody is ever going to see the full faith and credit of the United States as endowed.
We are always going to be the world's strongest economy.
We are always going to be the world's strongest currency.
And if we aren't, well, we'll deal with that when we come to it.
Jenny Yellen, who, remember, was the head of the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve was supposed to be a non-partisan, non-political board.
It is their job to see that the inflation rates remain low and that employment remains high.
So Jenny Yellen was supposed to be this non-partisan person.
Of course, that Chinese fence, that Chinese screen between the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve was obliterated long ago, but Janet Yellen has made clear just how fast that was obliterated.
She moved directly from the Federal Reserve to the Treasury Department, where she has been now advocating to get rid of the debt ceiling entirely.
The idea being that any time Congress just passes something, it should automatically raise the debt ceiling so we can go out and we can borrow for it.
And there will be no leverage to lower spending any time in the future.
Remember, the debt ceiling instrument has been used a couple of times in the past 10 years in order to lower spending or in order to jar certain political items loose.
And it's not just a Republican thing.
In 2006, Nancy Pelosi actually held up the debt ceiling in order to try and pry concessions from the Bush administration.
But most famously, the debt ceiling debate was hit during the Boehner time as Speaker of the House.
And the result was sequestration, which was a lowering of the rate of increase in government spending in the federal government.
It was pretty controversial because Barack Obama insisted that half the cuts come from defense if there were going to be any cuts because Barack Obama hated the Defense Department.
But it was at least an instrument for attempting to lower the amount of money we spend.
Now we have the executive branch saying we want to spend without end and we don't want any sort of congressional check on how much we can take out in order to pay for your spending.
So this is breaking down a long partisan line.
Frankly, you know, I'm at least mildly pleased that even Republicans are not on board with getting rid of the debt ceiling entirely.
But here's Janet Yellen making the case.
Would you support simply eliminating the debt ceiling so that we don't have to deal with this in the future and can focus on real crises?
Yes, I would.
If, to finance those spending and tax decisions, it's necessary to issue additional debt, I believe it's very destructive to put the President and myself, the Treasury Secretary, in a situation where we might be unable to pay the bills that result from those past decisions.
Okay, the debt ceiling is a natural constraint on the growth of government.
It at least provides a leverage point for reducing the growth of government.
Janet Yellen wants it gone.
And this is the entire theory of the Biden administration.
There should be no limits on spending.
It's spend, spend, spend until daddy takes the T-Bird away.
When daddy takes the T-Bird away, we hit austerity measures.
We have to radically increase taxes.
We have to cut benefits.
And this has happened across Europe.
So it's not as though this is unforeseeable.
It is completely and utterly foreseeable.
Not only that, when you ratchet up the spending, and at the same time you ratchet up the taxes and regulation, which is exactly what the Biden administration is seeking to do, all you end up doing is blowing money into an economy that is stagnating.
That's how you get stagflation.
That's how you get the 1970s.
You can get economic stagnation without inflation, that's Japan in the 1990s, when regulation and lack of entrepreneurship basically destroyed the Japanese economy for more than a decade.
That is, I think, a high probability at this point, and even Biden is recognizing that.
He's forecasting over the course of the next decade less than a 2% rate of growth to the American GDP, which is a really rotten rate of growth.
But you get stagflation if you have that rapid, that terrible stagnation, plus the federal government attempting to pour money into the system via forced subsidies.
The Wall Street Journal has a piece today titled Stock Market's September Slump Exposes Messy Underside.
And again, the economy is not doing well right now.
It should be blowing the doors off.
It really should be.
Again, we now not only have the COVID vaccines, but now we have reports that Merck is coming out with a once a day pill that reduces the possibility of hospitalization and death from COVID even if you get infected by 50%.
So we're coming up with excellent new therapeutics.
We already have a vaccine that is highly effective.
This pandemic from a public policy perspective is now over.
But the Biden administration can't let it go.
And not just that, they are firmly committed to this fiscal policy which is really about the reorganizing of American life along social democratic lines, which has a cost.
Even Sweden, which embraced the so-called Third Way, this vast spending, vast taxation initiative in the 1970s, they had to get rid of a lot of those taxes and a lot of that spending, specifically because it didn't pay for itself.
They had to free up their economy.
I mean, there are studies by which the Nordic countries actually have freer business regimens and business markets than the United States does.
They have less regulations.
They have more ease in beginning a business in many of these countries than the United States does at this point.
So the United States is going down a really bad path right here, says the Wall Street Journal.
Markets tumbled to end the quarter, sending the S&P 500 to its worst monthly pullback since the pandemic-fueled selloff of March 2020.
Stocks began the day higher, only to slump in the following hours.
The S&P 500 wound up falling 1.2% to 4,307.54 on Thursday, nearly erasing the entirety of its gains for the entire quarter.
The DJIA, the Dow Jones, it shed 1.6%.
As well, it suffered its first quarterly loss since the first three months of 2020.
Now remember, this was the year when everything was supposed to just be guns blazing, gung-ho, no holds barred growth.
Not really.
Central bankers who were thinking this year's rise in inflation would wind up being a short-term phenomenon aren't sure how long transitory pressures will persist.
Strategists who had predicted another strong quarter of economic growth are cutting estimates because of supply chain bottlenecks and the highly contagious Delta variant of COVID-19.
Economic data have also been falling short of expectations.
Citigroup's Economic Surprise Index, which tracks how much U.S.
reports have been exceeding or undershooting estimates, fell this month to its lowest level since June 2020.
The month proved a major setback for stocks, with all but one of the S&P 500's 11 sectors finishing lower in September.
The S&P 500 is still up 15% for the year and managed to squeeze out a sixth straight quarter of gains.
The index is just a few percentage points away from its record close hit in early September.
Not everything is moving together.
The stock market is probably going to continue to gain, but not nearly as fast as people thought it was going to.
The bond market has also caught many investors off guard.
The yield on the 10-year U.S.
Treasury note flitted above a narrow range for much of the quarter, only to stage a six-day rise above 1.5% between last week and Tuesday.
That was the biggest such advance since June 2020.
The move came after the Federal Reserve indicated it was ready to begin reversing its pandemic stimulus programs as early as November and considering raising interest rates next year, given a jump in inflation.
Lizanne Saunders, Chief Investment Strategist for Charles Schwab, says even though there's all this discussion about the market being resilient, the churn under the surface has shown more weakness.
Saunders attributes the swift rotations taking place in the market to a bevy of investor worry.
She says you have concerns about the virus, you have concerns about the debt ceiling, you have mixed economic data, and you've got uncertainty about monetary policy.
She says, I don't know that we're going to get out of this mode anytime soon.
And then there's inflation, which is also hitting and not going away.
Remember, we were told this was transitory.
We are now in October.
This is not transitory inflation any longer.
This has been continuous.
Month-on-month inflation since the beginning of the year.
Heavy month-on-month inflation since the beginning of the year.
Now, are we in full crisis mode at this point, given the fact that the debt ceiling is about to be hit and all of this?
No, Democrats can pass the debt ceiling anytime they want.
They can pass it as a clean bill.
If they just brought up a debt ceiling increase, And voted along reconciliation lines without any Republican support to raise the debt ceiling they could.
The reason that they won't do that is because they want to save that bullet.
Understand, the reconciliation process can only be used three times a year.
If they use it on the debt ceiling, they can't use it on some other piece of boondoggle legislation they would like to push.
What they did do is they passed a short-term spending bill that averted a government shutdown.
That extends for another couple of weeks.
That was bipartisan.
The Senate voted 65-35, the House 254-175.
Lawmakers reached a deal, according to the New York Times, on the spending legislation after Democrats agreed to strip out a provision that would have raised the federal government's ability to continue borrowing funds through the end of 2022.
The legislation keeps the government fully funded through December 3rd, which gives lawmakers additional time to reach consensus over the dozen annual spending bills that dictate federal spending.
So, we are not going to get a government shutdown, at least for the next couple of months.
But meanwhile, the underlying worries continue because the underlying economic theory of this administration is very, very wrong and very, very bad.
And it's being driven by the progressive left, which has no understanding of economics, like none at all.
So Nancy Pelosi is ripping Mitch McConnell.
She says he's playing Russian roulette by not raising the debt ceiling.
Is he though?
Because you guys can pass the debt ceiling anytime you want.
You have a majority in the Senate of the United States.
As Mitch McConnell himself has said about the need to address the debt limit, this is what he said last time.
Don't play Russian roulette with our economy.
Quote.
Yet that is exactly what he is doing, playing Russian roulette, interesting that he's playing Russian roulette, with our economy and with the financial security and the well-being She's so crazy.
She's so crazy.
Okay, notice, Russian.
She does this now with everything, right, ever since the Russian collusion crap.
Every time she says the word Russian, she's like, interesting that it's Russian, isn't it?
Every time she goes to a restaurant, and the waiter's like, well, we do have this Caesar salad with Russian dressing, she's like, interesting, Russian, what mean you by this?
So crazy.
Okay, but again, what this has to do with is an overall spending package and feeling toward how the economy ought to work, not in conjunction with reality.
That is going to lead to some pretty dire economic consequences.
We'll get to more of that in just one second.
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Alrighty, so again, the economic policy here makes no sense.
Jerome Powell of the Federal Reserve, he says, yeah, the inflation is going to continue into next year.
Remember, they said that this was going to be transitory.
Not so transitory anymore.
It is frustrating to acknowledge that getting people vaccinated and getting Delta under control 18 months later still remains the most important economic policy that we have.
And it's also frustrating to see the bottlenecks and supply chain problems not getting better.
In fact, at the margin, apparently getting a little bit worse.
And that's what has, we see that continuing into next year probably and holding inflation up longer than we had thought.
Whoops.
All these experts.
We don't expect inflation when you just blow money into the economy.
Who would have thought that?
Shocker.
But again, all of this has to do with a generalized Biden administration and democratic overlook, which is that spending money is an inherent good.
Spending money is an inherent good and private investment is an inherent bad.
The most obvious example of this perspective is something that I've talked about over the past couple of weeks, and that is the person that Joe Biden is trying to suggest as comptroller of the currency.
According to the Wall Street Journal, President Biden checked off another progressive identity box last week by nominating Saúl Omarova as comptroller of the currency.
Some Trump appointees were ridiculed for having supported the elimination of their agencies.
Ms.
Omarova wants to eliminate the banks she's being appointed to regulate.
The Cornell University Law School professor's radical ideas might even make Bernie Sanders blush.
She graduated from Moscow State University in 1989 on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship.
30 years later, she still believes the Soviet economic system was superior and that U.S.
banking should be remade in the Gossip Bank's image.
Until I came to the U.S., I couldn't imagine that things like gender pay gaps still existed in today's world.
Say what you will about the old U.S.S.R., there was no gender pay gap there.
Market doesn't always know best, she tweeted in 2019.
In 2019, it's true, there was no gender pay gap in the U.S.S.R.
because everyone was poor!
Because it was a communist country, where people didn't have jobs and lived in penury.
That would be why.
Also, it seems that Soviet women were not exactly operating at the same exact level as Soviet men.
The suggestion that everybody's operating at perfectly equal levels in the Soviet Union is rather ignorant of history and economics.
Then she said, I never claimed women and men were treated absolutely equally in every facet of Soviet life.
But people's salaries were set by the state in a gender-blind manner and all women got very generous maternity benefits.
Both things are still a pipe dream in our society.
Sure.
Sure.
Every so often they would take you and they would throw you in jail.
And they might kill members of your family.
And sure, your uncle had to float in a car from Havana to Miami.
But they have great, great basic healthcare.
You gotta give them that.
Literacy.
Omarova thinks asset prices, pay scales, capital, and credit should be dictated by the federal government.
In two papers, she's advocated expanding the Federal Reserve's mandate to include the price levels of systemically important financial assets as well as worker wages.
She doesn't just want the Federal Reserve.
Again, remember, it's the executive branch, not the legislative branch.
First of all, the legislative branch should not have any power to do this either.
Price and wage controls are not in the purview of the federal government.
Frankly, they shouldn't be in the purview of the state government either, but they certainly are not in the purview of the federal government.
Constitutionally speaking, nothing in the federal government's mandate of power, the Constitution of the United States, gives them the power to federally set wages or prices.
That is not a thing.
But even if you thought it were a thing, it would reside at the legislative level, not at the executive branch level.
She wants it to reside inside the Federal Reserve, which is not even answerable to the executive branch.
It's an independent agency.
This is crazy stuff.
And this is who Biden is selecting.
Moderate old Joe Biden is selecting this person to lead the effort.
In a recent paper, The People's Ledger, she effectively proposed the Federal Reserve take over consumer bank deposits, end banking as we know it, and become the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating financial resources in a modern economy.
So the Federal Reserve would now become the lender to the American people.
Want a mortgage?
You go to the Federal Reserve.
Want a business loan?
You go to the Federal Reserve.
Now, if you think that the Federal Reserve has a great history of this sort of stuff, I suggest that you take a look at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from, eh, say 1999 to 2007.
See how well that went.
It turns out that when the government runs the lending programs, they bias toward the people who are more likely to be politically beneficial to them, and their top priority is not, in fact, profitability or any measure of the durability of the lending instrument.
Instead, the only thing they care about is what it gets done politically.
Which is disastrous, obviously.
She wants the U.S.
to create a central bank digital currency, FedCoin, to redesign our financial system and turn the Fed's balance sheet into a true people's ledger.
She also believes that there should be a national investment authority with members overseen by an advisory board of academics to finance a big, bold climate agenda.
So, you know, a giant infrastructure bank, green infrastructure bank.
She wants a public interest council of highly paid academics with broad subpoena power to supervise financial regulatory agencies, including the Fed, without any constraints or requirements of the administrative process.
If she were appointed comptroller, she would supervise about 1,200 financial institutions.
She could punish banks that did not follow her diktat.
Even Janet Yellen was like, this is too much for us.
And Biden was like, well, I'm going to do it anyway.
Biden is going to do it anyway.
Genius.
Genius is in charge.
Speaking of which, in just one second, we have to discuss this $3.5 trillion plan, which is going to go down to flaming defeat at this point.
At the very least, it's going to be cut down to size, whittled down about half.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Okay, so one of the things that's fascinating to watch with regard to this debate over the $3.5 trillion spending bill, right?
There's the infrastructure bill and there's the spending bill.
The infrastructure bill is being held up right now by progressives in the House who want some sort of commitment from Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema that they will vote for Joe Biden's $3.5 trillion package.
Manchin and Sinema are like, no, we're not doing that.
So the progressives are like, okay, well, we will hold up the infrastructure bill until you do that.
That's not going to work.
The reason that's not going to work is because Joe Manchin is from West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema is from Arizona.
Kyrsten Sinema only won by about 3% in the last election cycle.
The only chance she has of holding that seat is being a Maverick-style Democrat in the same way that John McCain was a Maverick-style Republican.
Joe Manchin is in the reddest state in America.
Donald Trump won West Virginia by 40%.
I don't mean he won 40%.
I mean the margin of victory was 40% for Donald Trump in West Virginia, and yet they have a Democratic senator in Joe Manchin, which means that Manchin's actual political Sort of future rests on him standing in the gap and saying to Democrats, no, we are not going to spend this kind of money so he can go back to his constituents and say, listen, if you elect a Republican, they'll just be one more Republican among the rest of the Republicans.
If you keep electing me, then I'm part of the Democratic coalition and I will stand up against the more rapacious aspects of the Democratic financial plan.
And so this is a real holdup for the Democrats, no question.
But I want to point something out, and that is how this debate is going.
It's really quite fascinating.
So normally, when you have a giant bill that is on the table, the details of the bill are what gets debated.
When it was Obamacare, there were significant talks about exactly what was the mandate going to be?
What were the penalties going to be?
What kinds of plans were going to be available?
Would there be a public option?
Would there not be a public option?
What would be encompassed in terms of what insurance companies were forced to cover?
How would you deal with pre-existing conditions, right?
These were all policy debates that were happening over Obamacare.
By the way, Obamacare was projected to cost like a trillion dollars.
It'll cost about two trillion dollars after all is said and done.
This, right now, what we're talking about is at least twice that size.
It's probably five trillion dollars.
From the list price to the actual price price, you're talking about probably a 5x differential from Obamacare.
Okay, but put aside the price.
That is the only thing that anyone can... Like, do you know what's in the bill?
You might know what's in the bill a little bit because I've talked about what's in the bill, right?
Namely, a bunch of child tax credits that are not means-tested, which is basically just a government giveaway.
They also have a marriage penalty attached.
We've talked about the community college funding.
We've talked about the attempt to essentially make Head Start universal.
There's a bunch of stuff.
The climate change proposals.
I've talked about it.
But that is not what you hear in the media.
What you hear in the media is just the top line number.
All that matters is the top line number, not the content of the bill.
Now, normally, the way that you'd make a case for a bill like this is, here's a bunch of good stuff we want to do, and here's how much money it's going to cost.
If you don't like the cost, it's because you want to stop the good stuff we want to do.
No one is talking about that bill in these terms.
They are just talking about that bill in terms of, if you want $3.5 trillion, you are good.
If you want less than $3.5 trillion, you are bad.
It is all about the top line number.
Why?
Because the bottom line democratic idea here is that all that matters is the spending.
It doesn't matter where you spend it.
It doesn't matter how you spend it.
It doesn't matter what programs are involved.
The only thing that matters is that you blow money out.
That you make people more dependent.
You could just helicopter this cash over the center of the United States and the Democrats would be happy. It does not matter what programs are actually effectuated with the cash, which is why there are not any negotiations that are really happening between the progressives and the moderates, where the moderates say, listen, we got to curb this particular plan right here because we don't think it's good enough. And the progressives are like, well, if you're going to do that, we need to up the game right here because here's what we're trying to accomplish.
Nobody's talking about what they are trying to accomplish because the dirty secret is everyone knows what they're trying to accomplish and that is the maximization of government intrusion into your life via either subsidies or regulation.
That is what they are trying to accomplish.
So they never discuss the details.
The numbers are just a proxy for we want to run all aspects of your life and we want to fund all aspects of your life or we want to fund slightly less of your life.
Slightly fewer aspects of your life.
That is why they only talk in terms of the top line.
It really is fascinating, isn't it?
Again, normally when you talk about a bill, you talk about the contents of the bill.
No one's talking about the content of the bill.
Number one, because the formal bill has not yet been proposed.
And number two, because no one cares about the content of the bill.
Hillary, for example, is Ilhan Omar talking about how much money she wants.
Again, it's all about how much money they want, not what they want to do with the money.
We remain fully committed to passing the President's entire Build Back agenda and delivering on that transformative change that the President ran on and that helped deliver the House, the Senate, and the White House.
Now, as you remember, the Senate sent us a budget resolution that had the 3.5 price tag.
What do they want to cut?
Do they want to cut child care for families that desperately need it?
Do they want to not address the climate crisis for a future generation?
Do they not want to have hearing, vision and dental care for the elderly?
Do they not want to, okay, that sort of blackmail is not going to work.
Because again, there is all this stuff available for all these people already.
If you think that elderly people in the United States don't have any sort of way to get dental care, I don't know what world you are living in.
Private means exist for dental care.
That has been a thing for quite a while in the United States as it turns out.
It's not that there are a bunch of old gummers walking around all toothless.
The notion that the elderly population in the United States is in complete lack of dental and vision care, and that we need to pay for it with the federal government.
But that's not the point.
The point is the spending.
The spending is the point.
This is what Joe Manchin understands, right?
The spending is the point.
And this is why you end up with headlines like, from David Brooks, this is why we need to spend $4 trillion.
$4 trillion!
Look how he increased it by like, $0.5 trillion.
Just, you know, it's $500 billion.
David Brooks of the New York Times, who's being retweeted by Ron Klain.
If you want to know what Biden is thinking, Biden's brain is not Biden, it is Ronald Klain, who's on Twitter basically tweeting out, a la Donald Trump, all of his interior monologues.
So he tweeted out David Brooks' column today.
David Brooks, who is one of the supposed in-house Republicans over at the New York Times, which is hysterical.
He says, Have we given up on the idea that policy can change history?
Have we lost faith in our ability to reverse or even be alarmed by national decline?
More and more, I hear people accepting the idea that America is not as energetic or youthful as it used to be.
I can practically hear the spirits of our ancestors crying out, the ones who had a core faith that this would forever be the greatest nation on the planet, the new Jerusalem, the last best hope of earth.
My ancestors were aspiring immigrants and understood where the beating heart of the nation resided, with the working class and the middle class, the ones depicted by Willa Cather, James Agee, Ralph Ellison, or in the honeymooners, the best years of our lives and on the waterfront.
There was a time when the phrase the common man was a source of pride and a high compliment.
Over the past few decades, there has been a redistribution of dignity upward.
From Reagan through Romney, the Republicans valorized entrepreneurs, CEOs, and Wall Street.
The Democratic Party became dominated by the creative class who attended competitive colleges, moved to affluent metro areas, married each other, and ladled advantages onto their kids so they could leap even further ahead.
There was a bipartisan embrace of a culture of individualism, which opens up a lot of space for people with resources and social support, but means loneliness and abandonment for people without.
Four years of college became the definition of the good life, which left roughly two-thirds of the country out.
And so came the crisis that Biden was elected to address.
The poisonous combination of elite insularity and vicious populist resentment.
The Democratic spending bills are economic packages that serve moral and cultural purposes.
They should be measured by their cultural impact, not merely by wonky analysis.
Okay, bottom line is, if we spend lots of money, this is going to make people feel good, is David Brooks' basic argument.
You will feel better if we spend lots of money.
I also enjoy the notion that the Founding Fathers would have been all on board with the federal government taxing us at exorbitant rates to fund every form of social welfare benefit they could possibly imagine.
You know, precisely the stuff that they were rebelling against the British Empire for doing to them.
I mean, they were literally rebelling against the British Empire because their taxes were too high and because they were concerned that their rights as Englishmen were being invaded because they did not have proper representation.
What do you make of an executive government that basically regulates every aspect of your life without any input from you, as well as tax rates that would have made the British Empire blush?
What do you make of that?
But he's not going back to the Founding Fathers, obviously, David Brooks.
He's going back to the FDR vision of what the United States should be, namely a quasi-socialistic enterprise.
Well, I mean, you can make that argument, but that's not going to be a very good argument.
So anyway, Joe Manchin is standing in the breach because, again, his political motive here is to stand in the breach.
If he does not stand in the breach, he loses his seat in West Virginia.
So Joe Manchin came out yesterday, said my limit is $1.5 trillion, not $3.5 trillion, not $4 trillion, $1.5 trillion.
No, no, my top line has not been. My top line has been 1.5 because I believe in my heart that what we can do and what the needs we have right now and what we can afford to do without basically changing our whole society to an entitlement mentality.
Um, so, yep. Right.
I mean, he's correct about this.
This has made him persona non grata inside the Democratic Party.
Manchin then crushed more progressive dreams.
He said, there will be no deal linking both bills.
I'm not going to, I'm not going to hold up the infrastructure bill so that they can ram through $3.5 trillion of spending.
Not going to happen.
Senator, progressives feel, though, you're not dealing in good faith.
They felt that there was a deal made beforehand.
I never knew about that.
Never heard of it.
So you were never part of a deal that linked the two bills together?
Never heard about that.
About two of them are going to be together?
Yeah.
Why do you think we worked so hard to separate it?
Um, that is correct.
Okay, and then Manchin went even further.
He said, you want 3.5 trillion bucks?
Elect more liberals.
I'm not one of those.
Again, remember, his incentive structure here is to be a conservative Democrat, of whom there are very few left in the Democratic Party.
I've never been a liberal in any way, shape, or form.
There's no one who's ever thought I was.
I've been Governor, I've been Secretary of State, I've been State Legislator, I've been a U.S.
Senator, and I have voted pretty consistently all my whole life.
I don't fault any of them who believe that they're much more progressive and much more liberal.
God bless them.
And all they need to do is we have to elect more, I guess, for them to get theirs, elect more liberals.
Ouch.
Ouch.
I mean, that is Joe Manchin just smacking down the squad.
And then Joe Manchin dropped a bomb yesterday just directly on Chuck Schumer's head.
So Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have been playing this game where they're like, oh no, we never, well, it was always 3.5.
It was not always $3.5 trillion.
Joe Manchin actually just dropped a PDF of a framework deal signed by Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin for $1.5 trillion in spending, not $3.5 trillion in spending.
And by the way, again, Joe Manchin has already signed off this year on $1.9 trillion in spending earlier this year.
This would be $1.5 trillion in spending.
There'd be another $1 trillion in supplemental spending.
By the time you get to the end of Joe Manchin's spending, the conservative guy, this year, you'd be at $5 trillion.
OK, but he actually got Chuck Schumer to sign on to this.
So Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi were going around being like, oh, that Joe Manchin, he's terrible.
You signed this at the end of July, Chuck Schumer.
So what does exactly this document say?
It says the top line would be $1.5 trillion.
The funds in the new legislation would not be dispersed until all funding from COVID legislation and ARP, the American Recovery Plan from earlier this year, has been spent.
And one of the conditions was that the Federal Reserve would end quantitative easing.
In other words, stop inflating the currency.
It would require needs-based, means-tested guardrails and formulas on new spending, targeted spending caps on existing programs, no additional handouts or transfer payments, On climate, it would require spending on innovation, not elimination.
So in other words, it would not be about eliminating coal because the man is from West Virginia.
Also, any revenue exceeding $1.5 trillion would be used for deficit reduction.
It would not be used for further spending.
It would set the corporate tax rate not at 39% or 30%, it would set it at 25%.
It would raise the top rate on ordinary income to 39.6%.
That's the only area where there's broad consensus in the Democratic Party what they want it to be.
It would raise the capital gains rate to 28% all in, right?
Not 39%, which is what Biden was looking for.
It would end the carried interest tax so-called loophole.
And then it says, Senator Manchin does not guarantee he will vote for the final reconciliation legislation if it exceeds the conditions outlined in this agreement.
He just dropped that bombshell directly on the head of Chuck Schumer.
So yesterday was just Joe Manchin day, ripping the Democratic progressives apart.
And he was pointing out correctly that inflation has real downstream effects for the person in the middle class.
This is something David Brooks doesn't seem to understand.
And neither does the entire Democratic Party, except for Joe Manchin.
Inflation hurts the little guy the most.
If you're a rich person, and you have lots of wealth and savings, you know what you're doing with that stuff investing in.
If you're the person who's spent their entire life building up a little bit of a bankroll, and then the government just keeps inflating, All those savings are less are worth less than they were yesterday.
Let's say that you're a retiree on a fixed income.
What does inflation do to you?
Here's Joe Manchin pointing this out.
I asked for the strategic pause because after that, then we basically had COVID coming back at us and we have all the unknowns right now, especially with what the financial fallout might be or the geopolitical fallout, excuse me, the geopolitical fallout that might come from the Uh, from the Afghanistan departure.
And also inflation.
I'll give you a perfect example.
In West Virginia, I just saw the day to where the, uh, to where the one dollar, uh, what do we call it?
General Dollar Store?
Dollar General?
They're not one.
They're no longer Dollar General.
They're a dollar and a quarter, a dollar fifty cent general.
That's hard for West Virginia.
A lot of people do shop there.
That's all they have.
We have to take all this into consideration.
So, um, that is, um, bad, according to the Democrats.
Okay, remember, this is all about the common man.
I promise you, Joe Manchin represents the common man far more than Chuck Schumer does.
That is certainly true.
In just one second, we'll get to the media response to all of this, which is just screaming into the void.
First, let us talk about how you save money on auto parts.
So, do you really want to be waiting in line at the auto parts store?
Is that really something you'd like to do?
And then you get to the front of the line, and for some odd reason, Beto O'Rourke's behind the counter, he's like, dude!
I haven't seen you in a while.
Got that Nissan Altima, do ya?
Well, I don't have the part here, bruh.
But I can order it for you and upcharge you by 20%.
It'll come in three weeks, what do you say?
Does that sound great?
Or you could just go online and skip beta completely and get the part for the correct price with rockauto.com.
They always offer the lowest prices possible rather than changing prices based on what the market will bear like airlines do.
Why would you spend up to twice as much for the same parts?
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They're a family business serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.
Head on over to rockauto.com.
Shop for auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers.
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Head on over to rockauto.com right now.
See all the parts available for your car or your truck.
Write Shapiro in their How Did You Hear About Us box.
So they know that we sent you.
Alrighty, we'll get to more in just one moment.
First, it is that glorious time of the week when I give a shout out to a Daily Wire member.
Today, it is TL Coolo on Twitter who has reason to believe not all high school students are completely lost.
In the pic, TLC is smiling at her desk and proudly displaying the world's greatest beverage vessel.
The caption reads, Here I am with my Leftist Tears Tumblr, maskless, substitute teaching at a local high school.
I've actually gotten compliments from the students.
There is hope yet for the next generation.
Hashtag LeftistTearsTumblr.
Glad to hear it.
Keep up the good work.
Thanks for the pick.
Thanks for being a Daily Wire member.
Also, good news for you.
If you are a video editor who has dreamed of joining the Daily Wire team, now is your big chance.
At fame, fortune, and glory, we are searching for a new video editor to join our post-production department in Nashville, Tennessee.
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Like this one.
So, all the comedy-eating bros, they're all universal in their hatred for Joe Manchin.
See, you know that you are in line with the common man when the folks at the top of the comedy hierarchy, your late-night hosts, who earn millions of dollars, are very angry at Joe Manchin, the senator from West Virginia.
Is why, listening to David Brooks, who once suggested that he liked Barack Obama because of the way he pleaded his pants.
I'm not kidding you, that's a thing David Brooks actually said back in 2008.
David Brooks, who is like, the yuppie of all yuppies.
Listening to David Brooks about the morality of spending this much money, while ripping on Joe Manchin, is just, it's peak democratic elitism.
So, here you have the Daily Show ripping at Joe Manchin.
Introducing Manchin, the politics game where everyone works together.
Almost.
We're gonna pass an infrastructure bill.
You play as the Democratic majority in the Senate, but watch out, one player is the Manchin.
I have concerns over the partisan nature of this legislation.
Uh-oh.
Looks like someone's the mansion.
But Kyle, we're all on the same team.
You know, America.
This bill cannot move forward without the support of at least one Republican colleague.
But there are no Republicans here.
They didn't want to play.
With Mansion, you can feel the excitement of a narrow majority held hostage by one sanctimonious d***head.
Seth Meyers doesn't.
One's a sanctimonious, you see?
Uh-huh, it's funny, it's funny.
Man, really pushing the boundaries of comedy.
Remember that time when comedy used to make you laugh?
Seth Meyers doesn't.
Here's Seth Meyers being not funny.
You've got two senators, Joe Manchin, who's been called a kingmaker by fossil fuel executives and personally profits from the coal industry.
And Kyrsten Sinema, who's raked in hundreds of thousands in donations from big pharma and has been raising money from business groups, holding up a bill that would tackle climate change and establish paid family leave, make community college tuition free, transform child care, and expand access to health care, among many other things.
Name one thing He's so funny.
I am enjoying the notion from Democrats that if you don't vote the way that they want you to vote, it's because you're being bribed.
Joe Manchin is doing this because of the bribery.
And so is Kyrsten Sinema.
That's why.
Because they are being bribed.
That's clearly the issue here.
So, a few things.
One, if we're going to talk about open bribery, the Democratic Party is so in hock to places like the teacher's unions that they will literally rewrite CDC standards in order to please the teacher's unions.
Second of all, as a typical rule, you take donations from groups that are politically aligned with you.
And if Chris and Sinema were presumably aligned the other way, you should be receiving donations from other groups.
I mean, that's how politics typically works.
But really, good on you guys.
Good on the elite media for deciding that anyone who disagrees with them, it's because they're attempting bribery.
All the while ignoring the fact that the entire Democratic program is an attempt to bribe voters with their own money.
Take money from, in some cases, not their own money, in some cases, from their next-door neighbor.
We'll take your next-door neighbor's money, we'll give it to you, and then you'll vote for us, seems to be the Democratic pitch here.
But they're all for the common man.
It's all the common man.
It's all the common good.
Again, their basic idea here is we spend endless amounts of money forever, and there's no downside ever.
And all we gain is more and more control over your life.
Now, I would be remiss if I did not note that there is a new standard with regard to immigration.
I mean, this administration is a bleep show in so many ways.
The DHS has issued new arrest and deportation guidelines to immigration agents, right?
This comes just a week after the DHS lied about its own agents by suggesting they were whipping immigrants, illegal immigrants, at the border.
The Biden administration said that.
Biden said it.
Harris said it.
Mayorkas said it.
It was all a lie.
Now, the DHS is issuing new regulations.
What do these regulations do, according to the Washington Post?
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued broad new directives to immigration officers on Thursday, saying the fact that someone is an undocumented immigrant, quote, should not alone be the basis of a decision to detain and deport them from the United States.
Oh, that's not.
But aren't you like the immigration sort like border patrol?
So your job is to patrol the border.
But if someone crosses the border illegally, that is not alone the basis to detain or deport them from the United States.
Hmm.
I wonder why people think there's an open border here.
It's bewildering to me.
Who could have predicted such a thing?
The same time these people are releasing... There are 15,000 people under the bridge in Del Rio, Texas.
10,000 to 12,000 of them, according to Mayorkas, entered the United States.
I wonder why everyone thinks there's an open border here in the United States.
Maybe because there's an open border here in the United States thanks to these tool bags.
So now you're not just combining bad economic policy With inflationary policy and bad fiscal policy, you got bad economic policy, bad fiscal policy, endless welfare benefits, and an open border.
I can't see how anything here is gonna be bad.
It's all probably gonna be great.
Even Bernie Sanders used to be in favor of a closed border.
He was in favor of a closed border because he made the perfectly plausible and rational argument that if you offer endless welfare benefits to people and leave the border open, you won't be able to pay for everyone.
So much for that, we've got an administration that wants endless welfare benefits for pretty much everybody, and also an open border.
An amnesty program is on the way for those who say, well, you know, illegal immigrants can't receive things like federal welfare benefits.
First of all, they can receive in some states state welfare benefits.
They receive free public education for their kids.
But beyond that.
The administration would very much like to make all these people citizens as fast as humanly possible.
Does this look like a recipe for the success of the United States, or does it look like an attempt to gain ultimate power for the rest of time by the Democratic Party?
Endless welfare benefits, endless bribery, endless spending combined with open borders is one hell of a combo.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
First, you can't forget to end your week by checking out The Andrew Klavan Show.
Drew's show is every Friday.
He's got an exciting evening planned for you.
Head on over to dailywire.com at 7 p.m.
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