Ep. 494 Why Trump Does What He Does and More Embarrassing Liberal Fails
In this episode I discuss a theory about why Trump responds to the media in the fashion that he does. I also address the exploding Illinois budget crisis and why this may be a harbinger for the entire country if we do not change course. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-01/illinois-blows-budget-deadline-pushing-it-closer-to-junk-rating I discuss the California Medicaid crisis and how it relates to the national Obamacare debate. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449126/california-medicaid-unsustainable-costs I also debunk the Democrats' talking point that Medicaid reform is going to cause "people to die" using updated data. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2017/06/30/reality-check-the-obamacare-medicaid-expansion-is-not-saving-lives-part-i/amp/ Finally, I discuss this piece that addresses why some millionaires are receiving Medicaid. https://www.google.com/amp/dailysignal.com/2016/02/09/millionaires-are-qualifying-for-medicaid-under-obamacare/amp/
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I can't just say, trade stinks!
Thanks for tuning in to Dan Bongino Show.
Let's jump right in because we have no time for nonsense.
Get ready to hear the truth about America.
When I was a young man, I don't remember it being sexy to want to allow a nanny state to control my life.
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?
Uh, doing well, sensei.
Joe's, yeah, man, I'll tell you.
It was funny, Joe sent me a text.
I'm already my man, and it came over already M-A-M-A-N, like Maman.
And it made me think of a story.
When I first met Paula and I was dating her, I had to send her a fax.
I forget why.
She was working in Manhattan near the World Trade Center at CIFMA, the Securities Industry Financial Market Association at the time, and I had to send her a fax, and it was a cover sheet on it, and it had the Secret Service thing at the bottom, and it said, S.A.
Dan Bongino, and it must have come over weird, and her friend picked up the fax, and she's like, who's this guy you're dating, Sadan?
Like my mom.
She's like, it's not Sedan.
It's an abbreviation.
S-A-D-A-N.
Not Sedan.
My name was Sedan.
Like Saddam Hussein.
Like Saddam Bongino.
I thought you might have had a four-door, you know?
That's funny.
Funny.
Not Sedan.
Sedan.
That's funny.
I thought of that when you said that over.
My mom.
I noticed that when you said it. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, Hey, uh,
great weekend for me if I can share a quick personal story.
So, you know, I'm really into the ground fighting and Brazilian jujitsu.
So I just got back into it after, you know, a little bit of a five year break because of my arthritic
shoulders.
And so I got my, um, the, the purple belt this weekend and listen, I know.
And you know, that doesn't, you know, I get it. You guys all have busy lives.
You don't need to hear about my personal stuff, but it means a lot to me.
And I just put a nice Facebook post up this weekend because the Brazilian
jujitsu, man, you know how many beatings I took for that real belt,
but I got it a while ago under a guy named Jim thrift, who is a Calvert MMA.
But I, I couldn't, you know, I never actually went out and, you know,
wound up using the belt.
I should have, because I used no-gi training all the time.
But the guy I train with now, Harlan Taylor, was nice enough to give me the belt.
And man, I took a lot of beatings for that.
So this weekend, I was rolling around for 35 minutes with this guy who's really skilled.
And when you do a lot of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, these gis are super thick, folks.
They're like burlap sacks.
They're like those old karate uniforms.
You can't use those because if you grab them, you'll rip them apart.
And my fingers...
I'm not kidding.
I should put a picture on Instagram.
My fingers are about as thick as baseball bats right now.
They are so swollen from grabbing the inside of this guy's gi and rolling around on the mat for 35 minutes.
They're purple and they look like chorizo sausages.
It's horrendous.
Oh, man.
That's why Joe was messing with me when I opened up the show.
So I'm a little sore today, but I feel good.
All right.
I got a lot of stories to get to.
The weekend we had the Trump tweet, but Wrestlemania thing or whatever that was.
There's a lot of stuff to get to.
Let me just explain away quick the Trump tweet before I get into the core of the show, which is going to be liberalism just failing everywhere.
There's a huge crisis going on in California with Medicaid right now.
There's an argument going on about a surtax in Congress.
That's a big deal.
It's a big deal because the Republicans are getting ready to cave again.
And the Illinois budget is imploding in front of our very eyes due to liberal policies.
I mean really imploding, like it's getting very serious in the state of Illinois.
But the Trump tweet, a quick note on this, I was in for Hannity on Friday and I mentioned this.
Listen, I always make my best attempt to put out there what I would say in front of my wife or anyone else.
In other words, I don't like to give a different perspective on the air than I would in my own household.
It's not fair to you. That was a weird tweet, folks. It's kind of hard for me to defend. I
got to be honest with you. The violence thing, I'm not suggesting that he was saying we should
beat up the media. For those of you who missed the tweet, by the way, Trump tweeted out on,
was it Saturday morning? It was either Saturday or Sunday morning.
I think it was Sunday morning.
Sunday morning.
Some video someone had made of when he was ... Trump did a thing with the WWE, which is the fake wrestling thing, and at one point he attacks Vince McMahon, and someone made a video where they put a little logo of CNN over Vince McMahon's head, so it looks like Trump's laying out Vince McMahon now.
You know, listen, I think the guy was suggesting we should beat up the press.
Obviously not, but it's just my problem with it is it gave the press an easy win.
CNN is on the ropes right now for their relentless reporting on fake news.
So is the AP.
So is the New York Times, which in case you missed it, and I covered it on a Fox and Friends appearance this weekend, the AP got caught again.
They reported on a meeting that happened between the EPA secretary, Scott Pruitt, Trump's appointee, the EPA administrator, and this group, and it was supposed to be like this big meeting that was going to screw over all the environmentalists, Joe.
The problem is the meeting never happened.
The meeting was cancelled.
So how do you report on a meeting that never happened?
So the AP got busted on that.
They also got busted on a topic I've been discussing frequently on the show, this 17 intelligence agencies report that determined that the Russians had tried to hack the election.
Well, as it turns out, that had to be retracted too.
It was never 17 intelligence agencies.
Tucker Carlson's been saying this every night.
It was three, and the other 14 could not confirm that information.
Now, they had to retract that too.
So instead of keeping the heat on them, this tweet with, you know, Trump hitting Vince McMahon with a CNN logo.
You have to see the tweet.
It's very difficult to explain.
I couldn't even explain it to my wife.
It just took the attention off CNN.
I just think it was a really bad idea, and I wouldn't like it if a Democrat did it either.
I don't mind him going after the media tweets at all.
I said that last week.
I don't want him to stop tweeting.
I don't care one little bit about him going after the fake news, because that's what they are.
They're fake news.
I want the guy to fight back.
You know what I'm saying, Joe?
It completely let them off the hook.
Because now they're playing victim.
Oh, you're encouraging violence against media figures, which is ironic because the left actually engages in violence against Republicans and the media doesn't seem to care too much about that.
We just had a shooting by a kooky leftist who shot up a bunch of congressmen on a field in Virginia.
Yeah.
Now, what I explained on Hannity on Friday, and what I'll leave you with on this, is just an explanation of why I think... I'm not an armchair psychologist.
I'm not giving a mental evaluation of Trump.
Please don't take it the wrong way.
I'm just saying I think I get it, and I get it because I share a lot of similarities with Trump.
I'm not an income level or winning elections, obviously.
I wish it were the case.
We're both guys from Queens, and I know the industry he's in very well, because my father's been in it forever, and I've been kind of surrounded by it, and I've had a lot of, you know, experience with these kind of folks.
He's a builder from Queens, and the thing about Queens guys, you have to understand.
Queens is a borough in New York, for those of you who are not from the Northeast or don't know much about it.
It's probably not many of you, but...
Queens is a borough in New York, and of the boroughs in New York, Queens, I would say to you, because I'm from Queens as well, the men in Queens, we have a little bit, and I say this and I don't mean this and I said it on Hannity and I cringed when I said it, but there's no other way to say this.
And I don't mean it as an insult.
They have kind of inferiority complex a little bit and it causes them to reach for more all the time, guys from Queens.
And what I mean by that is when you're a Queens guy, you're never viewed as the tough guys because those are the Brooklyn and the Bronx guys.
You get what I'm saying, Joe?
So the guys always have to prove, and believe me, they are pretty tough.
I worked in a supermarket with some dudes from Queens who were Tough, and I don't mean that in even a good way.
I mean, some of them were downright nasty dudes, and they wouldn't hesitate at all to drop a hammer fist on your head if they needed to.
So they're always trying to prove that they're tougher than the Brooklyn and the Bronx guys.
And on the financial end, Queens is kind of an affluent borough, but it's not Manhattan.
So you're never like the rich kids either.
But it's like you have money by New York City standards show, not by Beverly Hills standards.
So they're always trying to show that they have money too because they're not like the Manhattan kids.
So you'll see kids in Queens with like souped up cars.
I remember that, you know, this guy when we were younger had a Mustang and we thought, oh my gosh, this guy's the richest kid in town.
So there's always this inferiority complex that develops because you have They're not, you have these guys, they're never viewed as as tough as the Bronx and the Brooklyn kids, and they're never as rich or wealthy or successful as the Manhattan kids.
So the Queens kids are always, always in a fight.
They're always battling.
They're always battling against the self-image, against an imposed image on them.
And folks, if you don't think this is real, by the way, you're out of your mind, and I'll tell you why.
One, again, I live there, and I went through the same psychological crisis, whatever you want to call it, myself.
But when I said it on Hannity on Friday, Joe, You can look at my Twitter feed.
I mean, the people who tagged me.
There's probably a hundred tweets from people from Queens going, dude, you're so right.
Like I'm from Queens.
That's exactly how Trump is.
He's always, it's all what I'm getting is it's all about the show.
You know, you got to show your tough.
So what do you do?
You fight back.
You got to show your assets and show your, You're wealthy and successful.
He's a Queens guy!
He had a fight against union interests for these buildings.
He had a fight against a mob trying to shake him down for the sanitation business.
This guy has been a fighter.
His whole life.
I'm not justifying anything, I'm just trying to explain to you why he does what he does.
You can ignore it, that's your prerogative, but I'm telling you that growing up where he grew up, and knowing the industry he was in, this guy his entire life has had to fight against some of the most vicious people out there.
So, there you go.
Alright, enough on that.
All right, moving on.
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The Illinois budget disaster is imploding.
The state of Illinois is in a massive financial crisis.
Now, just some background on this, because this story is why it's not getting national attention to a greater degree than it is.
It's astounding, because it's an indictment of what can happen in the future to the United States at large if we don't get our fiscal house in order ASAP.
Here's a little background on it.
They have not had a budget, the state of Illinois, since 2015, which is incredible.
That is amazing, since 2015.
How do you do that?
I have no idea, Joe.
I mean, for those of you, I really don't.
For those of you who've lost track of time, it's 2017 now.
So, they had a deadline on Friday.
The deadline passed.
They still don't have a budget.
They now have $15 billion in unpaid bills and bond yields are starting to rise.
Now, folks, if you're a regular listener to this show, you probably heard me discuss the importance of bond yields in the past.
This is why this matters to you.
It matters to you right now.
Bond yields are tied to interest rates for a number of different mechanisms.
And when I say interest rates, I mean interest rates that affect you every day.
What's an interest rate?
Well, an interest rate is what you pay on your mortgage, the percentage rate you pay on your mortgage, the interest rate you'd pay for a car loan, the interest rate you'd pay for a loan if you were in a student loan program and you took some money out on the side.
These are interest rates that affect your actual wallet every day.
If these interest rates were to go up, Your wallet is going to shrink by the same amount the interest rate goes up.
The percentage is going to affect your income.
It is going to hurt you directly.
Now, bond yields, the interest rates are rising for Illinois' state bonds.
Now, why would that be, ladies and gentlemen?
Well, for obvious reasons.
People who are lending money to the state of Illinois are starting to wonder if they're ever going to get that money back.
So to compensate for that risk, when Illinois says, hey, we're going to issue a bond, will somebody buy it?
Joe, of course, the market's starting to say, yeah, I'll buy it, but I'm not going to buy it at 2.8% interest.
I want to buy it at 4.8% interest now.
I want two percentage points more because I'm afraid you guys might not pay it back.
There's nothing new about that.
Nothing I'm saying is groundbreaking economics.
People want to be compensated for the risk they're going to take with their money.
Now, 4.8, to be candid, in the overall scheme of things, is still relatively low, especially compared to Greek bonds, which, gosh, we're in double digits easily.
They're still going bankrupt, by the way.
But this is a problem, because this is what I've warned you about with the United States debt.
I'm going to get to more about Illinois in a second here.
But we owe 20 trillion as a country.
And I was listening to a podcast, Econ Talk, this weekend with Russ Roberts, who I always enjoy, and they had a forum with George Will and David Boaz, and they were talking about some ideas for the future towards the end of the podcast.
And I think it was Boaz who brought up a really fantastic idea, talking about, you Our debt, our national debt.
So, just to be clear where I'm starting, where I'm going with this, the Illinois state debt is out of control.
They have 15, I'm not talking about their total accumulated debt, I'm just talking about their unpaid bills.
Our 15 billion in bills they haven't paid now.
I've got more information on how much money they've lost, I mean it's even worse than you can imagine.
But they're paying hundreds of millions of dollars in interest on bills the state of Illinois can't pay.
So because they can't do that, they're trying to get more money in the bond market so people will lend them money, Joe.
And people are demanding high interest rates because they're afraid they're not going to be paid back.
Sure.
So, my problem with our national debt is, and this is not a knock-on.
I don't think Joe Citizen at all.
I know people live really busy, intricate, detailed lives.
They got to get their kids around to school and back and they work for a living.
They don't have time to follow international finance.
But one of the problems I've always had is I don't think a lot of people out there, not necessarily this audience, but when you talk about the general public at large, have an understanding of how bad our debt situation is and how one day it is eventually going to stop.
You know, it can't continue like this, Joe.
The problem is with Illinois, everybody, you know, just brushed it under and said, oh no, no problem.
People keep lending us money until they didn't.
Now that Illinois has to pay higher and higher interest rates to get people to lend them money.
The higher interest rates, Joe, are causing more debt.
The accumulated debt now, they're paying interest on that.
This is a downward debt spiral.
Eventually, if interest rates go up to 6 and 7 and 8 percent for Illinois, God forbid 10 percent, they're not going to even have the money to pay the interest on the debt, forget about the debt themselves.
Now, the reason we're not feeling it in the United States at large, as much as the state
of Illinois is, is because international lenders are still lending the United States money.
And that has a lot to do with trade deficits as well.
I mean, we're sending a lot of money overseas to buy Chinese products, which is, I've always
said to you, that those Chinese dollars cannot be, I mean, those American dollars cannot
be spent in China.
China does not use that.
China has its own currency so that those dollars have to come back to the United States.
But there are a lot of people independently lending money into the United States as well because we're the most secure place to do it.
So whereas the Illinois bond market is starting to dry up a little bit and they're having to raise interest rates, the international market, even though we're in a near catastrophic debt situation, we owe $19 trillion and the economy's worth about $19 trillion, people are still lending us money, which is keeping interest rates low.
You know what I'm saying, Jill?
Like, why pay high interest rates as a country if you don't have to?
It doesn't make sense.
Now, you may say, so Dan, what's the problem?
You just said Illinois is in trouble because they can't find people to lend them money, and the United States isn't because they can't.
The problem is, these things can change like that, just like they did for Illinois.
Folks, everybody knew Illinois was in trouble, just like they know the United States is in trouble.
The crisis is now acute.
Now they've got people, legitimate providers of health care for the poor, housing programs that house the poor.
They can't cash a check.
There's no money.
Folks, this one day will happen with the United States when we reach a debt point and a debt load where international lenders say, I'm not lending you any more money at 2% and 3%.
I want 4% and 5% myself.
And then it goes up to 6% and 7% and all of a sudden in six months you're like, what just happened?
Now, all of a sudden, your car loan, which was, you know, whatever, 5 or 6 percent, is 15 percent.
Your mortgage is 18 percent.
Next thing you know, the United States goes into a massive recession.
I'm not trying to scare you, folks.
I'm just trying to tell you that what's happening in Illinois should be a Paul Revere moment for those of you out there.
But liberals, the sad part about this whole thing, Joe, is, you know, liberals are immune to facts.
I've said it over and over again.
None of this will bother them at all.
None of it.
None of it will bother them at all.
They'll ignore this whole thing, they'll pretend it's a Republican problem because the governor's a Republican despite the fact that he's been trying to get the Democrats to wake up to how severe the problem is for a long time.
It doesn't matter.
Liberals will ignore it and just move on like nothing happened.
They're triaging right now their payments, the state of Illinois.
And people are, hospitals are being left unpaid.
They have colleges that are at risk of losing accreditation because they're state colleges.
They can't get their money.
Folks, this is a real genuine problem.
But I heard an interesting solution.
Again, I think it was from Boaz, circling back to that.
And this is why I wanted to bring this up, this Illinois crisis.
He said, you know, to get people to feel, The debt crisis, before we hit that interest rate moment, Joe.
You get what I'm saying?
Before we hit that moment where Chinese and Japanese and worldwide lenders say, you know what?
We're not lending you money anymore.
We don't want to get to that point because that's when interest rates go up and we hit the death spiral, right?
To get people to feel how severe the debt crisis is and how much taxpayer money is being spent, he said, I got an idea.
He's like, and I love this idea.
He goes, how about a monthly bill?
No more withholding.
In other words, no more withholding tax.
You get your paycheck, you get your whole paycheck.
But you get a monthly bill from the IRS.
Like, I pay quarterlies now.
He's like, what if everybody paid monthlies?
And then at the end of the year, whatever the annual deficit was that year, say it was $300 or $400 billion, that amount's divided up amongst U.S.
taxpayers, and you get a bill for the end of the year for the deficit, too.
Yeah, who is right?
That's one of those like Tim the Toolman Taylor moments.
Everybody would be like, what?
Folks, the problem now is withholding.
Obviously, the tax is withheld.
That's what it's called.
You get it taken out of your paycheck.
You don't have a choice.
Some of us have gotten so used to it getting taken out of our paycheck that we don't even pay attention to the amount.
But if you got a bill every month for the amount of money government was actually costing you, I'm telling you even liberals would freak out and be like, this is ridiculous.
Thousands of dollars a month I'm paying for the average, you know, a middle-class worker or, you know, may not be thousands, but it would at minimum be probably $500 to $1,000 for a guy who makes $60,000, $70,000 a year.
Plus a bill for the deficit at the end of the year, which would probably be another five, six thousand bucks, whatever it may be.
People would freak out.
But why would they freak out?
They would freak out because they were expected to actually pay for the government many of them want.
And they don't want to do it.
Because none of this has affected them, Joe.
I'm absolutely convinced that liberals out there think this is free money.
They haven't seen any bump in their interest rates.
They haven't seen the economy go into a massive recession.
I'm talking about since the financial crisis, right?
They haven't seen any of this.
Their lives are, and you know, this is good.
I'm not wishing pain on anyone.
But folks, I'm telling you, the Illinois crisis is going to go national if we don't do something soon.
And the only way to do it is to make people feel the effects of their voting decisions.
You want to vote for big government, you know, with hundreds of billions of dollars in deficits every year?
Fine.
You're going to pay for it monthly and you're going to pay for it at the end of the year.
Now, I wanted to add one thing to this.
If you combine that with a flat tax, everybody pays the same thing.
No deductions, no nothing.
Get rid of everything.
We did a 15-20% flat tax, or I prefer the fair tax, but it'd be tough to push that through right now, which is a national sales tax based on consumption behavior.
I like the fair tax a lot better.
But if we started with a flat tax on a road to a fair tax, we did a 15-20% rate, no deductions.
I'm sorry, folks.
You live in the United States, everybody pays into the system, right?
You're, you know, you're all gonna get back your, if you're in a, you know, if you're below the poverty line, you're gonna get back the money in programs anyway.
But everybody pays that 15 to 20 percent.
You paid a monthly bill or a quarterly bill and then a bill for the deficit at the end of the year, I'm telling you right now, Joe, you'd see voting behavior change.
As they say, some of my friends down south, right quick, you'd see it change fast.
People all of a sudden would be like, I don't want to spend two, $3,000 a month on government.
Yeah, no kidding.
You're spending it now.
You just don't know it because you're passing it off to your kids and your friends, which is a shame.
Okay.
Let's see.
Where do I go next?
I have so many notes on this.
All right.
Let's do California Medicaid because this is important.
I read this story over the weekend and I thought to myself, gosh, another one, another liberal program imploding in front of our very eyes.
And of course the No, the liberals will just ignore this.
So California right now is in a Medicaid crisis and they're really worried because of the proposed Obamacare reforms out there, Joe.
They're worried that they may not have the money in the future for Medicaid, which is ridiculous because they don't have the money now.
So just some numbers, I mean, it's crazy.
California, the Medicaid program, which is a federal, joint federal government and state program.
Which gives health care, third-party payer health care, government health care to people who are poor and at a certain percentage of the poverty line.
Here are some numbers on the Medicaid crisis going on in California.
This is an amazing one here.
California, one-third of the population is on what they call Medi-Cal, which is their California Medicaid program.
That is an astonishing 14 million people.
20% of the entire Medicaid population of the entire United States are those 14 million people in California.
So one state is taking up one-fifth, one out of 50 states.
Now granted, it is a rather large population.
I get that.
I'm not immune to that.
But 20% of the entire Medicaid population is Medi-Cal in California.
Folks!
That's a lot of people.
14 million people.
The state of Maryland, where I left, only has, what, 5.5, 5.6 million people?
They have three times as many people in the state of California on government healthcare than live in the state of Maryland.
That is insane.
Another number here.
Two-thirds of this is funded by you.
The federal government funds two-thirds of California's program.
It's a $100 billion program.
Two-thirds of that is funded by you.
Now, again, to be fair and give both sides of the economic argument, yes, California does send a lot of money.
The federal government has tax receipts as well.
Those, what goes in and what goes out, those are totally different pools, because a lot of times they'll say, well, California sends money, sends more money to the federal government, then it gets back.
But a lot of those numbers are skewed, Joe, because a lot of the money that the federal government sends back to states depends on things like military bases in the state, you know, the percentage of the social security population, people who are old.
So how much you send and get back, I never trust those numbers as an adequate measure of who's contributing what, because it's largely dependent on factors out of your control.
You know what I'm saying, Joe?
In other words, a lot of it's not dependent on how great the state economy is, it's how many older folks you have on social security, military bases, and things like that.
But again, I'm trying to give you both arguments because I'll tell you what your liberal friends would say.
But two-thirds of that, this is an immutable fact, two-thirds of California's Medicaid program is funded by the U.S.
government taxpayers, which is you.
Now, California, also under Obamacare, was one of the most aggressive states in the ACA expansion.
And all this is going to be in the show notes today.
I'm getting a lot of these numbers from a National Review piece, which I will put in the show notes at Bongino.com and at ConservativeReview.com as well.
I'll also put a piece about the Illinois budget disaster.
I have a couple interesting pieces from the journal today, too, I'd like you to check out.
But the California Medicaid crisis, these guys in California were aggressive in the Obamacare Medicaid expansion.
From 2010 to 2014, they expanded their Medicaid program by 11% annually.
Now that's a, that's a huge expansion folks.
You're talking about millions more people given taxpayer funded insurance.
Now, I want to bring this up.
CalPERS.
What else about CalPERS?
I have another note about CalPERS here.
Oh, pension.
Yeah, I should get to that too.
Sorry.
I don't mean to be so much good stuff.
I want to put out today.
I don't want to miss any of it.
Take a note on that.
This is a big deal right now because California does not have the money. They are currently
taking money from their rainy day fund, billions of dollars, to pay off a pension fund which is
underfunded by billions of dollars, which is the classic Joe robbing Peter to pay Paul. They don't
have the money. So they're expanding Medicaid dramatically with money they don't have.
Now, the reason I bring this up is because California right now, and the representatives, the congressmen and the senators from California, are some of the leading advocates against Obamacare reform, and against any changes to the Medicaid expansion at all.
They don't want any of this to change, Joe.
In other words, they're ignoring the numbers that they're going bankrupt.
They're just pretending none of this is happening.
And they're out there, and a lot of them are propagating this myth that if Obamacare is repealed, And the Medicaid expansion, which expanded Medicaid eligibility to people up to 138% of the poverty line, and it also waived some other requirements, Joe.
So it enabled more people with more money to get on Medicaid.
You follow what I'm saying?
That's what Obamacare did.
The Democrats are arguing, if we take that away, you're going to pull people off Medicaid and people are going to die!
Again, this is what they do.
Now, I said on Hannity on Friday, and I got a couple emails from people, a couple Facebook posts as well, where I mentioned the number $90,000.
And I said, well, the Medicaid expansion, there were people up to $90,000, or not up to, but with $90,000 or more of income who are getting Medicaid.
And I got a bunch of emails saying, Dan, that's not accurate.
That's not 138% of the poverty line.
Folks, I never say anything I can't defend, ever.
Yes.
You're correct.
And maybe I should have been more careful with the 90,000 number, but actually I can go higher than that.
How does like a million in assets sound?
You're like, that's not 138% of the poverty line.
No, no.
Notice what I said.
I said a million in assets.
Now, again, I'll, I'll, I'll put this piece and this is a piece in the daily signals, an older one from, uh, I think it's Melissa Quinn.
It's really good, but it describes how people who have a lot of assets show.
But not a lot of income who are worth literally millions of dollars are now getting Medicaid in certain farm states where you have a ton of land and assets.
Folks, I'm not making this up.
There's a story the other day of a lady who got a $500,000 divorce settlement who's on Medicaid.
You're paying for her insurance.
I'm not making this up.
I don't say anything.
I can't back up.
So yes, you're right.
It's not just $90,000.
I shouldn't have said income.
I think that's where I screwed people up.
And my apologies for that.
I was debating with Jessica Tarloff on Hannity on Friday, and I was saying how people with – what I should have just said is, people who are wealthy are getting Medicaid.
That's probably a more precise way to self-correct there.
People who are literally millionaires in assets are getting Medicaid, which is even worse than people with $90,000 in income, but I like to be more precise.
So I will put that out there.
And also, the subsidies, by the way, with Obamacare, where you're getting taxpayer money to buy private health insurance in the exchanges, which is not Medicaid, you can be up to 400% of the poverty line for that, Joe.
Damn those rich people.
Oh, man.
I mean, this is... You would think this would fit perfectly into the left's income inequality argument, right?
There you go.
Yeah.
Now, the reason this happened in the Obamacare expansion is because a lot of states that chose to expand Medicaid up to that 130% of the poverty line based on income!
Not assets.
The Obamacare expansion, a lot of the states waived the asset test.
That's why I brought that up.
So before the expansion, you couldn't have $5 million in land, but only $20,000 in income and get Medicaid.
There are states where you can pull that off now.
That's the problem, folks.
Now, as for the people are gonna die if they lose Medicaid, there is an unbelievable... I'm gonna have a lot of links to the show notes today.
There's a really... It's a long piece, let me warn you in advance, by Forbes.
No, it was... Yes, in Forbes.
I have so many pieces.
It's definitely in Forbes, I promise you.
And there are links and everything in there, but it goes through systematically how this Democrat talking point about how people are going to die if they lose Medicaid is based on a unbelievably flawed report.
Now, I don't have time on the show to go through the 50 or 60 points it makes.
It's very wonky, but I'll sum it up.
With a couple of issues.
When your Democrat friends say people are going to die if they lose Medicaid, just so you understand, they're basing it on a report that came out years ago, decades ago, based on 1970s data that showed that uninsured people will have a greater mortality rate than people who have insurance.
So in other words, if you don't have insurance, The chances of you dying are much greater.
Now, you may say, okay, well, that makes sense, Joe.
If you pull people off Medicaid and they don't have insurance, and the study said if you don't have insurance, you're more likely to die, well, that makes sense, right?
Yeah.
Well, it doesn't.
No.
Oh, it doesn't, Armacost!
You're like, yes, because we're thinking logically.
Here's the problem with the study, folks.
Next problem.
Yeah, the study's based on 1971 data that was enacted before The regulation changes in the United States where you have to be admitted into an emergency room and cared for.
You can't be thrown out of an emergency room.
So the data is old and also it was a very small sample size.
So liberals love to do this.
They love to pick one study that shows what it says and what was the mortality rate here?
Let's see.
Oh, okay.
The study I'm talking about, there was a 25% greater mortality rate for those uninsured rather than people who were insured.
But remember, this is before the emergency room rules came out.
And the data is from 1971, taken through 1975.
Now, you would think, gosh, why are they using such old data from an old sample size?
Because that's basically one of the few studies that backs up their assertions.
What do the other studies say?
Interesting.
A guy named Kroenig did a study that was 22 times larger.
So remember, Joe, when you do studies in science, you want a large sample size, right?
Because it randomizes effects across a larger study of people.
If I give a drug to Joe and it works, that doesn't mean the drug works for everyone.
If I want to test the efficacy of the drug, I wanted to give it to Joe and a thousand other people because I want to see if the drug really works.
So a study that was 22 times larger, you would think the results would be a little bit more important.
Not to liberals, they ignored this one.
Here's a study by this guy Kronick with a K, 22 times larger.
They found that there is no difference in mortality rates between people with private insurance versus people with no insurance at all.
So forget, I'm not suggesting you should not have insurance.
I'm just telling you on this show we do the data and the liberals always do this.
They cherry pick the data from a study that has, by the way, less scientific robustness than the one that showed the result they don't like and then they quote the other one.
Folks, it doesn't make sense.
Again, I'm not telling you not to have insurance.
I'm just telling you that the latest study, not the latest, but one of the biggest and most robust and most scientifically profound studies, 22 times larger, showed no difference at all.
Even worse, Joe, a later study after that, and this one I've quoted quite a bit on the radio shows, There's a 32% higher mortality rate than people who are uninsured if you're on Medicaid.
Folks, it's all in the Forbes piece.
You can see the data.
But the point you should be making to your liberal friends is, So if people get pulled off Medicaid, who by the way, some of them, not all, but who could have assets in the millions of dollars, but if we just roll back the Medicaid program to give it to people who are actually poor, not people who have assets and people who are above 100% of the poverty level, but if we were to give Medicaid to the poor, let me get this straight, Libs, what you're saying is people are going to die.
What are you basing it on?
Oh there was a study that came out yeah yeah I know the study you're talking about it's a 1970 study before people uh when people could actually be turned away in the emergency room and that study was very small but a later study came out 22 times larger than that that showed no difference at all between people who were uninsured and a study and people had private shirts and a follow-up study after that people who had um Medicaid versus people who had private insurance showed that people on Medicaid had a 32% higher mortality rate, meaning they were more likely to die than people who had private insurance.
So what are you talking about?
Again, liberals are just making it up.
They make it up as they go along, folks, because they don't have anything to stand on.
And just to be clear, the reason Medicaid insurance is always insufficient, in my mind, is because it's a third-party payer system where there's no incentives for cost control and for quality.
You're not paying for it if you get Medicaid from taxpayers.
Taxpayers are paying for it.
So you don't really care about the prices because you're not paying for them.
And the doctors in the hospitals, a lot of them--
I'm not suggesting they're bad people.
I'm just saying I'm an incentives guy, Joe.
And the incentives aren't there.
You're not paying.
They don't have to satisfy you.
They only have to satisfy the government.
Folks, it's got to--
I mean, please read the piece.
Again, I know it's long, but you will be much more informed after.
And he quotes Avic Roy in there, the author as well, who's really great on this.
Maybe it's Avic.
I'm sorry.
I say names wrong a lot.
All right.
I have so much more to get to.
All right, quick here.
Have you signed up for CRTV yet?
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All right, let me hammer this one out because it's important.
Another liberal failure.
So the theme of the show today has been liberal failures.
The Illinois state budget run by liberals nearly forever.
They're going bankrupt.
They have no money.
Secondly, California, again run by liberals, thought it would give away free health care to people.
They're going bankrupt as well on the Medicaid crisis.
While they're fighting back, saying if we pull people off Medicaid, people are going to die using faulty data.
That's not true.
Again, liberals don't let facts get in the way of the truth.
Here's another one for you.
CalPERS, the California Pension Program, I saw this in another piece today about California, which really blew me away.
Their pension debt is estimated to be $228 billion, meaning if you work for the state of California and you want a California pension, you're retired, the net present value of what the government owes to people in the future, Joe, what it owes today, right, in today's money for future debts, is $228 billion.
You may say, oh, wow, that's astounding.
Well, Okie doke!
It's astounding, but that's at a 7.5% discount rate.
Now, I've explained these in the past.
This is important.
It just goes to show you how California is not even telling you the truth.
Forget about Medicaid for a second in California and Illinois' budget crisis.
California is in a world of trouble outside of the Medicaid crisis.
When you use an actual, a real discount rate, a more genuine one.
Now, to explain what this means.
The way California is calculating its liabilities for its pension fund in the future, Joe, is they use this thing called the discount rate.
Now, I'm not going to go into details.
It's not really complicated, but those of you who study finance know exactly what this is.
It's basically an interest rate in reverse.
So what California is rather cleverly doing is they're using a discount rate of about 7.5%.
Meaning, oh, if we put this amount of money aside now, it'll grow at 7.5% in the future.
So we can put a smaller pool of money aside now, Joe, because look, it's going to grow at 7.5% and we'll have the money to pay those people in the future.
And that amount of money today is $228 billion.
Well, Joe, what's the problem with that?
Doesn't sound good.
No, it doesn't sound good.
And why not, Armacost?
Because if you don't grow the money at 7.5%, what happens?
You are what has two thumbs and just screwed over a whole bunch of pensioneers?
This guy!
And it's a California politician.
If you don't grow at 7.5%, folks, you are screwed.
You're not screwed.
The pensioneers are screwed.
So, California has not been growing their pension fund at seven and a half percent.
A more realistic rate is about three percent.
Ooh.
Well, yeah, ooh is right.
We're back to that Tim Taylor moment.
That may be copyright protected, so shout out to Tim the Toolman Taylor, right?
When you use an actual interest rate that's more realistic on their returns, they should have a lot more money, Joe, right?
Because if I needed, say, A trillion in the future, and I know, say I need a trillion in 10 years.
In 10 years, at a 7% interest rate, you can put aside, it'll double.
Money will double in 10 years at 7%.
So I can put aside $500 billion, right?
Now, if that goes down to half of that, I need a whole lot more money now.
Here's the number, the real number, at 3%, what California owes if they're going to pay their pensioneers.
And I'm not trying to scare you if you're a cop or a fireman, you get a California state pension, a teacher, but you should take it on your own to be scared.
You don't need any outside stimulus.
The real number is $969 billion.
That's the shortfall at the actual rate of return.
Folks, keep in mind, that's at 3%.
God forbid there's another stock market crash in a recession and people actually start losing money in investment funds.
Now you're not talking about $969 billion, now you're talking about $2-3 trillion.
Folks, they're in a world of trouble.
Liberalism is imploding anywhere.
I cannot wake you up in any stronger arithmetic terms to the mathematical reality we are facing right now.
And the reason I bring this up today, again, is all of this is happening at the federal level as well.
Make them pay the bills monthly.
It'll fix all this.
Hey, don't forget tomorrow's show.
I'll be doing a show tomorrow, Joe and I, live show on Independence Day.
Well, not live, but live for us, which usually means about a half hour delay.
I want to talk about this tax fight I teased in the beginning of the show because there's about to be a huge ideological capitulation to the Democrats.
Amazingly, despite the fact that we control nearly everything, the House, the Senate, the courts, the state systems, everything.
The Republicans are about to go back to a big tax and spend party platform, and this is a huge fight.
And I've got some numbers for you on this.
It's about Obamacare and a tax hidden in there that the Republicans hope you don't know about.
That is a huge fight, and we cannot lose this one.
All right, folks, thanks again for tuning in.
I'll see you all tomorrow.
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