In this episode I address the latest meltdown by the unhinged Democrats. I also address the latest positive job numbers and the economic challenges ahead. Finally, I address the threat of financial blacklisting and the threat of a cashless economy.
News Picks:
The latest job numbers are incredible!
Newly elected liberal congresswoman goes on an obscene anti-Trump tirade.
President Trump makes a surprise appearance at the press briefing.
Financial blacklisting is a real and growing threat to free speech.
The global debt situation is approaching the danger zone.
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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.
Alright, welcome to Dan Bongino's show.
Producer Joe, how are you today?
I'm doing well because it's Friday!
Yeah.
Dude, you sound like a game show cat.
You're so funny, man, really.
It's all that time in radio.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
What do they call that again on the radio?
Puking.
Yeah, that's a phony voice.
I wasn't puking so hard this year.
It's called puking.
The affectations on the radio.
You want to go faster.
Thank you again for tuning in to The Five the last few days.
I'll be on again today on Friday 5 p.m.
Eastern Time on the Fox for some more spicy debates.
I appreciate all the tremendous positive feedback.
There was a couple emails, some people who had some criticisms.
I don't mind those as long as you guys are cool about it.
As long as you don't car drop an F-bomb on me on an email.
Totally cool.
That's why I give my email out to you.
But one of them was, just so you see the positive and negative, some people complain that me and Marie didn't go at it enough on the show, but you know, Marie Harf, who's a liberal, and I'm obviously a conservative, but folks, you have to remember, it's the five.
It's not the Dan Bongino show.
I deeply appreciate that you want to hear me talk more, and I love debating with Marie, but you have to pick your opportunities.
I hope you all understand that.
I'm not abandoning you.
Got out of some sense of fear.
Marie doesn't operate like that either.
We go at it on the air when we have to, and you gotta let other people in.
Kennedy was there, and Greg, and Jesse, and it's not my show.
So I really appreciate it.
It's a lot of fun to do.
Behind the scenes, it's a lot of fun.
You just gotta learn to play the harf, man.
Listen, there are opportunities to move in and sometimes you take them and sometimes you can't.
The show's five-minute segments.
It's not like the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but it's fun.
Tune in today.
Don't miss it.
It's meant to be a fun, quick, kind of spicy show, so I really appreciate it.
Now, just to be clear, these are unambiguously, overwhelmingly positive, mind-blowing economic numbers.
That is not an exaggeration, in case you missed it.
Now, just to be clear also, today's show is not going to be all peaches and cream.
There's going to be some bad medicine, some harsh medicine, some syrup of Vipecac later, too.
But let's start with the good news on this Friday, okay?
Job numbers came out today.
The U.S.
economy added a staggering And I mean staggering.
312,000 jobs, the latest numbers.
Whoa.
You know, I follow these numbers.
I follow the movement in the Fed, the market.
The non-residential real estate investment numbers, the productivity numbers, so you don't have to.
And folks, I was expecting, economists were expecting 165,000, 167,000 jobs.
I thought it could be anywhere from 150,000 to 200,000.
312,000, we're talking about almost double what even the most optimistic, rose-colored glasses economists were thinking.
312,000 is a huge, huge number this far in to a recovery from a recession.
It should say to you a couple of things.
The first takeaway from this is the United States economy, despite some of the shortfalls I'm going to get to later, and maybe I should have done the show in reverse.
I left you with the good news on Friday, but this is unambiguously good news today.
I'm going to get to some of the negative stuff later, but this should tell you lesson number one, despite The world's troubles right now, which I'll get to later, global debt, what appears to be a pretty massive slowdown in China.
I was reading a report on China this morning that an inside baseball economist who's an expert on analyzing the Chinese economy has said that their recent stated growth numbers of 6.5%, which is extraordinary.
But not for China.
China, given its almost near industrial revolution type status, but they're back, you know, years from where we are, still stealing our technology.
6.5 for them is really not that great.
But an inside baseball economist who sees what's going on behind the scenes has said the real Chinese growth rates are probably closer to 1.6.
That's bad.
Yeah, that's ugly.
Now, folks, for as much as I dislike what the Chinese are doing to our economy, IP theft, you know, government procurement methods over there, the Chinese economy, if it were to drastically slow down, they do still buy a lot of our stuff.
A lot of American companies do sell stuff.
So it's not in our best interest to have this band-aid ripped off just that quickly, okay?
Also, it's not just China.
So there are other global economies around the world that are struggling as well.
We've seen the stagnation, obviously.
Italy, Greece, places in the Eurozone.
I mean, outside of Germany, most of the Eurozone is struggling a bit too with stagnant growth and government debt.
Having said that, the reason I frame it this way is that the U.S.
economy, Joe, is... I mean, you run out of adjectives to describe it in this harsh world, global debt, stagnant atmosphere, but, you know, a beacon in this fog is really the only way I can think of it.
I mean, economic freedom, tax rates right now are trending in the right direction, in a liberty direction, thanks to President Trump and some members of the Republican Congress and Senate that cut the corporate tax rate and have worked on dramatic deregulation and the cutting of red tape from the U.S.
economy.
The global economy right now is struggling.
The United States economy is not.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, that explains a lot of why interest rates are so low and why despite the fact that the United States economy has taken on a massive amount of debt, 22 trillion, which I will get to in this show, Interest rates are still low, Joe, because people are still lending us money.
Interest rates go up when?
Interest rates go up when people perceive the money they lend to people to be at risk.
I'm not going to lend Joe money at 5% interest if I don't think he's going to pay it back expeditiously.
I need Joe to pay me and compensate me with a higher interest rate, the cost of my lent capital to him, at a higher rate.
I understand.
Because I perceive him to be at risk.
I don't perceive him to be at risk, but you get the point.
I would say, give me 20%.
That's what loan sharks do, right?
The risk in being a loan shark is you're lending it to risky people.
That's why, not to mention that most of them are engaged in criminality too, but that's why they get, the interest rate is we're going to take one of your thumbs if you don't pay your money back.
It reminds me of Rocky 1.
Rocky 1, remember he's the enforcer?
The guy who always sends them, he told me to break your thumbs, you know?
So this is what happens, all right?
The United States interest rates are still relatively low because we are this beacon of light right now in this global morass of economic stupidity, socialism, and government debt.
People are still lending us money because of, I believe, what the Trump team has done.
I'm not, this is not overly laudatory.
I'm not trying to genuflect in front of the president.
I like what the president's doing, but I'm just giving you the facts.
The president's commitment to cutting taxes and getting red tape out of the U.S.
economy has made this place a powder keg of economic growth.
You want to say hello to the audience?
I got my little daughter in the room.
She's going to make an appearance on The Five today.
We're going to watch.
It's going to be a great one more thing.
Say hello.
Hi.
What's your name?
Amelia.
What's your stuffy's name?
Aurora.
She has her stuffed animals with her.
I traveled over here, folks, up to New York, and I bring my family sometimes.
So I bring my daughter.
I said to my wife, we're traveling up to New York for three days.
Three days, folks.
I've got like a pair of underwear and a toothbrush.
Like that's what I do.
That's how I travel.
I travel light.
They've got like 72 bags.
I said to my wife, I go, what's in all these bags?
Turns out it's my daughter's stuffed animals.
She has a whole suitcase full of stuffed animals.
So wait, folks, I'm sorry.
This is really funny.
You gotta hear this.
Look at this joke.
Can you see this?
Oh, this is my daughter.
This is going to be, I'm just going to make an appearance on one more thing today on The Five.
Don't miss it.
So me and my other daughter, we find this schedule.
She has a schedule for her stuffed animals, my youngest, and she wrote it out.
Here's the schedule for her stuffed animals.
She wrote this on the hotel stationery.
Morning.
Pee-pee.
Food.
Treat.
Pee-pee.
Treat.
Pee-pee again.
Nighttime.
These stuffed animals do a lot of pee-pee.
It's the cutest note ever.
By the way, if you want to see the note, I'm not making this up.
Go to my Instagram.
I'm at dbangino and you can see it.
You're going to laugh.
I'm going to put it on one more thing today.
You're going to kick out of it.
All right, getting back to the serious stuff.
But these are strong economic numbers, and the nice part about these strong economic numbers, Joe, is it's going to continue in a cavalry charge of good news.
It's going to continue to incentivize global investors to pull their money out of other markets and invest them in the United States, where the economy is strong and growing.
I can't emphasize to you enough how enormous these numbers are.
312,000, a near doubling of what even the rosy estimates are, should put a smile on your face.
I want to get back to this because I want to get to a little bit of bad news first.
Then I want to get to the demo.
Don't miss the show.
It's going to be really important.
I want to also get to the Democrats completely showing their butts.
Joe was kind enough to pull some clips this morning of a Michigan Democratic radical, far leftist, a new Congresswoman who got up in front of a group of people and just said, It's just that they're losing their minds, so I'll get to that later too.
But I want to get to the downside of this, and then I want to give you some solutions, okay?
The downside of this is this.
I have an article by Quinn Hillier who's, you know, I don't always agree with rights at the Washington Examiner, but it's a good piece today and it's worth reading.
I think as the sophisticated audience you are out there, and I know you are because I read your emails, you're all very smart.
Your economic and finance emails you send back to me are brilliant.
I've got a lot of great ideas from them.
We should be able to evaluate ideas, and even though people are sometimes, you know, never Trumpers or whatever, if you see a good article, we should be able to sometimes put that aside and just be able to read it for what it is.
There is actually a pretty decent piece in the Washington Examiner about the global debt apocalypse, and it's very easy to read.
It's not that long, and I'd love you to check it out, but this is the downside to the rosy economic news.
Things are good now, Joe.
Growth rates look like they're going to be substantial.
Let's see what this first quarter, what we do, if we can get past 3%.
I mean, it's all over Fox right now.
Booming economy.
Everybody's just going crazy over these numbers.
But our debt is extraordinary.
Our debt is now $22 trillion.
And Hillyer writes in the piece, which is smart, and it's an obvious point when you think about it, but it's overlooked by people who get lost right now because our national debt doesn't seem to be having a real impact on people.
They're not paying any more interest for their car loans.
They're not paying higher interest for mortgages.
Money isn't hard to find.
Loans aren't hard to find.
Now think about this in your personal life, right?
If in your personal life you made $100,000 a year and you had $120,000 in debt, sooner or later it's going to be hard for you to walk into a bank or go to a credit card company and get the capital you need and the loans you need to build out a business or do whatever you want to do.
Right.
For obvious reasons.
The bank examiner, the loan examiner is going to say, listen, Joe, Dan, whatever it is, you owe $120,000.
Are you editing out Paula's sneezes in the background?
Yes, I am.
No, you can keep those in.
Don't worry.
Don't cause yourself extra work.
It's a hotel room.
Yeah, God bless you, Paula.
God bless you.
You don't have to edit that.
Folks, it's a roadshow today.
Listen, I bring all my equipment with me, so it sounds good, but you are going to get a Paula sneeze and a comment from Amelia on the roadshow.
It's just the way we roll here.
Dan sees me writing something down immediately, he knows what I'm doing.
I know, I see you, Joe.
This is supposed to show you how much he puts into this, right?
Joe puts so much into this that he's concerned about the audio quality, that he hears little things that you would never probably even notice, and it costs him forever to get the show.
Don't even worry about it.
These are fine.
I don't even know what I was talking about now.
Oh, so Hilliard points out this piece about this global debt apocalypse.
And I was saying that sooner or later, people are going to stop lending you money and are going to ask for high interest rates, like I said before with the loan shark.
That hasn't happened in the United States because we are still that beacon of freedom and beacon of economic freedom.
And Trump has done the right thing moving the economy in a positive direction.
So it hasn't hit us yet.
But Hilliard points out that the problem with this, Joe, is it is going to hit us eventually.
There eventually is going to become a point.
Remember, all debts are paid.
I can't say this enough.
The Milton Friedman quote.
Don't ever forget it.
Tattoo this on your forehead.
Figuratively, of course.
All debts are paid.
Debts are paid by the debtor or the creditor.
Debts are either paid by the person who took out the loan and pays it back or the person who gave you the loan.
He pays your debt because he gave you the money and you never paid it back.
He didn't intend to do it, but he paid your debt for you.
All debts are paid.
These debts are going to have to be repaid.
But who's gonna bail us out, Joe?
Heller makes a great point.
That the problem with global debt now, matter of fact, let me read to you what I have from the piece, because it's a really good quote.
He says, quote, the world has never had as much debt as it has right now.
Nearly 250 trillion, Joe.
$250 trillion in debt, reported the Wall Street Journal.
Worse, the biggest borrowers are the U.S., China, the Eurozone, and Japan, which together have more than two-thirds of the world's household debt, three-quarters of its corporate debt, and nearly 80% of government debt.
Ladies and gentlemen, what's the problem with that?
The problem is the fact that the world's biggest economies, China, the U.S., the Eurozone, and Japan hold that debt.
Who's going to bail us out, Joe?
You know, when Greece and Italy have debt problems, and they do, and they're substantial, that's a big deal.
But the reality is, Greece and Italy are small enough, not small economies, but they're small enough, don't mistake what I'm saying.
That their impact on the global economy will be relatively minimal if they were to, it's not going to be small, don't mistake what I'm saying, you know, we've, uh, you know, we've seen small things we thought were small, you know, continental Illinois, uh, in other words, you know, in the, uh, The East Asian crisis and other, you know, other financial crisis have ripple effects throughout the world.
But I'm just saying here, relative to a default by China, a default by the collective Eurozone countries, that would be a disaster.
The default of just Italy and Greece, they can be bailed out by other countries that have the capital, had the capital to do it.
We don't have it anymore.
You hear what I'm saying, Joe, but who's going to bail us out?
Hilliard makes a great point.
Once this debt, all debts are paid.
Okay.
The 22 trillion owed by the United States government, the, uh, the, the, the, the trillions owed by entitlements by Japan and, and, and China and Eurozone countries and the financial promises made and the borrowing and the, and the, and basically this closed system borrowing amongst each other.
Sooner or later, somebody is going to want their money back, but there's no money.
And there's no big dog to bail out the big dogs.
We are the big dogs.
There is nobody out there that's going to be able to bail us out.
I don't mean to, on this day of really great economic news, especially on a Friday, sound so morose.
And that's not my intention.
But again, I don't want to be Pollyanna-ish, because if we continue to ignore this just tidal wave, this red menace coming ashore, as Mitch Daniels once described it, we're not going to keep the pressure on lawmakers to try to do something.
And we all know they're mostly cowards and won't do anything unless a crisis, you know, basically slaps them in the face.
Now, I want to suggest a path forward out of this.
I want to give you the two, three ways out of this.
And when I say out of this, just to be clear what I mean, I mean out of this massive debt crisis.
And the time to do it is now when the economy is good.
It's not to wait for another Great Depression or Great Recession.
I'm gonna give you the two really awful ways first.
And I shouldn't say a way out of this, but what's, there's only, let me rephrase this.
There are only three ways this can end, Joe, this debt crisis.
I'm gonna give you the two bad ones first, and the one in the end that could potentially save us.
Okay.
Here are the two bad ones first.
We could risk a massive default.
A default the scale of which has never been seen in civilized human history.
You're talking about a default of upwards of hundreds of trillions of dollars in debt being wiped out.
Meaning every Everyone who is a basic, no one will be left untouched.
At some point, somebody is going to be, uh, somebody is going to be touched by this either through catastrophically high interest rates or money you're not paid back.
Let me just describe.
When I say the fault, I mean, these governments basically just say, Joe, well, we're not going to pay because we can't because we don't have the money.
Now, what does that mean?
That means if you own government denominated assets, uh, treasury bills, if you owe, If you own government bonds, foreign governments that have lent the United States money, you will not be paid back.
That's what a default is.
They're just not going to pay.
Or they'll pay just pennies on the dollar, which is by default.
Literally, you'll get screwed.
You'll be done.
You'll have lent people money.
So are we clear on that?
If you had lent these governments money, you're just not going to get it back.
You may say, oh, well, don't worry.
I'm safe.
I don't own government bonds.
You're not safe.
Ladies and gentlemen, I cannot bring up this interest rates argument enough.
This is a key critical argument for a reason.
You will not be left untouched.
The minute the United States, God forbid, defaults on $22 trillion in debt and the global economy soon follow for $250 trillion in debt to be wiped out overnight in a massive global default, interest rates around the globe, nobody is going to lend anybody money.
It's right, Joe.
Interest rates, he's raising his hand up in the air like the Statue of Liberty here.
You're right.
They are going to skyrocket through the roof because nobody is going to want to lend anybody money.
Governments aren't going to want to lend governments money.
Citizens aren't going to want to lend their governments money.
Banks aren't going to want to lend businesses money.
You are going to be talking about stagnation on a global scale and just a sclerotic economy like you've never seen before.
Basically, the cement will have hardened, capital flows will stop.
I mean, it will be an economic disaster that will take years for confidence to rebuild itself.
Years, maybe decades.
We could be looking at the Great Recession times the Great Depression.
Again, I don't mean to sound apocalyptic, I just mean to warn you.
So that's number one.
We could risk a massive global default.
Interest rates go through the roof.
People just don't get their money back.
That's as simple as that.
Pathway number two, and remember there are only three ways out of this.
There is no other option here.
Pathway number two is the United States government, these foreign governments could inflate away their debt, monetize their debt essentially.
Meaning the United States government could say, engage in some form of quantitative easing en masse, a geometrically expanded quantitative easing.
And essentially like monopoly money, say, we're just going to print money.
We're going to print loads of money, oodles of money.
We're going to pour it into the economy.
We're going to use that inflated currency to drive down the value of our debt.
We're going to make that debt worthless.
And then all of a sudden everything will go away because the debt will be easier to pay off because the monetary value of the debt is lower.
Now, you know, without, you know, trying, this isn't an economics course here, but it, you know, I do, I'm always fascinated by economics.
I love it.
Finance and economics has always been my personal passion.
But think about what that does.
The United States government's Federal Reserve, which, you know, I get it, Federal Reserve, they're going to tell you about their independence.
You know, they're subject to political pressure and the whims of it, like anyone else.
They're human beings over there.
The pressure to print money always grows by Fed.
That's why they want federal central bank independence, which we technically have in the United States, but I don't, I don't really buy much of that at all.
The political pressure can be overwhelming, but the pressure to print money gets overwhelming.
Now, when you print money, you may say, well, that's an easy way out because remember when you print money, the money in circulation is worth less because you have more money chasing the same amount of objects, same amount of goods and services.
When more money chases the same amount of chairs and computers and whatever, the price goes up.
Why?
Because there's more money chasing it.
There's a thousand dollars chasing a hundred computers, they're worth a certain amount.
If there's a hundred thousand dollars chasing a hundred computers, those computers can fetch more money because there's more money in circulation.
It's not complicated.
That makes the amount, the value of the dollar go down.
But that also makes the value of a dollar of debt go down too.
Does that make sense, Joe?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that makes sense.
I'm with you.
When you're printing all this money and it's chasing a similar amount of goods, the price of those goods go up, what we call inflation.
But that makes the purchasing power of the dollar go down.
In other words, when the price of something goes up, The power of one dollar to buy it goes down because you need more dollars because the price went up.
But remember, when you owe a lot of money, it also makes the value of your debt go down.
Because if the purchasing power of a dollar goes down, and it's worth less, and you owe a dollar, then it takes you less to pay it back.
Because it's worth less.
So debt is just a really bad thing.
And the way to get rid of it is to inflate it away.
The dollar's worth less.
A dollar of debt is worth less.
It gets easier to pay off.
Government, as Joe said to me during a break we just took there, governments love debt.
They love debt.
This is what they thrive off.
Governments love debt because they love to spend money they don't have, endlessly.
They don't want to have to rely on a tax base.
It's like that old line by John Maynard Keynes where he was talking about how there are basically two ways to tax an economy.
If you wanted to tax 25% of an economy, this is a great one.
John Maynard Keynes, who was a disaster otherwise, did understand what inflation and debt means to governments.
He said, if you want to tax an economy and tax its citizens, you want to take basically 25% of what the citizens owe.
There's two ways to do it.
The first way is to tax 25% of every dollar your citizens make, right?
If you make a dollar and I get a quarter of that, then that's the government taking 25%.
But he's like, there's another way to do it that's really brilliant.
If there's, say, a dollar in circulation, and then the government just prints another 33 cents up, and it takes the 33 cents they printed and spent it, Now the economy would have $1.33, right?
They had $1.
The government printed $0.33 more.
There's $1.33 in circulation.
But it's not in circulation.
The government prints the $0.33.
It just spends it.
$0.33 is roughly a quarter of $1.33 that nobody even knows.
Now you're like, oh, that's great.
The government just printed money.
I didn't have to take it out of my wallet.
But they did.
Because now there's $1.33 eventually in circulation after the government spends it, which makes your dollar worth less because there's more money chasing the same products.
I can't say this enough.
So that's pathway two.
Government inflation.
And of all people, John Maynard Keynes, the founder of the liberal school of economics basically, is the one who shows us exactly how that works.
Now, here's the good path.
You're like, gosh, we're never gonna get to the good news.
This sounds really horrible.
No, no, we are.
Don't worry about it.
There is good news in this.
The good news is, as I've said to you before, the Trump economy, and I do attribute this to Trump, because I can't stand a lot of the swamp rats up on the hill.
What are you laughing at back there?
My daughter back there's scared.
This is funny.
I love doing the show with them around.
It's like having a studio audience.
The way out of this is shockingly simple, folks.
If you apply basically the rule of sevens, that at 7% growth rates, an investment will double in 10 years.
If we were to hit 7% growth, now listen, I get it, that's an unrealistic number in advanced economy to hit year after year, but if you were, If you were to hit 7% growth over 10 years, you would basically double the United States economy.
The economy now is worth $20 to $21 trillion.
The economy would be worth $40 trillion in 10 years.
Now, it's probably not realistic.
We'd all agree.
I just told you the growth rates hovering around 3% are considered good news.
Hitting 7% would be more than double.
If we were to hit even 3.5, which is obviously by simple math, half of seven, then it would take what Joe?
20 years.
If it takes 10 years at 7%, it would take 20 years at 3.5%.
If we could hit 3.5% in our lifetimes, many of us, I got a studio eyes, I believe.
If we were to hit the 3.5% over 20 years, the economy would double.
It'd be worth roughly $40 trillion.
That would be in our lifetimes.
3.5% is not only doable, it's been done many times.
Matter of fact, Reagan in 1984, 85, and 86 hit 6, 5, and 4% growth.
If we could average 3.5% over 20 years, our economy would be worth double what it is now in today's dollars if we can control inflation, relatively speaking, in just 20 years when I'm only 64.
I'm 44 now.
Joe, if we just held the line on spending today and had some lawmakers up in DC that could grow a spine, explain to the people what's really going on, get some kind of a bipartisan coalition with some Although there are very few, if any, left common sense Democrats and say we need to explain to the American people in a prime time address what a catastrophe this is, a catastrophic debt situation we're looking at.
If we just put a lid on spending today and insisted on within a few years dialing down the debt and getting our spending down and saying to people, listen, Social security recipients.
I get it.
If you're 55 and older, you've already planned your lives.
We've taken your money.
We made a mistake.
We spent the money.
This isn't going to work, but because you're 55 and older and we screwed up, we are going to take existing tax flows and make sure you're compensated.
But people 55 and younger, there's nothing we can do.
The system is bankrupt.
If we were to say about Medicare and Medicaid, that we don't have the money to continue to fund the third party payer system, we're going to go to a strict safety net.
We're going to go to some voucher-based system where people can buy insurance in the same market, you know, the wealthy and everyone else buy it.
This is all fixable.
If we were to say on the discretionary spending side that we are getting out of anything that does not involve national security or basic functions of government, we're out of it.
We could fix this tomorrow.
We could get a lid on spending.
And we could take that, because remember, we're paying hundreds of millions now in interest on the debt alone.
We could take some of that leftover revenue from this economic growth and start to at least try to pay down, pay down or pare down some of the debt we have now.
And we would have a long run trajectory out.
The problem is we have none of that now.
And as Hillier points out in this piece to kind of circle back to the examiner piece, which is in the show notes, and it's definitely worth your time.
The point he brings up that's the biggest problem of all, Joe, is the fact that it's not just that we're in a massive amount of debt.
We've been here before, post-World War II.
We have never been in this kind of debt during times where the economy is motoring on all cylinders.
We accumulated a large amount of understandable debt in World War II to save the world, and to save the United States.
After World War II, We made substantial efforts to pay down large swaths of that.
We never got it all completely paid off, contrary to what they tell you.
But they made an effort.
The problem now, Joe, is we're out of a recession.
We are not in a massive, at least, world war.
What would happen if there was a crisis tomorrow?
We are already at the red line of debt.
We need a path forward, a long-term trajectory out of this to re-establish faith in our markets, faith in the United States, and make sure that that day never comes where global investors start to say, oh my gosh, the United States, are they ever going to pay us back?
That day comes, we're in a world of trouble.
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Okay.
Oh, gosh.
That was kind of the good news, folks, is there is a path out of this.
I think at some point, even the weak-kneed, cowardly politicians in Washington, D.C.
will grow some guts at some point and realize we are in a catastrophically bad situation.
And we'll have to fix this.
They don't have much of a choice.
They will have to fix this.
Because it's just the interest rates are going to guide everything when people stop lending us money.
All right.
Uh, Joe, you have that, uh, that sound soundbite queued up.
This is just the man.
I'll set daddy.
What have I always told you about the gift of Donald Trump, the gift of Donald?
Here's my experience with Washington DC.
When I ran for office and worked around these guys during my prior line of work, some of them, a lot of them, I mean, outside of there's a couple of good ones up there.
Like Mike Lee ran Paul, Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows.
I think there's some of the good guys who really are believers that are up there for the right reasons.
Most of them aren't, they're up there because they like their foie gras lunches and their chauffeured cars.
We're probably nobodies and they realize this is the first time ever that someone's patted them on the back and told them how wonderful they are.
So they really appreciate that show.
I had dinner with an old friend last night.
He's like, the best thing that ever happened to you is not getting elected to Congress.
He's like, you'd never fit in up there.
He's like, don't be the king, be the king maker.
He's like, you don't need to be in there.
There's people, he's like, they're the worst.
He deals with them all the time.
But the gift of Donald Trump has been to get the Democrats to show their butts to the rest of the world.
I actually had a different opening to this show and Joe and I changed it.
That's why we're a few minutes after.
Well, depending on how quickly Joe edits, we may not even be there.
But Joe should have been a few minutes late, even if he's not.
Because I said, I don't like this beginning.
Let's start over.
I wanted to find a way to say this in a way that makes sense because I don't just like to say, oh, look at this lawmaker and I'll get to what she said in a minute.
She's crazy.
You know, that's not anything, you know, doesn't edify anyone.
You know, you may feel emotionally relieved that hearing the insanity of Democrat radical lawmakers, but I want to explain the why here and the why is important.
Trump has not followed the script that Democrats are used to.
There is a psychological principle known as learned helplessness.
If you ever look up Seligman, it's a staple of a lot of psychology programs.
When I was a graduate student, I always found it fascinating.
Learned helplessness was the idea that folks, this was an experiment in the more sicker days of psychological experiments.
It happened.
I'm not recommending this.
I'm not saying any, please don't send me emails about how awful it was.
I know it was awful.
I'm just telling you it happened because I got a ton of emails last time as if somehow I was recommending we experiment on animals.
I love animals.
That's not what I'm saying.
So please don't send me those emails.
That's not what I'm saying.
But back in the days before ethical rules of experimentation had, you know, been instituted in psychological experimentation, this guy Seligman, they did these studies on dogs and shock pads, where they would put them on a shock pad, which gave them an electric shock.
Again, I'm not saying this is a good thing, I'm just telling you what happened.
And this guy figured out that after a while, if you prevented them from getting away in a locked cage or whatever it was, they would eventually stop trying.
And the principle became one, however sick the idea was to do that.
The principle that was established through these various experiments was called learned helplessness.
In other words, that Animals, and we all are, although we are God's children, but still, we have the ability to say, I think, therefore I am.
That given enough punishment and the lack of alternatives and options out show, people will learn to be helpless.
They will just stop trying.
Does that make sense?
Yes, it does.
Like the animals in the experiment.
If you don't give them an opportunity to escape, they eventually stop trying.
Right.
That principle's very real, however sick the experimentation was.
People can learn to be helpless.
Now, later on, they figured out through various other experimentation that if you gave the animal a way to get out and to figure out a way out, that eventually, even if they had learned to be helpless before, they would try later on and relearn how to be not helpless, which is not, I mean, I don't think that's particularly groundbreaking, but you get it.
The point I'm trying to make is the GOP has learned to be helpless over the years.
They have suffered under a relentless barrage of academic media, far-left liberal democrat cultural elites, and Hollywood entertainers calling them the most vicious, vile things known to man.
Racists, misogynists, you've gone through all of it, the xenophobes, the Trans-a-phobes, homophobes, as we say on the show, the phobophobic-ist-a-phobes, anything with a phobe or an ist at the end, you've likely been called by people who have cultural power.
They wield that cultural power.
They make movies, they make music, they teach in academia, they run media outlets, they have the power to hurt you.
And hurt you bad.
The power of Donald Trump is, whereas in the past, we have learned to be helpless, and you have seen Republicans the first time the R-bomb gets dropped on them.
Say you say something, Joe, like, you know, listen, I really think we need to look at police policies in the inner city.
Well, what does the media do?
Media folks and others, not all of them, but a lot of people come out and say, oh, if they don't like the policy, Joe, that's clearly racist.
You're a racist.
And what happens?
Everybody piles on, and Hollywood people pile on, and entertainers pile on, and academics show you fake studies that you're a racist.
And it's not true.
I mean, it's all completely, totally, 100% fabricated and meant to harm you, harm your reputation, harm you personally, and send the message to nobody else to get out that we need to fix policing in inner cities.
That's just totally racist.
In the past, Republicans under that withering pressure had learned to back down because it is, it's painful and it's hard to hear.
No one wants to be called a racist.
You know, outside of being a child molester and a murderer, is there anything else to be worse to be called?
I mean, it's disgusting and the Democrats know that and that's why a lot of these vicious liberals do it.
That's the shock pad, Joe.
It's the shock pad over and over.
And when you see no way out because there's nobody there to protect you or provide cover, and nobody else wants to step up and say, hey, Joey Bag of Donuts isn't a racist.
He was simply making a comment about policing in inner cities.
They're afraid to speak up too.
Why, Joe?
Because they don't want to be branded a racist too.
That's right.
It's the shock pad.
You learn to be helpless.
Why did Trump do?
Trump came in and he is the first politician I've seen in my lifetime with this kind of a platform.
I'm sure there've been guys at the local level, but I don't know them because their platforms weren't big enough and they haven't made it on the national stage.
But Trump is the first guy in a long time to come in and say, there's a way off this shock pad.
And the way out of this shock pad and out of this state is Twitter, is the bully pulpit, and is to take that fight right back to these dogs and call them the exact same names they call us.
And the liberals hate it.
Folks, they don't know what to do.
The liberals, so not to make this again an overly economical, I really enjoy enjoying this show so far, but I hope it's not too like wonky or anything like that, especially in the economics and the finance stuff.
And then this, but I want to be clear.
I want to add something to this.
I don't just want to say, look at these maniacs and I'll get to the cut.
I haven't even gotten to that yet.
Probably best at the end.
I'm suggesting to you the Republican Base and players in the activist movement have, in a sense, learned to be helpless over the years because nobody would back them up.
They were afraid of saying anything.
Anything!
I mean, you know, you mentioned programs like, say, Affirmative Action.
You say, well, is this really helping?
I mean, when you look at the numbers and you read the books by Thomas Sowell on what's happened to people who it's alleged to have helped and the actual data, it's clear there's been a significant, significant downside to this within the minority community.
Oh my God, you're a racist.
You can't say, I'm just discussing facts and data.
You're not allowed to say that.
I'm using air quotes.
You're allowed to say whatever you want, but the cultural elite stopped you.
Donald Trump has provided a way out because he doesn't have that red line, Joe.
He says what he wants to say.
He draws all the media fire to himself and he provides air cover for people to get off the shock pad.
And they've learned now how not to be helpless anymore in this cultural political battle.
On the Democrat side, this has forced the Democrats to show their butts and to show the American people who they really are.
They're socialists.
Not all, but most.
They are big government, economic, in some cases, they revel in economic confiscation.
They want your money.
They want your kids' education.
They want your health care.
They want red tape hovering over your business.
They want the power to tell you no.
Remembers the late Chuck Ecker from Howard County once said, the power of a bureaucrat is that there's no power in yes.
They want to tell you no all the time.
So you have to come to them to make a campaign donation to get the yes, right?
Yeah.
They want you to grovel.
The Democrats have understood this.
They have beaten us down forever and they've watched us be helpless in many cases before this Trump era started.
But that has made them soft.
Folks, they're soft.
Do you understand the term snowflake originated because the Democrats didn't know what to do when finally people started to fight back and say what needed to be said?
Like, hey, you know what?
This immigration policy sucks.
We don't need millions of illegal immigrants ignoring our immigrants.
Oh my gosh, that's xenophobic.
No, it's not.
It's rational.
Don't tell me what's xenophobic.
I've never, I married an immigrant to the country.
You're not going to tell me what's xenophobic and not your loons.
The Democrats had so gotten used to us sitting on the shock pad and learning how to be helpless, Joe, that when we eventually fought back and he had this singular personification of the fight back beginning and Donald Trump, they were not prepared.
It's like they walked.
You know what it reminds me of?
Ever see Braveheart?
Yeah.
Great movie.
I know it's so like cliched, but it's my favorite.
It's every guy's favorite movie, but it's the only movie I ever saw in a movie theater twice.
I loved it so much.
It's like 72 hours long too.
And I loved it.
In second time, matter of fact, it was even better.
Meanwhile, they're eviscerating a guy from the inside.
I'm pretty sure he couldn't say that.
Wes's intestines were being ripped out, but whatever.
It was a good movie.
But there's a portion at the end end of the movie after that scene, When Robert DeBruce is on the battlefield with the Scots and the British Lord who's getting ready to accept the surrender of the Scots at the end, he looks over at the other guy and says, I hope you washed your
Mm, today, because it's about to be kissed by a king.
And in other words, the British were expecting Robert the Bruce to come out and kiss their butts.
He uses the term, uh, uh, you know what I'm saying.
The other term for, it's a family friendly show.
Donkey.
Yeah, exactly.
And what happens as they get ready to walk out to the battlefield for the surrender of the Scots, the Scots charge the bat.
Charge!
And they, and, and, well, won their freedom.
And that, you know, in the movie, that's how the movie ends.
And for those of you, it's a great movie.
You don't, I'm sure most of you have seen it, so I don't think it's a spoiler.
It's also 20 years old now.
But that scene always reminds me of what it's been like for the Democrats in the Trump era.
They are so used to, I hope you washed your butt today, it's about to be kissed by the Republicans, and all of a sudden you've got Donald Trump.
Right, Joe?
Yeah, right through the invisible fence.
What do we do now?
They don't know what to do.
The archers weren't ready.
The spearmen weren't ready.
The cavalry is dispersed.
They don't know what to do.
And when they don't know what to do, they've reacted emotionally and not rationally.
And this particular clip is a result of that.
People love you and you win.
And when your son looks at you and says, mama, look, you won.
Bullies don't win.
And I said, baby, they don't because we're going to go in there.
We're going to impeach the mother.
Now, that word she said at the end was not mother, it was something else.
You can figure it out.
Again, it's a family-friendly show, but it's important we play that.
That was Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib, I'm sorry, I don't mean to say, I think it's T-L-A-I-B, out of Michigan.
At a meeting outside of Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.
with a far-left radical group.
Now folks, this has followed a week of insane, was it Brad Sherman, introduced impeachment articles.
Folks, this is not rational.
This is not reasonable.
This, make no mistake, I want you, I'm trying to leave you on a Friday with good news, and you're probably saying, how is this good news?
No, no, listen to me, please.
This is good news.
I'll bring this up on the five today later too if the chance comes up.
This is very good news.
Because the Democrats are unprepared and they're acting emotionally.
You are watching the slow degradation of an American political party into a bunch of emotional hysterics.
Listen, please.
I know a lot of people get upset.
I know they want to see more action on especially things like SpyGate and other stuff, and I'm totally with you.
I'm with you 100%.
Period.
But I want you to take some solace in the fact that you are watching a party that previously professed to be the party of the little guy decay into a party of Hollywood academic elites obsessed with political punishment and emotional outbursts on a national stage.
This is all they've become.
They don't stand for anything more.
They have gone down this path before, folks.
There have been numerous instances in the cyclical cycles, if you use the same word twice, of human history and human political history in the United States, where you've seen political parties move from one, you know, the ups and downs, the peaks and valleys, these natural political vicissitudes, right?
We've seen this before.
We saw it just recently in our lifetimes, many of us in the, in 1984 political race, where the Democrats thought to combat Ronald Reagan, they'd run a far left guy by the name of Walter Mondale who ran on a, at the time, radical platform of, we're going to raise taxes, we're going to, and what happened?
Uh, they lost 49 out of 50 States.
Reagan, the only state he lost was Minnesota, which was Mondale's home state, which he would have won, except for the fact that Reagan didn't want to go to Minnesota because he felt bad for Mondale.
They've tried this before.
The Democrats, the Democrats have tried this far lurch left into emotional liberal radicalism, big government, uh, basically so near psychotic behavior, the screaming, and we're going to repeat the mother.
You are watching them decay into a cesspool of just chaos.
Now that's good news for us.
It's good news on two fronts.
Number one, it's going to expose them.
It forces them to show their butts.
Folks, this is who they really are.
I'm not suggesting to you this isn't who the Democrats haven't always been.
They have.
I'm telling you they've just been better at hiding it in the past.
What you will see, though, Some more good news.
I think you will see a more moderate brand of Democrat coming out of this, uh, of this just cesspool of anti-Trump insanity.
Now you may say, well, how's that good news, Dan?
Ladies and gentlemen, listen to me, please.
It is never.
The Democrats now, the radical far left wing of the Democrat party, I kid you not, is an existential threat to the financial viability and long-term success of the Republic.
The things they want, Medicare for all, endless government debt, you know, free everything, will cause a financial apocalypse and the destruction of our Republic.
It does us no good to have a party like that in power.
None.
Who cares if we win elections if there's nothing left to win?
If we can get back to a point where we can get second-term Bill Clinton and the Democrat Leadership Committee, which came in after the Walter Mondale mess and tried to clean up the Democrat Party, and we could have two parties that at least joke the Democrats and the Republicans agree on a common set of principles.
Remember, ladies and gentlemen, Gingrich and Clinton enacted some of the most sane, rational government budgets we've seen in 50 years.
You realize one year of the Clinton administration, we came within $18 billion of an actual balanced budget?
We're $600-700 billion in debt now, every single year.
If we could get back to two parties that have an overlapping set of spheres, Joe, and in that overlap we agree the United States is exceptional.
The defense of our country is our primary goal of our national government.
The government matters, but the government can't matter everywhere.
Courts, at the state system, maybe roads.
Some states like Maryland have a public education system written into their constitution.
I wish we would leave it up to the free market, but whatever.
But if we could just get back to a common set of ideas.
The debt is a problem.
National defense is a priority.
Borders are a big deal.
Folks, this is a net good for the country.
Please understand where I'm going with this.
I don't mean to like take you down this windy path and I'm not trying to, this is not one of those radio shows where we kill time.
We have nothing to say, believe me, we wrap it up.
I'm trying to make the point that this Rashida Tlaib outburst, we're going to impeach the MF-er.
The Maxine Waters type outburst.
The Brad Sherman outburst about impeachment.
These are a good thing.
They are showing their butts to the American people.
It is going to force a gross reevaluation of the Democrat Party at some point in the future.
And then after that, hopefully we can get back to the Clinton-Gingrich era.
I don't want a democrat president.
It's not what I'm suggesting.
I'm just suggesting that there was some agreement on basic principles of what the republic stands for.
Balanced budgets, border security, national security, other issues.
Listen, we still can debate and we should debate.
I think we're right on all of them, the conservatives and the libertarians.
But if we lose the country right now to this radical group of left-wingers, I'm telling you the financial viability of the republic long term is finished.
It's over.
There's a great story in Breitbart today I'd really like you to check out.
Joe, how long have we been talking about blacklisting?
Financial blacklisting, how this is going to be the new wave of the future.
Listen, when the Democrats can't win something politically, by the way, what do they do?
They use the culture.
They use the culture to demonize people.
They use the culture, academics, Hollywood elitists, cultural elites, media institutions to demonize people.
Well, the Democrats have been at war with free speech for a very long time, but they can't get anything done because even the liberals on the Supreme Court are generally, generally, I'm emphasizing generally, been in defense of our right to free speech in the country.
So what do they do?
They've been using credit card companies to blacklist individuals and getting them basically kicked out of the financial market and blacklisted.
There's a great, great piece at Breitbart today about how Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin's efforts to create an alternative to Patreon, which is a company that allows you to support your favorite conservative and liberal content creators and other folks.
Uh, they have been, they believe, discriminating against conservatives.
They had a thing with, um, what's the guy's name?
Benjamin.
Carl Benjamin.
And it turned into a problem.
I support what Peterson and Rubin are doing, by the way, 100%.
But the piece is that it's not just Patreon show or YouTube or others.
It's the credit card companies as well who are starting to say, well, you know, we're not going to allow credit card transactions for this, for A or for B or for C. And that's where the real problem is going to be, because you can have all the, you know, Patreon type accounts in the world or alternatives you want.
So if you can't pay by credit card, you know, what are you going to do?
Are we going to go to a cash economy?
How are you going to do that?
Are you going to mail it?
Right.
And this is the real problem.
Joe, how many times have we said we are going to have to create a conservative economic infrastructure from the ground up?
Over and over.
Over and over.
Repeatedly, folks.
It's going to have to happen.
It's not enough to just get an alternative to Patreon.
We're going to need banks that don't discriminate.
Credit card companies don't discriminate.
And as I've said again, repeatedly, I'm not asking these credit card companies to say, we're a conservative credit card company or we're a conservative bank.
I'm not, no one's asking for that.
Your model of business only has to be, we're not them.
In other words, we're not conservative or liberal, but we are definitely 100% not going to discriminate our customers, our credit card companies, our financial transactions we work as intermediaries on, based on any political content at all.
If you don't commit any crimes, you are welcome here.
And the whole brand is going to be, we're not them.
Sound familiar?
Sounds kind of like what Fox News did in the Roger Ailes era, right?
You know, when they first started on Fox News, what they do now, too, they say, hey, listen, fair and balanced.
We're not the other guys.
And it was beautiful.
That's what they did.
Fox hires liberals over there.
They hire liberals.
I brought it up on The Five the other day.
They hire for spirited debates.
But Fox's brand is, we're not the other guys.
Well, you will get a fair and balanced approach here, unlike them.
And they're the number one cable channel in the world because of it.
One last story, because I wanted to tie this in, the negative interest rates, because this blacklisting in the cash economy, you may say, well, Dan, the cash economy is going to be the only way forward.
Folks, it would be nearly impossible to institute, but it is important I bring this up.
Because with regard to what we were talking about before, about these paths forward and how we would find our way out of this debt apocalypse, I left one thing out and I just want to leave you with this one note.
If we were to risk a massive default, what you're seeing happen around the globe right now and what governments are getting savvy to is they're trying to lower interest rates artificially by printing a lot of money.
So in other words, if you can't sell your data to a certain interest rate because people don't want to buy it as a government, you just print money and buy it yourself and you drive down interest rates.
It's a really disturbing way of creating backdoor inflation.
Well, one of the things we saw a couple of years ago, I wrote an article at Conservative Review.
It's probably not up at the website anymore.
Maybe the audience archivist, Judy, can find it somewhere.
But I wrote an article about the basically four steps to government control of the economy.
And I'm not gonna go through all of them, but the idea of negative interest rates, in other words, driving interest rates so low that if you were to put money in the bank, Joe, you know, a positive interest rate, you put money in the bank at 5%.
What do you do, Joe?
You make money, you make 5%.
It's an APR, you make it per year, whatever it may be, however it's calculated.
A negative interest rate, think about what that does.
You would put money in the bank, and you would lose money every single day the money was in the bank.
You may say, well, why would they do that?
Well, folks, think about the beauty of negative interest rates.
Again, what I told you before is if the value of money keeps going down and down and down and down and down and down and down, every day it's in the bank, what else is going down and down and down and down and down?
The value of government debt, too.
Governments love negative interest rates.
Now, The problem with negative interest rates is a cash economy.
Because think about it.
If you take your cash out of the bank, Joe, and there's negative interest rates, The value of your cash money, the money you're held in cash, actually goes up if you keep it in the safe.
Because everyone else's money is going down, right?
Theirs is in the bank.
Yours is in a safe.
If Joe has $100,000 in assets and keeps it in the bank at a negative 5% interest rate, which is a lot, granted, everyone else is losing a ton of money every year.
Not Joe.
Joe's money is in the safe.
Joe's richer for it, right?
They tried this in some Asian countries, and what happened, Joe?
It led to a booming business for what?
Saves!
That's why I'm bringing this up.
People took their money out of the bank.
The only reason I bring this up is because, and I want to tie this into the blacklisting piece, This is where the danger of having private companies control the financial system through credit cards, the use of credit cards, and governments making, you know, incentivizing a cashless economy, this is where it gets so dangerous.
Because folks, in the future, we may get to a point where economies are entirely cashless.
And I've warned you, and I'll warn you again, it was the gist of my piece when I wrote it.
This is the biggest danger out there.
Because then you are going to have private companies controlling your financial viability.
Because the minute they shut down your company, you, or your ability to use your credit card, there will be no cash.
It'll be a cashless economy, number one.
And number two, if they were to install negative interest rates in the economy to drive down the value of their debt, You'll have nowhere to hide, folks, in a cashless economy.
There'll be no cash to take out.
Right.
It's the worst form of taxation out there.
Interesting, huh?
Yeah.
I thought that in terms of the blacklisting.
I forgot to bring it up before, too, with the debt article.
All right, folks, thanks again for tuning in.
We had a really great week, considering it was a holiday week, too, with the new year, and I appreciate you all, again, tuning in to The Five.
It really helps a lot.
Tune in today.
I'll be there again, 5 o'clock, 5 p.m.
Eastern time on The Five for some more spicy debates, and please subscribe to our podcast.
It is free to do so.
You can subscribe on iTunes.
You can follow on iHeart, on Spotify, SoundCloud, and elsewhere.
It really helps us move up the charts.
I appreciate everything.
Thanks a lot, folks.
I will see you all on Monday.
Good day, sir!
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