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Dec. 20, 2017 - The Dan Bongino Show
50:00
Ep. 614 This is an Unprecedented Attack on the Republic
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The Dan Bongino Show.
Get ready to hear the truth about America with your host, Dan Bongino.
Welcome to the Dan Bongino Show.
Producer Joe, how are you on this fine Monday?
No shortage of things to talk about, do you think?
Yeah, yeah, the weekends are always rough, man, because I have to triage your needs, folks.
I have to determine, based on your emails and feedback on the show, what the most important things over the weekend are to get out to you on a very busy Monday morning.
Man.
All right.
Where do we start?
So I did a couple of Fox hits this weekend.
I was up in New York for Fox and Friends, which is always fun, by the way.
I enjoy going back home to New York.
I don't think I could live there anymore.
The tax rates are too high, but I still love the people and the energy.
I mean, you grow up there, you never really get the New Yorker out of you.
And being up on Fox, a little behind the scenes, it's always, the hits are always better.
Hits, that's like an industry term.
The hits, the appearances are always better.
When you're in studio, it's a lot more energy and there's better back and forth and the dynamic.
I mean, I don't mind doing remotes from my house, but they're always better in studio.
Had a lot of fun.
I was at a Christmas party on Friday night with a lot of folks you would know.
I was chatting with Buck Sexton and people, so I had a really good time.
But I did a hit and I got into talking about And I did another one.
It's funny.
I did the hit from Fox and Friends' studio on Saturday, flew home, and then did a hit from my studio in Palm City on Saturday night.
People were like, how'd you get back?
But what a mess at LaGuardia, by the way.
They're undergoing construction.
And it was one of these things where Delta boards by zones, but the zones are always not done right.
It was a total mess.
I was like, gosh.
And this lady in front of me who was getting on a plane who must have had Four or five vodkas before she got home.
I was like, I'm handicapped!
She kept screaming it.
And it was like, the people were like, okay, do you want to, like, what do you want us to do?
She wasn't handy because she was walking around in stiletto heels.
I'm not kidding.
I mean, unless it was something I didn't see, but it was just totally bizarre.
So I got home, finally did my head.
So I was talking about on the show on Judge Jeanine and on the Fox & Friends appearance how this is really an unprecedented attack on the presidency.
I just want to hit this quick before I get into some of the stuff that's really digging me.
Folks, this is entirely unprecedented what's going on.
Some of the news broke last week that you may have seen or you may have missed.
And one of the news bits that I found fascinating was the fact that an attorney who had been Basically corralling people who claim to have been, you know, sexually put in a bad position by Donald Trump, you know, whether harassment or inappropriate talk.
This attorney, it broke last week, that there are people who were volunteering to give six-figure sums for people to come forward and make allegations against Trump or to pay them off after they did.
Now, folks, That obviously creates a source of serious conflict.
If there is a six-figure sum waiting at the end of a yellow brick road for you, if you make an allegation that you don't have to substantiate at all against the President of the United States, that he made you uncomfortable in an elevator or said something about you, that creates an incentive, Joe, for people to say things that may not be true.
That's right.
So now you combine that with the fact that we've had this special counsel investigation based on charges nobody can prove.
So now we have people offering people money to make allegations against the sitting president.
Second, we have a special counsel investigation based on charges not one person has been able to produce a scintilla of evidence actually exist.
And as I said to Chris Hahn in a debate on Judge Jeanine, you know, you could debate the effectiveness and necessity of a special counsel.
I will agree with you, folks.
I don't think special counsels, as I've said repeatedly, are the best idea.
But if special counsels are going to be a weapon used against Donald Trump from this point on, then the only way to fight back is to special counsel the special counsel, to show Democrats that special counsels are not the path forward.
But one of the rebuttals people make frequently is, well, we had a special counsel on Bill and Hillary with Whitewater and Travelgate and all that stuff that resulted in the Lewinsky thing.
Okay, fine.
I'm not telling you special counsels are a good idea, but Joe, here's the difference.
The Whitewater land deals the Clintons were involved in that elicited all this suspicion actually happened!
They were real, yeah.
They were real!
Whether a special counsel was the best way to investigate it or not, fair question, point stipulated, I concur doctor.
But, the point is it actually happened.
So when I say to you Trump is under an unprecedented attack on the presidency and the Constitutional Republic as we know it, I'm not making this up!
I'm not making this up!
People are offered now six-figure sums to come forward and say, hey, the president grabbed me.
Now it's a special counsel investigation on a Russian collusion matter that nobody can produce a scintilla, an iota, a drop an ounce of evidence that even happened.
That's the difference with Whitewater and these other special counsel investigations or special investigators or other things that were involved.
Independent commissions and all these other things.
They actually happen.
Benghazi, when we had a so-called independent investigation, we had the ARB, which was a mess.
But that actually happened, Benghazi.
There's no evidence this happened at all.
No one's produced anything.
Then we have the FBI insurance policy.
I'm not, again, blaming the men and women of the FBI.
You all are wonderful and you have my full support and always will.
I know you, well, not all of you, but many of you.
I've worked with some of them on cases.
They are terrific.
But you had the Peter Strzok text messages to his paramour, his love interest, Lisa Page.
His mistress saying he was investigating Hillary and Trump and he was talking about an insurance policy.
So now we have six-figure sums paid to people to make allegations.
We have a special counsel investigation founded on absolutely nothing.
We have an FBI insurance policy that they talked about.
We need an insurance policy in the event Trump is elected.
Talking about insurance policy, people assigned to investigate Trump.
What was the insurance policy?
I could make the case to you strongly that the insurance policy was a steel dossier.
The Democrat paid for oppo research on the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, at the time.
And then, you know, one final component of this is you have this litany of media fake news.
You had the Mike Flynn was ordered to contact the Russians when Trump was a candidate story, fake, total fake news.
It was not as a candidate, it was as the president-elect, which changes the entire dynamic of the story.
You had the Deutsche Bank fake news.
Deutsche Bank has been asked to look into Trump's bank records by investigators.
It was not about Trump.
It may have been about associates of Trump, but it was not about Trump.
And then you had the Don Trump Jr.
was contacted by WikiLeaks on September 4th story, fake news.
It was not September 4th, it was September 14th.
That date is critical because the WikiLeaks information was already made public at that point and Don Jr.
never responded to the emails.
So these are fake news stories.
Folks, this is an unprecedented attack on the presidency and this should really worry you.
If you're one of our liberal listeners out there, I'm really imploring you as an American citizen.
I get it.
We have significant political differences.
I understand that.
I get it.
I don't agree with you on taxes.
I don't agree with you on health care.
I don't agree with you, candidly, in a larger 30,000 foot view.
I don't agree with you about the government's role in our society.
But can we not set a ground level for the debate?
A ground level we'll never drop into the basement on.
And that ground level is that the government and the targeting of American citizens without any backup information or evidence of impropriety at all is wrong?
Even if that person is the President of the United States you don't like?
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm telling you.
I'm not giving you the virtue signaling line.
I'm not trying to appear Like some kind of moral superior to anyone out there?
But I'm telling you if this happened to Barack Obama, I would be speaking out the exact same way.
I have!
I mean, when someone leveled the charges at an event I was at about Obama that I thought were insane, they really were, I was at a Heritage event actually, Heritage Foundation event down in DC.
I was quick to speak out because I thought that was unnecessary.
I thought it was an unnecessary personal attack that wasn't going to advance our cause at all.
This kind of stuff has to have unanimous bipartisan support.
Paying people to make allegations against someone?
Imagine if that was you.
Imagine if that was Obama.
Special counsel investigations based on no evidence of wrongdoing at all?
An FBI insurance policy in case Trump is elected because the people investigating him say it's a quote a risk we cannot take?
Media fake news stories that imply that the Trumps did nothing did something wrong when in fact they did nothing wrong at all?
Completely fabricated details of the story?
This is bad stuff, folks.
This is really bad.
And if we can't agree on that, I mean, we're going to have a difficult time continuing fidelity to the Constitutional Republic as we have it now.
Disturbing.
Very disturbing stuff.
All right, moving on.
Story number two.
This was fascinating.
I saw Tim Ryan on Fox & Friends this weekend on the curvy couch.
He is a Democratic lawmaker.
He paints himself as a representative.
He's in the House of Representatives, a congressman.
I think he's from Ohio.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the case.
He ran against Nancy Pelosi for the minority leader position.
He got smoked.
But he's kind of an interesting character, this Tim Ryan, because he paints himself, Joe, as a man of the people type.
I'm part of the working-class, dirt-under-the-fingernails American type, you know?
Damn right.
You're damn right.
And I don't get it, because every time he opens his mouth, although he claims to be, again, the opposite of a Nancy Pelosi Democrat, more of a, hey, we're looking out for the middle-class type of guy, he goes on these TV shows, and he had a... Remember that Was it a couple months ago?
We covered him.
We had soundbites from him and Neil Cavuto, and he was just parroting the far-left talking points.
That's all he was doing.
Well, he did it again on Fox & Friends this weekend, and it's interesting because he keeps bringing up these points that the liberals keep parroting about the GOP growth agenda, the tax package, and regulatory reform, and he keeps attacking the Republicans.
And I wanted to go through a few of these, because one, they'll give you healthy information to debate your silly liberal friends, but secondly, they're becoming so pervasive and spread by media hacks, who'd have no idea what they're talking about, that I think people are starting to believe this stuff is in fact true.
Yeah.
Yeah, as a matter of fact, I have a...
A quote from a Washington Examiner piece from CBS that is going to make you laugh, but I'll get to that in a second.
So the first thing he said, he was talking about the growth agenda and the tax package out there.
He said this, and CBS kind of echoed this claim in different form, and I'll read that quote in a second, but Ryan said that regarding the tax cuts, he said, well, we're going to borrow money from China to pay for it.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
You heard that one?
We're going to borrow money from China to pay for it.
That stuff tastes pretty good, too.
Give me a little boost of energy.
How are we borrowing money from China to pay for tax cuts?
Folks, do you see how logically this makes no sense at all?
When your liberal friends and people like Tim Ryan, who claims to be a centrist but is really a liberal, say things like this, can we stop for a moment, take a time out, and think about this rationally?
What is a tax rate cut?
What is it in essence?
Ask your liberal friend.
What is a tax rate cut?
It is a cut in the percentage of your income or the percentage of a business's income that they in fact then turn over to the government.
It may or may not be a cut in the amount of money they turn over to the government.
This is where liberals always get confused.
They do not understand the distinction between... Lord, in Tim Ryan's case, they do, and they're just, I think, lying to you.
This is not a stupid man.
He's just lying or manipulating you, right?
They do not understand the critical difference between tax rate cuts and actual money turned over to the government, and revenue cuts.
In other words, because I cut the rate a business or a person pays to the government, if they are paying 50%, and thanks to the guy, by the way, emailed me about the math mistake, embarrassing one I made last week's show.
If you listen to the show again, you'll pick it up.
I cut two numbers in half.
One of them was supposed to double.
But thank you to the listener who sent me that.
I was thinking about it over the weekend.
I'm like, yeah, he's right.
Like, how did I screw that up?
And I probably went, yeah.
Yeah, no, you said, yeah, just like the dude from Trading Places.
No, no, I, you know, when you do shows on the fly, you just you're thinking too, sometimes my brain gets ahead of me.
But the point is, you have to understand the difference between a rate cut and a revenue cut.
Just because your rates are being cut, The GOP, the entire ethos that they've built their ideological economic house on is the idea that when you cut tax rates, or the percentage of someone's income or a business's income that they turn over to the government, that that money, this is the important point here folks,
That money has to go somewhere.
It doesn't disappear.
If I'm giving you 20% of my income, and then I turn over 15%, that 5% I'm, air quotes here, Joe, allowed to keep, gee thanks, you know, allowed to keep my own money, that 5% has to go somewhere.
And as I've said repeatedly on the show, there are only really three options for it when it comes to the corporate tax, the business tax, which is what the Democrats seem to be so against.
They can consume it, invest it, or spend it.
Spend it, meaning they can hand it out to their, and this is just my breakdown.
I know it may not make sense, the terminology I use, but it's an easy way for me to remember it.
Spend it, meaning they can give the money to the owners of the company, the shareholders.
So you can get a dividend payout, there can be a stock price bump due to increased valuation because they have cash on the books.
So they can spend it.
They can invest it, meaning they can take the money they're keeping and not give it to the government, and give it to other companies.
They can do a merger and acquisition, Joe.
They can buy stock in another company.
Or they can consume it.
Meaning they can spend the money again, but spend it internally on new factories, new equipment, employee raises, all of that stuff.
My point in this is all three of those scenarios are growth-oriented, free-market, American citizen positive scenarios, where the American citizen makes out.
If they consume it inside, and I'm sorry if I'm getting a little wonky here, but please try to follow me because this is critical because this is going to go on in perpetuity now after these tax cuts happen, hopefully this week.
You're good so far, yeah.
Alright, cool.
If they consume it, in other words, they take the money they didn't give to the government.
They were paying 20% or in the case of the business tax, they were paying 35%.
That was the tax rate.
The tax cuts are offering 20%.
That's a 15 percentage point cut.
If they consume it internally in the company and buy new equipment, they make the workers more productive.
More productive workers demand more money.
That's the way wages go up.
Folks, that's an economic fact.
That is an irrefutable data point.
Secondly, if they invest it in other companies, then the other companies get the money and they get to follow the same course.
They could consume it, invest it, or spend it themselves.
Either way, the money winds up in the free market economy dominated by American citizens and the businesses they work for.
If they spend the money, spend it on shareholders... Folks, I've got news for you.
You may say, shareholders, that sounds like a rich person thing.
It's not!
You have a pension fund, You work for a pension?
What do you think they're investing in?
Government bonds exclusively?
They're investing in American companies.
A lot of Americans own stock.
They're not all rich people.
I own stock.
I'm not rich.
Either way, the point I'm trying to make is the rate cuts, and I'll get back to the China thing in a minute, but you have to understand the background first.
Either way, the rate cuts on the taxes leave money in the free market economy that no matter which way you look at it, has to be in the hands at some point of American citizens, whether business owners, business employees, or owners of the business who are stockholders.
There's no other way!
Now, If leaving money in the pockets of American citizens, business owners, employees, regardless, American citizens, the people who produce economic growth and prosperity in this country, if leaving money in their wallets through rate cuts makes them better off, that's not refutable, folks.
They're not burning the money.
It's not refutable if you live in the world of common sense.
How are we borrowing money from China to, quote, pay for tax cuts?
To pay for what?
Joe, I'm not messing with you here.
Can you explain that to me?
How if I give you, let me ask you a simple question.
If I give you a five percentage point tax cut, okay?
In other words, whatever, you're paying 20%.
Now I say, Joe, you only have to pay me 15%.
I'm Dan Bongino, federal government monarch.
I take, I'm the king who taxes everything.
If I say, Joe, give me 20%, next year and say, I say, Joe, give me 15%.
Yeah.
How would I, King Dan, have to borrow money from China to pay for money I didn't take from you?
Does that make any sense?
No, it would make me feel good, dilly dilly.
Of course it would, because you get more money!
Understand this, this is a silly Democrat talking point they're using because it tested well in a focus group.
We're borrowing money, you're trying to pay for it.
What are you paying for?
Joe, by any normal reading of the terminology, pay for, are we not talking about the transfer of money to acquire something else?
In other words, Joe, we pay you for your production engineering services for the Dan Bongino show, correct?
Yes, you do, Dan.
We, I assume they, I don't know how they see our payday direct deposit, whatever, it doesn't matter.
So, they give you money in exchange for services, that's paying for, right?
That's right.
If we don't take your services, and just like the government do a tax rate cut, doesn't take more of your money?
So, not a trick question, if I no longer were to demand Joe Armacost service to the chagrin of my audience who loves Big Joe.
Would I then have to pay you for services I do not take?
The answer to that is no, Dan.
The answer to that, Dan, is no!
This guy is on a roll again!
How do you pay for something you don't take?
Don't know.
Now, of course you don't know because you have an IQ above 100 and you're not an imbecile.
Here, from the Washington Examiner.
This is a great piece.
It'll be in the show notes at Bongino.com.
Please subscribe to my email list, folks.
It helps us out a lot.
I'll fire these emails, these articles I read, right to your inbox, right?
Here's a good one, the Washington Examiner today.
Quote from it.
Again, on the same line about how not taking people's money is somehow paying for something.
It says, consider, for example, CBS's claim that, quote, the transfer of public wealth to the private sector has left governments without the resources needed to invest enough in education, health, and other measures to help counter inequality.
Read that opening sentence again, please.
I'm talking to myself.
I'm asking myself to reread something.
That the transfer of public wealth to the private sector.
Wait, wait, wait.
So what is public wealth?
That's what I'm wondering.
Public wealth as if the government has a bank account where the money comes from like Martians or angels and demons or something, like some otherworldly, you know, spawn from the comic books kind of character realm.
Folks, my cousin used to love that comic book.
I didn't read it, but he was obsessed with it.
There's no such thing as public wealth.
Guys, ladies, please follow me here on this one.
Because if we can't dismantle the overarching 30,000 foot silly ideological arguments of the left, everything else is meaningless.
What is public wealth?
It doesn't make any sense.
I have wealth.
Joe has wealth.
People at CR have wealth.
But there's no conservative review in CRTV.
But there's no CRTV wealth.
There's money that comes into CRTV that filters down to the employees from subscribers, if you're a CRTV subscriber.
But there's no... And folks, I can prove it to you.
If there was some collective public wealth, using a business analogy, just like there was some collective CRTV wealth, why wouldn't we all get a shot at it?
Joe, am I right?
Yeah.
Me and you would say, oh, there's a pot of money at CRTV?
It's public?
Give me more, I'll take it.
Joe, I'm tripling your salary.
Go to the CRTV public wealth pot.
I'll be right there.
Yeah, you're damn right.
You'd be first online.
So would I. The point is, because it's wealth does not make it public.
It is owned by the owners of the company that decide how to give that wealth to the employees and give that wealth back to the subscribers in terms of content in an exchange of services.
The taxpayers are no different.
There's no such thing as public wealth.
There's people who give money to the government and the government picks its winners and losers and gives it out to other people.
You have no claim over it whatsoever outside of what the government says you can take back.
Oh no, sure I do.
I get my social security.
You, you, really?
You sure?
You sure you're getting your social security?
You're getting social security.
But trust me, it's not yours.
The money you gave in through payroll taxes to Social Security, I'm not attacking you for it.
Don't email me.
I hate when people do that.
I am not attacking you for paying into a system you didn't design that failed you.
Please, to Social Security recipients, for the third time, I am not attacking you.
I'm just stating a fact.
It is not your money.
The money you gave, the physical dollar bill you transferred electronically to the government through a payroll tax is gone.
It has been spent.
It was given to someone else through entitlement programs and already spent.
It's gone.
It is a pay-go process, meaning the people paying now Me, Joe, other people paying payroll taxes are giving you our dollars.
It's not your fault.
I'm not attacking you.
I'm just telling you there is no public wealth.
There is no entitlement to public wealth outside of what the government tells the private citizen he can have from the taxpayer honeypot.
So when CBS says something like the transfer of public wealth to the private sector has left governments without the resources, that's insane!
There cannot be a transfer of public wealth because there's no such thing as public wealth.
There is simply the taking, and this is it Joe.
This is where it all comes together.
There is no public wealth.
There is only the taking of private free market American citizen money.
The taking of it, and the giving to other American citizens.
There is no public wealth.
They use that terminology to make you believe that the government has some pot of money it benevolently generates from sources you'll never know, and that when tax rate cuts happen, that pot of money somehow shrinks to give out goodies to others.
That is simply not the case.
Tax rate cuts are simply giving... I'm using even their terminology.
Yeah, you got caught.
I did.
Are simply people keeping more of the money they've earned themselves.
Right.
You don't borrow money from China.
I didn't spend a lot of time on this, but it's necessary to pay for something you never took.
All right.
Secondly, He's parroting this nonsense claim again that the wealthy are going to benefit from this.
Now, this is crap, and I want to just make a few points.
There's another fantastic piece in The Examiner today I'll put in the show notes.
Very well done.
And they talk about how CBS, others, Tim Ryan types, and the liberals keep parroting this point that these tax rates cuts are going to benefit the wealthy.
And one of the points they're using is research by Thomas, or if you wanted me to use the fake French accent, Thomas Piketty.
I do not do French accents.
Well, Joe is far better at that type of stuff.
Thomas Piketty.
I'll call him Thomas Piketty.
Like spaghetti, but Piketty.
Piketty wrote this book about inequality that went nuclear with the left.
Portions of the book have been largely debunked based on questionable statistical methods.
The point of his book, Joe, is that inequality has been increasing in the United States due to capital formation and basically a bunch of fat cats are living off investments and not working while the working class is getting their butt kicked.
Inequality is an issue.
It's always an issue.
That is not Debatable.
What is debatable is Piketty's assertions that it is somehow worse in the United States than it is elsewhere.
Why am I bringing this up?
In defense of this tax plan, they're trotting out Piketty again because this is what they do.
He published, Joe, the World Inequality Report.
What?
What?
The World Inequality Report!
Oh my gosh, this sounds bad.
It paints an unbelievably disingenuous picture.
And by the way, the New Yorker and other left-leaning regs have doubled down on this.
And the New Yorker actually said, Joe, that in this damning expose of the World Inequality Report, The New Yorker doubles down on the assertions and says that the United States is now more unequal than Europe and China.
So, yes, because people are dying to leave the United States and wind up in Europe and, of course, China.
That's a big problem, Joe.
We lost tens of millions of citizens last year leaving the United States to become Chinese citizens.
Well, wait, what?
You just made that up?
Yes, I did.
It's total crap, of course, and any common sense person knows that, even liberals listening, right?
Here are the actual numbers from the Washington Examiner piece, which will thoroughly refute this.
And again, I'm bringing it up because it's being used by the media, so we're clear on the points here.
We're debunking some nonsense talking points.
The moment we don't borrow money from China for stuff we don't take.
You don't pay for something you don't take.
Secondly, that the wealthy benefit, and they're saying, look, the wealthier benefiting is going to make inequality worse, these tax rate cuts.
Here are the actual numbers.
The average wage in the United States, Joe, $35,700 a year.
$35,700.
Now, the New Yorker wants to... You have to be a dope to believe this.
They want you to believe that the United States is more unequal than Europe and China.
Okay, so if the average... You have Jay's abacus, Joe?
Yes, I do, Dan.
Get Jay's.
We haven't busted Jay's abacus out in a while.
Okay, I'm gonna give you some numbers.
Now, Joe, again, as always, this is very, very complicated math.
I love this part.
Yeah, I know you do.
This is going to be tough.
I'm going to ask you a greater than or lesser than question.
I know you're going to have to use the abacus, hat tip to Jay, to figure this out.
So the average wage in the United States, Joe, $35,700.
So again, the assertion we're dealing with here, I hear you moving the abacus around, getting ready, is that Europe and China Are far better places for equality than the United States.
So you would think that if the United States average wage is $35,700, of course the average wage in Europe and China must be far higher because it's such a better situation for people who are poor and middle class, right Joe?
Is this number I'm going to give you, this is the average wage in China, less than or greater than $35,700?
Are you ready?
Okay, yeah.
Get the abacus.
The average wage in China is...
$10,300, Joe!
Is $10,300 greater than or lesser than $35,700?
Get the abacus out.
I gotta figure this out.
Okay.
Try it, buddy.
Try it.
It's less, Dan.
It's less.
It's less, Dan!
than $35,700.
Get the abacus out.
I gotta figure this out.
Okay. - Try it, buddy.
Try it. - It's less, Dan.
It's less. - It's less, Dan!
It's less.
Wow!
*vomiting* That's crazy!
The New Yorker said otherwise!
Clearly, the New Yorker is wrong.
Again, of course $10,300, the average wage in China, which by the way is probably largely statistically manipulated due to the socialist control of the Chinese economy and the socialist control of information that flows out of China.
$10,300 is of course far less than the $35,700 average wage in the United States.
Joe, here's one more.
Get the abacus.
Ready?
Because they cited Europe and China.
Oh, and Russia was in one of these mainstream media hack outlets, too.
Russia's even better than we are for inequality.
So, the average wage in the United States, again, $35,700.
Joe, the average wage in Russia, is it less than or greater than $35,700?
The average wage in Russia is it less than or greater than $35,700 and the number is $8,000 Joe!
Less!
Less?
Less!
It's less!
I got it!
It's less!
Dude!
Dude!
You are on fire with the math the last few weeks.
Of course, because Joe, clearly your intellectual aptitude and achievement levels are higher than most people around the world.
You are in the Justice League of intellectual superheroes.
I mean, the evidence is overwhelming at this point.
Folks, this is garbage.
The average wage in Russia is $8,000.
So the question you have to ask yourself and answer yourself at the same time, would you rather live in a country where the average wage is $35,700 or would you rather live in a country where the average wage is $8,000?
Joe, I'll give you a second to think about that.
that. 35,000 or 8,000?
35,000, 7... 35,000 thing.
Yeah, that's where I want to... It sounds about right!
Yeah, round it up 35,000, 7... 36.
Round it down 35.
Of course you'll take 35.
This is... the idiocracy here is stunning!
Folks, this is... they're just making this stuff up.
Oh man, I got a ton of stuff I want to get to.
But, just quick too, he trotted out the... Tim Ryan did on the Fox and Friends thing.
So, Let me just recap you.
So we're not borrowing money from China first.
Number two, the wealthy benefiting from tax rate cuts and it's going to increase inequality is a nonsensical thing.
Inequality in the United States is a relative term.
Would you rather be richer as a poor middle-class employee or would you rather be poorer and have the rich be poorer too?
That's the only relevant question, right?
Finally, he trotted out the Clinton surplus thing.
Folks, there's never been a Clinton surplus.
I've said this a thousand times.
The only question you need to ask your friends about the mythical Bill Clinton surplus is name one year the deficit went down under Bill Clinton.
we raise taxes is name one year the deficit went down under Bill Clinton.
Just one. The answer is you can't because it never happened because the Bill
Clinton surplus is a myth.
It's nonsense.
It's not true.
Okay?
I'm not going to... I know my listeners are probably tired of hearing about it, but yeah, they are.
I get emails all the time like, enough with the Clinton surplus!
But it is.
It's an epidemic on the left of citing the Clinton surplus, and there's an epidemic in the media of people citing the Clinton surplus that never actually happened.
All right.
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Okay.
Gosh, that was only story number two.
I have like four or five more I wanted to get to.
All right, here's just a quick one here.
This is really bothering me, and I'm trying to be very delicate about this story, folks.
If I can be frank and candid with you for a moment, I'm very sensitive, and I mean this.
I know we're sarcastic.
the show and Joe and I can try to elicit a good laugh because I think it helps humor helps kind of put people
At ease and it makes the information flow a little easier, but I mean this with all my heart
I am very sensitive to the the needs of people who've worked their entire lives in the United States
I'm not trying to be melodramatic or hyperbolic But if you're a trucker
if you're a steelworker if you're an electrician like my brother a plumber like my father was I grew up around a
Overwhelmingly my grandfather was a bar owner a overwhelmingly blue-collar family
You know Joe is pretty much a blue-collar guy - it seems like a services industry job
But Joe doesn't believe me it could be exhausting poor guys on his feet all day at the radio station start like 4 o'clock
in a morning
I used to work at the shipyard as well here in Maryland.
Mm-hmm If you see Joe at CPAC or whatever, you'll see, like, he's got the scars of a life of blue collar work.
I mean, I did.
I was a gravedigger in a cemetery.
You know, I worked in supermarkets stocking shelves.
And I remember specifically going to fill in at WMAL in Washington, D.C.
when I used to live in Maryland.
I used to guest host their morning show a lot.
And as Joe knows, you're on the road at like three o'clock in the morning.
And I used to see these truckers sleeping on the side of the road in their rigs.
And I think, God bless these guys and these women out there.
That is a tough, tough line of work, driving around the country in traffic all the time, making sure the products get at the table.
So, you know, a long opening, but I want to make sure you understand, I am absolutely sensitive to the fact that you really work hard.
But to a lot of the manual laborers out there who are members of unions, guys, ladies, You got screwed.
I don't know any other way to tell you that.
Again, just like I'll say to social security recipients, I'm not blaming you, but the government worked you.
We used to say in New York when I grew up, you got worked.
You got worked.
Yeah.
They said, oh, give us your payroll tax money.
We'll put it in a lockbox and we'll give it to you later.
That's not what happened.
You got worked.
The same thing is happening right now with a lot of what they call multi-employer pension plans.
What are these?
These are These are big pension plans that work across industries sometimes.
So you may have some truckers in one, you may have some steel workers in one.
Bottom line is there are a lot of union pension plans that are in these multi-employer pension plans.
And Joe, right now, a lot of them are going bankrupt.
Here are some numbers from a piece of The Daily Signal.
Really short, really sweet.
It'll be in the show notes at bongino.com.
Check it out.
They have set aside a lot of these multi-employer pension plans that are going to affect a lot of our truckers and people who work hard.
Again, I'm not knocking you at all.
Please don't take it the wrong way.
They have set aside, Joe, less than 60% of the benefits they actually promised to pay.
The shortage is an astonishing $600 billion.
Folks, that sucks.
I'm sorry, but that's really bad.
Now, A lot of these pension plans paid insurance to a government enterprise called the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation.
Now, basically with that is it's kind of like the FDIC, where the banks pay a certain amount of money to get government insurance for a certain amount of deposits.
I think you're covered up to $250,000 or whatever it may be.
Well, the way the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp would work is a similar kind of way.
These pension plans pay basically a premium to this government enterprise there, and they guarantee, I think it's up to $13,000 in benefits or something like that, but that's it.
Why am I bringing any of this up?
Because these plans are bankrupt, and they are now lobbying lawmakers in D.C.
to bail them out again with taxpayer money, your money.
Folks, this is not a knock on the people who put their money in the pension plans, just like the Social Security recipients did.
But you know, when I wrote my second book, and I meant it, and I say it on this show a lot, it's time to get big.
Folks, we all have to get big.
This is wrong.
I'm sorry, but this is wrong.
And I know I'm going to get some emails from people who are members of these pension plans.
They're like, well, why is it wrong?
You know, everybody else is feeding at the government trough.
We should get a bailout too.
You know what I'm saying, Joe?
The government taxpayers, why not pay us our full pensions, folks?
Once that starts, that cascade of hands in the cookie jar, which has already started, do you realize the path to bankruptcy is not only expedited, it's expedited dramatically.
What's next?
Are American doctors going to ask for a bailout for hospitals that go under?
Are hedge funds going to ask for a bailout for losses on their investments?
Folks, the taxpayer, this is a great quote by the Daily Signal, by the way, The quote by the Daily Signal is, why should taxpayers be on the hook for private pensions outside of the guarantee that they, you know, the insurance guarantee paid to the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp.
Why should we be on the hook for them?
We had no seat at the negotiating table.
I thought it was a very well-worded point.
Joe, did you get a say in this?
No.
I don't think so!
You never got a vote, right?
No one came by in a census application or something.
It's a joke.
Can I interview you?
How do you feel about the benefits guaranteed by the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp to private pensions?
How do you feel about that as a taxpayer?
Go!
Never was asked, no.
Neither was I, because it never happened.
We had no seat at the table to negotiate any of this, so why should taxpayers be responsible for the bailout?
Now, you may be saying, oh, it's easy for you to say.
You probably make a nice salary over there.
I do.
But folks, Joe knows well, when I left the Secret Service, I had nothing.
I gave up my pension completely.
I didn't lobby the government to pay me because I wanted to run for office.
Guys, ladies, I'm sorry, but this is just wrong.
This is not right.
There are other taxpayers out there working hard to save for their own retirement.
The country is not full of Daddy Warbucks.
You know, it's funny how they talk about the 1%, but what about the 99% who are working really hard?
Why should they be responsible because the pension funds of some of these union operations were entirely, completely mismanaged?
Why are we responsible for that?
Here's a quote from the piece, too, by the way, because some people are saying, well, it benefits the taxpayer anyway, because if we bail out the pension funds show, the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp, which is, in a way, kind of taxpayer subsidized, they won't be enforced, they won't be forced to pay the money.
But that's nonsense.
They said, but that's impossible.
This is a quote.
For starters, the Guarantee Corporation is not taxpayer funded.
In other words, Joe, the pensions pay the premiums, not the taxpayers.
So taxpayers cannot be on the hook for its unfunded liabilities.
And second, even if taxpayers were required to bail out the corporation, it cannot possibly be more expensive to provide a portion of the promised benefits than it would be to provide 100% of the plan's promised benefits.
Folks, this is not fair.
I'm sorry.
This is not fair.
It's time for all of us to take a collective hard look in the mirror and ask what kind of country we want to be.
I am not blaming you.
Your pension operation failed you.
They did not put enough money aside.
They are $600 billion short.
They only have 60% of the benefits.
But I'm sorry, I have my own kids to worry about right now, and so do a lot of other middle class taxpayers, including Joe.
Why am I now paying for your retirement as well as my own as well as the entitlement structure in the United States because Social Security was not properly funded and not properly secured either?
I'm paying for everyone else but myself at that point.
It's not fair, folks.
Read the piece in the Daily Signal.
This is not right.
I'm playing with you as a friend and an ideological patriot here with you.
That we have to start standing for something, even though they're difficult decisions to make.
If your lawmaker even sniffs doing this, even hints about doing this, bailing them out, I'm telling you, you better make a big stink.
Call their office, email their office.
This is not right.
And I get it.
There are going to be some Republicans out there.
I know that Democrats love handing out money to anyone, so there's really no vote for anything.
But there will be some Republicans out there who will say, well, we're going to lose middle class votes because there are people out there.
Folks, no, we're not.
And if we do, folks, we stood on principle and we did the right thing.
Sometimes it's more important to do the right thing and not the easy thing.
This is the wrong vote.
Do not allow this to happen.
It will never, ever end.
You will be next, I promise.
Something is going to happen that's going to bankrupt some company next.
And what?
You'll be at the table next and then your neighbor's going to pay for you?
What did Milton Friedman always say?
The joke of the whole thing about taxpayer money is you think your neighbor's paying for something, but he's saying the same thing.
It's not fair, folks.
All right.
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First, let me give you the website.
It's iTargetPro.com.
And the inventor's a genius.
He figured out a while ago that, hey, these competitive shooters, Joe, people do this for a living, they dry fire ten times more than they live fire at the range.
You know, dry fire, where there's not a round in the weapon, you just basically pull the trigger and you work on your trigger control, your sight alignment.
In the Secret Service, we used to do, we'd put a coin.
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It takes a lot of time.
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All right, final story here of the day.
So Joy Reid from MSNBC, who is always a cornucopia of liberal ideological dopiness, came out with something, I think it was on Friday or over the weekend during her show, she said, you know, Trump is an authoritarian of the first order.
Oh, yes, Joy, that makes a ton of sense.
So let's go through the authoritarian things Trump did to increase his power.
And of course, Trump is a future monarch, as Joy Reid believes.
So let's go through a couple of things.
So, regulatory reform.
Trump has now dumped 635 government regulations, delayed 244, and shelled 700 more.
Let me see.
Scratching my ears is a head-scratching sound.
I think we need a sound effect for that.
If someone has a good one, send that in.
Ron P is always good for that.
So we need a good head-scratching sound.
So he's trying to increase and concentrate his power, Joe, because he's an authoritarian, as Joy Reid from MSNBC said, while he simultaneously is scrapping government regulations that increase government power.
Hey, good, Joy, you nailed it again.
You are really, you are so smart.
Does your family, are they the ones reinforcing you at the end of every show?
Joy, you so nailed it that time.
So he's dumping regulations at a record rate.
But yes, of course, he's an authoritarian.
Secondly, Let's appoint a Supreme Court Justice in Neil Gorsuch, who believes in the limited power of government and the power of the Constitution, a document, at least in the Bill of Rights, of negative liberties, which dictates what the government can't do.
Sounds like an authoritarian to me!
Let's appoint a Supreme Court Justice who limits the power of government.
You are so good.
This woman is a genius.
Number three, he has insisted on not filling positions within the executive office of the president, and he's left a lot of government positions vacant.
Joe, I don't know about you, but if I'm an authoritarian, if I'm a future monarch, King Dan or King Joe, first move I make, of course, is to actually not hire anyone in my office to enforce my authoritarianism.
Does that make any sense?
That's a tough one, Dan, yeah.
My friend, that's a tough one.
But again, it's Joy Reid, so we'll give her a pass on that.
She's got clearly has issues.
Two more here quick.
So, tax reform.
Yes, of course, every authoritarian wants to cut taxes and keep money in the pockets of the citizens.
The great unwashed by authoritarians.
It's what every authoritarian does, Joe.
Of course, they give money back to the citizens and don't take the money from... I mean, isn't that obvious?
How did you miss that one?
Authoritarianism at its worst, allowing you to keep your own money, using their dopey terminology.
And finally, last week Ajit Pai and the FCC dumped this fictitious net neutrality nonsense.
There was nothing neutral about it.
It was the government control of the internet.
And of course, Joe, that's a move made by every authoritarian.
The internet, the largest information trafficking source in the world.
When you're an authoritarian, of course the first thing you do is scrap government control over the internet and let actual people dictate how it's going to be run.
Joy, your analysis is just absolutely tremendous.
I mean, this is a woman who's been so immunized to facts that how she's not horrified and embarrassed by saying such nonsensical crap.
It's just, I don't know how she stays on the air.
But I'll put in the show notes a Breitbart piece about it.
It's comical and that's just my commentary on it.
The only authoritarian in human history decreases the power of the government.
All right, folks, thanks again for tuning in.
Please go to my email list and subscribe at bongino.com.
I will send these articles right to your inbox.
And tune in to Addity later.
I'll be there on the radio show and I'll be on his TV show as a guest tonight.
I'll see you all later.
You just heard the Dan Bongino Show.
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