In this episode: Why did The NY Times mislead its readers about the Trump administration and an environmental report? https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/08/09/new-york-times-guilty-of-large-screw-up-on-climate-change-story/ http://dailysignal.com/2017/08/10/heres-a-list-of-the-5-biggest-ny-times-screw-ups-this-year?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT1RBNE1ESmhaakZoTVRrdyIsInQiOiJydTZZejE0ajFzYXZcL1JFYzJzb2pTUTd5M096ZU50NVVTVTFwYU9rdUZZZnYwbnk4Y2l5QjhJOE9qQ2pGZHZ5Rit1cWplb2NOMkFtTEYrSVRcL3hqUWo5T3pvOExiZkZhQVlkTjBmZFNKRW1MMXJFS1VvWVJlV1J6aktHdit2K3ZOIn0%3D Is the Universal Basic Income a bad idea? No, it's a really bad idea. https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-a-universal-basic-income-would-be-a-calamity-1502403580 The hypocrisy of "environmentalists" is stunning. Read this. https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-environment-of-destruction-1502403603 No, "rich kids" aren't keeping your kids out of college. https://www.cato.org/blog/rich-kids-college-tuition?utm_source=Cato+Institute+Emails&utm_campaign=c994ded51e-Cato_at_Liberty_RSS&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_395878584c-c994ded51e-143016961&goal=0_395878584c-c994ded51e-143016961&mc_cid=c994ded51e&mc_eid=3fd7404a34 You'll never believe where Trump's recent approval rating bump is coming from. http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-approval-rebounds-to-45-surges-among-hispanics-union-homes-men/article/2630910 SPONSOR LINKS: www.PrepareWithDan.com www.CRTV.com
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We have to call it what it is and we have to stop being delicate about it.
Get ready to hear the truth about America.
We're not like the leftists.
The conservatives don't need safe spaces.
They don't need lollipops and coloring books and teddy bears.
I'm good, okay?
On a show that's not immune to the facts with your host, Dan Bongino.
Alright, welcome to The Renegade Republican with Dan Bongino.
Producer Joe, how are you today?
Hey man, I'm doing well.
Yeah, I know.
Good.
I know.
Well, I do know because I spoke to you before we got on the air.
But yeah, another crazy news day.
This whole thing with North Korea is just freaking me out a little bit.
And you know, I don't mean that in a panicky kind of way.
I just mean that the North Koreans, as I've said repeatedly on the show over the last few days, I think it's assumed by some that we're dealing with a semi-rational actor in this short fat kid, Kim Jong-un.
You know, as if this were a replay of the Cuban Missile Crisis show, where as crazy as Khrushchev was, And Peggy Noonan points this out in the Wall Street Journal today, at least I think Khrushchev understood, and I think that's clear as history would tell, that engaging in a continued action against the United States by putting missiles on Cuban soil was going to result in mutually assured destruction.
We would destroy each other via nuclear war.
I think that's pretty crystal clear.
I'm not sure the short fat kid gets that.
So, you know, a couple things I wanted to bring up on this, and I got a couple other interesting stories I wanted to bring up too.
This universal basic income thing keeps creeping up on me as well.
All right, today's show brought to you by our friends at My Patriot Supply.
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Alright, couple quick points on the North Korean thing, and I'm gonna move on.
First, Folks, they have a network of underground tunnels in North Korea, which I was privy to some information.
I'm not going to say from who or where because they didn't give me permission, but I mean, this isn't a big secret out there.
But, you know, in order to make sure that the North Korean situation is rectified, there's probably going to have to be some type of a ground-based battle.
It can't all be done from the air and from drones.
It's just not possible over that kind of landmass and terrain.
I mean, this is a friend of mine was bringing this point up the other day.
You know, with their network of underground tunnels, we're looking at, you know, massive casualties if we were to get involved in this.
I mean, this is the kind of thing I know Americans, and especially the listeners of my show, are very cautious about the use of military power.
Yeah.
But just something to keep in mind, that this is not going to be some just quick mop-up operation, you know, like we had in Gulf War I, where our military power was just overwhelming.
And although we obviously suffered casualties, and I applaud the heroes involved in that effort, this is probably going to be a far different endeavor.
The North Korean military, I think, is much stronger.
Obviously, with their nuclear capabilities now, it presents another dangerous situation.
Also, with all the artillery pointed at Seoul right now, you know, you're looking at potentially wiping out Seoul if they were to unleash an artillery barrage against Seoul.
And, you know, I've been to Seoul and the DMZ.
Folks, it's not far.
I mean, it's a quick car ride to the DMZ from Seoul.
One more quick thing about this.
The Chinese are, from what I've been reading, the coverage of the incident, are more afraid of THAAD, that Terminal High Altitude Missile Defense System we have.
They're afraid of the radar we're intending to deploy on a larger scale in South Korea, because they think the radar is going to peek into Chinese territory.
It's very powerful radar.
I'm not sure the Chinese are as worried about the North Koreans as they are about that, and I think a number of other analysts would say the same thing.
Not that they're not worried about, you know, millions of North Koreans pouring across the border there into China, but they're also worried about the American presence over there.
So I think we can use that THAAD system as a pretty strong hammer in our negotiations, because they fear it.
Maybe we should deploy it on a mass scale and force them to respond and do something different about the In the way they're handling the North Koreans, coal, and their trade.
One more quick thing on this, I want to throw this in there.
The Democrat response to this has been ridiculous, okay?
You know, Trump's saying the North Koreans are going to experience fire and fury.
The Democrats are more concerned about Trump's rhetoric than they are about the North Koreans, which, one, speaks to the futility and the absolute absurdity of being a Democrat these days.
That they don't even care that a hostile power is threatening the United States and the United States territories over in Guam and 6,000 you know military personnel we have over there.
They don't care about that Joe.
Right.
They care about Trump's comments about fire and fury being brought down on the North Koreans if they continue and progress along this uh along this route they're going now.
I mean are you guys serious?
Are you serious?
You know I thought under times of national crisis it was more important to put aside partisanship for a moment.
Apparently it's not but A second point I wanted to make on this is that Democrats are loons, but sometimes having a president of the White House who, Joe, this may sound a little crazy, but play for a moment here, play the game here.
Don't you think, you ever have that, you know, when you were growing up, right?
I remember this and when I grew up in Glendale, there was this kid, I'm not going to say his name, but he was kind of crazy.
Like he just would fight anybody, anytime.
I don't think he ever won a fight.
Regular listeners to the show, I may have mentioned this name before, but He would never win.
Yeah.
But it was always going to be ugly because he just, he was really just crazy.
He had no fear of fighting at all.
You know, all men and women, most of them have an inherent fear of physical confrontation because it's painful.
No matter if you win, you're still going to get punched.
You may get, you may even get bit.
You may get kicked.
Who knows?
This kid didn't have that fear.
He would lose the fights all the time.
It wound up happening over time.
He was a small kid too.
I used to date his sister.
Yeah, dead.
And he was just nuts.
I mean, I know, because me and him got into scraps a couple times, too.
Like, he just was crazy.
He would fight everybody all the time.
He was really small.
Over time, people just stopped messing with this kid, even though they knew they'd win, because they knew he was going to fight back.
Having a guy in the White House like Trump, who some people on foreign soil, I think we could both agree, Joe, question his His sanity, they just do.
I don't, but they do.
You know, that may not be the worst thing.
Right.
You know, I know this sounds crazy, no pun intended, but it may not be the worst thing.
I mean, people generally knew Obama was very rational and reasonable, but they also knew he wouldn't do anything.
And I'm not an interventionist.
I'm not saying, I just told you there's a severe penalty for a ground war in North Korea, which really deeply concerns me.
You know, I lost an uncle in Vietnam.
I don't talk about any of this lightly.
But I want to be crystal clear on this as well.
That there's also, although there's going to be a massive penalty for a ground war if it results in that, God forbid, Joe.
There's also a penalty for inaction.
And there's also a penalty for a person like Obama who sits out there and says things and it never follows through.
Remember the Syrian red line?
Oh, if they're Syrian Jews, chemical weapons, that's going to be a red line.
All three of them.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And nothing happened.
Nothing happened.
Zero happened.
So there's a penalty for that as well.
Sometimes it doesn't hurt when you have a president in the White House willing to speak off the cuff in inflammatory terms.
Maybe it makes them question his sanity, and maybe that's a good thing.
I just wanted to bring that up because the Democrats' response to this entire thing has been completely unhinged.
All right, so some current events.
The New York Times, by the way, I put this in the teaser on the Facebook Live for all of you watching on Facebook Live.
By the way, if you're watching on Facebook Live, you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud, and iHeartRadio.
Really appreciate it.
The New York Times has just been humiliated again.
Did you see this story, Joe?
It cracks me up.
Yeah, I did.
I think I know which one you're talking about, but go right ahead.
So the New York Times wrote this story.
I mean, it's not even credible.
Forget about lining a birdcage.
It's not even worth buying to line the birdcage anymore, because as the bird craps at the bottom of the birdcage, you'll be forced to clean it up.
And at some point, yeah, you may run across the words in the New York Times, and they're so ridiculous, I don't even want to see it.
I don't even want it in my presence.
Now, unfortunately, I have to read this crap, right?
Ugh, with the mic.
We just don't have the mic on.
Yeah, we get it.
The mic is loud.
By the way, for those of you watching on Facebook Live, the mic is different.
It's not the same mic I use for the podcast, so sorry if it sounds a little loud, but I yell a lot because of the can, so my apologies.
It'll be better soon.
Yeah, Joe's coming down to fix that up.
But the New York Times put out a story, and what happened, Joe, is there was a national climate assessment report put out by scientists within the government that showed that climate change was going to be, you know, of course the world was going to collapse, the sun's going to melt us, and we're all going to be dead.
I mean, I'm being hyperbolic, obviously.
People will die.
People will die!
Again, right?
That's our expression, right?
People will die every time.
That's the assessment of these climate folks.
So the New York Times put out a story.
This is hysterical.
And they were really concerned that the data won't be made public and the Trump administration is going to suppress this data in this National Climate Assessment Report.
Okay.
All right.
You know, it seems to me to be a bit editorializing, writing about something that hasn't yet happened.
You know, we're afraid they're going to suppress this report that hasn't yet been suppressed.
I don't... Okay, fine.
Here's the problem, Joe.
A non-profit already published a report in January.
It's been out there forever.
Let me get this straight.
Oh!
Oh!
So the report was so suppressed, to use their term, it was going to be suppressed, that you could go online and read it since January.
I mean, the Times has just become...
I know we're laughing, we're being sarcastic.
Joe and I love to beat up the Times and the Washington Compost.
We get it.
But it really is sad.
You know, it makes sense.
And by the way, thank you.
Oh, you turned your computer, laptop, tablet volume down.
Yes, we've tried.
It's not working!
Please stop!
If you don't want to listen, don't listen!
Goodbye.
Sorry.
Trying to put it out there so you can turn your volume down too.
We had a gain issue on the iPad, but Joey's going to help us out and he's going to work that out for us.
But it is sad watching the death of American journalism, you know?
I mean, we really need a free and fair press.
Now, a free press is an obvious one.
I don't suggest, and I never would, any government response that we should, you know, no matter how bad, I want to be clear on this, no matter how bad The press gets, and they're bad right now, the New York Times and the Post.
There's never ever an appropriate, I don't think, government response to this.
I don't feel that way.
You know, free speech, if we're gonna be true advocates for free speech and a free press, then that free press should include horrible free press as well.
And you should do what I've suggested and what I do myself when I'm on my own time and not doing research for work here, is just don't click on their stuff.
Don't see their movies, don't read their media stuff, but A government intervention in this is just the wrong idea.
I just want to be clear on that.
The only reason I bring this up is I saw a poll recently that showed that some Republicans support government mandates and government diktats on limitations of a free press, and I thought, wow, that's really disturbing.
For as crappy as the Slimes is, and it's garbage, and they're ruining their reputation, and they're ruining American journalism, there is no real government response.
Now, government secrets are different.
You know, if you're going to publish the locations of, your sensitive locations of nuclear weapons that we put on foreign soil, I mean, I'm obviously, I'm making that up, but you get my point.
That's a different story.
I think endangering the United States, that's a whole different story.
But, and in general, crappy journalism should, the market should decide.
All right.
A couple more stories I saw, which I thought were really interesting.
I got to turn back.
That was one of yesterday's that I missed.
So a guy named Dan Nedess, N-I-D-E-S-S, I may be saying his name wrong, but he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today, which is fascinating.
It's about this universal basic income.
And every time I mentioned this, I get a ton of listener feedback.
It's a story and a topic, I should say, that fascinates me.
And it's always in the news these days because Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and a lot of technology people who have influence over the culture, Zuckerberg Joe from Facebook and Musk from Tesla, ...have suggested that technology is going to make human labor more and more relevant in the future as robotics and automation take over and eliminate a lot of jobs.
Now, again, we've done whole shows on this, so I don't want to redo and reimagine new arguments here, but a quick point I want to make is that this has been said over and over and over again.
Matter of fact, the word sabotage comes from a technological development that enabled people who made these sabot, which were these shoes, these wooden shoes, and they thought, oh my god, all these shoemakers are going to be out of business, so they would destroy the machines.
So that's where the term sabotage actually comes from.
I did not know that.
Yeah, it's just an interesting note there.
But this has been going on forever.
ATMs are going to destroy bank jobs, all this stuff.
What it actually does, technology, and I think Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are wrong on this, is technology enables people and frees up people and their intellectual capabilities and their labor to do other things.
Now, is it transition smooth?
Never.
It's not, Joe.
I mean, let's be honest.
You and I have very specific skill sets.
I was a police officer.
I owned a mixed martial arts business.
I was a secret service agent.
Now we do content production for conservative media.
We have a skill set.
But we can both agree, Joe, our skill set is limited, right?
Yeah.
If there was an advent in nuclear energy technology tomorrow, do you think either you or I could walk into a nuclear power plant and go, we're here, we're here fellas, we're ready, we're ready.
Where do I hit the switch?
Hey Joe, don't hit that red button.
What, this one?
Right?
I mean, I'm not, now I know Joe's a very smart guy because he's going to come down here working all our sound and studio stuff tomorrow.
But what I do know about Joe is the transition would not be smooth.
It would take a significant retraining period before Joe could operate a nuclear reactor.
He's smart enough, but it would take a while, okay?
Well, I get it.
I get it that there's always going to be some interruptions with technology.
What I find really disturbing about this universal basic income story, this idea that the government should pay people to not work because they're not going to have jobs because of technology, is it It's very short-sighted, and it's very... it's almost... it patronizes people, you know?
Like, oh, like, Joe, if you lost your job tomorrow, let's say terrestrial radio and podcasting went the way of the dinosaur, that you would just sit around all day and look for a government handout.
No, I wouldn't.
You would find something else to do.
I mean, even in the time Joe's been with WCBM over terrestrial radio, technology's changed.
I mean, for those of you who aren't familiar with the radio industry, we brought this up last week.
When Joe first started, pretty much everything was done by ISDN, right Joe?
That's how the radio worked, over distance.
ISDN, which is that copper or is that old school copper?
I don't even know what it is.
Yeah, I mean, it was ISDN line.
Now, when I do, when I fill in for Mark Levin and Sean Hannity, I don't use ISDN.
I used to.
I go over a Comrex box, which is a digital codec device that transmits over the internet.
I mean, you just learn and you evolve over time.
So technology doesn't mean that, you know, you're going to lose jobs.
It just means that, you know, the technology evolves, people evolve with it, training evolves with it.
And it's not something to fear, and it bothers me if they do, but it eliminates and it patronizes human beings.
And here's a quick example that Nades brings up in this piece in the Wall Street Journal, which I experienced firsthand when I was a Secret Service agent, right?
He brings up the example of Saudi Arabia, and this is a brilliant example I had not considered in my prior coverage of the universal basic income.
Saudi Arabia is a country now where oil wealth, obviously, I mean, the kingdom has just insane amounts of oil wealth, right?
Their oil wealth is used to subsidize a form of universal basic income now, where people are paid, Joe, to essentially not work from the revenues the government makes from the oil wealth.
Why they do that is a completely different situation from the socialists in the, you know, in the liberal, you know, it's more to kind of pacify the population, whereas liberals want a universal basic income as a way to buy off votes.
Regardless, the results will be the same.
I saw this firsthand in Kuwait, when I was over in Kuwait as a Secret Service agent.
They are having a problem now, Joe, as they try to make a transfer in Saudi Arabia to a limited market economy.
I don't want to say a free market, no one would mistake Saudi Arabia right now for being free.
But to a limited market economy, what's the problem?
The problem is, very simple, people have been paid for a very long time to not work.
So what happens is you're incentivized to not do anything and it's very hard to break that.
It's very hard to get people to come back into the workforce and produce eight hours of productivity a day, potential manual labor, at a minimum intellectual labor, when they were getting paid to do the same thing and sit at home and do whatever, play video games, cut their lawn, it doesn't matter.
It's very difficult to do that and break that cycle.
Now, I saw this in Kuwait.
I remember when I was over there, Kuwait has a similar problem.
Where Kuwaitis, generally, a lot of, not all of them, I'm just saying a good portion of them, it's tough to get them to work.
And I remember, I saw a lot of the large immigrant population in Kuwait, and I was asking one of the expats over there, I said, hey, what's the deal with this?
He says, yeah, the Kuwaitis have a tough time getting people to do construction and things like that, so they have to import immigration, they have to import immigrants into the country to do the work, because the Kuwaitis won't do it, because they've become accustomed to not working.
And it was ubiquitous.
I saw this firsthand.
So I think one of the things universal basic income advocates have to understand is there's a psychological, sociological component to this that you can't ignore.
Why would you pacify people and make them basically wards of the state?
You know, you create what Nades calls, and he's absolutely right, Joe, you create a productive class versus an unproductive class, and that's a very dangerous thing to do.
You know, you don't want a class of people who are seen as the underlings while you have this productive class that gets all the benefits.
It just doesn't make any sense.
All right, I just wanted to bring that up.
I read that today.
I'm pulling up another article I saw that I thought was fascinating, too.
But, you know, the Universal Basic Income Advocates, this is a problem with the left on a number of topics, not just this show, where they constantly ignore those second-order effects.
Things sound nice, right?
Like, oh, people aren't going to have jobs, so we're just going to pay them because robots will produce everything, and we can tax the robots!
Oh, great!
But they never consider the fact that there's a devastating psychological component to this, where people get used to not working over time.
Not a good thing, folks.
All right, moving on.
So, the other day I discussed the piece by Phil Graham in the Wall Street Journal.
It was an opinion piece about the Reagan tax cuts.
And, you know, the reason I keep bringing this up is not to re-litigate the Reagan years, folks.
I mean, the Reagan years happened, it's over, it's great, and the economic conditions of the time were, many of them, were unique to the time.
And, you know, we shouldn't do what Democrats do and constantly, you know, look to refabricate the past to make it fit our current narrative.
But, It is important to bring up some of the things that happened in the Reagan years because these arguments are being re-litigated by the left and they're rewriting history.
Why?
The why always matters, Joseph.
The reason they're doing it now is because obviously the Trump administration, along with the Republican Congress right now, after the failure of Obamacare, are trying to push tax cuts.
This is really important.
They're trying to push tax cuts right now, and I'm a little worried about the stock market right now.
I think we need to do something quick.
They're trying to push tax cuts to generate economic growth.
So what are the Democrats doing, and why are they relitigating the Reagan years?
Because Joe, you were alive during them, obviously.
You're a little bit older than me.
I was.
Most people alive today who are voting American adults remember the Reagan years as being pretty damn prosperous.
You bet.
You bet is right.
They also associate the Reagan years with tax cuts.
The Democrats, of course, who are obsessed with lying to you and recreating false narratives want you to believe that the economic prosperity of the Reagan years, because they can't lie to you about it Joe, because you lived through it, They want you to believe that was due to something else.
So, Phil Graham wrote a great piece and he said, hey, here's what happened in the Reagan years, here were the results of it, here's what happened to government tax revenue, and here's how the economy grew.
Well, it wasn't but a couple of days before the liberals went nuts and the letters to the Wall Street Journal came flying in.
So I read one of them today and I took a little screenshot on my phone because it's almost comical, the response.
And this is a liberal, I don't know his politics, I don't need to, but it's obviously a liberal trying again to debunk the economic prosperity of the Reagan years because he wants you to forget that what happened actually happened.
So here's his letter back about the op-ed, and just to be clear, the op-ed said, Reagan tax cuts, good.
Economic growth, good.
That was it, simply.
Right?
Really simple.
So the guy, the author says, Citing the tax burden as the cause of the 1980-82 recession ignores the two oil price increases and Volcker's massive interest rate increases to eliminate inflation.
Okay, this is kind of hysterical here, because he's talking about Paul Volcker, who was the Fed chair at the time, hiking interest rates to crush inflation.
Joe, have you not heard me talk about this like 10,000 times on the podcast?
No conservative who's advocating for Reagan-era policies now, like Trump is trying to reinstitute, ignores Volcker's interest rate.
This is a strawman argument that this liberal is bringing up to lie to you, to try to propagandize you, to try to win an argument, rather than talking about principles.
Inflation was bad.
There's no question about it.
We had double-digit inflation in the 80s during the Carter years and during the early Reagan years.
But the hiking of interest rates to essentially dry up some of the money supply to suck inflation out of the economy is a conservative sound money principle.
That's not a liberal principle.
Folks, I can't be clearer on this.
The irony of this is the liberal is ignoring the fact that, yes, it is exactly our attention to the Volcker, the attention we pay to the Volcker interest rate hikes, that we cite for Reagan's economic success.
You see how they do the flipperoo?
He goes, oh, you guys are just ignoring it.
No, we're not ignoring it.
We're saying that was part of it.
Liberals love easy money, folks.
They love easy Federal Reserve policies and they love low interest rates.
A topic I cover on the show often.
Why do they love that?
Because, remember, liberals love inflation.
Because inflation inflates the value of a dollar.
You may say, well how does that benefit liberals?
It also inflates away the value of a dollar of government debt.
So liberals can spend money over and over and over again, take out massive amounts of debt, and inflation devalues that debt over time.
You know, Keynes brought this up in his book, where he said if the government wants to confiscate 25% of the economy, it has two ways of doing it.
It can either tax 25 cents on every dollar and take 25 cents of everybody's dollar, or It can inject another 33 cents into the economy by printing money for every dollar out there and then never put it in the economy, just spend it itself.
It can print money and then use it.
Think about it.
If you had a dollar in the economy and you take 25 cents, you've taken 25 percent.
If you have a dollar 33 because you just printed 33 additional cents and then the government just spends it and doesn't circulate it, right?
Right away?
Yeah.
It also spends roughly 25%.
So this was Keynes, who was, by the way, the foundation of liberal economics now.
So liberals love inflation.
It allows them to spend more.
It allows them to spend more without taking it directly out of people's pockets, at least right away.
And it inflates, it destroys the value of the dollar.
But in addition, it destroys the value of a dollar of government debt.
So I find it hysterical that the liberals trying to quote, you know, debunk the Reagan years, cite Volcker's interest rate increases, even though that was a conservative's push for that.
Okay, he goes on.
This is just a foolish letter, but it's so worth debunking because if you're arguing with your liberal friends, they're going to bring up these stupid arguments still.
He says, attributing the economic growth in the late 80s to Reagan's tax reductions ignores Reagan's $2 billion stimulus that tripled our national debt.
This is hysterical.
Okay, let me get this straight.
So now you're suggesting comically, I might add, that Reagan was for government spending, which he wasn't.
Yes, we ran up pretty heavy national debts in the Reagan years, not because of tax revenue.
Tax revenue doubled, but because Reagan had a deal with a Democrat House and Tip O'Neill, who insisted on levels of government spending in exchange for a lot of these tax cuts.
So don't blame Reagan for the fact that the government spent a lot of money.
Yes, he signed it.
I'm not completely absolving him of blame for signing the budgets, but clearly, Joe, anyone who understands the history of that knows there was a trade-off.
Now, Let me be clear on this.
He's suggesting that deficit spending or debts under the Reagan years, government debt, was responsible for our economic success?
Think about the stupidity of what he just said.
So Obama, who racked up the most government debt of any president in United States history by far, I mean ran historic amounts of annual deficits, meaning every year he set records, The smallest Obama deficit of any year of his presidency was roughly equivalent to the largest of any of the Bush years.
So debt's bad.
I'm not saying that because Bush ran up the deficit that it was good.
I'm just saying that, relatively speaking, there is no deficit or debt accumulator anywhere close to Barack Obama.
So if government debt correlates well, or even causes economic growth, then how come in the economic years of Barack Obama, where we rammed up historic amounts of debt, the economy had the worst recovery in growth rates post-World War II from any recovery from a recession?
I mean, Joe, it doesn't make any sense.
It's just that, but again, This is my frustration with dealing with liberals, is they say things and they don't, and this guy's actually, he has the cojones to write this into the Wall Street Journal, and he's so confident about it.
Like, oh, it was definitely the deficit spending.
Okay, so why wasn't it the deficit spending under Obama?
Oh, because Obama never cut taxes.
All right, maybe that had something to do with it, but that would require you to think, which is usually asking liberals for too much.
All right, he goes on.
He also subsequently raised taxes.
This is the writer talking about Reagan.
That's the he.
Okay, he did.
I've discussed this before.
Reagan cut the income tax rate from 70 to 28 percent.
In order to make income taxes correspond to capital gains tax rates, so there was no arbitrage going on, Reagan raised the capital gains tax from 20 to 28 percent.
But here's the problem.
If you believe government revenue is, and this is good folks, follow me for a second here, because it again, it demonstrates completely the liberal stupidity that is so abundant throughout our population that doesn't want to educate themselves as to what's going on.
Like our buddy Kank.
The Kankster.
This is like 90 on the Kankster curve, all right?
This is seriously.
This guy is suggesting somehow that raising the capital gains tax, which Reagan did.
He cut income taxes, raised capital gain tax.
You follow me?
Capital gains went from 20% to 28%.
He's suggesting somehow that that led to this spurt in economic growth.
But Reagan hiking the capital gains tax resulted in less capital gains tax revenue.
Oh, you didn't know that?
Oh, you didn't do your homework?
The capital gains tax revenue in the Reagan years, as the tax rate went up, went down.
So in one sentence, you're saying that deficit spending, in other words, the government spending money we don't have, that government spending, that that's what's stimulating the economy.
In the next sentence, you're citing a tax increase that brought in less government revenue.
I don't get, Joe, I mean, really?
This is the frustration in dealing with the modern liberal.
And folks, believe me, as this tax cut debate heats up, you're going to hear these arguments over and over.
But Reagan hike taxes.
Yeah, but you're saying government, the government spending money Is what's going to lead to economic growth?
It wasn't the tax cuts?
Okay, so how come Reagan hiking the capital gains tax rate resulted in less revenue to the government?
So what you're saying is less revenue to the government is good for the economy?
Oh, thank you!
There you go!
You proved that point!
But you see, do you get my leap there?
What they're saying doesn't make any sense.
It's ridiculous, but he doesn't seem to know that, but he's very confident.
Oh, this one's a doozy, by the way.
He said, certainly deregulation had some positive effects on our economy, but they also led to the S&L crisis.
Here we go again.
Now, I don't have time to debunk this nonsensical argument about how deregulation caused the savings and loan crisis.
Deregulation was not the cause of the savings and loan crisis.
It was regulation that subsequently led to deregulation later.
That's a different argument.
The savings and loan crisis was a disaster.
We lost savings and loan... Let me just sum it up like this.
Rather than deregulating the right way, what we did is deregulated and re-regulated.
So they made investors in savings and loans constantly protected by, up to a certain amount of money, protected by a taxpayer bailout.
So rather than Joe, say, in a private company, you know, if we had whatever, you know, Joe's table and chairs, right?
And Joe's Table and Chairs is having economic trouble with the savings and loans were, because they had engaged in, once they were allowed to invest in other products outside of mortgages, they were having some trouble recouping their investment.
Rather than, say, Joe's Table and Chairs, where investors would start pulling out their money because you weren't making any money anymore, money kept piling in.
Now why would that be?
Why would you keep investing in Joe's Table and Chairs?
It doesn't make any sense.
Oh, well because the government re-regulated and put in a taxpayer bailout where even if you lost money the taxpayers provided a backstop?
And all of a sudden this is an argument for what?
This is an argument that Reagan screwed up the economy because deregulation?
In other words, code word for less government involvement?
No, it was precisely government involvement in the savings and loan that caused the debacle.
Again, this is just comical stuff that liberals won't tell you and will argue without thinking through the consequences of their illogical behavior.
Their statements make no sense.
They'll lie to you constantly, folks.
It's really upsetting.
All right, now, hey, have you signed up for CRTV yet?
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All right.
Kato piece, I will put in the show notes today at bongino.com as well.
By the way, what do you think of the backdrop?
We loaded up my new Renegade Republican logo.
Looks great, man.
In the podcast, you can't see it, but yeah.
On the Facebook Live, you can.
It's pretty cool.
Um, Tom Fiery, Thomas Fiery wrote a piece in Cato, and it's just interesting because it debunks, again, more liberal nonsense.
There was a Washington Post piece by Christine Emba, and the premise of the piece, now that the Justice Department, Joe, to give you a little background, is opening up an investigation or looking into college admission behavior with regard to Asian Americans.
This has been a problem for a long time.
Asian-Americans, I really feel for, if you're Asian-American trying to get into college, you're getting screwed.
You're just getting screwed, there's no other way to say it.
You have to score the equivalent of hundreds of points higher than people who are white, people who are black, or people who are Hispanic to get into college.
Because whether colleges will admit it or not, Joe, there's an informal quota, but it may be a tacit agreement and a wink and a nod, but make no mistake, it's there.
There's an informal quota for the number of Asian Americans that are admitted to colleges.
And this has been a festering sore on America for a long time, and it's an ugly form of reverse discrimination.
Now, as I said to you the other day in the show quoting Hayek, you know, Hayek made the point in his book, The Road to Serfdom, and clearly, that when you engage in policies like affirmative action and attempt to treat people, quote, equally, what you actually do is force the government to treat people unequally.
Because what you're doing is you're giving spots and slots and seats in a college to people who may or may not be qualified based on physical characteristics.
That spot is zero-sum.
That desk needs a butt in it, but only one butt fits in the desk.
So when you give it to someone based on a characteristic other than merit, what you're doing is you're telling someone else that merit doesn't matter.
Make sense, Joe?
I mean, not hard to understand.
We've heard this in the last few days, yes.
Yeah.
Well, the left is going nuts over this, this lawsuit, because the left doesn't care about reverse discrimination.
The left only cares about discrimination in its favor, because the left is concerned about buying votes.
That's it.
Nothing more.
Now, this Christine Emba wrote a piece, and the premise of the piece is, it's not black Americans who are keeping your kid out of college, it's rich kids, because they're buying the seats.
Now!
Fiery does a great job at just knocking this thing down, and I'll put the piece in the show notes, but he makes a great point, and one that we've brought up on the show in the past with respect to airline seats and other things.
It's just not true.
Now, let me be clear, and he's clear in the piece too.
He's not suggesting that buying a seat in a university doesn't exist.
Neither am I. It does.
Are we clear on that?
So don't send me nasty emails on it.
I get it.
Buying people, buying access to elite colleges and universities happens.
You got it.
Point stipulated.
You win.
The judges rule.
Secondly, I'm not suggesting that's fair.
Okay?
It happens.
Not fair.
Point stipulated.
You win.
Please don't send me an email on that.
It drives me crazy when people say things that I said that I didn't say.
Okay?
You win.
But suggesting from an economic and financial perspective that like hard affirmative action programs that keep Asian-Americans out of seats, that rich kids are keeping you out of a seat in a college, it makes no sense at all.
And it requires, and the author should be ashamed, I mean it requires a total misunderstanding of economics even in its basic sense.
It would be the equivalent, to give you an analogy, it would be the equivalent of saying that a first-class passenger on an airline is keeping you out of a coach seat.
The analogy works the same way.
What do I mean by this?
Fiery points out in the piece that colleges, Joe, have these list prices.
You know, you've seen them.
You know, the regular $50,000 a semester to go to whatever.
You know, Joe Armacost University.
Yeah, you've all heard it.
I mean, everybody's complaining about them.
You know, my niece goes to Duke and tuition's outrageous.
The point that the guy makes in the piece is the list price, these outrageous prices you hear, $100,000 a semester.
Joe, almost nobody pays that.
Except who?
The rich kids!
That's right.
That's right.
The rich kids pay it.
The rich kids pay the list price.
They're the only ones.
So what am I getting at?
Just like the really wealthy people are the only ones playing for the first class seats.
What happens?
It is those rich people paying for, by the way, I never understood a first class seat on like an hour flight.
I'm sorry.
I mean, is it really that bad for an hour?
Gosh, you're going to pay like double the price for an hour?
God bless you.
Knock yourself out.
I never understood that.
But it's by those first class passengers paying a premium for that seat that keeps the coach seat prices down.
I mean, folks, seriously, does the Washington Post not get this?
So the point the author makes is that Colleges will even admit to you that by a limited number of rich kids buying access, which I'm not saying is fair, let me be clear, but by that happening it gives colleges financial leeway to charge people who can't afford
Their college list price.
Less money via scholarships and other parts.
Does that make sense, Joe?
Yeah.
Now, again, we're overlooking the big, you know, bull in the China shop, which is government involvement in higher education, which has inflated the cost.
I get that.
We've covered that in other shows.
The government's had a large role in inflating the cost in general.
But, forgive me, leave that aside for a moment.
Suggesting that rich kids are limiting seats for other people is just economically stupid.
It just doesn't make sense.
It's actually incentivizing the colleges to allow more middle class and poor people in because they have financial headroom now from rich kids paying that list price to allow people who can't afford that price to pay less.
I'm not saying the economic model isn't distorted.
I'm just saying this is another effort by liberals There's Christine Emba at the Washington Post to ignore basic economics, to ignore common sense, and turn what is obvious racial discrimination against Asian Americans, Joe, into a class war.
This is, for them, this is a tragically brilliant slide of hand.
And remember what the Washington Post writes, so thank you.
So Sean just wrote on Facebook, I'm an administrator at Adversity.
You are exactly right, Dan.
Thank you.
Cool.
This Christine Emba is trying to, tragically, she's trying to flip it into an economic equality argument.
And this is what they do.
They distort the truth.
Liberals do this all the time, folks.
It's really, really irritating.
They do this all the time.
They take what's an obvious case of discrimination and they turn it and they flip it into something it's not and they lie to you the entire time.
And when you respond otherwise, Joe, what do they do?
they call you a racist. We haven't done that in a while.
Ode to our friend Tom Marr.
God rest his soul.
We love Tom.
Tom was a radio host at WCBM and once in a while, Tom used to do that all the time.
Sometimes listeners ask for a comeback.
I don't like to do it too much, but he used to say, remember that on the radio?
Tom did it better than I did.
They'll call you a racist.
All right, a couple quick current news stories I just want to hammer through quickly.
So, Wall Street Journal had a piece again showing the hypocrisy of the silly left, how ridiculous they are.
Remember the Dakota Access Pipeline, that pipeline out west that the left was protesting?
We covered it on the show a couple times.
So they gave kind of a hot wash, a little autopsy of what happened afterwards at the Dakota Access Pipeline, where a bunch of liberals were protesting an oil pipeline.
Many of you saw it in the news.
But again, liberals don't know what they're protesting.
These were supposedly environmentalists.
These environmentalists, Joe, left behind?
9.8 million pounds of garbage that had to be cleaned up by the government.
You guys are great.
Nice job.
That's really very beneficial.
Yeah.
They left behind abandoned animals, including puppies.
There were 600 arrests.
There were shots fired at police officers.
So, you know, you just have no credibility, Libs.
You really don't.
I mean, at least when Glenn Beck had that rally down in the mall with the Tea Party years ago.
They left the place cleaner than they found it.
Liberals show up and, you know, they're just a bunch of punks, a lot of these far-left radical activists.
How do you even leave behind 9.8 million pounds of garbage?
How do you even do that?
Is that even possible?
Like, you have to intentionally want to pollute the area to do that.
Did someone put out a call on Craigslist like, bring your home garbage to our protest and dump it on the ground?
I mean, this is nearly impossible to do.
But liberals will find a way.
And the greatest irony of all, Joe, they were environmental protesters.
So nice work, Libs, again.
One more story.
You won't see this in the media, Joe.
Trump's approval rating's been going up, and going up dramatically.
And this is the kind of story, again, the mainstream media ignores, but you'll hear it here.
Washington Examiner, interesting piece, I'll put it in the show notes today.
Trump is currently at 45% approval.
Is that great?
No, not great.
Is it good?
It's better than where we were.
Yeah.
And it's trending up.
And Joe, this is the kicker.
This is gonna really scare the hell out of the libs who love identity politics.
The bump in his approval rating is due to two groups.
It's due to Hispanics, which his approval rating is a stunning 42%, and union households, get a load of this one, 51%.
You want to talk about the Democrats panicking right now?
Remember the yesterday's show when I talked about the demographic breakdown of Trump voters?
I'm telling you right now, although the Republicans suck, They do.
They have really blown it on Obamacare.
Not all of them.
I got a critique from a state lawmaker, and fair enough, she sent me an email.
She said you shouldn't criticize all Republicans.
She's right.
I don't mean all of them.
I should be clear on that.
But a good, sadly, a good swath of them, even though they're terrible.
The Democrats, folks, are in far worse shape.
If they lose the Hispanic vote and the Union vote, Joe, do you understand there is absolutely no arithmetic for them to win?
None.
And they do, too.
They know, too.
That's why they're in a total panic.
There is absolutely no way they can win with that kind of a demographic breakdown.
It's not possible.
All right, folks, thanks again for tuning in.
I haven't given a plug for a while to my book, so I'd appreciate if you go look and pick it up on Amazon.
It's available for pre-order.
Sorry to everyone who gets offended by me plugging my stuff, but, you know, I enjoyed writing it, and I hope you like it, too.
It's called Protecting the President.
It's available on Amazon now for pre-order.
It's coming out September 19th, so go pick it up today.
Protecting the President by Dan Bongino.
I think you'll like it, the inside story of what happened in the Secret Service.
Thanks again, folks.
I'll see you all on Monday.
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