In this episode I address our govt spending crisis and its inevitable effect on your wallet. I also address the collapse of the Venezuelan economy and the media's attempts to provide cover for socialism. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/14/world/americas/venezuela-collapse-analysis-interpreter.html?emc=edit_th_20170515&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=43987258&referer= Finally, I discuss another part of Obamacare which is going to be difficult to repeal. http://www.hoover.org/research/no-exit-health-care?utm_source=hdr&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2017-05-16
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We have to call it what it is and we have to stop being delicate about it.
Get ready to hear the truth about America.
We're not like the leftists.
The conservatives don't need safe spaces.
They don't need lollipops and coloring books and teddy bears.
I'm good, okay?
On a show that's not immune to the facts with your host, Dan Bongino.
Hi, welcome to The Renegade Republican with Dan Bongino.
Producer Joe, how are you today?
Hanging in there, bro.
How about you, man?
Yeah, man, doing good.
A little bit of natural peanut butter.
Love that stuff.
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Okay.
Uh, big busy week again.
A lot of emails, Joe, yesterday on the Seth Rich controversy, the DNC staffer who was tragically murdered.
Yeah.
And I made the point during yesterday's show, if you haven't heard it, I suggest you go back and listen.
Just based on some experience I've had as a police officer and federal agent, Listen, it's just an opinion, folks.
If I had the information that the guy was murdered by the DNC to cover up the Russian leaks, I'd obviously share it with you.
I'm just giving you my opinion, having worked inside the federal government, having had clearances at the highest level that it is not easy to cover up a crime like a murder of the I love this guy.
I know it's been making its way around on social media, and I appreciate all the feedback.
A lot of Facebook posts, a lot of email, people who feel otherwise.
I totally respect that.
A lot of people who've been around the Clintons have certainly mysteriously died.
Right, Joe?
I mean, we had Vince Foster.
These are facts.
They have mysteriously died, many of them, but I just don't...
I don't think these people are that smart enough to pull off and hide conspiracies such as this.
So that's just my opinion, but thanks for all the feedback on the show.
Okay.
A couple big stories I wanted to get into yesterday that we just didn't have enough time because we're limited here.
I want to get you and make sure you guys can commute to work and listen to the show and not be overwhelmed with information.
The Puerto Rico situation is really on my mind.
Puerto Rico is insolvent.
They have spent too much money.
People have lent the Puerto Rican government money, government money, which was then thrown away.
In some limited circles, Joe, we would call that a clue.
to possibly, you know, to fund. They just did not have the income stream to fund all this, all these government
programs.
Now, in some limited circles, Joe, we would call that a clue, that big government spending over time doesn't work,
but liberals are immune to this thing called evidence. They just are absolutely, uh, they, they,
they're so hard-headed and pig-headed sometimes that when evidence slams them in the face that
their, their operating mechanisms aren't working to fund government, they just ignore it.
Now, I wanted to bring this up for a very simple reason, folks.
Interest rates.
Interest rates.
I want to talk about Puerto Rico, Obamacare today, and the corporate tax, but I want to talk about it in terms of big umbrella issues and get to some points you're not hearing anywhere else.
Here's why this can't possibly continue.
There is a nexus between government debt Growth and interest rates.
And interest rates are ultimately going to determine how long you can continue this liberal mode of governing.
The reason I'm bringing this up is, I read a piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday where bondholders, in other words, people who lent the Puerto Rican government money and were given bonds in return, I brought this up again last week as well, but it's now it's getting really feisty, Joe.
They're now sniping at each other because they all want to get a hold of their money back first.
So Joe, If you lent Puerto Rico money, and I lent Puerto Rico money, and Puerto Rico goes bankrupt, and Puerto Rico can only pay you back, say, a quarter of what you lent them, so you lent them $100, and they can only pay back $25, and say they can only pay back one of us, then that pits me and you against one another, and all this right now is brewing.
There are hedge funds that are going after sales tax bond holders, and it's turned into a real mess.
Now, the problem with this, folks, in the future, For places such as Puerto Rico, is they're not going to be able to borrow money again in the future without sky-high interest rates.
And this is one of the things, I mean I'm not going to beat this topic to death, but I think it's important that you understand that liberal governing has a real cost.
So for the liberals listening who tend to ignore that cost, that over time it will always catch up with you no matter what.
Now here's how it's going to catch up with you in real life.
Puerto Rico is now going to pay in the future an extraordinarily high interest rate on those bonds.
In other words, if Puerto Rico tries to borrow $100 in the bond market, they're going to have to pay an interest rate, I don't know, 10, 15, who knows, 20%?
Depending on the risk.
And the risk is going to be a lot higher because people who had lent Puerto Rico money in the past At whatever it may be, a 5 or 6% rate, Joe, never got their money back.
So they're going to say, well, I'm not going to give them that money for 5 or 6% because I could lose the money.
I'm going to demand a lot more.
And the reality is, Joe, Anybody can borrow money.
I mean, you know, loan sharks are into money borrowing, money lending business.
Right.
But loan sharks basically say to people, they say, listen, you know, we'll lend you the money, but you're going to give us 25% or we're going to, you know, we're going to break your thumbs.
I mean, that's just how this stuff works.
So, interest rates, you can borrow or lend money at any rate.
It's just all that matters is how much you're willing to pay.
Puerto Rico is going to have to pay a lot of money in interest rates.
Now, how does that affect you?
Well, in the United States, eventually, folks, this is going to happen as well if we continue down this path we're going down.
Now, what does this have to do with the nexus I told you before, government debt, growth rates, and interest rates?
As long as the United States is growing at a reasonable enough rate, economically, this is why growth and tax cuts are so important, why I emphasize them on the show all the time.
If we can get the economy growing at 3%, 4%, even 5% if we're lucky, and 5% has happened before, happened twice under Reagan.
84 and 85.
5% a year, by the way, growth rates are extraordinary in global economic terms, especially for an advanced economy.
But if we can get the economy, remember this all compounds, growing at 5%, that even at an extraordinary debt load, in other words, all the money we owe now, 20 trillion dollars, as I said in a prior show, Investors who are willing to lend us money are willing to lend it because over time they understand that the United States economy is going to grow and they'll have the income stream, even though they owe a lot of money, Joe, to pay for those debts.
Therefore, interest rates will be suppressed because those people who lent us money, even though we owe a fortune, Don't see us as screwing them over and basically going bankrupt and not paying them back.
Make sense?
Puerto Rico has a big problem because they don't have the growth rates or the income stream to pay for any of that.
So that's why growth rates are pivotal.
Your economy has to grow.
Debt is not as significant a problem if you can continue growing.
We haven't been growing under the eight years under Obama.
Now, when those interest rates go up because people in the market see your economy isn't growing in the future, and God forbid that happens to us, now you may say to yourself, well, you just said the economy wasn't growing for eight years, so why are interest rates still relatively low in the economy now?
Folks, because we're the safest option around.
That's the simple reality of it, is the United States is still the safest economy in the world, despite the fact that we've had anemic growth rates.
I mean, where are you going to invest right now, Joe?
Russia?
Yeah.
Are you going to invest in France?
50% unemployment amongst the youths, as Joe Pesci would say?
Yeah.
I mean, where are you going to invest?
I mean, you have a couple options right now.
You have Germany.
You have some of the Bells.
The Baltic States, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, you basically have us.
I mean, that's it.
The dollar's very stable.
So despite the fact that we're not growing, people are still investing in the United States.
But there's no guarantee that that's going to go on forever.
Once those interest rates go up, they filter throughout the entire economy, folks.
Meaning it's going to cost you more to get a car.
You know, what are you paying?
6%, 7%, 8%, 9%, 10% on a car loan?
You want to pay 20%, 30%?
You say, oh, Dan, that's silly.
That's not going to happen.
Joe, you remember the 80s, the mortgage rates in the 80s?
Oh, yeah, they were high.
Gosh, high.
They were 10%, 15%.
I think my aunt got a mortgage at like 18%.
I mean, now they're down at 4%.
That means you're going to be paying more money per month because the interest rate is going to be high, which is built into the cost of the loan.
Obviously.
If the interest rate's high enough, you may get that negative amortization where you're not even paying off the interest and the principal gets higher every year.
So folks, Puerto Rico is an example of just how ugly this can get in the United States when things turn.
And things always turn.
Because as Milton Friedman said often, all debts are paid.
Whether by the debtor or the creditor.
Meaning if the person lends you money and you don't pay them back, that debt was paid just by the person who lent you the money.
They never got the money back.
You lend someone money and they pay it back?
The creditor.
The debtor pays it back.
But the debtor or the creditor, one of them, always pays.
And that's the problem we're running in the United States.
I saw this with Puerto Rico, though, and I thought, gosh, I wish people would just understand the liberals.
You can't have it both ways.
You can't fight for increasing higher amounts of government debt year over year, which is what they're fighting for.
And then at the same time, fight against tax cuts that would grow the economy, and getting rid of red tape, you know, things, Joe, that would incentivize businesses to invest.
You can't fight them both at the same time.
It's just not possible.
And you would think, like, the evidence of Puerto Rico and every other state that tried this big government spending thing would slam them in the face.
But, you know, Libs, don't let information and data get in the way of a really stupid argument.
You're really good at that.
Okay, another story I saw over the weekend, which I was really kind of flabbergasted by.
I read this Washington Post piece about socialism and I tweeted it out.
I'm sorry, but I'm just not going to put this one in the show.
I have to read the Washington Post because It's part of the job here, reporting on their chicanery, their shenanigans.
But if you want to click on it, go find it yourself.
But here's the bottom line.
I'm not going to dig into this too deep, but they mentioned this piece about the failure of Venezuela, and along the same lines about how liberals are immune to facts and data, and how they're immune to the fact that Puerto Rico tried big government spending, and now they are completely out of money.
They're out of money.
The debtors are fighting with each other.
Creditors are fighting with each other.
Everybody's fighting with everybody in Puerto Rico.
The same exact thing right now is happening in Venezuela just on a mass tragic scale.
Venezuela's completely collapsed, there's no money left, people are eating pigeons and dogs, there are riots in the streets.
So Tucker Carlson had this kid on the other night talking about how it really wasn't the fault of...
Socialism was the fault of these rapacious capitalists, and I had a laugh, it was a silly interview.
But he was just a kid, I don't know his name, but he's just a dopey kid who doesn't know anything.
But the Washington Post piece was really offensive, because these are allegedly brilliant people.
And I say allegedly, because it's... I mean, common sense would just dictate that, you know, if you have a socialist leader, And he implements a socialist system and subsequent to that enactment of socialist policies, people are eating dogs and pigeons and beating themselves, you know, beating up the government, government beating up them in the street.
You would think you would call that a problem, but that's not what they blamed it on, Joe.
The Washington Post piece blamed it on populism.
Now, what?
Yeah, I don't even think socialism appears anywhere.
It's a long piece, too.
It's not like a blog entry.
It's a long piece.
They blamed it on populism.
Now, the why matters.
I say this all the time in the show, folks.
Why would the Washington Post have an interest in indicting populism rather than socialism?
What's the MO here?
Why do that?
As always, I will explain to you why.
Thank you.
Well, who has been known as a populist who just won a national election in the United States?
Donald Trump.
Trump.
I mean, just Google Trump populism.
The Washington Post is trying to plant the seed already that populism, which is this It's the general idea that you run a political campaign based on policies that will appeal to the masses, that are popular, but not necessarily economically feasible.
Does that make sense, Joe?
Like, a populist campaign would be, you know, see what polls at 51%.
Like, people generally like Medicare.
Okay, let's say we'll save Medicare.
Okay, well, that's what Trump did.
You know, tax cuts poll at 53%.
Okay, let's Let's advocate for tax cuts, even though that one makes sense and, you know, Medicare's broken, tax cuts work.
But it doesn't matter when you're running a populist campaign, you want to appeal to the masses.
By the way, they've run populist campaigns their whole lives, but now that Trump's in charge, they're afraid that this populism is going to lead to their media apparatus in the Washington Post.
They're trying to insinuate that Trump's populist approach is leading to a blindness in politics.
A deadly Idi Amin type phenomenon where the strong man takes over just like he did in Venezuela because people have allegiance to him and not the economics of their policies and all of a sudden this is going to lead to tyranny and death in the streets in America just like Venezuela because Maduro and Chavez did the same thing.
Folks, this is just insanity.
This is insane.
Now, I don't doubt that Maduro and Chavez, who implemented socialism in Venezuela, did make a populist appeal in certain respects, especially in struggling areas of the country.
I don't dispute that.
But the populist appeal was based in socialism.
Donald Trump has never, ever, ever made an appeal for socialism.
Socialism is the government control, the means of production.
Trump has never advocated for socialism.
He has advocated for some big government policies, there's no doubt about that, the likes of which we've seen in some Scandinavian countries, but that's not socialism.
Socialism is when government controls the means, economic means of production, and that is clearly what Maduro and Chavez did.
In Venezuela.
The economy subsequently collapsed.
So it's just silly for the Washington Post to not be able to put two and two together intentionally, hoping that you avoid the obvious connection.
The connection being that socialism leads to death, destruction, economic depravity, and the like.
They just don't want you to put two and two together, so they're blaming it on populism, hoping you connect Venezuela to strongmen.
Strongmen to Donald Trump.
Donald Trump to tyranny.
Does it make sense, Joe?
That's the leap they want you to make.
Now, you know what?
I should put the piece in there.
I'll put it in the show notes.
I hate giving the Washington Post clicks, but I'll dig it up and put it in the show notes at Conservative Review.
But read it yourself.
But understand, the piece is strictly a propaganda piece.
It's not done to inform you.
The piece was done, again, for you to make that leap.
Populism, Venezuela, Venezuela, similar to Trump.
Even though the populist policies are two completely different things.
One was advocating socialism.
One was appealing to tax cuts.
That's certainly not socialism.
And some other things that were big government-type policies.
But Trump never advocated for the government ownership of the means of production.
It's just silly and ridiculous.
But they're hoping that you make that jump.
Venezuela, strongman, strongman.
Trump, Trump, Tyranny!
Oh, there we go!
It's like that, what was that game?
Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon or whatever.
That's what it is.
They want you to do that.
They want you to make this ridiculous leap from that, from Venezuela.
Seven Degrees of Tyranny.
Yeah, which is silly.
It's just dopey.
It's ridiculous.
All right.
I got a lot of feedback also on yesterday's piece with Daniel Greenfield's piece, The Civil War Is Here.
And folks, I covered it a little bit yesterday.
I said I'd You know, dive into it a little more today.
And I just, I thought of a couple, couple other things.
For instance, yesterday's show and the premise of Daniel Greenfield's piece at Front Page Mag, which is in yesterday's show notes called The Civil War is Here Is It.
And this is the takeaway.
I put this on my Facebook page.
I got a lot of comments on it.
You can't have two sides fighting in a constitutional republic where one side is fighting a political fight.
An ideological fight, and the other side is only fighting an ideological fight.
What I mean by that, Joe, is if conservatives in this country are continuing to fight on ideological grounds, you know, conservative policies, tax cuts, school choice, that kind of thing, right?
Individual patient control of health care.
But they're also fighting politically.
And conservatives win.
But liberals are only fighting ideologically.
Meaning, even though they keep losing politically, they're not recognizing the results of political elections.
In other words, they're still pushing their ideology, even though they're not in charge.
They're not recognizing.
There's no path forward.
We're already involved in the Civil War.
And the critical takeaway from yesterday's show is that you're going to have to pick sides in this, folks.
And this is the problem with what's going on right now.
Do you see what I'm getting at with the political ideological divide, Joe?
One side is only fighting ideologically, and another example I thought of yesterday of this is Obamacare.
You know, when Obamacare was implemented, the executive reigned supreme.
The president reigned supreme.
That was all they cared about.
They said, no, Obamacare said this, and you guys all have to follow, and people did.
But now it's interesting.
So the sovereignty of the states was suppressed.
That was like a beach ball being kept underwater because Obama was in charge.
But then Obama gets out of office and Trump implements a perfectly legitimate executive order, makes some changes in the DOJ to how they're going to enforce immigration, and all of a sudden you see states pushing again for states' rights in immigration.
So in other words, states' rights matter, but just only when we're in charge.
Yeah.
Yeah, when we're in charge of the states.
But states' rights don't matter when we're in charge of the federal government.
There's not a principle there, folks.
In other words, they're fighting strictly for ideology because when they lose an election, they don't represent and they don't recognize legitimate political authority.
So the problem in this is eventually, I mean, you have what Ron Paul discussed and I talked about in my second book a little bit in one of the chapters going on right now.
You basically have a soft secession going on, Joe.
I mean, this isn't hyperbolic or dramatic stuff for effect.
I mean, you really have a soft secession.
I mean, if the left is only going to recognize a centralized executive in the form of the president, when the president is a liberal, then you don't have a constitutional republic or the United States.
I mean, how is it any other way?
There's nothing dramatic about what I just said other than the fact that it's true.
If they're only going to recognize the legitimate power of the government now that the conservatives don't do this because they fight politically and ideologically and when they lose politically they may not agree with the central governing power but...
They respect its authority, which is odd because Obama did things that were completely unconstitutional and weren't even in his authority.
And yet conservatives, many of them, not all, there were some people who have had kind of, you know, what Levine would call them, neoconfederate tendencies.
But the large swath of conservatives does not want to break up the United States.
You don't see this now with liberals, and folks, this is a real problem.
I don't... I've got to be very careful here.
I don't... Because I don't want to be seen as condoning.
I obviously believe in the republic, in the 50 states, but I don't... Everybody has to... The whole thing about a... Let me just give you an analogy, because we're good with stories.
The whole thing about a treehouse and club rules is that if you're a member of the treehouse, that everybody has to be subjected to the rules.
Like, if there's no eating in the treehouse, and there's 10 members, and three members don't care and eat in a treehouse, then what happens, Joe?
Everybody starts eating in a treehouse, and all of a sudden there's no rules, and the treehouse is a mess, and no one wants to be in a treehouse, so the treehouse falls apart, and the club falls apart because nobody respected the rules.
We're getting to that point, folks, where you have to start to ask yourself where if the rules only matter when they're in charge, you know, what are we gonna do?
I mean, you know, I said in my book, You already have states disregarding federal drug laws.
I don't agree with all of them, but you have them disregarding federal drug laws.
And I wrote in a book, like, what are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
You're going to send the army and invade Colorado because of their drug laws?
The answer is, of course, you're not going to do that.
So when you don't have people respecting the rules, let me be clear on this.
This isn't the Civil War days, folks.
There is no viable option to maintain the integrity of the union.
So I think Greenfield's piece, even though the title of yesterday's show, The Civil War Is Here, seemed dramatic.
Folks, it's not.
Thank God there's no bloodshed, yet hopefully there'll be none ever.
Pray for that, that there's never any bloodshed involved in this, and I don't see that as being likely.
But I don't see a way to maintain the integrity of the union.
There is no force mechanism to keep people from obeying and understanding.
I mean, they can't even pull sanctuary city funding without the courts right now, people suing in court and using a court in Hawaii to override everybody else.
Folks, it just doesn't make any sense, and how long are conservatives going to put up with that?
So let me get this straight.
We come in, Obama does all this unconstitutional stuff, DAPA, DACA, keeps changing Obamacare despite legislative approval, and the states are told, conservative states are told, sit down and shut up?
But then when, you know, when conservatives get in office and win the presidency and implement perfectly legitimate immigration policies, like saying, we're not going to give you federal grants for immigration type stuff if you're not willing to enforce federal immigration law.
And a judge sues and says, you can't do that.
How long can this continue?
So I know we must have some judges listening.
If you're on the federal bench, you have to ask yourself, I mean, have you contributed to this?
Because the union is dismantling, maybe not de jure, but certainly de facto right now.
Very troubling stuff.
All right, folks, have you signed up for CRTV yet?
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Take a look at my Austin Goolsbee interview.
I'm really proud of it.
We had like a 20-minute interview about tax cuts that goes into all this.
I think we got him to admit a few things, including that liberals ration healthcare, which I was very proud of.
That was nice of him to do it.
Come on, but it's a really good interview.
Go check it out.
CRTV.com.
Okay.
I wanted to get to two more stories, but I don't think I'm going to.
There's a... Here's one I really want to get at because it's hot in the news right now.
Hoover Institution, Richard Epstein has a piece up.
They have a pretty cool email list and I was reading it yesterday.
And it talks about a topic that's been hot on my mind recently.
This whole idea of community rating and Obamacare and how the... I got a lot of good feedback on that show we did, Joe.
The genius of Obamacare and the essential benefits.
Well, The premise of that, if you missed the show, was that the genius, and I don't mean this as a compliment at all, I want to be crystal clear on this.
The genius of Obamacare mandating that you buy these Cadillac plans, these insurance plans that cover hair transplants and all this other stuff, the genius of the whole thing was they inflated the value of these products to such a degree and they held down the price through community rating because there were government price controls built in.
the government said you have to buy this inflated product, but you can only buy it at a cheap price,
was that they created such massive losses for the insurance companies that they understood
that if they could just keep essential benefits in over time,
I don't wanna repeat the show, but the idea is that they would create such massive losses
that they would drive the insurance companies out of business
and over time they would create government insurance as the only option.
Well, I mean, tragically genius plan to create single payer in the United States, government-run healthcare.
But Richard Epstein has a great piece at the Hoover Institution where he talks about the other peg in this.
I was talking about the essential health benefits and how genius it was that the Democrats so passionately fought for this because they understood once you sell an overpriced Corvette, people are never going to want to go down to the B model Corvette again because they've seen the A model.
Now, one of the other components of it is the community rating, or the idea that you couldn't sell the Corvette for the real price.
You had to sell it for a reduced price, which is what we would call price controls.
In the Obamacare, it's called community rating, but it's a government price control, make no mistake.
Epstein has a really good analysis of this, and he says, listen, the problem with this whole thing is the cross-subsidies, and he's right.
In other words, if you have a price control that says 3 to 1, which I've discussed in the show before, in other words, older folks can only be charged three times as much as younger folks for insurance, even though older folks on insurance cost about six times as much.
Someone has to be subsidized, Joe, because the insurance company can't continue to pay out benefits at a rate of 6 to 1 when they're only charging 3 to 1.
It just doesn't mathematically make any sense.
So what happened was younger people were forced to pay inflated amounts to pay for older people's health care coverage.
And when we say older, just to be clear, we're not talking about people In their mid-60s and older, Joe.
I should have been clearer on this on the show I initially discussed this, because those folks are on, right now, they're on Medicare.
So the tax dollars are being used to pay for them.
So you're paying, you're just paying through a different mechanism.
You're paying through taxes and payroll taxes.
You're not directly paying through Obamacare in subsidies to insurance companies.
That make sense?
Yeah.
Because with Obamacare, I want to be clear, I said older people, and I got some feedback where people said, oh, well, what's the big deal?
You know, so you have younger people paying to finance people in their 70s and 80s.
Well, you're not.
I mean, you are through payroll taxes, but you're not, that's not what Obamacare is.
Obamacare covered the individual market before the Medicare, you know, before people who weren't on Medicare.
So the problem you have now is, and Epstein points this out brilliantly, is the cross-subsidies problem can, no matter how it goes away, it's going to be ugly.
Let me just read this to you quick.
He says, such intense opposition to these key AHCA provisions, which is the Trumpcare policy, is indicative of the huge difficulties that it's going to take to manage cross-subsidies.
If the subsidies are too large, as they are under the current Obamacare plan, then insurance in the individual market will implode because young people will flee from plans that offer them a raw financial deal.
Folks, here's the deal.
I'm going to give you the hard truth here.
I know this is tough to hear, but I assume based on the feedback I get from my audience that you don't come here to be BS.
You want that, you go to some other shows, but don't come here for that because that's not what we do.
The point Epstein's trying to make is, someone's going to pay for people up to their mid-60s healthcare.
Someone's gonna pay.
It's either those people... Now keep in mind, we're not even talking about pre-existing conditions, Joe.
We're just talking about...
Regular, normally healthy folks who happen to be older who just could get more flus and they fall a little more, somebody's going to have to pay for their health care.
The question is, do you create a subsidy so large for them, the older people, that their insurance is cheap?
That the subsidy bankrupts younger people who then drop out because they don't have the money.
Does that make sense, Joe?
So in other words, to make that insurance really cheap for people in their 60s and 50s who, you know, fall more, get sick more, whatever it may be, somebody had to pay.
So if you make it cheap enough, which is what Community Rating did because it capped the price at 3 to 1, Joe, if you make it cheap enough for older people, it's still not cheap for the insurance company.
You got me?
So the money had to come from somewhere, so it came from younger folks who subsequently dropped out because they didn't have the money.
Somebody has to pay!
So the guy says, now if you dump that, we should be honest with people in their 50s, in their 60s, and some in their late 40s who are maybe approaching that time where they need a little bit more medical care.
That for a little while, until the market settles, you may have to pay a little bit more.
Folks, honestly, you may not because Obamacare distorted the market so badly that if we got rid of a lot of the essential health benefits, we could clean this up.
But everyone else's insurance is probably going to stay stable or go down.
Now, we should just be honest and stop faking it because the argument here is a moral and ethical one, Joe.
You know, listen, I'm 42 years old.
I make a decent salary here at Conservative Review.
I've got royalties from books.
I do okay.
You know, neither Joe or I are rich, but we do alright.
Is it really fair, Joe?
How old's little Joe?
17.
Little Joe's 17, Joe's son.
He's not that little anymore, believe me, but when I met him he was little, so he ain't little anymore.
But, little Joe, how fair is it for us, for us, me and you, in a stable income situation, who, you know, have some assets and we're doing okay, how fair is it for us to ask little Joe to compensate us for healthcare?
I mean, folks, Are you interested in an honest conversation, or are you just making this whole thing up?
I mean, you understand that those health care costs are going to have to be paid for.
The cross-subsidies matter.
Either the older folks are going to pay for their own health care, or younger folks are going to pay for their health care.
So you're in the most stable economic position of your entire life, in your 40s and 50s, and you're asking people who are just entering the job market to sacrifice portions of their income to not only pay for their health care, but to pay for yours too?
That's not fair!
Now, why did I bring this up?
Because as Epstein aptly and correctly mentions, and this is why I brought this up this week, and it ties into my essential health benefits show, this could all go away tomorrow, Joe.
Because the cost could come down for everyone if they would just let people buy insurance plans That covered catastrophic insurance and didn't cover hair transplants and vasectomies and toothbrushes and eyeglasses and all this other stuff.
You see what I'm saying?
That older people could offset a lot of those costs and younger people as well if they were just allowed to buy what they needed and not what the government told them.
But they don't want to do that because they want to bankrupt the insurance companies, making sure they can never enter the market at a reasonable price because of the price controls I just mentioned.
Either way, someone's going to get screwed.
Either younger people are going to pay their market share and older people are going to pay more to cover their own health care, or younger people are going to continue to pay more to subsidize older people's health care even though they're in a far worse economic condition.
And ironically, they're not paying it because younger people dropped out of Obamacare.
