Ep. 506 Don't Get Depressed, There's Good News Coming
In this episode I address the GOP broken promises on Obamacare and why the replacement bill collapsed. http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2017-07-18-US--Congress-Health%20Care/id-37abb1d7eb8740bb9a8829d05b58b01f I also discuss the continuing liberal love affair with "green energy" despite the failure to meet their own goals. https://www.wsj.com/articles/germany-should-say-danke-for-u-s-oil-1500326174 I address preemption laws in Texas and their constitutional implications. http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/342291-texas-republicans-take-aim-at-liberal-cities Finally, I discuss the potential for bold tax reform and how this could transform our economy, and the 2018 midterm elections. http://www.theamericanmirror.com/gingrich-boost-economy-large-tax-cut-real-danger-speaker-pelosi/
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Aiming to stop free speech so the speaker can no longer speak is exclusively a far-left phenomenon.
I'm talking to moderates in the Democratic Party who are actually interested in what's going on, not blind lemmings walking off a cliff into an abyss of stupidity.
Get ready to hear the truth about America.
The rich did it.
Yeah, the rich did it.
They lent money to people who bought homes and the people never paid the money back.
Oh, wow.
That sounds like a great business plan.
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?
Ah, the world is my oyster.
Yeah, hey folks.
All right, you know, I didn't get into, really, I didn't get into Obamacare yesterday and obviously the failure of the replacement bill.
Yeah.
What the heck was that?
What?
Like a beep just went off in my office.
Did you hear that?
No.
Like, ding!
I didn't get into it because I wanted to get, I want to, I really need to give the dust an opportunity to settle because there's so much dust in this thing.
That I wanna be careful, the information I put out there, that it's brief, it's coherent, and it gives you the information and tidbits that you need to take out of this.
And it's just been... I mean, I don't know where we're gonna go with this thing.
They voted in 2015, just to be clear, 49 out of the 52 current Republican senators, 49 out of the 52 in 2015 voted for a repeal bill, Joe.
Yeah.
Let's just put the repeal bill out there, get rid of Obamacare, and we can figure out what to do when we get rid of this legislative disaster.
The bill out there gives it a two-year sunset period, so it's not like anybody's going to lose anything overnight.
They're going to have two years to readjust and fix what's going on.
So I'm going to get into that, why I think this thing is a disaster for the Democrats too, because this thing Obamacare, talking about this thing, obviously.
It can't continue, folks.
It is mathematically, arithmetically, economically impossible.
It cannot continue.
The path we are on now is simply not sustainable.
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Okay.
So.
Folks, here's the takeaways from what's going on with Obamacare.
It's dead.
It is dead.
Obamacare is dead either way.
Obamacare can't continue.
The economics of it don't work.
Sadly, the replacement bill is dead, too.
But I don't blame... A lot of you out there have seen some Twitter... I'm not talking about particularly my audience, but in the Twitter universe, I've seen a lot of people put into blame Sadly, on Senators Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Jerry Moran.
And folks, I think that's misplaced.
Senator Lee and Senator Paul stood principled against this replacement bill because it was not a repeal of Obamacare.
I can't say that enough.
And for those of you out there who believe, well, you know, a replacement was better than we have now, I strongly disagree, folks.
Here's the problem.
The replacement bill did almost nothing.
To curb the death spiral of Obamacare, even with some of the amendments that were put in there.
Now, what do I mean by that?
And this is why Lee said, we can't do this.
We're going to own this failure.
It's going to fail anyway if this passes.
We have to do something different and get rid of it.
I don't blame him one bit.
He stood on principle here.
Folks, the death spiral would have continued with this bill, and it's going to continue now.
And for those of you listening to the show who are familiar with the death spiral, it's really easy to sum up.
Because of Obamacare's mandates that you buy a bunch of stuff in an Obamacare-compliant plant.
Stuff you did not want, Joe.
How do I know you didn't want it?
Because if you wanted it, the government wouldn't have to mandate you to buy it.
Make sense?
Liberals try to follow.
If people wanted access to vasectomies and hair transplants, insurance—remember, not the healthcare, because if you want to go get a hair transplant, you're free to go to a hair transplant place tomorrow.
No one's going to stop you, neither is Obamacare.
What Obamacare said, Joe, to be clear, is you had to buy insurance for that.
Mm-hmm.
Not the product!
Are we clear on that?
Obamacare mandated you had to buy insurance for things people didn't want.
If they wanted it, they would have bought insurance for it beforehand.
This is not hard.
This is only difficult for liberals to understand.
Liberals are calling this patient protections.
This is nonsense.
It's not patient protections.
There is nothing protecting the patient by forcing them to buy stuff they don't want, like vasectomy insurance and hair transplant insurance.
They can go get a vasectomy and pay in cash if they want it.
They can go get a hair transplant and pay in cash if they want it.
Or they can go shop for an insurance plan, Joe, that insures against these things if you lose your hair later.
None of that changed.
Obamacare just made you buy stuff.
That's why the plans are so damn expensive.
Because instead of insuring against things like, I don't know, Joe, cancer?
HIV, hepatitis, diabetes, things that in the real world could sadly happen to you and that could be financially catastrophic, it's forcing you to buy health insurance for a vasectomy when you could go buy it yourself.
You don't need insurance for it.
Go buy it if you want it, if that's your thing.
Now, all of these mandates drove up the cost of insurance, unsurprisingly.
So insurance, again, for the 10,000th time, you know, and explain this to your liberal friends at your, you know, your dinner.
Some guy sent me an email the other day, or a woman, excuse me.
She wrote, thanks for all the ammo on Obamacare.
I got some liberal relatives visiting.
Now I feel like I'm prepared.
Folks, this isn't hard to explain to them.
Obamacare made people buy stuff they didn't want, which drove up the cost of insurance to the point where only sick people thought Obamacare was worth buying.
Because, Joe, if your insurance pre-Obamacare, we're just using round numbers, okay?
Don't quote me on the numbers.
It's irrelevant because the numbers change in every state.
All you have to know is the average premium went up all over the country under Obamacare.
But let's say your premium before Obamacare, Joe, was $500 a month.
Okay.
Post-Obamacare, because you now have to buy insurance for hair transplants and vasectomies, which you didn't want, but you have to buy now, is now $1,000 a month.
If you're not sick, Joe, if you're not sick and you don't think you're going to need that insurance in the future, what did a lot of common sense people do?
They said, I'm out.
I'm not spending $1,000 a month.
I would rather pay the Obamacare penalty.
And the penalty was lesser than the amount of the increase in the insurance.
It goes up each year.
But all you have to know is the penalty for Obamacare not having it, the tax penalty, was not severe enough that it was more than the amount of your premium increase.
Does that make sense?
Oh, yeah.
So people just said, screw it.
I'm just going to cancel my insurance and pay the penalty.
It doesn't matter to me.
It's not worth it.
So that's what they did.
Now, again, folks, who didn't cancel?
The people who were really sick!
Because they said, well, you know what, even though my insurance doubled, I'm at high risk for cancer, whatever it runs in my family, my mother had it, my father had a heart attack, whatever it may be, I'm gonna keep it.
Well, what happened?
Most of those people got sick!
And now the fact that the insurance pool dwindled because everybody else dropped down, only sick people are left, insurance companies can't hack it, now they need a federal bailout.
That's the death spiral.
That's it summed up in a nutshell right there.
Buy stuff you don't want.
Prices go up.
I can't afford it.
The only people who can afford it, make it worthwhile for them are sick people, which costs insurance companies a lot of money, who in turn can't pay the premiums, excuse me, can't pay for the services because they only have sick people on their rolls, who then come to the taxpayer for a bailout.
That is the entire death spiral summed up.
This cannot continue, ladies and gentlemen.
It is a disaster.
That is why I'm saying just vote for the repeal.
To be clear and not leave you with half-assed information here.
Thank you.
The repeal portion of it, if you were to vote for a straight repeal, is not that simple.
To vote for a full repeal, they would need 60 votes in the Senate.
They don't have 60 votes, ladies and gentlemen.
They only have 52 Republican senators.
And really, they only have 50 because McCain, Portman, Collins, Hell, they're not reliable.
So they really probably have less than 50.
Forget about 60.
60's out.
You would need eight Democrats to fully repeal.
Clear on that in the Senate?
Not gonna happen.
Ain't happening, no.
But they can repeal the portions of the bill through a process known as reconciliation.
Reconciliation allows you to pass a repeal with only a simple majority.
So you would only need 50.
You may say, well, that's not a majority, that's half.
Well, it is with Mike Pence, the Vice President, who would break a tie in the Senate.
So they only need 50.
Now, the repeal would only apply, Joe, through reconciliation.
If they use reconciliation, the repeal would only apply to measures on Obamacare that affect the budget.
But the ruling, they could go to the, I know this is complicated, but it's really critical you understand this, they can go to the parliamentarian and make the case that large portions of that bill are subjected to a budget, would affect the budget substantially, talking about cuts in budget and cuts in spending, and then they can do it with 50.
My point in the whole thing is not to confuse you to death, just to say that I get it that repeal isn't that simple, that a full repeal would need 60, but they can repeal large swaths of it with 50 votes.
They can even lose two, which they will.
They'll lose Collins because she's not even a Republican anymore.
She votes with the Republicans on almost nothing of substance for Maine.
Susan Collins for Maine.
But all they need is 50.
So just go for it.
Just go for it.
Now folks, one other point I want to make on here, because I'm not Unrealistic.
I really hate when the establishmentarian class paints us, the good conservatives and libertarians, as a bunch of raving, lunatic idiots.
Do what you want.
That's fine.
My audience follows me.
I don't really care what the establishment thinks.
I'm not trying to attract an establishment crowd.
But I do want to be realistic and, you know, I'm very angry at the GOP and I really hope that if they don't vote for straight repeal that a lot of these people are primary, a lot of these senators.
So we clear on that, Joe?
Let's say they put straight repeal up on the portions they can do through reconciliation and let's say that doesn't pass either because five or six Republican senators bail and won't even vote for repeal even though 49 out of the 52 voted for the same bill in 2015.
Which is just perplexing to me that you wouldn't do it again.
It just says to me you have no principles.
I am not going to suggest to you that... I am suggesting they should be primaried.
I think primaries are a great idea, always, because they keep Republican politicians honest.
I think it's always worth the money, despite the fact what the establishment will tell you.
They'll say, it's a waste of resources.
We should be applying those resources to the general election.
No, no, no, we shouldn't.
Because these people get up there, these Republicans, and they get bought off by the establishment lobby interests in D.C., and they become swamp creatures in D.C., and we can't fix them.
A good primary keeps you healthy.
Good primary by a good conservative makes you answer for your votes.
There's nothing wrong with that.
It's a great way to spend resources.
Now!
This is where I was going with this.
Even if we lose those primaries and these establishmentarians win, I would never suggest to you, Joe, that voting for a Democrat's a better option, however angry I get at the Republicans.
I know sometimes, you know, I get very hot on this and I do, but I just, and I have even, you know, sometimes kind of sarcastically said, well, what's the difference?
And you're right.
What is the difference?
But I just think in the long-term ideological war we're fighting here, you have two choices right now.
If we were to lose primary, so you say the Establishmentarian wins the primary, we have two choices.
We have the long-term destruction of the United States, which RINO's bad Republicans are unquestionably contributing to, and you take the blame in that, okay?
I'm not absolving you of blame at all.
Or you have voting for Democrats, which is the immediate destruction of the United States, because they vote like the Borg from Star Trek.
They will vote to hike your taxes, destroy school choice, destroy your healthcare system, and bury you in red tape tomorrow morning.
I don't care what state they're from, Democrat, there are no more blue dogs.
So my point in the whole thing is don't fall into that trap where, oh, you know, Democrats, maybe we should just vote for the Democrat or whatever or stay home.
That's a bad idea, too.
It's sad, Joe, and I'm going to get to some optimistic stuff at the end, I promise you.
I know this part sounds depressing, but...
Given long-term destruction or immediate destruction, I'll take long-term.
Maybe we can figure something out.
You get it?
Voting for immediate destruction by voting Democrat, you have no time, so don't do that.
That's a really bad idea.
All right, moving on.
This is a quick one, and it's just, again, infuriating, the stupidity of the Hollywood kind of entertainment crowd.
I saw an Instagram post by Snoop Dogg.
Snoop D-O-double-G, who, you know, when I was growing up I think I bought a few Snoop Dogg, you know, back then we had tapes and now it's all CDs, bought a few CDs maybe.
He put a video up, Joe.
Did you hear about this?
No, no.
It's a real video, it's not an act, of a cop getting tuned up pretty bad at a fast food place.
So the cop comes in, he's arresting someone for something.
Again, the cop is white, the subject happens to be black, which only seems to matter to the left, of course, but we'll play their game for a minute here.
And another guy comes on top of the cop and starts pounding him in the head.
And just beating up.
So Snoop Dogg posts this and he's like, basically, yeah, you know, this is FTP, which means, you know, F the police.
You know what?
F you, Snoop Dogg.
You're just a clown.
You're just a joke.
You're a farce.
You don't have half the guts to go to work every day like these cops do into the most dangerous parts of cities.
Some of them don't even live in.
But they police these cities.
They do their job.
They go to work for what?
What do you think a cop makes, Joe, in relation to Snoop Dogg?
One one thousandth of his money?
So this is a uber wealthy millionaire entertainment clown who You know, the guy, I mean, he's a total zero.
He's a loser, and he posts a thing using his influence on his platform to scream, you know, F the police.
You're just a piece of garbage.
And I tweeted, this guy's a total P.O.S.
I was like, that'd make me sick.
Disgusting.
Snoop Dogg.
You can plant a big fat one on my... Yeah.
Coward, too.
Chump, too.
Chump.
Listen to me, Snoop Dogg, you're a chump.
Chump.
I'm calling you out.
You're a chump.
I have zero respect for you at all.
You're a coward.
I like to roll around and kind of do my thing with real dudes every day.
Like I enjoy, you're a chump.
You're a total chump.
You couldn't last two minutes with 99% of the cops out there.
If it was like, all right, you know what?
You want to call for violence against me?
How about we just do a little charity MMA thing?
What do you think?
Snoop dog?
You're a chump.
You're soft.
Chump.
Hope someone who listens and knows Snoop Dogg... CHUMP!
CHUMP!
I bet they will.
Calvin Brodus.
CHUMP!
Alright.
Pisses me off.
Alright, another interesting piece.
Moving on.
Alrighty then.
You know, I love stories about how liberals push an agenda, and their stated agenda backfires in their face and actually does the opposite.
So here's a doozy I read in the Wall Street Journal, it'd be in the show notes.
And again, the show notes are available at Bongino.com, ConservativeReview.com, and their podcast.
And if you want them emailed to your email, just go to Bongino.com, sign up for my email list, and I will get you the articles you need to read daily, right in your email box.
It comes out about three o'clock.
My daughter helps me with it.
So Germany, Joe, Germany began a push for green energy a long time ago.
Again, the green energy people want you to believe somehow that the future is going to be dependent on solar and wind.
But there's a big problem, Joe, with these two things.
Now, liberals, get ready.
Joe, this is going to be hard for liberals to understand.
We don't even need Jay's advocates because there's no math in this one.
But this is going to be tough for liberals to understand.
Joe, the sun, you know, that powers solar energy, right?
Sun, solar, there's a connection there.
Yes, you've seen it.
I know what you're talking about.
You've seen it.
Yeah, I'm in Florida.
Sometimes I go out and it's there and I'm like, oh my, what is that?
Well, you have a different sun.
It's a different sun, yes.
Down south, you get a different sun.
Up north, the country's bisected into two.
My sun's hotter, okay?
So my sun down here is really hot.
Sometimes I go out and I'm like, oh my gosh, my skin is, I get burned.
You know, my Italian skin is, my Irish skin is taken over in my old age.
I'm burning a lot.
I'm half Irish and German, right?
So.
All right.
Here's the problem with solar energy.
I know we have two separate suns and you have a sun up north, but let me ask you a question about your sun up in Maryland.
All right.
At night, does it go away?
It's not out at night.
That's why it's night.
Yeah, it's not out.
So it's dark.
So that sun thing you have up there emits light.
So when you go out during the day, you can see stuff, right?
Yeah.
Amazingly, it works the same way down here with our sun, right?
All right.
When you go out at night, the light isn't there, right?
You can't see the sun.
You see another thing in the sky, right?
It's kind of bright sometimes.
That's a moon.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think we have the same moon, but that's a moon, okay?
That's not a star, just so you know, okay?
We have to coach the liberals through this.
So the problem with solar energy is It doesn't come out at night.
It's not like that song, the freaks come out at night.
The sun does not come out at night.
So the problem with solar energy has always been storage.
Because Joe, even in Florida where this hour sun down here is hotter than Hades and beams all day, the problem with the sun is it only works during the day.
And unless you have a super powerful battery or a high capacity battery to store the energy during the day, you're going to have this problem at night.
When the sun just goes away.
Now, this is magic.
I know liberals have trouble with this.
Now...
With wind.
We have a similar problem outside of like the Gulf in Texas, which we discussed a couple weeks ago.
The story I teased for like seven straight days and never talked about, and eventually got to it.
But unless you're in the Gulf in Texas, where the wind blows pretty consistently, the problem with wind is, Joe, you know, you go outside, wind you feel, it feels like a friction up against your skin, and it feels refreshing on hot days.
You've had that experience.
The same wind for me, unlike the sun, we have different ones up there, right?
But the wind is kind of the same.
And the wind, the problem with the wind is the wind doesn't always blow either, and the wind doesn't always blow at night.
So these are inconsistent sources of energy, unlike coal, natural gas, and oil, Joe.
This is amazing.
Get ready for this, Joe.
This is going to be a shocker to liberals.
You can burn oil and coal at night.
Did you know that?
Now, Joe, this is exciting.
This is groundbreaking.
This is a bombshell.
You can burn that stuff at night.
So when you're at night sleeping and you need your air conditioner to go, because I love Florida, and Florida is hot.
It's not that hot, but people exaggerate it, by the way, but sometimes me too.
But you need an air conditioner at night in Florida.
This is it.
Here's the bombshell.
You can burn oil and gas and get your air conditioner to work at night.
That sounds like a cool idea.
This is amazing!
It's incredible how it's a cool idea.
I know someone only would have thought of that.
So where I'm going with this is that the Wall Street Journal has a piece about Germany which has made this big push for solar and wind despite, although we use heavy sarcasm there, the obvious problems that the sun doesn't come out at night, wind doesn't blow all the time.
So Germany makes this big aggressive push and here's a quote from the Wall Street Journal which should surprise you.
Sorry, I'm like laughing at myself again, which is a major sin.
Germany began to pursue renewables aggressively, and their annual carbon dioxide emissions are down a negligible 0.1%.
So Germany aggressively pursues green energy under the guise that they're going to lower carbon dioxide emissions, which I don't really understand The correlation between carbon dioxide emissions and Earth-bound catastrophe is still not clear, by the way, despite what scientists will say.
But Joe, they do this and they lowered their CO2 emissions by 0.1%.
Okay.
Wow.
Great.
You guys are terrific.
Wonderful job.
Okay.
Meanwhile, this is the quote from the piece, the United States, which granted has had some green initiatives to push, but nothing like Germany, which has really rock hard mandates there.
Meanwhile, the United States experienced year over year reductions in CO2 emissions in 2015 and 2016 and CO2 emissions have fallen a dramatic 14% since 2005.
Wow.
And now, why is that, folks?
Because of this magic thing called the free market, where they didn't have government mandates in Germany.
You had to use a certain amount of solar energy, despite the fact that there's this inconvenient fact that the sun doesn't come out at night and wind doesn't blow all the time.
Now, fracking, which is hydraulic fracturing into rock, which releases tight oil and natural gas, has been an economic boom for the United States.
There's no question about it.
Money and investment made this possible.
Money and investment that was available to hydraulically fracture horizontally fracture rock and use hydraulics as well.
They do use water to do it.
Money and investment made this possible.
Now, the money in investment is not there in Germany to do that because the money in investment is being scooped up by taxes used to give money to solar and wind companies that cannot make money in a free market and need government subsidies to stay in existence.
You following me, Joe?
Oh, yeah.
Money and investment is needed to buy the cranes.
It's needed to buy the engineers.
It's needed to buy the hydrofracking and horizontal fracking equipment that they use out in these plays, as they call them, these natural gas plays to fracture the rock and get that tight natural gas and oil out of there.
The money is not available in Germany to do that because it's being scooped up in solar and wind subsidies for solar and wind companies that can't make money in a market because the energy is too expensive.
It doesn't exist at night.
So the money's not there.
Folks, opportunity costs matter.
I talk about this all the time in this show.
You have to understand the concept of opportunity costs.
There are economic benefits and financial benefits, and those things are not always the same.
In a pure economic sense, if you are spending money on solar and the solar company produces energy, you can look at it... Let me use my wife's example again.
The best way to describe the difference between... It's simpler.
Once you get into energy, it confuses people.
My wife is a really good web designer.
She could make six figures easily doing web design and breaking down people's websites and telling them what's wrong.
If she leaves that and decides to paint toenails for a living for $20,000 a year because she likes toenails, in a pure financial sense, She's earning $20,000 a year painting toenails, but in an economic sense, she's really losing $80,000 a year, folks, because the foregone opportunity, the cost of the opportunity she let go, Joe, does this make sense, is actually $100,000 because she gave up a career in web design.
So she actually lost $80,000.
The point I'm trying to make with this whole thing is, The Germans are looking at this all the wrong way.
They're looking at it, hey look, we're producing all this solar and wind energy, but what they're not looking at is the opportunity cost.
They're not looking at the cost of the foregone opportunity.
In other words, where would that money have gone if it didn't go into solar and wind?
Oh, it would have went into what?
Buying cheaper natural gas, which would have allowed companies to operate on a tighter energy budget, which would have allowed them to lower prices, which would have allowed them to pay workers more?
This is how complex economics works.
But it doesn't work that way for liberals because they're not complex creatures.
They're first order thinkers only.
And it reminds me of when I was over in Africa.
I remember, was it?
I think it was Africa, yeah.
We were sitting in the parking area, very small parking area.
It was.
We were in the Hotel Rwanda from the movie, from the genocide.
I think it was Don Cheadle was in the movie.
But we were staying there in Kigali, and there was a kid.
We were throwing out a bunch of plastic water bottles, whatever, deer park bottles from the limos.
You know, people drink water.
Yeah, throw them in the back.
We were throwing them out and these kids were coming and taking and leaving with them.
They were going into the garbage cans and taking them.
And I remember Joe saying to the guy at the hotel, like, what's up with that?
And he said, you know, these kids don't have any money and they don't have a way to take water to school.
They don't even have like a container, a vessel for water.
So plastic bottles are a big deal.
So they take them and they use them to fill them and take them, you know, take water to school.
I thought to myself, my gosh, like we're so rich in the United States, this hasn't even occurred to us.
You know, like the idea, we have so much money.
That hasn't occurred to us like the opportunity cost for them for investing in these.
See for us Joe the opportunity cost is low with the government engaging in all this green energy agenda stuff because you don't see any effect on your life.
Right.
You see what I'm saying?
Like Joe really what's the you'll lose a couple dollars in tax money but you don't see any huge effect because the United States is so wealthy of the government giving your money to solar companies Because you're not going to go poor over it.
Now you'd be a little richer without it.
But when you're in a country where decisions actually matter, if they were to do that in Rwanda, and they were to say, we're going to ban plastic bottles because they're filling our rivers with debris, kids could potentially dehydrate and die because they don't have any vessels to get water to school when they go to school because it's hot and they're dehydrated.
So the opportunity cost for us for government stupidity is low.
The opportunity cost for people who are living really tough lives in impoverished countries is very high.
And, you know, that's why we're victims of our own success, Joe.
We're so rich that the government can make a bevy of stupid decisions and people will feel no real pain in real life.
You get what I'm saying?
Yeah.
All right.
All right, moving on.
Hey, before I get to that, have you stocked up on your emergency food yet?
I appreciate all the emails from people who have.
I got one from a regular listener and emailer, Mark.
So a little shout out to Mark, he emails me a lot.
I do appreciate it.
I read all your emails, I promise you.
I respond to as many as I can.
But he picked up his emergency food.
It's a great idea, folks.
Not having a supply of emergency food is really kind of crazy.
We insure everything in our lives that matter.
Our health, our cars, our homes.
Why not have an emergency supply of food?
And you may say to yourself, oh, I'll never need that.
The supermarkets are always stocked.
Are they really?
Have you ever been in a real crisis?
You know, I've been actually a couple of times.
And let me tell you, supermarket shelves empty fast.
And if you have kids at home, Or you're married, or even if you're on your own, do you really wanna be the last guy to turn the lights out in the supermarket when there's nothing left on the shelves and there's no restocking coming for four or five days?
Folks, it could be worse.
I mean, we've seen it before with Katrina and other natural disasters.
I'm asking you as a friend to go out there and defend your home and defend your livelihood by getting an emergency supply of food.
It's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.
It could get you through an entire month.
Go to preparewithdan.com.
That's preparewithdan.com.
In my patron supply, I get you a month's supply of emergency food, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
It lasts 25 years.
It comes in a super slim plastic case, slides right in your closet.
Again, better to have it, not need it, than need it, not have it.
It's only $99.
Just $99.
Go to preparewithdan.com.
Pick up your month's supply of emergency food today.
Thanks to everyone who supports our sponsors.
I do really appreciate it.
Okay.
A couple more things I want to get to.
Some, uh, Texas is, Really leading the nation again in a number of these preemption laws.
And I want to discuss this because I've been getting a lot of questions about it on email.
Preemption laws are basically this.
The state house in Texas, which meets for two months every two years, which I love, not like Maryland, Joe, which seems like they're perpetually in session.
I know they sign-e-die in April, but it seems like all the time Maryland lawmakers are trying to screw people over.
I remember living up there.
Texas only meets rarely, and when they do, they're engaging in a lot of these preemption laws, and it's causing a lot of constitutional consternation amongst people because some people are confused.
And these preemption laws basically lay out a bunch of state guidelines that cities can't overrule.
So what Texas does, what they're pushing is they're pushing some minimum wage rules, Rules that ban localities from doing things on plastic bags.
Rules that ban localities from becoming sanctuary cities.
And a lot of people have emailed me and said, well, if you're a believer in subsidiarity and a constitution and local control, Joe, doesn't this kind of go against your ethos?
Because technically, if locals, liberal cities in Texas want to do dumb things that make a $35 an hour minimum wage, then we should let them Suffer.
Folks, subsidiarity is based on a larger goal.
The why matters.
The larger goal of subsidiarity or local control.
Control at the most local level possible.
That's what that means.
In other words, not even just the state, but the county you live in, if not the, you know, the block.
If you could have an HOA, you want to control it locally because there's more accountability locally.
But the entire goal of subsidiarity is to enhance human freedom and liberty, Joe.
So if you have a bunch of localities within a state, and I'll get to the constitutional question in a second, but just from a larger ideological perspective, Joe, it's important, because your liberal friends will go, I thought you were for local control.
Yeah, when it advances liberty and freedom.
I'm not for local control if they were to institute an indentured servitude agreement.
You know what I'm saying, Joe?
Like, here's what we're going to do.
We're going to make conservatives, you know, work for us.
This is crazy.
Folks, it's not the goal of subsidiarity.
Has always been to enhance human freedom and liberty.
So if Texas as a state wants to put out a bunch of edicts that say local localities, say Austin, which is very liberal, they have their saying, you know, keep Austin weird.
Austin wants to make a $50 an hour, I'm being dramatic, but let's just say $15 an hour minimum wage, which is by the way, going to take away the freedom of store owners to pay people what their productivity is worth, Joe.
Then I'm all for it.
There's nothing advancing freedom about wage floors that take away the freedom of employees and employers to engage in a contract that works for both of them.
A minimum wage doesn't do that.
It says you can't engage in a contract for $12 an hour, Joe, because our minimum wage is $15.
Well, that doesn't work for us.
It doesn't care.
We're the state.
I don't care.
We're the state.
We'll tell you what works.
So I have no problem at all with these rules.
Now, on the constitutionality question, this is important.
There is nothing in the Constitution that mentions cities.
Nothing.
Now, there is a 10th Amendment which delegates these powers to the states, so there's no constitutional hang-up at all.
There is no provision in the Constitution, there is no 32nd Amendment, Joe, or anything, or 28th Amendment, that says, and by the way, whatever powers aren't delegated to the states go to the cities.
That's not what it says in the Constitution.
It says that powers not delegated to the federal government are delegated to the states, and Joe, Power is not delegated to states, it's delegated to the people.
It doesn't say cities.
Cities and counties are creations of states.
So there's no constitutional hang-up and there's no subsidiarity conflict either.
Local control, the goal of local control is to enhance freedom, liberty, and accountability.
If locals want to take away both freedom, liberty, and accountability, and states step in and say no, that's not a conflict with subsidiarity at all.
So just a note on that on preemption, I'll put an article up from The Hill, which is a really good piece about what Texas is doing with a lot of these preemption laws, which is to be clear, in case I didn't explain it well.
Preempt localities from creating new laws that are dangerous to freedom and liberty.
Gotcha.
You get what I'm saying?
So they say you can't do this.
You can't create a $15 an hour minimum wage.
You can't say immigration laws don't matter.
So that's what they are.
I'll put that article in there and you can check that out.
It's a pretty good piece.
Okay, one quick thing.
Social media is really obviously exploding and I think this has really been a Tremendous, tremendous asset for conservatives out there.
There are three stories.
I'm not going to go into all of them in detail because I've discussed most of them already.
But I just wanted to mention this quickly how I think the tide is turning due to social media a little bit Joe.
Social media is allowing us to Get stories out there that would not have received a lot of coverage otherwise, because the liberal media in the Walter Cronkite area would have hid them.
And I think they're starting to turn the tide.
I don't want to be overly dramatic, but they're stories that have been unbelievably damaging to the liberal narrative over the last week or so.
Here they are.
You know the Omar Khadr story, the terrorist I discussed who got a $10 million payout from the Canadian government?
Yeah, I know.
I know you were pissed about the story, too.
We talked about it yesterday.
This story would have gone almost nowhere in the Cronkite era, where they controlled CBS, NBC, and ABC.
You would have never heard about it.
This story is everywhere, and I read a stunning poll yesterday.
Canada, which can lean liberal.
We got a lot of Canadian listeners, and I always appreciate it, but can lean liberal.
I love Canada.
There's a beautiful place, by the way.
70% of Canadians think this thing was a horrible idea.
Newsflash, it was, which is great.
That's probably why 70% of Canadians think this thing sucks, giving $10 million to a terrorist who threw a grenade and killed a United States military Sergeant First Class.
This is just a ridiculous story.
Second story is Charlie Gard.
Charlie Gard is the child in the UK who is, there's going to be a decision soon on this, who is being essentially condemned to death by the courts in the UK.
He has a rare mitochondrial disorder.
He has some brain damage.
He wants to come to the United States.
The family has raised 1.7 million for care.
The British government has no financial liability in this at all.
But the UK single-payer system, they sent this to the UK courts and the UK courts said, nope, can't go to the United States, essentially giving a death sentence to Charlie Gard.
This thing has...
This story is an abomination, number one.
This is the dangers of single payer.
But Joe, to social media, thanks again to all the conservatives out there who keep this story going.
Let's save Charlie.
And let's make sure Cotter, Omer Cotter, that he pays, that that money gets paid to the families, not to him, ever.
This guy, I mean, this is an unbelievable story.
But there's one more.
This is one that kind of rode under the radar a little bit, but it's been coming to prominence because of social media and the video of it.
You know Venezuela, what's going on with the socialists over there destroying the country?
On July 5th, I don't know if you saw this video, but a bunch of supporters of Maduro, the socialist head of state over there, who is the successor to Chavez, Uh, walked into their government building and basically beat the crap out of a bunch of congressmen who oppose socialism.
And they came out all bloody and it got all over social media.
It spread like wildfire.
And as a result, the Venezuelans, Maduro had to release one of the opposition leaders from prison and put him on house arrest.
Now, they didn't do that because they're benevolent, they're socialist thugs, they did it because they're starting to realize that the tide's turning a little bit on this.
That, you know, socialism, according to at least the younger generation, is wonderful until you see bloody congressmen coming out with broken nose who got their asses kicked by a bunch of socialists who didn't like what they had to say.
Not good.
Not a good look.
So those three stories, again, I don't want to be hyperbolic, they're turning the tide, the war's over, we won!
No!
But these things all reflect really poorly on the left.
Money to terrorists.
Killing babies because you believe in single payer and, you know, they don't need babies.
We don't need to save them.
And then finally, beating the snot out of opposition people in a Congress duly elected and having them walk out with their bloody noses.
Not a good look for you.
Hey, last story.
So, some good news for you.
Really good news.
Hold your head up high.
The one positive to take from the collapse of this Obamacare thing is they're moving on to tax reform, and from what I'm getting from a lot of people inside, staff members and stuff that I talk to up on the Hill, is the pressure's on.
The donor class, the grassroots are furious about the failure of the GOP to do anything substantive.
Now they've repealed some regulations, Congressional Review Act, great, congratulations.
They've done almost nothing of substance.
They're starting to get it a little bit, Joe.
There's an article I put up from Reuters, which is really good.
Not Reuters.
I'm going to put the American Mirror article.
It's a little better.
It's about Newt Gingrich talking about the electoral ramifications of not getting tax reform done.
They're starting to get it.
And I think what we're going to see is we're going to see a big, bold, badass tax reform
bill coming out of Congress.
And they're going to do it via reconciliation.
And here's the catch.
They would have to pass a budget first.
That's the only catch.
So it's really going to be two votes, Joe, just to be clear.
It'd be a budget vote and it'd be a reconciliation vote.
And remember what I told you about reconciliation in relationship to Obamacare.
They'd only need 50 votes in the Senate because Pence can break the tie.
But it has to save money over time.
And I think because of that, the having to save money portion, you are going to get a
big, bold, hairy tax reform package.
And remember, that money has to go somewhere.
Folks, I can't say to you enough, we could be looking at three, four, even 5% growth.
If you were to put a trillion dollars of tax cuts, not put because it's in the economy,
but allow it to stay in the economy rather than the government confiscating it.
In other words, do a tax cut?
Man, we could be looking at some enormous economic growth.
Then the only question is...
Is that amount back in the economy going to grow at a greater rate than the interest rate on the debt?
That's the critical question, right Joe?
Because we already owe a lot of money.
So let's say the interest on the debt we owe is, you know, right now 2-3%.
Probably, you know, a little less than that, but 2-3% we're paying on our debt.
If we can grow the economy at 4%, I've said this to you over and over, the debt matters, believe me, but the debt matters a lot less when growth rates supersede the interest rate you're paying on the debt.
Think about, I mean, just let me use a quick analogy.
Think about it from your own perspective, right?
If you have a business growing at 5% a year and the loan you took the business out on is a 3% loan, which isn't going to be the case, but you get my point, I got news for you.
You're going to pay off that loan pretty damn fast because you're growing at a greater rate than the interest you paid and the money you borrowed.
That's where the same thing works for the United States.
So folks, I feel really good about this because interest rates are really low right now.
They're still low.
We borrowed a lot of money, but we didn't borrow it, thankfully, at high interest rates.
So put a smile on your face.
If Trump can sign a bold tax cut package, I think we are in for explosive economic growth.
