Ep. 519 The Huffington Post Viciously Attacks Conservatives
In this episode I address: Did you see this vicious attack on conservatives in the Huffington Post? I debunk this nonsensical piece using facts, which are anathema to the Left. http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_59519811e4b0f078efd98440 The European social welfare state's taxation model is collapsing, here's the data. https://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-has-a-whale-of-a-tax-problem-1501793392 The far-Left NYC Mayor wants to tax the rich, again! http://nypost.com/2017/08/06/de-blasio-wants-to-tax-the-rich-to-pay-for-subway-repairs/ The NY Times is floating a ridiculous Mike Pence story that requires attention. http://washex.am/2fltvO2 www.CRTV.com Promo Code: Bongino
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Aiming to stop free speech so the speaker can no longer speak is exclusively a far-left phenomena.
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.
Hi, welcome to The Renegade Republican with Dan Bongino.
Producer Joe, how are you today?
And we're off.
Here we go, Dan.
Man, I had a totally different show planned today based on some news over the weekend.
And I do want to get to some, you know, some breaking news stuff.
But I read a report this morning, folks, that's gonna just knock your shorts off there.
It was...
Yeah, I read it.
The Daily Signal from the Heritage Foundation, they have an email list like I do every day and they send out, you know, news clips of interest just like I do at bongino.com and they put out a piece and there's a link in the piece to a Huffington Post piece that just blew my mind by this woman Kayla Chadwick and the gist of the piece, Joe, is Um, if you believe in conservative and liberty-based libertarian values, you know, the constitutional republic, and you're a constitutionalist, you suck, you hate everyone, everyone's evil, and you're not even worthy of this woman's time who wrote the piece.
She shouldn't even talk to you, because she can't even explain to you how stupid you are, and she's just tired of it.
She's tired of it, Joe.
She's tired of having to debate, you know, silly things like facts and data.
So she's pretty much done with you.
And the title of her piece now, listen, I do want to preface this entire thing by saying...
I understand we're giving this woman clicks, and I understand we're giving the Huffington Post clicks, and I rarely do this, and you know that, because I try not to drive traffic to these dopey sites.
But folks, you need to read the piece today, even if it drives up traffic to their site, because it is so epidemic.
of the cancer that the modern left has become on our society and it sums it up nicely in an amateurish, immature, uneducated, non-facts oriented, kind of like desperate author who is either doing it for clickbait or is just really unbelievably ignorant and it really sums up where the left is.
The title of the piece pretty much says it all.
It says, by Kayla Chadwick, who is a contributor at the Huffington Post over there, Says, I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people.
Oh, you need, we need, Joe, we need an explanation from Kayla Chadwick.
Kayla Chadwick.
I don't know Kayla Chadwick.
I've never met her.
I'm sure she's a wonderful human being.
Never met her in my life, but I sincerely doubt my listening audience needs a lecture from Miss Kayla here about how we should care about other people.
Now, I want to go into this and I want to relate it to some current news, too, because, you know... A little condescending.
A little?
Dude, seriously?
Like, you're being very generous.
Wait until I start reading some quotes from the piece, a little condescending, you're gonna be like, this can't be real.
This is a piece from The Onion, surely, the satirical site.
But no, no, it's real.
But just some quick news I saw over the weekend.
Hey, listen, this New York Times article, it's gone viral about Mike Pence considering the vice president, of course.
You heard about it?
You talked about this on today's show?
Considering running in 2020.
The New York Times didn't say that directly, but kind of alluded to it in a piece that Pence is sniffing around in Iowa and he's considering running.
Folks, I know a lot of people on the Pence and Trump team.
I'm not back slapping myself.
I'm just, I have a little bit of credibility and enough that I can say this confidently.
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
Pence is not running for president 2020, okay?
I mean, unless there's, God forbid, some major disaster like the Trump-Russia fairy tale is used as a premise to impeach the president and the phony rhino Republicans do it.
I mean, unless Trump disappears from the scene from it, politically speaking of course, impeachment or he resigns or whatever it may be, Pence is not running for president.
It's a dumb story.
He would never get past the Benedict Arnold label that would be permanently affixed to him.
I mean, it should be common sense.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Trump base is what got him through the primaries pretty handily.
I mean, it was tight until the end, but he ran away with it at the end.
The Trump base is the Pence base now.
They're attached at the hip forever.
I mean, for the New York Times, a Non-credible, but taken seriously by some newspaper to write an article like that and allude to the fact that Pence was going to run for president 2020 and backstab Trump is just ridiculous.
And listen, one thing about Pence, you can like Pence, you can hate Pence.
That's your, you know, that's your call, Joe.
But nobody questions Pence is loyal to Trump.
Nobody.
He's never given a public statement.
Otherwise, you know, Pence is loyal.
So it's just a dumb story.
I just wanted to address it because I've gotten a few emails asking me for my opinion about it.
Alright, getting back to this Huffington Post piece.
Okay, let's go into this, because this is just absurd, and it relates to my show, where I like to debunk just liberal stupidity, and this is just overflowing at the brim with it.
So, she says, Kayla starts off, like many Americans, I'm having politics fatigue.
Or, to be more specific, arguing about politics fatigue.
Oh, Snowflake, sorry!
Is this hurting your delicate sensibilities?
You don't want to argue about politics anymore?
I haven't run out of salient points or evidence from my political perspective, but there is a particular stumbling block I keep running into when trying to reach across the proverbial aisle and have those difficult conversations so smugly suggested by think piece after think piece.
Here's where it goes downhill fast.
I don't know how to explain to someone why they should care about other people.
Now she's making the case, so let's think of this in a lawyerly fashion.
Now she goes on to make the case why you, conservatives and liberty-oriented folks, constitutional conservatives and people who believe in crazy things like robust individual liberty at a limited state, Why you're all crazy, not worthy of her attention, Kayla, because she's the arbiter of what's worthy of attention and not, and why she's right.
She says, I'm quoting again, personally, I'm happy to pay an extra 4.3% for my fast food burger if it means the person making it for me can afford to feed their own family.
If you aren't willing to fork over an extra 17 cents for a Big Mac, you're a fundamentally different person than I am.
Yes, yes, Kayla, we are.
Joe, right?
We are fundamentally different in that we're interested in actually helping people, not writing ridiculous, childish, amateurish, non-fact-based, totally absurd articles at the Huffington Post about helping people.
We actually are interested in doing it, us crazy conservatives who are quote fundamentally different people than you.
We are fundamentally different in that we're intelligent and you're clearly not by writing a ridiculous humiliating embarrassing piece like this.
Let's break this down though piece by piece and let's do it rather than uh ranting against this this this the the Kayla here who just is I mean could not be More insulting towards people on the other side of the political ideological aisle.
So she says, I'm happy to pay an extra 4.3% for my fast food burger.
Hey, Kayla, great.
Nice job.
Round of applause.
You're a real rock star.
Kayla, let me give you the hard facts.
That doesn't matter.
Okay?
That doesn't matter.
Policy and the effects of policy have a funny way of existing in the real world, not the world of good intentions.
The fact that you want to donate 4.3 percent extra towards a fast food burger because you are so-called compassionate to the person behind the counter is a wonderful thought.
The problem, Kayla, is you're free to do that now.
Is she not, Joe?
No.
When you go into a McDonald's, Joe, now, where Joe works at WCBM, there's a McDonald's right next to it, because when I used to guest host, I used to pick up those egg white, egg McMuffins there in the morning.
Joe, when you go in there, have you been in there before?
Which one?
The McDonald's next to CBM.
Oh yeah, yeah, a number of times.
Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.
When you go in there, if you see someone behind the counter serving you whatever, your morning breakfast or whatever it may be, is anything stopping you from leaving a tip or even throwing the person a $5 bill and saying, hey, you can spend this better than I can, knock yourself out?
No, as a matter of fact, I've done that in there.
I know you have.
I know you're a generous guy.
I know what you do with the church and stuff.
So there's nothing stopping you from doing that.
Right.
Also, is there anything stopping Kayla, who again, now doesn't even want to talk to us anymore because she's happy to pay more for the burger, although she doesn't.
She doesn't actually do that.
She just says she's happy to do it.
Is there anything stopping Kayla on her tax filings from checking the box on everyone's tax form that says, I'd like to voluntarily donate extra money to the federal government?
Is there anything stopping her, Joe?
No, I don't think so, Dan.
Because there isn't!
That's why you don't think so.
Because it's not there.
So what Kayla's saying is, although she doesn't actually do that, and she likely doesn't, I don't have her tax returns, I don't need them, because I know the actual data, again, this is, Joe, data.
We're doing actual facts.
I know the data and the actual data on people who donate extra money to the federal government in the form of taxes is pretty appalling if you think taxes and the big government and the financing of big government is a public good deed.
It's appalling.
One of the record years the federal government had for voluntarily paid higher payments was 12 million bucks.
12 million bucks!
Think about what I just told you.
If the country is 40% liberal, and even that's a high number, And there's 330 million people.
You're looking at over 100 million people in the country.
Factor out the kids and everything, 50 million.
Factor out people who don't have a lot of money, go down to 25 million.
If those 25 million people donated even a dollar extra to taxes, they would double what the government raises now in voluntary tax payments.
But they don't do it, Joe!
Why don't they do it?
Why?
So Kayla, she says she's personally happy to pay an extra 4.3% for a burger, thinking minimum wage is going to do someone a favor.
But what she doesn't tell you is, number one, she doesn't do that.
She probably doesn't donate any money in taxes.
Again, I have the data on that.
She probably doesn't and probably hasn't looked into it.
They don't donate extra money to taxes.
And then what she doesn't tell you as well is, as we discussed last week, a number of very robust studies on minimum wage that actually study a common sense issue, Joe.
When you ask employers to pay more, the money doesn't come from the money ferry, the money has to come from somewhere.
And employers who were running businesses are just money collectors.
Where they collect the money from to pass it on to their employees is relevant.
You would think, where do they get it from?
Customers.
So folks, there's only two ways to give extra money to employers if the government mandates it happens.
Either they can take more money from customers and put their businesses in jeopardy, destroying their own competitiveness, or they can take money from other workers to give it to the workers who remain behind because the minimum wage has gone up.
Now, you doubt this?
There would be the Seattle story we discussed last week, which I'm not going to readdress in total this week, but Seattle instituted a slowly escalating minimum wage up to $15 an hour.
The Seattle liberal mayor found out about a study from the University of Washington, no far-right think tank, that was done using new methods where they could aggregate the data in a more finer fashion and figured out that the increase in minimum wage was going to Costs lower income workers $179 a month.
Kayla doesn't know that!
Or, and I'm saying that to be generous, like I don't want to insult Kayla, because the alternate scenario, Joe, is more disturbing.
That she does know that, and she's legitimately lying in the piece.
That, oh, minimum wage is so great, and I'm not even willing to talk to you people who discuss the other side of the equation, which is market-enforced wages.
I'm not even willing to talk to you because you're not sympathetic to other people and you don't care.
Do you understand how sick that is?
That our side of the equation is right.
Our side of the equation is right on common sense.
It's right on economic theory.
It's right on the facts and the data that are out there.
The University of Washington study on minimum wage in Seattle showed that it was costing people money.
But Kayla insists that if you don't support her proposal for minimum wage to take $179 a month out of lower income workers' pockets, that you don't care about people and you're not worthy of her time.
Really, I had a totally different topic this morning.
These efforts, Joe, by people like this, this amateurish, childish, uneducated ignoramus who wrote this piece insulting all of us, make no mistake, folks, is an effort amongst a bunch of these far-left kooks to delegitimize completely conservative thought and to keep it out of mainstream politics.
I've told you this over and over, and you know, again, I always say there are a couple takeaways.
If there's a list of 20 takeaways, put this one on there.
Liberals cannot beat you on a facts and data-based argument.
Ladies and gentlemen, they can't.
I'm not done with this piece, by the way.
All right.
But Joe, they can't beat you on a facts and data-based argument.
They can't.
No.
Because what they're saying makes no sense.
When you ask them simple questions like, okay, the government's mandating I pay my employees a certain wage, but what about the employees I have, although they may be really good people, what if they're young and they haven't accumulated a large skill set yet, and they're not worth productivity-wise to my business, the amount of money you're asking me to pay, in other words, you're asking me to pay them $15 an hour, but as a component of my business, they're only generating $10 an hour in productivity.
Where am I gonna come up with the extra five dollars?
They're not generating enough money to pay themselves the money you're asking me to pay them.
Liberals will look at you like you're crazy!
Because they... Do you understand they have nothing?
You understand this is why my... I have such anger directed at them?
Because they have nothing!
All they can possibly do is say, come back with, oh you're a racist, you hate poor people, income inequality, or Kayla who's saying, now you're not even worthy of my time.
And, you know, I read an interesting piece by the Wall Street Journal this weekend, too.
They were talking about the growing use of the word illiberalism, how around the world people are starting to point to, you know, compare people like Trump to, you know, of course, the Hitler comparisons, which are just, I mean, beyond insulting, they're hate-filled.
But they were saying how this is one of the pieces in the journal.
One of the components, excuse me, of the piece was that this use of the word liberalism is being used in the same way Kayla writes her piece now, to delegitimize, Joe, folks who have an opposing political position based on facts and data because you don't want to argue the facts and data.
Okay, so that's her take on minimum wage, that she's so generous, she's willing to pay the extra 17 cents, but she doesn't.
Just go around with your liberal friends to fast food places and tell everybody to keep the change.
I'm not gonna do that, that's so impractical.
But it's more practical to institute a nationwide minimum wage policy that we can almost conclusively show will cost minimum wage workers money.
Will cost them money, cost them, not give them money.
That's more practical.
And if I argue that, I hate poor people and you're on the moral, ethical, and intellectual high ground?
Really?
Are you an imbecile?
Oh, gosh.
Here's another doozy from this piece.
Kayla, again, with her mastery of the English language and her intellectual wizardry.
She says, I'm perfectly content to pay taxes that go towards public schools, even though I'm childless and intend to stay that way, because all children deserve a quality, free education.
Here's the kicker.
If this seems unfair or unreasonable to you, we are never going to see eye to eye.
One, no one's asking to see Ida.
Believe me, I'm addressing your piece and driving traffic to your deranged piece and this ridiculous website you write for because your piece is endemic of the intellectual failure of your movement.
Now the fact that we're not going to see eye-to-eye is an intellectual slap to your face, not mine, because you can't argue your own point.
Joe, her point is strictly emotion.
She says, here's her point, children deserve a quality free education.
That's a quotation, take it from that paragraph.
Nobody disagrees with that.
No reasonable person disagrees with that.
What she does is she does a typical far-left debating tactic where she makes an umbrella statement.
She makes an umbrella statement laden with emotion.
Children, free, quality education.
She uses emotional laden words.
But she never makes an actual argument there.
Now, the way you beat and defeat these people like Kayla, which is not difficult at all, requires almost no energy at all, because they're so pathetic in their amateurish, you know, amateur hour thinking, is you say, okay, well, Kayla, what does that mean?
What does that mean exactly?
Children deserve a free quality education.
Free to who?
Because it's the children's parents that are paid.
It's not free.
It's not free to anybody.
Joe, can we all agree that the education system, the public school system is not free?
Yeah, the meaning of the word free has gotten real screwed up.
It has, but you understand how it's an emotional, it's not a reasonable word to use in an economic conversation because literally nothing is free.
Nothing.
Not figuratively.
Literally in economics, the allocation of resources is only a question of price or rationing.
You can ration resources and price them.
They're never free.
They are never free.
It either comes at a cost to your liberty or a cost to your wallet.
There is no way to allocate resources any other way.
You can price them or ration them.
If Kayla can explain to me a third way, I would be fascinated to hear it.
She will win the Nobel Prize to end all Nobel Prizes in economics.
If you have a barrel of oil, you have two ways to get it out there.
You can price its contents or you can ration it.
There is no third way.
You have a doctor's time.
He works eight hours a day.
Say he works double.
Say he works 16 hours a day.
It doesn't matter.
You can allocate that doctor's time to patients one of two ways.
You can price his time, or you can ration his time.
Kayla has not really thought about these issues because she's a liberal, or she has and she's lying.
Either way, it makes her a really silly person to debate with, but it's important we do this today because this piece is so grotesquely offensive.
Now, it's interesting that she brings this up about how children deserve a free quality education when the public school system in the United States is one of the worst in the OECD world.
Economically developed countries, the United States has one of the worst performing education systems in the world based on standardized testing models.
We are falling behind the rest of the world.
Now, why would that be?
Now, Kayla's not interested in discussing any of that.
Now, the reason is quite simple, folks, if you think about this rationally, which Kayla has apparently no capacity to do.
When you look at our higher education system, which is one of the best in the world, our university system, which nobody questions, And you compare it to our public school system, K-12, which is one of the worst in the world.
What's the difference?
Well, it's very simple, folks.
Again, this is complicated for Kayla, but not for anybody else.
People choose what college they go to, and the fact that they have to choose a college makes the college compete on its academic rigor to pull people in and attract them to their school.
Joe, is any of this hard to understand?
Not at all, Dano.
When you are a public school in a state that does not have vibrant school choice, there is no need to attract people to your public school because they are forced to go there based on their zip code.
This is only complicated to Kayla.
Another statistic I've thrown out often, which Kayla's probably unaware of or doesn't care about or is aware of and chooses to lie to you about, Is the fact that there are 20,000 public high schools in the country, and about 2,000 of those schools are responsible for half the dropouts.
If you happen to be black, you have a 50% chance of sending your kid to one of those 2,000 schools that produce half the nation's dropouts.
Now, what Kayla's not telling you is if that was in a largely upper-crust white neighborhood where the school had a 50% dropout rate, There would be pitchforks at the statehouse.
But Kayla doesn't care because it's a largely minority population and for compassionate Kayla who thinks we're all morons, she's apparently unaware of the data of how black children are being stuck in zip codes due to poor government policies where they will never get an education, will have no access to our modern ideas economy.
Kayla has none of that.
She doesn't have that or she does have that knowledge base and it's just lying to you because she wants to mislead you because that's what Kayla and liberals do.
She goes on, Joe.
I'll wrap this up in a minute, but it's just... I mean, it's just a disgusting story.
She says, and if I have to pay a little more with each paycheck... No, by the way, notice she doesn't!
Kayla doesn't do that.
Kayla, if you want to prove to us, prove me wrong at least about yourself, because I can prove your point about liberals.
I can totally debunk your point that liberals will pay quote a little more because they don't.
The federal government gets almost no money at all from voluntarily hired tax payments.
So you saying you're going to pay a little more, you're not, you're talking about you.
If you want to send us your tax forms, line out the private data and post them online, prove me wrong.
I'll say, well, Kayla's leading by example.
She's, I want to see how much more you pay.
Right.
Because you're saying you do it, but you don't.
She says, if I have to pay a little more with each paycheck to ensure my fellow Americans can access health care, and in caps she has this, sign me up!
Sign me up!
Yeah.
Poverty should not be a death sentence in the richest country in the world.
If you're okay, This is even hard to read.
Can someone get me an Advil, please?
I'm feeling good today that I've read this piece.
If you're okay with thousands of people dying of treatable diseases, just so the wealthiest among us can still hoard more wealth, there's a divide between our worldviews that can never be bridged.
Guys, ladies, this paragraph of the piece is horrendously embarrassing for this woman.
This paragraph is embarrassing for the embarrassing piece.
It takes the embarrassment to the next level.
Remember the Kangster Curve we talked about last week?
I do!
For those of you listeners, you're going to have to go back and listen to the show, but the Kangster Curve rates liberal dopiness on a scale of 1 to 100 based on some listener feedback.
I thought it was a great idea.
We're going to incorporate the Kangster Curve.
This is like a 97.56 on the Kangster Curve for pure liberal stupidity.
So let's just get this straight.
If I have a little more with each paycheck to ensure my fellow Americans can access health care, sign me up.
Okay, she doesn't do that!
And liberals don't do that!
Again, the data's clear.
Twelve million dollars in voluntary tax payments in a country with a four trillion dollar budget.
Liberals, you are absolutely free to go out tomorrow and call your accountant and find out a way to pay quarterly taxes at a higher rate you're doing now.
You're free to do that!
Why don't you do it?
Matter of fact, liberals, making it even worse, why do your ideological leaders, people you represent to advance your worldview, correct Joe, that's what we do with politicians?
That's what we do.
Why do your ideological leaders hire accountants to not only not pay more, which is what you say you want to do, but to actually pay less?
Why does John Kerry park his boat in Rhode Island to avoid Massachusetts taxes?
Why?
As Kayla said, liberals just want to pay more.
Why does Hillary Clinton have an accountant that works out her real estate arrangement?
And by the way, Joe, I'm not suggesting they're doing anything illegal.
Right, right.
At all.
Matter of fact, thank God John Kerry and Hillary Clinton do everything they can to pay less taxes because the government would just waste the money.
Really.
Yeah.
But that, although that may make them economically and financially smart, it makes them hypocrites, ideologically, just like Kayla.
Why does Hillary Clinton engage in these real estate operations to shelter her income?
Why?
Why does Al Sharpton have an issue with his taxes?
Why does Charlie Rangel have an issue with his taxes?
These are all devout liberals who claim to want to pay more and to want everybody else to pay more, but they don't!
But they don't pay more!
Matter of fact, some of them are in trouble for paying less!
Remember folks, this is critical.
Tax evasion is a crime.
Tax avoidance isn't.
I can't say this enough.
Tax avoidance is a national pastime.
Avoiding taxes.
Tax evasion, meaning not paying taxes you're legally obligated to pay, is a crime.
But avoiding taxes by sheltering your money in legal avenues, Joe, to do so, is not a crime.
Why do Americans do it?
If the country's even 20% liberal.
So we're talking about 60 million Americans.
Again, wipe out the kids who can't pay.
You're talking about 30 million Americans.
Why don't you guys all donate $10?
A hundred dollars!
Just do it!
I don't understand, if your taxes are a public good, and you claim to want to pay more, why don't you actually do it?
Now, on this topic, by the way, the healthcare topic is absurd because the government already pays for 40% of healthcare, and the reason healthcare's a mess right now, if Kayla had any knowledge of economics at all, she would understand that the third party payer effect of having the government pay 40%, roughly, of all healthcare expenditures in the country now, is distorting the cost curve on healthcare, because when a third party pays for something, it disconnects the person buying the product from the supplier, hence the third party.
So if a consumer wants to pay for healthcare out of their pocket, they're gonna shop around.
When the government pays for them after taking their tax dollars, the consumer has no interest in shopping around for the best price because they're not paying!
This is only hard for people like Kayla.
Oh boy, this is frustrating.
All right, now I said I would relate this to some current news.
One of the reasons I keep bringing up the tax argument is not to beat this thing to death, but given the Trump administration and the failed Republican Congress and House, their renewed push for tax cuts in light of their abysmal failure on Obamacare, By the way, I got an email about this where someone said, don't blame all the... I don't blame all the... I blame the RINO class.
The problem is, listen, it's a Republican brand, and the Republican brand right now is overwhelmingly on the other side of the issue.
If they wanted to repeal Obamacare, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan would be putting the screws to these guys.
And bottom line, Joe, is they're not doing it.
I mean, these people who vote against repeal, nothing happens to them.
Matter of fact, some of them are probably patted on the back and quiet.
But the reason I bring it up is, again, number one, the tax argument is heating up, but number two, there was a great piece in the Wall Street Journal today.
It may be subscription only.
Again, I'm sorry, but I'll put the link in there.
But it was about how the European model is broken right now for taxes, and the Europeans don't know what to do.
It's a really fascinating piece, and it talks about the whale in the bathtub problem.
And I was like, what?
I mean, listen, we've always known the European social democracies are collapsing because the cost of financing the welfare state in Europe is getting overwhelming.
Matter of fact, some countries, you know, a lot of the Bells, you know, the Baltics, Estonia, Latvia, some of them are trying to turn the corner on the welfare state, realizing that there's just not, as Margaret Thatcher said once, they're running out of other people's money, right?
But it's a really fascinating piece, and I'd like to read you a few quotes to escape the idiocy of Kayla's piece for a second from this Wall Street Journal piece.
It talks about how the European model, again, of taxation is broken.
And the European model, just to be clear about what I'm talking about, is this idea that progressive taxation is enough to finance a social welfare state and basically pay for government goodies.
It really simply stated, Joe, the idea that tax the hell out of the rich people and they'll give you all free stuff.
Yeah.
It's failing.
So.
The irony of the European model, which does this, and what the whale model is, is there's a graph in the piece, and it's a fascinating graph, and it's broken down by a different color arrangement.
And what's fascinating about the graph is it shows how the gross taxation, whether it was what people are paying, is really similar whether you're poor or you're rich, almost regardless of what the income tax rate is.
Think about what I just told you.
What I'm trying to say, very simply, is Your tax the rich model of taxing income, which is being used in Europe right now, Joe, isn't working because the percentage of your gross household income paid by people who are poor and rich is not that much different.
But Joe, the point of progressive income taxation, I mean, you and I can both agree, correct, is to so-called tax the evil rich people, to use their terminology, right?
The greedy rich people.
But what I'm telling you is, where that model's being instituted, that's not what's happening.
And the reason they call it the whale in the bathtub is the top portion of the graph, when you look at it, it becomes clear.
It looks like a whale because it's very fat, and they use the color blue in their graph, deep blue.
I mean, excuse me, a light blue, like a whale's skin.
And what it shows, Joe, is that the social taxes, the taxes for things like social security type programs and safety net programs and those types of things are pretty consistent across income categories.
So let me read you a quote from the piece.
It'll make a little bit more sense.
This is from that journal piece today.
And by the way, it's all available at Bongino.com.
You can join my mailing list there and I will email you the show notes every day and some interesting articles to read so you don't have to go hunt around a thousand websites to find good content.
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Okay, here's a quote.
It says, but if you look at the proportion of gross household income paid in all forms of tax, the rate varies by only 25 points.
Now, The paragraph before this, he's showing how the rate, the income tax rate, Joe, varies between rich people and poor people.
In other words, rich people pay a greater percentage.
Okay?
But he says if you look at the taxation of all the household income, the rate varies by only 25 points.
He says the lowest earning 5% of households, this is astonishing, pay roughly 27% of their income, Joe, in various taxes.
Whoa.
Mainly a VAT.
So they pay a heavy VAT, value added tax.
Wow.
He says while a household in the 85th income percentile pays total taxes of around 52%, mostly in social security taxes that amount to nearly double the bill.
So again, the point of this, to be clear, because I don't want to confuse you, is...
There's not enough money in an income tax on the richest income to pay for a social welfare state in Europe.
So what they quietly do is they sneak in other taxes like VATs, valuated taxes, which are taxes at every level of production.
A VAT is pretty simple, folks.
A VAT is The best way to explain it is we used to have a grappling sock company, my wife and I owned a small business, and if I say buy a bunch of yarn to make the socks for a dollar, and a bunch of rubber to put on the bottom of the socks for the grip, right?
That's what we did.
And let's say the rubber's a dollar, but I sell the socks for ten dollars.
The difference between the- my value added is $8, Joe.
I spend $2 in materials.
I'm simplifying it, but roll with me for a minute.
So I spend $2 in materials, right?
A dollar in yarn, a dollar in rubber spray, and I sold the sock for $10.
So I would pay taxes on the value added.
The $8 added.
You get it?
That is built in at every level of production.
A VAT is a really horrible tax because it's hidden into the production process and you don't really see it like you would an income tax on your pay stub.
And that's why the Europeans love it because it's a great way to raise money.
And the point he's trying to make is that this VAT, which is supposedly sold to people as a progressive mechanism to raise money for the welfare state in Europe, like Kayla's suggesting, these big government models and how she wants to pay so much more, isn't actually working because lower people are getting screwed.
Here's another quote from the piece.
Tax expert Stefan Bach at the German Institute for Economic Research has graphed this in a laborious process using survey data to estimate how the tax code affects households.
The result is shown in the nearby chart, the one I just told you about.
He said, the striking feature is how irrelevant the personal income tax is, both in terms of the proportion of households that pay it and the proportion of household income it collects from people.
Someone just called me right in the middle as I was reading.
It collects from those who do.
Excuse me.
The real money is in the VAT and social taxes.
So what he's getting at is they're not telling you the truth, folks.
There is not enough money.
There's not enough money taxing the so-called evil rich, greedy rich, one percenters.
There's not enough money there to finance the welfare state and the growth of the welfare state.
And Europe right now is having a problem because their efforts to finance social security type programs, social welfare programs, food stamp type programs, this nanny state, you know, subsidize rent, subsidize phones, subsidize internet.
There's not enough money.
So ironically, Joe, what is it doing?
It's taxing and taking money from the very people it's supposed to be helping.
Yep.
So how can a social entitlement program be generous if the generosity, air quotes here, is being stolen out of the wallets of the very people it's trying to help at high and massive percentages?
Folks, it doesn't make any sense.
Alright, let me go back to this Kayla Chadwick piece for a second, another quote, just to upset you a little bit more.
Sorry, didn't mean to do this to you on a Monday, but there's nothing I enjoy more than battling intellectual vacuums on the left.
She says, I cannot have a political debate with these people.
Our disagreement is not merely political.
Oh, it is, by the way.
But a fundamental divide on what it means to live in a society, how to be a good person, and why any of that matters.
Now, folks, this is a very... I don't think she's smart enough to be doing this, but I think she's fallen into the far-left trap.
This is a very deliberate way, again, of avoiding facts and data, and a facts and data-based argument, then engaging in an emotional argument and attempting to paint people who are conservative or libertarians Attempting to paint them as something less than human, not worthy of debate.
Now, when you understand this in terms of the anti-anti-communist approach by David Horowitz, how the far left has co-opted people like Kayla and has taken them under their intellectual wing, you understand why groups like Antifa have no problem going on a stage and beating the crap out of a conservative speaker, hitting people with bats, macing them, because this is what they want.
They fear a facts and data generated argument.
They fear that.
So what they do is they create an emotionally laden argument, an argument laden with rhetoric, and what they want to do is paint you as the enemy, but the real enemy, the moral enemy, Joe, not the intellectual enemy, the moral enemy.
And when you're painted as the moral enemy and an enemy of freedom and an enemy of everything that's good, anything that happens to you, whether it's violence, whether it's speech suppression, whether it's, you know, calling you all kinds of nasty, you hate people and you can't stand people, that's all acceptable because you're stopping a worse outcome by allowing these people to speak.
Folks, this is really, really dangerous stuff.
I cannot argue to you in strong enough terms to combat this at every single opportunity.
When you're debating with your leftist friends, the first question out of your mouth should be, what the hell does that mean?
When they say things like, well, I can't even argue with you about that because you don't want children to have a free quality education.
Okay, what does free mean?
Free to who?
Well, free to the kids, but not free to their parents.
No, free to their parents, too.
Well, who's going to pay for it?
The rich people.
Yeah, but the rich people don't pay for it.
Well, how do you know that?
Because the European models and their own graphs of where they're getting their tax income from show that rich people do pay a good amount of taxes, but lower income folks are getting fleeced by the government.
They're the ones paying.
So it's not free.
Can we all agree on that?
It's not free.
She won't agree on that, though, because our first comeback is going to be, well, you just hate kids.
Now, I saw another story related to current events.
Yeah, this one's a doozy.
Let me pull this one up.
It was a New York Post piece about our buddy de Blasio.
Now, Mayor de Blasio is the communist mayor of New York City, and it was another fascinating story I saw this weekend.
Although it's a local issue, it's been getting a lot of national attention because, again, it speaks to the failure of the model of governance that our friend Kayla here at the Huffington Post is suggesting, that somehow turning over more money to the government is going to lead to some, you know, positive philanthropic benevolent outcome.
So de Blasio up in New York is having a big problem with the subway system.
For those of you not from New York, it has been, they're calling it the summer of hell.
You can see pictures online of all of the massive delays.
I addressed it on the show a couple weeks ago.
Remember Joe, I was talking about the comparison between Disney World, which is a free market enterprise.
About two, three weeks ago, yeah.
Yeah, and the subway, the New York City subway is undergoing renovations, massive renovations, and it's the cost overruns, it's just a disaster.
People are sitting in sweltering subways, on lines, hundreds and hundreds of people long trying to get around New York City, and they just can't do it.
If you doubt any of this, again, just go to Twitter and put in New York City subway, summer of hell, and you can look at the photos yourself, I assure you.
They are in doctrine.
I compared that to Disney.
I was at Magic Kingdom not that long ago, and Disney's undergoing a bit of a renovation as well on Main Street, and the difference being Disney's run by people who have to satisfy customers, and New York City Subway is run by government officials who want to kick you in the cojones and steal your tax money at the same time.
Disney's renovation is seamless.
I challenge you to go there now and even, you know, give a hard look and see what's going on.
They've actually painted little canvases and put them in front of some of the stores and places they're renovating to look exactly like the front of the store.
Facades.
Yeah, you don't even notice the difference.
Yeah, the facades.
Because Disney has to satisfy customers and government doesn't have to satisfy anyone but their own electoral efforts.
So what's fascinating about the de Blasio story is he wants to institute a 14% tax hike on New York City residents who make $500,000 or more.
Or couples who make over a million more.
To quote, fix the subways, Joe.
Now, what's astonishing about this, there's a couple points I wanted to get across.
So it's a millionaire's tax, is what it is.
Number one, New York City already has some of the highest taxes in the country on high earners.
Number two, people have been fleeing New York in droves.
If you look at income tax data, because it's very difficult to To disaggregate the data any other way other than income leaving a state and entering another state, look at the states that income earners are moving to and look at the states income earners are moving away from.
The top two every year, or almost every year, in New York and California on the exit side and the top two on the entrance side are usually either Nevada or Florida or Texas, where the taxes are lower.
Now, is that the only reason people leave?
No.
Is it one of the primary reasons people leave?
Yes.
So, clearly this tax structure strategy is not working because there's a mass exodus out of your states to escape the tax structure you swear is going to benefit your state.
Although it's so beneficial, Joe, people can't move out fast enough.
Now, remember the Maryland millionaires tax?
They tried this in Maryland.
Joe remembers it.
It was about five years ago.
I remember it well.
The governor at the time, Martin O'Malley, was a liberal, said, hey, we're going to institute a tax on millionaires in Maryland.
It's going to generate something like $200 million in additional revenue for the budget.
What happened?
It lost.
They think it was $197 million were lost as millionaires promptly fled Maryland and moved to other states.
Again, this is only complicated for people like Kayla, not interested in an actual argument, but interested in making emotional arguments about why conservatives don't care about people.
Okay?
So de Blasio's doubling down on this.
Folks, this is just astonishing.
And here's a quote from him.
Again, it's so economically devoid of common sense that you're going to lose probably 20 IQ points when I'm done reading you this quote because it's so stupid.
But you'll get them back after the show.
Go read something at Heritage or Cato or something and you'll get them all back.
This is from the mayor.
He says the top 1% can afford to do a bit more, and should!
Emphasis mine.
Because a transit system that works makes New York City's economy strong and benefits us all.
Again, following the Cayla strategy here of making an emotion-based argument rather than an argument based on data, facts, and reality.
It's happening on the ground.
Joe, no one's going to disagree with the fact that a transit system should work.
Who's going to disagree with that?
The transit system should work?
Oh, gee, thanks, Mr. Mayor.
That's a brilliant analysis of the situation.
But he says the top 1% can afford to do a bit more and should.
But notice, the top 1% in New York are overwhelmingly, in New York City, Joe, can we both agree or both are overwhelmingly Democrat?
Oh, yeah.
The Manhattan crowd votes 70, 80, 90% Democrat.
So based on pure percentages, facts and data alone, again, people are immune to that, you know, the facts and data on the liberal side, but based on facts and data alone, the overwhelming proportion of the 1% in Manhattan are Democrats who subscribe to the same ideology Communist Mayor de Blasio does.
So if the rich can pay more and should, why don't they?
The answer is quite simple, because although they apply that ideology to other people, they don't apply it to themselves because they know what they believe in is in fact false.
Is there any other explanation for this, Joe?
You're already paying one of the highest tax rates in the nation as a New York City millionaire.
You're already financing one of the most bloated budgets in the history of humankind in New York City.
If you really thought you paying more as a millionaire, paying an extra 14% in that tax hike they're looking to put up, if you really thought that giving that to de Blasio to allocate towards the subway system would fix the subway system and make your life better off, you would do it.
But you won't do it.
You will either move from New York, like the numbers conclusively prove, again, more facts and data, Kayla, I know this stuff is hard, thinking is hard, right?
They're already fleeing, and the most of them are hiring accountants to get out of paying what they owe now.
Folks, this is a broken model of governance.
The facts are on our side.
And understand, please, the only thing the left has is gaslighting.
I can't bring up this term enough on the show.
It's important you understand it.
It's the idea that if you say something false, Use emotion.
Say it confidently.
And you say it often.
And you isolate people from the truth.
You can eventually get them to believe that an alternate reality is in fact real and exists.
And that alternate reality from Kayla is a world where minimum wage makes people richer, although we all know it makes them poorer.
Public education provides a quality education, although the facts and data say the exact opposite.
It provides a really horrible education, comparatively speaking, especially to our other institutions of higher learning.
Kayla's alternate reality, which she's trying to gaslight you on, is that healthcare, that our healthcare is so expensive and we have to help people pay, and if you don't, you're evil, although she never tells you why healthcare is actually expensive, precisely because of government involvement.
Nobody talks about this with any other service.
It's only healthcare and education because that's where the government's involved because of third-party payor effects.
But she doesn't want to talk about third-party payor effects because that requires you to do first, uh, second-order thinking and leave first-order thinking behind.
It requires you, as Thomas Sowell says often, to say, okay, and then what?
And then what?
And they don't want to do that.
So this is how they gaslight you folks.
It's really upsetting.
And this piece, I want you to read it.
I know we're clicking on their site.
I'm going to put it in the show notes.
But I think it's really important that we define who our ideological enemy is.
Not personal.
Not like they want to make us, Joe.
But I think it's critical we understand how these people view us so we know how to fight back and do the right thing, folks.
This fight's important.
It matters to me, and I know it matters to you, too.
So I'll put the piece in the show notes.
Give it a look.
I know it's going to trouble you to read it, but it's important.
All right, hey, by the way, have you signed up for CRTV yet?
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