In this episode, I address the humiliating implosion of the latest CNN anti-Trump “scoop.” I also address the liberal effort to negatively spin the latest economic data. Finally, I address the troubling proposal from this major Democratic presidential candidate, which will blow up your life savings.
News Picks:John Bolton is out.
What is George Soros up to?
The Trump administration’s tough on illegal immigration approach is working.
Fascinating details regarding the CNN Russian spy fake news story.
Another strong article on California’s war on Uber and Lyft.
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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.
A very solemn day today, folks.
In commemoration of 9-11, an event obviously close to all of our hearts, these savage animals that attacked us that day.
Let me get into a little bit of that.
I've got a stacked show for you today.
I've got a lot of information to get out there, so stick with me here.
Welcome to the Dan Bongino Show.
Producer Joe, how are you doing today?
Hey man, I'm doing pretty good today.
I'm just remembering 9-11 like everybody else is.
Yeah, I'm doing as good as I can be.
Yeah, as good as you can be.
Watching it on Fox this morning was a little bit tough.
All right, so let's get right into it.
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Alright, let's go!
Delayed!
Ding, ding, ding.
So to begin the show, you know, this morning I tweeted something out.
I really do have a lot of material to cover, so I'm going to humbly ask you to stay with the show.
There's some economic data, Census Bureau data, there's some breaking news on that CNN spy story yesterday I wanted to get into.
But just quickly, every year that passes since 9-11, I always assume it's going to get easier for me to watch the video and the footage, and it never does.
Getting choked up this morning watching Fox.
I know, Joe, it's tough for you as well.
And, you know, time doesn't heal all wounds, and I don't think we should tell people that.
Some wounds aren't meant to heal, and that's one of them.
It was the definitive moment of my generation's time.
I was a Secret Service agent at the time.
I remember the day vividly.
I was sitting there.
We were getting ready to serve an arrest warrant on this guy, and I remember doing the briefing.
It was early in the morning.
It was about Eight o'clock in the morning right before it happened, and this guy was selling diamonds on eBay.
eBay was new back then.
It was 2001, of course, and there was a lot of fraud on eBay, and the guy was selling diamonds.
The catch was he didn't actually have the diamonds, so he was staying in a hotel on Long Island.
There aren't that many, and he was deaf.
And I remember we weren't doing this to be, you know, dopey or silly.
There's a knock and announce thing.
You have to knock and announce, police arrest warrant.
You have to knock on the door.
You can't just kick someone's door down.
And being that he was in the hotel, we were, we were like, what do we do?
How do we knock and announce?
We knew he was clinically deaf.
He couldn't hear anything.
So we were sitting there and we're, and then I remember as we, this briefing's going on and on, this guy, Tommy Hunter, this agent runs in, Him and his partner, his partner was already Ketchum.
So they used to walk into the place, Hunter, Ketchum.
And the guys would look at him like, really?
Those are your two names, Hunter and Ketchum?
But Tommy Hunter runs in and he says, hey guys, I got bad news.
And I could see he was not a dramatic guy at all.
And he had this look and panic on his face.
And he said, and he looks at us, we're in this cramped office in Long Island, New York, in Melville.
They since moved.
Used to be on Pine Lawn Road.
And we all look up at him and he goes, I think a bomb just went off in the World Trade Center.
And we all look like, like he wasn't a joker.
He just wasn't that kind of a guy.
And we're like, Tommy, what are you talking about?
He goes, Maurice, this kid Maurice, who at the time was the dispatcher in the New York office, which was in 7 World Trade Center, right, you know, right, right there was the big brick building at the time.
Maurice said, he was on the phone with Maurice, and he was telling him about the arrest warrant, because we had to put a file on it in case people called the New York field office, the Secret Service.
Hey, you got some guys out here.
And Maurice said to him, I think a bomb just went off.
There's papers coming down.
And Maurice was looking out of the window at Seven World Trade, and there were these papers coming down.
Because remember, when the plane hit, all of those paper files, and they were coming down in this kind of very ghastly, slow, spinning leaf-like pattern.
And we all just dropped the files and we ran into my boss, Marty Walsh's office.
He was the GS14 supervisor.
And we sat down there and we turned on, and I'll never ever forget this as long as I live.
We turned on the TV and The View was on.
The View was new, that show.
I forget who was on back then.
Barbara Walters was there.
And I'm thinking to myself, no, Maurice got it wrong.
But Maurice, the guy was telling Tommy vividly, something happened.
Because The View, they weren't talking about it, The View was talking about whatever.
And we're looking around like, isn't there supposed to be breaking news?
So I remember thinking to myself, ah, this is a really poorly timed joke.
This is really big.
And then all of a sudden the TV goes out and breaking news and obviously the news team comes on.
I forget what the view is on ABC or whatever.
And we sat down and it was dead silence.
Silence.
Like nobody knew what to say.
And this agent in our office, Paul Sadler, He came in and he was, I remember because he was tall, he was like 6'7", a really thin guy.
He was a navigator in the military.
He wasn't a pilot, he was a navigator.
I mean, what better guy to get a perspective?
And he was the first one to break the silence.
And he looked at all of us and he said, I've flown hundreds of times as a navigator.
There is absolutely no way what just happened was an accident.
Because there was some speculation that a small plane had blown in.
And then, of course, as we're watching, you know, the second plane comes in.
We go in and we drive into the John F. Kennedy Airport office.
And you can see downtown Manhattan from the JFK Secret Service office.
And we're watching it just smolder.
And the UN was going on.
We're trying to account for agents.
It was just complete chaos.
I'll never forget driving into the parking lot.
And two agents, I think one of them was customs or whatever they were at the time.
It was before CBP and ICE.
U.S.
Customs they were.
One of them had a shotgun in the parking lot and it was, I mean, it was just, it was just, I mean, the day was indelibly marked on me.
Now, keep in mind, folks, personally, I had just met Paula.
Obviously now my wife is sitting in the other room here.
I had just met her 10 days earlier.
So 9-11 for us is, there's I mean, the bitterness and the tragedy of the day.
I just met my wife.
I was dating her at the time and she worked at 120 Broadway, which for those of you familiar with downtown Manhattan is right there at ground zero.
I mean, looked into the pit.
I freaked out.
I'm calling.
I just met her 10 days earlier and I didn't want to be a weirdo.
So I kept calling and she wasn't answering.
And I'm thinking, my gosh, I was just devastated.
I thought, you know, the worst.
Well, you know, it turns out she was fine.
She was in Las Vegas visiting her mom, who had lived in Las Vegas at the time.
And, you know, I called her and I'm like, are you okay?
And she couldn't get back.
It took her, she couldn't get back till that Friday.
They were stuck out there.
Joe, you were in, tell everybody where you were.
I was in Novosibirsk, Siberia.
We were adopting our sons, Misha and Joey.
And we got a call from our interpreter.
Oh, Mr. Armacost, he was crying.
Your country is at war.
I don't know what's going to happen with your adoption.
And we were going, what?
We threw the television on and there was President Bush.
Can you imagine?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
But you didn't Siberia?
I mean, of all the... Joe is on the other opposite end of the earth.
Yeah.
I mean, Joe, would you... I mean, you would agree, Craig, this is the defining moment of our time.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, you're a little older than me, not that much, but...
Everybody remembers, I mean, my father called me crying.
Yes.
He thought my brother was dead.
My brother Joe was an EMT with the New York City Fire Department and they couldn't reach my brother Joe.
And I remember the cell lines were down.
You could not get a cell phone call in.
Right.
Yeah.
You couldn't get it.
Remember that?
Yeah.
You couldn't call anybody.
There's ways they fix that now.
But I just wanted to end this On this one note, I want to hat tip my friend Brian King.
Brian put this on his Facebook.
He was one of the original guys I met when I first ran for office, who knew me when nobody else did, and he showed up for a parade.
Well, I'm friends with him on Facebook, on my personal account, and he put up this picture.
If you wouldn't mind putting that up, Paula.
Yeah.
I want you all to look at this.
I know it's an audio podcast, but these pictures matter sometimes if you're watching on our YouTube account.
This is a picture taken of a fireman by the name of Gary Box.
The picture's in one of the New York City tunnels where they're clearly stuck in traffic and they can't get out.
That fireman got out of the truck and ran to the towers.
Gary Box.
His body was never found.
I don't want to get all emotional because my story doesn't my nothing
We were fine.
I went into New York that day and we lost a Secret Service member of our family that day out of respect for his family.
I don't mention the name.
They don't like to relive it every year, which is that is absolutely their call.
But I just remember the end of the day, we had a bunch of agents in town for the United Nations, which happens at that time in September every year, and we just kept crossing off the names as we found them.
And there were two names left.
One of them obviously lost his life that day.
The other guy, ironically, there were two names left, was in Nigeria.
Like, Joe was far from home, and we couldn't get in touch with him.
This guy, Kevin Worthington.
And he was obviously alive, but he was the last guy on that list, I remember.
And the last guy, obviously, was never found.
So, God rest his soul.
All right, I know it's a tough day for everybody, so we got a lot of stuff to cover as well.
I addressed yesterday this dreadfully awful CNN story that Donald Trump burned this Russian source we had.
For those of you who missed the detail yesterday, just a quick headline.
CNN trying to get out ahead of the IG report and the John Durham report on Spygate, which is basically going to show that the CIA and the FBI used debunked faulty sources to spy on a presidential candidate.
It's as simple as that.
It's as simple as that.
Excuse me.
CNN's trying to get out ahead of this, so former Obama staffer Jim Sciutto, who works for CNN, put out this story we covered yesterday.
It's been widely discredited that one of the main sources they used in the Russian government to get the information to spy on Trump, that Trump burned the source when he became president because he was so irresponsible with the information, and they had to exfiltrate this guy, pull him out of Russia because his life was in danger.
Folks, the story's been debunked by everyone.
Shudo had to do a big facepalm, and they still haven't retracted the story embarrassingly enough.
Even the Washington Post and the New York Times said, that's not true.
The Obama administration themselves, before Trump even got in office, was concerned about this spy, and it was the media coverage of this spy that caused the situation.
Now, showing you further, there's a great epic Times piece by our friend Jeff Carlson who does just phenomenal work over there on the whole Spygate drama at this point.
He has a story.
Please read it.
It'll be in the show notes today.
Media reveal existence of Russian source for Trump.
Russia allegations amid ongoing John Durham investigation.
September 10th, Jeff Carlson.
There's a key takeaway from this.
So I want you to keep in mind, again, CNN's story.
CNN's story is that this spy they used to spy on Trump was so serious and so connected.
Now, why are they doing that?
They're doing that because they're trying to give the FBI and CIA cover.
Well, of course they believe this spy.
He was such a good source.
He was such a good source, as a matter of fact, when his name was put out there, we had to get him out of Russia just to preserve his identity.
There's a lot fishy going on there too, but let's get to this.
Because remember, there are allegations that Trump burned him giving up this information.
Here's the information that they allege CNN, that is according to their horrible sources, gave up that caused this source to be in trouble.
Quote from the Epoch Times piece, Jeff Carlson.
The intelligence shared at the meeting, they're talking about the meeting Trump had with Sergei Lavrov, the Russian ambassador that they believe Trump burned the source, involved an ISIS plot to use bombs hidden in laptops to bring down planes.
Keep that in mind.
So Trump's talking to Lavrov about an ISIS plot to use bombs and laptops to bring down planes, a matter that the White House believed was appropriate to share with Russia, given the fact it concerned a threat to aviation.
Fair enough.
Notably, the president has the right to declassify information at any time that he chooses to do so.
So.
Keep the timeline in mind.
CNN's hypothesis here is that in this May, May, May 2017 meeting, Trump shares information with the Russians about an international threat to aviation.
Trump's free to do that.
He's the executive.
He can declassify info at any time.
So Joe, One would believe, right, that if Trump's telling him, hey, there's this threat, this ISIS plot, be careful with your airliners, ISIS putting bombs in laptops, you would think that if that was the information CNN's alleging caused this source to be burned, and that they should pull them out of the country, that CNN, in fact, hadn't reported on this themselves, right?
Because it was Trump who burned them, right?
Let's put up this CNN article, and I'd like you to pay close attention to the date of said CNN article.
CNN.
April 1st, 2017.
Joe, is April before May?
Just checking.
That would be correct, right?
I'm not nuts, right?
Okay, thank you.
You're good.
Here it is.
CNN politics.
First on CNN.
New terrorist laptop bombs may evade airport security, intel sources say.
It's the same story!
So CNN, a month before Trump allegedly burned the source by giving this story up to tell the Russians, hey be careful, CNN wrote the same story a month before Trump said that.
I don't know how that got by us.
You wonder sometimes.
Joe, did they do even a basic internet search?
Did someone look on the internet and say, hey, did we print this story?
Because someone already talked about it.
So how could Trump burn the source?
Dude.
Let me just tell you two what, what did I know the running theory behind the scenes.
And I just want to be careful here.
I'm giving you a thing.
I'm not suggesting specifically this is mine, but I would be.
Remiss if I didn't put out the information.
Amongst credible people I trust, there is a theory out there that the source that they allege Trump burned, they didn't, was a discredited disinformation source, whether witting or unwitting.
Follow me.
Okay.
Follow me.
I know you are.
The audience is smart.
You'll pick this up.
The CIA and FBI used information from this source to spy on Trump.
The source was a source of disinformation.
In other words, the Russians were playing us.
Whether the source they used was a pawn in that or not is an open question.
In other words, whether that source was part of the scam or someone knew the source was talking to the Americans.
and was feeding him disinformation to sow chaos is an open question.
That he fed information to the Americans, this Russian source that was wrong,
is not an open question.
Copy. - Okay?
We all get that.
The information was wrong.
Whether he knew it was wrong, the source or not, is an open question.
One of the theories out there is that in order to cover their butts,
certain officials at the upper echelons of these agencies did this exfiltration to get him out,
to give the impression that his information was taken more seriously.
Oh.
Or should have been taken more seriously than it was.
That may get confusing.
Once they got burned, once they got burned and realized his information was wrong, they had to cover their butts.
They can't just leave him there, so they engage in this lengthy exfiltration, which they can leak later to say, hey, everybody took this guy seriously, so seriously, we had to take him out of Russia.
Get it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Again, I'm not so sure yet.
I'm going to be perfectly candid with you.
That's up in the air, a lot of that.
But the reason I believe people believe that is based on credible data points.
One of them being, Joe, When you exfiltrate from a country, a high-level government source, that has given you allegedly valuable information on the Russian government.
Mm-hmm.
Ladies and gentlemen, you go in the Witness Protection Program x10.
Oh yeah!
You disappear.
Forever.
You don't buy a house in the middle of downtown expensive DC.
Okay?
And reporters, like Fusion Kendallanian, don't find you as easily as they did.
That's not how this works.
We'll get back to that and there's more information surfaces.
You see where I'm going with this?
Yeah, man.
If the government thought it was so serious to exfiltrate them because he was such a quality source that just got misled, then why are they not making any effort to hide this guy?
Any serious effort.
Folks, it's not adding up is what I'm getting at.
None of this is adding up.
All right.
I got a ton of stuff to get to.
Census Bureau information came out yesterday.
The left is engaged in hysterical spin.
It was great economic news in there.
And the left is picking out, of course, one little sentence.
And even that, they're lying to you about because that's just what they do.
All right.
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Okay.
So the Census Bureau yesterday put out some data and of course liberals pounced.
Now I'm going to get to what liberals pounced on in a minute because they lied to you.
There was one negative piece of data in there about uninsured Americans, the number of uninsured Americans going up.
Uninsured talking about health insurance.
And of course, liberals, oh my gosh, Trump the worst, look what he did, he screwed up the whole economy.
Having said that, what's fascinating is the Census Bureau data that came out was incredibly good for the economy, and the liberals just ignored that completely, including the candidates and largely the left-wing media.
So let's put up this article from the Wall Street Journal so you know what was in this report, because I don't want you to get it from other places in the media, they're gonna lie to you, I'm just gonna give you the actual data.
So the article's by James Freeman, does good work, Wall Street Journal, Americans Get Richer.
And for those concerned about economic inequality, there appears to be less of it.
That can't be!
How is that?
That's not even possible.
The candidates for president have told us, the Trump economy, it's only benefiting the rich.
Everything's awful.
Crash and burn.
Terrible.
The economy's going to implode.
It's over.
This is all we've been told.
This is what they do.
They lie to you often.
Well, there are three major takeaways from the data that emerged yesterday.
Let's go to takeaway number one about the poverty rate.
Surely, if the liberals are right, Joe, the census data indicated that the poverty rate must have gone up because the Trump economy allegedly is only benefiting the rich.
Had to.
Wrong!
Here's from the piece.
The great news of the day arrives in a report from the Census Bureau.
Quote, from their piece.
The official poverty rate in 2018 was 11.8%.
A decrease.
A DECREASE.
That means down for the libslessing.
A decrease of 0.5 percentage points from 2017.
This is the fourth consecutive annual decline in the national poverty rate.
In 2018, for the first time in 11 years, the official poverty rate was significantly lower than 2017, the year before the most recent recession.
The number of people in poverty in 2018 was 38.1 million, 1.4 million fewer people than 2017.
Folks, I'm just here to give you the facts.
What you do with them is completely and entirely up to you.
But for the Democrats with an open mind who listen to my show, and even the Liberals, I'm sure there are some out there that listen to the show and appreciate the content.
I've received a few of your emails.
You vote and do what you want to do in your personal life.
I'm just suggesting to you that if you're voting on the economy, and your vote is based on what the Democrats have told you, the poverty rate's going up, this Trump economy's only benefiting the rich, you're just entirely inaccurate.
You're just wrong.
You're voting, but you're voting based on inaccurate data.
The poverty rate is down.
1.4 million people are out of poverty from last year.
That is a good thing.
Whether you like the president or not, that should be celebrated.
And you shouldn't lie about it to make a political point to give the American people the impression the recession is around the corner when it isn't.
Not yet.
The second takeaway from this piece, again, what have we been told?
The middle class are suffering.
The Trump economy is only benefiting the rich.
Wages are stagnant.
Folks, not true.
That is simply not, you're just making it up.
The data does not indicate that at all.
You're making it up.
Quote from the Freeman piece.
Thank goodness few of our neighbors are living in poverty and the rest of us seem to be moving farther away from poverty too, according to the census report.
Here's the report.
Between 2017 and 2018, the real median earnings of all workers increased, liberals, up, increased 3.4% to $40,247.
The number of full-time, year-round workers also increased by 2.3 million between 2017 and 2018.
The number of men and women full-time, year-round workers increased by 700,000 and 1.6 million, respectively.
million between 2017 and 2018.
The number of men and women full-time year-round workers increased by 700,000 and 1.6 million, respectively.
Folks, middle-class earnings, median income and earnings, Yeah.
They're going up.
Your data is inaccurate.
Your data is inaccurate or you're lying.
You're not basing it on the real world.
Middle class wages are not stagnant.
Income inequality is not growing.
The data does not support that.
What bothers me is that you lie about it.
Again, if your take is, I don't like the president, I'm voting on him.
Stance on abortion, on guns, on health care, whatever.
Do your thing.
I'm not here.
This is not a monarchy run by Dan Bongino.
This is a constitutional republic.
We elect representatives.
Make whatever choice you want.
Congratulations, by the way, to Dan Bishop in North Carolina.
Let's say good for all you North Carolinians who voted.
Thanks for taking our vice history.
He won.
But having said that, vote as you see fit.
But vote based on accurate data.
Your data that poverty is getting worse is wrong.
Your data that wages are stagnant for the middle class is wrong.
And your data on income inequality growing is wrong too.
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, that's hysteria!
Ghostbusters?
Yeah.
Put up this third part.
Put up the third part of the piece.
From the Census Bureau report, inequality, ladies and gentlemen, did not get worse either.
From the report, as incomes rose, inequality fell.
Down.
The share of income held by the top 20% fell by the largest amount in over a decade, as did the Gini index.
I'll get to that in a minute.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
In fact, households between the 20th and 40th percentile of distribution experienced the largest increase in average household income amongst all quintiles in 2018 with a gain of 2.5%.
Folks.
Dude.
The Gini coefficient is a measure of income inequality.
It's basically a measure of the concentration of wealth.
If the concentration of wealth was equally dispersed, it'd be one number.
If the concentration of wealth was held by one person, it would be at the opposite end.
So the Gini coefficient has not gotten worse.
In other words, income inequality has not gotten worse.
Matter of fact, it hasn't gotten worse over the last 25 years.
Hat tip to Matthew Perry on Twitter, by the way, not the actor.
There's a Twitter account that pointed me to this in the census data.
The income inequality situation in the United States has not gotten... You're just making it up, ladies and gentlemen.
You're just fabricating data to make a political argument, not one based on reason.
It has not gotten worse.
Matter of fact, the rich have not gotten richer, relatively speaking, as a group.
It is the middle class, that 20 to 40 percent, those earners, those are the people who are getting richer at a faster rate.
By the way, talking about this stuff collectively is idiotic.
I just want to put that out there.
As Thomas Sowell points out, when you're talking about income groups, the argument's already lost.
Because it's not the same people.
When liberals talk about the rich, they want you to believe it's this group of Thurston Howell bowtie-wearing idiots sitting there munching on foie gras for their cocktail parties.
It's not the same people.
The rich is a different group.
It's not a homogenous group that doesn't change.
Thomas Sowell used to tell this joke.
Famous economist who I adore, just a great guy, and really smart.
He used to say, it's like saying, you know, in New York City, a person's hit by a car every eight seconds.
And then the guy responds, wow, that guy must be in a lot of pain.
It's different people!
It's different people!
There you go.
Do you understand?
Like, wow, we better get that guy medical attention.
He gets hit by a car every eight seconds?
The statistic is irrelevant because they're not talking about the same guy.
It's different people!
The rich are different!
Rich people become poor.
Middle class people become rich.
Poor people become rich.
Rich people become poor.
That group changes for various reasons.
Never static.
So I just want to put that out there from a pure economic perspective that talking about collective data is really dumb because it doesn't take into account individual factors.
But income inequality is not getting worse.
The Gini coefficient has not gotten worse.
You're just making it up.
Now, in the data from the Census Bureau, there was a There was a downside.
You know, again, unlike liberals, I'm here to give you the cold, hard truth.
All right.
The number of uninsured Americans, in other words, Americans who don't have health care, did go up since the start of the Trump administration.
Now, liberals were crowing about this, Joe.
Oh, my gosh.
They were losing their minds.
Look at this.
The Trump economy is failing.
Do you have that Ghostbusters?
This is it.
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!
Yeah!
It's over.
It's over.
The number of uninsured Americans... That was a live clip of Bernie Sanders at his rally yesterday.
The liberals were almost happy about this, that the number of uninsured Americans went up, right?
Folks, gosh, this is so... It's just...
Again, if you're a liberal and you're a diehard, I get the analysis stops here.
You made your point.
Trump got in office.
The number of uninsured Americans with healthcare went up.
Trump is the bad guy.
Now for the conservatives, the reasonable Democrats, the Republicans and Libertarians listening, now's where we do the intellectual work and we ask, okay, well, what happened?
Well, ladies and gentlemen, there's another Wall Street Journal had some really good stuff today in their opinion column explaining why the number of uninsured Americans went up, and now it'll make more sense as to what happened.
From this piece, how to think about health coverage by their editorial board.
New census data show the poverty rate fell for the fourth year in a row.
But there's a little nugget down in this piece about the bad news the liberals are crowing about of the number of uninsured Americans.
Why exactly did that happen?
Well, from the piece we find out, fascinating here, yet 8.5% of Americans lacked health insurance in 2018, which is up from 7.9% in 2017.
Okay, the first increase since the recession.
And this figure is getting all the media attention.
Liberals, you can tune out now.
Now, let's get to the why and the thinking part of the program.
Much of the decline, however, comes from a dip in Medicaid coverage.
And as a general rule, you'd expect this as fewer folks qualify for Medicaid as the economy improves and poverty
declines.
Ugh.
I- I get it. I- I- Again, I get that facts and data get in the way sometimes.
I understand that.
Some of you caught my relatively spirited, heated debate with Geraldo last night on Hannity.
Facts and data got in the way of that one, too.
I guess he was unaware, Geraldo, about the background check system that the NRA actually supported, the NICS system, the development of the background check.
But that's a whole other story.
But I get your talking point.
Your talking point is clear.
People are uninsured.
Trump sucks.
It's over.
I get it.
Now the thinking's over for you.
You made your point.
The problem is the point you're making is not the point you think you're making.
The reason the uninsured rate went up, not all, but a large part of that, healthcare-wise, is because people got richer and don't qualify for Medicaid anymore.
In no rational universe would we call that a problem.
So now you can get off because you have a better job.
You're making more money, you can get off government-run healthcare, and you'll find yourself economically in a position to buy your own choice in healthcare?
One other thing, contributing to this small rise, it wasn't dramatic, this small rise.
They got rid of the individual mandate, meaning you won't be penalized anymore by your own government for choosing, choosing not to buy crap insurance you don't want.
Hence, more people decided they don't want it.
Folks, this is not the issue that Democrats want you to think it is.
It's an issue.
But again, as I've said all week, the Democrats in the media want to tell you a story, never the story.
That's why shows like this exist, and others.
To give you what's really going on and then allow you to make decisions for yourself.
You may be a liberal.
You may think the government should force people to buy health care.
That's fine.
We're never going to agree, but tell the truth that the number of uninsured Americans went up because people don't want to buy that health care.
And just be honest and say, I, not me specifically Dan Bongino, but I'm a liberal, right?
I want to force people to do that.
Just say it.
I'm a conservative.
I believe people who don't want to buy healthcare shouldn't have to buy it.
I also believe that if they make that decision that the consequences are theirs and theirs alone.
Fair enough?
I'm honest.
You're not.
And I'm sorry about that.
I'm sorry because you can't have an honest argument with people who just won't be honest.
All right, I got another story.
Let's get this last read of the day.
I got a major, major facepalm by labor interests, the unions that are not representing their workers at all.
They were warned about this.
And I also got the story about Elizabeth Warren, that if you are a person, 55 or older, listening, or a union worker, ironically, invested in pension funds, or you're invested in the stock market, you better pay attention to what Elizabeth Warren's talking about, because she's about to bankrupt you.
Don't go anywhere.
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Okay.
Major League Union facepalm.
Listen, as I've said repeatedly, I'll say it again.
I don't want to have to keep repeating it, but I think it's important because I don't want you to misinterpret my words.
I have no issue with unions.
Unions represent workers who built this country.
I do, however, have an issue with organized labor interests that don't represent the actual interests of their employees.
And I think, sadly, a lot of organized unions do that.
Now, major facepalm.
Wall Street Journal story on this.
They were warned.
Warned.
Big labor's minimum wage remorse.
After job losses, unions now want to impose limits on self-checkout counters at grocery stores.
What happened?
What's the backstory?
Okay.
Labor interests were warned repeatedly.
Forcing unnaturally high minimum wage rules on states and the federal government.
The federal government hasn't changed us, but many states have.
Was going to cause rapid automation.
They were warned.
Follow the sane economists, some democratic and liberal too.
Warn them.
Be very careful.
If you're going to push for a $15 an hour minimum wage for employees who can't produce that amount of value in an hour for a company, the company was not going to pay them and is going to seek automation.
We're seeing an explosion in this now.
McDonald's, self-checkout counters in Walmart and elsewhere.
If you cannot produce that amount of revenue for the company, equivalent to what your salary is, the company can't afford to pay you.
If I have a lemonade stand, and hiring you will generate for me $10 extra an hour, I can afford to pay you probably $9, so I can make a buck on it.
If I have to pay you $15, I'm not gonna lose $5 an hour to hire you if you can only produce for me $10 an hour in extra sales.
Right.
Ladies and gentlemen, honestly, I don't know why, I don't even need our audience ombudsman hat for this.
I'm not sure why this is complicated to the left.
People are paid what their value generates.
If you can't generate that value, the company can't pay you.
Because they don't have the value earned to give you the money you think you're worth.
If you're not.
It's a simple math problem.
Unions were warned.
This is going to cause massive job losses.
Well, in some of the states, Oregon and others, where they implemented a lot of this stuff, what's happening?
Self-checkout counters are exploding because they can't pay $15 an hour for people to work at checkout counter if it's not going to generate that revenue.
Not hard!
Simple math.
So what's happening, Joe?
Self-checkout counters are exploding.
Yep.
So what are the unions doing now?
In what a major league facepalm from the piece, they're now trying to eliminate checkout counters.
Self-checkout.
From the piece.
The union that's fighting to get rid of these things still needs the Attorney General's sign off on the paperwork.
It was submitted last week and 112,000 signatures to get this initiative on the 2020 ballot.
They want this on the ballot.
This is what it's called.
Get a load of this.
You want to talk about the most ridiculous name bill in Oregon ever?
But under the proposed Grocery Store Service and Community Protection Act, Oregon groceries can operate no more than two self-service checkout counters at a time.
Violators would pay hefty fines.
Holy Moses.
Ladies and gentlemen, do you understand this is why I say, I have, I, I, I...
Our tradesmen, our craftsmen out there, specialized laborers, laborers out there, God bless you all, the truckers, you will never have a better friend than me.
These people are not representing your interests.
Do you understand they were warned repeatedly that this is what was going to happen?
So now what's going to happen is now they want to eliminate checkout counters, which is what's going to happen next if this goes through.
Self-checkout.
Because automation's a natural, if you can't afford the labor, you're going to automate.
What's going to happen then?
Well, if they limit the self-checkout counters and have to pay people money they're not making, the business is going to go out of business and you're going to lose your job.
It is a simple math problem.
It is not complicated.
These organized labor interests are doing you no favors.
None!
That is why membership in private unions is down dramatically.
These people are in it for themselves.
They're not in it for you.
Everybody said any... You did not need to be the Captain Marvel of economics to figure out that a $15 minimum wage for certain people in checkout positions was going to lead to automation and the loss of jobs.
Everybody warned them.
And now you want to limit automation too.
I mean, let's just get rid of the car and bring the horse and buggy back.
We'd have jobs everywhere.
Hey, I'm here with my horse and buggy.
I mean, let's just get rid of the electric stove.
We can hire a bunch of firemen now to put out the fires as people burn down their houses.
I mean, seriously?
Talk about a major league facepalm, and they'll never admit fault here!
They're trying to put- and- and the- the- the- what is it?
The Community Protection Act?
Yeah.
Holy Moses, folks.
I can't believe you bought- don't- please don't tell me you're falling for this garbage.
Alright, this is an important story.
I didn't even get to Bolton, there's so much news.
My gosh, Bolton's out yesterday, I saw that.
I just- there's a lot of stuff to cover, sorry.
So Elizabeth Warren, if you are an investor in the stock market, You're a union employee or non-union employee invested in a pension fund.
A pension fund invested in a stock market.
If you're an older American, ladies and gentlemen, you need to pay very, very close attention.
Elizabeth Warren is a serious candidate for the Democrat nomination for the presidency of the United States.
She is moving up and she is an anti-capitalist socialist who is proposing things that are so unbelievably outrageous that if they take back the House and Senate and pass this stuff, I am promising you on my show, I told you I'm trying to get out of the predictions business.
This one I'm comfortable with.
If what she's calling the Accountable Capitalism Act, which you'll see in this Wall Street Journal piece, if this thing passes, I am guaranteeing you a collapse in our economy like you haven't seen since the Great Recession.
The title is a piece by Phil Grammison, an op-ed piece, Warren's Assault on Retiree Wealth.
Her vision of accountable capitalism would destroy savings built over a lifetime and sink the economy.
No doubt.
What is she proposing we do?
I'll get to that in a second, but first let's get a couple things out of what the Accountable Capitalism Act is, which is nonsense.
Folks, for those of you who believe, maybe because you've been misled by the left or the media, which is really one and the same, but for those of you who misleadingly believe that stocks and equities and bonds, investments, are only the coin of the realm for the rich only, you're wrong.
Unions are invested in pension funds.
Governments are invested in pension funds that invest in stocks.
Stocks, bonds, equities are everywhere.
They're ubiquitous.
Middle-class people are as touched by the stock market as the wealthy are.
I'm not talking about individual cases.
Obviously, if a guy has a billion dollars in a hedge fund, he has more exposure than you do.
But there are not that many billionaires.
Again, this is the problem with collective analysis.
There are not.
There are a whole ton of people who are middle-class Americans.
The real money is in the middle class, not in individual cases, but as a collective bunch of people.
The wealthy, there are very few of them.
That's why they're called, by the left, the one percenters, as a pejorative.
One percent's not a big number.
What I'm getting at is the exposure to the stock market, equities, and other investments is huge for the middle class.
Why does that matter?
Because Elizabeth Warren's argument about, hey, stockholders and you rich people, as if it's some kind of amorphous group of lunatics that they can harm without touching your savings is wrong.
Now, seniors, listen up.
From the Wall Street Journal piece, Who owns the, this is a quote, who owns the vast wealth of America?
This is their quote.
Old folks!
Their words, not mine.
I don't know if I'd call them old folks, but you get it.
According to the Federal Reserve, right?
Right?
Don't you think so?
Like who let that get past an editor?
Old folks.
According to the Federal Reserve, households headed by people over the age of 55 own 73% of the value of domestically owned stocks and the same share of America's total wealth.
Yeah.
Households 65 to 74 have an average of $1,066,000 in net worth, while those ages 35 to 44 have less than a third of as much on average at $288,000.
Okay, none of this is shocking.
No.
But if you're a leftist, it's shocking, because you've been told that the 1% holds all the wealth, not America's seniors and retired folks.
Now, none of this is shocking if you have common sense, because Joe, would you say you're wealthier now than you were when you were 18 or 20?
Not a trick question.
Absolutely wealthier now, yeah.
Sure.
Why though?
Again, not actually why.
Why is that?
I've been here longer to accumulate this wealth, you know?
Verdict is in!
Arbacost, PhD in economics.
Yes!
It's not hard!
Why do older people, why are they worth more?
Because they've worked their whole lives and saved and accumulated wealth.
This isn't complicated.
It's a simple function of chronological calendar math.
If I work 20 years, I'll have more money than when I joined the workforce in year one.
But that's not, you understand, I'm bringing this up because that's not Elizabeth Warren's narrative.
Elizabeth Warren's narrative, and I haven't even gotten to what this thing's going to do.
Elizabeth Warren's narrative is, the evil one percenters hold all the stocks and bonds.
Screw them!
Go after them!
But this isn't going to affect you older folks, to quote the Wall Street Journal, at all.
Don't you worry.
You work your whole life.
You're fine.
It's just those evil rich people we're gonna go get.
That's not where the money is.
The money is with America's middle class, working sum, many retired seniors who've accumulated and saved and busted their butts and ground down their fingernails over their lives to accumulate a nest egg to live on.
That's where the money is.
Okay, so let's get to it then.
What the heck is Elizabeth Warren going to do?
From the piece.
You know what, take that down one second, let me get back.
Let me explain, because this talks about the damage this is going to do.
Elizabeth Warren wants to make corporate America accountable, her word, the Accountable Capitalism Act.
Not to the people who actually own their stocks and bonds.
So you buy a stock in IBM, Home Depot, whatever it may be.
Elizabeth Warren wants to change the fiduciary responsibility of those corporations to not be responsible to you, even though you own a portion of the company.
You own a stock, you own a portion of that company.
Maybe very small, zero, zero, but you own it.
That's what stock is.
That's what having equity in a company is.
Elizabeth Warren wants to change the guidelines to make those corporations, Joe, responsible to various stakeholders.
Stakeholders?
I thought the stakeholders are the owners of the company.
Yeah.
Right?
The company has to... Keep in mind, we're not talking about chaos.
Companies are... There are regulations.
There are environmental rules.
You can't cheat people.
Companies are all played by the same rules in the United States.
There are rules.
But those companies are responsible to people who own the company.
Yes.
Seniors who own the stock.
Union workers who own the stock.
Elizabeth Warren doesn't want that.
She wants you to be responsible for stakeholders.
And stakeholders.
Oh, gosh.
What does she mean?
Like you mean environmental groups and other stuff?
That's exactly what she means.
What kind of bull is that?
Dude.
From the Wall Street Journal piece.
Here's what's going to happen.
She wants us to apply to companies one billion in revenue or more.
Basically most of the companies out there that are dealing with big issue stocks.
At best, every U.S.
company with gross revenues over a billion would be suddenly coerced, this is from the piece, into operating like a not-for-profit.
Coerced?
But unlike legally recognized benefit corporations, the companies would be redirected to multiple competing purposes.
A new... Joe, if this doesn't sound Orwellian, I don't know what does.
A new Office of U.S.
Corporations as Elizabeth Warren... Yeah, I know.
Does that sound horrible or what?
They would decide and lawyers would sue to determine whether those stakeholder interests are satisfied.
And only then would retirees receive the remaining crumbs.
Only in Senator Warren's socialist heaven would workers continue to sweat and sacrifice while their rewards go to publicly favored groups.
Ladies and gentlemen, I cannot think of a quicker path to national bankruptcy than Elizabeth Warren's Accountable Capitalism Act.
They are accountable.
You own stock in the company, they're accountable to you as an owner.
They're accountable to bad media PR, which will cost them money.
They're accountable to U.S.
government, state, and local regulations, environmental law.
We already have accountable capitalism, Senator Warren.
You will be bankrupted.
Make no mistake.
One more story.
If this passes, do not laugh this off.
We all laughed off Obamacare.
Well, that's not going to happen.
And look, it happened and he destroyed our whole health care system.
This will make Obamacare and the disaster that ensued look like Mr. Rogers' neighborhood.
This will collapse the economy almost over.
This will collapse the economy before it's passed.
Do you understand that, Joe?
If there's even wind of this getting passed, people are going to sell stock in companies worth a billion or more like that.
Their stocks will collapse.
So will your retirement, bond values, everything.
Stakeholders.
They are responsible to stakeholders.
People who own the company.
That's how capitalism works.
Very dangerous.
Alright, last story of the day.
I didn't open up with it because I don't like to talk about stories that I can't add color commentary to because you can get a lot of it on the news.
Having said that, John Bolton out yesterday, National Security Advisor.
Obviously he's disputing accounts of whether he resigned, whether Trump fired him, when it happened.
Well, Bolton's saying he offered his resignation the night before it happened.
I have a story up at Legal Insurrection up at the show notes today by Mary Chastain.
You can check it out.
Trump's saying you let him go the next day.
I honestly don't.
It's irrelevant to me.
He's not there anymore.
It's all that really matters.
Well, I don't want to say behind the scenes because it's out there in the media now, but
what I've heard from people that are inside is that Bolton was wearing on Trump.
That Trump has a similar foreign policy to me and many others.
I think Tucker Carlson where he just doesn't believe we should be the world's policeman
anymore.
It's, you know, relatively easy for us to talk about that stuff when it's not our kids
out there doing it.
But the reality is we do have national security interests.
I'm not an isolationist, but I don't believe we are the traffic cop and law enforcement cop for the entire world.
There are other nations out there as well, and their kids and them, they can take on some of the burden as well.
That is not necessarily the interests of John Bolton.
I'm not knocking John Bolton.
He's always been very good to me.
I just don't share the same national security interests as him.
He's a Maryland guy.
Joe and I know him.
Not personally, but we've met him.
We've spoken to him.
He's a decent guy.
He's never been rude to me.
I just don't share his same national security outlook.
And the word I got is that was increasingly conflicting with President Trump's national security outlook, which is US first, us first.
Let's make America great again before we make everywhere else great again.
And it just started to wear on him.
And the final straw was the meeting.
The meeting that was supposed to happen with the Taliban at Camp David, which was, I agree, was a bad idea.
But Trump called it off.
But apparently there was a blowout over that and Bolton wanted to resign.
That's it.
I didn't have a lot to add to that story.
That's why I didn't open up with it, even though it was the big breaking news yesterday.
Again, folks, kind of a solemn day today.
So, you know, just tell your kids about it.
I know many of you do.
Yeah.
But my daughter left this morning and I just, you know, she wasn't Obviously alive when it happened, and I just said to her, just remember, today's 9-11.
We'll talk about it later.
So it's just important they understand what a devastating day that was.
