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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman go through the House Tax Plan as put together by Republicans who used to pretend to care about deficits, but this one will just add to the debt astronomically. Donald Trump's awful math makes him think he can make up that deficit by selling Gold Cards to get citizenship. They had to go through the bizarre "Dear Leader" (but who is the leader) cabinet meeting that had Bobby Kennedy Jr minimizing a measles outbreak in Texas. And they finish with Jeff Bezos editorializing the editorials - exerting the kind of control that, in a different era, would have killed any publication's credibility.
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I was not going to forget to crack open two episodes in a row, Nick.
Really?
Two?
Wow.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the McCray Podcast.
I'm JJ. It's next time I'm here with Nick.
Nick, how's your weekend looking?
My weekend is looking like not much, so that's always good, I guess, right?
I don't know.
I mean, sure.
I'll take it.
With the way things are going, I'll take a weekend with nothing going on.
Yeah, hunker down, just relax.
I mean, the weather has been absolutely amazing in LA, but it will now get a little bit colder, so we'll have to deal with that.
But I won't mention the numbers because people, I'm sure, are very cold right now.
It's getting warmer out in what I like to call real America.
It's getting a little bit warmer.
But we do hope you all are going to have a good weekend.
And unfortunately, we're going to start it off with some nasty shit.
Yeah, but just understand that where I live will be real America pretty soon.
And the rest of you guys will have to come over here.
Wow.
I just want the listeners to go ahead and note that down.
That Nick is taunting us.
With entry or non-entry into the Republic of California.
Yeah.
I mean, listen, we're wide open.
You can come, but that's where you have to be if you want to have a democratic society.
We'll see.
I mean, listen, I'll do a juice cleanse every now and then.
All right.
I'm fine with it.
Or a sugar fast or whatever it is that y'all get into.
Right now, I haven't had sugar in a week, man.
Feeling great.
You look it.
You look like a man who hasn't had sugar in a week.
All right, everybody.
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All right, Nick, so we got a whole lot of nasty shit to go over.
Let's begin on Tuesday.
The House GOP passed their budget.
We knew this thing was going to be bad.
It's real bad.
It was passed along partisan lines, 217 to 215. It has pushed to extend the Trump 27 tax cuts, a reminder to everybody that not a single cent of this trickled down from the wealthiest few and hurt our economy.
It would add new cuts.
It looks like it wants to slash $2 trillion with all eyes on Medicaid and Medicare.
It would raise the debt ceiling by $4 trillion.
And Nick, let me check my figures here.
That can't be right.
The fiscally conservative party wants to add over $3 trillion to the federal deficit?
Wild.
They snuck that one in there, Jared, maybe on page 40. I'm sure it was a math error.
I'm sure that the Republican party did not intend to add to the federal deficit.
Well, you know, luckily for us, I believe there really are a couple of zealots, and that's all you need in the GOP. Bullshit.
Consistently talk about how they want to slash budgets and save money when we all know that when you reduce taxes like they want to reduce them on the wealthiest people, they never pay for themselves.
That's just math.
It always blows up the deficit.
Always.
And that's probably the goal without them saying it out loud.
But at some point, maybe someone will figure that out that votes for these people and then stop voting for them.
I don't know.
Well, you know, first things first, a reminder to anybody who's lost track of this, all of the quote-unquote principles the Republican Party have are cudgels.
They're not real.
They don't believe in small government.
They don't believe in fiscal or social conservatism, any of those things.
Those things are always weapons to use against the Democratic Party and appeals to voters.
What we're looking at here is $4.5 trillion worth of tax cuts.
That is their goal.
And for anybody saying that sounds like a lot of money, you are correct.
And on top of that, Nick, they've done one of the sneakiest things, even though, like, if you pay any attention to it whatsoever, you know what's happening here.
They have put out a goal of eliminating $880 billion.
This was a figure that you and I talked about a couple of episodes ago.
And they're looking around and they're like, well, are we going to get rid of this $880 billion by getting rid of a program here, by getting rid of some employees here?
And there's just one big target.
And that's what that is.
It's Medicaid and Medicare.
And you texted me the other day when this thing became clear, and you said, how is it that they can go after Medicaid and hope to ever win an election?
And there's a couple things we need to talk about here, particularly with this budget.
And that is, one, they are completely relying on a lack of participation in American politics.
We saw from the, you know, the trend in America is more and more people are tuning out from politics and aren't figuring out what's happening until it finally hits their pocketbooks, though they're hoping that people won't notice that Medicaid or Medicare gets absolutely slashed.
The other thing, Nick, is we are in a late stage of this thing, and it is a smash and grab.
Much like getting rid of Roe v.
Wade, much like everything that Trump is doing, they basically see the finish line up ahead.
And it's much like anybody who's ever ran like a, what is it, 5K? I don't do those races.
I race for myself.
Yeah, 5K, a marathon, whatever it is.
They see the finish line up ahead and they're ready to sprint toward it with any and all consequences.
But this is one of the big ones.
This budget that got put forth, it should make it abundantly clear what it is they want to do and what it is they're going to try and do.
Well, is the finish line putting Trump in a coffin and hanging it upside down from the ceiling?
Or is it that they're never going to have elections anymore?
Well, I mean, I think probably both.
I think both are probably factored into that plan.
Right.
Because it's like, I can see that Trump's like, you know what?
I don't care.
After four more years, I'll be so wealthy.
I don't have to care anymore.
That's one part of this whole thing, right?
But then, obviously, with the Republicans who intend to continue staying in their positions of power, yes, you have to imagine, like, maybe they're going to have to figure out a way where the elections do not count the way we're used to them counting.
And that would be what keeps them in power.
But again, we've talked about this for years and years, how the Republicans just needed the chance.
Once you see how good life is going to be, Once we can get all these things in and ram them through by hook or by crook, it'll be, you know, even on earth here.
And I can't picture any other version of this besides massive suffering.
And maybe, you know, even if you wanted to try and extend it out to eventually 20 years from now when the budget somehow balance and slash and there's just less people in America, right?
Like that's basically what they're counting on.
But why do millions of people have to suffer needlessly like that for 20 years until they get to some fantasy?
Well, I mean, a lot of what you're saying is really important to land on.
First and foremost, they have been living in a fantasy their entire careers.
Their ideology is based around a fantasy.
The trickle-down economics never worked.
A lot of people understood that, and everybody else just kind of...
I lived in some sort of utopian fantasy that eventually it would somehow or another come together.
They're not deep thinkers, a lot of these people.
The other thing, which we're going to talk about at length later, Nick, is, you know, back in the day when I played Monopoly and I would play with my family and everybody would get mad at one another and, like, they would screw each other and it would ruin a Sunday afternoon.
I didn't care about the money I was spending.
You know why?
Because when the game of Monopoly was over...
You put the board, you put your pieces, you put your hotels and your houses, and eventually all of the paper money into a box and you put it away.
It wasn't real.
And so what we're looking at here is a lot of people who do not have forward thought because on one hand, they don't care.
They just want to get the tax cuts that they have.
They want to re-engineer the economy and the government in order to carry out the agenda that they want.
And a lot of them have come to the understanding that...
We might not necessarily have dollars anymore.
Then it might just not matter in the long run, especially if you have some sort of authoritarian landscape that is helped by, you know, corruption and things like cryptocurrency, which we'll talk about later as well.
But yeah, it's literally a bunch of people.
Some of them are lost in fantasies that don't make sense.
A faith, a religious faith in something that doesn't exist.
And others are just like, you know what?
Smoke them if you got them.
Let's go.
Well, think about what you just said about your family playing Monopoly.
What are you really doing when you're playing Monopoly?
You are participating in a capitalistic venture.
No, it's a capitalistic venture, but for the record, we were also engaging in self-destruction within the household.
It never ended up well.
It was really bad.
Because that's what it does, right?
On a Sunday in your house, you were able to recreate what was going on in the big picture here now, turning people against each other.
And what's mine and what's not mine and what I'm not willing to share or help with anything else.
And it's like, that's the problem with the society in a nutshell, is that you're guaranteed to have winners and losers, no matter what people's decisions are.
But the Republicans want to treat this like any of the people who are losing are simply people who made bad decisions and don't deserve any help.
That's the problem here, right?
All the losers that we have in a capitalist society, and the losers is not the right word, are simply a product of the system itself.
And plenty of people who have money who are successful have made worse decisions in their lives.
And because of their backgrounds and the color of their skin, they don't have to deal with what other people do.
And that's what they don't seem to understand or are unwilling to understand.
And so they're just moving toward the party that wants to say the N-word out loud.
And you know, Nick, we're sitting here and we often paint a dismal portrait of where things are going.
But the good news in this, we have a clip here from Donald Trump.
Last time I checked, he was President of the United States in name and title only.
He's got a plan that's going to take care of this whole thing.
Let's go ahead and hear what the old boss has cooked up.
We're going to be selling a gold card.
You have a green card.
This is a gold card.
We're going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million, and that's going to give you green card privileges plus.
It's going to be a route to citizenship.
And wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card.
They'll be wealthy, and they'll be successful, and they'll be spending a lot of money and paying a lot of taxes and employing a lot of people.
And we think it's going to be extremely successful.
It's never been done before anything like this.
Oh, good.
I'm glad they're going to take two weeks putting this thing together.
A couple of notes here.
One of the most anti-immigration political figures that we've ever had has now put a for sale sign up for people wanting to buy immigration.
For the record, this guy who is completely and utterly lost, undoubtedly they said gold card to him and he was like, yeah, absolutely, let's do it.
And the good news here, Nick, is that this open for sale sign in terms of immigration, it's going to solve all the deficit problems anyway.
So what do we have to worry about?
Well, when you deal with math like these guys are doing, including Musk, who supposedly is some guy who's supposed to know about math and coding and whatnot, this is the example of what we're dealing with.
Here's what he said about a little bit more about this gold card.
Howard was using a different number, but that's $5 trillion.
If we sell 10 million, which is possible, 10 million highly productive people coming in or people that we're going to make productive, they'll be young, but they're talented, like a talented athlete.
That's $50 trillion.
Okay.
Nick, I'm just a humble ex-humanities professor, but no.
Yes.
10 million people buying a car for $5 million each does not equal $50 trillion.
No.
It's like, I don't even know what to say because it's so frustrating.
I taught math in high school, but I don't even know.
You don't have to have taught that to understand that.
So this is what we're dealing with.
Idiots.
They're idiots.
They don't, and they're in power.
Like, this is how, how does this happen?
And, you know, meanwhile, I mean, it just makes me think about Lauren Boebert can't even spell, gosh, what was the word?
I'm sorry.
You didn't see this?
I'll tell you one second.
But, you know, it's like these are idiots that are getting elected.
There's no respect for, you know, intelligence anymore or people able to do stuff like that is confident.
Oh, yeah.
She spelled disdain, like as in you have disdain for me, Jared.
She spelled it D-I-S. Oh, no, D-I-S-T-A-I-N. Well, that's tough.
That's a tough one.
That's a tough L there for Lauren Boebert.
Nick, I also want to point out, this idea is not only corrupt to its core, and it's going to bring over oligarchs, but also tech workers.
And do you know what this is about, Nick?
This is the equivalent of Tom Sawyer talking kids into painting the fence for him.
If you remember, one of the biggest schisms that we had recently was the fight between Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and all of the white nationalists who didn't want to have the H1 visa situation expanded.
So what did they do?
They created a brand new story for them.
We're now going to make a bunch of money.
Basically, having tech companies and oligarchs paying to come to the United States of America, and that's how we're going to solve things.
They took the biggest problem that they had within their base, they just put a coat of paint on it, and now they're going to go along with it, even though it's like one of the most open pieces of corruption you could ever imagine.
Oh, I got even the worst scenario for you, Jared.
Are you ready?
Are you sitting down?
Let's just say, and this is me because I watch a lot of movies, but let's just say you're a, I don't know, we'll call it, let's just say you're a spy.
And you like to spy on America.
Is it easier to spy on America if you are in America?
I don't like that you're saying that, but you're absolutely right.
Yeah, and would it be easier if you had machine?
Of like, oh, you're a businessman who now has a literal, you know, a green card or even citizenship and now can be a spy for whatever country that has plenty of money to spend on $5 million to do that and get them in.
So imagine the ramifications of that.
And they are not going to give a shit.
They can't even vet people who are, you know, working on algorithms or correct code for Doge, much less, you know, vetting anybody else who's going to come to this country, even though they can't complain that that's what, like, the big problem that they want to look at.
It's astounding to me, but then again, that is also the thing.
They probably want the spies to come.
They want us all open and everyone to sort of be on the same page with all the other axes.
We are the axes.
We are the bad guys now, Jared.
We're the bad guys.
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