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June 4, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:18
BIG BEAUTIFUL ABOMINATION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1097
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Coming up, Trump says it's a big, beautiful bill, but Elon Musk says it is an abomination.
Who's right?
I'll talk about that.
And Kevin Posobiec of Human Events joins me all the way from Poland.
We're going to talk about the Polish election and the implications for the MAGA movement worldwide.
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I want to talk about the big, beautiful bill because the question I think we need to ask is, is this somehow a big, beautiful, disgusting abomination?
That phrase, a disgusting abomination, is from Elon Musk.
And it seems a bit jarring to hear it because quite clearly it represents some kind of a break between Elon Musk and perhaps not with the Trump administration, although it could be because Trump is very much in favor of this bill.
But it's certainly a break with the Republican Congress.
Where Musk seems just appalled, disgusted that these people are spending money like drunken sailors.
And we have a Republican House and we have a Republican Senate.
Just this morning, Musk added to his epithets by basically saying, if we keep spending like this, we will end up in debt slavery.
Rather harsh expression.
I mean, you have to think about, when you think of debt slavery, you think about people who came as indentured servants to America.
They were in debt because the price of their passage was paid.
And they were expected ultimately, in effect, to work for a certain amount of time to pay back that debt.
If they didn't do that, they were, well, thrown in prison.
So this is what Elon Musk historically is referring to with the phrase debt slavery.
And what I want to do here is I want to lay out the Elon perspective, and then I also want to lay out the the counterpoint coming from the Trump administration, specifically in the last couple of days from Stephen Miller.
Now, I will say that...
Not that Stephen Miller is doing that, but I did see that Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, says, Elon is wrong about this bill.
It's got a lot of good things in it.
Usually when this kind of a fight brews, you don't want to have it on X, so you don't want to have it on social media.
You want to basically get Elon on the phone.
And lay out what the issues are and try and see if you can find some points of agreement.
Now, I think Elon's basic point is simply this, and that is that we are overspending not in the millions, but not even in the billions, but in the trillions of dollars.
And we have a national debt that, if unaddressed, And I think Elon's point is, it is being unaddressed.
At the very least, we should not be spending more than we have, not adding to this number.
But if we keep adding to it, look at the direction.
Just recently, it was $30 trillion.
Now it's up to, what, $38 trillion?
It'll pretty soon be $40.
next stop 50. And at that point, you're basically dealing with So think about the implications of the United States defaulting on its debt.
Right now, our debt is considered, our treasury bills, our government debt, the safest in the world.
If we default, that is a global signal.
That the dollar is untrustworthy.
People start dumping dollars, which means getting rid of their dollars, moving into other currencies, giving up dollars for something else.
And the net effect of that is what?
Well, it is devaluing the dollar, devaluing your dollars and mine, because the more dollars that are swimming around the system, the.
So think of people today in America who are struggling to make ends meet.
Things seem expensive now.
Well, guess what?
I wonder how expensive they'd be when, let's say, your dollar loses 25% or 50% or 75% of its value.
Another way to put that is if a dollar loses half its value, It is roughly equivalent to everything doubling in price.
Obviously, things don't double in price exactly.
Some things go up more, other things go up less.
But just as a thought experiment, try to imagine every single thing that you buy, from a car to eating out at a restaurant, everything costs twice as much.
And this is the direction in which we're headed.
I saw an interesting post on X about a trillion, just to digest the meaning of the word trillion, because we don't really think about it.
We're so numbed by these numbers, a billion, a trillion.
It's hard to even know what we're talking about.
So think about it this way.
A million seconds ago.
From now, right now, was May 23rd.
So if we count back a million seconds, we would be at May 23rd.
If we count a billion seconds ago, one billion, it would be 1993.
So think about that.
That's 32 years ago.
That's a billion seconds ago.
A trillion seconds ago was, guess what?
30,000.
So, that gives you an idea of the volume of a trillion.
Another way to put it in just simple terms, a million has six, is a one with six zeros.
A billion is one with nine zeros.
A trillion is one with twelve zeros.
A billion is a thousand million, and a trillion is a thousand.
It is not just irresponsible.
It is downright indecent to be spending this kind of money.
Now, let's turn to the other side of it.
And this is the Stephen Miller sort of rebuttal to Elon Musk.
And part of the way that Stephen Miller gets to this is that he shifts the focus of the discussion.
He says, first of all, that this is the most significant border security and deportation bill in US history.
So this is kind of bringing it back to what Trump campaigned on.
Trump campaigned on, I'll seal the border.
I will send a lot of the illegals back.
And this bill does do that.
So in terms of realizing a campaign promise, And in terms of achieving something that is ultimately not just of economic but also of cultural and even beyond that of national security importance, this bill does do that.
Number two, it is the largest welfare reform in history.
It cuts spending on welfare.
It strengthens the work requirements of welfare.
So this whole idea...
You see a number of these people actually on social media, on TikTok, on Instagram.
These are people who are like, they're able-bodied.
Now, in some cases, they're like 400 pounds.
But apparently, they seem to think, I'm 400 pounds.
I don't need to get out of bed.
I don't need to work.
All I need to do is stay at home, watch TV and eat.
And the government should be subsidizing or funding my And the Big Beautiful Bill says it puts limitations, it puts restrictions on a system that even though it was reformed to a degree by Clinton in the 1990s, has accumulated a lot of corruption, a lot of waste, a lot of fat.
I use fat as a pun here.
And it needs to be fixed.
And it is going to be fixed to a large degree by this new bill.
And then there's a further point, which to me is perhaps the most important point.
And that is that when the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, says that this bill is going to add $2 trillion to the deficit, What is the CBO talking about?
Does this bill, in fact, increase spending by $2 trillion?
No, it does not do that.
What it does is it makes the Trump tax cuts permanent.
Now, what the CBO is doing is they're acting as if the tax cuts should be expiring on schedule.
And if the tax cuts...
And so the government would get more money, but it would get more money because, in effect, Americans would be paying more taxes.
And since this bill preserves the Trump tax cuts and extends them, the CBO goes, well, we're not going to be getting that money as a result of people taxes going up.
And therefore, the deficit is going to go up.
And so, what becomes really clear here is that the choice is not overspending cuts at all.
The choice is, should we extend the Trump tax cuts, even though they will increase the deficit, or should we let those tax cuts expire?
We should kick everybody up into a higher tax bracket.
All of us get to pay more taxes, and the deficit, as a consequence, will be less.
That our problem with our government is not that you and I are paying too little in taxes.
The problem with our government is entirely on the spending side.
And so I think the Trump tax cuts should be made permanent.
In fact, that is important to achieve.
One of the key goals of Trump's economic policy, which is to ignite the engines of economic growth.
Lower taxes means more incentives.
It gives entrepreneurs more of a reason to do what they do because they get to keep a little bit more of their money.
And so we do want to bring down the deficit, but not by raising taxes.
Now, all of this is sort of It doesn't increase spending.
What it does is it reduces or maintains the Trump tax reductions.
So I think on the balance, I think that this is a good bill, not a best bill, not a perfect bill.
And again, if I were to draft it, I would spend much less money.
But here we come to a problem.
And this is in some ways, I would call it by and large, the Thomas Massey-Rand Paul problem.
Thomas Massey, of course, is the sternest budget cutter in the House, and Rand Paul is the sternest budget cutter.
Thomas Massey did not vote for the Big Beautiful Bill, and Rand Paul is not going to vote for the Big Beautiful Bill in the Senate.
Now, what is their position?
I think their position is simply this.
I can't in good conscience vote for a bill that spends this much money.
And yet, if you were to say to Thomas Massey or Rand Paul, all right, we agree with you.
Why don't you give us a bill that has, let's not even give it a, let's just give it a 50-50 chance of passing the House and the Senate.
You draft it.
Give it to us and let's see what that looks like.
It is not an accident that neither Thomas Massey nor Rand Paul have produced such a bill.
Why?
Because they know, as well as you do, as well as I do, as well as Trump does, as well as Stephen Miller does, as well as Elon Musk does, that there is not political support.
In the House or the Senate, on the Republican or the Democratic side, for the kind of cuts that Massey and Rand Paul want.
So do I agree with them in principle that those cuts would be desirable?
Yes.
But see, here we come to the heart of our system.
Our system is that all good ideas, however good, have got to be supported by Popular consent.
And by popular consent here, what I mean is the consent of the American people as expressed through their elected representatives.
Now, you can tell me, and you're probably right, that we have a system in which the elected representatives have all kinds of perverse incentives.
Not to want to cut spending, particularly in their own districts.
And you can tell me that there's also a perversity in the entitlement mentality of the American people who want Social Security benefits to continue, even if the system is going to run out of money.
They want Medicare and healthcare benefits to continue, even if it is a heavier and heavier burden on the smaller cohort of people who are working.
Be that as it may, the problem may lie with the founders, it may lie with democracy itself, it may lie with our elected representatives, it may be with the faulty choices of the American, short-sighted judgments of the American people.
But my point is, whichever of those it is, or whatever combination it is, the simple truth of it is, there is no political majority here.
To vote for the kind of legislation that Rand Paul and Thomas Massey want.
And so the way I think about it is, it's either what we got, this big beautiful bill, or nothing.
Which is to say, no big beautiful bill.
None of this is to say that there can't be incremental improvements.
The Senate might be able to make some further reductions, and then Speaker Johnson will have to try to get that revised bill through the House.
So I'm not talking about tinkering with the bill to make it better.
I think that is possible.
But to come up imaginatively with a fundamentally different bill, a bill, let's say, that takes another $2 trillion out of government spending.
That is just not going to happen.
That is just not in the cards.
So while it might be a desirable idea, it's not a practical idea.
And in the end, politics is not about what can be conceived in your mind.
Politics is ultimately about what you can get done.
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Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast.
This is from Poland.
Kevin Posobiec.
And this is the other side of the dynamic Posobiec duo.
We've had Jack Posobiec on the show a number of times.
I think this is the first time I'm having Kevin on.
And he's a co-host of Human Events.
He also claims to be, and I'm going to ask him about this, the brain trust behind the name change of the Gulf of America.
You can follow him on X at Kevin Posobiec.
The websites are humanevents.com and also clownworldstore.com, which I'm sure is kind of a juicy place to get all kinds of cool merchandise.
Kevin, thanks for joining me.
I appreciate it, especially all the way from Poland.
I want to talk about Poland.
I know you're actually in the governmental or the parliamentary building, but before we do that, I want to I want to probe you on this claim that you are the brains behind the Gulf of America name.
Talk a little bit about that.
Well, thank you so much, Dinesh, for being on the show here.
Yes, indeed I am.
Not everyone is familiar with that in Poland here, but it was an incredible story.
Yes, so the legend has it now that I am indeed the founder of the Gulf of America.
It used to be...
Until recently, last April, my friend and I, Johnny, from my church that I go to in Tampa, we were just hanging out one Sunday afternoon and we decided to rent Wave Runners because it was just a beautiful day and nothing else was going on.
So we went out and we hit the beach.
And we're ripping down the ocean, you know, a very 4th of July Americana, you know, Hulk Hogan kind of moment.
And he actually lives down there, Hulk Hogan, in Clearwater, Florida.
So I was feeling very patriotic Americana, and I took this picture of my feet on the Wave Runner, and I said, in the tweet on Twitter, I said, cruising the Gulf of America come 2025.
and that was last April.
So lo and behold Jack And I think it was around the time President Trump was speaking about taking back the Panama Canal.
Jack mentioned, hey, while we're at it, let's also rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
And perhaps someone from the administration saw that and showed it to the president.
And he said, wow, that is a good idea.
How about it?
After that, we've seen his poster that he has in the Oval Office, and it has been renamed.
So here's the first part of it, is that the Washington Post calls Jack and says, hey, where did we get this source?
How did you think of that?
And he said, me?
No, it was my brother.
So I spent about a half hour on the phone with Washington Post, and yeah, they ended up publishing it about CPAC in D.C. a few months back.
And they credited me with it, saying, sure enough, I was the founder based off this tweet.
Kevin, this is actually hilarious and awesome and delighted to hear it.
The reason I'm actually chuckling over the whole thing is that you might have seen in the news that Pete Hegseth is apparently now in the process of renaming a whole bunch of U.S. Navy ships.
I don't know if you know about this, but we've got Navy ships.
I didn't know.
We've got Navy ships that are named after the gay activist Harvey Milk.
We've got one named after Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Harriet Tubman, someone named Lucy Stone, Cesar Chavez, and apparently Medgar Evers.
I'm a little surprised not to see George Floyd's name on this list.
But these guys, most of whom have absolutely nothing to do with the Navy.
Now, apparently this Harvey Milk guy was a Navy instructor or a Navy diver for a couple of years.
But guess what?
I mean, there are a lot of people who are Navy divers, right?
But they don't exactly get ships named after them unless, I guess, they are, quote, gay icons.
So it looks like you see on the right now something that the left is normally so good at, which is the whole take down the monuments, rename them, essentially stamp everything with their badge of approval.
And I, for one, am actually glad to see the Trump administration doing the opposite.
Absolutely.
Absolutely, yes.
And it was great on Pete Heggs to just wait on that, to stall until June for him to change the Harvey Milk name.
And yeah, we'll see how smoothly that transitions because just quickly to follow up with the Gulf, so the kicker there was the Associated Press refused to acknowledge the name and we'll see if everyone acknowledges the names of these ships.
And they took the White House press office to court.
And behold, the judge sided with the White House in that case.
So they had to recognize the name or else they would be not allowed to be the AP in the press office.
But I think it's grand to see that the titles are being renamed as well as hopefully the forts as well.
You know, we're bringing back the patriotic spirit.
It's amazing to see.
And even in the military, there's no more painting your fingernails or dyeing your hair color.
So it's a great move on Pete Hegseth.
All right.
Let's pivot to our topic of the day, which is to say the election in Poland.
It seems to me that this is a very significant election and couldn't come at a better time because both in Canada and in Australia, So you have sort of anti-Trump currents that have been blowing in Canada and in Australia.
The Polish election was critical.
And it seems like the result was a surprise.
Was it a surprise to you?
Give us a little bit of the background and tell us why you're there.
Well, actually, I'm here.
We have Polish roots.
It was a fantastic surprise.
It was a razor, razor thin victory from Karol Nowbrowski and the Peace Party.
And my goodness, I was here for it on Sunday.
I got to attend the election party as well.
And yeah, there's a rise in patriarchy.
There are so many similarities, Dinesh, between the Trump campaign and the deep state tactics against Nowrowski that he had Soros funding from the mayor of Warsaw for Tchaikovsky, the left runner.
And so there was just a very similar tactic.
Matter of fact, we have maybe perhaps a surprise as well for us.
A special advisor to the Deputy of the House here, Speaker, this is Matthias Marshak, and he was also directly involved in the campaign win.
And so, yeah, we're here today to see some parliamentary proceedings, you know, in the first few days after the election.
Well, if I can pose a question to him, it seems like there is a close similarity between the left in Poland with its emphasis on globalism, the idea of trying to open up the border, a kind of softness on crime.
Am I right in saying that the same issues that define the American election of last November are somewhat identical to what was going on in Poland?
Yes, first, hello.
It's very nice to be a guest in your show.
And of course, there is a lot of similarities between the left Actually, the example you gave, the migration, we have a big migration crisis since before the Ukraine-Russian war, since 2022.
And the leftists, all they do is saying no one is illegal, there is no illegal people.
But we have actually people coming from Belarus.
The Belarus regime is bringing them from the Middle East and they are trying to force them to go to Europe, to Poland.
And our soldiers, our military, our border guard is doing their best to protect our borders.
And there are left activists, leftist activists, and even some MPs from the Tusk party.
That they're doing things against our soldiers, against our border guards, and they're helping smuggling people, literally.
And if I could interject too, Dinesh, so Lavrovsky ran on certain policies that are anti-woke in that, you know, you said the left here wants to take down statues.
He's trying to make it not unlike Trump's policy of a 10-year sentence for if you touch any of the statues in America.
He made a comment recently saying that no crosses should be removed from offices in Poland as well.
So he's very, very religiously minded.
And, you know, that should be seen to take precedent through his policies as well.
And they are very much no-nonsense around here.
And, yeah, specifically the Red Army statues and the remnants of the Soviets in Poland, helping to promote removing them.
And so in a sort of good way to remove those statues, but to retain their sovereignty, you know, to establish Polish strength as their own nation and sovereignty.
Nawrotzki, he's actually a PhD in history.
He was the head of the Polish.
Institute of National Remembrance.
So he was actually hunting down people who were trying to change the history about Poland and what happened to Poles during the Second World War.
And he actually was the one who made it possible to destroy the Soviets.
Soviet statues around Poland and for that he's on the most wanted list in Russia.
So that's kind of interesting, actually Russia.
I put a price on his head just to bring him and accuse him of destroying the Russian, the Soviet heritage.
And he was doing his best to actually fight with communism, left agenda, this, as you said, woke agenda in Poland.
And I think, I mean, I'm from the Confederation Party, so that's a different party than law and justice, but I believe.
He still will be better president than his opponent, Mr. Shostovsky.
So, yes, there's a bit of a coalition there at the end because instead of just Republicans and Democrats, they have about five parties or more or seven?
Yeah, our system is a little bit...
We got many parties.
Yes.
Either way, though, Dinesh, they have paper ballots.
So there wasn't anything to be worried about as far as your chapters about the mules and about the police state.
They had, I think, roughly 37 million people population.
And, you know, they had just a few hours into the night and they were able to count all the paper ballots for this election.
Wow.
Let me ask you both a question, and that is that it seems like in Europe, the powers that be have been trying to block right-of-center parties.
You see this happening, for example, in France with Marine Le Pen.
You see it in Germany with the AFD.
The European Union has treated Hungary as a kind of pariah.
And do you expect that they will now, the EU and the globalists in Europe, try to put some kind of outside pressure on Poland to get you to sort of buckle or bend the knee, as we say here in America, to sort of give in to the priorities of the EU?
Are you confident that the new government will be strong enough to be able to push back?
I see just today.
And it seems that there will be also a coalition, because I think they need three-fifths majority to help him in this way.
But also, I think he made a message as well about a certain plan B, you know, towards the new president.
And also for the American audience, they have the president of Poland and then the prime minister.
So it's not just the president.
Like we have with Trump.
So the president does have power to veto things and it's also in the control of the military as well, I believe.
But the prime minister controls all the legislation.
So maybe you could speak more to that if you know any insights?
Yes, so if it comes about pressure from the European Union, One of the European parliamentarists, European MPs from Germany actually threatened Poland.
He said something like that, that Donald Tusk, the party is over.
you need to work on your country and bring back democracy.
And if you won't do that, we will just block the funding from European Union to Poland.
And that is just because Karol Nabrowski won, not Trzaskowski, who would be a supporter of the Donald Tusk government.
And now they will have a tough time to actually bring a law that would be fitting to the European elite elites and so on.
And actually, one more country worth mentioning is Romania.
There was a different scenario.
There was a presidential election and they were totally cancelled.
Totally cancelled because of the accusation of a Russian influence on the election.
And the only influence was to, of course, I'm not saying it was good, but financing the part of the campaign among the people.
from different sources.
But still the European Union was first to scream about that.
Guys, I want to thank you for giving us your insights all the way from Poland.
Kevin, we have to have you back on when you're back on this side of things.
But I know there's a lot of celebrations still going on over there.
Congrats on what you've accomplished.
I'm glad, Kevin, you were there to witness it.
It's good news from Poland.
Guys, I've been talking to Kevin Posobiec, co-host of Human Events.
Guys, thank you very much for joining me.
You're welcome, Mr. D'Souza.
You're welcome.
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We're talking about Reagan's economic policy.
Part of my book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
And the signature achievement of the first year of Reagan was the 1981 tax cut.
This was a 25% across-the-board tax cut.
Basically a 5% reduction the first year, and then 10% the second, 10% the third.
And so added up, that's 25% total.
The top rate has dropped from 70%, if you can believe it, 70% to 50. As I've mentioned before, it would subsequently drop from 50 down to 28%.
This is big stuff.
And there were some other improvements.
Taxes were indexed to inflation, which meant that if there was inflation, you wouldn't be kicked up into higher tax brackets.
There was also some reductions in real estate and business taxes.
The IRA system of saving money for retirement was exempted.
You're still allowed to make tax-deductible contributions.
So this was a big achievement by Reagan.
And the Democrats did their best to block it, to stop it.
In fact, Reagan was subjected to so many kind of attacks from Tip O 'Neill that he was somewhat surprised and perhaps even wounded.
So he went to Tip and he goes, well, Tip, you can criticize my plan, but your rhetoric is just so over the top.
It's just so extreme.
And apparently Tip O'Neill said something to Reagan to the effect of, you know, um...
After 6 p.m., we can be friends, but before 6, it's politics.
And so Reagan was like, okay, well, I guess it's politics.
And that's when Reagan...
He goes, Tip, you're a lot like the government.
You're big, you're fat, you're out of control.
And so this is a little bit of Reagan doing, even before Trump, the Trump thing, which is to strike out against your opponent, kind of in their own coin.
The other thing about Reagan that's worth noting, and this is also something that's interesting to compare with Trump, is Reagan was a really very shrewd negotiator.
His approach was by and large to say no, no, no, no, and extract more and more concessions from the Democrats.
And then right before the Democrats would walk out of the room in disgust, Reagan would give in and sign.
So in other words, Reagan's point was to get an agreement.
Why?
Because you look at the bill that you end up with, and it's not perfect.
It's no more perfect than the one big beautiful bill we're dealing with now.
The question you always have to ask in these situations is, compared to what?
Is the bill as good as it could be?
Very often, the answer to that is no.
Is it better than the status quo?
Usually the answer to that is yes.
And Reagan's point of view is, let's make it as good as possible, and then let's get it done.
Now, the problem for Reagan came on the spending side.
And this is something I want to focus on in some depth, just because of the eerie similarity to the spending debate that we're having today, the spending debate I've been talking about on this episode and in recent podcasts as well.
And that is the issue of government spending exceeding government revenue.
And yet they were not small at the time, and they caused a lot of controversy.
And if you can believe it, Democrats were complaining.
About deficits.
The very Democrats that have blown the budget, that pushed for spending even now and would spend us into bankruptcy if they could.
Nevertheless, they complained under Reagan of, quote, $200 billion deficits as far as the eye can see.
And it's true.
Under the Reagan years, the United States added $1.5 trillion.
To the debt.
But we're talking about $1.5 trillion over eight years.
Right now, we're talking about deficits of $2, $2.5 trillion in one year.
So the Reagan deficits were, as I say, minuscule by comparison, but were not minuscule, were not seen as such at the time, and arguably...
Now, a lot of the rhetoric we hear today is not really new.
We're robbing our children and grandchildren.
We're borrowing from the future.
This is an intergenerational offense in the Reagan years.
In fact, ironically, as the economy prospered, The Democrats went from saying that we would never prosper, things that we would not have economic growth, to then complaining, this is an era of greed, it's an era of selfishness, it's an era of big spenders, of multi-millionaires, of people going around in yachts.
So they claim that your policies will never produce prosperity, and when they do, they deplore the prosperity.
They say things like, and one of the phrases that was developed in the Reagan years and hasn't gone away, trickle-down economics, that somehow the benefits of the economic boom of Reaganism just went to a few people or it went to the people at the upper end of society, and very little of it kind of percolated down.
To people in the middle class or below that.
The fact that the United States was running these big deficits caused a number of people, and by the way, not just Democrats, but some Republicans, particularly some of the same types of Republicans, the Paul Ryans before Paul Ryan, the sort of balance-the-budget Republican crew, the Republican establishment.
They deplored Reaganism.
In fact, one of them, a guy I knew from my days in DC, a very nice guy and smart guy, Fred Smith.
I believe at that time at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, he goes, the Reagan revolution hasn't failed.
It hasn't really been tried.
And what he was looking for, Fred Smith, is he approved of the tax cuts, but he wanted to see spending cuts that were commensurate with the tax cuts.
And when he didn't see that, his argument was, hey, we didn't get the spending cuts that we had hoped for, and therefore the whole thing is kind of a failure.
We're going to be looking at this a little more carefully and in a little more depth because whenever we evaluate these situations, we have to look at the choices available to people at the time.
So, you might like to say, in theory, I would like to have a US government that is half as big as the government we have now.
In theory, I would like to shut down half the departments.
I'd like to fire half the bureaucrats.
In theory, I want to reform Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security.
In theory, I think that the government should only spend what it takes in.
And yet, you don't have a pathway to get from here to there.
You don't know how to go from here to there.
This is a little bit of the problem, I think, that we're having right now with, say, Rand Paul.
Rand Paul is basically saying, we can't spend this much.
And he's right.
We shouldn't be spending this much.
But the problem is, if you turn around to Rand Paul and say, all right, Rand Paul, we can't spend this much.
Where would you cut?
Now, this is not the case where Rand Paul doesn't have an answer.
He would absolutely have an answer.
He'd say, well, let's cut here, here, here, here, and here.
And then you say to Rand Paul, if you do those cuts, can you get us a majority of votes in the House?
I think he would answer no.
Can you get us a majority of votes in the Senate?
I think he would answer no.
So in other words, what you're dealing with is an opposition.
Not between a kind of a good bill and a not-so-good bill, but an opposition between theory and practice.
An opposition between something that is viable and something that is not viable.
This notion of getting things across the finish line.
In other words, a budget is not simply something that is developed in thought.
A budget is something that needs to be approved.
It needs to be signed.
It needs to become the operating budget of the United States.
And in our constitutional system, that doesn't happen until the House votes and the Senate votes and the president then takes it up.
And there was a shadowy, interesting, smart, eccentric figure in the Reagan administration.
His name was David Stockman.
David Stockman is still around.
He had a rather brief and, I would have to say in the end, unhappy career in the government.
He was very much a Paul Ryan before Paul Ryan.
And David Stockman was a assiduous, determined budgetary.
His knowledge of the budget was second to none.
He could tell you line items that Reagan had never even heard of.
And he had great ideas about where to slash the budget, how to shut down entire departments and agencies.
And his knowledge was detailed, precise.
and this was a guy who knew what he was talking about.
He was the director of the Office of Management and Budget.
He ended up fighting with Reagan.
He ended up essentially defecting and going to the Atlantic Monthly where he wrote, he gave an interview.
Later it became a book, very critical of Reagan.
His basic theme is that Reaganism is not only going to fail, it's like already.
And it's already failed because my plans have not been enacted for cutting the government.
So if all of this sounds very familiar, yes, we've kind of been down this road already.
And by looking at it in the Reagan era, we can come to a little better understanding of what are the choices available?
Why do these budget-cutting schemes kind of come to grief?
What is the problem here?
Is the problem with just the Democrats?
Is it that we have a uniparty and the Republicans are in it with the Democrats?
Is the blame to go to the American founders themselves?
They set up a system that is somehow inherently sluggish, inherently defective.
Is the problem with the American people?
They want and claim entitlements that they somehow are, quote, entitled to, but there just isn't enough money.
But since it's an entitlement, who cares if there's enough money?
I'm entitled to it, so pay me.
And we'll deal with any problems that arise later.
So all of this stuff that we are dealing with now is the, perhaps not identical, but similar stuff to what Reagan was dealing with and Stockman was dealing with.
And think about it.
This was in 1981.
So we're talking about 45 years ago, you may say...
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