Stephen Moore and the host dissect the government shutdown's liquidity crisis, predicting New York will lose another 2.5 million residents to high taxes as wealth flees for Texas. They warn that Democratic victories could trigger fiscal collapse requiring federal bailouts, while reflecting on Dick Cheney's legacy: a military stabilizer whose era of unchecked power and surveillance serves as a stark warning against excess. Ultimately, the episode argues that governance, not money printing, must resolve these self-inflicted economic wounds. [Automatically generated summary]
Support Good Ranchers For Real American Meat00:01:32
Hello, you sick freak.
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This is the best of edited version, and we got some of the best here.
Dick Cheney died last night.
Here's what we should remember his legacy as.
Why the government shutdown needs to end sooner rather than later.
And Stephen Moore joins us on The Economy and Mamdaniel.
All that on today's Best of podcast.
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Cash as Oxygen for the Economy00:11:03
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Now let's get to work.
You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
So we have hit a critical juncture, a turning point, if you will, on the closure of the government.
And the government needs to open back up.
And I'm going to explain it in a way that nobody else will explain it to you.
If you're watching CNBC over the last couple of days, they were saying things like, you know, the repo market is under great stress and they've loaned out banks that have been getting money from the Federal Reserve at incredible rates, highest it's been since 2020.
What does that mean?
What does that mean?
The banks, when they close at night, they have to have a certain amount of cash in their vaults to cover everything.
It's a requirement by law.
And if they don't have that, then they have to go to what's called the repo market and they borrow money overnight.
They pay interest on it and they borrow it overnight and they give it back in the morning when they open back up.
Okay.
It's only done when banks are short of cash.
It used to be a very bad thing, but now it's kind of happening all the time, but not at these levels.
So let me explain what all of this means.
Try to imagine, if you will, that America's financial system is like a living body.
The heart, as much as I hate to say it, for this example, is the Federal Reserve.
It doesn't create life, but it keeps the blood pumping.
The arteries and the veins are the banks and the institutions that carry the lifeblood of the economy, money.
And the capillaries are like you and me, every family, every small business, every worker trying to make a paycheck stretch from one week to the next.
We're not an artery.
We're capillaries.
Now, in this body, there is something called the repo market.
This is a place where banks and institutions go to borrow cash overnight.
Think of that cash like oxygen.
The oxygen exchange that happens in the lungs.
It's fast, it's constant, it's invisible, but it is vital.
You don't have the oxygen.
It doesn't matter what the blood's doing, right?
Every night, money goes out.
Every morning, money comes back in.
And that rhythm is what keeps the entire body alive.
Well, in the last few days, that rhythm has faltered.
Something is clogging the arteries.
The banks, the vessels, they're gasping now for oxygen.
So they're going to the Fed's emergency oxygen tank, the standing repo facility, and they are drawing records amount, record amounts of cash out just to keep breathing, okay?
It's like watching a marathon runner suddenly reach for an oxygen mask at mile three.
Why?
Why is this happening?
This is the important part, because while the government is shut down, and we might think, well, that's good, they're not spending money.
The treasury is the fiscal liver of the body, and it's storing all of the blood in the liver, okay?
It's storing cash in a vault now called the Treasury General Account.
There's nearly a trillion dollars sitting in there.
Cash, trillion dollars sitting there, not being paid.
Every dollar that goes into that vault is a dollar that can't circulate now through the body.
So now it's starving everything of cash because there's a trillion dollars sitting in the treasury.
And even though you can't see it, every second the shutdown drags on, the system is being starved and the arteries are tightening and the heart is straining and the body is starting to shiver.
And that's what's happening right now in the shadows of our financial system.
It's not about Wall Street greed.
It's not some obscure number on a Bloomberg terminal.
It is about a government that is turned inward, frozen by politics, unable to pass the simplest resolution to fund itself.
And because it's doing this, it's pulling all of that precious liquidity, a trillion dollars in cash, the oxygen, the life of our economy, out of the bloodstream and into a vault.
If you've ever had a power outage in winter, you might know the feeling.
Let me describe it this way.
First, it's fine.
You grab a candle, you grab a blanket, it's kind of fun.
You start the fireplace.
Hours drag on.
The house starts to get a little cooler.
If it continues to drop on, the pipes begin to freeze.
And by morning, it's no longer a cute little thing that, oh, we're just going to sit by the fireplace.
It's cold.
Okay.
That's where we're at financially right now.
We are not at the point of collapse, but we are at the point of freezing the pipes.
What does that mean when I'm talking about the arteries?
The government shutdown has locked up the treasury's checkbook.
That means fewer payments to contractors, less spending, less money flowing into the banking system.
When less cash circulates, the banks can't lend freely because there's no cash.
Money gets tight.
Repo rates, that invisible overnight interest rates, that starts to spike.
And when that happens, it affects the capillaries.
You and me, the smallest players, the smallest businesses, the consumers, the credit unions.
We begin to feel it first.
When arteries clog at the heart, what's the first part of the body that goes cold, goes numb?
The fingers, the toes.
That's us.
Here's the tragic irony.
The politicians, you know, in the Democratic Party fighting over a principle, they may think it's about posturing, about leverage, about who blinks first, but it's not.
While they're playing chicken with our nation's checkbook, it is now time to say, okay, enough is enough because the system is starting to gasp for air.
And this is how financial crises begin.
We're not in one yet.
But again, the pipes are beginning to freeze.
And this is how things happen.
They happen quietly, not with a bang, you know, not with a crash, but with tightening.
With the arteries getting clogged, all of a sudden you have a widowmaker.
And you didn't see it coming because it's a slow, silent squeeze that begins in the overnight funding markets.
The kind of plumbing that nobody ever looks at, nobody ever talks about.
Nobody even understands.
Do you understand how the pipes are working in your house behind your walls?
I don't even know where they go.
I mean, I know they eventually go down and out, but I don't know.
And all of a sudden, you find out when a pipe bursts.
Make no mistake, if this continues, it won't just be the banks that are hurting.
It will be your mortgage rate, your credit card interest, your grocery bill, because the system has to begin charging more for everything because they are paying more in interest to hoard what little cash is out there.
The longer it goes on, the more cash goes into the government and it sits there.
It's like watching your bloodstream start to clot.
You're not going to feel it right away, but if it reaches the heart, it reaches the brain, the damage can be fatal.
So here's the one truth today on the economy that the media won't tell you or they fail to explain it.
The repo market, what the hell does that mean?
Why are you only talking to the people on Wall Street?
Why don't you tell the people who are going to be affected first?
Why can you, how can an alcoholic DJ figure out a way to explain this to the average person, but you can't?
This shutdown is not just a political stalemate.
It is a self-inflicted wound.
We are at a point now where the government is literally draining oxygen from the economy and the Fed is in triage mode, pumping emergency liquidity into the veins just to keep the patient alive.
The question is, how long can the Fed keep doing CPR before it tires out?
How long before they just, we got to start printing money?
The cure is not more money printing.
It's governance.
It's having a damn adult in the room.
It's lawmakers that understand that starving the bloodstream to win a headline is not courage.
It's madness.
When, when will the Democrats stop this game?
The shutdown has to end, not because Wall Street wants it, but because Main Street needs it.
The blood of the American economy, the trust, the liquidity, the stability, it's not infinite.
And once the heart starts to falter, it takes more than an emergency repo to bring a nation back to life.
This must end.
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Protecting Yourself Without Guilt00:10:40
Now, back to the podcast.
You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
Stephen Moore is with us now.
Stephen, how much time do you have for me today?
As much as you want, Glenn, great to hear your voice.
Great to be with you.
And I disagree with you on something you just said.
Okay.
All right.
Let's start there.
You know, I do think, look, New York has lost 2.5 million people on net over the last 10 years to other states, almost 2.5 million people, which is what, four congressional seats right there.
And so there's a mass what's the big story in America, Glenn, right now.
And people should go to our website, Vote With Your Feet, and you can see, just click on any two states.
You can click on New York and you can click on Texas.
And it'll show you where the moving vans are going to and from and also how much money they're taking with them because we know the income of these people as well.
So New York has lost 2.5 million people.
If New York's, and by the way, half of those people came from New York City.
So if they elect a socialist and they raise the taxes again, you know, New York City already has the highest taxes in the United States and North America.
So if they raise them again on quote the rich, they're not going to be there any longer.
And I'll make another prediction to you, Glenn.
Now, look, are you in Texas?
Where are you now?
I can't keep track of this.
It's like a shell game.
I never really know.
I just moved last week.
I left my business in Texas because I am never going to dissever myself from Texas.
But I left my business in Texas.
But I promised my wife about 400 years ago that someday we would live by the beach.
And so we moved to Florida.
So I live in Florida.
You move from one no income tax state to another no-income tax state.
Are you crazy?
I'm not doing anything else.
I would have dug a canal from the Atlantic all the way into Dallas if that was forced me to move to a tax state.
Yeah.
So anyway, I'm in Dallas today.
That's why you guys vote for the same person.
But anyway, where are you in Florida?
I'm not saying that on the air, but I will tell you that we're going to have dinner, Stephen.
When you get back into Florida, we'll have dinner.
Awesome.
Okay, great.
Well, anyway, so I know I lost my concentration, but I think you were talking about the people that are moving and the tax pace.
Yeah, so basically, that's why I believe, well, look, 1 million is probably a long shot, but I think you're going to see a lot of wealth move out of New York.
Now, here's the thing.
You probably are aware of this, but about two months ago, the Texas set up their own stock exchange.
So we've had the New York Stock Exchange for 150 years.
Now you've got the Texas Stock Exchange, which I believe is into Dallas.
I believe that if they raise these tax again, you'd pay 17% income tax in New York City.
Who's going to do that?
By the way, that's on top of a 40% federal tax.
So people will move.
And I'll give you one example.
You know, Ken Griffin, he's the billionaire who created Citadel and a good guy.
He's a pre-market guy.
And he was the single biggest charitable giving in the city of Chicago.
He gave to the Art Institute.
He gave to the homeless shelters.
He gave to the food kitchens and the museums and so on.
I mean, he was by far the biggest donor to all of the charities.
Well, finally, they kept raising, raising, raising taxes in Chicago.
And as you probably know, he moved out of Chicago and he moved to Palm Beach, Florida.
And so then the interesting part of this story is it put a $50 million hole in the Illinois budget.
One person.
Oh my gosh.
And there was a funny story in the Chicago Crane's business that all of a sudden these charities like, hey, why isn't he donating us to anymore?
Well, he doesn't live there anymore.
And so my point is, you chase the evil rich out of your city and your state, and you pay a high price for that in terms of the employment.
By the way, he took several thousand jobs with him.
So when you hear soap the rich, you know, the rich aren't, you know, as the old saying goes, the rich aren't rich because they're stupid.
Right.
You know, so let me ask you this, Stephen, because it used to be, it used to be that New York was, I mean, was the capital of the whole world.
Financial capital.
Yeah, because of the stock exchange.
How real is the loss of the New York Stock Exchange is something like the Texas Stock Exchange?
Is that something that really could actually happen?
Yeah, it could happen.
And look, the truth is that the New York Stock Exchange, even today, isn't anything like what it was, 60s, 70s, 80s.
Just like, you know, I mentioned I'm from Chicago.
Remember the moving trading places and they're trading the commodities on the Chicago.
It doesn't really exist anymore because that's all done by computers and electronically.
So the trading floors aren't the same as they were.
So Wall Street is just a shadow of what it once was.
But what I'm saying is that today in America, in Dallas, Texas, there are more financial services jobs than there are in New York City.
Oh, my gosh.
That's amazing.
Oh, my gosh.
So it is happening.
I mean, it's happening.
So how long, how much more, Stephen, how much more can New York take before it's no longer the financial capital?
How much more, how many people have to move?
What has to happen for it to really understand, wow, we made a huge mistake here?
You'd think they'd have gotten that message already.
I mean, one of the things you lived, you know, when you first did your Fox Show back many, many years ago, you were in New York.
And so you're familiar with New York.
And when was that, in the 90s?
And when were you in the mid-2000, you know, 2005, 2010?
Yeah, because I remember when Rudy, this is an important point, because I know you have a lot of listeners all over the country in New York and New Jersey and the New York area.
So when Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor, New York was a mess.
And you could see every week, because I was working at the Wall Street Journal at the time, every week you could see the improvement in the city.
He got rid of the crime.
He got rid of the graffiti.
He got rid of the drug dealers.
He got rid of, he lowered the taxes.
It wasn't complicated, Glenn.
I mean, this wasn't rocket surgery, as my kid would say.
This was obvious stuff.
And New York was New York again, and it was booming.
And what's so sad about this election that's happening today is if Mandami wins, they will reverse every single thing that Rudy did, and they will be back in the ditch.
How stupid would people be to fall for that?
And part of the problem, Glenn, quite frankly, something you and I have talked about the years, is our education system.
You have these 24-year-olds who are voting.
They think socialism works.
Where?
Show me.
Where?
So what happens if he is elected?
I mean, what does it mean to people who have never gone to New York City?
Is the loss of New York City to Imam Donnie, is that going to affect everybody else's life?
That's a good question.
I mean, you're there in Florida.
Florida has gained.
I really want people to go to this website, vote with their feet, because it's amazing.
And so Florida, under a great, great, great governor, Ron DeSantis, and you had a great governor, Rick Scott, before him.
Florida, are you ready?
Are you sitting down, Glenn?
Florida has imported over a 10-year period $1 trillion of income from people coming in from other states.
$1 trillion.
It's the biggest mass migration ever in the history of this country.
And by the way, people are not just leaving New York.
You know what other big state they're leaving?
California.
I think New York is moving to Florida and California is moving to Texas.
Moving to Texas, exactly.
And so you're just bleeding these blue state.
That's why I don't get it.
And so the thing that worries me, I was thinking a lot about this the last couple of days because, you know, if these states vote wrongly, the only way that New York even survives fiscally is with another massive federal bailout.
They're not going to have the daughter space.
How are they going to pay their bills?
They're not.
They're not.
And, you know, this is what I've said for a long time.
You know, the Constitution's not a suicide pact.
And California and New York and Chicago are going to eventually need giant bailouts.
And why should I pay for that?
I didn't live in those places.
I didn't live there for a reason.
I've never seen those people.
Right.
That's taxation without representation.
I don't want to bail them out.
It's their fault they did this.
I've always wanted to live in California.
I never have because it was insane.
I knew that it was not going to work.
So why do I have to pay for it?
Bingo.
And incidentally, you're right.
You can understand why people might leave New York for Florida.
You know, you're in Florida.
It's beautiful weather in Florida and it rains a lot and cloudy in New York.
But how do you screw up California?
I mean, California is probably one of the most idyllic places on the planet.
And people are leaving.
This is the first time in 250 years people have been, more people are leaving California than going to California.
That's never happened before.
That's unbelievable.
Yeah.
Unbelievable.
Okay, can you spend some time with me?
One other point about this.
And yet the governor of California is right now the lead candidate to run on the Democratic ticket for president, Gavin Newsom, the guy who, what's he going to run on?
I'll do for America what I did for California.
Yes.
And so many people will buy into it.
I mean, I don't know what's wrong.
It's so frustrating because you try to apply logic and you're like, but none of this makes sense.
None of it.
What are you doing?
I would love to be able to sit down and have a conversation with you, but none of this makes sense.
You're streaming the best of Glenn Beck.
To hear more of this interview and others, download the full show podcasts wherever you get podcasts.
So let me start here with Dick Cheney.
Wisdom To Stop00:14:11
You know, there was a time not long ago when America was not sure of itself, like we are now.
The Berlin Wall had fallen.
We had gone through the 80s, which was a big boost to our confidence.
But we had done so much damage to ourselves in the 60s and the 70s, it took more than one president in eight years.
Vietnam still haunted us.
The headlines were all about peace dividends.
You remember that?
The Berlin Wall comes down.
Now we should have peace dividends.
Downsizing.
Doubt.
We didn't know.
We were arrogant and yet doubtful.
The idea of a military, a powerful military, had been almost embarrassing to say out loud since Vietnam.
Reagan had rebuilt us, but it was peace through strength.
We never went to war.
Thank God we never went to war.
But our perceived strength did all of the work for us, but we didn't know because the last time we had tanks rolling anywhere was Vietnam, and we thought that was a very bad thing.
Well, George H.W. Bush comes into office, and he brought with him a man who had five deferments in Vietnam.
He had never served in uniform, and he picks that guy, a guy from Wyoming, not loud, not flashy, to step into the role of Secretary of Defense.
That was pretty controversial.
Wait a minute, what?
Hold it.
The guy didn't look like a warrior.
He looked honestly like the accountant that balanced the books after the battle.
He was quiet, soft-spoken, but he was firm.
He was very clear on what he believed.
And he believed perhaps more than more deeply than almost anybody else in Washington that a nation that can't defend itself isn't going to remain free.
And so Reagan had, you know, really built the military up, and Dick Cheney kind of finished that off with George H.W. Bush by restoring the faith in our military.
Faith that America's strength was not the problem.
America's strength was the protector of liberty.
I'm old enough to remember the opening night of the Gulf War.
CNN was the only news network at the time.
And on my living room screen, I was living in Baltimore at the time, there was this eerie green grain of night vision footage, which we really hadn't seen before, and missile strikes through the darkness.
We had never seen war like this before, not only in night vision, but not live in our living rooms.
We had never seen anything like it.
And I remember we all kind of held our breath and we watched this new kind of war unfold.
And it was swift.
It was surgical.
It was divisive.
There was no draft or decisive.
There was no draft.
There was no chaos.
There was no quagmire.
For the first time in decades, Americans felt pride without apology when it came to our military.
And we still wondered, is it going to be a quagmire?
But it wasn't.
The mission was very clear.
The victory was clean.
We liberated Kuwait.
That was the mission.
And then we left.
There was no oil fields, no spoils, no empire building, just a message to the world we could be proud of.
This is what moral strength looks like.
Free a nation and go home.
Now, when George W. Bush ran for president, I don't think anybody was really comfortable handing the nuclear codes over to this guy who had been the governor of Texas and really kind of like, hey, let me tell you, yeah, right.
I mean, I wasn't comfortable.
He was a guy we barely knew.
He seemed like somebody who was more comfortable in the stands of a baseball stadium than even, you know, in the main offices of the baseball stadium that he owned, you know?
And everything changed in 2000 in the election when he chose Dick Cheney as his running mate.
The reaction was instant.
And I think it was the sound of America kind of exhaling a bit.
He announced Dick Cheney and Colin Powell.
They were the ones that brought us the Gulf War.
It was quick, decisive, and over.
And America said, okay, okay, okay.
He's got Dick Cheney behind him.
All right.
The adults are back.
Then came that blue September morning.
And the skies were clear and the markets were open.
And in an instant, absolutely everything changed.
The world stopped.
The New York skyline was filled with smoke and fear filled the air all over the world, not just here in America.
No one knew what was going on.
And our president was reading stories to children in Florida.
And Dick Cheney became the acting president for a while until we could get the president to safety.
He was the one that was rushed down to the emergency bunker in the White House.
He took over for a while.
He was steady, emotionless, and firm.
He didn't tremble.
He didn't panic.
And in those hours, those first few hours, America needed that.
But fear, once it's tasted, it's hard to let go.
And so we started a war, and it just stretched on and on and on.
And the mission became blurry.
Freedom became a slogan instead of a strategy.
And freedom started to take a different meaning here in America.
We passed the Patriot Act.
We built the Department of Homeland Security.
None of those things had anything to do with freedom.
We created the FISA courts and airport lines that never seemed to end.
And for a while, we told ourselves, all of this is worth it.
It's the price that we have to pay to live in a dangerous, dangerous world.
But when you give more to one God, the other gods will demand payment later.
And something in those days, a seed that was far more darker was planted.
The anthrax attacks.
Most people don't even remember them now.
They rattled the nation.
Cheney, who was always the realist and the adult in the room, always the sentinel, told the nation's top scientists, we can't wait for the next attack.
We have to study it.
We have to anticipate it.
And so it was Dick Cheney that urged men like Dr. Anthony Fauci to push research further, faster, into what we now call gain of function.
And I'm sure it was born out of good intent to protect us.
But as history often teaches us, good intent can be dangerous as a companion to unchecked power, or as my grandmother used to always say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
And still beneath all of that calculation and control, there was a different side of Dick Cheney.
He was quiet.
When his daughter Mary came out as gay, he didn't blink.
Long before Clinton evolved, before Obama changed his mind, Cheney, the hawk, Darth Vader, the architect of war, said plainly, my daughter deserves the same rights as everybody else.
It was personal.
It was brave.
It was human.
And as a politician, he stood almost entirely alone.
Nobody gives him credit for that.
And he belonged to a different time, a Cold War man in a postmodern world, a deep believer in the chain of command, in America's dominance, in doing what has to be done, even if the world didn't approve.
He died last night.
He had five heart attacks in his life.
I think it was 2012.
He had a heart transplant.
Doctors said it would give him another decade of life.
13 years later.
Dick Cheney's life offers both a chance to give medals and lessons, the virtue of strength and the peril of excess.
And he should have learned from the first Gulf War.
He was the iron for many years in America's spine after decades of doubt.
But he was also a reminder that iron rusts if it is left unexamined.
We needed his resolve when the towers fell.
And perhaps in the years that followed, we needed more of his restraint from 1991 in the years that followed that, but we didn't get it.
And so he leaves behind a really complicated legacy, which I think is appropriate today, as I try to talk to you today about what does it mean to be a conservative on all fronts.
What does it mean?
Dick Cheney was a conservative for a man of his time, but he lost one of the main principles, and that is conservatives believe in the rule of law and the Constitution.
He's a patriot, yes, but he's also a warning to us.
He helped America find its courage, but he also taught us how easily courage can drift into control.
And he left us some lessons that we should learn.
The Patriot Act.
That has given our government tools to spy on its own citizens.
On Capitol Hill, nobody is talking about this, but this is the biggest scandal probably in American intelligence and American corruption of all time.
The Patriot Act made all of it possible, a government-wide scandal of a president spying on his opponent's party, including senators and congressmen and donors and average citizens.
That's still being revealed.
Nobody's talking about it.
But that came from the Patriot Act.
That gave him the power to do it.
The FISA courts, as we know, in a completely other scandal.
The FISA courts were lied to.
Our FBI actually changed, physically changed documents to falsify testimony to secure wiretaps that they said they needed that we now know were unwarranted and illegal.
What else should we learn today?
We paid a heavy price for never-ending wars in blood, in treasure, and faith.
We failed to learn the right lessons from the Gulf War.
Define the mission narrowly, execute it efficiently, and then get the hell out of there and come home.
Enhanced interrogation.
That's Dick Cheney.
We called torture enhanced interrogation, and we still refuse as a people to have this debate.
We either torture or we do not.
And it's the people that should make the decision.
No one in the world looks to a nation who says one thing, but then farms out the torture to another dictator or authoritarian someplace else.
They don't look at that and go, you know what?
There's a great nation.
We should also learn the lesson.
I mean, think if we just learned this.
No, enhanced interrogation, it's torture.
It's not, you cannot change the name.
You can't change the meaning of words, okay?
Enhanced interrogation is still torture, no matter what, no matter what you do to a man surgically, he's still a man.
You can't just say, oh no, that's a woman.
Changing the words doesn't change reality.
And the heaviest lesson we have not learned a bit from is gain of function.
It may be illegal, but it is still happening because there are those in the government on both sides of the aisle that think it's important.
It is not.
It has killed millions and it has changed our world.
In that crisis, we saw blue states give new dictatorial powers that still haven't been corrected.
So Dick Cheney, believe it or not, I actually liked Dick Cheney, but I've changed.
The times have changed.
And I would like to salute his service to a nation for what he did and he actually believed he was doing the right thing and he did do the right thing in his day.
But things have changed and his passing marks not just the end of a man's life, but the close of that age, an age of secrecy and steel and certainty.
Honor Dick Cheney's service today.
But can we learn from the mistakes?
And can we remember one thing?
The strength of a nation is not measured just by its power to strike, but its wisdom To stop.