Summary:
In this episode I address the explosive allegations that the DOJ and the FBI may be hiding a more widespread abuse scandal. Finally, I discuss the disastrous budget situation and the effects of tax policy.
News Picks:
Is Bob Mueller sweeping under the rug decades of illicit government spying?
The federal government collected record amounts of tax revenue, yet it's still running a massive deficit.
Dan Horowitz’s new piece details the disastrous new budget plans.
In August alone, the federal government ran a $200 billion-plus deficit.
This is a really bad sign for the NFL.
If John Kerry isn’t guilty of a Logan Act violation, then this ridiculous law should be repealed.
The Obamacare Medicaid expansion is a lesson in economic mismanagement.
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Get ready to hear the truth about America on a show that's not immune to the facts with your host, Dan Bongino.
All right, welcome to the Dan Bongino Show.
Producer Joe, how are you today?
It's Friday!
I'm doing great, man.
It is Friday.
It is a Friday, or as Dana Lash calls it on the NRA TV show, a Fri-yay, which I always see her do.
Is that a thing?
I'm so not hip into the culture stuff there, you know?
Fri-yay.
But hey, listen, God bless all those folks out there in the Carolinas.
It looks like it's gonna be a pretty significant wind event and an even more significant rain event, so stay safe, stay frosty out there, and despite the You know, folks on some side say, oh, don't say thoughts and prayers.
No.
You know, prayers do matter.
I believe that.
And, you know, I'm not going to be dissuaded from saying that at all.
So our prayers are with you.
Mine are most definitely with you.
You bet.
And I hope everything turns out OK.
But it does look like it's going to be, at a minimum, a significant rain and water event over there.
And it's a big deal.
And we, like I said, we live in a hurricane zone here.
God bless you.
All right, I've got a lot to talk about today, and I want to start with something I saw on television last night that reminded me of what happened to me.
It's an experience I had in the Secret Service I want to share with you.
I think it's important.
Before we get to that, let's get the, of course, we get to pay for the show.
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Okay.
Last night I'm watching, I don't usually watch ESPN anymore because of their liberal bent, I try to stay away from it, but they had a show on last night about sports after 9-11 and just quickly I wanted to share something with you because it really mattered to me.
They had played some footage of sporting events that had happened in the immediate period post 9-11.
The Army-Navy game, the World Series, some hockey events that had happened and it was really touching to watch because my wife and I, I don't share a lot of personal stories with you but I think this is important and you maybe see where a lot of my worldview comes from.
My wife and I, our relationship began 10 days before 9-11.
So the 9-11 horror has a unique place in our relationship.
She worked at 120 Broadway, my wife, which was right outside of the pit.
Right next to the building.
Her office, you can look down and see what were the World Trade Center area right there.
She used to shop down there.
She worked down there forever.
We met on a blind date and I was instantly taken by her.
I told you today, I didn't want to be a weirdo, but when 9-11 happened, even the day of, my first instinct was to call her, even though we'd only been dating, gosh, nine days.
I mean, I'd only seen her like two or three times.
So I called her, and I called her house, and I called her house, and she didn't answer.
And I was worried because I knew she worked at 120 Broadway.
Well, it turned out she was in Las Vegas visiting her mom, who had lived out there at the time, and she just couldn't get back, and the phone lines were all clogged up.
So I didn't want to Be a weirdo, but finally I found out where she was and I was I was incredibly relieved but that our relationship has always been Married to that date because we met right around there But one of the things that happened to me is right after we met about a month later I was a secret service agent.
I got an assignment and that assignment was I I never forget, I got an email saying, hey, you need to, I was a Yankees fan at the time, and you need to report as a post-stander to Yankee Stadium for, what was it, game three, I believe, of the Yankees-Diamondbacks World Series.
Now keep in mind, this is October 7th or so, this is just less than a month after 9-11 happens.
President Bush was gonna go out and throw the first pitch at Yankee Stadium.
Most of you remember that iconic image where President Bush throws his perfect strike.
Yep.
And you've heard a lot of the stories where Jeter's joking around with him in the tunnel.
As he's warming up, Jeter tells him, don't bounce it.
They'll boo you.
And he wasn't kidding.
I know New York fans better than anyone.
I'm one of them.
So I get this assignment as a Secret Service agent to go there and partake in the security plan.
I was there when that happened.
I was in the stadium.
I watched it, and I'm telling you, it was a moment of collective unity like I've never seen in my life.
I mean, Yankee Stadium fits about 55,000 people.
There was not an empty seat in there.
There was not an empty seat in the stadium.
I mean, I think that's obvious in a World Series game, but I mean, like, even in a World Series game, people are in the bathroom, people are getting a hot dog, some people show up late.
Folks, I'm telling you, there was not an empty seat in the entire stadium.
The seats were blue.
You could not see the blue backdrop of one seat.
People were standing in the aisles.
And President Bush walked out, and for all of our political disagreements, heck, I have political disagreements with Bush, we brought him up on the show.
I'm telling you, it's my first and only experience as a Secret Service agent where, and I'll just throw this out there and I'm fine telling you, where I was almost wholly distracted from my security mission for a few seconds.
I was.
It was just, we had had this unprecedented attack on our sovereignty, on our country.
Something that if you would have told someone before 9-11 was going to happen, they would say, dude, that's the dumbest movie I've ever heard.
Who would dare do that?
But it happened.
Stories about, you know, people jumping off the buildings.
We all live through it, we know.
People incinerating into the, you know, into the concrete as they jump to escape the flames.
I mean, just an awful day.
And for those of us who were up there and in that New York area when it happened, it was really pronounced.
For those of you in the Pentagon or You know what I'm talking about.
It was just that much more pronounced what happened.
Joe, were you on the air that day?
No, I was in Siberia.
No way.
For Joe?
Yeah, for Joe and Mish.
Yeah, we adopted them.
Wow.
Someone, a viewer asked me to ask you because he said, I would like to know what Joe was doing that day.
And I can tell you, forgive me, I didn't even think to ask.
I wasn't being rude at all.
We got a call from the interpreter crying her eyes out.
Mr. Armacost, I'm so sorry.
Oh my God, your country is at war.
I don't know what we will do.
Did you know what she was talking about?
I thought she was nuts.
And I said, what?
And then I found out.
And then my next thought, believe it or not, was how do I get out of here?
Yeah, get home, I know.
Sheesh, gosh, I didn't even... I mean, it was just such a transformative moment in our lifetimes.
I mean, it was up there, to me, with the moments you remember every detail.
I mean, I'm not comparing the tragedies.
9-11 is a unique scar in our nation, but it reminds me when the space shuttle exploded.
It just... I remember every detail of it.
I was in, what, fifth grade?
Oh, yeah.
So I'm there though at Yankee Stadium and Bush walks out and I'm telling you it was the only time as a Secret Service agent I was genuinely distracted for that moment from my mission.
I am in the right field, yeah, right field bleachers.
So I've got a great view with this whole entire thing.
And he walks out, and I remember thinking to myself, please throw a strike.
Please.
And folks, when I tell you this, I mean this as the most nonpartisan person at the time.
I was not thinking the politics of it at all.
I was thinking we need one collective Blank you to these terrorists that tried to beat us down and nothing would make me happier than the President of the United States who there's no question they would have tried to kill if one of those planes would have made it to the White House.
To walk out onto the mound forgetting the politics of the moment and throwing up a laser beam down the home plate is one big collective middle finger to these jerkwads who did what they did.
And man he gets out there folks.
And he throws this laser beam strike and I got lost in a sea of emotions.
I got, you know, I'm an emotional guy as is.
It's not a secret.
Don't let my 6'1", 230 pound frame fool you.
I'm a big, uh, that's teddy bear.
I got lost in it and everybody else did too.
It was this collective sense of we were being defined by negation.
I don't mean this in a negative way, I'll get to that in a second.
Right after that, forgive me if I'm getting the timeline wrong because it was such a transformative moment, but it was either right before or right after.
There's a flyover.
I think they were F-22s.
And it was the loudest thing.
I'd heard F-22s before.
We used these things.
We used caps and other stuff.
And, you know, we were Secret Service agents.
But hearing the men with the crowd and the roar, this sound was just deafening.
Right over Yankee Stadium.
And I was like, YES!
Yes!
You will not beat us down, you sons of bitches.
You will not beat us down.
You have no idea how badass this country is when you piss us off.
And I thought to myself, yes!
I looked next to the dude next to me and I was like, yes!
And I remember a guy looking at me, giving me like a nod.
And the nod, he didn't have to say anything.
The nod was like, you pissed off the wrong country, you SOBs.
Because we're coming, and it's gonna be ugly when we get there.
And then we had those military officials and Central Intelligence Agency guys on the horseback in Afghanistan.
It's like, we're gonna hunt you dogs down at every corner of the earth in the caves we find you in, and it is gonna be a bloodbath when we get you.
Because you have pissed off the wrong guy.
You poked a bear who's hungry, who's angry, and who's been preparing to eat you for a really long time.
And it's over, Johnny.
Why am I bringing any of this up?
Because I watched it on ESPN last night again, and I watched George W. Bush's comments now, later on about it, and a guy I used to work for, Nick Trott, on the Secret Service, who was there too, he was one of the bosses that day.
And I thought, you know, we were defined by negation.
In other words, we were defined by what we weren't in that moment.
We were Americans.
And again, I don't mean this in a negative way.
We were Americans because we were not those savages.
Now we were going to kill those savages and we were going to hunt these animals down.
We were going to hunt them down and we were going to kill them and we were going to find them.
But we weren't them.
We don't run planes into buildings.
We don't intentionally target innocent civilians.
We conquered countries and have walked out and give them money to rebuild.
Think about the Marshall Plan.
We defeated and destroyed the entire Nazi army and then gave money to Europe to rebuild the country.
That's what we, no one else does that.
We do that.
And we were defined by what we weren't.
We were defined by negation.
We were defined collectively.
And we were proud to say, gosh, we're the United States.
What a great day.
No one was saying we're a Democrat, we're a Republican, a Libertarian, Conservative.
None of that was happening after 9-11.
And it's just sad.
It's sad to watch all of that collapse.
Not that this, again, I'm trying to get into some Kumbaya moment where this moment of collective unity was going to last forever, but I bring it up and I took a note on this and I wanted to bring it up today because we're defining ourselves by negation again.
But that negation is American citizens looking at other American citizens and saying, we're not those guys.
We actually have a group of now far leftists and socialists and others out there and some sadly mainstream Democrat figures who look at other Americans and paint upon them the worst kind of slurs and labels and look at them and go, I'm taking the moral high ground because I'm not that guy.
And who's that guy?
The racist, the xenophobe, the homophobe, the misogynist, what I call on the show the istophobic phobophobe.
Put a phobe or an ist after any word, and many on the Democrat side will call you that.
Folks, it's sad to watch.
It really is.
It is really sad to watch.
And as I watched it last night, this show, you know, sitting and laying in bed with my wife watching it, again, we both, it means so much to us because it defined our relationship too.
I watched it and I said to her, gosh, if we could just get back to a tenth of where we were at that time, where we could look at fellow Americans, where Democrats could look at conservatives and say, listen, these aren't bad people.
They're just bad ideas.
And we disagree.
We think they're good ideas, of course.
But you see my point Joe that the other side I mean it's a humble ask for you now and I don't want to spend too much time on this but maybe you if you know the country would be in a far different place and you wouldn't have ushered in the era of such confrontational politics if you didn't choose to define yourself by negation against us.
Maybe dial it back a bit.
I get it.
Listen, I got a temper.
I've been known to take this fight, but I did not start this fight.
I did not ask by liberal groups to be called the worst of the worst, which happens on Twitter all the time.
I'm happy to screenshot them for you.
I did not ask because I support the Second Amendment to be called, to have people tell me I have blood on my hands.
I did not ask when I'm a school choice supporter, oh you hate teachers.
I did not ask because I support conservative American values and standing for a flag to be called a racist or whatever it may be.
You did that.
You did that.
And if you would dial it back and just, again, start to maybe see that we are patriots, we do love this country, we just have a seriously different set of ideas, maybe we could get back to one-tenth of what I experienced that day.
It was a transformative moment in my life, folks.
I'm telling you, I've never seen anything like it.
It was just the feeling of depersonalization, that you're part of something bigger than yourself right there in that unit of people.
Which doesn't make sense, right?
We had to get a unit of people.
Something singular and something plural.
It was some kind of collective feeling of, again, being defined by negation that we're not those animals that hit us and we're coming for you.
I wish we could get back to that.
Some of it, you know.
It's sad.
All right.
I've got a lot to cover today.
My show notes today are pretty extensive, are very, very good, and I please, please encourage you.
Thanks, by the way, everyone yesterday who came through big time for me.
I told you we were having problems with our domain being attacked, so we got a ton of new subscriptions to my email list.
People have been opening our emails.
That means a lot, folks.
If you want to support the show, that's the way to do it.
We don't have a Patreon account.
We don't ask you for money to support the show.
We do it through sponsors.
So I really appreciate those little things like signing up for our email list, opening our emails, signing up for our YouTube account, signing up for our Twitter.
It means a lot for the show.
So thank you very much.
But there is an article in the show notes today I'd like you to pay attention to by Jeff Carlson over at the Epoch Times who's been doing just extraordinary work.
And he proposes something that we've been covering for a while, but he proposes it in really good detail.
The proposal is this, Joe.
What else is the DOJ hiding?
And I'm going to add to it.
This isn't in his piece, but I'm going to add to it.
Remember what I told you Plan C was, right?
Plan A was attack the Trump team using unmasking efforts and possible 702 queries in the NSA database.
That got shut down.
Then they went to FISA warrants.
And then Plan C, when all else failed and Trump won the election, was to bring in Bob Mueller as a special counsel to clean up the mess, to make sure the American people never saw the abuses that went on the DOJ.
But Carlson's piece brings up a great point.
What else, Joe, are they hiding over there?
And I gotta tell you, if you pay attention to Sheryl Atkinson, Sheryl Atkinson's timeline, which she has up on her website.
I bring it up because he references Sheryl Atkinson in the piece, Carlson.
You start to ask yourself questions, Joe, that... Is the DOJ resisting declassifying and unredacting a lot of this data?
Because this Pfizer abuse is not just about Donald Trump.
Folks, the Carlson piece is a good one, and I want to spend a little bit of time on this, because this is important, and it's Spygate-related, but it's not a Spygate story, specifically.
Keep in mind the question we're asking.
Yes, we know the FISA system was abused to spy on Donald Trump, or his team, at a minimum.
Carter Page, that's a documented fact.
We know through the two-hop rule, it can be expanded to his team.
Hop from page to people he emailed to people from there.
That's how they surveil the whole network using a Pfizer one.
But Carlson has a great question.
How many other people has this happened to?
Folks, is the DOJ resisting this because they know if they Release the data and declassify the data on the spying used to spy on Trump, Joe, that they may be opening themselves up to a precedent on others this was done to, too.
Ladies and gentlemen, I've got to tell you, I should have brought this up to you sooner, and shame on me for not doing it.
This may be a bigger scandal than being just about this Republican president.
You see where I'm going with this?
I've got some more details.
You said Cheryl Atkinson.
I kind of had an idea.
Because she was a victim of some of this herself.
Cheryl Atkinson is a widely respected investigative journalist.
This is not some like party hack.
She has gone after people How bad was the abuse?
sides of the aisle and she has a in the piece you'll see she has this theory out
there that the FISA system to spy the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
that can obtain warrants to spy on people in the most intrusive ways Joe
that this Donald Trump scandal may be a scandal not only because it's about
Trump but it's about a larger litany of people now a couple of questions here
how bad was the abuse are there other cases now Carlson brings this up and if
I lose you Joe follow me because he says there is resistance
So you understand the background.
Americans, me included, are pushing to declassify everything at this point.
We want to know what went to the FISA courts to spy on Trump, the investigative 302s, the investigative summaries between the FBI and Bruce Ohr.
We want to see everything.
And a lot of us, me included, have been wondering for a while, Joe, why not, if Trump knows he was a victim of this, and we know too, why not just declassify the information?
Why are people in the White House Which Carlson outlines in his piece as well, fighting this declassification.
In other words, if people inside the White House know Trump was a victim of this, why are they some of the ones telling Donald Trump, hey, you may need to stand easy on this a little bit.
And a suggestion there, which I think may be accurate, is Joe, how many other cases was the FISA court lied to on?
Now, you may say, well, what's the problem, Dan?
It would expose corruption.
Yeah, folks, but listen, the world is a very... As I've said to you repeatedly, the whole entire field of ethics is about the gray, not the black and white.
If all answers were in black and white, we wouldn't need a field of ethics, right?
Let me propose something to you, why the White House itself, people within it, may be saying, hey, stand easy on this declassification, because if we do it, it may set a precedent for other declassification efforts, and those declassification efforts may reveal FISA abuses on other cases as well.
But folks, what if those cases were people who are actual terrorists?
If I'm confusing you, stop me here.
But I'm trying to get at you.
Now Carlson doesn't get it.
I'm taking his piece and elaborating it.
I just want to be clear.
You read the piece.
It'll make sense.
But I'm taking this to the next level given my own experience in law enforcement.
What I'm suggesting to you is It's clear that the FISA process was abused for Donald Trump.
It may also have been abused for other people who turned out in the end to be legitimate bad guys.
The problem now is the egg on the face of the government if some of these FISA abuses are exposed and the FISA abuses were used to nail legitimate bad guys.
You may say, well what's the egg on the face?
The egg on the face is that they basically lied to the courts they may have lied to the courts to gather information to get the bad guys so it creates an interesting conundrum for the justice department in the white house saying well we've got this guy terrorist whatever a we've got this guy locked up or we've got this guy on a watch list but we use the Pfizer process and some of the information came from sources we then use later on other broken cases who were not good sources
So now what do we do?
We expose this guy as a bad source, which shows our information may be crap, which we may, follow me, which we may have given to other governments too.
In other words, hey, watch out for this guy, terrorist A. You see what I'm saying folks?
And then the government starts going, these other governments, hey, You gave us that information about Terrorist A and Terrorist B, but now you're saying some of the information turned out to be bogus that you used in this secret court you have.
What are we supposed to believe in?
Right, right, right, right.
We're with you.
Folks, again, I'm not here to give you simplistic, easy explanations, and I'm certainly not suggesting they shouldn't be classified.
You know I've been pushing for that for a while.
I insist on that now.
My stance has not changed one bit.
Again, I'm just trying to give you a bit of a layered, more detailed approach than simplistic, you know, 140, 280 character tweets.
You know, declassify.
Yes, let's declassify, but let's understand what else may be going on here.
It's a sage point.
And Sheryl Atkinson's work on it is good.
It's really good.
And when you read how there may be other examples here, you understand why now.
Now it makes sense why there's been a delay.
So just to recap a bit, because I want to get to some other issues here too, that Carlson does address in the piece.
Issue number one.
This FISA abuse process, abusing these courts to spy on people, may not only be about Donald Trump, folks.
It may have happened to other people.
Some may have been legit bad guys, some may not have been.
Either way, if the information presented to the court was using sources and methods that are now broken, and we gave that information to other people or targeted other people, the government's opening itself up to some serious liability and political problems here.
Geopolitical problems.
Hey, Jordan, Israel, whatever, UK, we gave you this information on this guy and it doesn't look so good anymore.
That may be at the heart of some of this and that may be why the White House is saying, hey, take it easy.
If we declassify this, we may have to declassify other stuff too and we're setting a very dangerous precedent.
That's problem number one.
Problem number two with the declassification of the information and the FISA warrant and others, Is what about insubordination?
This is a serious problem, Joe.
In other words, if somebody at the DOJ, and I'm willing to take that chance, I'm not the president, so it doesn't really matter, but I think the nation's need to know at this point outweighs anything else, but there's a serious concern according to the piece about insubordination.
Meaning, Joe, you know, you're the AG, or the DOG, or the DAG, the DAG, and I say, Joe, declassify it, and you say, I'm gonna resign, and then ten people join you.
That becomes a very serious political problem for Donald Trump.
Again, folks, I'm not suggesting they shouldn't declassify.
Understand where I stand on this.
Not at all.
I'm simply suggesting to you that on my show, I prefer to give you a more wider spectrum of ideas about what's going on, so you understand the problem, so you're not, you know, debating like a liberal.
You know, Texas, uh, low taxes suck.
That's, I mean, that's, that's the depth that they're an inch deep and 42 miles wide.
Understand that there may be other problems here and the Trump team may be concerned about the political ramifications of mass resignations if they declassify.
Again, I don't think that's going to happen, but it is out there.
I told you about precedent.
If they set the precedent, there may be other cases, so we can knock that one out because I want to get some other stuff.
And then finally, the elections.
We're now in that 60-day window where the Department of Justice would rather not impact elections, which I find almost laughable given their indictments and prosecutions, these two and potential prosecutions of these two Republican congressmen.
Again, I'm not suggesting they didn't do anything wrong.
I'm just suggesting, I thought we were supposed to stay out of politics for 60 days, let the voters decide, then prosecute them afterwards.
I'm just saying, are the rules the rules or are they not?
So again, not suggesting they shouldn't declassify it, but one of the reasons they may be giving is, Mr. President, if you declassify now, it'll give the appearance in violation of Department of Justice election meddling rules that are, again, laughable, that you are meddling in these midterm elections.
Copy?
So it's a really, really good piece.
I have it in the show notes.
I strongly encourage you to read it, and it'll give you a more in-depth knowledge of the full spectrum of problems surrounding the declassification, so when you and I discuss it on the show, you'll understand that there may be a hang-up.
Now, having said that, how bad was the abuse?
And how long has this FISA process been going on, this FISA abuse process?
You know, Chuck Ross has an interesting tweet out there about the Washington Post and the New York Times, Joe, that I brought up before.
I think it was, was it Lee Smith or Carlson who pointed out or the Last Refuge guys?
I'm not really sure.
But when they reported on the FISA date, initially, the Washington Post and the New York Times, or in other words, the original FISA warning against the Trump team, Chuck Ross has a tweet out and he has images of it.
What's fascinating, Joe, Is that both the New York Times and the Washington Post made the exact same mistake.
The first FISA against Carter Page was not issued until October 2016, but the Washington Post and the New York Times, according to their sources, both reported that the FISA was issued in the summer of 2016 and both had issued corrections.
What does that tell you?
Folks, I can tell you what it tells me.
That there may have been an inside operation, a canary trap.
There was information being leaked out to select people with the wrong information.
Those people with the wrong information, when they relayed it to their sources, were given specific dates that were wrong.
So when they leaked it to the Times and the Washington Post, They would all have the date wrong, and then the people who leaked it would be caught.
The canary trap.
I always use the Miami Vice example.
If I'm trying to find a leaker and I have five suspects, I give them all a different date, suspecting one of them's going to leak.
I give them all a different date, and then one of those dates shows up in the New York Times or the Washington Post, I can figure out who leaked because I gave them all different dates.
If the leak is, when is Dan Bongino's birthday, and I tell five different people my wrong birthday, the one who leaks the wrong birthday is the leaker.
This is pretty simple stuff.
Folks, please, I'm not trying to talk down to anyone, but the canary trap is a tried and true method to weed out leakers, right?
It's pretty clear to me at this point that the fact that the New York Times and the Washington Post both published the wrong date for the Pfizer and had it corrected, that they probably had the same source.
Yeah.
And that same source is probably part of an ongoing leak operation.
And the fact that the FISA date was corrected, by the way, says to me someone close on the Crossfire Hurricane Trump investigation called the New York Times and Washington Post and said, ah, that date's wrong, which makes it even worse.
Not only do we have a leaker, we have a leaker fighting leakers by leaking.
You get it?
This is real.
In other words, it's really bad.
So that's up in a Chuck Ross tweet, but it's a really good point, um, that, again, how long, and I bring it up in context of how long has this FISA abuse been going on, because, and the inverse, how long has this leak investigation been going on too, folks?
In other words, if it was a canary trap set months ago, right?
Just how long has this been going on?
We already know a grand jury's been empaneled, right?
I reported to you last week about Andy McCabe, the breaking news that Andy McCabe, there's a grand jury empaneled to investigate the deputy director in the FBI and his role in all of these investigations.
I've told you to take it easy for a while.
How long has this been going on?
How many more people do they have ensnared in this canary trap, folks?
Are there more handcuffs coming out?
Are there more people going down?
Joe DeGeneva seems to think so.
Joe was on the Hannity show last night right before me.
Joe DiGenova is adamant that they are all going down.
His words.
Comey, McCabe, Stroke, Baker, Rebicki, all of them.
Joe seems to think all of them are in serious trouble for this leak investigation.
Something to keep in mind, folks.
All right, got a lot more to get to.
It's a busy show.
Don't go anywhere.
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Okay.
Oh man, Fridays, Fridays, Fridays.
All right, here's another great story for you I picked out of my culling the internet today for the best stuff out there.
So, a couple articles in the show notes, three, that you really should read about the fiscal condition of the United States.
Folks, we are, I don't know what to do to give you the good news.
Let me give you the bad news first because it's Friday and I don't want to leave you.
with bad news. So I'm going to put out the bad news now and it's bad. It's not like mildly bad,
it's really bad. So we raised record income tax revenue up to this point. The fiscal year is
almost over. Remember the fiscal year for the government does not run the calendar year.
It's not January to December 31st.
It runs, what is it, October through, it runs, it starts in October for obvious reasons.
You know, the spending levels for the following year start earlier.
So, we are 11 months into the fiscal year.
The budget year is almost over.
The good news for the government, not for you, is they raised record income tax revenue.
1.521 trillion dollars.
Now, we're down a little bit on the total tax revenue side.
I brought this up in a prior episode.
I want to correct this here.
The corporate tax revenue has gone down since the tax cuts.
You may say, but Dan, you always say tax cuts don't lead to tax income revenue losses.
They don't over time.
The historical evidence is crystal clear.
Look at the corporate rate cuts and capital gains tax cuts under the Reagan years and other tax cuts you'll see over time.
Once those tax cuts set in, you'll see that the income base grows to economic growth.
What I'm getting at here is...
The Donald Trump tax cuts involved a dramatic corporate tax cut, 35 to 21 percent, and it also involved expensing.
Expensing changes, meaning people could take deductions immediately that they'd have to depreciate over time.
There was no way you weren't going to get, Joe, a short-term loss in corporate tax revenues.
None.
The cuts were dramatic.
I'm just asking you all to be patient.
So understand where I'm going with this.
We're in the bad news segment now, so bear with me.
The bad news is government tax revenue's up.
On the income tax side, it's down in total because we lost some on the corporate tax side.
We're actually down $7 billion in total receipts on the corporate side because of the expensing.
But folks, we are running an absolutely extraordinary deficit and us saying that, hey, you know what, it's the Republicans now in charge of Congress because they draw up the budget, is not an excuse.
To the Republicans listening, and Dan Horowitz has a scathing, scathing piece in Conservative Review today, which I have at the show notes.
Just a simple question for you.
Why did we vote for you?
We are now running, Joe, an $898 billion deficit.
Go to hell.
Yeah, you're darn right, despite record income tax revenue coming in.
898.
We are running Obama-era deficits.
It does none of us any good to apologize for this, and we have to start activating and asking our congressional representatives and senators out there, what the heck are you guys doing?
Ladies and gentlemen, please understand, in a four trillion dollar budget, a nearly trillion dollar deficit every single year is in no, in no fathomable universe is that sustainable.
We are on a guaranteed path to national bankruptcy that is going to manifest itself shortly through higher interest rates if this keep up, which are going to strangle the economy.
How do you feel about paying 18% on your mortgage?
Oh, that's not going to happen.
Are you sure?
I've got some more for you.
I've got more coming for you soon.
More data to show you that not only can this happen, it is happening around the world right now.
What are the turkish interest rates?
They just moved them up to like 40%?
Folks, we're in a world of trouble.
Now, I want to dispute one simple premise from this, too, because a guy I like, I have a lot of respect for, Tom Rogan writes for the Washington Examiner.
You see him on Fox sometimes.
He does some good work.
But Rogan wrote a piece yesterday in the Washington Examiner, I think it's in yesterday's show notes, I put it in there, suggesting that the GOP should not make these tax cuts permanent.
You all know the story, the income tax cuts were not permanent, the corporate tax cuts were because of Democrat obstruction on the filibuster side and having to use reconciliation.
So the Democrats blocked it.
Now there's talk of tax cuts 2.0 and making these income tax cuts permanent for you.
The Democrats are threatening, obviously, to filibuster that.
Again, Rogan, who is not a liberal by any stretch, but wrote, listen, we should really reconsider making these tax cuts permanent because the deficit situation, unless we can accompany it, which is not a bad idea, by the way.
He says, unless we can accompany, Joe, those tax cuts with significant spending cuts, we have a real problem.
Now, I don't disagree with accompanying it with spending cuts at all.
I think Rogan makes a great point there.
I think he's right.
But I disagree with the necessity to pair them to make them permanent.
And the reason I say that is, again, the evidence over time, when you look at income tax cuts under Reagan, under John F. Kennedy, under George W. Bush, under Calvin Coolidge, wherever you go, when you look at those income tax cuts, it shows pretty conclusively that we're not going to suffer a long-term loss in tax revenue.
So I don't, I disagree with, you get what I'm saying Joe?
I like his idea of accompanying those tax cuts with significant government spending cuts.
Great, great idea.
Point stipulated.
But I don't agree with making that some dispositive factor.
In other words, if it doesn't happen, then don't make them permanent.
That I disagree with completely, because there's very little evidence that these significant income tax cuts, if we can get them in there and lock them in, there's very little evidence that it's going to cost the government money, which I hate that term, but over time at all, and exacerbate the deficit.
There's very little evidence of that.
Matter of fact, remember folks, Ronald Reagan, over the course of his presidency, cut the top tax rate from 70 to 28%.
Does anybody doubt the dramatic that a 70 to 28 percent.
Donald Trump's income tax cuts on the top side were like one or two percentage points depending on how you calculate your taxes.
The Reagan tax cuts folks were almost nearly 40 plus points of percentage point tax at the marginal rate and the tax cut the tax revenue to the government doubled.
Doubled.
So I disagree with the premise on there.
One final point on this.
Tax revenue to the government overall, even though income tax revenue went up, the corporate tax side fell, tax revenue to the federal government overall is down $7 billion.
So the liberals, Joe, are, look, look, the tax cuts exacerbated the deficit problem.
No, you can't do basic math.
You're just a knucklehead and you're lying.
I'm sorry.
Joe, spending's up $100 billion.
Now tell me again what's causing the deficit problem.
So tax revenue's down $7 billion, even though income tax revenue's up.
But total tax revenue's down $7 billion, spending's up $100 billion, and yet you'll continue to let liberal knuckleheads insist to you that the tax cuts did it.
I'm a jerk!
J-E-R-K!
Jerk!
A spending problem on a magnitude of 10 times higher than the tax problem you're alleging is the issue.
If you're going to acknowledge that $7 billion in lost revenue is an issue, are you going to acknowledge that $100 billion in additional spending is an issue on the magnitude of more than 10 times higher?
You understand they can't get out of that.
Right.
If they're going to tell you the tax cuts caused the deficit, They can't then simultaneously ignore the spending hikes which have caused the deficit 10 times worse.
This is how you pin the liberals to the ground in a debate.
You use their own arguments against them.
It is just so incredibly simple when you know the numbers.
Okay, final reading.
I got another story because it's important.
This is going to be the good news.
I don't want to leave you in a bad mood.
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Okay, here is the good news, because it is a Friday!
Friday!
Joe always gets excited on a Friday.
Yes, I do!
The good news is this.
The rest of the world's economies are in such disastrous shape right now, folks.
That's not good news about the world.
I'm not wishing ill on anyone.
But this is a comparative situation.
People are going to invest where they can get returns.
And the rest of the world is such a disaster that given the Donald Trump corporate tax cuts in conjunction with the GOP, Joe, on the business side, Businesses from around the world are starting to drastically reconsider where to relocate their capital and their people.
Where are they deciding to relocate it?
The great old United States of America.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have money pouring into this country like you have never seen in your life, and it is precisely the reason interest rates in this country are still unusually low.
Now, I brought up the bad news first, because you may be saying to yourself, you don't have to be an economist, but if you understand even basic economics, Money has a price, right?
That price is an interest rate.
If countries have a difficult time attracting money to their countries because their economies really stink, their governance is bad, their contractual law is bad, and the business environment isn't healthy, what do they have to do, Joe?
They have to raise interest rates to basically guarantee a return on their investing in their economy.
Does that make sense?
Everything has a price.
The price to invest in a country that's high risk has to be high.
The reward, excuse me.
So if you're going to invest in whatever, country X, and country X has crappy governance, terrible contractual law, bad business environment, high taxes, the return better be 20-30% for you to invest in it.
You get what I'm saying?
The United States interest rates are still so unbelievably low despite our catastrophic debt situation I just told you about.
Even under this Republican Congress spending money like drunken sailors and that's an insult to drunken sailors, right?
We still have low interest rates.
This is the good news because money from all over the world is piling into the United States right now because everywhere else is just so sucky right now.
I can't think of a better word.
Now, I have a couple articles on this too in the show notes today, I'd like you to read them.
Emerging markets right now are having a legitimate currency scare.
Places like Turkey, Argentina, we've seen this happening around the world where they've had up interest rates 10, 20%, 30%.
What's happening here is money is fleeing these countries en masse because, not just because of our tax cuts, that's helping, but because these governments can't seem to get the tax, low government spending thing, solid court system, solid contract law thing down, and companies don't want to put money into some of these countries.
You've seen a totalitarian streak in Erdogan in Turkey.
Argentina is having a severe inflation crisis now.
And what's happening is businesses are taking the money, Joe, and they're flying it out into the United States.
Not physically, but you get the point.
These countries, in order to attract that money back, have had to significantly move interest rates higher to attract capital in there.
Now, what's making that worse is it's devaluing their money significantly.
Their domestic money, the Argentinian pesos, the Turkish lira, their domestic money is losing value.
What's the problem?
What's the problem with that?
And why is the business environment going to get worse for them?
We saw this in Mexico back in the 80s.
Folks, this is bad.
A lot of these people and businesses in Turkey and in Argentina and elsewhere in these emerging markets
took loans, Joe, denominated in dollars, our dollars.
Oh boy, is that bad.
Why?
Because now as our money gets stronger, right, and their money gets weaker and weaker,
they have to pay back those loans in dollars.
But if five years ago, you paid back one dollar, one lira for every dollar, but now the value of your Turkish lira is in the can, and you have to now pay 30 liras to get a dollar, folks, I've got news for you.
Paying back those loans denominated in dollars is going to cost you 30 times more.
Simple math.
You see what I'm saying?
Your dollar bought this in the past.
Your lira bought you one US dollar.
Now your money's in the can, the country's economy's falling apart, now it takes 30 of them.
Now you gotta go scrounge up 30 times more to pay off those loans.
We've already seen this around the world.
We saw it with some East Asian countries, with Mexico.
Folks, this is a real problem.
I'm saying that because you're going to see, I believe, this capital flight get worse and worse, which I'm not, again, I'm not wishing ill on any country around the world.
Having a global economic crash doesn't help anyone.
I'm just saying with this emerging, and it hasn't spread like contagion yet, just to be clear.
It's really an emerging market phenomenon now.
I'm just saying that because the good news on a Friday is this money is finding a home.
It's finding its home here, which is going to result in heavy investment in American companies, heavy investment in the workforce, heavy investment in training, in capital, in real estate.
You're going to see a lot of investors scooping up homes.
I think if we can just Please, and I'm not using the Lord's name in vain here, please give some divine inspiration to some of these guys up on the hill who are just chumps and cannot get a hold, if we can just get a hold of our spending situation.
Read Dan Horowitz's piece, it is a scathing, scathing review of this GOP budget, which is no different on substance from a Liberal Democrat budget, none.
If we could just get a hold of this outrageous spending situation.
Ladies and gentlemen, we could be looking at a couple decades of United States economic prosperity we have not seen since the mid 80s.
But we have got to get a cap on this spending because this emerging market crisis and worldly crisis is not going to last forever.
Sooner or later these countries are going to get their act together.
They always will, they don't always, but most of them do.
When they do, the United States may not be that option anymore.
And when that funds of money, when that flow of money dries up, we don't want to be the ones charging a 30% interest rate for a mortgage.
Our economy would be, you would throw a monkey wrench into everything.
It would explode everything.
So the good news is, we're the best option.
The bad news, we may not always.
We have got to get a control of this spending situation.
I didn't even get to Adam Schiff.
I had so much more stuff on that.
You know, folks, I'll have to get to some of them on this.
If you want to watch my Henry TV show tonight, 5.30 on HenryTV.com, I'll try to pick up the rest.
That's the great part about having two shows.
If I miss one, I go right to the other.
Hey, thanks for a great week.
I appreciate all the new subscriptions on YouTube, on iTunes, on iHeartRadio.
It's all free, folks.
It means a lot to us, helps us move up the charts.
And thanks for joining my email list and opening our emails.
