40% of young women say they want to flee America -- possibly forever. Libby Emmons talks about what might be driving women to hate America. Plus, Blake set off a huge argument on X over the weekend by opposing Ron DeSantis's plan to abolish all property taxes. Him and Andrew have an extended debate over whether it's a good idea or a giveaway to those Americans who least need one. HUD Secretary Scott Turner discusses a new Trump effort to tear down regulations blocking home construction. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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This is according to a new Gallup poll.
20% of people say they want to live somewhere else.
That's one in five.
And the shift is mainly driven by young women ages 15 to 44.
40% of them say that they want to go.
The other thing is that it doesn't ask, are you going to leave?
It just says, basically, it's like at a cocktail party, would you say, I really want to get out of here?
I really want to leave the country.
But they're not actually leaving the country.
So it's just nobody all won, won, wah, complaining.
And there's a lot of Trump derangements.
They all want to be Emily in Paris.
That was actually a really good.
You got to love Martha.
She's pretty great.
And Dana Perino, they're both great.
Gonna welcome in now editor-in-chief of the post-millennial and human events.
That would be Libby Emmons, good friend of the show.
Welcome, Libby.
Hey, Andrew Blake.
Glad to be here.
Really glad to have you.
So why don't you react to this?
I mean, because this is a really crazy stat that 15 to 44-year-old women, 40% want to leave the U.S. permanently.
What do you make of this, Libby?
Yeah, these women are out of their minds.
They have no idea the bounty of conveniences and food and freedoms and peace that we have here in this country.
And I think that this is the reason for this is that we have done a really, really bad job of telling our kids what is so great about America and what is so great about their homeland contrasted to every place else.
By infusing our entire educational system with cultural relativism, we've led these women to believe that all cultures are the same when in fact, American culture is the greatest one.
Well, I mean, it's different types of American culture.
Yeah, there are.
There are now.
We are, you know, not even bifurcated.
We're like, what are we?
We have like 13 strands.
I mean, we've always been a country with multiple cultures within it.
If anything, we flattened out in a lot of ways.
We flattened out after very distinct New England and Midwestern and California and everywhere.
I miss that, you know?
I miss that.
I think we should have more.
I love the regional differences that we used to have.
I wish we still had those.
One thing I love about going back to New England where so many, much of my family is, is I get to hear all of these Boston accents and the Maine accent.
And it's all very different.
And New York is different.
And Philadelphia is different.
I think what these women find, and we've seen viral videos of women in the past few months.
We saw a woman who moved to Africa and then she was like, wait a second, it kind of sucks here.
We saw a woman who moved to Costa Rica and said that now she knows what real poverty is.
She grew up thinking she was poor going to private school just because she was the broke kid in private school.
And we all know that kid, that kid is not poor, you know?
So we're seeing this happen.
We're seeing these viral videos.
Women who have left tell you that it's not that great out there.
And I think that we really owe it to our kids to let them know that America is a great place to live.
It has a lot to offer and it has more opportunity than anywhere else.
And it has more opportunity for these women if only they would wise up and stop believing every lie that they've been told.
Well, that's one of the most interesting things about the opportunities.
Because if you think, we've had a million pieces where it's, you know, articles and data points where it's women pulling ahead.
of men.
They're more likely to complete college.
They're more likely.
They're almost in some ways, they're becoming male in surprising ways.
You know, now they're the ones who don't want to get married.
They don't want to be attached.
They're the ones more likely to buy a home.
Like they're, they're getting, like, they're adopting almost more masculine traits in some surprising ways.
And yet, and then of course, they're also, like, let's be frank, we have basically affirmative action for women in a lot of areas.
You know, we had a ton of that in academia, in tech, in medicine.
There's been a big effort in America to make every institution possible more opening to women, more welcoming of women to recruit more women into it.
And there's something interesting that they can look at decades of that reality and feel so repulsed by what they see that 40% of them are saying they actually just, they want to move to an entire different country versus men who don't want to quit and leave America.
Yeah, well, I actually, I mean, and on that point, Libby, how much of this do you think kind of what Martha McCallan was saying is this just sort of TDS, living liberal women having to live under a president they didn't vote for versus some of the these larger societal trends that we've seen where, you know, you could throw up image 95.
This is liberal women are the least likely to be completely satisfied with life.
Only 12% of liberal women are compared to 37% of conservatives, 28% of moderates.
So I think that it's a good sign of confidence.
If you want to be a conservative woman, that you're more likely to be completely satisfied with your life.
So is it TDS or is it part of these larger societal trends that's driving this desire to get out of the U.S.?
I think TDS might just be the capper.
But women, of course, just like everybody else, a lot of people live under presidents that they didn't vote for.
And it's not that big a deal.
You look at the president, you say, okay, didn't vote for that guy.
Maybe next time the guy I vote for will win.
But I think Blake is onto something when he's talking about these societal trends because women are basically the dog that caught the car, right?
American women, American women demanding power, demanding access, demanding all of this opportunity, demanding complete equality with men.
And then it turns out there you are in your 40s.
You've got some killer career.
You've got no kids.
You've got no man.
You've got like a mountain of stuff.
And we know from that old Tracy Chapman song that the mountain of things is not really satisfactory.
It doesn't give you anything that you want.
Turns out having a career for women who, you know, let's face it, are different than men, are just composed differently than men are.
Women look around at all their stuff and it's, it's really just not that great.
I mean, it might be shiny, but it's nothing like a bundle of grandbabies to snuggle with, you know, and to look after or anything like that.
So I think that's really what's going on here is women have been led to believe that equality with men will give them satisfaction.
And then what happens is all of these women end up powerful and they look around at the men who are available to them to partner with and they say, oh, but that guy doesn't make as much as me or he's not as powerful or as educated as me or any of these other things because women don't want the thing that they have been told to want, right?
We have been told to want power and equality, you know, straight across the board.
And instead, what we have gotten is a situation where women can't really be women.
Expressing maternal instincts and impulses gets you chided and derided by the left.
But there's nothing more satisfying in life than being a mom.
Women like to take care of people.
I know that, you know, not all women, blah, blah, blah, whatever.
But for the most part, women have this maternal instinct.
And so when you have women who are cut off from that instinct, they tend to mother everybody and screw up everything that they're in charge of.
Well, this is a good point because check this out.
This was actually a few days.
I remember sharing this article with Charlie, actually.
I think he tweeted about it.
The marriage effect from The Atlantic.
This is, I believe, September 1st.
The common narrative has it that commitment and motherhood make women unhappy.
New data suggests the opposite is true.
New data.
This is like thousands of years.
A common narrative that we've been telling you in the pages of the Atlantic for years that marriage will make you depressed and you won't have all your free time to have like wine nights with the ladies and Netflix.
A popular lunatic psyop has suggested that.
Yeah.
I mean, listen, I think this is really important, though, is that we've lied to young women for a generation or more, really since, you know, the 60s, burn your bras and all this kind of stuff.
I mean, this has been going on since the post-war era, and it really is taking a massive impact when you add onto the heap social media, you know, mental, I think, changes in the way we do psychiatry and the changes in the way we administer antidepressants, all of these things on top of each other.
So cultural lies, the drugs, social media, all of it is coming, the chickens are coming home to roost with our young women.
Libby Emmett.
Yeah, I think that's 100% true.
I was talking to Dr. Chloe Carmichael about this the other day, the incessant and rampant medicalization of womanhood.
And we get it from such a young age.
It starts with birth control pills and then you move on to SSRIs and then, you know, you end up with fertility treatments.
And then all of a sudden you're medicating menopause.
I think all of that is a contributor to women's unhappiness in this country.
And I also think the emasculation of so many American men is a contributor to American women's unhappiness because as you see these roles reversed and women are more educated and they're making more money and they're more in charge of stuff or whatever, and then you see men becoming more of like the stay-at-home dad or other things that men then end up doing, which were traditionally more feminine roles, women aren't attracted to those guys, it turns out.
It turns out that the male feminist is not someone that a lady wants to get married to.
Let's look at image 98.
This is from Gallup.
The desire to migrate became a partisan issue in 2017.
So you see it just really divide in 2017.
You know, if you disapproved of the country's leadership, you wanted to get the heck out.
And that kind of underlies like really how divided people are.
Because as you said, we've all lived through presidents we didn't like.
We never thought, okay, I'm not an American anymore.
But that is increasingly untrue because the vision for the country of either party is getting farther and farther apart.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I saw an article recently from David Marcus over at Fox Digital, and he was talking about how the left essentially wants a welfare state.
They want open borders and they want the decline of the country.
They want it to just be nothing that has anything to do with a culture or a history or foundational elements.
And I think that's a big part of this too, right?
You have on the right, you have a desire to have independence, to have government be out of your lives.
And on the left, you have a desire to push government into every aspect of Americans' lives.
You had Mom Donnie say recently when he made his victory speech in New York City that there is no problem too large for the government to small, to, I'm sorry, no problem too large for the government to solve and no problem too small that they won't get involved in it.
That sounds like a recipe for tyranny for me.
And I think you've also seen a lot of people saying they would leave New York over that.
I don't know if they're planning to leave America, but yeah, you have people saying they want to leave America because of Trump.
We've definitely seen that.
But these people have not considered where it is that they might want to go.
There is a decline of free speech rights in Europe and the UK specifically.
There's been a decline in that in Australia and New Zealand.
Where are they going to go, Libby?
Are they going to go to Germany with the Middle Eastern migrant rape gangs?
Are they going to go to the UK with the grooming gangs?
Are they going to go to, where are they going to go?
Like maybe not.
It is a funny thing I've seen pointed out that it's like the left often like they talk about leaving the country and they fantasize basically about going to countries that are whiter than America is.
And then when the right actually, you often hear right-wingers fantasize about leaving America and they want to basically go expat in like Mexico or Peru or something.
It's a funny dynamic you'll sometimes see.
It's cognitive dissonance, but it totally is the trend.
It totally is the trend.
Libby, I just, I have to play this because you were talking about strong men versus weak men and how weak men are actually driving women crazy in part.
And I don't disagree.
You're not lecturing men.
I just want to be very clear.
That's not what you're doing.
You're just saying you celebrate strong men.
I know what you're saying.
But this is really funny.
131.
This is a liberal woman having a similar thought.
131.
single man.
We got aura.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
We got Aura.
I mean, perhaps she likes men instead of little wussy creatures who, you know, just do what they're told and don't have any ambition.
I think it's a sad thing what we've done to American men.
And I certainly hope that trends reverse that.
Women don't want that and men are unhappy too.
Men don't want that.
It's terrible.
It's a terrible condition for them.
Absolutely.
And let's throw up this image.
This is actually, I don't have a number for it, so I'm going to make sure we have it.
But this is a really important data point.
And it's a general social survey from the family studies.
It shows that 40% of married women with children are reporting that they are very happy.
Do you know who the least happy is, though?
And this is an important thing to note, is unmarried with children at 17.
And unmarried with no children is at 22% report being very happy.
So the happiest cohort is by far married women with children.
They report being very happy.
So I guess the cautionary tale is here is don't have children get married, then divorced and have to be a single mom because then you'll be the least happy.
So choose well.
I'm not saying rush in with the wrong person.
I'm saying married with children is the happiest cohort.
Libby, you are the best.
We love the postmillennial and human events.
Thank you for making time for us.
I know you had a busy media morning.
Thanks so much, guys.
I appreciate it.
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Without further ado, I'm excited to welcome Scott Turner.
He's our HUD Secretary.
Welcome to the show, Secretary Turner.
Thank you, Andrew.
Great to be with you guys.
Thank you, Blake.
Yeah, it's an honor to have you.
You've been, I mean, you've been doing a tremendous job, but on top of that, you've always been so encouraging, a huge supporter of Charlie's, of Turning Point.
And we salute you for that, sir.
So thank you just for being a great friend along the way as everything we've been through in the last couple months has transpired.
Well, absolutely.
You know, you know how much I love and respect Charlie and the entire Turning Point team and you gentlemen and Eric and everything that you're doing to continue the mission.
I'm here, you know, to support you and pray for you and love on you guys.
So thank you so much for this brief moment.
We can be together.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, thank you for making the time, Mr. Secretary.
And you have come out guns blazing with this affordability crisis.
And this is something Charlie talked about a lot, especially in the final weeks and months of his life, and wanting to make sure that Gen Z has a stake in the American dream, has an opportunity to get on the rung of financial success, that first rung in the ladder.
And so you came out, I saw the clip, I instantly reached out to your team, and I love that you were talking about it.
Tell us about your plans to address the housing and affordability crisis, especially for young Americans.
Well, absolutely.
Well, let's go to the root of it.
You know, during the Biden administration, the policies as it pertains to housing, the economy, and in particular, the immigration policies of the Biden administration were crippling to our country and housing affordability in particular.
You talk about over 12 million illegal aliens coming across our border.
And because of this, Andrew, it literally stifled and weakened our housing supply and stifled housing affordability because illegal aliens were taking up homes that American people should have been taking up.
And so because of that, you see the affordability crisis.
You see the issues that we're having.
And one stat that I wanted to bring forth is about 59% of illegal alien families, 59%, they utilize one or more of the welfare programs in our country to the tune of about $42 billion.
And so if you think about over half of the illegal alien families use one or more welfare programs, costing the American people over $40 billion.
That's a problem.
It's not sustainable in our country, in particular when it comes to housing affordability.
And so for millennials and really for every American citizen, what we're doing at HUD is one, being very focused on tearing down burdensome regulations, which we can talk about as the show goes on, but taking down these regulations, both from a federal standpoint and then encouraging the localities, mayors, economic development, states, and cities to take inventory of their regulatory environment because that has really what has crippled development and building in our country.
And so regulations, for instance, in a multifamily housing project, 40% of regulations are the cost when you build a multifamily housing project in a single family housing development.
20 to 25% of the cost is in regulations.
Well, Andrew and Blake, this is unsustainable.
And so we have to tear down the regulatory environment in order to unleash the development and build in creativity and innovativeness in our country as it pertains to our housing supply.
Yeah, go ahead.
Blake, Chen.
You know, another stat I saw recently that really drove this home is put up 132.
And this chart is the number of newly built homes per capita in the U.S. by year.
And you can see different points in time, but the trend is clearly downwards.
You can see different housing busts.
You can see the Great Recession.
It really tanks new construction.
But the trend is so consistently down.
Sure, some of that is we're probably a little better at building houses that can last a little longer.
And so you don't need as much turnover.
But at the same time, the number of new houses getting built is just steadily going downwards.
And that might not even be an accurate per capita thing because we might not have an accurate number of how many people are illegally entering the country.
It could be lower than that.
And so it's just there's a steady downward trend in how many houses are being built.
Shocker, the price of houses is going up.
Yeah, and that's why we've had massive population increases, right?
I mean, from if you, I mean, this is approximate numbers, but it was, let's say, 225 million people in this country in 1980.
Maybe it was like 1985 by that, we got to that point.
And now we're at 330, 340.
We really don't know how many people are in the country because we don't know how many illegal aliens are in the country.
I am a big proponent, Mr. Secretary, of single-family homes.
And I know that you kind of work on both the single-family homes, especially in the urban core, these multifamily units.
I believe that it's the best way that a young family gets a start.
The kids need a yard.
I mean, you know, it gives a better sense of ownership, of independence, of, I think, a stake in the community.
I really like single-family homes.
What do you see is the solution for expanding single-family homes?
We're in Phoenix.
It's like the capital of single-family homes.
Just like it's like gives you a lot of urban sprawl downside.
I understand.
But it's also the biggest metropolitan area in the country that voted for Trump, right?
So it's, I think it's the fifth biggest metro area in the country, and it went red if you count all Maricopa County.
I think there is a correlation to housing density and politics.
I just think it's, you know, the white picket fence, you call it an ideal, you call it old-fashioned.
I think it's a beautiful thing.
What's your viewpoint on how we approach new housing developments in the country?
We want to be respectful of public lands.
We want to keep things beautiful, but we also want to make sure we're not outlawing single-family homes as they've essentially done in California, by the way.
You can't build new single-family zoning in California.
Right.
And that's a great perspective and great question, Andrew.
And, you know, at HUD, we deal with every American citizen in our country.
And when I say that, meaning that housing impacts all 380 million people per se that we have in our country.
Right now, we have a housing shortage, guys, of about 7 million units of housing that we need.
We need single-family houses.
We need multifamily, duplex, condo, manufactured housing.
Manufactured housing obviously is going to play a big role in filling this housing gap that we have in our country.
And Andrew, yes, you know, when you own a home, it is the single most powerful way to build equity and to start building generational wealth is in the home that you own.
And so, yes, I am a proponent, as you are, for single-family homes.
But also when you think about the millennial generation or people who are just now getting started, sometimes people have to rent a multifamily or rent an apartment or a condo in order to save so that they can have the monies available and appropriate and need it to invest in a single family home.
And so from our standpoint, you know, we look at the picture from a holistic view.
And so what we're doing when I talk about bringing down regulation and using some of the programs at HUD, like our section 221 and 223, to help build affordable housing and make rents as such that people can afford that to save up to achieve the American dream of home ownership.
So yes, I am in agreement with you that single-family homes are very important to build wealth, to build family, you know, to bring families together to raise our children.
I encourage the young people of America today, you know, to get married, to have children, to raise a family, to save up, buy a home, you know, build neighborhoods.
And so I'm in lockstep with you, but from our standpoint and my standpoint, personally, you know, we have to help those that are just now getting started out that may be renting to save up to buy a home.
And our FHA program has been tremendous.
We've helped about 630,000 people this year to have the first time, to buy loans from FHA.
And 370,000 of those are first-time homebuyers.
Oh, fantastic.
That's great.
Oh, I just want to commend the admin.
We did a whole segment on this last week, but I just, you know, there was some polling that came out.
Rich Barris was on it talking about that there was a feeling, a sense out there, especially after the offs, you know, the off-year elections in Virginia, New Jersey, that there was maybe a messaging disconnect from the administration to what people were actually wanting, right?
There was a lot of focus on foreign policy.
They wanted more focus on domestic.
And I just want to say the admin has completely responded.
You're part of that.
And I just love that you guys are really hammering home the fact that affordability, affordability, housing, housing, housing, Gen Z, Gen Z. Let's go ahead and play 79.
This is another indication of some of this messaging that's getting out there.
79.
President and his team want to put a difficult start to November behind them with a blizzard of policy and PR announcements designed to help Americans with the cost of living.
So what are those announcements going to be?
More deals with pharmaceutical companies to bring down drug prices, efforts to address those higher mortgage rates, try to change the housing market, reducing tariffs, as you guys mentioned, on a number of products, as well as a possible $2,000 rebate check for some taxpayers.
Affordability, affordability, affordability.
Blake, I don't know if you had anything to add there.
No, just it's one of the things Charlie cared about the most.
And I look at all of those long-term trends and you see long-term trends.
We don't build, we don't build as many houses as we used to.
We are steadily escalating the price of those houses.
I mean, we have the debate over how should we even try to lower them.
And it really appeals to people.
I think we should emphasize this for the administration.
We talked about the 50-year mortgage idea last week, and the number of emails we got about that was gigantic.
Some topics don't fire up our audience, even if we talk about them.
That one did, email after email after email.
And some people really liked it.
Some people really, really hated it.
It's not uniform how people felt about it, but what they do have strong thoughts about is the housing topic.
Well, and I love the creativity, Mr. Secretary.
I mean, it seems like we're going to get a blizzard of new proposals in the coming weeks.
And I'm just grateful to you that you at HUD are focused on it and you're laser focused on helping Gen Z start a family, get married, have kids, and use every power that you have at your disposal.
So thank you, sir, for doing that.
Absolutely.
Thank you guys.
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We're going to be talking about property taxes.
Okay.
Ron DeSantis is trying to get rid of it in the state of Florida.
I think he wants to get rid of it nationwide.
Yeah, but what's that?
He wants to get rid of it nationwide, sure.
But he has power in Florida.
A lot of people think this is good.
A lot of people think this is bad.
They think it's a form of elderly welfare when they happen to be the most wealthy in the country.
But really quick, before we get to radio, let's play 49.
This is Charlie on renting.
If you have a generation that does not own stuff, then all of a sudden political radicalization starts to seep in.
I have a question for all of you in the audience, and this should hammer at home.
It's from my friend Frank Turek, and I told him as soon as he said it, I said, I'm going to steal this one, Frank.
When was the last time you washed a rental car?
When you rent a car from Hertz or from Avis, do you wash it?
Do you go get the oil checked on that rental car?
Of course not.
It's not yours, and you know it.
You're borrowing it.
And it's no different than how people are living in apartments endlessly until they're 32, 33.
They have two kids and they have to rent because the access to the housing market is so impossible.
You have an entire population, generation, that is on the outside looking in.
And that is a prerequisite for a political revolution if we don't turn renters into owners.
All right.
So I want to play this clip and then we're going to have some reaction on the other side.
134, Governor Ron DeSantis on the bombshell, dropping property taxes.
134.
From the property tax situation.
It's very important given how that's pinched so many homeowners, particularly our senior citizens who have their homes paid off and they bought it 30 years ago for a certain amount.
Now they're being told it's worth so much more and they have to pony up more and more money.
It's almost like they have to pay rent to the government just to be able to enjoy their property.
And that's wrong.
And we need to do something about it.
I actually really sympathize with this because I remember when I found out about property tax, I was like 18, 19.
I was like, wait, wait, wait.
You don't ever own your thing?
You don't like you pay for it all these years and you don't even own it?
It kind of is upsetting.
I get it.
I understand.
I've seen this pop up and I can see how that's like very intuitively appealing.
But at the same time, like, so I had a tweet over the weekend where I objected to this and it got commented on it.
Yeah, and it got a like, it got a very strong reaction, like much stronger than usually.
And most of it was pretty hostile, I'll admit it.
But I think I occasionally talk to Charlie about this because this was starting to bubble up while he was still with us.
And, you know, what I think needs to be emphasized is abolishing property taxes.
As he says, DeSantis said who the biggest beneficiary is intended to be.
It's intended to be senior citizens who've already paid off their homes.
Let's look at the numbers.
Elderly Americans are the wealthiest Americans by generation.
And this has gotten more and more dramatic over time.
This is not just a constant of life.
This is something that has gotten growing more intense every single year.
We already have a lot of things that specifically benefit older Americans.
They receive Social Security payments, of course.
And yes, they paid into it, but those are funded by just taxing young people now.
And a very large number of Social Security recipients get more money than they ever paid in.
There's your tweet up there, by the way.
Yes, 8000.
It's not the specific numbers.
It's the digital reaction.
It's a great tweet.
Good conversation stimulator, man.
Yeah.
And like, so you have that.
So elderly people are, they're pulling away.
I mean, they get Medicare, of course.
Their Social Security is now tax-free.
Did we pass that, I believe?
At least some portion of it is tax-free.
They had to, because it was done through reconciliation, they had to basically give them a tax.
They're also the biggest beneficiaries of the general rise in home prices.
They were generally bought for cheaper amounts, and these keep appreciating.
And property taxes, like they do pay for things.
They pay for, like, among other things, the legal system that guarantees your right to ownership.
I think that's important.
Fire department.
Yeah, your fire department, your police department, schools.
And they say, well, I don't have kids anymore.
Well, you benefited from schools when you had kids in them and when you attended them yourself.
We do not just say only parents pay into things.
We collectively pay for a lot of things in society.
You pay for cops even if you're not in a high-crime neighborhood or not that exposed.
We have a general obligation to care about the wider wealth.
And you can say those taxes are inefficient and wasteful.
I'm totally okay with that.
But explain that versus a land tax.
Well, land tax would be better, but this is the thing.
We're not proposing replacing.
I understand, but what is it?
A land tax would be you tax the unimproved value of your land instead of taxing like any property on it.
You're just kind of taxing the land as it would be worth if there was nothing built on it.
And this has become more popular lately.
It's an idea from the 1800s, actually, to tax this because the idea is it discourages speculation.
It discourages sitting on land and doing nothing with it because you hope it'll go up in value.
And instead, it encourages development.
It encourages productivity.
And that's the other thing.
It's generally when we've studied it, taxes on land have been, or property taxes are some of the least distortionary taxes.
Think of income tax.
Taxing income discourages people from working to make more income because you're taking it out.
Taxing property discourages sitting on property without doing anything to make more money.
And so we think of what different taxes encourage.
So, Blake, I responded back.
I said, maybe after a certain age, property tax rates get locked.
So if you're over 65, your property can't continually appreciate till you say you lived to 90 and you're on that fixed income for 25 years.
At some point, it's going to outstrip your ability.
I mean, I don't want to see a situation where if somebody, because hold on, you're talking about, well, you paid into the system when you'd had kids and you benefited from it.
So you need to keep paying into the system.
Well, you also paid into the system all those years.
There should be, I think, a reasonable compact made with people that when you get to a certain age and you're unable to work or you retire, that you know, you, you have, there's a kind of an agreement.
We're not going to kick you out of your house.
You know, and that's where we're not kicking you out of your house, but any other situation, and old people, let's be frank, old people love to point this out with younger people if they live beyond their means and then they feel entitled to things.
If you are living in a large house you can't afford the property taxes on, you are to some extent living beyond your means.
And the way that we respond to that in plenty of other situations is you can downsize.
And the reason they usually can't afford it is their house has gone up dramatically in value.
So another thing you can do is stop.
Maybe lock things in for people after a certain age.
Because here's the thing: you plan for retirement, making certain assumptions.
Well, if your house, I mean, we've seen the charts, those crazy, those crazy spikes before, I think, 08, and then another crazy spike after 2011 in the housing.
These are historic, unprecedented increases in the value of property.
Historic.
So you would make certain assumptions working your 40, 50-year career based on what you think you need in order to survive.
And then here, unbeknownst to you, your property value shoots up, you get reappraised, and your property taxes shoot through the roof.
And all of a sudden, it's the driving factor pushing you out of a house.
I just think that that is, if you could, if you're retired, if you're over 65, you're retired, let's say you retire at 65 or 70, something like that.
You stop earning extra income, but you're able to afford it.
But then five years later, your house, like, so this happened in California, where I was living.
After COVID, a bunch of houses in neighborhoods with a lot of old people in it went from like an average cost of the house being like a million, all of a sudden it was worth 2.5 in four years.
And you're telling me that some elderly couple that is on fixed income now has to be driven out of their house because their property tax gets reassessed.
What if you're a renter and renting prices went up?
So should we have rent control?
Because you don't deserve to get driven out of the place.
I agree.
I agree.
There's good counter arguments.
But like somebody who's done it right, that saved enough, that did the right thing.
They didn't save enough.
What's that?
They didn't save enough.
Well, they thought they did, but they were mistaken.
Like, I guess what I think is, I feel like I'm pleading.
It is special pleading for objectively the generation of Americans who have the most resources.
Well, but not everybody does, right?
So this is the thing, right?
Yeah, you can look at it in the macro, and there's a lot of wealth that is accumulated with elderly people in the macro.
So maybe you make it means tested.
I don't know.
Well, you can do that.
But then again, you're not cutting, like what we're seeing is we have, first of all, like I said, when we study this, property taxes are the least distortiony in terms of distortionary in terms of what behavior they do.
Like income, like having a high income tax.
You mean what behavior they result in?
Like having a high income tax can actually reduce productivity of individual citizens.
Having a high capital gains tax, that warps the behavior that people engage in.
Relatively speaking, a property tax is less distortionary in what it causes people to do.
And a land tax is even less distortionary, but no one's proposing changing to that.
They're just proposing we get rid of property taxes.
And like it really strikes me as an unhelpful, like it really is giving favoritism to like you should ask who's going to benefit the most from this?
And the people who are going to benefit the most from it are people who already have the most going for them.
The wealthiest Americans.
It is basically saying, let us continue to devour the young in order to favor the old.
So, okay, so Texas does something like this with the homestead property once you reach age 65, but it doesn't shield you from property tax increases due to improvements, upgrades, additions, et cetera.
So after 65, they sort of freeze the rate at which you're taxed for your property.
Gives you a little bit of predictability.
I mean, I'm just saying, you know, when you get old, you don't want a country that just kicks you to the curb.
There is a special dispensation for our elders when you're getting kicked to the curb.
Listen, we spend most of our time.
Because none of these ideas are even to say, like, we're going to just cut government spending generally and finance it by getting rid of property taxes.
They're still going to want all the services.
They're still going to want, frankly, heavily subsidized health care, heavily subsidized, you know, so no one's proposing getting rid of Social Security.
No one's proposing getting rid of Medicare.
So it's basically just a handout for a given group of people.
And we already actually know how this is going to go because, like, for example, California had a giant property tax revolt where they freeze property taxes to be lower for older people.
And what's the end result of that?
It's been massively.
The end result is California has the least affordable homes in the country.
I don't, but okay, but that's causation and correlation.
You know, we're not sure which is which because, I mean, California has a lot of issues that are driving.
California has tons of issues.
Right.
But actually 2013 for normal working families, I'm telling you, my wife's family has benefited tremendously.
It's why they're still able to be in their home, right?
And they've, listen, you could say that that's a handout for them, but they weren't living beyond their means, I will tell you.
So I just think, listen, if a land tax is even in the conversation, I think Florida should consider it.
Or you do it means tested and age frozen.
I mean, they're still paying.
They're still paying into the system.
Well, no, they're not if they're not paying property taxes.
No, I'm saying that.
A lot of this is because it's people who are retired.
They have no income taxes.
They have lower capital gains taxes.
They're receiving, you know, tax-advantaged Social Security.
And this is like the last thing that they have to pay into.
Well, what would you, you want them to keep working a job?
No, I think what we should say is if you are in a piece of property that is radically increased in value.
Free it up for the market, give it to somebody else.
Or you should recognize market pressures that exist for everyone else.
We don't think young people should be entitled to live in the most expensive parts of the city.
That's true.
We don't think young parents should be entitled to that should be the most entitled to live anymore.
We don't think young people should be entitled to go to the most expensive college for free.
We recognize this with a bunch of other things.
So I don't think we should view it as an entitlement to live forever in a house that has radically gone up in value.
If it is something you desire, you can work for it.
You can save extra money against it.
You can get support from your children.
But if you are just unable to do it, among other things, we're talking about something where you have benefited from something tremendously useful.
Your home has gone up dramatically in value.
You can take out a reverse mortgage on that.
You can borrow against the value of your home to do that.
Or you can downsize.
And historically, that is what elderly people have done.
You have downsized as you have fewer needs.
Because think about it.
If you don't have kids in your home anymore, if you don't, if you're not as mobile, you probably can't even use as much of your property anymore.
Like that is historically a thing that has happened.
And it's not just been poorer people.
I like to cite this example a lot because Charlie liked Winston Churchill.
Winston Churchill had a big house.
I think Checkers was the name of it.
But whatever it was.
He had a big house.
And when he was his son, right?
Yeah, he gave it to his son.
And he personally himself built a smaller cabin that he and his wife lived in.
And then he gave it to his son to live in the main house.
And he and his wife lived in the smaller home, which they didn't need anymore because they didn't need a big home anymore because their own children had grown up.
And it's not, I'm not saying this.
I don't want to be like this vicious person.
I'm not saying giddily, oh, make these people leave their homes.
I am saying this in response to a push to get rid of all property taxes, which has suddenly become this big meme on the right is to get rid of all property taxes.
And I would say this is sort of the conservative mirror image of Mamdaniism that wants to, you know, ban rent hikes.
We're waging war on like a normal thing that basically has always existed.
We've always had property taxes in America.
Literally, I think the first one was in 1634.
In fact, it used to be far more broad.
We used to have general property taxes in the United States, a tax on all property you owned, all your land, all your farmland, all your home, everything in it, your livestock.
We used to have general property taxes.
Just having a tax on residential or commercial property is a more restrained version of that, which we adopted because it got way harder.
How do you tax the value of every single thing in a modern person's home?
It would be implausible.
And so this is what we've adapted to.
But it's something that's always existed.
The same founding fathers who fought for life, liberty, and property were okay with property taxes existing.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting.
I think from the very first, like I said, when I thought about property taxes, I thought it was a raw deal.
Because I feel like you should be able to.
Texas stay.
Texas are horrible.
No disputing that.
Well, and this is why conservatives in Texas have been railing against property tax.
Now, they don't have an income tax in Texas.
They have higher property taxes to sort of make up for it.
And so that's been a huge, especially as property values in Texas have skyrocketed in the last 10 years.
You see a big push to either lower, reduce, or get rid of property taxes in Texas as well.
So I don't know where they're going to be making their income to run basic services in Texas if they get rid of it.
But I think, I think, listen, we're talking in like a very stark binary, right?
You either have them or you don't.
You either can afford it or you can't.
But I think something in the between of you know, maybe you freeze it at age 65 and it's a bit means tested or something to even get it frozen, something like that could be good because I don't think you should be a country that treats your elderly the same as you treat everybody else.
I think when you get old, that we should look out for our old people because we look out for old people.
I know we do.
But this is another way that's really important.
You can't make it means tested.
A real can't afford it.
You can't afford it.
Or force.
I actually do, you know, to be fair, a reverse mortgage is probably the answer here.
But yeah, there's different options.
But a big picture thing, and I know people are going to push back on this.
And I'm going to talk about it anyway because Charlie, that's what Charlie would do.
Charlie will sometimes say people need to hear uncomfortable things.
And it's not that we're hostile to the elderly, not in the slightest, but we do have to recognize we are in a large society and we need to care about the future of this country.
And what we're seeing all across the West is a sort of long-term damaging things to make things better for politically powerful older people.
Because every Western country has this, where they had a baby boom and then they had a baby bust.
So they're aging.
So older people have our larger share of the electorate.
And there's incentives for politicians to give them things understandable, but those things can be very harmful.
In Europe, it's especially bad.
You know, the justification.
The demo triangles, like it used, it used to be used to be like this, and now it's like this.
And now it's just old people make up the top rung.
If you want an extreme example of how bad this can get, in the United Kingdom, they have a pension system like ours, and there's a thing, they call it the triple lock.
This is a political issue in the UK.
I want to check what it is, how it exactly works.
So the triple lock on the UK's state pension is a law.
By law, the UK is required to increase the annual pension payout by either the rate of inflation, by the average wage growth that year, or by 2.5%, whichever is highest.
So they are guaranteed iron law of the universe to have their pension payments go up faster than the rate of inflation.
Because if inflation goes below 2.5%, you just have to go 2.5% no matter what.
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You know, it's funny.
I was in Portugal when I was around like 20.
And I was studying abroad in Spain, and I went over to Portugal for a weekend.
I met this homeless Brit.
And he was, I saw him at this pub, because everywhere is a pub in Portugal.
And he was celebrating.
And I go, what are you celebrating?
You look homeless.
He's like, I mean, just a really raggedy-looking old guy.
And he was celebrating because his pension had kicked in the day before.
His UK pension.
He'd made it to the appropriate age.
And he was like, I'm sorted for the rest of my life.
I'm like, well, you live in Portugal.
You still get your UK pension.
He's like, oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I'm still getting it.
So now I don't have to be homeless anymore.
And I was like, so this guy's basically been living as a bag of people.
We don't want this sort of world where everyone's life revolves around getting to their pension age.
And I'm not saying that this is the case.
I cited the UK example just to say that is a policy that is, it is their third rail.
You can't touch the triple lock.
In fact, I think one of the parties ran, I think maybe the conservatives ran on promising a quadruple lock.
There would be a fourth thing that they would lock it to so it could go up even faster.
They are guaranteed to have their pension payments go up faster than inflation.
It is a suicidal thing to do.
It can only end in disaster.
I remember David Cameron tried to run on austerity and he got just absolutely blasted.
And in other countries, the justification for endless replacement migration is always they need to pay into our unsustainable pension system.
And I cite those as examples to then just pivot back to the property tax debate, which is just we have a system right now where things are, broadly speaking, pretty good for older Americans and they're getting very bad and they're getting worse for young Americans.
And Charlie would talk about you can have MAGA or you can have Mamdaniism.
And the sense that young people have no ability to buy into the system or it's extremely difficult and they don't have a straight path forward and that everything is against them drives a lot of Mamdaniism and it drives it across the spectrum.
So yeah, on the left, you have the people whose brains are shocked by the systemic racism, all of the insane narratives left pushes.
But on the right, it drives that.
You see this nihilism on the right.
That's what drives a lot of the popularity of Nick Fuentes, for example.
You can see there's this nihilism that encourages them to embrace radical solutions, the attitude of burn it all down.
And you're only going to have that burn it all down mentality get worse if they're seeing headlines where it's okay, we had to increase our state income tax or our state sales tax because we got rid of our state property tax.
And state sales tax and state income tax are a thing a young person pays.
And the state property tax was something that an older person was more likely to pay.
And by the way, they're the ones who also already own their homes.
They already have way more assets than you do.
But we just changed the rules so that they pay fewer taxes and you pay more.
And if you're giving that message to young people, they're going to get more radical and they're going to embrace one form of revolution or another.
I'm not saying we should double property taxes.
I am not saying we should do like extreme things.
I am saying we should not abolish property taxes because this is an idea that has caught fire on the right.
I think this issue is going to come up again this week.
I just have a feeling.
And I want to hear from the audience that is still with us.
Can we answer a few of these emails?
Well, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Tell us what you think about property taxes.
Should there be, in my opinion, maybe you lock it at 65, you means test it if you're going to be eligible for a lock.
Otherwise, you pay it.
Because I broadly wonder, I broadly agree.
I broadly agree with the entire premise.
You know, I do because I'm more concerned about the welfare of the next generation than I am about the elderly generation, boomers, and silent generation.
But there is a point at which you're going to find my sympathies if you look, if you're looking at property values jettisoned up like rocket ships from a million to 2.5 is the example that I'm thinking of the top of my head.
Let's say I had a stock that went up like 10 times in value, like we should abolish the capital gains because I will pay more tax on the stock.
And I know with property, it's different because it is something you have to pay, even if you aren't selling it.
But we are talking about the impacts of, okay, your home went up dramatically in value.
And no, I know.
Yeah.
And probably a reverse mortgage is a fine option.
What did you want to?
What emails are you going to do?
Well, I like this idea of Allison email that just came in who, just because they had a proposal.
What about freezing property taxes until you move?
So they wouldn't go up until you sell your house.
That's a common idea.
The reason to push back on that is...
What was the proposal?
Freeze property taxes until you move.
So you get the rate of, or the amount, I guess, of when you buy.
And a reason you don't want to do that, and this is tough for people to hear, but it makes things a lot more inefficient.
And you actually Prop 13.
Yeah, well, Prop 13 locks you in.
Exactly.
And what do you get from that?
You get people, it actually, it makes the economy across the board less efficient.
It is discouraging good behaviors.
We should want people to not, you don't want people to just be parked in their houses because it's just such an economically terrible idea for them to move to a new situation that's yes.
So what it does, so here's, here's a really concrete example: is you want to encourage young families to buy homes.
Yes.
But if an older couple is locked in at a very low property tax and if they move, they lose it, which is the case with like Prop 13, then they're not going to sell that house.
Well, let's see if they can get it.
They're going to keep it, and they're going to get very creative about keeping it, by the way.
So even if they move, they're going to try and keep it.
Let's take other examples that stand out.
Let's say you're working in Los Angeles and you've received a job offer that would pay you twice as much to move to Phoenix.
But let's say we had this situation where your property taxes got locked in.
You got locked in at some insanely low property tax level.
And now you actively just don't want to take a job that will pay you more and make America and you more productive because you would be giving away this like insanely good property tax deal you have.
That's overall just not a good thing.
You want a tax system that is encouraging people to do productive things.
That's why.
By the way, that's also an argument for making your mortgages transferable.
So you could migrate.
So if you say you owed a million dollars to a bank at 3.5%, but you were going to try and buy a home in Phoenix and the new rates are at 6%.
You could actually use that mortgage, that money you owe once you sell your house, transfer the mortgage to the new property.
There could be a lot of other issues that are used to be the case.
That used to be the case.
And now they're supporting that idea as it's one of many ideas because guess what?
If I took a million dollar loan at 3.5, brought it over here, had to get another 600,000, say, to buy a nicer home or the same quality, but it was at 6%, then you dollar cost average those and you're somewhere like 4.8%.
The thing about that is I think that would, again, I don't think you want to be.
But it discourages like getting planted in a certain home and not moving and opening up inventory.
It does.
It disincentivizes that.
I'd have to look more into that one because I know I've seen that idea.
I would be worried about essentially declaring like the people who bought houses in 2020 when we had insane low interest rates are now just this like permanent nobility of low interest rates, which I think people will dislike.
I mean, listen, you took the loan out.
You still got to pay the loan off.
You do, but also, and then, like, how does that work with the bank?
How does that work?
Because the entire point, also the point of your loan to some extent was, you know, your house was the pledge against that.
That's what the mortgage is.
Yeah, but if you have another house, I mean, to the banks, it's what if you have out an extra $600,000, but you default on the first loan and then well, that's an interesting point.
Yeah, that is an interesting point.
I assume there's experts on this because I know they didn't come up with this idea.
I'm not an expert on that specifically.
But what I'm saying is it discourages people from not moving because of the price of the bank.
It does.
It lowers that.
But the price of their mortgage.
In general, you don't want anyone to end up just being like a privileged caste because they have like a special weird carve-out in the tax system.
And you want to encourage efficient, or efficient is like a weird thing.
You want to encourage productive and positive behaviors because people respond to incentives.
And that's one of the reasons people talk about why a land tax is good because it's the tax on the unimproved value of land.
It only encourages making land more useful, more productive, and getting stuff done.
Right, because you, because there is an incentive structure based on I don't want to renovate this house or improve this land because then I can't afford the upgrade exactly.
Whereas if it's just tax on land value, you want to make it useful.
You want to make it more valuable.
You want to add on.
Oh, there's no penalty for making it more valuable.
There's no penalties for making it.
Exactly.
I think that's a good place.
Yeah.
Well, just let's see if there's anything else.
Let's see.
I mean, you said property tax is not an elderly issue.
It is a family issue.
My husband and I are not elderly.
Our neighbors and local friends are not elderly.
That's all true.
That's all true.
It's not only elderly people who pay property taxes, but we heard what Ron DeSantis said there.
This is clearly, this is overtly aimed at being an aid to elderly people because they are more likely to pay these things.
And you have to look at the overall trend.
It's not what every individual person does.
My sister's younger than me.
She owns a home with kids.
Another sister, my other sister's also married.
She owns a home with kids.
I assume my brother will buy a home.
I don't own a home, but I do own, I own properties that pay, I am a partial owner of properties that pay property taxes.
So they do affect me still.
But.
Well, it's baked into your rent.
Well, yeah, the rent.
Yeah, I mean, listen, you've convinced me on one point.
I will contest or I will concede.
And that is that you build up a 401k, right?
For when you retire, you draw down your retirement as you get older.
It would make sense in the same way that the value of an asset that's not your 401k, your home has appreciated in value.
You draw down like the reverse mortgage thing got me.
I know some people hate the idea of 100%.
Some people are really mad because some people say they're a scam.
I know there's debates about that.
No, I mean, listen, essentially what you're doing is you're taking equity out of your home to augment your income.
Yeah.
You don't want, I mean, basically what should happen is that if you end up passing away and your children inherit that home, that they can still sell it and be the owners of it.
So you don't want a reverse mortgage where the because eventually what happens with a reverse mortgage is that they own your home, right?
That's the reason it's a scam.
But you could take out, I mean, another option would be you take out a home equity line of credit or something like that, right?
Where you where you borrow against the equity that's in your home.
You have to make a monthly payment at that point.
But say you take out half a million bucks to make your payments.
You use part of that to pay the note, I guess, and then you would use the other to meet your basic needs.
I don't know.
I'm conflicted.
I'm conflicted, especially if somebody's fixed income was able to meet, say, property taxes when you turn 65, when you retired, and your house accelerates.
I mean, I think you should stop assessing it, Doug.
I want to respond to another one.
We had Cynthia.
She says, you're wrong about how Prop 13 works.
Prop 13 helps families more than anything.
And she says, one, not everyone can be productive.
I don't want to have to move because my grandkids are here.
These are understandable things.
I understand them.
But first of all, it's probably not, if you do have to downsize, it's probably not that you have to move across the country.
You may just have to move into a smaller.
Maybe.
But here's what I would say.
So I'm thinking about this, and the more and more I like the idea of locking them as opposed to abolishing them.
And here's why.
Because, again, I think you make special dispensations for the elderly.
I really do believe that.
I actually think it's biblical.
But here's what else I'll say: is you reassess property taxes to keep up with the cost of living, right?
Because as things get more expensive, the police become more expensive, you got to pay fire department, firemen more.
You've got to do all kinds of things.
Things just start costing money.
But if the property values accelerate at such a rate as we've seen.
A real thing, I should flag.
Hold on.
Let me finish my point.
Is that when you get to a certain point, say you're 65, you're essentially making a deal with the elderly that you're, let's just say the average person is going to live to be 78 or something, right?
So they get to 65.
That means they have 13 years on average before the average person's going to be deceased.
Maybe it's 80, whatever.
So my point is, you're basically making a deal with your elderly population to say, hey, listen, once you hit a certain age, we're going to understand that you're still going to pay property tax, but it's going to be locked at the age, what it was when 65.
And yeah, by the time you're probably dead at 78 or 80, you're not paying as much as inflation has now caught up and everything's more expensive.
But you're a subset of the economy.
You're still paying in.
So you're a drag, yes, by the time you're 80, but you're not as much of a drag as if we just abolished them altogether.
Okay.
But then, but that's just for a 13-win year window on average between 65 and 78 when the average American passes away.
Maybe even make it like 68 or 7.
What should I do?
Sure, okay, fine.
Yeah, eligible.
Yeah, but like if you can take that over abolition.
If you can pay your bills for 13 years and we lock it off and you can keep your home and we're not causing you undue stress and trauma, I think that's a fine deal to make with your elderly population.
Now, Cynthia also flags that cities abuse property tax increases to fund their never-ending pensions.
That's totally true.
That's true.
But that is, I would just, I've pointed this out several times.
That's a separate issue.
If your local government spending is insane and out of control, your problem is that local government spending is insane and out of control.
And none of these proposals I'm seeing are going to fix the problem of.
Well, it does put downward pressure on budgets.
Well, they just have to do it.
Well, they're going to get more creative to sweat their budgets.
But what they'll do, they might just pass higher sales taxes, higher income taxes.
That's true.
Income taxes.
And then I'm going to say like Florida, because they actually are well governed.
But you've got to imagine, like, what are they going to do to make up the difference?
I mean, that's a real question.
There's a lot of things they can do, and those things are all more distortionary.
So that's a really good question that should be asked of Governor DeSantis.
What are you going to do with that budget shortfall?
So you're obviously going to make more and less revenue.
And all policies create incentives.
So we have to think about who the winners and losers are and what these incentives do.
Should the government pay to have children, to encourage childbirth?
We already do in some ways.
But for example, like in Texas, there was that law.
And by the way, we could do this on Thought Crime or another day.
But In Texas, there was that law that was saying like you would pay zero taxes if you had 10 kids, which is like kind of pretty wild, which is kind of weird because at 10 kids, you're using a lot of services.
Yeah, a big thing with a lot of this is a difficult one.
A big thing with children is the people who are really falling out in terms of how many kids they have is what you would call the productive middle class.
You know, it's like low-income families will have more.
By the way, this is so true.
And then high-income jumps up again.
Yes, exactly.
You're talking about how policies give winners and losers.
There is a point at which you're really poor and a lot of policies that are in place help you.
And then you get to a certain point and there's like nothing for you.
And as a matter of fact, there's so little for you that there's like the working class or the middle class trap where the tax code basically puts a ceiling on your ability to get up to higher higher.
Especially in California, there's so many they have just cliffs where if you go from making like if you're a mom with two kids and you go from making $20,000 to $70,000, I think you basically lose money because of how many products.
No, totally.
But like it's also true at like $240,000.
Yeah.
Like if you like $250,000, you essentially earn your, you earn your, you earn a penalty.
Yeah.
Like a massive penalty.
So instead of being able to get ahead, like truly become financially independent or truly kind of, you know, achieve that next tier, which by the way is so American.
You should be incentivized to keep producing and keep earning.
But basically the tax code and the penalty structure will make sure that you always stay working class, middle class, whatever.
You're never going to become upper class.
So you have to have such a huge payday to get you to break through that ceiling.
Yeah, this is which is which is unfortunate.
It's a real issue.
I want to bring on Scott Galloway, by the way, because he has a whole book on this.
And he basically says you need to add up your cost of living.
So let's say your annual life costs you $150,000 to live and you want to be able to live that way into retirement.
You've basically got to take that multiple and multiply it by between 15 and 20.
And that's what you need in your retirement to be fully financially independent.
But we invited him.
He was going to come on.
Do you know that when Charlie was still with us?
And he ended up canceling for he wouldn't tell us why.
But he was going to come on.
I think probably because Charlie was too controversial for Scott Galloway.
