All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
July 23, 2020 - The Charlie Kirk Show
54:27
10 Ideas to Save America — A Middle-Class Moonshot

Charlie lays out 10 ideas that will save America and revive the middle-class: A Middle-class Moonshot.

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Reviving The American Middle Class 00:03:26
Thank you for listening to this Podcast 1 production.
Now available on Apple Podcasts, Podcast 1, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Hey, everybody.
Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, one of my favorite episodes we've ever done, 10 specific ideas on how to revive the American middle class and save America.
This episode is brought to you advertiser-free.
That's right.
It's brought to you advertiser-free by those of you that are able to go to charliekirk.com slash support.
CharlieKirk.com slash support allows you to hear us uninterrupted without advertisers.
We do this on a couple episodes a week, so we are able to be advertiser-free.
It helps us be insulated and protected from leftist boycotts.
It allows us to be protected from those people that want to divest the capital source from our show.
So we have our source of inspiration from those of you that go to charliekirk.com slash support.
Please consider joining Turning Point USA and supporting our organization on over 2,000 high school and college campuses across the country at tpusa.com, tpusa.com.
If you want to win a signed copy of the MAGA Doctrine, type in Charlie Kirk Show to your podcast provider, hit subscribe, give us a five-star review, and screenshot it.
And email us at freedomatcharlikirk.com.
We have 10 ideas for you.
They're specific.
Some people say that they are helpful to the American middle class.
10 ideas to save America.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
It's time to revive the American middle class.
This episode, we are going to embark on 10 ideas, 10 specific ideas of how we can revive the American middle class.
There's a lot of conversation going on right now about the decline of America.
We have covered this extensively through BLM Inc., the protests in the streets, the deletion of our history, statues being toppled.
There's no lack of focus on the amount of destruction that is happening to the core fabric of America.
What is not being talked about enough, though, is what has set the table for this revolution.
So we talked a lot about at Turning PointUSA, tpusa.com, and thank you for those of you that are supporters of tpusa.com.
We greatly appreciate it at Turning Point USA.
We're the nation's largest conservative student organization on over 2,000 high school and college campuses across the country.
So thank you for doing that.
We talk about a lot at Turning Point USA that whatever happens on college campuses will soon happen in the halls of Congress and then in corporate boardrooms.
That what happens in a specific educational institution does not just stay in that educational institution, that it spreads almost like a virus all throughout the culture, that it can infect other portions that were otherwise healthy of a functioning American republic.
So we talked about the decline of the church and how pastors have been involving themselves in BLM Inc. and not standing for truth.
We've had Pastor Rob McCoy.
We've talked about Jerry Falwell Jr. at Liberty University and the Falkirk Center for Faith and Liberty.
Power Of Delayed Gratification 00:14:23
We've talked about how we have lost the means of communicating, the activist media that has been so deceptive in their reporting of what has been going on in our country.
All of these things are true.
But where I think conservatives at times do not look at the complete picture, in fact, I think it is a rather incomplete picture, is when we do not talk about how economics also play a role in socialist takeovers.
If we are trying to convince ourselves that only upper middle class Malibu and Manhattan socialites or socialists and the members of that ruling class, they alone and their radical and insidious ideas can turn a country socialist, that is nonsense.
Now, of course, many of them are cultural socialists.
Like, oh, yeah, that kind of sounds fun.
I'm sure we're racist, all these sorts of things.
But they are very much not socialists at all in practicality.
They live an upper middle class white liberal lifestyle.
In order for a socialist revolution to take root, in order for a socialist revolution to work, yes, you need the indoctrination.
You need Mao's little red book.
You need the cultural revolution.
You need Stalin's indoctrination.
You need a belief not in God, but in government.
You need all those things.
And we have covered those things extensively.
But what we have not talked about enough in the conservative movement, and credit to JD Vance and to Oren Cass and to Tucker Carlson for really contributing significantly to this conversation.
It's how economics play into the role.
Now, I'm not going to handicap either way.
I'm not going to say it's 40% that way or 60% that way or 80% that way or 20% that way.
I just am certain that economics, the lack of wealth in the American middle class, contributes to the lack of hope and them not being bought into the system.
If you're a middle class, which Aristotle famously called the golden mean, and Aristotle argued for the importance of the middle class, he wrote extensively in his writings about how if you do not have a middle class, you will not be able to have a functioning society.
Aristotle said this, and I'm going to quote, and again, if you're going to quote Aristotle, make sure you qualify it because he's a very important philosopher, but can be taken out of context in the most extreme ways, because some people say he supported slavery, which is not technically true, but that's a different podcast for a different time.
So basically, when Aristotle was writing about a political community that has extremes of wealth and poverty, he said, quote, a city not of free persons, but of slaves and masters, the ones consumed by envy, the others by contempt.
Nothing is further removed from affection and from a political partnership.
So basically, he was talking about what happens when you have nothing but slaves and masters.
What happens when two sides of the political equation grow so extreme away from each other?
And I'm afraid that economically that is happening more times than not in our country.
And some conservatives reject this.
Some conservatives say that is not true.
People are just generally getting richer no matter what.
I do not hold that view.
Now, I actually hold the view that they are where they are because of government, because the lack of economic freedom, not because of economic freedom, that because of a certain set of ideas that at times benefited transnational corporations and also a cultural decline contributed to the economic decline, I think all those things are true.
But just to say endlessly, the middle class is doing great, the middle class is doing great, I do not think is an honest diagnosis or an honest assessment of what is happening in our country.
So if we are serious about defeating socialism, if we are serious about stopping Alexandria Casio-Cortez and Rashida Talib and Elon Omar, we must ask ourselves, why is it that people are gravitating towards their movement?
If you ask the average Bernie Sanders supporter, I would say that 20 to 25% of them are committed Bolsheviks.
They are ideologues.
They would have been Joseph Stalin's best friend.
They would have continued to push forward in Stalinistic Marxist ideology regardless of the facts in front of them.
But I would say that 75% of Bernie Sanders supporters, especially younger Bernie Sanders supporters, they are supporters because they've lost faith in the system.
They are supporters because they do not believe that if they work hard and play by the rules, they do not believe that their life will get materially better.
Now, some people would say that this is an overemphasis on materialism.
I don't believe that.
I believe that human beings in a capitalist society, which we should be, by the way, embracing private property and embracing the ideas of free enterprise, I believe that if you cannot see your wealth go up a little bit year over year and you cannot enjoy your family and what comes with that, which of course costs money and requires some form of currency, therefore you be paid for your labor, slowly but surely you're going to lose faith in that system.
So it is more important than ever that we have an agenda to revive the middle class.
We must have a contract with the middle class.
So what makes the American middle class so different than the rest of the world is for decades, the American middle class would always be able to have what I call intergenerational stratification.
It's a very complicated and probably overly complicated way to say that if you work hard and play by the rules, you and your kids will have a better life.
Not a dramatically better life.
You're not necessarily going to go from the lowest income bracket to the highest income bracket.
You're not going to go from someone who's going to work at a general motors facility to become Jeff Bezos overnight.
I'm not suggesting that.
But maybe someone who's working at a general motors facility, your kids might be able to have not just the home that they enjoyed in the suburbs of Detroit, but also maybe a home up in Patoski, Michigan.
Maybe you'll have two homes.
Maybe you'll be able to have not just one vacation every other year, but maybe a vacation every year.
And maybe your kids after that will be able to inherit those two homes and maybe they'll be able to split the homes between the kids and maybe they'll be able to take not just one vacation, but a vacation in the winter and the summer.
Now, this oversimplification of the American experience is actually how I think we need to judge success at times.
I also think when you look at suicide rates going up, drug use going up, the over-commercialization of marijuana, the overindulgence in, let's just say, very dangerous drugs, and how you see the younger generation becoming more and more miserable.
I think part of that, of course, is a cultural decline.
But if that young person does not believe that there's any meaning at all to be found in the economic marketplace, what kind of country are we creating?
And so I kind of find the golden mean, if you will, between Tucker Carlson and some people like Ben Shapiro.
And I encourage you to check out our episode with Ben Shapiro.
And I agree with almost everything that he says.
I pushed back at one point.
And I agree with almost everything Tucker Carlson says.
I think there's actually something in the middle of it, where you weigh the cultural and the economic together and don't say it's all because of the economic.
And I'm not saying Tucker says that at all.
Tucker weighs them both together, but definitely he spends more time on the economic than the cultural because I believe, I don't want to speak for the great Tucker Carlson.
I think he just believes that that argument is not being articulated enough.
And I think he's doing a good service by at least platforming it.
And I know I was informed by him and his speeches and his books and his Fox News show on this topic.
But I think that the emphasis should be on both of them equally, economics and culture.
So two episodes ago, we dove deep into the cultural decline of America.
Now let's dive into the economic trouble that America has.
And let's put forward some ideas of how we are going to revive the middle class.
We talked in the previous episode about how much debt Americans have undertaken, how much economic uncertainty the middle class has to live through.
And some people are emailing me, and I hear this loudly and clearly at freedom at charliekirk.com.
Well, Charlie, no one has to go into debt in America.
That was a voluntary choice that they made.
I completely agree.
I am the number one advocate of personal responsibility.
In fact, I articulate a worldview around the idea of personal responsibility and making good choices and knowing your life can get better and not indulging in things that make your life less prosperous.
Maybe going a couple months without drinking.
Don't do drugs.
Don't play with other people for your problems.
Stop looking at stupid stuff on your phone.
I'm a huge proponent of that.
In fact, I believe that does not give you meaning.
I think that it gets you further and further away from meaning.
However, just to say that people are going into debt only because of their decisions, because they made nothing but foolish decisions, is partially true, but I also think it ignores the economic implications of in order for you to get things that generations before you got, you all of a sudden get into this culture of debt.
And so that's idea number one for the revival of the American middle class.
Idea number one, encourage saving early and often and offer tax benefits for the middle class.
So I think that we should offer tax savings and I think we should glorify and glamorize saving, not spending.
And yes, that means interest rates.
I think interest rates are too low.
I think the way interest rates are right now is that they have an unrealistic amount of money being pumped into our system.
I think that we should, I don't know the perfect number, but I know the number that we have right now where we're entertaining and thinking about going to negative interest rates, it creates a culture of debt and a culture of deficit spending, especially on the consumer side, and not a culture of saving.
I think a culture of saving is one that can be very durable.
I think the more a culture saves and the more a family saves, the better they will be tomorrow.
In fact, Jordan Peterson talks about this a lot, that as soon as human beings realized this concept of delayed gratification, I think we have to get back to those two words in our country.
Delayed gratification, what does that mean?
I'm going to forego something today so I might prosper tomorrow.
That is the concept of saving.
We are not a country of savers right now.
Now, we should be, and I believe that we should be communicating to young people and to the middle class workers.
Don't spend so much.
So I'm not going to necessarily condemn every single middle class family that goes into debt.
I think they go into it for good reasons.
They want a better life and they want a happy life for them and their family.
And I think that we should be less likely to go into debt, but we need tax benefits and tax credits for people to save.
We should not have tax benefits that over will reward spending.
And we do that through low interest rates.
We just do.
And you can see the amount of credit card debt that is held by the average American, the average American family.
That is not a durable society.
In fact, it makes us less likely to succeed.
So those two words, delayed gratification, that I mentioned, are actually according to the Smithsonian attributes of whiteness.
Now, the Smithsonian should be completely and totally defunded.
They should be put in front of a congressional panel and subpoenaed for their racist ideology, where they said that saving, delayed gratification, individual initiative, believing in God, and families being together are attributes of whiteness.
Now, mind you, them saying that, and that was on the African American History Museum website, which was a project of the Smithsonian, them saying that would be no different than a KKK member in the 1880s saying exactly that.
I could take writings from eugenicists in 1915 that believed in white supremacy.
I could take writings from members of the National Socialist Workers' Party in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, and it would look very little to no different than the writings of the African American History Museum.
So in a very bizarre way, maybe the American left is coming full circle, where they're actually agreeing with the most radical elements of the eugenicist culture of the early 1900s and 1930s.
And to be most specific, it's the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
And you can go to downtown Washington, D.C.
It's right on Constitution Avenue, and you can see for yourself the racists that are running the Black History Museum.
Interestingly enough, they don't have Clarence Thomas in the museum that honors black Americans.
Awfully puzzling, perplexing, and in my opinion, inexcusable.
And so they say that delayed gratification, those two words, they say that it is an attribute of whiteness.
Well, let's just dismiss that altogether.
But delayed gratification built Western society.
Think about it.
If you didn't have delayed gratification, would you get on a boat to go all the way across the Atlantic and risk your life as a pilgrim to go start something new?
That's basically the definition of delayed gratification.
If you didn't believe in delayed gratification in 1620, you would have gone into the local pub or the equivalent of it of that time, and you would have got endlessly drunk and not definitely not come on the Mayflower and come all the way to the United States of America, or was then the British colonies of America.
Delayed gratification built our country, delayed gratification built Western civilization.
And to use an example in the black community, how about Michael Jordan?
I mean, this is not just an attribute of a single skin color.
I hate the hyperracialization of this, but let's use many examples.
I mean, delayed gratification.
Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player ever to play in the history of the sport.
Bar none, not even close.
Michael Jordan, 6-0 in NBA finals, almost every single single scoring record in the playoffs that you can achieve.
Many single season scoring records until LeBron James came along.
And it's not even the same sport because they don't play defense like the way they did in the 1990s.
They just don't.
Jordan won in 91, 92, 93, took a couple years off.
And then Michael Jordan won in 96, 97, 98.
And I encourage you to check out The Last Dance.
It's now on Netflix as well.
It is so incredible.
I'm re-watching it actually for the third time.
It is really that good.
And being a Chicagoan, it's the last thing I can be proud of from that corrupt, awful place of disaster of that awful city.
It's something I can actually be proud of.
So Michael Jordan, you're trying to tell me Michael Jordan didn't believe in delayed gratification.
He was the hardest working basketball player of his era.
He showed up at 6 a.m. at the gym, worked out more than any other player, was obsessive about victory.
And it wasn't even that Michael Jordan was faster than other basketball players.
It wasn't that he even had more natural boring skill.
He was not seven feet tall.
He actually was below average height for some of the best basketball players of that time.
Saving Half Your Income 00:15:07
It's that he worked harder and he also had a killer instinct.
Oh my goodness.
And when the lights were on and you needed Michael Jordan to perform, he would.
It's because he believed in delayed gratification, which goes to my number one point of how to renew the American middle class and revive it.
We need a set of public policy positions and laws that encourage and incentivize saving, not spending endlessly into debt, but a family that has $200,000 in total wealth in one year, and five years later, they'll have $270,000 in total wealth.
How do we create a country that does that?
You tell me the reason why we have to create money out of thin air to go continue to pay these ridiculous stimulus checks, and every Republican should be against these stimulus cash payments that are actually rigged against the middle class.
Our Republican Party is espousing and is advancing a set of ideas that are against the middle class.
This last stimulus did not work.
It just didn't.
Don't let anyone tell you that it worked.
Part of PPP sort of worked, the payroll protection program, but it was ripe with fraud and was given to people that didn't need it.
We at Turning Point USA rejected the money completely and categorically.
But this next stimulus is just going to go give out more money to allegedly help the middle class.
Well, first of all, the inflation that will ensue will destroy the American middle class.
Secondly, when you just create money out of thin air to go give it to people, she asked the question, why don't they have it in the first place?
It's because they didn't save.
The reason that politicians feel compelled to have to send this money so they don't have a revolt on their hands, it's the modern day equivalent of the Roman redistribution program to try to prevent a revolution on your hands.
The reason they're doing this is because they know people have very little money in the bank or any sort of wealth at all whatsoever.
So, idea number one: encourage saving early and often.
For all younger listeners out there, you should be saving half of what you earn if you can.
Let me say that again: you should save half of what you earn if you can.
Now, if you can't, I completely understand.
If you have medical obligations, if you have student loan repayment, that's fine.
But force yourself to try to put half of what you earn into a saving account.
And then, if you have to, take it out.
But really try as hard as you can for when you're young, because when you get older and you have kids and you have obligations and you have a mortgage, it's going to get nearly impossible to save.
It really is.
But save young, save early.
I have a rule for myself where I try to save 70% of everything that I earn.
70%, 7-0.
So, I have to figure out what I have to pay in taxes, live life, and everything else after 70%.
So, as soon as I get a paycheck or as soon as I make some money, 70% of it gets saved.
I am hawkish about the amount of money that I save.
And it's worked great.
It allows me to invest and allows me to be able to, as a percentage basis, actually see that year over year, I'm moving up.
And I'm really big on measurement.
It's just the way I kind of run our podcast.
It's how I run Turning Point USA.
I think that if you're not measuring everything, you're not being honest with yourself.
And I think that if you're not being honest with yourself, then why even live?
I think that honesty is a necessary precedent to a successful life, especially a responsible life.
But if you're not able to see that you're even improving your life a little bit one year over year, materially or financially, then you're going to lose faith in the system.
And so, and I'm not going to say maybe you have an emergency, maybe you splurge a little bit, maybe you go on a nice vacation.
I get all those sorts of things, and you then factor them in.
But for young people in particular, I implore you, save as early as you can.
And I was told this advice by many business people: like, wow, I wish I would have saved more in my 20s because I could have really utilized that in the 30s and 40s.
And I was presented with good business deals.
I knew we're going to work, and I wish I had the capital to reallocate it.
So, I highly encourage you personally to do that because we need to get away from this culture of debt.
Idea number two: we need to eliminate the FICA tax for anyone earning $95,000 or less a year.
So, the FICA tax is paid half by the employee and half by the employer.
It's a payroll tax.
So, if you are working, the federal government is stealing, literally, 6.2% of your earnings.
Now, they say this goes to fund Social Security and Medicare.
For many younger workers, though, you're never going to see that money.
And that money does not go to a social security lockbox where they lock the key and then it's perfectly protected for you.
No, it's actually not that case at all.
Instead, it goes into a general fund.
It gets spent, and there's not even enough money to fund our current obligations.
So, why the Republican Party has not advocated as part of their policy position a permanent and absolute abolition of the FICA tax for workers, not for employers.
I wish it would be for employers too, but for workers is beyond me.
It's a tax that works.
So, if you're listening to this podcast and you are earning a paycheck, imagine earning 6.2% more money every single year.
So, instead of saying we want to give money to everybody, why don't we just say we want to cut your taxes by 6% a year?
That's real money for a family that is earning $95,000 a year.
Let's say the family is earning $60,000 a year.
How much money is that if you're earning 6% of that?
Well, $60,000 of your top-level earnings, 10% would be $6,000.
So, that's about $4,000 a year for someone earning $60,000 a year.
Now, it's actually even higher than 6%, 6.2%.
And our team at the Charlie Kirk show sent me a message while I was doing this.
They said, no, no, no.
It's actually even higher.
It's 7.6%, 7.65%.
I'm sorry, if you count Social Security and Medicare.
So let's just do the math in real time.
$60,000 times 0.075, what does that equal?
$4,500.
So if the Republican Party was serious about representing the American middle class, if we were serious about giving a stimulus, about giving representation to the American middle class, why are we cutting corporate taxes of corporations that hate our country?
And we are not cutting payroll taxes for workers that are losing their country, that love their country, that are patriotic.
I have been a long-term advocate of the total abolition of FICA for anyone earning less than a certain amount.
And I picked $95,000.
Of course, it's arbitrary, but it's less than six figures, and it's right near the median income in our country.
And so why not?
Okay.
At some point, when you make tax policy, everything is arbitrary, 10%, 11%, 10.4%.
I mean, there's nothing completely and totally perfect unless you go biblical and you just go 10%, of which I support.
Not going to happen anytime soon.
But I'm a huge proponent of abolishing the FICA tax.
If you're listening to this and you say, boy, I'm barely getting by and you're earning $60,000 a year.
And I told you right now, like that, as I snap my fingers, $4,500 tax-free could come to you and your family, you would take that deal in an instant.
Well, that money is there.
Now, mind you, people say, well, it helps fund Social Security and Medicare.
That's fine.
There's other ways to pay for Social Security and Medicare.
And I have a much longer conversation on how to fund that.
But there are other taxes that we are not totally collecting on.
There are other import tariffs that I would actually recommend instituting that could help fund for Social Security and Medicare other than taxing middle-class workers.
Here's the whole point.
There's other ways to pay for things, especially on the higher income distribution ladder.
No, I am not advocating for higher taxes for anyone.
But if you gave me a choice, which of course politics is the lesser of two evils a lot of the time, you say, Charlie, would you abolish the FICA tax for anyone earning less than $95,000?
And would you raise taxes 1% for anyone earning more than $950,000 a year?
I would say, of course I would.
And if you can make the numbers work, which I'm confident you can, and many economists can do that, the fact that we do not have a grassroots movement to eliminate the FICA tax just goes to show how much the anti-American corporations have influenced the zeitgeist, which means the spirit of our times and the conversation in our country.
And Social Security is not even properly funded.
I think the entire Social Security model needs to be abolished and obliterated, not for current recipients, but for future recipients.
And so FICA payroll taxes are among the most regressive of all U.S. federal taxes.
But amazingly, it is the one part of tax, especially on the worker side, not on the employer side.
Just so you know, at Turning Point USA, last year, we paid well over a million dollars in payroll taxes, okay?
So it's plenty amount.
It's a ton of money you have to pay, okay, for payroll taxes.
Over a million dollars that we wrote to the U.S. Treasury just to employ people.
Okay, it's an extraordinary amount of money.
But even just imagine on the employee side, okay, on the employee side, that's a huge amount of money.
So you're talking about $4,500 a year if you're earning $60,000 a year for a decade.
That's $45,000 a year.
No wonder the middle class is not able to save.
You're taking their money through taxes.
And so that's where I really come down on this.
And I just push back so hard as people say, oh, no, the middle class is doing fine.
No, they're not doing fine.
And they're not doing fine because we don't embrace conservative values.
You could do both.
You can agree with the assessment and then disagree with the actual prescription on policy-wise.
And just some more information on Social Security.
Between 1945 and 1965, the decline in worker-to-beneficiary ratios went from 41 to 44 workers per beneficiary.
Now it's 2.9 workers to one retiree.
And most of that burden is on middle-class workers.
Most of that is on people that are barely getting by, and we are taking their wages every single year.
So email me your thoughts on that one, freedom at charliekirk.com.
I think the Republican Party has rightfully become the party of middle-class workers.
It's about time we start to put forward economic policies that can benefit them.
The fact that no Republicans advocate for a FICA abolition just goes to show how out of touch the ruling class is with the rest of our country.
Idea number three, encourage family formation and make it easier to start and grow a family.
So currently birth rates of native-born Americans are right around 1.7 below the replacement level, by the way.
In many European countries, it's much lower than that.
And this is, by the way, economics play a huge role in this.
The reason why people don't have big families, it's because it's too expensive to have big families and we're taking their money through FICA.
We need to revive the marriage culture in our country, not through government, but by empowering and rewarding those social institutions that benefit the family and parents remaining married.
So for mega churches out there that are supporting BLM Inc. and sending millions of dollars to BLM so that they can destroy our country and for churches out there that are raising money for the Marxists so that they can increase the amount of abortions.
Why are churches not saying any family that has a child, we're going to help pay for the bills every single month?
You know, these churches continue to build their megaplexes and their multi-billion dollar institutional cash reserves.
Why don't they say we're going to help pay for children?
What a great idea, right?
Instead of building these ridiculous monstrosities, mostly in Southern California, by the way, of which will turn to dust and turn to nothing and ruin, why not say every family that has a child in our church will receive $30 a month, $50 a month.
And it has to be used for groceries.
Why won't churches help step up and do a middle-class family stimulus?
It's because Christian Inc., Christian Incorporated, is much more worried about becoming Christian famous than fighting for what is right and for what is true and what is good in the world.
And some churches do do this, but very, very few.
And some of these good churches are Pastor Rob McCoy and Pastor Jack Hibbs do a version of this, and God bless them for that.
And I will add to this, I would support some public policy around family formation.
As long as the mother and father stay together, I think we need more tax credits about having more children in our country.
And this is one of the reasons why we bring in so many immigrants every single year is because it's so expensive to have children in the inner cities and suburban America.
So we bring in millions of people that do not share our values, do not speak our language, to try to keep our birth rate stable.
Well, how about we restrict immigration, which is number five coming up in just a second, but we restrict immigration and we say we want to have bigger, more flourishing, productive American families.
And that includes black families and that includes American Hispanic families.
If you're an American, you should have bigger families.
We want functioning families.
And there's been other countries that have entertained these ideas and it's actually working rather well.
Israel, Poland, they've done this really successfully.
I think the family is the longest lasting, most important institutional bedrock of a functioning society that we have turned our back on.
We have turned our back on the American family.
I always laugh when I talk to some new parents.
I say, how many kids do you want?
They say, I want one of each.
I'm like, well, it's not a, you're not picking out a car, okay?
I want one of each.
And I mean no offense if that's you, if you're listening to this podcast.
And again, two kids is a lot.
I mean, some people only have one kid, but it should be, I'm going to have as many kids as I financially can have because God tells me to do that.
And kids are the greatest way that you can continue to contribute meaningfully to our country.
I really believe that.
And I think one of the reasons that we had a really conservative America and a center-right America was because of the Catholics.
I mean, you always knew the Catholic family in Chicago.
I mean, I went to school at the last end of the Catholic family population spree in Chicago.
You always knew the Catholic family because they had nine kids or 12 kids.
And if you know Catholic dogma or doctrine, not dogma, they get mad if I say it's not dogma, it's doctrine, dogma, and doctrine.
I love our Catholic friends.
But if you know the Catholic teaching on birth control, they're not exactly fans of birth control.
And because of that, the Catholics contributed greatly to the American birth rate for years.
And as soon as, for whatever reason, they started to use birth control, and maybe for good reasons, maybe for not.
And I'll let the Catholics sort that out amongst themselves.
All of a sudden, two, three kids per family.
And with that, we became a more liberal society.
And for Hispanics, even though they had the second highest fertility rate in the United States in 2018, the fertility rate of Hispanic women dropped by 31% from 2006, 2017.
It's now 2.06%.
So we should have a national moonshot.
We say we want to make middle-class families three to four kids per household.
And the reason why a lot of people don't have kids is because it's too expensive.
That goes nicely into number four.
We should have a national federal bill.
And again, this doesn't interest corporate America, so don't expect them to mention this anytime soon.
But these are all conservative, pro-growth ideas.
College Is Not Required 00:08:15
A federal bill that says no middle-class family can pay more than 10% of their total income to sales tax, state tax, local tax, or property tax.
That there is a cap on how much you as a middle-class family can actually pay in taxes outside of your federal government tax.
Now, this is really important.
Our current tax policy ought not merely level the playing field for married couples.
We should actually tilt it in their favor.
We should make it easier financially for married couples to be able to advance in American society, not harder.
Right now, it's easier to be single than it is to be married.
The family is the core building block of a society, something that flourishes and something that functions meaningfully, something that is durable, something that can survive the Chinese coronavirus.
None of the stimulus that the federal government has issued should have happened in the first place.
None of it.
I have been completely against the stimulus.
I have.
I was against it early, and I'm against it now again.
If we had strong families that saved, and if we had a tax burden that did not destroy workers and destroy entrepreneurs and small business people, we wouldn't have to send $1,000 to every single person.
We wouldn't have to create $3 trillion out of thin air.
We have done this because we have created bad public policy for decades.
The tax burden for middle-class families, if you count property tax, state tax, local taxes, it should be capped at no more than 10% of total income.
And it's far more than that for most American families.
I talked to families in suburban America in Chicago, Illinois, and they're paying anywhere between 14 to 16% of their total income to state, federal, local, property, and sales tax.
For example, in Chicago, Illinois, there's an 11% sales tax.
In Chicago, Illinois, property taxes on a home valued $800,000 are $32,000 a year.
Illinois has a 5% income tax, not to mention all the other taxes just to survive in Illinois, such as business transaction tax, such as tolls.
You add all of it together.
It's anywhere between 14 and 16% before you even touch federal taxes.
So before Tax in Illinois, 14% plus, let's say you're earning $200,000 a year.
So you're paying about 70% of, you're paying about $70,000 of that to the federal government plus FICA.
So you're talking easily, $100,000 in taxes if you're living in suburban Chicago to all sorts of levels of government before you're even able to get started.
That's $100,000 a year to support a family of three or four.
I mean, it's livable, but it's tight.
And things cost more in Chicago because there are more taxes.
So you go out to eat to Chili's with four kids and it's $230.
Because then, of course, you put 10% on that with sales tax.
So we need to lessen the tax burden generally and restrict the state governments from taxing Americans as much as they are.
Idea number five, restrict immigration to increase wages.
A record 45.8 million foreign-born people reside in our country.
Immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive in the United States at an estimated rate of 1.5 million annually, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.
More than one in five people living in America speaks a language other than English at home, while more than 10 speak Spanish, according to the largest, according to the latest United States Census Bureau American Community Survey.
For wages to rise, immigration must fall.
You must restrict immigration.
Corporate America knows this.
This is why corporate America wants an endless stream of cheap labor in our country.
Even Cesar Chavez said this, who is revered by the left.
Now, the big tech companies, they want an endless supply of H-1B workers to try to limit the wages of recent college graduates that studied science, technology, engineering, and math.
Also, corporate America, specifically big agriculture, they want an endless stream of cheap labor to keep wages down in the agricultural sector.
As Governor Christy No mentioned in our podcast a couple weeks ago in early July, when there was the immigration moratorium put forward by President Trump, which was terrific and clairvoyant and ahead of its time, considering we have 25 million people out of work, when that was signed by President Trump, every single job that was opened in South Dakota was filled by American South Dakotans that went to work for the first time in a long time.
The labor is there.
We just have to activate it.
Now, according to Dan Stein, immigration expert, United States GDP in 1974 was $1.5 trillion, the equivalent of $5 trillion in today's dollars.
In real terms, our current $18 trillion GDP is three times as large as it was in 1974.
Yet, millions of Americans are no better off in terms of wages than they were nearly 50 years ago.
Why?
Simple supply and demand.
Because in that same period of time, we have increased the immigrant population in the United States by at least 50 million.
You need to put the logical connection for why this is.
Now, mind you, to connect all this together, there is, of course, a contributing factor when you bring in 50 million people over the last 50 years to wages not going up.
It's simple supply and demand.
Idea number six, we need to convince a generation that college is not needed to be able to live a meaningful life.
I've talked about this a lot.
I actually am thinking about writing my next book about this.
I'd love your comments on that.
Freedom at CharlieKirk.com.
Email me directly, freedom at charliekirk.com if that's a book that would interest you.
According to the Wall Street Journal, in recent years, college degrees have become riskier, splitting graduates more widely into haves and have-nots.
There are three related shifts causing economists to reexamine the returns of college.
First, the wages of college graduates have remained mostly flat this century after inflation.
Secondly, the cost of attending college has gone up dramatically.
It's soared.
Third, even with higher salaries, significant numbers of college graduates in recent years are failing to build the kind of wealth that previous generations did.
College and graduate school tuition has risen at triple the rate of inflation since 2000.
Meanwhile, the New York Fed data shows roughly 4 in 10 recent college graduates between the ages of 22 and 27 are in jobs that typically do not require a degree.
So they get a degree and yet they go, then 40% of them go in jobs that don't require a degree.
Yet the highest demand in our society are people that are in HVAC, plumbers, and people in the trades.
This is the highest demand.
By the way, you can also start your own business in these fields and with no debt, be able to take a risk.
And then if you don't succeed, there's very little downside.
One of the reasons why the middle class is shrinking and one of the reasons why the middle class is in trouble is this lie that you have to go into debt or save the money that you're able to save so your kid can go to college for what?
To go borrow money they don't have to study things that don't matter, to find jobs that don't exist.
I am more and more convinced that higher education is one of the greatest scams in America and that I am more so than ever encouraging people not to go to college.
And people say, what do I do?
Go find a job and go read great books and read the Bible and work harder than the person next to you, find something that you think you might enjoy and you have a skill towards and then see where God takes you.
You're young.
Use your ambition and your energy and your enthusiasm to your advantage.
None of your enthusiasm, none of your ambition is captured, in fact, is used to your advantage in college.
In fact, I think that college is great at demotivating people.
It creates resentful, angry, arrogant activists.
In a lot of different ways, it creates a generation of people that are less likely to work and more likely to go pillage and destroy.
So, of course, some degrees, such as engineering and technology and math, you're going to do quite well.
But understand also the national graduation rate is 67%, which means 33% of people that go to college will not graduate.
Bring Manufacturing Back Home 00:05:46
43%.
The national graduation rate has gone down, which means we are sending way too many kids to college.
You're sending way too many kids to higher education.
They're going to tell you to go to college.
Maybe you do.
Maybe you don't.
But at least prove to yourself that you need to go.
So I think the presupposition with college needs to start with, I'm going to start from a default position that I'm not going, and then I need to prove to myself that I should go.
So you start from a position of not going, and then go through the logical justifications of why I should go.
I want to study this.
I have a passion for this.
And only this place allows me to do that.
I'm not going to go that far into debt.
I like this college, all those things.
Therefore, I'm going.
Bad logical matrix is I'm going no matter what, then I need to prove to myself not to go.
That has destroyed the American middle class.
Idea number seven, healthcare price transparency.
We need to pass the Price Transparency Act, which is being pioneered by a friend of mine, Cynthia Fisher.
The Transparency Act is a bill that would require hospitals and insurers to publish their real cash prices and secretly negotiated rates.
You cannot have a market.
You cannot have a price system.
You cannot have a market if people do not know the price of anything they are purchasing.
The reason why healthcare has gone up so dramatically is that people are not able to make informed choices in the marketplace.
So this bill will lower health care prices by providing healthcare and consumers with the information we need to shop for the best value before care is delivered.
This will help eliminate cost drivers in the healthcare space like price gouging, resource wasting, or misallocation, over-doctoring and over-prescribing, and surprise billing.
Economists believe price transparency could reduce healthcare costs by as much as 30% to 50%.
Newt Gingrich has estimated that this savings would amount to as much as $11,000 a year for the average American family.
181 million Americans get health care through their employer.
This will save employers massive amounts of money, meaning more hiring, more wages, and more investment.
Several surveys show that 90% of Americans support healthcare price transparency.
It is a winning issue.
Healthcare is a dominant financial concern for most middle-class Americans.
And Republicans have been awful at putting forward a replacement because their corporate donors do not allow them to be able to talk clearly about health care.
Well, guess what?
Healthcare price transparency is being lobbied.
against by the hospital lobby and the pharmaceutical lobby.
I'm so done with Republicans not doing what is right for our country and instead hiding behind their corporate donors.
We know the Democrats.
I don't expect anything out of the Democrats.
I expect total Bolshevik Leninism, Marxism, and destruction of America.
Got it.
We do a whole podcast on that about twice a week, and we're going to continue to do it so you understand the left.
What bothers me is how Republicans are not behind these very common sense ideas because they're so worried about losing reelection and they're being held hostage by their crony corporate donors.
If you're taking money from the hospital lobby and you do not support the Price Transparency Act, you're a highly conflicted individual who honestly should be run out of office because you serve the interests of a small few cartel of corporate corporations and not what is best for our country.
The fact that when I go to a hospital, I cannot tell how much a Bandaid costs versus a simple procedure costs and it's all secret and we'll tell you later and we'll bill your insurance company or third party paying.
It is one of the most backwards, quasi-rigged systems in all of America.
Idea number eight, we need to have a self-sufficiency American agenda.
We need to make things here in America.
Again, if you do not measure something, you're not going to be able to get to that something.
We need to have a made-in-America agenda to bring back 3 million jobs in the next two years to make critical essentials here in America.
There's a long list.
We need to make vitamin C, penicillin, pharmaceuticals, steel, critical manufacturing, personal protection equipment.
Anything that we are basically making in China outside of textiles should be brought to our country.
And it should be done quickly through tax benefits, through re-domiciling agreements.
It should be done with corporate heads and it should be done without getting McKinsey involved.
And McKinsey and company is probably the best at making sure our country gets sold out to China.
They are the experts at making sure the CCP is going to own the 21st century.
Now, corporate America is not going to like this because corporate America generally in our country does not care about what is best for America.
They care what is best for the bottom line in appeasing their Chinese puppet masters.
And so this is going to have to be done outside of corporate America.
And maybe a small business in Hubbard, Ohio is going to have to step up to actually make something again.
And that's going to be great.
Maybe there will be a small business and a manufacturing plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia, a beautiful part of the country, by the way, one of my favorite parts of the country right there on the Ohio River.
Maybe there is a manufacturing plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia that is going to get a call saying, hey, we need you to make vitamin C. Can you go hire 200 people?
Maybe there's going to be a phone call that is made for somebody in Lebanon, Virginia.
And they're going to say, hey, do you have the capacity to be able to make masks?
Oh, yes, I actually have the full capacity and I have a manufacturing plant that I was going to close down.
Great.
You're going to make masks again.
Congratulations.
It's coming over from China and you're going to do it in a partnership with this company and you'll own the manufacturing contract.
Maybe there is going to be a call made to someone in Merrillville, Tennessee, a place that has been destroyed by the deindustrialization of our country.
And we've been convinced by our masters that this is the best thing ever because we have all this plastic coming in from China.
No.
Maybe in Merrillville, Tennessee, they're going to say, you know what?
Congratulations.
You make penicillin.
You get the point that I'm making.
There are massive portions of our American society and culture that have been deindustrialized.
Follow The Money In Education 00:06:37
We need to be self-sufficient again.
It's not about saying that we're anti-capitalist.
This is the most capitalistic thing I can possibly argue for.
Because if we do not become self-sufficient, the socialists will win and they're going to take over everything.
And look, I totally believe in free markets.
The type of free market that allows Indiana to trade with Idaho, no tariffs, no barriers, common currency, same language.
They care about the same country.
But when you start trading with China where they steal everything from us, that's not the same as trading between Indiana and Idaho.
So while we have this beautiful free market within 50 states, why don't we utilize it?
Why do we need Honduras and Guatemala, Nicaragua?
Why do we need them to continue to bring down our labor pool and basically destroy the American middle class?
We don't is the answer.
We need to bring back jobs to Fairfax, Missouri.
We need to bring jobs back to peer South Dakota.
And we can.
We have the labor.
We have the infrastructure.
We have the talent.
We have the people.
And then we need the wherewithal and we need the political elite to stop pandering to transnational corporations and start serving the interests of middle America.
Self-sufficiency American agenda.
Idea number nine, allow a parent trigger and for tax credits to be used for vouchers and private schooling.
We need to be the biggest advocates for school choice and for homeschooling.
If someone homeschools their kids, they should get a full refund for the money that they would have gotten to send their kid to the local public school.
Service not rendered, child still needing education, you get a refund.
That's the way it should work.
That's called liberty.
That's called representative government.
We don't have that right now.
Instead, when you homeschool your kid, you get no refund and you still fund the Marxist school down the street so that the other kids, you pay for the neighbor's kids' education, but not your own kids' education.
That's nonsense.
So look, the strongest support for school vouchers come from lower income families.
Vouchers allow children to attend a private school using some or all of the per-pupil spending amount allocated to the local school district.
The national average for spending per pupil per school district is $13,000.
Vouchers would allow parents to use that money for private schools or religious schools.
Interestingly enough, the oldest voucher system in the entire country was Vermont, which started in 1869.
And now that state's darling socialist senator doesn't even support it.
And the two groups that support school vouchers the most, poor people and black people.
The people who oppose school vouchers the most, rich white people, rich racist white people like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.
Too many Americans are stuck in failing school districts hijacked by public sector cartel teacher unions that are among the most radical unions in the country.
These are Marxist organizations.
We need the ability for middle-class families to have the money follow the child and to be able to properly invest and see where their money is going in education.
Idea number 10, and the final idea, these are all Charlie Kirk originals, and I've taken some from friends of mine, Cynthia Fisher, and self-sufficiency from Chris Buzzkirk, but I put together the list.
And I think, by the way, if the Republican Party, if Donald Trump ran on these 10 ideas, we would win against Joe Biden in a landslide.
It wouldn't be even close because these are real, tangible ideas that could benefit the American people.
And they're things that make sense.
Like, oh, yeah, why not?
Why don't we make things here again?
Why don't we have a self-sufficiency agenda?
Well, it's because, again, I've said this in prior podcasts.
The Republican Party is bought by corporate interests.
And campaign finance is one of the main reasons as to why we have seen the decline of America.
So idea number 10, put every dollar of federal spending online in real time.
A majority of people do not trust their government, which is correct and a good thing, but they trust it even less because there's no transparency.
So every single dollar the federal government spends, no different than those of you that work for a company, you have to put up a expense report.
The federal government should be required by law within 24 hours to put up an expense report at every single transaction.
Someone at the Treasury Department goes out to a nice steak dinner.
I want to see the receipt.
Somebody at the Department of Education flies in a private jet.
I want to see the receipt.
You need 24-hour reporting mechanisms.
Now, that might not be totally realistic, 24 hours.
Okay, let's say it's a week, okay?
One week.
You need a Department of Transparency, not a new federal cabinet, but you need a czar of transparency that puts every single dollar of federal spending online in real time.
If I walked through with you what we spend money on, we spend money on treadmills for shrimp.
We spend money on natural gas gas stations in Afghanistan where there are no natural gas cars.
We spent $400 million on a hotel in downtown Kabul, Afghanistan that ended up having to be abolished because it actually allowed being safe harbor for terrorists.
The elites in both parties do not want transparency because it actually might show how utterly corrupt that they are.
Every dollar of federal spending online in real time.
So these 10 ideas, let's recap them really quick.
Encourage saving early and often, a culture of saving and also through public policy.
Eliminate the FICA tax for anyone that earns less than $95,000 a year, which would be a 7.65% raise for every middle-class family.
Encourage family formation to make it easier to start and grow a family.
Lessen the total tax burden for a middle-class family.
No more than 10% of total income can go to taxes, state, local, or property.
Idea number five, restrict immigration to increase wages and also to be able to have a cohesive American culture.
Idea number six, convince a generation that college is not a needed path to meaning.
Idea number seven, healthcare transparency, the Price Transparency Act.
Idea number eight, a self-sufficiency American agenda.
Idea number nine, allow a parent trigger for tax credits to be used for vouchers and for private schooling.
Idea number 10, put every single dollar of federal spending online in real time.
Maybe even do an application, a mobile app, where you can see where every one of your federal bureaucrats is making, the money they're spending, the expense reports they're filing, and every single dollar that you earn, where is it going in real time?
These 10 ideas can help revive the American middle class and save our country.
The failure to be able to put forth real ideas that are just more than, well, we need less corporate taxes.
That's nonsense.
Stop it.
Okay, you are just doing the parroting of a Chinese corporation.
Okay?
Think more creatively.
Think big, as we have said in a previous podcast.
These 10 ideas, I believe, are incredibly popular.
They're good for the American middle class.
They can win the future and they will make our country strong and secure.
Email me your ideas, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Because it's time we get very serious about where our country is headed and how we're going to solve it.
We are a solution-based show, as always.
Think Big For Freedom 00:00:49
Get involved with Turning PointUSA.
Go to tpusa.com, tpusa.com, the nation's largest conservative student organization, over 2,000 high school and college campuses across the country at tpusa.com.
If you want a signed copy of the MAGA doctrine in order to get into the running to win one, type in Charlie Kirk show, your podcast provider, hit subscribe, give us a five-star review screenshot, and email us, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And please consider supporting this program by going to charliekirk.com slash support.
That is CharlieKirk.com slash support.
Become a monthly supporter.
We just had an amazing supporter call for all of our monthly supporters at CharlieKirk.com slash support, CharlieKirk.com slash support.
And please email me your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com, your thoughts on this episode, and how we are able to revive the American middle class.
Thank you guys so much for listening, and God bless.
Export Selection