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May 21, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
31:18
Rubio BLOWS UP Senate Democrats 2025-05-21 19:43
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Discipline, but we're cutting a path that hasn't been cut before, and we're doing it in a responsible way, and I'm very proud of this product.
Not perfect, not far enough for a deficit, Hawk, but certainly a good, big, and meaningful step in the right direction.
So let's talk about the process from here.
Obviously, let's assume that it passes through the lower House of Congress, and now a version has to pass in the Senate.
I mean, there's only a framework, is my understanding, in the Senate at this point, so they have to pass their own version of the bill.
The Senate says that they could get their work done by July 4th.
I don't know if they will or not.
I know this.
They have a better chance of doing that because of the several months of work that has been put in this.
By the way, long before President Trump was sworn in or we started this 119th Congress.
So we're going to get this package done.
Whether we get it done this weekend or not, I think the chances are good.
If not, it'll be soon thereafter.
And if we get the product there in the Senate, I think they'll make some modifications.
Hopefully not.
Material changes.
And that will help expedite it to the president's desk.
But I don't think they're going to get much more in terms of deficit spending reduction.
I don't think they're going to give away any more in terms of, you know.
Tax breaks for special interest.
That's what I would put in the column for the salt cap increase.
And I don't know that they're going to be able to do any more than we're doing on the growth side.
I think that's sort of been maximized.
So the House is driving it.
All of our work, I think, will help facilitate a seamless, relatively, for Congress, seamless path to the president's desk.
And then, most importantly, Making it a reality for the American people so that we truly make America safer and more prosperous again.
And I think this bill will do that.
Congressman Jody Arrington, the House Budget Committee Chairman.
So Congressman Arrington, when you look at the possibility of passage, obviously there's going to have to be pressure brought to bear to make sure this gets over the finish line.
President Trump was doing some of that yesterday, I think actually quite effectively.
The markets have already priced in the passage of the bill.
If this bill were to fail, if this were not to pass, the consequences could be pretty disastrous on the American economy, on investment, on everything else.
I think that's sort of the unspoken pressure here, is that taxes and a massive tax increase in this sort of fragile economy, that spells doom for a lot of folks.
Oh, it does.
I couldn't agree more.
On predicting a 1.8% annual average GDP, that's the growth rate on average for the next 10 years, while assuming that the tax cuts would expire.
The tax cuts expiring were a $4.5 trillion tax hike on the American people and our job creators would be devastating.
We would certainly be in a recession.
And we're talking about 26%.
Million small businesses not getting the comparable treatment to the corporate rate that was reduced.
We took their 20% deduction to 23%.
But just on an individual basis, 91% of the American people take the standard deduction.
That would be cut in half.
45 million people get a child tax credit.
That would be cut in half.
On average, the American people would receive a 22% tax increase.
So, look.
The bottom line is, as you said, and I think you said it well, we've got to extend the tax cuts.
We put a few more in place that are targeted on working people in this country.
I think after about, I think it was a 20% regressive inflation tax over the last few years, that's appropriate.
So it's about bringing the prices down.
It's about getting our economy off high center.
If you grow the economy, Ben, by one percentage point, Over the next 10 years, over the budget window, we will reduce the deficit by $3 trillion.
So it's important, again, that we get our economy growing, create those conditions, unleash prosperity, build on that, and also build the political will and the support from the American people to understand that all this...
All these entitlements that are on auto-spend that represent 90% of the increase in spending over the next 10 years that will drive us from World War II levels of debt to $125 trillion on top of that, which is unsustainable.
It's the biggest threat to the economy, to our security, to our global leadership, our children's future in the world.
But we've got to sell that.
We have to have the American people.
As Abraham Lincoln said, if you have the public sentiment, you can do anything.
If you don't, you can't do anything.
And so we've got some work to do there.
But again, we're starting to turn the battleship.
This is a responsible bill.
I'm very proud of it.
Well, that's Congressman Jody Arrington.
Really appreciate your time, sir, and good luck on the bill.
Thank you, Ben.
It's an honor to be with you.
Alrighty, folks, also on the line to discuss the big, beautiful bill, we have the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vogt.
Director, thanks so much for joining the program.
Really appreciate the time.
Yeah, you bet.
Thanks.
So let's talk about this bill.
Obviously, there's been a lot of heartburn, particularly by fiscal hawks about this bill's suggestion that the bill doesn't do enough to cut the national deficit.
It adds to the deficit or adds to the debt.
What's the truth about that?
Well, I think, look, this is the most historic level of mandatory savings that we've had ever, $1.6 trillion.
And just to give people a little bit of context, for 30 years, we've had virtually no efforts to cut mandatory savings, which are the things that are hardwired into permanent law, welfare benefits, things like Medicaid.
And we've had nothing.
Of consequence since the 1997 balanced budget agreement, which included the work requirements with the Republican Congress and Bill Clinton.
This bill essentially doubles that with $1.6 trillion, begins to have sizable savings to get illegal immigrants off of Medicaid, to have a work requirement in Medicaid, to take those reforms from 1997 and apply them to more of the federal program to get people back into the labor force.
So it does sizable things at the same time as being in addition to the economic growth that we think will come from this, because, you know, my view as a budget guy, you can't cut spending if you don't have a growing economy.
And so the last thing you want to do is not preserve these tax cuts, get them extended.
That is really just what current law is.
There's a unique thing in budget land where you allow for...
So all that we're doing is extending what is essentially current law and then adding $1.6 trillion in mandatory savings.
We think it's actually historic and something this town has even begun to approach.
And we're working with members to be able to tell that story.
So, Director, one of the things that I think is kind of interesting about this debate is that many of the fiscal hawks seem to be railing against what the bill is not rather than what the bill is, meaning...
Would it be great if the bill actually took on mandatory entitlement programs in a far bigger way that actually moved towards solving our systemic national debt problem, which, of course, is going to accrue over the course of the next 10, 20 years?
The cost curve is being bent here, but it's not being bent to the extent that it totally solves our national debt or deficit crisis.
But, of course, it never was going to.
The Republicans have a two-vote majority, essentially, in the House.
They have a three-vote majority, if you include the vice president, in the Senate.
The sort of idea that there is going to be a widespread rejiggering of the entire way that America does its welfare state in this bill, I think that that is asking a little much.
I assume that's why President Trump has been a little bit upset with, for example, Representative Thomas Massey, who's out there basically saying that unless we completely hamstring the entire welfare state, he's against.
We definitely have very slim majorities, and this is what we believe that we can accomplish.
And the way I look at it is we have had no successes at all for so many years.
We've been living in this town and working and laboring, fiscal conservatives all among us, and had no victories.
And this has massive victories, not just on the policies, securing the border, national defense, the tax relief, but $1.6 trillion in real mandatory relief, not gimmicks.
Our biggest problem, Ben, is that we have not been able to achieve any successes over 30 years.
This one would, and it allows us to then go to the next vehicle and make more progress.
And once you get in the business of having things that pass and are enacted into law...
Now you've got the country moving in the right direction and we can get more of the way down the road with regard to restoring our fiscal house to order.
But I think you summed it up very, very, very importantly.
This was not originally the debate to be able to fundamentally balance the budget.
This was to figure out how much we could do on a critical leverage point to make sure that we weren't hurting the fiscal situation and to make as much...
We're trying to communicate, look, we've got a lot of different levers.
We haven't even talked about what's happening in the appropriations process.
We sent up a budget that is 20% below non-defense cut from last year, which is the lowest level since fiscal year 17. If you adjust for inflation, it's the lowest since 20...
Since 2000.
So that's something that you have to zoom out to be able to look at what's going on here and tell that story about all the moving parts.
So, Director, one of the other things that you've been working on, obviously, is you've been working closely with Doge with regard to going through the federal government, looking for cuts, waste, fraud, abuse, restructuring of the administrative state.
What are your goals there?
What should we be looking for from Doge in the future?
Obviously, the first few months, there's been a lot of action.
It's kind of unclear how many of those cuts are going to be made permanent.
What actually can be done just purely at the executive level as opposed to requiring some sort of confirmation from Congress?
What's your view on what Doge is capable of doing in and of itself?
What can be done just within the executive branch to stop spending, cut regulation, and what does require the help of Congress?
Well, it depends on the specific funding that we're talking about, but we've identified $160 billion of waste, abuse, of reforms and savings that we are trying to make permanent.
And so we will use the Impoundment Control Act, which Congress put in law in the 1970s.
We're not big fans of it.
We think it's unconstitutional, but there are...
We have processes in place that allow us to be able to evade the filibuster in the Senate.
And if we can get a majority vote on some of our rescissions bills, we're very happy to work with Congress.
Our first rescissions bill on foreign aid and NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting should go up very soon.
And I think that's going to be passed.
I really do.
We're now also working to think through what are the other things that can go through the various features of the Impoundment Control Act at different...
Different parts of the year.
And also, impoundment continues to be on the table.
We, 200 years of presidents, had the ability to spend less.
The constitutional principle is that Congress puts that ceiling in it, but it was never meant to be a floor.
And in the aftermath of Watergate, the lowest point of the presidency, Congress stepped in and said, no, we're going to make this a floor and we're going to make it so if we give you $100 million for apprenticeships and you feel like you could do it for $75 million, we're going to make you spend that extra $25 million.
We want to have that debate.
If you're not, we're going to definitely keep these things, I call them executive tools, to reduce spending beneath.
The appropriation from Congress, those are very much on the table.
And, Director, one of the other questions, obviously, that's arising right now, Moody's recently downgraded the American debt, basically suggesting that, obviously, many of the problems we're talking about are systemic and on into the future.
The timing of that Moody's decision, obviously, may be politically suspect.
Moody's is not known for being particularly apolitical.
With that said...
Much of what you're worried about over at OMB is specifically that.
You are worried about the long-term national debt.
What do you think are the next steps beyond this big, beautiful bill in the future for the rest of the Trump administration in terms of moving toward bringing America's fiscal house back toward order?
I think it's using every leverage point that we possibly can fiscally to make progress.
And there's kind of some big, the big moving parts are economic growth numbers, tariff revenues that are coming in, it's discretionary cuts that I just talked about.
That $160 billion in the first year over 10 years is $4 trillion of the answer.
And it's mandatory reforms.
And so, you know, we need more than 1.6.
But $1.6 trillion is a sizable amount of what is needed to get us back towards balance.
And so a combination of all of those different moving parts will get us there over time.
We can do a lot of it executively.
We're going to need Congress on more of these, particularly on the mandatory side of the reforms and the savings.
And we'll just keep using leverage points to move forward.
But I think when you look at what we've done on the tariffs, even what is Already right now in place, not just kind of being, you know, negotiated as part of the reciprocal tariffs.
Those have sizable impact over 10 years that we never really assumed for in years past.
Well, that is the director of the Office of Management and Budget, one of the most transformative people in the American government, Russ Vogt.
Really appreciate your time, sir.
Thanks, Ben.
Well, meanwhile, Elon Musk has now announced that he is likely to step back from his political involvement over the course of the next couple of years.
He announced this at the Qatar Economic Forum in an interview with Bloomberg.
Here was Elon Musk yesterday.
Bye.
I think in terms of political spending, I'm going to do a lot less in the future.
And why is that?
I think I've done enough.
Is it because of blowback?
Well, if I see a reason to political spending in the future, I will do it.
I don't currently see a reason.
Okay, so there are a couple of things that are happening here.
One is that Elon happens to be correct, actually, that when he injects himself into any political controversy in, say, a purple state, it actually sometimes creates the opposite effect.
So, for example, he spent an awful lot of money on a key Wisconsin Supreme Court race last month.
But the negative publicity that emerged from him spending on that race actually may have outweighed the signal contribution that he made to the race.
When it comes to presidential races, obviously, that is a different thing.
Democrats have attacked Musk.
They've attacked his businesses.
It is not a great shock that he is moving out of that realm.
Obviously, many of his major businesses have suffered as a result of his contribution to the public discourse, his involvement in Doge, and all the rest.
And this is a reminder.
That Democrats do not have that same incentive structure.
There are a lot of Democrats who have involved themselves, you know, we're talking about people in business, at a very high level and continue to do so volubly with huge amounts of money, and they've never received the kind of public blowback that Elon Musk has received for having gotten involved in the political arena in that way.
Now, to be fair, Elon is obviously a lot more voluble than many of those other Democrats.
Many of these Democrats are sort of behind the scenes, contributing money.
They're not out in front.
They're not as publicly going out there and...
And holding chainsaws or flamethrowers or anything like that.
However, it is a reminder that while the right will constantly say the legacy media are dead, the impact of the left dead, that is obviously not totally true.
And we should keep an eye out for it in the future because the pressures that were unleashed on Elon Musk here are very much still in play for other corporate heads.
I think the right sometimes declares victory a little bit too early on fronts like this one.
Meanwhile, all the controversy has not abated with regard to Joe Biden's health.
We are now finding out.
From Joe Biden's team that his last known prostate cancer blood screening test, his last PSA, was performed in 2014.
2014.
That's insane.
I also am not sure I believe that.
And the reason I don't believe that is because the Biden family has actually a pretty long and storied history of covering up actual cancer among members of its family.
The new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, Original Sin, which has a lot of fascinating parts of it.
One of the parts of the book.
It's a section where they talk about how the Biden family covered up Bo's cancer, actually.
The book explains, quote, Bo's cancer treatment also demonstrated the Biden's capacity for denial and the lengths they would go to avoid transparency about health issues, even when the person in question is an elected official, in this case, the sitting attorney general of Delaware.
So in summer of 2013, Bo Biden had surgery because he had a stage four tumor removed from his brain afterward.
And he started looking very sick, obviously.
He started looking very gaunt.
In November 2013, Bo told a local reporter he had a clean bill of health after an exam.
He remained the sitting attorney general of Delaware for the entirety of 2014, even while the family was secretly flying him all over the country for a variety of experimental treatments.
In April 2014, he began having difficulties with speech.
He would often enter hospitals under an alias, George Lincoln.
Apparently, Bo's wife's Hallie didn't like this, but Joe Biden insisted on it.
According to the book, making it public likely would have led people to rally around the family who's an elected official.
But both Biden and Beau oppose the disclosure.
At times, Biden also instructed his team to mislead the media about his whereabouts.
They would publicly say the vice president was going to Delaware for the weekend, then returning to D.C. the next week.
That was technically true, but sometimes Biden flew to Houston, where Beau was receiving treatment to be with his eldest son over the weekend.
That, again, all the questions that are being asked right now about the cover-up of Joe Biden's health are perfectly legitimate.
Like, every single bit of it is perfectly legitimate.
Do I believe that he just found out about his cancer last week?
I have a very difficult time believing that.
Why in the world would his last PSA be in 2014, 11 years ago?
In the interim, he was Vice President of the United States and President of the United States.
And by the way, these sort of old guidance that you don't bother doing PSAs for older people because the cancer develops so slowly that if they're really old, they probably die of old age before the cancer kills them.
The rates of survival of prostate cancer have increased dramatically over the course.
Of the last 30, 40 years.
And so, you know, my parents, my dad, obviously, as he gets older, he has a routine prostate exam and routine PSA, obviously, as he should.
It is ridiculous not to.
And when you're talking about the vice president and president of the United States, why would you not?
Why would you not?
This is insane.
Well, Tapper and Thompson are making the rounds.
And Tapper and Thompson said yesterday, That even Biden's top aides were astonished by the fact that the media were so complicit in the cover-up.
And Alex and I are here to say that conservative media was right and conservative media was correct and that there should be a lot of soul-searching, not just among me, but among the legacy media to begin with, all of us, for how this was covered or not covered sufficiently.
100%.
I mean, I'm not here to defend coverage that I've already acknowledged I wish I could do differently.
And that was on Megyn Kelly's show.
Megyn really held Jake's feet to the fire with regard to his coverage of Joe Biden's health conditions, suggesting that he should have done more.
And Tapper himself acknowledged that he certainly should have done more.
And that goes to deeper questions about why the legacy media were so complicit in Biden's health cover-up when it was perfectly obvious to everyone with the naked eye that Joe Biden was in the middle of a health decline.
Would they have been quite as conciliatory?
To the Trump administration, if Trump were in the middle of a real health collapse.
Well, according to Tapper, the person driving the decision making in the White House was Hunter Biden, which is just insane.
That's just crazy towns.
If you're wondering who the real president was, the answer was combo of Jill and Hunter appears to be the answer.
Here was Jake Tapper explaining.
How big a factor was the Hunter stuff?
I think it was considerable.
I think Hunter was driving the decision making for the family in a way.
He was almost like a chief of staff of the family.
Does that strike you as pretty bizarre?
It's bizarre because I think he is provably, demonstrably unethical, sleazy, and prone to horrible decisions.
Tell me how you really feel.
Well, I mean, I just look at the record.
I mean, after his brother died, he cheated on his wife with his brother's widow and then got her addicted to crack.
That's just one thing I could say.
I mean, there are...
I don't have a lot of personal regard for him.
And just based on having nothing to do with...
I barely have ever met him.
I've met him like once or twice.
But I knew Bo.
Bo was a great, upstanding guy.
I knew him too, really.
A real loss.
For the country, too.
Not just for his family, for the country.
But Hunter is not that.
And the idea of letting him drive the family car, as it were, is just really, really questionable.
Okay, so again, all this was out there.
The big unanswered question, of course, that we all know the answer to is why didn't the media cover it better?
The answer is because they wanted Joe Biden to win.
What's amazing is watching some of the left-wing members of the media not do what Jake Tapper is doing.
Tapper, at least, is doing a mea culpa.
Jake is at least going out there and saying, yeah, I should have covered this better.
My mistake.
And again, you can take or leave the...
You can either take it or leave it, what he's saying, but at least he is saying the thing.
That is not the case with, say, Joe Scarborough.
Joe Scarborough, Like, a couple of weeks before Joe Biden went on national TV and died, said that Joe Biden was at his best ever and you were crazy if you didn't think so.
He is still kind of holding by that now, which is just wild.
In fact, when I finished talking to Biden on, I guess it was 22, late 22, I hung up the phone and I said to me, I go, He doesn't have dementia.
Whoa!
Because, again, it was not just cogent.
It was a better, really, analysis of the situation than I'd heard from most people unless it was, let's say, it was Chairman McCall or somebody running a permanent committee.
And you're confident if someone heard the audio of that conversation, they would come away with the same conclusion.
Oh my God, yeah.
Anybody.
But looking back at that, do you say, well, it was misleading to say Best Buy never, without caveating it, and say, except on the days when he's not the Best Buy now.
Well, but I never saw those days, personally.
Well, you did.
You did, because you saw him address a dead congresswoman, and you saw him in South Carolina.
A dead congresswoman, yeah.
Yeah, well, more than that.
I can show you the RNC clip reels.
There were plenty of days in public.
When he was not the best Biden ever.
Yeah, he stumbled and bumbled around, Mark.
I mean, yeah, he certainly did.
Donald Trump did.
Other politicians did.
But it's actually the same case as a lot of times when I've gone in and talked to Donald Trump.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
Again, like...
Am I allowed to ask about bias now?
I mean, now we all know.
Like, really?
Seriously?
Again, when people change their opinions based on new facts, or when they apologize for screwing it up in the first place, that is better than this.
Whoopi Goldberg, by the way, continues to claim that there was no way, there were no outside indicators that Joe Biden was ever in decline, except for your own eyes, lady.
Here she was.
Listen, he's 83, so he's a little stumbly, he's a little rumbly.
I...
Can't point to anything that he's done that he did.
But I'm saying, I want, not you, but I want somebody to tell me, well, when did you know it was bad?
When did I know that it was bad?
When I watched him do things.
That is the answer to that question.
That's when we all knew that it was bad.
Come on.
Come on.
The deeper the Democrats dig this hole, the harder it's going to be for them to get out of it.
They really should just say, we were wrong.
We thought he could get through it.
We thought maybe he would recover.
It was a cover-up.
Our bad.
That's the best they can do, seriously, but they're not actually doing it.
Again, just another reason I should point out why I think AOC continues to do well in the polling, because AOC is sort of outside the Democratic Party.
I've cited Matt Continetti, the political commentator, to the point before that people who tend to be successful electorally in presidential politics, Well, apparently, a brand new coefficient survey conducted May 7th to May 9th found that 26% identified Ocasio-Cortez as the face of the Democratic Party.
26% said there is no one currently leading the party.
22% chose other.
Ocasio-Cortez was ahead of the second-place finisher.
That second-place finisher, Was Bernie Sanders, who is likely to be her supporter.
Jasmine Crockett placed third in the survey with 8%.
All these so-called establishment Democrats are stuck 6%, 5%, 4%.
Cory Booker, despite his bizarre Mr. Potato Head routine on the Senate floor, is stuck at 4%.
I think people are underestimating AOC at their own peril.
And let's be real about this.
Democrats right now are complaining about AOC.
We'll get behind her if they are forced to do so.
James Carville, who is way too smart to get behind the sort of AOC Bizarro wing party.
He says that he would back AOC.
And I don't think the party is in near as bad shape as it's being portrayed to be.
We lost the election.
I don't like the party.
I don't blame the party's reputation for being low.
I think if AOC wants to run for president, she gets a nominee, and God bless you, you are the leader of the Democratic Party.
Whoever gets that nomination is going to be it.
That's all I'm waiting for.
You know, if they can't stand the way AOC is, it's going to be very difficult for them to stop her.
She's got one entire lane of the Democratic Party to herself, that far left lane.
She's got huge name recognition.
She's got Bernie Sanders' base of support.
She's probably got finance from that wing of the party.
Everybody on the right who's very sanguine about this, by the way, oh, we'll definitely beat AOC.
I'd just like to recall a person named Barack Obama who was running against the establishment Democrat, Hillary Clinton, and ended up being a two-term president.
So don't be sanguine about anything, I think, should be the message of the last 20 years in American politics at the very, very least.
Okay, meanwhile, the Europeans are apparently angry at Israel for, you know, trying to destroy Hamas.
That continues to be the pattern.
That's nothing new, by the way.
The Europeans were very angry at Israel for surviving the 1973 war.
They were angry at Israel for attacking the Osirak reactor.
They've been historically angry at Israel for defending itself.
Now, the British government, which, again, is subject to a very large Muslim population and also is a very left-wing government, and the French government, run by the absolutely ridiculous and politically bile Emmanuel Macron, is also calling on Israel.
to stop its final moves against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, despite the fact that Hamas is not surrendering the hostages and continues to wield enough authority in the Gaza Strip to kill people who oppose it.
The same from the Canadians.
None of this is a giant shock.
According to the EU, EU Foreign Policy Chief Kaha Kallis announced that the bloc of 27 countries would begin a formal review of its trade accord with Israel.
A huge majority, Kala said, of EU foreign ministers backed a proposal to reconsider the deal, which includes provisions on international human rights law.
A spokesperson for Israel's foreign ministry said that this reflects a total misunderstanding of the complex reality Israel is facing.
Now, to be fair, part of this is Israel's fault.
Israel should have moved faster.
We are now 19 months into the October 7th war.
Israel should not have had itself stopped by the Biden administration.
Certainly since President Trump took over, they should have moved faster in Gaza.
They should move fast now.
The reality is that large swaths of the West do not understand how war works.
They do not understand what Hamas is.
They do not understand the notion of trade-offs.
They don't understand that war is necessarily ugly, particularly when one of those sides is a terrorist regime hell-bent on civilian casualties and holding hostages.
That's just the reality of the situation.
Israel should have moved faster.
But now, given the situation, should Israel finish the job or should they leave Hamas in control with hostages under their control?
What exactly is the alternative being posed by the EU?
The EU, of course, has always been an organization filled with foreign policy cowards.
So that, of course, is no shock.
By the way, it is worth noting here that while the EU is considering sanctioning Israel, essentially, for finishing off a terrorist group in the Gaza Strip, the EU is trying to lift sanctions on Syria, which is run by a literal, honest-to-God terrorist group backed by the Turkish government that just a few weeks ago we were discussing.
was trying to slaughter the Druze and not just a few Christians, apparently.
And so the EU is like, no sanctions on the Syrian terrorist group, sanctions on Israel, which I think shows you exactly where their head is at.
Pretty amazing stuff from the EU, but I would expect nothing more and nothing less.
All right, folks, the show is continuing for our members right now.
We are going to get to the beautiful relationship between Bill Belichick and Jordan Hudson.
And we have new details from the New York Times, just beautiful and inspiring details of a wonderful relationship.
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