In this episode I discuss how the Secret Service handles incidents such as the Kathy Griffin episode. I also discuss a pervasive liberal myth about overpopulation, along with the Paris Accords. http://dailysignal.com/2017/05/31/overpopulation-fears-hoax-heres-higher-populations-actually-good-thing/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWmpRM1pXTXpOell4WldFdyIsInQiOiJ6YnhzS0dXVTNwMGFuVEJsUTRIUjhwb295VzltM0hzMHdJMjVtTzVNWHQ3M0ppbnk2YkpkZmNxMElPWkNSVXZoXC9mb1RFZldHUnEwd0N2TUdNbnhWbFdLZmtOSlBXSmoxeEZGbXRvWXNOQm9aY2dBNjZCVmdQQnVcLzhDRlJKTzFQIn0%3D
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On a show that's not immune to the facts with your host, Dan Bongino.
All right, welcome to The Renegade Republican with Dan Bongino.
Producer Joe, how are you today?
Hey, babe, I'm doing well.
How you doing?
Yeah, man.
Good.
I got a couple of additions to prior shows.
I got a lot of email.
That Universal Basic Income show we did, I got tons of email on.
Tons!
I mean, up there with one of the top two or three shows, content-wise, audience feedback I've ever received.
So, a couple things on that.
And it's just a lot, a lot of news going on.
Let's get right into it.
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All right.
I don't know even where to start today.
Let's go, okay, the breaking news first.
Let's do that because it's important.
The Paris Accords.
So it's breaking this morning that Trump is looking at pulling out of the Paris Accords.
This was a climate change, climate global warming, whatever the left wants to call it today or tomorrow, based on their, you know, their manipulation of language agreement.
And it was an executive agreement.
It was not an international treaty that Obama agreed to in 2015.
Now, just a couple quick notes on this thing.
I don't want to beat it to death.
It's not been confirmed yet, but it's breaking today that Trump is leaning heavily towards pulling out.
Number one, I think it is a good idea, but let me give you the pros and cons again so we can do a reasonable show where you can make a reasoned analysis, you know, unlike how liberals handle business here.
The pros to this is this could be used as a far-left interest group bludgeon to file lawsuits against companies who don't comply with this, even though it's not an international treaty.
The left will sue for anything, and the gist of it is the Paris Accords, the agreements, Joe, was that Countries would set these emissions controls targets.
In other words, they would release less greenhouse gases.
The difference between this and the Kyoto agreements were, this was kind of a, it's been referred to as a bottom-up agreement.
In other words, countries could set their own targets for emission controls, greenhouse gas controls.
Kyoto was top-down, meaning that the agreement said, you all will do this.
All of you, you get what I'm saying?
So, Kyoto, you all have to set this target for greenhouse emissions controls, greenhouse gas controls, the Paris Accords agreements where you countries individually will set their own targets.
Now, the pros to this are, excuse me, the cons, which I just went through, I think the left will use this as a bludgeon to sue the snot out of everyone in the United States all the time, so I think it was a great idea to get out of it.
The pros of it, even from a conservative perspective, a relatively conservative perspective, is some are saying, well, there's nothing binding about it, Joe.
Which there isn't.
Right.
Matter of fact, even the signatories to the Paris Accords have said that it was really a name and shame game.
In other words, that if you didn't, say, cut your greenhouse gas emissions according to your own country's tailored individual targets, that there's nothing they can really do.
They can only name and shame you.
Which, again, I'm not saying we should have stayed in.
I think it was a good decision to pull out of these things.
But I'm just saying, some conservatives have said, well, this thing's not legally binding anyway, so we might as well get a seat at the table, right?
For these talks, when they continue to go on.
But given the gravity of the situation, I don't buy that.
Why should we have a seat at the table for a table that can be used to bludgeon us over the head with lawsuits?
I don't see the logic in that.
And it was one big problem I had with the Paris Accords, it's a big takeaway for you all.
There's a section of it that talks about finance flows to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
Whoa, whoa!
Time out!
You know where I'm going with this, because we've done these shows before.
Whenever you start talking about, quote, finance flows between countries for greenhouse gas emissions, what does that mean?
That means redistribution, babe.
According to Joe Armacost's language.
Absolutely.
Make no mistake, this is going to be used in the future to get U.S.
taxpayers to pay off developing companies because those developing companies have been, you know, quote, exploited by U.S.
capitalism and freedom and we had our moment in the sun and we're really rich and it's now the best opportunity to take money from U.S.
taxpayers and give it to Zimbabwe because we clearly took advantage from them in developing our own economic engine.
It's nonsense.
It's all crap.
It's all part of the father.
So whenever you see finance flows in an agreement, run for the hills because it is a raid on us taxpayers.
We are where we are because of American ingenuity, American entrepreneurialism and American hard work.
We owe it to ourselves.
We don't owe it to anybody else.
We steal our prosperity from anybody else.
So when I saw finance flows and an agreement was signed, I was like, run for the hills and run fast.
Okay.
Kathy Griffin, whoa, what the hell happened with that yesterday?
So, comedian, I've been getting a lot of comments on this given my history as a Secret Service agent.
Kathy Griffin, D-list comedian at best, maybe even the F-list, who knows?
She is a total disaster.
Released a photo yesterday.
She's a big, rabid anti-Trumper.
She put a photo out.
Who told her this was a good idea?
I have no idea.
Of her holding a decapitated, bloody head of Donald Trump.
You can look at the picture yourself.
You saw it, right Joe?
Yeah, it's disgusting.
Did you guys cover it on the show?
Yeah, we did.
It's horrendous.
It's gross.
You know, folks, you read my first book about leaving the Obama administration life inside the bubble.
I'm always very complimentary when it comes to talking about the personal characteristics of Obama and not politically, of course.
I think if you listen to the show, you know that.
But I don't get into a lot of the personal stuff with Obama because it's just one who has so much material.
To beat them on politically.
Forget about violence.
I'm just talking about nasty personal stuff.
The fact that Kathy Griffin, someone thought it was a good idea to tell her, with ISIS and all the beheadings and all this real stuff going on in the real world, that it was a good idea to put a decapitated head of Donald Trump and her holding it, is just beyond sick.
I mean, it's really sad.
It really is.
I don't feel bad for her because she's done stupid stuff like this and her apology was phony.
Yeah, it was totally artificial.
But I've been getting a lot of questions on my Facebook page and email and everything else saying, hey, can you please address this from the Secret Service perspective, how this is going to happen?
So here's how this works, folks, in the Secret Service.
The relevant statute here is 18 U.S.C.
871.
U.S.C.
stands for United States Code.
18 U.S.C.
871 is the criminal code section that covers threats to the president.
And here it is in a nutshell for you and how the Secret Service is obligated to go forward on these cases based on the criminal statute.
There are two components of the criminal statute when it comes to pictures like that of the decapitated head of a prison.
It has to be done the threat.
It has to be done knowingly and willingly.
Now, you have to have both components.
It's not an either or.
So, let's talk about knowingly first, and she definitely fits the knowingly category.
If I were to type, let's say, an email threat to the president, let's make it an even easier example.
Let's say it's a snail mail threat, and I put it in an envelope and I address it to the White House, and I say, hey Joe, can you do me a favor?
Can you mail this?
And you have no idea what it is, but it's a threat to the president, and you mail it, technically you've committed a crime.
But the reality is you haven't because 871 requires knowingly, and you didn't know.
You didn't know it was in the envelope.
So there's no disputing the fact that Kathy Griffin, actually technically didn't commit a crime.
I should be precise on that, especially if we're going to talk legalities.
Kathy Griffin, there's no question, she knowingly did it.
It's her.
She agreed to it.
She's on tape talking about the ramifications of it.
So she knowingly did this.
Now, was this a willing threat to the life of the president?
This is where you get into some legal problems here.
Now, this was unquestionably in horrendously bad taste.
But can you make a legal case in court, if you were to go arrest Kathy Griffin for threatening the President, that she willingly did this, understanding that this was a legitimate threat?
In other words, there's some kind of an intent, criminal mind, mens rea component to this, that this was willingly done to show that this was a threat to the President of the United States.
Like she knew and understood that this was a threat.
You get what I'm saying?
Yeah.
And folks, I think the Secret Service is probably going to go and interview her.
I'm guessing.
I don't have any inside information on it.
I haven't asked.
I tried not to get involved in active threat investigations or call up contacts about this stuff because it's very sensitive.
I don't want to put people on the spot.
But my guess is, knowing the Secret Service, she's gonna get a visit.
But I don't think she's going to be arrested.
I just don't.
Because there's absolutely no way a prosecutor's gonna be able to prove that she really was going to go and decapitate the President.
It's just not...
I mean, I may disappoint you, I understand it was in horrendously bad taste, but I don't think anything legally is going to happen to her.
I think her career's over.
I think she's going to suffer greatly for this.
But I just want to address one more component of this, Joe, because it's really important, and I think from an inside Secret Service perspective, I need to put this out there as a warning to any other far-left radical nutbag like Kathy Griffin who thinks this is a good idea.
In my 12 years as a secret service agent, I spent a lot of time in protective intelligence squads.
Now, I addressed this in my third book coming out in September, but protective intelligence investigations are basically threat cases.
People threaten the president, and there's a specific squad of secret service agents in each office, and they go out, and that's what they do.
We do threat analysis, and we determine if that person's a threat.
Folks, there are people out there with severe psychological disturbances who live in an entire set of delusional belief systems.
This kind of stuff, if it even remotely incentivizes one of these troubled people to go forth and do something that was only previously just an afterthought in their mind, then you have a role in causing a real national crisis.
Now, I'm not saying that Kathy Griffin's stupid, poor taste, horrible picture is going to inspire someone to do this, but I also can't tell you with 100% certainty that it wouldn't.
Because I've interviewed these people, and if you hear them talk, you would be like, my gosh, these people live in a totally different world.
I mean, I can't tell you how often we would hear things about aluminum foil.
What aluminum foil?
No, I'm not kidding.
I'm not making this up.
I have an aluminum foil liner in my hat because it keeps the rays out of my head.
That's not a joke.
Joe, people say all the time about tinfoil cap.
There's a reason that's said, because it's true.
A lot of people think that.
The CIA's beaming rays in my head.
I've heard that a thousand times.
You see a picture like this and someone gets an idea, like, oh look, Kathy Griffin said it was okay, let me follow through.
You know, you have a role in causing a real destructive event, and I tweeted that out yesterday in my time as a Secret Service agent.
This woman, this D-list actress, doesn't understand the damage these types of pictures can do.
So, you know, we as conservatives call out Fake conservatives when they used to do really dumb stuff with Obama.
And it's, you know, it's the left's job now.
And I applaud a lot of the people, by the way, to be fair to everyone in this.
I applaud a lot of the people on the left who have called this out in unequivocal terms.
Anderson Cooper did a good job calling it out from CNN.
He, of course, hosts the New Year's Eve show with Kathy Griffin, and it was unequivocal, his condemnation.
Chelsea Clinton as well, who said, listen, this is just a really stupid thing to do.
Again, I disagree with these people politically, but I think we do have to be fair and say, you know, good job.
We would do the same thing if someone were to, you know, if some D-list, you know, clown who claims to be a conservative put a picture of Obama, God forbid, his head, bloody head on there, we would be the first to call him out.
Joe, you and I have done this, so we have the bona fides here.
Listen to the show.
Hey, dude.
I'm glad you did this, because when we were doing the show this morning, I was kind of hoping to hear it from your perspective as an ex-Secret Service agent, because you know all the ins and outs, and I appreciate that.
Thanks.
Yeah, yeah, no, thank you.
It's got a lot of Facebook messages on it, too, and people were, you know, they were interested in knowing what's going on.
Okay.
Um, the universal basic income show I got, I'm getting the feedback has been just incredible on this show.
I mean, it just continues to go on and on.
Uh, I don't want to recap the show again, cause I don't like wasting any of your time, but the show was about Mark Zuckerberg speech.
Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook gave a speech and he suggested that everybody in the United States should be entitled to a universal basic income, which is exactly that.
It's say a government check for, you know, The amounts and how it's going to be handled, there are a number of different proposals, but for the sake of brevity on this show, let's say it was just $30,000.
Everybody would get a check from the government for $30,000.
Now, I'm strongly against this, but a woman emailed me yesterday, and I appreciate the feedback on the show, I think her name was Chris, or, I'm sorry, if it's not Chris, my apologies, but I got a lot of email on this, so it's hard to keep track of the names.
And she said, well, listen, you know, you're not really explaining it right.
I mean, this could be done a number of different ways, and it could be done by a sliding scale.
And I did kind of address that in the show.
Now, granted, you are correct, I didn't go into that portion in detail.
And I said, the problem with it is once you create the income cliff, no one's going to want to work past a certain amount of money.
So let's say you get the $30,000 check from the government if you make up to $30,000 a year.
But if you make $30,001, you get nothing.
Now that creates a tax rate of 100% at $30,001.
Why is that?
percent at thirty thousand and one dollars. Why is that?
Because you can either do no work and get thirty thousand or you can work your butt off get thirty
thousand and one. So you effectively have a tax rate of a hundred percent because the minute you work
for one dollar more than thirty thousand the government takes all the money it gave to you before
which is your entire the equivalent of your entire income.
So now you're working for nothing because you don't have to work.
You could have worked a dollar less or not worked and just taken the $30,000 check for sitting home.
So I said, the problem were income clips.
And she said, well, what if there was kind of a sliding scale?
And I did kind of address this a little bit.
In other words, what if you made like $30,001 and then the check was $29,999?
You get what I'm saying, Joe?
Yeah.
And if you made $30,002, it was $29,998, the check from the government.
I get it, folks.
I totally get it.
But I don't think you're considering the problem with that then.
Well, when do you start paying taxes?
In other words, now in effect, what happens?
Does it go down until you make $60,000 and you get a $1 check?
So in other words, Joe, if you make $59,999, do you get a $1 check from the government?
So like a sliding scale, when does the tax paying start?
Because remember, at $59,999, Joe, you're still getting a dollar from the government.
You're not paying for anything.
So now the government, the problem I have with this whole thing is it creates disastrous income tax cliffs if you do it where let's say we do to the poverty line.
Everybody gets a $30,000 check up to the poverty line.
That's the reason conservatives say everybody has to get it regardless of income.
Or you have to make it really, really high so it doesn't matter.
In other words, you have to make it that, Joe, everybody gets a $30,000 check up to, say, $500,000 a year, whatever.
And then after that, people don't care.
I mean, they're not going to not work at $500,000 a year.
Okay.
Folks, those are reasonable proposals, too.
The problem is then it gets really expensive.
The problem I'm trying to tell you is Either way, you lose.
If you give it to everyone to avoid the income tax cliffs, if you give it to everyone, it's super expensive.
It costs between four and six trillion dollars a year.
If you don't give it to everyone, you just give it to the poor, it incentivizes people who are poor to not go to work because they're being paid not to work.
You get what I'm saying, Joe?
Yeah.
And then with the scale problem, well, how does the scale work?
When do people actually start paying taxes?
Folks, it's a mess.
Now, Another critique I got about this, and my sincere apologies to the audience, is we did the show on a universal basic income.
We made a huge mistake.
We did?
Yeah, it wasn't you, it was me.
I never like to leave the audience without an answer.
And I even said, if you go back and listen to the show, and I'm going to propose a better way forward at the end.
And I didn't do it, because I got so lost in the wonkery.
It happens, I'm sorry.
Sure.
So, here's my proposal.
The universal basic income is a dumb idea.
It's just a stupid idea.
There's some good stuff out there, the negative income tax, some decent stuff, but the best way to do this going forward is the fair tax.
That is my opinion.
What's the fair tax?
Scrap all of this stuff with the government handing out income checks to people.
Scrap all.
You can keep a safety net if you want.
I personally think right now that we could get into the wonkeries of S-chip and Medicaid,
but on a pure economically efficient way of looking at a society in general, the best
way to do it is the fair tax.
And the fair tax, for those of you who don't understand what it is, the fair tax is basically
a national sales tax.
It would replace the income tax.
There's a sunset provision in the clause if the income tax doesn't go away.
For those of you worried like, "Oh, well, then they'll do a sales tax and an income
tax."
The sales tax would sunset.
There is legislation out there now for the fair tax.
It's a national sales tax.
And the reason I believe in the fair tax, and I think it's a better idea, is, folks,
taxes are a disincentive to do something.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
There's no other way to look at it.
If you buy a chair, I'm looking at a chair in my studio in front of me, if you buy a chair and the tax is 10%, it increases the price 10%.
Nobody cares.
In other words, Joe, when you go home with the chair, do you ever say to your significant other or little Joe, hey, Joe, I bought this chair for $50, but don't worry, Joe, only $45 was the price.
The other 5% was just tax.
Of course you don't.
Never discussed.
Never.
You come home and you say, I paid $50 for the chair.
So if you only have $45 for a chair, and that's the price of the chair, Joe, right?
$45, the rest is tax.
I got news for you.
You're still not buying a chair because you only have $45.
You don't get to go into the store and negotiate the tax.
The point I'm trying to make is that tax is a disincentive to buy something.
So when we disincentivize things and we increase the cost of it, whether it's a chair or, in the case of an income tax, we're increasing the price of?
Work.
Work costs you money.
Why does work cost you money?
Because the more you work, the more you make, generally speaking.
The more you make, we have a progressive income tax in the United States.
The more you make, the more you pay.
Folks, these are just laws of basic economics.
The more you increase the price of something, the more you create a disincentive.
It's not a total disincentive.
I'm not suggesting that because we have a progressive income tax system where the more you make, the more you earn, and the more you pay as a percentage of your income.
I'm not suggesting that that disincentivizes people to work at all.
I'm just saying that there's no question it's a real effect.
And if it disincentivizes two or three percent of our population from working more, Joe, that's a lot less stuff that gets produced and a lot less wealth that gets produced because people are disincentivized to do stuff.
The fair tax wipes all that out.
Because what does this fair tax disincentivize?
A sales tax doesn't increase the price of work.
It increases the price of consumption.
And you may say, well, why is that a good thing?
Consumption is a good thing.
Folks, consumption can be a good thing, but consumption is generally the destruction of wealth.
Our national wealth is accumulated by savings, by savings, savings, savings, that pours into our capital structure, that invests in factories, that create new stuff, that makes stuff cheaper.
Consumption, if I buy a hot dog and I eat it, I consumed it, I essentially destroyed it.
Now, because we need consumption to stay alive, but when you disincentivize consumption in favor of savings, because remember, in a fair tax, a national sales tax, you're not taxed on your income or your savings at all.
Joe, you could accumulate wealth your entire life and not pay a dime in taxes on it, at least at the federal level.
I'd like that.
Yeah, of course you'd like it, and then later in life.
And also, by the way, the rich tend to consume more, so it tends to work in a progressive fashion.
Now, people say, well, the poor consume more as a percentage of their income.
In other words, even if the rich, let's say you're worth a billion and you spend a million a year, you're still spending more than poor people, but as a percentage of your income, it's less, but it's still a million dollars spent.
Now, if you're poor and you make $20,000 a year, you're probably consuming all of it to stay alive.
So fair enough, but still, the rich are still paying a really heavy portion of it.
So the fair tax is the way to go, and that's one of the reasons I think it's a really good idea.
All right.
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All right.
I saw an awesome story, kind of a pet peeve of mine.
I thought about it in conjunction with the Paris Accords thing, and I just wanted to quickly hammer home some points on it.
Walter Williams has a piece in the Daily Signal today, which I will put in the show notes.
Walter Williams is a fantastic economist who was allegedly told once by another famous economist that, you know, Walter, when you talk about liberty, talk about it with a smile.
And I always found that story kind of humorous.
And he writes this piece about overpopulation, and I thought it was a good piece to talk about quickly in relationship to how the left has got us all in a tizzy about how the world's going to blow up, global warming, global cooling, climate change, the polar bears are dying, the sky's falling, and one of the things they constantly harp on is overpopulation, how it's such a big problem.
And folks, I bring this up because You want to get to know Dan Bongino a little bit right now?
I'm going to tell you a little, if you're interested.
And I just did a Bob Dole, so forgive me.
Bob Dole.
Bob Dole says, never talk about yourself in a third person.
You want to get to know me a little bit?
One of the things that turned me on to conservatism when I was very young, I'm not kidding.
I was in a pharmacy.
I was waiting for a prescription.
I was really sick.
And I picked up a book off the shelves and it was written by a conservative.
And the only reason I'm not saying who is because I'm not sure it's this author, but I remember reading the passage vividly and it was a chapter on overpopulation and it just debunked overpopulation myths.
And I was in college at the time and I thought, overpopulation isn't real?
Like if there was one thing, Joe, I thought was real, right?
I was like, we're clearly all like, we're all going to die.
The mothership is over, we're all going to starve in the future.
The mothership is overpopulated.
The earth is dying.
And I read the chapter, and I'm not making this up, folks.
It wasn't the road to Damascus moment, but it started me on the road to Damascus, the conversion, because I started to question everything.
Like, wow, if overpopulation isn't truly... Is Keynesian economics legit?
Is government debt and government spending legit?
And I started to question everything.
Williams has a piece today which just debunks this whole overpopulation stupidity and in light of the climate accords and all this other stuff, I thought it'd be a good time to talk about it.
Here's just some numbers for you.
Here's one from me.
This isn't from the Williams piece, but I'll get to that in a second.
Joe, the acreage in the continental United States, the lower 48, right?
So get rid of Alaska and Hawaii for a minute.
The acreage.
We have 1.9 billion acres in the lower 48.
Again, we're not even talking about Alaska, which is huge, and Hawaii, which is not so huge, but still a state nonetheless.
You know, Obama, 57 states and all.
How many people are in the world?
Well, 7.5 billion.
So just as a matter of simple math, before we even get into some other economic stuff on this that Williams just totally throws out, do you realize if we stuck every single person in the continental United States, we could give them a quarter acre of land?
My house, by the way, which is not expensive, but isn't cheap either.
And I love my house.
My, my sister's in town today.
She's like, you've got a really nice house.
My house is about a quarter acre.
You could give every person in the whole world a quarter acre lot in the United States and the whole rest of the world would be empty.
All of China, all of Russia, all of Antarctica, all of the Arctic, all of India, Pakistan, you name it.
Turkey, you could empty out the entire world and give people a quarter acre home in the United States.
Does that sound overpopulated to you?
There are all kinds of analogies like this.
Someone was telling me once if we built apartment buildings in Texas that we could stick everybody in the world in the state of Texas with the equivalent floor space of the average apartment in France.
I don't remember the exact numbers on that, but the other one I just told you is just a fact.
We have 1.9 billion acres in the United States, 7.5 billion people.
It's roughly a quarter acre of land for every person in the entire world.
I mean, you could create like your own farm in the yard and the whole rest of the world would be abandoned!
But, again, debunking this stupidity, Walter Williams, I hadn't actually considered the economics of this.
He goes, this is from the Peace Day, let's put you the reader to a test.
See whether you can tell which country is richer and which is poorer just by knowing two countries' population density.
So let's just be clear, let's set the premise here, Joe.
If the liberal kookadoodles are right, and overpopulation is a problem, Then places with higher population density that are, quote, overpopulated would really be suffering, right?
Joe, is that a reasonable premise?
Sounds good to me.
Sounds good to you, of course it does, because you're the audience on BuzzFeed.
Okay, Williams goes on.
North Korea's population density is 518 people per square mile, whereas South Korea is more than double that at 1,261 people per square mile.
Hong Kong's population density Is 16,444 people per square mile, whereas Somalia's is 36.
One more.
Congo has 75 people per square mile.
Singapore has 18,513 people per square mile.
Now, if you're, again, lefty wackos, please tune out now.
This is where we do the facts and the reasonable portion of the show segment, so you can feel free to tune out now.
For all the people left, who are the smart ones, Okay, let's look at the gross domestic products of these countries.
One would have to be a lunatic to believe that the smaller population density leads to greater riches.
North Korea's gross domestic product expressed in U.S.
dollars.
17,396.
And these are millions of US dollars.
This is not 17,000.
You know what I'm saying?
You got to times it by a million.
Yeah.
So North Korea, 17,396.
This is not this is not 17,000. You know what I'm saying?
You gotta times it by a million. Yeah, so North Korea 17,396 South Korea 1 million four hundred and eleven thousand two
hundred and forty six Hong Kong, 320,668.
Somalia, 5,707.
Congo, 41,615.
Singapore, 296,967.
Seems to be a correlation.
Somalia 5,707, Congo 41,615, Singapore 296,967.
Seems to be a correlation.
Seems to be a correlation between higher population density, higher population density and economic
Now, of course, liberals, I'm serious, don't let facts get in the way of a really stupid argument, because almost nothing they say is ever true.
That's been kind of an ongoing theme of this show.
But debunking it is so easy that it only requires a modicum of research for you to make your liberal friends look silly.
The simple takeaway is this.
If overpopulation is a problem, then how come countries with a greater population density than poor countries are, in fact, rich and the other ones are poor?
It doesn't make any sense.
The correlation is the opposite.
It's the inverse.
You're just making it up.
And again, the fact that we're overpopulated, what are you basing that on?
I mean, the fact we could fit everybody in the world in the United States with a quarter acre of property and abandon the rest of the globe, again, in some limited circles we would call that a clue, but again, not you guys.
Hey, one more thing I got from an email.
I know I'm stuffing a lot in today's show, but yesterday we had record.
If I told you how many downloads we got on yesterday's show, folks, it'd blow your mind.
Me and Joe this morning were like, did that just happen yesterday?
We're doing the numbers of a big major market radio station, so thank you.
A big, fat thank you to you.
But I have been getting a lot of feedback on stuff, and I'd like to address it.
One guy sent me an email about purchasing power parity.
And the point I tried to make is, Despite eight years of Barack Obama, we are still kicking caboose when it comes to GDP and the economy.
Well, a guy sent me a nice email and he said, yeah, but I've heard this, you know, lefties try to debunk this, say, well, based on purchasing power parity, the Chinese really have a bigger GDP in the United States.
Let me just throw a fire extinguisher on that silly liberal fire right away, because everything liberals say is pretty much true.
And, you know, there's some conservatives who will try and argue this stuff, too.
Purchasing power parity is In essence is this.
It's the idea that your money in China, in the local currency, can buy a similar or greater amount of stuff as your money in the United States can.
Folks, the whole idea of that, though, is silly.
Because it requires domestic production.
The idea is, Joe, well, if the economy's not doing that great, then people aren't working for high wages.
So, I saw one example.
So, if you go get a haircut in China, It may cost you a dollar in U.S.
dollars, but if you get a haircut in the United States, it may cost you $20.
So technically, purchasing power, right?
Gotcha.
Parity, excuse me, you can accumulate a relatively similar basket of goods for far less money.
Folks, the whole idea of that is silly.
The idea of making international comparisons, though, is not taking out those variables.
In other words, not saying, like... Joe?
Hmm?
Here's the problem with getting a haircut in China.
You're in China!
That's the problem.
That's the whole reason purchasing power parity stinks.
You're in an authoritarian regime.
You don't have the access to the United States court systems and contract law, our entertainment, our restaurants, our dining, our clean food system.
That's the whole point.
That's why purchasing power parity is stupid.
Purchasing power parity.
That's like a really nasty tongue twister.
That's why the whole idea of it's dumb.
My humble opinion is deployed by lefties to talk down the U.S.
economy and say, oh, well, just because the U.S.
economy is 18 trillion and China's 11, you can buy more in China.
Yeah, you're in China.
That's why Chinese, everybody wants to immigrate to the United States or emigrate to the United States.
That's the whole point!
It doesn't make any sense!
I don't want to get a haircut in China!
I want to get a haircut in the United States!
The extra money I'm paying, when I'm making more, is for access to the United States system of government.
It's just, I think it's just, so that's my, to the person who emailed me, it was a, I think it was a guy, that's my answer to that, that purchasing power parity is just silly.
In this case, nominal GDP, I think, does matter.
You know, I have used some different arguments when it comes to Scandinavian countries to debunk socialism, but that's different because when you, people say, well, purchasing power parity, they'll argue for, you know, Denmark and Sweden and say, well, look, you know, they're wealthier in the United States and in nominal terms.
I discussed this on a prior show.
The bottom line is this.
They're paying for a massive cost of government over there as well.
So it just, it doesn't apply.
You have to live in these countries in order to get access to their markets and nobody wants to do it.
So that's why it's a silly system.
All right, folks, please don't miss tomorrow's show.
This is important.
I want to discuss this idea called critical theory.
There was an incident that happened in a college in Washington that was really horrendous.
There was a day of absence, they called it, where all the white people were wrestling.
Did you hear this story?
Yeah.
There's something behind this that you really need to know about and need to understand in order to effectively argue with your liberal friends.
I'm talking about your smart liberal friends, not your stupid ones.
There are a lot of dumb ones who know nothing.
I'm talking about the ones who actually understand this thing called Critical theory on what this is.
It's very, very, very damaging.
And at tomorrow's show, I'm going to break it down for you and tell you why that thing that happened in that college campus where white people were supposed to leave the campus, why this is symptomatic of a larger ideological fight.
You have to be read in on.
All right, folks, thanks again for tuning in.
I'll see you all tomorrow.
You just heard the Dan Bongino Show.
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