"Trickle Down Economics Has Never Worked" | Weekender Teaser
*This is the first 15 minutes of our weekly Patreon series The Weekender*
To access the full episode, additional content, and support the podcast, become a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
Jared and Nick dissect Joe Biden's speech in front of Congress and how historic it truly was, considering his willingness to poke holes in Republican ideology that had taken root in this country for many decades. Rudy Giuliani comes up as well, and what the early morning search warrant means for his future as a free man.
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I'm Nick Halseman and this is an announcement to let you know that we are going to be doing a new series called The Weekender over on Patreon that will appear every Friday.
And this is a little sneak preview so you can get a handle on what it's like and why you want to go over there and join the Patreon and be part of that community which has been incredible and amazing A lot of people there and a lot of great conversations.
So, here it is.
Check it out and feel free to check out the actual Patreon as well at patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Hey everybody!
Welcome to the weekender edition of the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm J.D.
Saxton here with Nick Halseman.
First off, I'm just gonna start the weekend.
Oh, very nice.
We need some more ASMR.
You gotta hold it closer to the mic.
Nick, ask me how I'm doing.
Jared, how are you doing?
Any better, I'd have to be twins.
That's how good I'm doing.
Wow.
I want to start this podcast off on the right note.
And not a half hour ago, I finished my final lecture of the spring 21 semester.
Wow.
I got grades to do.
I got a couple letters to write.
But I have to tell you right now, I'm on summertime.
And let me tell you right now, I'm double vaccinated.
I'm done with the semester.
The president of the United States is advocating job plans that I've been yelling about for years now.
I am declaring this, Nick Haussmann, with you as my witness and as with our beautiful Patreon subscribers listening.
I'm declaring this the summer of the muckrake.
Well.
Done.
Done.
Well that's good to know.
What is that?
This is... Is that school's out?
Yes it is.
So what better way?
Of course I couldn't time that perfectly because I had to wait for the damn ad in the beginning, but hey.
It ruins all effects.
Alright.
I remember when I was in elementary school that would come on the radio like before my school was out and I was so upset.
I was so upset that they would be playing schools out while I still had school obligations.
I'm sorry to hear that, but let's not ruin the vibe that you've got going today.
Let's not even talk about it.
Summer of Buckrake, baby!
Yeah, absolutely.
Listen, everyone knows that feeling, you know, it's like early June, although for you it's early, of like you're about to get out of school, like let's say it's seventh grade or whatever, and you cannot wait.
In fact, I just watched Jason Confused as a drive-thru of last month, and it was a great experience.
Although, have you ever gone to drive-thrus before?
Yeah, absolutely.
I love a drive-in.
Drive-in.
What am I saying?
Drive-through.
Drive-in.
I've never really done it.
It's a little bit rough on the butt.
I gotta tell you.
It's not great on the butt.
You gotta shift around.
You gotta move.
Not great.
No.
But I do love a good drive-in.
All of this is to say, by the way, And we got to get into, of course we were recording this on Thursday, April 29th, going to come out on the 30th.
We do have to react to the State of the Union, not State of the Union.
Whatever, however we want to address this.
It's a joint address of Congress.
It's the State of the Union without saying it's the State of the Union.
He can't go up there and say the State of the Union is meh.
You know, that's not part of it.
It is its own thing that we have to talk about at this point.
I don't know if it smells like a State of the Union and talks like a State of the Union.
Quacks like a State of the Union?
Chances are.
So, I've got a lot of takes.
I've got a lot of thoughts on what we watched last night.
We also have to talk about Tim Scott's abysmal And let me tell you what, the Republican response to the State of the Union, it's like an elephant graveyard, man.
It is.
And you know what?
We did not have the Muckrake podcast when Marco Rubio and Bobby Jindal destroyed their careers.
So we have to talk about those things and add a certain level of context and humor.
But before we get to that, let's get to the big enchilada.
Nick, how do you feel about this speech?
I got chills, Jared.
I gotta tell you, there were moments- Chills?
Yeah, when he starts to describe, I mean, you know, as the list of what's the accomplishments and where we're going.
And, you know, you have Trump's orations sort of fresh in your mind too, and you remember what that was like and how, just how unpresidential that was at the very bottom line base, like the way he presented himself.
So I actually felt like I was getting back in touch with some sort of deep down, you know, stuff.
Feeling I haven't had in a long time.
Maybe that's called patriotism.
I don't know what that would be called, but there was something bubbling up to the surface and I was actually not prepared for it.
So was it a Chris Matthews thrill running up your leg?
Is that what it was?
It was up my leg and then out my shirt sleeve for sure.
I tell you what, when Chris Matthews said about listening to Barack Obama that he felt a thrill run up his leg, That was probably the right time to pull him off the air.
And that was a while back.
That was early on.
That should have been the moment.
Yeah, I have to tell you, I am still trying to refashion my consciousness from the Trump presidency.
I know we all are.
I know that we are.
I actually went back and watched his last State of the Union.
I had forgotten and this is, this is like, this is Trump in a nutshell.
It was like the moment where he would land on a line and then he would decide that he needed to repeat the line as if it just occurred to him because maybe it did.
And he'd be like, then we want strong borders.
We want strong borders.
We want strong borders, don't we folks?
And I watched it and I was like, oh my God, who let this asshole up on the lectern, you know?
And listen, Biden is not the smoothest operator.
He is not.
And there was even a moment in it last night where, like, he kind of let his stutter kind of get ahead of him, which happens.
And he was like, sorry, let me go back and do that.
Like, it was not the cleanest, most polished thing that was ever given.
But to get beyond Trump, and by the way we're just talking about presentation now, we're not even talking about what was actually said, what was addressed, what was proposed, but to even hear a president who wasn't up there starting fights, who wasn't sowing total division was, I mean it felt like a different universe.
I might have to do something I never thought I would do.
I have to defend somebody who's indefensible.
Wow.
I have to defend Ted Cruz.
Sleepy Ted.
Sleepy Ted.
I got to admit, Jared, you know, my biggest fear, if I ever were a senator, would that be, I would do exactly what Ted Cruz did.
I'd be sitting there and it's long, it's 45 minutes, whatever, and I would nod off.
So I feel for him.
I have some real empathy for Ted Cruz.
So for those of you who didn't watch it, and there are a lot of people right now nodding in their cars, driving safely, obviously.
The camera at one point panned on over to Ted Cruz, who, um, I think this was probably 930, 940 Eastern, uh, who, I mean, wasn't just asleep.
I mean, like he was, he was in like head nodding down, rim sleep.
My favorite thing about Ted Cruz, who, by the way, I tweeted this earlier today, has earned his public paycheck, abandoning his constituents to a wintry hell.
And lighting off to Cancun, Mexico.
And then, on top of it, like, he got caught sleeping at the State of the Union.
But my favorite part of it, Nick, is that he was wearing a mask that was the Texan, like, flag with the cannon that says, come and take it.
Which, if you're asleep, people can come and take that cannon.
That's right.
It's supposed to denote alertness.
Mixed messages.
It's so many mixed messages for sure.
Yeah.
And so, uh, but he did clap when they did get a shot of him clapping because I want to bring this up.
Um, you know, I get it in this political climate.
They don't want, the Republicans don't want to be seen, you know, agreeing with anything.
Uh, they caught him clapping and maybe even Lindsey Graham clapping on the, uh, on the, on the vaccine rollout.
Okay, great.
But when he announced his intention of, uh, cutting child poverty in half, Child poverty.
Child.
Children.
Children not starving and not being poor.
They cut across and not one, as far as I could tell, Republican even like raised one hand much less the other to clap them together.
And I couldn't believe what I was seeing that they couldn't even do that for child poverty.
I'll take it one step forward, actually, because there was another thing that actually was in the same vein.
They, the Republicans, could not be bothered to clap for a proposal to eliminate lead in pipes that carry drinking water.
And by the way, and this goes ahead, let's get into the substance of this speech.
Can I just say, What a fucking embarrassment it is that the President of the United States of America, the most powerful country that has ever existed, the richest, wealthiest country in the history of the world, supposedly the most exceptional nation that has ever existed in all of humankind, that in 2021, we're just now talking about getting lead out of the pipes carrying our drinking water?
That is That's an embarrassment.
That's shameful.
Oh, it gets worse, because this bill passed, but it wasn't 100 to 0.
I don't know, did you see that, the results?
Did you see who had felt compelled to vote twice?
The two senators were both, happened to be in the GOP, just, you know, coincidence.
Weird.
And then, you know, the guy, this guy Hawley, I think he's been notable for other things as well.
And I think it's Cruz was the second guy who did not vote for this bill.
I mean, my god, it's... And I have to say, one of the things that actually struck me after last night, and this was something that I had to... I had to sit with for a little while, and I actually wrote about it today on my sub stack.
You know, like immediately, obviously, idiots like Cruz and the Republicans, they got in front of every camera that they could find.
And they were like, oh, the president laid out.
And by the way, they're doing the same thing that like everybody always does, which is, oh, it was so boring, but radical, right?
Like it was all at once.
And what a radical idea.
What a socialist idea.
Joe Biden didn't push anything radical.
Last night.
What Joe Biden actually did in the speech, and hear me out because this is important, and we've talked about this a lot, the Republicans dominate every debate.
And they dominate every debate because they define the terms and they define the battleground, right?
They determine what reality is and everyone loses these linguistic battles.
Well, let's make this very clear.
The President of the United States, Joe Biden, last night didn't propose anything radical.
All he did that was quote-unquote radical to the Republican Party is he went in front of the American people and actually announced what the problems are in this country.
And that was termed radical.
That should tell you everything that you need to know.
Oh, there is one thing, though, that was not only radical to the right, certainly, but I'm telling you, I was I almost fell off the couch watching this.
And when he said That trickle-down economics doesn't work.
I don't know if people really kind of understand and fathom what that means to have the President of the United States saying that out loud.
You can't argue this anymore.
I think that might resonate.
I think we might have finally, since 1980 until today, gotten to a point where you can, on equal terms, argue that the whole religion of the Republican Party's fiscal foundation is built on a lie.
And by the way, the Republican Party has known all along that trickle-down economics is bullshit.
behind him and then the music fades up in like a movie.
I couldn't believe that that was spoken and that that's going to be out there.
People can listen to that and believe it.
And by the way, the Republican Party has known all along that trickle down economics is bullshit.
Matter of fact, one of the first and foremost critics of trickle down economics was, wait, let me check this out.
Noted liberal George H.W.
Bush.
Yes.
Voodoo economics.
Called it voodoo economics because no body in the Republican Party, in their constellation of bullshit think tanks, nobody actually thought that this worked.
They understood that this was a redistribution of wealth from the bottom up.
Now, we have to be honest about this.
Why that was important and also, by the way, another seismic event that happened last night, right?
And by the way, we haven't even gotten into the actual proposals at this point.
And again, it was not a radical thing.
It was a very common sense, middle of the road, moderate proposal that sounded like a revolution because of how bullshit this country is.
The other thing that he said was that white supremacy is terrorism.
Now, in order to point out why these were giant seismic shifts, we have to take an honest look at Joe Biden.
Who is Joe Biden?
What has his political career been?
Joe Biden was, I should say, a senator from Delaware, which meant that Joe Biden represented, and by the way, nobody lives in Delaware.
No real human being actually lives in Delaware.
By the way, there's like two people, I assume, listening to this show who live in Delaware.
Basically, Delaware is where banks have their offices, where corporations have their offices, where credit card companies have their offices.
That state has been in that pursuit.
And Joe Biden has always been there for those people.
He's always been their senator.
That guy, who by the way was part of the Democrat Leadership Council, that said we will never beat Ronald Reagan, we'll never beat the Republicans, we have to enter into an economic consensus with them or we'll lose every election whatsoever.
That guy came out and said trickle-down economics doesn't work.
And you have been listening to a free preview of our Patreon exclusive Weekender Show.
If you want to get in on all the fun and get that bonus episode every week.
Not to mention exclusive content, live hangouts, question and answer sessions.
We're even going to do some of these live so you can come and watch how the sausage is made.
All you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast On top of that, you get to hang out with the Muckrake community, which are a really good group of people.
