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April 28, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:51
Episode 4445: The Elite Watch As You Flounder Financially; Electrical Blackout In Europe
Participants
Main voices
s
steve bannon
35:16
Appearances
b
ben harnwell
02:33
d
dave walsh
04:34
Clips
j
jake tapper
00:08
| Copy link to current segment

Speaker Time Text
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
This is the primal scream of a dying regime.
Pray for our enemies.
unidentified
Because we're going medieval on these people.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
You're just not got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people.
The people have had a belly full of it.
I know you don't like hearing that.
I know you've tried to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it.
It's going to happen.
jake tapper ▲ ● ▼
And where do people like that go to share the big line?
unidentified
MAGA Media.
jake tapper ▲ ● ▼
I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
unidentified
Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
unidentified
War Room.
Here's your host, Stephen K. Bass.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Okay, it's Monday, 28 April, Year of the Alert, 2025.
Welcome.
We were going to go to Rome, but we have Ben Harnwell, head of our International Bureau, working on something.
He'll be with us momentarily.
Here's what I would like to do.
I would like to, if we can do this, I want to play Fareed Zakara and Ray Dalio.
Let me tee this up, because I played as a cold open last time.
Who is Ray Dalio?
Ray Dalio runs the largest hedge fund in the world, Bridgewater.
His deputy, McCormick, brother Dave McCormick, West Point grad Dave McCormick, is now in the United States Senate from Pennsylvania.
Can we get this organized?
Okay.
Hang on a second.
Not played yet.
Dalio was on yesterday with Freed Zakara.
Freed Zakara comes out with his whole point of view on...
GPS, and they're talking about the economy and the stock market, all this stuff.
He's got Zandi on, who's the head of The Economist.
And she's going in with her things, the tariffs and trade, everything, boom, boom, boom, boom.
And this is kind of, when I talked to the World Economic Conference, the new Davos in D.C., put on by Summerfort last week, I was in front of those folks, and Ben Smith asked me the first question, well, how, all this turbulence in the stock market.
I said, dude, it's a casino.
However the casino moves in the next roll of the roulette table, doesn't matter.
And the media gets so obsessed with this because now this is their new thing.
They've got to get something else.
The signal chat doesn't work.
They all got to go.
So Ray Dalio is on there, and we're going to play it again.
You'll hear what Ray has to say.
He completely rips on Fridzakar's question.
He says, "You're missing a point, kid."
Boom.
It's all about debt.
He preaches the gospel of the war room.
And this guy is not a fan of Stephen K. Bannon and certainly not a fan of the war room.
Let's go ahead and play it again.
unidentified
It reflects what Zannie was saying and says that all of this produces huge risks.
We expect a policy-induced slowdown, including a probability of a recession.
The Fed is going to be less able to handle this, and so there are risks of stagflation, the combination of slow growth and inflation.
U.S. corporates are under threat.
There's exceptional risk to U.S. assets.
Would you agree with that?
By and large, I agree with that.
I don't think it covers what's going on, so let me just clarify.
We have a problem with the debt.
We have a problem with internal order, democracy as we know it, the system.
We have a problem of a geopolitical order, rising power, challenging an existing power in that global environment.
These things exist as the backdrop of this set of circumstances.
Now, there's been volatility.
Yes, in my opinion.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is you seem to be reluctant to comment directly.
No, I'll comment directly.
What are the effects of the Trump administration's policies in the last hundred days economically?
The effects of those policies, economically, is to bring to the surface issues about the polarity that exists.
And at the same time, it's doing it in a volatile way that is causing trouble in terms of the volatility of that.
So it is dealing with problems, and at the same time, the way it is dealing with problems could be done more smoothly, more quietly.
Zannie, let me ask you, you said we're still, let me ask you about something you know a lot about, because we are, right now, the deadlock, the most important deadlock, is a U.S.-China deadlock, where, in order to get the world economy...
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Just a second, this one's so good, I want to play it separately.
I don't think that gets to the problem.
He tells a guy on his own show, that is not supposed to happen.
And Freed tees it up with that whole, oh, you got the trade tariffs and trade.
It's everything they can see of the moment.
Let me give you some stats.
Anytime like Zandi starts, the economy is doing so good.
As Ray Daly just said, it's a debt financed economy on federal spending.
The model we're on right now is not sustainable.
Full stop.
I want to know what everybody off of that model is.
Because this is what's killing the working class.
This is what's killing the middle class.
This is why 9 million people have two jobs.
This is why the $1.4 trillion of credit card debt, 10% of it's non-performing.
This is why you haven't had a wage increase.
Dave Brett just went through the twos.
Next 30 years, projected growth in the United States of America economy by CBO, Congressional Budget Office, 2%.
That 2% Also includes the federal spending.
If you took the federal spending out the last five years, you have negative growth.
You're in a recession.
The recession started years ago.
And now it's getting to the point that it can't sustain itself.
Why?
With these crooks over here on Capitol Hill and the Federal Reserve, would they continue to print money?
Hell, all day long they jam it down.
Who's resisting it?
The BRICS nations.
Remember, the greatest export that the country has is the dollar.
We're the prime reserve currency.
If you want to give to a convent in sub-Saharan Africa or do a drug deal in Thailand, you convert it into dollars.
And everything in between.
It's the greatest export we have.
The entire post-war international rules-based order is predicated upon Bretton Woods.
Yes, a ton of institutions, right?
They're set up.
International Monetary Fund.
World Bank.
Trade deals, all of it, but all predicated upon the U.S. dollar.
It's the U.S. dollar's purchasing power that continues to drop, that has the nations of the world, the BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, plus now Saudi Arabia, everybody else.
All those people, every one of those central banks, you know what they got?
Plenty of young people that went to Harvard Business School and can work an HP-12C computer and can do discounted cash flow and say, hey, guess what?
The Americans are screwing us.
The American elite are screwing us because they continue to run these massive budget deficits to cover themselves.
You also simultaneously have the greatest in concentration of wealth in mankind's history, starting in 2008 in the financial collapse under the most progressive president in American history, Barack Obama, who was convinced by Geithner and Bernanke.
And, of course, all of his sponsors on Wall Street, the Lords of Easy Money, oh, you've got to bail it out that way?
Hell, he's a constitutional lawyer.
You read David Susskind's book, Confidence Men, Obama tried to make the best decisions he could, but he was overwhelmed by neoliberal neocons who said, guess what?
We need to do this.
We need to bail out everybody except the American working class and the American middle class.
In fact, since I had Chris Leonard on on Friday writing that new book about the...
Defense Department.
Leonard went back.
This is why he's so good.
He went back to all the inner workings of the Federal Reserve.
Those notes from the governor's meetings are only put out 10 years after they happened.
He went back and read all of them from 2008.
It was the governor of Dallas.
The Dallas Fed, who sat there and said, when you go to zero interest rates or negative interest rates, it's the working class and middle class are going to get screwed because of their little checking account and their savings account, the things that my dad had all his life.
They have no interest.
You have no ability to have capital formation.
As a working class or middle class people, none.
He says, we're going to do this.
He says, we're going to bail out the entire system on the backs of the working class and middle class.
You know what they said?
They voted 11-1.
Hey, thanks for your input.
I think he actually voted for them a couple of times so they could show unanimity, but he fought it in these meetings.
The entire...
Financial system.
The entire financial system rests on your shoulders.
You're the full faith and credit of this.
It ain't the Federal Reserve.
It's not the SEC.
It's not Congress.
When people say, well, why is the market here liquid?
Why do people invest here?
Hey, in the city of London, they've got the same types of restrictions basically we have here in the United States.
You go to Singapore, basically the same type.
Frankfurt, Tokyo, a little different but about the same.
The regulatory apparatus is about the same.
Slightly different, but about the same.
Here, people put their money in, they know they're going to get their money back.
Why?
It's the little platoons.
It's the little platoons of Burke.
It's the associations.
It's Little League.
It's the churches.
It's the doctors, the nurses, the first responders.
It's everything that makes small-town America work.
That is the backbone of the nation.
That is the full faith and credit of the United States government.
It's you.
And let me give you another newsflash.
You get screwed every day of your life.
In broad daylight.
Don't think they're not going up to Scott Besson's office today to work out a deal that benefits you because they're not.
Okay?
They're not making any real cuts to federal spending.
None.
With everything.
And here's the tell.
You know what the tell is?
The debt ceiling.
Wait to what they asked for in the debt ceiling.
It's going to be $5 trillion.
I'm picking a random number.
It's going to be $5 trillion.
It's going to be in two years.
So if it's $5 trillion, understand we're going to go from $37 to $42 pretty quickly.
Okay?
And they're not going to cut defense spending.
We just passed a National Defense Authorization Act at $900 billion.
And in this reconciliation, the big beautiful bill, they're going to throw another $150 billion.
That's over a trillion dollars.
And I love Pete Hexeth, but when Pete Hexeth puts out a trained-out defense budget, all caps, I'm not feeling good.
I'm not feeling like I got control of the building.
Here's why.
Has President Trump just not walked us through a complete reorganization, geopolitical, geostrategic reorganization from Greenland to the Panama Canal, from the West Central Pacific all the way to the Three Island Chain leading up to East Asia?
Is that not actually...
The hemispheric defense of the United States of America.
That we're finally off the Eurasian landmass.
We don't have to get into these endless wars that we've been in.
That all of a sudden, hey, the Russian army is your problem, NATO.
We're there to help, but that's your problem.
Yes, we'll help sort out Ukraine.
I think today just announced this is going to be, I think, May 8th, which would be, I think, the 80th anniversary of what the Russians take as their victory.
In the great war against the fascists as they will do a ceasefire.
I think that's what we're hearing right now.
But that's all kind of the give and take of daily news.
The important thing here is that for America to be safe and to get a defense budget that doesn't drive us into bankruptcy because you are not going to be able to touch social programs until you get cuts in defense.
And people up there right now are selling you a bill of goods.
Here's the way the math works and the only way the math works.
Scott Besson laid it out.
Six and a half percent.
We're at six and a half or seven percent right now of budget deficits to GDP.
It's not sustainable.
The BRICS nations, the bond market's going to get a vote.
Just like Liv's trust got turfed out, the bond market is going to reject.
Ray Dalio and others are saying that you're going to have a bond auction.
Remember two weeks ago when we had this big freeze up?
The bond market froze up on the morning for a moment.
Then Scott Besson had to oversee an auction of treasuries.
These kind of debt figures, folks, we've got to sell $10 to $12 trillion a year to refinance that debt.
For years and years and years.
Remember Dick Cheney?
Deficits don't matter?
Well, they don't matter if those folks are running them at the beginning.
But they're certainly going to matter a lot.
If you're under 40 years old, it's going to matter a whole lot.
Because you know what?
You're no different than a Russian serf, okay?
You don't own anything, and you're not going to own anything.
You're being buried every day by federal spending that helps the oligarchs.
This is why you've had this great concentration of wealth, right?
It's obvious, obvious, obvious to anybody.
Sure is the turning of the earth.
We're going to take a short commercial break.
Where have we taught this for four years?
Birch gold.
Look, I was not a gold bug at all.
I can see this day coming.
Four years ago, started the end of the dollar empire.
Sixth re-installment is modern monetary theory.
Now, why would a working class and middle class audience want to learn about modern monetary theory?
Because it is the idea that broke the world.
A radical idea coming from, wait for it, France.
But adopted by Capitol Hill, adopted by both parties, they're both guilty, and by Wall Street.
Modern monetary theory.
End of the dollar empire.
Go to birchgold.com slash band and also talk to Philip Patrick's team.
Short commercial break.
We're going to return in just a moment.
unidentified
I got American faith in America's heart.
Here's your host, Stephen K. Band.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Okay.
We're going to go to Rome.
I got Dave Walsh up because there's a situation in Portugal and Spain.
unidentified
Maybe part of France about energy I'm gonna get to in this electricity I should say I'm gonna get to that in a second let's play the second part of this Ray Dalio Let me ask you about something you you know a lot about because we are right now the deadlock the most important deadlock is a US-China deadlock where in order to get the world economy to a more stable place and you wrote this in your post about a beautiful rebalancing between the US and China you need the two sides to start talking The U.S. says they
were waiting for China to call.
The Chinese say the U.S. started this.
You put these tariffs on.
First, the U.S. has to reduce the tariffs.
Then we're willing to talk.
How is this going to resolve itself?
My sense is the Chinese are holding pretty firm.
The United States has too much debt.
It cannot add to the debt the way it is operating.
It is the world's biggest consumer, largely financed by government debt in the way that it's operating.
China is the biggest producer.
They produce...
A lot of goods, more than the United States, Japan and Germany combined, and manufactured goods, and they put it out, and they save too much, and they buy the dollars.
We cannot continue this debt-money problem.
We're at the end of a debt-money world order.
So how are we going to get the negotiation?
It is only through cooperation, calmness, and analytical work.
In which we recognize that these imbalances are unsustainable.
They're not just financially unsustainable.
In a world that is near war, that there could be, there cannot be mutual dependencies.
And so how that is done together is the most important thing.
Okay, let me, Danny, ask you about another thing.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Ray Dalio is the apostle of coupling, right?
Coupling.
We here are the apostle of decoupling.
And here's why.
Let's go back.
As I told this economic forum last week.
Since we, the United States, brought them, and this is after Tiananmen Square, since we brought them out of being an agrarian backward country and actually built their manufacturing capability, they have gamed the World Trade Organization.
They have gamed Most Favored Nation.
They have gamed, and Obama cut a deal with them on cyber in 2015.
They didn't live up to anything on that, okay?
Then the Hong Kong situation in early 19th, they totally walked away from that, and now they have Hong Kong totally under control as a colony, broke the 70-year deal.
For two years, two years, Bob Lighthizer, Peter Navarro...
Sat and negotiated a deal that would have taken what we call the Seven Deadly Sins with Lee Hood, the Vice Premier, for two years.
And in May of 2019, after they had their first Belt and Road conference, I think in Shanghai, that Putin attended, Xi and Wang Shishan decided if we do this deal, we're totally coupled both technologically and commercially to the foreign devils.
And they will never give us the technology we need.
They'll always hold it back.
So therefore, no deal.
Walked away.
And then Wuhan, the virus started, however you want to say it.
It either started at the military games in August and September or it started the following December and November.
The skinny deal, by the way, they signed in 2020.
Didn't live up to anything like that.
They have not lived up, whether it was Trump or Obama.
Or Bush or Clinton.
You pick them.
And you pick any one of the treaties they sign, any one of the agreements they sign.
They've never lived up to anything.
Why?
They're at economic war with us.
Remember, in the philosophy of Sun Tzu, if you have to go kinetic, you've already lost.
It's like loss of face.
They also know and they fear the foreign devil's ability with technology to fight.
So, unrestricted warfare.
Is to defeat us every other way.
Cyber, politically, psychologically, particularly economically.
And how do they do that?
They infiltrate our institutions.
Hell, half the city's on the payroll.
The universities are on the payroll.
Total on the payroll.
Here's what I would do with Harvard.
And I don't think President Trump's being hard enough.
First off, I would have not focused on the Ivies, but since you did...
You know, after Columbia, God bless you.
I would have gone to the public ivies.
I would have gone to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and I'd gone to the University of Madison in Wisconsin.
Here's the deal.
And don't put it all on the Jewish kids and anti-Semitism, right?
It's deeper than that.
Yes, that's a huge problem, but it's deeper than that.
It's neo-Marxist, anti-Americans on the faculty that have tenure.
And here's what I do.
I give them a list of 200 faculty members and 200 administrators.
We're cutting off all federal money, all federal money, until they're gone.
Once they're gone, we'll start bleeding it back in.
And oh, by the way, all 350,000 Chinese nationals, students that are here in the country, got to leave immediately.
The Chinese, the independent sources say $600 billion a year are stolen and or forced out of intellectual property through joint ventures every year.
Our trade deficit's $25 trillion.
They never want to talk about that.
You know why?
Oh, it's just an accounting, just a bookkeeping issue.
That's not true.
It's not true.
It's resources coming from this country to overseas to pay for the stuff we buy.
Okay?
Because we don't manufacture anything anymore.
China alone, the CCP alone, is $18 trillion.
The deficit on intellectual property is $25 trillion.
It's $600 billion a year.
And every businessman will tell you that.
To get access to the Chinese market, you have to do a joint venture.
To do a joint venture, you've got to dump all your intellectual property into it, which they have free access, much less what they take on industrial espionage.
Chinese nationals are in the weapons labs.
They're in the national labs.
They're at all the research in the universities.
Hey, how about very simple?
You have to go home, like today, and you replace them with, okay, wait for it, U.S. citizens.
How about that?
You don't think you break the ivies?
Right now, the ivies, particularly Harvard.
Harvard is a cesspool.
There's a report out today that Qatar and the Chinese Communist Party put $29 billion into the top universities in the United States.
$29 billion.
Think about that for a second.
Buy you a little access?
Maybe get you a couple or three students over here?
The whole system is rigged.
You pay for all of that.
All of those universities you're paying for.
They say, oh, no, no, it's privately held.
It's real simple.
Take all the federal spending, not just a couple billion dollars, Marvin.
Take it all.
Let's see what big shots they are.
They will fold quicker than the law firms.
Remember how big shots the law firms were?
Paul Weiss and Karp, the chairman, and they're organizing all this anti-Trump stuff, and they're going to do this and they're going to do that.
It took one letter.
Now, what did the letter say?
The letter said your security clearance is going to be pulled, but that was just a predicate to say no more government work.
And oh, by the way, they had a line in there.
Oh, by the way, any clients you have that retain you are going to have no access to government programs either.
In 24 hours, the other law firms were like jackals on their clients.
Not one partner at any major law firm in the country has resigned.
Nobody at Skadden Arps.
Nobody at Paul Weiss.
All the big talk and how liberal they are.
When it came down to hard money and getting the nose out of the government trough, they cratered in 24 hours.
Just like Harvard.
Just like the other Ivies.
Just like Michigan will do.
Just like Madison will do.
Let's go to Berkeley.
Let's go to UCLA.
Let's go to every public Ivy.
Let's go to North Carolina, Charlottesville.
Let's do them all.
You're all big talkers.
You're all big, you know, huge, woke, DEI, anti-MAGA.
Hey, that's fine.
Do that.
Be that.
In fact, go to the state of Michigan.
Go to the state of Wisconsin and ask them to put up to $2 or $3 billion the federal government's putting up every year.
See how far that takes you.
See how far it takes you.
This entire thing is on your shoulders, all of it.
Now you get zero respect.
You get zero respect.
You get shafted every day, shafted every day.
If in this tax bill, let me be blunt about this, the math cannot begin to work unless the upper bracket has a, not a tax increase, they just don't get extended the tax cuts they got.
This is going to be the most massive tax cut for working class and middle class people in the history of the country.
Extend the Trump tax cuts to $17,000, plus cut no tax on tips, no tax on overtimes, no tax on Social Security.
A massive tax cut.
And President Trump said the other day, have to get tariffs rolling, no tax on anybody on $200,000.
That's aspirational.
I'm talking about the here and now.
unidentified
To do that, what do we do?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
We don't extend the tax cuts to the upper bracket.
In fact, you could actually say, just create a new bracket at a million, because the upper bracket now thinks $600,000.
Just create a new bracket.
That new bracket at a million dollars goes to, let's round up, 40%.
That begins to bridge the gap that you have.
Then, with some defense cuts, you can go to Medicaid and smartly restructure that.
You can go to some of these social programs like SNAP and others and start to restructure and get cuts.
That's the way you get from the 6.5% deficit, percentage of GDP, down to Scott Besson's 3.5%.
There's not another choice.
This orgy they're going to lay on you has, defense spending is going to be $1.1 trillion.
They're increasing spending.
And the games they're going to play is, oh, Steve, you understand these conservative wins because over the 10-year cycle, there's one point, I don't want to hear about 10-year cycles.
I don't hear that's required you have to do.
That's all completely and totally phony.
I care about this fiscal year, and I care about next fiscal year.
And oh, by the way, I want to see where the Doge numbers are.
I'm begging for it to be $150 billion.
That's fantastic.
They're using that as a magic wand to avoid making tough decisions programmatically.
The cuts are going to have to come, and they're going to have to start in the Defense Department, or it's never going to happen.
Appropriate defense cuts.
And here's all you have to do.
Match President Trump's hemispheric defense, really a naval strategy, with the existing Pentagon budget.
They're going in two different directions.
One's about big land armies on the Eurasian landmass for fighting the 20th century's wars.
Or, unfortunately, the early 21st century.
That day is over.
President Trump's telling me right now he's going to get a negotiated deal in Persia.
Not going to be any bombing there.
No new Middle East wars.
Short commercial break.
We're going to go to Spain, Portugal, and France next.
unidentified
Here's your host, Stephen K. Band.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Okay, the president just put out a new true social.
When tariffs cut in, many people's income tax will be statually reduced, maybe even completely eliminated.
to focus be on making people making less than $200,000 a year.
Also, massive number of jobs are already being created with new plants, factories currently being built or planned.
It will be a bonanza for America.
The external revenue service is happening.
Remember, folks, it was John Gardner, an expert in small manufacturing and bringing small manufacturing back here to the United States, that named the External Revenue Service, what, about two months ago, three months ago?
Actually, it might have been even before inauguration.
It might have been during the Mar-a-Lago time.
He's from Laguna Beach, an expert.
External revenue is going to be very important, aspirationally, to get to no taxes under $200,000.
That's fantastic, and that's aspirational.
What's happening in the Secretary of Treasury's office today at 4 o 'clock, when John Thunan, the Speaker of the House, show up, that's reality, the here and now.
Here's the way the math works.
If you take that you have to get from 6.5% to 3.5%, and you have to.
If you don't do that, the BRICS nations and the global bond market are just going to reject you, and this shows you you have less and less room for maneuver every day because your debt's increasing so quickly.
Okay?
Remember, it's got to be finance.
Somebody else has got to buy this.
Or we end up buying it ourselves, which is another trick the Fed does.
Right now, you have to have the back of the people up there that want to cut and cut spending.
Spending has to be cut.
And we can't have any happy talk.
Over ten years, we're going to cut two trillion dollars.
Forget the ten years.
I don't want to hear about it.
Because it's always in the out years and it never happens.
I want to know what you're cutting this year and next year.
unidentified
Okay?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
I want to know how we're going to get from the six and a half down to, I don't know.
Let's pick a number.
Five, four and a half.
Pick something.
That's got to come from cutting federal spending.
Let's assume, for purposes of this discussion, that the numbers that DOGE is reporting is the numbers they report, $150 billion.
I doubt that's real, but let's say it is.
That's great.
That's a great start.
Then where do I go on discretionary spending?
I go to the Defense Department, I go to the social programs, and that means Medicaid.
In Medicaid, you've got to be very smart about how you do it.
Why?
Well, there's a lot of MAGA on Medicaid.
That's reality.
Why is that the case?
Because there's no manufacturing jobs in this country.
They all went to China.
And don't sit there and tell me all the happy talkers on Cuomo the other night, oh, 80% of the nation is service.
You ask any worker in a service gig at any media company right now, and you see how secure they feel.
You see how they're putting their heads in their pillow every night.
They're nervous.
It's all a gig economy.
They don't have any 401k.
They have no retirement plan.
They can be laid off next week.
The service economy is not stable.
It moves and shifts by the economy.
Manufacturing is stable.
Manufacturing is the backbone of this country.
As Chris Leonard told you on Friday, we gave it all away.
We gave it all away.
The sociopathic overlords on Wall Street, the global corporatists, and the apartheid state of Silicon Valley gave it away.
Okay?
Now it's President Trump is trying to get it back.
Two prongs to that.
Number one, Tariffs mean more external revenue for people who don't shift their manufacturing here, and the others will shift their manufacturing here, and you'll get higher, better-paying, more stable jobs that you actually build a family around.
It's going to be tough.
Didn't say it was going to be easy.
Ray Dalio laid it out right there.
It's all about the debt.
Anybody that'll start off by talking about the debt, and the big, beautiful bill right now, I haven't heard anybody except for chip-roaring these guys talking about you've got to make cuts.
You have to make cuts, and how is it going to be paid for?
The massive tax cut.
This is the most, the biggest tax cut for working class and middle class people in the history of this country.
The extension of the 2017 tax cuts for the middle class and working class plus no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security.
Add those three.
That's a start to getting no taxes for folks under $150,000.
But the upper brackets have to go up.
I don't care about the happy talk you hear from Speaker Johnson and all these other Grover Norquist.
It's not relevant.
Because my math is the math that makes sense.
They never talk about mathematics.
They never talk about debt.
They never talk about percentage of GDP.
Deficits are.
They never talk about the increase to national debt.
They never talk about the interest of spend.
They just kind of think that all goes away.
It is crushing you right now.
That is why inflation is embedded into the system.
The more you have to refinance a bigger number of debt at higher interest rates, that crowds out other money.
And that's this embedded inflation that's not going to go away.
We don't have a supply chain problem.
We have a too much spending, too big a debt problem.
If you're under 40, and by the way, you're the lucky beneficiaries of, on top of all that, the $1.7 trillion of student debt, which is these loans are exploding loans.
I hate to say it, tough break for a swell guy and gal.
You're completely screwed.
I would love to give you some happy talk, but if you're under 40 years old, given the economic situation today, the lack of capital formation, the lack of your ability to get into a real asset, right, like real estate, the ability to have any kind of savings or have any kind of capital formation,
to have any kind of job that has any kind of stability to it and not just some glorified gig economy.
Right?
You add on top of that, in the increased debt payments, think of when this thing hits $50 trillion.
When the debt's $2.5 trillion.
Excuse me, the interest expense, $2.5 trillion.
Is Dave Walsh up?
Dave Walsh, talk to me about one way we get out of this, the bedrock for it, is energy, sir.
Talk to me what happened in Portugal and Spain today.
Is that a foreshadowing of what's going to happen in the United States of America?
dave walsh ▲ ● ▼
It is.
You appear to have about 6 million people in key cities in Spain, Portugal, and now France, out of power for an elongated period.
We're not quite sure why.
There's some rumors about a spatial event with solar flares.
But you know what?
That doesn't affect just a tiny, weeny area like Spain and Portugal.
If that were true, that would broadcast over a very large area, or it hasn't.
It looks like this is about their generation system.
How does this affect us here?
Spain, over time, has accepted the notion for the whole Iberian Peninsula of all solar, all wind.
There are about 50% of their electricity is now produced that way, 65% of their installed capacity.
It doesn't work at night.
It doesn't work at night.
It doesn't work when it's cloudy.
So, therefore, you've got, like, capacity factors, maybe 25%, meaning 75% of the time that doesn't work.
They've now announced the shutdown of their last two coal plants and all seven of their nuclear power plants over the next 10 years.
They will have no nighttime power effectively.
Batteries don't solve that.
By the way, all of the battery power and solar panels come from, guess who, from China.
They're very committed to that.
This is what you wind up with.
Translate this to the United States of America.
In 2012, electricity reserve margins here averaged 25%.
We produced more than we needed to take care of the peak times of summer and winter when it's hottest and coldest.
Reserve margins have collapsed to 14.5% now, only in about 18 years, because of the mass adoption of these part-time technologies that cost three times the money.
And yeah, batteries are great, but they all come from China.
Solar panels all come from China.
We're taking in power generation resources that cost 11 times more than...
Basic gas-fired electric power.
In solar, about three times more costly.
Battery storage, about 11 times more costly.
And it all comes from China, and we're incentivizing that.
$42 billion a year of Biden-Ira incentives that continue to this day and are not being attacked in this version of the budget.
And then B, makers inside the IRS tax code, accelerated depreciation on this stuff, five-year lives.
Massively accelerated depreciation schedules, another $11 billion of subsidies that way.
For Chinese-sourced solar panels, 87% of those in the world are made in China.
87% of batteries in the world are made in China.
unidentified
Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Are you saying that we, the taxpayer, are subsidizing that?
That's not a subsidy coming from us, is it?
dave walsh ▲ ● ▼
Yes, yes, yes.
We're subsidizing companies like Sarah, yes.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Slow down, slow down.
Hit rewind.
I want to make sure this flows over people on a Monday morning.
Give me that again.
dave walsh ▲ ● ▼
The ITC investment tax credit, production tax credit, and accelerated depreciation subsidies to wind, solar, and battery storage extended in the Biden IRA that were existent all the last 12 years,
including this same administration last time.
Those incentives were all there then.
Continue and cost taxpayers $42 billion a year.
The tax subsidy portion in depreciation schedules, accelerating depreciation for tax on this stuff, allows another $10 billion a year.
So $52 billion a year in subsidizing part-time, massively monthly.
And hang on.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
But also, it's not part of the baseload, but...
The manufacturing takes place in China, so it's $52 billion we're not getting in tax revenues because we're giving a subsidy to support manufacturing jobs in China, correct?
dave walsh ▲ ● ▼
Correct, correct.
Now, the way forward to slow this down was the tariffs.
Unfortunately, two Saturdays ago, we let China off the hook on battery storage and thin-film PV and batteries were exempted from the tariffs for the time being.
A timeout.
A timeout was declared.
That was a huge mistake because that was the only way forward.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
It wasn't a blink, but maybe it was a wink.
We've got to get that whole thing sorted because that's the counter to the no rare earths, no magnets, no ball bearings, all that, correct?
That was kind of a wink.
That's going to get sorted.
dave walsh ▲ ● ▼
But the energy cost that that kind of equipment produces here, Spain, for example, 32 cents a kilowatt hour.
2.2 times more costly electricity than here, all because they've decided over time to build this second system, new system, on top of the existing one you must have run at night and when it's cloudy, called solar and battery storage, that basically doubles the cost of electricity.
At $0.35, you won't have any reshored manufacturing here.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
No, because they're all in the cult of decarbonization.
And you know how funny that cult is?
I'm going to show you how funny that cult is.
Do you hear any mention of that?
Do you hear Green New Deal?
Do you hear a green thing?
Oh no.
Once the oligarch tech bros, the progressive oligarch tech bros, realize they need power to the 10th degree in the United States, you don't hear anything else about climate change or global warming.
It's all about AI, and we've got to do the full muscle, right?
The Western approach, not the deep seek.
Am I correct on that, Dave Walsh?
You don't have much talk about decarbonization anymore?
dave walsh ▲ ● ▼
Yes, but Steve, the people in the populist movement need their fridges on at night.
They need their air conditioning on it.
They need their computers on.
Mine didn't work this morning.
At night and in the day.
And in the day.
It's the same for them, too.
Not just the tax oligarchs.
We all need baseload, continuous duty, abundantly low-cost electricity.
unidentified
Oh, no.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
I'm not saying we don't need it.
I'm saying they knew it.
When it came to something they had to have, all of a sudden, they left the cult.
Of decarbonization.
Dave, we've got to bounce.
This is amazing.
I'm going to try to get you back on.
This 100-day thing has got me jammed up, but we've got to get you back on this week to go through all of it.
Where's your social media in the interim?
dave walsh ▲ ● ▼
Thank you.
At DaveWalshEnergy on XTrueSocial and Getter.
Thank you, Steve.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Incredible.
Everything that guy says comes true.
You notice that over the last four or five years?
And guess what?
It's not a solar flare.
No way.
Impossible.
It would have taken a much bigger section of the world.
Anyway, we need you up on the ramparts.
As you can tell from this morning, they're going to start negotiating.
So Scott Besson's got two things going on.
Number one, he's leading the charge in the process, particularly with the East Asian companies, with Japan and Korea, Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, India.
He's got these deals stacked up over Treasury.
Like flights over LaGuardia on a Friday night, okay?
They're trying to bring them in this week.
I think you may have a couple of terms agreed.
It'll take months to paper them, but I think you'll have a couple of terms agreed.
You'll see the architecture of these deals, and we'll get down to, remember, I've been showing you this thing about Beijing warns of retaliation against nations doing U.S. deals.
That's because the center of gravity of these deals will be some sort of, I don't know.
Basic understanding you're in the American trading bloc, or words to that effect.
Beijing's going to fight this hard.
Also, at 4 p.m. today, John Thune and the Speaker of the House or in the Treasury Department's office are going to start negotiating on the big, beautiful bill.
Short commercial break.
Back in the warm in a moment.
unidentified
We rejoice when there's no more.
Let's take down the CCP.
Here's your host, Stephen K. Van.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Okay, folks, you can see that we're going to be at the Ramparts later in the week because lots are going to be going on.
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Ben Harnwell.
A lot happened over the weekend.
Besides the funeral, a lot of activity, getting ready for the conclave.
I think it's been designated as May 7th.
That'll be a pretty big weekend, May 7th, which is the 80th anniversary of the victory in Europe from the Western American and British side.
I think May 8th is the Russian side.
May 8th is supposed to be when the ceasefire is supposed to start in Ukraine.
We'll get you on that tomorrow, Ben.
But in the Vatican, what is this I'm hearing that a group of cardinals, not all just conservatives or traditionalists, are actually sitting there and making an argument that Francis was actually not legitimate given the retirement of Benedict and many things that happened on that transition.
And so therefore no cardinals that were ordained by Francis should be included in this conclave.
unidentified
Well, the rumor definitely exists.
ben harnwell ▲ ● ▼
That's for sure.
There's truth that the rumor exists.
And I don't want to leak any of the names that I've heard on this show until I've been able to confirm.
Either with their cooperation or without it, their presence in these meetings.
But essentially, the context is this.
It's a statement that was released.
I think Liz Yor might have it up on her getter and on her Twitter by a guy called Professor Josef Stieffer.
Now, he was actually a leading member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, which is a great institution founded by Pope John Paul II and then undermined and almost liquidated by This guy went off and created a rival academy,
a very principled, coherent person, and unusual for Vatican Consigliere.
He's absolutely insistent on the non-negotiability of the principles.
He's released this document, and it's exactly as you say.
The thesis is, and here's the argument, without going in on this show in the two minutes I've got, The thesis is this, and it's been rumbling along, not just, by the way, Steve, in the Francis pontificate, but it's basically been rumbling along since the Second Vatican Council itself.
The argument is this, that heretics forfeit the ecclesiastical office that includes popes.
So if Pope Francis has been guilty of heresy either before his election, during his election as pope, or afterwards.
He immediately forfeits his papal office.
That's the thesis.
In which case, his pontifical acts are therefore illegitimate because they weren't made by a pope.
Now, there are counter-arguments with this.
We won't go into them now.
The important thing is that Professor Zephardt, one of the most respected theologians living on the planet today, has called on the Cardinal, specifically citing Archbishop Vigano's research on this.
And he's called on the conclave of cardinals before it meets, as you said, on the 7th of May, to thrash out this issue of Francis' legitimacy.
Because 80% of this conclave was appointed by Francis.
If he is illegitimate, his appointments are illegitimate, and then those cardinals cannot be voting in the conclave.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Okay, we're going to get you on tomorrow.
You were tied up doing some research for us this morning, and I appreciate that.
We'll get you back in the morning.
I do want to say one thing.
This is the annual.
It turns out it's America Week.
I think it's that the Papal Foundation meets once a year to go and meet all the grandees in the Vatican.
It just turned out that Pope Francis passed away, died, and then had the funeral.
They're there this week.
I'm hearing from sources close to some of these cardinals.
That some of the biggest Americans don't say, hey, look, you can't give us another Francis if you do.
The money from the United States is going to, I think it's already dropped 50%, it's going to drop worse.
Remember, the Vatican is not bankrupt because they have so many assets, but they have a massive liquidity crisis.
They're kind of insolvent.
So they need cash money, and that cash money comes from the Americans.
Ben Harnwell, where do folks go?
We'll delve into all this tomorrow morning in depth.
Where do folks go to get you in the meantime?
ben harnwell ▲ ● ▼
Thanks, Steve.
Thanks so much.
And I have some particularly provocative posts waiting for your perusal, folks, at the top of my feed.
Thanks, Steve, so much.
God bless.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Catch you tomorrow.
Very provocative.
Remember the conclave's on the 7th, but all the deals will be cut, I'm sure, before then, and we'll be in the middle of all that, folks.
Mike Lindell, tomorrow we're doing five-hour...
Okay, so first off, Charlie Kirk follows us, Jack Posobiec after that, Steve Gruber, then Eric Bolling.
We'll do the hard handover from Bolling to ourselves back here at 5 o 'clock live.
Tomorrow, Eric Bolling will be right here in studio.
We're going to have a five-hour special, a lead-up of a couple hours.
ben harnwell ▲ ● ▼
Why?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Because Steve Gruber's going to be actually...
Gruber is going to be actually the master of ceremonies or at the rally in Michigan and our own Brian Glenn is going to be on Air Force One going out there with the president.
So the wall to wall coverage we're going to do a couple hours pregame and then we'll do the rally at
Mike Lindell, you'll be in Michigan tomorrow.
We'll be interviewing you live.
You'll also be with the president after that.
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Give me some sheets.
unidentified
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steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
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