Dave Smith and his co-host dissect the 2012 election, mocking media fixation on Romney's tax status while critiquing Obama's foreign policy and GDP figures. They condemn QE3 as a path to hyperinflation, advocate for a gold standard, and label Medicare and Social Security as Ponzi schemes. The discussion extends to student loan disasters, Ann Coulter's book "Mugged," and the war on drugs, arguing that government intervention has exacerbated racial disparities and economic stagnation, ultimately warning of a catastrophic future for the American economy. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Edgy Music Choice00:02:43
You are listening to Part of the Problem.
How is it possible that this song exists and yet our troops are not home yet from Iraq?
How is this song not at all events?
Edgy Music Choice, by the way.
I didn't come here to be offended.
Dave, this is part of the problem.
We are not afraid to take a position on this show.
Is that how you choose your music?
You just choose music that you feel is part of the problem.
I think the concept is that we're all part of the problem.
Everyone is part of the problem.
Starting with Achilles.
Oh, they're definitely part of the problem.
Guys, welcome, everybody.
Thanks for listening.
If you haven't figured it out yet, this is part of the problem.
The greatest podcast ever in the history of podcasting.
And that's a lot.
That's a lot to say.
Yeah, that sounds fair.
But it's nice to be here.
It is nice to be back.
Thank you, everybody, for listening.
And thanks, everybody who's been listening.
It's nice to be here.
Of course, as always, I am joined by my partner in crime, the lovely Jessica Sager.
Hello.
And backed by Popular Demand, one of our favorite guests of all the three that we've had.
Popular Demand, more popular than two people, or at least two people couldn't make it today.
Dave Kinney, welcome back.
Helen.
Thanks for coming.
It's a rainy day, but you know what?
It's a beautiful day when you put on the killers.
What's that song even called?
The Greatest Podcast Ever00:02:09
When I went to look it up, I was like, where do we get I got sold, but I'm not a soldier.
It comes up.
Yeah, but their band is called The Killer, so it's kind of mixed messages, I think.
It's true.
Whatever.
They're not saying, like, in times of peace, they won't fucking kill you.
Just they're against war.
I don't think even that band has put that much thought into them.
They probably haven't.
And I'll tell you, that was not a lot of thought.
They're like, you play guitar, I play drums.
Let's go get laid.
Wow.
Okay, so first thing, before we even get started today, I do have to, I want to make a couple corrections.
Things that have been brought to my attention, a couple things that we got wrong in previous spots.
And I know, if anybody, everybody knows I hate to be wrong.
And luckily, I very rarely am.
So I'll just, but I did want to say, I did last week, I accidentally, I gave Russ Maneeve credit for a Greg Giraldo joke.
Oh.
Sorry, I take that when I was saying the joke about the joke about the letters back from war from the World War II veterans compared to the Iraq veterans.
That's a Greg Giraldo joke.
I said I think it was Russ Moneve, but it wasn't.
It was Greg Giraldo, who, for anyone who doesn't know, late, great, great comedian, who's not with us anymore.
Russ Maneevee is a great comedian, and he's alive, which is a plus, so you can still see him.
Up, but that wasn't his joke.
Is that a subtle dig at Greg Giraldo?
Because that's like an awful lot.
He's a great joke writer, but when it comes to being alive, I know that joke.
That's a great joke.
Yeah, that is a great joke.
I messed up giving that credit too.
And this was from Ruben brought this to my attention from a couple podcasts back.
I said, which look, I will, I mess up sometimes.
I rant on for over an hour on the show.
But the thing I said about Ayn Rand, I said second most sales to the bye ball, which is completely wrong.
What I was thinking of is The Secret.
No, no, no.
There's this big poll they did where she was the second most influential book in America, but it wasn't second most sales.
It's probably 50 Shades of Gray.
Yeah, no, I'm sure there was something way trashier.
But that's a pretty big.
Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugs?
I believe it's Atlas Shrugs.
That was her other one.
Tax Flashcards in Election Season00:15:19
I got to get paid.
That was her book that didn't do so well.
Her later records, not nearly recorded.
But anyway, the point I was making when I brought up that was that just that it was about feminism, and I was saying that feminism is like it's liberalism first and then feminism.
Like, that's what it really is.
And I was just making the point that feminists never celebrate women who did anything on the right.
Like, they're not like Ayn Rand, second most influential book ever, not second most sales.
The second most influential book in our country that, you know, no one talks about her.
Margaret Thatcher led Britain.
No one cares about like if you're conservative, they don't really defend you at all.
And then I was making the point, you know, so anyway, I was really still right in the point I was making, but I did get something wrong there.
So see, I'll correct it, and I'm sure I'll get more stuff wrong coming up.
So there, all right, start with that.
That was fun.
Well, Dave, you know, since you're here, I thought this was, and you're such a, you're a football fan.
You have your Saving the Dolphins.
Yep.
What's the website?
Yeah, savingthedolphins.com.
Savingtholsky.org.
Just as a people who want to save the Dolphins.
That's right.
That's right.
You told us this last.
That's right.
Savingthedolphins.com or.org.
You decide.
Yes.
Whichever one you want to go to.
So I'll bring this up.
That the NFL refs are back.
Yes.
Or they will be back.
No, no, they're back.
Well, they're back.
They're on Thursday.
And they will be back for the entire league on Sunday.
That's a good save.
I'm like, no, they're back Thursday.
And they will continue to be back forever because that's how being back works.
Well, who knows?
I mean, the way strikes work now, they'll probably have another strike next year.
What did you think about the whole situation?
Are you glad you're happy they're back?
I'm sure.
Yeah, it's so funny because, I mean, as a football fan, one of your favorite things to do is whenever there's a call against your team, be like, oh, come on, bullshit.
And then they watch a replay and you're like, no, all right, that does look like interference.
Right.
But the thing is, I mean, like, there were just, I mean, the games that I saw, and I'm not the dude who whines about every single call.
I mean, like, holding to the point where you're just grabbing a dude by his jersey and like just he's like dragging you across the field.
I mean, like, there were so many calls that were so, so bad.
I mean, I think that the Green Bay call was the one where it kind of came to a head.
Yeah, such a blatant ticket.
Took a game a while.
A blatant call that anyone who knows the sport at all could have made was obviously the wrong, and it changed the game at the end in dramatic function.
They were really bad.
It definitely went to show you how good the real refs are.
You realize like, oh shit, these guys are bad.
It is pretty crazy, and some people have been talking about how much it just shows where America's at.
I mean, this got so much more attention than the Chicago teachers' strike that preceded it the week before.
I mean, people, it was like, look, if the kids in the city of Chicago aren't going to school for a few days, like whatever.
But if games in the NFL are being changed, they're like, look, that kid can still catch up later, but Green Bay cannot get that win back.
That is not a legal contest.
I'm calling my Congressman.
It is pretty crazy.
But not even just, and it doesn't even have to be a thing about strikes.
You could just say the anger that there was.
I mean, there was more outrage over getting these fucking refs back than, like, the NDAA bill or, like, any, like, major.
It just shows, like, where America's at.
And it's crazy.
This is, like, all throughout history, though, inside the empire.
They keep you real fucking dumb down.
Tying it back to politics, Bill Simmons had brought up this idea, which is really funny, which is, I think the easiest way for Mitt Romney to turn things around because he has the money he has would just be like, hey, America, I'm going to pay the difference to get the refs back.
I'm saving football, guys.
Like, how quickly...
I mean, even like people who are on the liberal side of things would be like, just Mitt Romney, guys, not all bad.
Yeah, like, stop fucking holding back and trying to be like, no, I'm not out of touch.
Be like, yes, look, I am out of touch.
I'm out of touch because I'm way richer than all you guys.
But I can hook you up with like some of the people.
I'm going to put you in touch with some good refereeing.
How's that sound?
Yeah, I mean, well, we can.
Barbecue at my house.
That's a good translation.
Let's talk about the presidential race a little bit.
Right.
So Mitt Romney, overall, right now, where we're at, there's like the national polls are actually pretty close.
But in the swing states, Obama is pulling ahead in pretty much every swing state.
So it's looking pretty good for Obama, which is crazy in the environment we're in.
It really goes to show how bad a candidate Mitt Romney is.
I mean, we've been saying this every single week.
It's like politics is a fucking popularity contest, and there's no chance that Mitt Romney can beat Obama in a popularity contest.
Something crazy would have to happen.
I mean, I guess people are saying he'll have his chance at the debate, the first debates this Wednesday.
Funny thing about that, Romney's campaign sent down a memo saying that Obama's probably going to win the debates, but don't worry, Romney will still win the election afterward.
Well, yes, they're trying to brace everyone because everyone's saying this is his last chance is the debate.
So they're trying to go.
The backup plan is like, if the debates don't go good, we don't want it to be over right then.
Yeah, they can keep saying that all they want to, but at some point you've got to start having a path to win this thing.
Whatever.
It doesn't really, I mean, again, doesn't much matter.
The truth is, the more I think about it, I just kind of, in a way, I want Obama to win because America is so dumb that it's like when things fall apart, it needs to be on a liberal's watch in order for them to understand.
Like if Mitt Romney got back in and the economy collapsed next year, it's like, well, there you go.
Free market came right back and collapsed the economy.
Like I know that would be the narrative that'll happen.
Just like in 2008, that was the narrative.
But I mean, that's been the narrative from the opposite side, too.
I mean, the economy crashed under a Republican.
Right, right.
And now all Republicans are like, if we would have put another Republican in office, it instantly would have turned around.
We would all be driving Mercedes right now.
But Obama just refuses to let people get jobs.
Well, no, but you know what?
There is a pretty, I mean, I don't know.
The argument I make from a free market position, which I think is pretty goddamn consistent, is, again, I'm a small government guy, and we've had the two biggest government presidents in a row.
Like, the idea, look, you've got to get out of the matrix a little bit and get out of the idea that George Bush and Barack Obama are polar opposites.
They're not.
Their policies are like centimeters apart from each other.
What is the policy that you're talking about that's changed?
I don't get how he goes to this era of deregulation and low tax cuts in the Bush administration that everyone talks about.
First of all, all the tax cuts have been continued.
None of these tax cuts have gone up.
They were continued by Obama under an all-Democratic Congress.
They're all been continued.
There's no difference in taxes.
So it's just rhetoric is what Obama's talking about.
He talks about taxing the rich the same way he talks about peace, but it's not real.
He's kept the same foreign policy going.
We've actually been, by any objective measure, more aggressive under Obama than we were under Bush.
Certainly, I mean, with the drone programs, with extradition to other countries, in terms of crossing borders of countries that we're not even declaring war in.
I mean, again, the war in Iraq is quote unquote over, but in real terms, the war in Iraq is not over.
And neither is the war in Afghanistan will not be over next year.
I'm just saying, this idea that Mitt Romney represents going back to the Bush administration, it's like, no, Mitt Romney will continue the Bush administration the same way Obama did.
They're all pretty much doing the same thing.
It's pretty much all the same.
What's interesting about Romney and Obama's war positions?
The Romney campaign is saying that Obama is too timid.
Yeah.
They're saying he's too timid and that he should have gotten Osama bin Laden faster than he did.
Yeah, and it's such a terrible position.
I would have had him at least two weeks earlier.
It's such a terrible position, and they just don't know how to handle the fact that he's been every bit the war criminal George Bush was.
So they can't go at him with this traditional, like, you're the Democrat who's soft.
And they can't go at him like, you're a war criminal because that's kind of their thing.
So they can't, like, it's this crazy.
Well, if he's a war criminal, then so is George Bush and so is Ronald Reagan, which they all are.
But it's like he can't, the Republicans can't go down this line because they're bought.
That would be like as soon as you're going to see the Democrats start challenging the teachers' union.
They're bought by these guys.
They can't start challenging the military-industrial complex.
That's who the Republican Party is.
So, you know, it's this thing where they can't really knock him effectively.
But I'm just saying things were terrible under George Bush, but it's to blame it on the free market is what drives me crazy.
It's like George Bush is about as free market a president as Stalin.
Like, there's no, I don't know how you even.
Yeah, that's a fair comparison.
Like, but literally, I mean, it's not that crazy of a fucking comparison.
That is a total violation of the word, literally.
That is a violation.
Figuratively, though.
No, you're right.
It's not a good.
All right.
No, but I mean, no, no, he's the exact same as Stalin.
Yes, that was an exaggeration.
Next episode, you're going to be like, I want to make a correction.
Literally.
Evidently, Stalin killed a few people.
It was in wartime.
I'm not making excuses.
It was in wartime.
A bunch of nitpicky fact-checkers called me up.
It's like, first off, you should probably stop worshiping that Christian God.
It's not going to get good for you.
To your point about what you're saying, I feel like, especially in election season, I feel like the parties just have certain flashcards that have a tax written on them that they're going to read out no matter who the candidate is.
So the Republicans are like, Democrat is soft on war and like soft on national security.
It's like, but this guy killed Osama bin Laden, and he's been doing drone attacks like it's going out of style.
He's like, well, my card says soft on national security.
No, absolutely.
So I'm just not going to stay from it.
Socialists raise taxes incredibly.
No, he actually extended the same Bush tax cuts.
If anything, it's the same shit.
Well, the card says really high on taxes.
Absolutely.
We talked about last week where they go, you know, they found this tape with Obama saying redistribute.
You know, he's for redistribution.
And you go, so Mitt Romney, is your position that you're not for redistribution?
Who the fuck is that?
It's so funny to me.
It's like they wanted, it's like these words like social.
I wish people would just stand up and be honest about what they are.
Everybody who runs for office is a socialist in America right now.
That's what our federal government does.
It does social.
There is a free market part of our government, of our society, but it has nothing to do with what the government's doing.
The government's out there, like literally, but if anyone ever mentions it, you go, if you say that you're a socialist, then you're fucking doomed.
If social security is socialism, of course, yes.
The whole income tax, everything about the federal government that funds the government is a big socialist experiment.
But they can't say it.
You know, it's like Ron Paul was the only guy out there who's not for redistribution, and they all agree that he's insane.
Like, everyone agrees that he's crazy.
It's like, yeah, the one guy who's not for redistribution, you go, oh, well, this maniac here.
And someone goes, I'm for redistribution.
And they go, what?
You're for redistribution.
Yes, that's the whole, your whole group is for redistribution.
What do you think all of this is?
Mitt Romney is Mitt Romney has said strong safety net like 20,000 times during this campaign already.
They're all for some degree of redistribution.
The other thing I do want to say, though, is that, and again, I've knocked Romney every single week.
I think he's a terrible candidate.
I think he would be a terrible president.
Republican John Kerry.
Yeah, absolutely.
And just a terrible.
Again, there's nothing.
He stands for nothing, and he's not going to get anything done.
And just like all these Republican presidents, none of them ever cut spending.
He's not going to cut spending.
The government will just keep growing in slightly different ways.
Anyway, I will say it is pretty incredible how biased the media is.
So, I mean, it is Fox News versus pretty much everyone is in the tank for Obama.
It's unbelievable.
It's just like every little thing, dude.
Wait, you think Fox News is in the tank for Obama?
No, I said Fox News versus everybody in the tank for Obama.
I mean, there's a couple other outlets, but it's pretty like when you just see things like the newest tape that's been on every single show, the thing where Mitt Romney says he's harvesting companies.
I mean, he's literally laying out, he goes, he's like, Bayon Capital's goal is, you know, to take over companies.
We actually take an active role in managing these companies, and we try to harvest them for a profit.
Every single scenario, it's a bad word.
Like, first, do you even understand?
I mean, it's just so the entire media, it's like they're just all, they all have a tremendous amount of contempt for capitalism.
They all have a lot of like contempt for just the idea of free markets.
Like, oh my God, you're trying to take a company and squeeze the money out of it.
It's like this idea is that, well, they take a company and they literally, like, they're going to come in and sell off everything and bleed everyone's pension and just squeeze everything broke as if that is more profitable than just creating a really profitable company.
Well, that's what they were trying to do in every single case.
When the companies would have failed, they tried to bring them to life.
And then, you know, they do what every company does when they finally go bankrupt and sell them.
You sell off the assets and you get, you know, you declare bankruptcy.
There's nothing wrong with doing, I don't know.
It's just every, this becomes the narrative on like every single news show now.
This just becomes the talking point.
He's got to defend himself against this tape that's nothing.
Part of it is just because I think because Mitt Romney has been so overly safe and cagey about every single aspect of his campaign, they're like, what's your plan on this?
And he's like, you'll find out later.
He's like, what did you just buy from the hardware store?
Hardware stuff.
Like, he refuses to answer any questions.
And I feel like he's been so standoffish about everything.
So then when a video comes out of him talking about the 47% and like, or like this thing about harvesting, you feel like this is our first view into a human being talking.
So it's easy to try to characterize and be like, this is who this guy really is.
Yes, it may or may not be, but I don't feel like he's giving an alternate picture to contrast it to.
Okay, here's the two things I'd say.
Okay, no, Adam, we did.
We tore apart the 47% last week.
I think that was terrible.
But you would almost think eventually they would start to have a conversation about what he's talking about.
Since this has been brought up on every single channel ever, you think at least once they would mention they would go, okay, well, there is a growing number.
That word harvesting is just, it's like, what are you saying isn't a bad point?
But that word harvesting is a very good thing.
It's just funny because it's like, look, so the company is a body, and we're going to cut it open and harvest its financial organs, and we're going to sell those on the black market, which creates profit.
So why is everyone offended by this?
That's how business works.
But right, but it's not actually, that's actually a term that's used in like venture capitalism.
But it's not actually, it's not such a bad term.
It's like harvest is like things grow and the company is more profitable.
It's more productive.
It sounds way more like the organization.
It does.
Just picture kidneys.
Okay, I get what you're saying.
But here's the point.
This is what you don't see about.
Look, there are things that Obama has said that haven't been picked up.
Let's just, yeah, real quick.
This could have been a 47% moment.
As I said, we've created 4.3 million jobs over the last two 27 months.
Over 800,000 just this year alone.
The private sector is doing fine.
That's Obama literally saying, in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression, the private sector is doing fine.
I mean, this is literally like straight out of Hoover administration.
Something in just like this terrible economy is saying, now, this, if this could have been picked up, I mean, I'm saying, if the media was as in the tank for Romney as they are for Obama, this would have been leading every single program over this.
Government Bias on Media00:15:41
We would have been talking.
If Obama would have had to defend this the way Mitt Romney has to defend the 47%, McCain got screwed on the same slide.
I'm just saying, look, this is what McCain said that the fundamentals of the economy are strong.
And Obama blasted the shit out of him for saying that.
Obama went on the offensive just for weeks, said nothing but, my opponent said the fundamentals of the economy are strong.
And look, Mitt Romney could be making such a stronger case.
I think I make a stronger case every week on this show against Obama than Mitt Romney's made yet.
Sure.
But I just don't think he's making a good case against him.
But there is definitely, he is definitely fighting Obama and Obama's media.
Yeah, well, the thing is, the thing is with Romney is, I mean, it's that he's made this weak case against Obama, but I feel like what's way worse is he's made a way weaker case for himself.
Like, I don't, I've heard a case for Obama.
I've heard a case against Obama.
I haven't really heard a compelling case for Romney.
And going back to the John Kerry example, in that election, when John Kerry went up against Bush, some people were for Bush and some people were against Bush, but no one was for John Kerry.
Absolutely.
Even his wife was like, fucking like, I mean, I guess, I'd like to live in that house.
Dude, he was.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I was not for Kerry, but I was against Bush.
I voted for Kerry because I was against Bush.
Yeah, and that's the thing is, it's hard to win an election if the only thing that you have going for you is people who are against someone else.
Like, because that doesn't compel people to get to the polls as much.
It just makes them stay home and frown a lot.
Yeah.
I mean, I just, to this point, I haven't seen much to get excited about for Romney.
I get what you guys are saying.
I think that's definitely true.
I think Mitt Romney hasn't done a great job with that.
I think there is, I think, to be honest, he just, there isn't that much of an argument for him.
I think he knows for him to really stand on who he is wouldn't win.
And I don't know.
I don't think he's got to run away from his record as a governor.
He's got to run away from his business record.
There's just nothing.
The problem is even the stuff that you can make a case that is positive, right?
Like he's donated all this money to charity.
The charity he's donated to is this, is his church, the Church of Latter-day Saints, Mormons.
And that is the very last thing his campaign wants to talk about.
So even the things that some people would feel are positives, he can't even play to his strengths.
That's why literally almost every question it's like, so what did he do today?
Nothing.
I know when I tell you, it's true.
He's the most guarded presidential candidate I've ever seen.
Which is cool, unless you want to be in politics.
Well, as far as what I was saying with the media bias, I just to finish up on that, I do just want to say that I think too often, I do think too often people call it like a liberal bias in the media, which I don't really, I don't know if I really think it's more, not so much a liberal bias, I think it's like a government bias.
I really is how I see it.
I think that the media is biased toward government and the Democrats being more the party of government and at least more verbally, like in terms of rhetoric, more the party of government.
I think it's why the media tends to side on the Democrats more because that's really what they are.
It's like this belief that government should do everything.
It's embedded in the media.
It's unbelievable.
John Stossel always talks about this.
I think it's such a great example, but just the questions that we don't even think about when it's always anytime you talk about anyone who's been in government, the question is they go, what was your greatest legislative achievement?
Like right away.
That's such a biased view of like as if you're like, so in order to be a good member of government, you should be adding a new law.
You should be adding a new rule that we can't do.
Like, who says who?
What if we get to the point?
We haven't done the opposite side of the argument.
So, you've been in Congress for 20 years.
You have not authored a single bill.
No.
I hate it.
Right, but why not?
Right, but why?
See, I completely disagree with you.
I think, yeah, that would be someone who goes, yeah, government's too big.
Why not ask, what evil law have you repealed?
What law that was hurting people have you gotten rid of instead of saying, what new rule have you added that been one more rule of things that the people can't do?
If you get to a certain point, wouldn't you say we have all the rules we have and then you don't want people who are just having legislative achievements?
All these legislative achievements are is when you got all the lobbyists together that they would all agree on some 3,000-page nonsense that would help them out.
But that's what we want.
And that's why they hit Ron Paul with exactly what you just said, where they go, oh, yeah, he's been in there for 30 years and he doesn't have one major legislative achievement, which he did get this audit the Federal Reserve thing might be his thing.
This still might go through it.
But regardless, it's like, yeah, that's the point.
He's been the one guy voting no on everything.
He's been the one guy who's up there voting no.
And I'll tell you, and they hit, you know, the party of no thing, which I wanted to specifically bring up to you, which I always think is so interesting that when we, when I first started comedy, me and you used to do shows together all the time.
And you used to have a joke about how the Democrats.
Because they were back then.
Under George Bush, the Democrats were kind of the party of no.
Yeah, like I had this joke that the joke basically was centered around that idea, but it was also that it was Democrats have no ideas.
All they do is try to stop Republicans from doing what they want to do.
Republicans have ideas, but those ideas are so evil that they must be stopped.
Like some Republican will be like, we need to blow up the moon.
And some Democrat will be like, I think we should not blow up the moon.
And then they're like, then what's your idea?
And they're like, not blow up the moon.
They're like, no ideas.
But it does, and it's very true.
And it was very, and it's a great joke.
And it's a very, like, at the time, the Democrats were the party of no.
They were the party that wanted to stop.
And people will say that the media rather was very, very, not critical nearly enough of like George Bush's wars when they were going in, kind of missed the whole thing while we were having our Netanyahu moment, which we'll talk about later.
But when we were sending Colin Powell with designs of the nuclear weapon trucks that Saddam Hussein had, the media wasn't being harsh on them.
They were never critical.
And that was kind of a government bias.
You know, like big government, the media tends to support them.
And then they ultimately, they were much harder on George Bush when he wanted to do things like privatize Social Security.
Like that's when the media got on him, when it's almost like an anti-government measure.
In fairness, he would have privatized Social Security because his idea was to tie it to the stock market.
Because as we all know, the stock market always goes up.
If that idea would have passed, it would have financially ruined.
I mean, Social Security is bad enough to begin with.
Well, just to be fair, when you say, yeah, his idea of privatizing Social Security was government getting involved in the stock market.
That to me is not privatizing anything.
Privatizing Social Security would be if you stop taxing people and let them keep their money.
I feel like if anything that has come undercover is what a disastrous idea that would have been.
What you were saying about the whole Lake Romney and the liberal bias.
I mean, there is a liberal bias to the media.
I'm not saying that there's not, but I think the stories that catch on are the stories that resonate with what people already suspected about the candidates, right?
Like, I think the reason why the financials, McCain's saying the fundamentals of the financial system are strong, is because I think a lot of people had the feeling that he was kind of out of touch.
Like, the reason why the Jeremiah Wright thing struck so hard on Obama, and it did.
I mean, he was able to pull it out against Hillary in the primaries, but it really, really hurt him a lot.
And the reason why is I think that there were a lot of people who kind of had this feeling, like, this is this black candidate.
He's probably more radical than we know, which is why when it happened, it resonates with a preconception that people already had.
I think that the reason part of why Obama, and this is even on Fox News and in more conservative outlets, part of why him saying that he feels like the private sector is strong didn't hurt him as badly as for whatever Obama's strengths and weaknesses are, I don't think people get the sense that he's out of touch.
There's people who think his ideas are dangerous.
There's people who think that he's this.
No, I think you're right.
No one thinks he's stupid.
Well, no one thinks he's stupid, and you're right.
More people, I think, do think that he kind of cares about the average American, which to me is crazy.
The reason he was saying those comments, what he was saying when he was saying the private sector is doing fine, his point was that it's the public sector, public sector jobs are the problem.
And that is very much speaks to his worldview that in these times of economic slowturn, it's government that turns us around.
And that's a very critical thing that, by the way, everyone in the Republican Party has bought onto too.
Paul Ryan voted for the bailouts.
He voted for it.
Paul Ryan said we have to abandon capitalism to save capitalism in his speech on the House floor, just like George Bush did.
So he's not, they all believe that in times of, you know, when things are going not good, that's when you need some socialism, which is a very different view from someone who believes like capitalism is where you get your wealth from so you can afford a little bit of socialism because it's like kind of morally the right thing to do is to have a safety net.
That's a very different view than saying socialism is the real economic driver that gets us out of these bad times, which is why this recession is lasting so long and why we're not turning around.
Look, my point is just...
What I was saying about Romney, what I was saying about Romney earlier, though, and like what I'm saying about Obama as far as what resonates and what doesn't, that's also the reason why that 47% video hit Romney so hard is deep down.
I think a lot of people, Democrat, Republican, Independent, have the sense that he's this rich, out-of-touch dude who just sees like the nation is a bunch of people who just feel like they deserve to eat and sleep in a bed.
Look, you're right.
This is all true.
Everything you're saying is true.
If people just believe that about him, it wouldn't be.
But let me, you're missing the point of what, look, a lot of all of these things that people are thinking is because this is the narrative.
This is how it's presented by the media.
If we had an honest media, what they would be talking about right now, the narrative would be that both sides suck.
And I don't mean that as a joke.
That would be the narrative.
It would be that this is the most unspecific campaign ever.
None of them are being honest about it.
Look, we have these huge problems facing our nation, and none of them will talk about it.
It's like this agreement.
Obama said he's not going to talk about the entitlements till after the election because he doesn't want it politicized.
So he's not going to talk about what is driving us off the cliff.
He's just not going to talk about it.
Mitt Romney is running away from the fact that they barely tinkered with a little bit of one thing that would still drive us off the cliff.
It's like we're going off the cliff at 130 miles per hour and they were like, maybe we slow it down to 125.
And they're like, you're throwing grandma off the cliff.
And they're like, wait, no, no, no, no.
Obama's slowing it down to 125.
We're not slowing it.
This is the campaign.
And the narrative should not be over this dumb 47% comment.
The narrative should be over the fact that our fucking country's falling apart and none of them are talking about it.
Their positions are exactly the same on foreign policy, so there's no difference, even though we're literally occupying the most anti-American part of the world as it blows up in our faces, and we're having no conversation about that.
The economy is crashing and we're having no conversation.
Like, this should be the narrative.
But because the media just wants to protect Obama, the entire narrative is Mitt Romney's taxes, Cayman Islands, 47%.
Like, if you got to step back and see the kind of bigger picture, to me, that is a big part of the problem.
Oh, I see what you're doing.
No.
Still, it almost kind of comes off like, okay, so the Heat are playing the Lakers in the finals.
Who's going to win?
And you're off on the side, like, has anyone seen these Harlem Globe troubles?
They are amazing.
This dude could spin a ball on his finger for 10 minutes.
Like, yeah, well, he's not playing.
Yes, I know.
But you know what?
The fucking truth should be playing.
Look, I'm not being like, look, I'm a libertarian.
I'm sorry, just I'll let you get this out, but I would love to see Dennis Kucenich in this debate.
I would love to see Ralph Nader inject some things into this debate.
It's not just like a libertarian versus liberal or one of the other.
There's no one honest.
These guys, it's not a matter of these guys aren't smart.
They're not honest.
They're full of shit.
Obama's full of shit.
Mitt Romney's full of shit.
And that's why there's no third party is allowed to be on stage.
Because they would just fucking expose them in a heartbeat.
You were going to say, Just.
Oh, no.
I was going to say it's also important to remember that the media at its core is a business and they're just trying to sell what makes them money.
So by latching onto things like the 47% comment and Jeremiah Wright and by letting Al Sharpton speak every once in a while, that's what people are going to tune into, and that's why advertisers are going to give it away.
Yeah, they want, it's like, yeah, I know.
And I know that's the big thing, but sometimes I just feel like there's some stories that would be good fucking ratings that they turn their other eye to.
Like, I don't believe that they're not reporting on the dead soldiers coming back from, you know, they're not showing that footage because it's not good ratings.
Like, I don't buy that.
I think that would be great ratings.
In fact, that'd be much better ratings than the latest Octomom or whatever.
You know what I mean?
Like, I think there's truth to that.
Like, the country is dumb, but they also are in an agreement.
You know, this is what happens when you have a big government: it perverts the free market.
So, what is good ratings in a complete free market?
It's like, yeah, you're just catering to the consumer.
Like, ratings.
That's what you want.
In a big government, it's like ratings, and I don't want to get shut down by this big government.
So, it's like now you have to kind of appease the government, too.
It is this inherent thing, dude.
Dude, trust me.
I mean, you don't think it was.
TV's controlled by networks, but podcasts aren't.
I mean, podcasts.
That's right.
That's why we're fucking here right now.
No, but at the same time, I mean, I think, well, it's a good point on an intellectual level.
I would also never hire you to run a channel, like, to drive business.
Because that's for a lot of other reasons.
No, no.
Many other personal reasons I should never.
Back to the Rod Paul hour.
And we're back.
No, but Ron Paul's dog sleeps.
No, no.
But the thing is, I mean, with the channels, you always hear this argument that people want real news, real news, real news.
You always hear people talk about that shit and how it's so sad that it's become this shocking shit.
The thing is, with podcasts, podcasts are not run by networks.
So it really is a pure democracy in the sense that any whatever people like the best will get rated.
So why are the top political podcasts still a bunch of idiots just yelling at each other?
Why aren't the top podcasts really complex discussions of political issues?
I would just discuss that.
Because this is not what people are doing.
I completely disagree with that.
I think when you go into the podcast world, you get a lot more, certainly a lot more discussions about, like, look, you talk about the Rogan experience or Bill Burr's podcast, Adam Carolla's podcast.
These are all like libertarians.
They're also in the comedy section.
If you look up the political section, but these are some of the biggest podcasts in the country right now.
And there are some really intelligent conversations.
Yeah, that's the world we live in, is that comedians are having the most intelligent conversations.
That really is the world we live in.
But you do get when you go to the alternative.
And I don't think it's biased that we're all comedians and we feel that way.
Yeah, not at all.
I'll go around the room, take it to a vote.
My hands up right now.
Look, I think that when you go to the alternative media, you do get a lot more.
The thing that never comes up in the main, the biggest thing, and I watch both of them, right?
Like, I avidly, every single day, I watch mainstream media stuff and I watch alternative media stuff.
And the big theme that comes up in the alternative media that absolutely doesn't get mentioned in the mainstream media, maybe every now and then they mention it, but it doesn't get talked about, is the shadow government that is the U.S., the secrecy of our government.
Things like the CIA and the Federal Reserve and the Pentagon and just the entire, the fact that there's so much money.
I mean, these little things like, you know, there's a trillion dollars completely unaccounted for in the Department of Defense.
No one knows where it went.
Just a secret.
It's a trillion fucking dollars.
You know, like, we bring Jamie Diamond in because he lost $3 billion.
Nonsense.
The government lost a trillion dollars in one department.
It's fucking insane.
Trillion Dollars Missing from Defense00:02:35
And they don't talk about any of the secret stuff.
They don't talk, you know, we literally, like, the mainstream news goes, we might have war with Iran.
Let's talk about the history of our relation.
Well, seven years ago, we put sanctions in.
Five years ago, we put tougher sanctions in.
Another year, we put more sanctions in, and they're still going after this nuclear energy.
But they'll never mention that, like, our CIA went in and overthrew their elected government and installed the dictator.
Like, this is a fact.
But that never comes up.
And you can't tell me it's just because of the ratings.
There's an agreement there that they're not going to mention this shit.
They're not going to fucking talk about it.
They don't talk about our, they don't really, they very play down that we're crossing borders that we're not internationally allowed to do.
They play down our CIA activity.
Even the declassified stuff from the past, they don't ever talk about.
You think that would be huge, huge news, you know, but they never talk about it.
I think a lot of people just, I feel like the shows that drive advertisers that generate profit are for the most part, they're shows that make people feel comfortable.
If you watch a liberal show, if you're liberal and you watch MSNBC, it reinforces all your beliefs and you're like, yes, good.
This isn't challenging me.
This is how I feel.
The world is exactly how I thought it was.
Fox News, if you're conservative, same deal.
Good.
All the people I thought were bad people are bad people.
Like, people don't like to be challenged, which is why when 9-11 happens and Osama bin Laden was trained by the CIA.
I mean, this isn't like some conspiracy theory stuff.
He was.
No one argues it.
That's a fact.
It's not, I wouldn't say it was unreported to the point where anyone's denying it.
But I don't think they like to remind people of that fact that much because it's challenging.
It's a challenging thought that our country's worst enemy was one that in some ways we played a hand in creating.
But God forbid.
And I am really not a conspiracy theorist.
That's not my deal.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
Like I distrust government, but I'm not a conspiracy theorist at all.
I like having facts and information.
But I will say, we will never go down the road of the narrative that like fucking everybody worked for the CIA at one point.
Who's a problem?
If you go down the list of our problems, it's like bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Fidel Castro, what's his name?
Rashad Kennedy here, just Lee Harvey Oswald.
Everybody, like all these guys, it just comes out.
It's like, oh, yeah, well, they were CIA trained for years, and then they went and did this thing.
But you're never supposed to even question that or even look at whether that's a problem.
It's like, hey, and who the fuck is our CIA training right now?
You know what I mean?
It's these people trying to go overthrow the Syrian government.
Not a Conspiracy Theorist00:04:44
It's these people trying, you know, like we're doing the same thing now.
We're not allowed to ever talk about that.
It's a big psychological issue because I think for the most part, and I don't think this is an overstatement, I think for the most part, people's concepts of politics, just like their concepts of religion, I mean, they always say religion and politics are the two things that are impolite to talk about.
Your understanding of politics and your understanding of religion, in a lot of ways, defines the way that you perceive the world around you.
So if someone starts saying things that makes you question those things, if this isn't true, then what else in the world isn't true?
And it really, sometimes it can get to a point where it shakes people to their core, which is why I think that's why there are just separate channels.
If you believe this way, you can get your news from here if you believe this way.
Because people don't like to be challenged.
People don't like to think maybe everything I know is wrong.
All right, we're going to do the segment now because it's just so fed in.
This is the only segment that we've come up with yet.
But it's called We're Better Than Cable News.
That's a segment where we just, you know, after a nice, interesting conversation that we have, I thought the last thing I'll do is check out the interesting one.
It really kind of is.
It's implied, but here it's explicit.
Yeah, exactly.
Specific ass.
That's why I need you.
Right when I start getting, like, I'm like, oh shit, I'm on my heels now.
It just comes right in there.
It's not implied.
All right.
She's like a corner man.
So let's just check in.
You know, these are the conversations we've been having.
Let's check in with Cable News and see what conversations they're having.
Let's check in on the number one rated show in Cable News.
Did you see that?
We begin with Kanye West.
He's a rapper who apparently doesn't think Mitt Romney pays any taxes.
This Seghetto opera, Francis Born Carcopola.
I need a new crib to hold my plex.
Rick Rossett told me that.
Zabi all up and going set.
Like, D sha homie back.
Did y'all hold me back.
I'm just trying to protect my stat.
Mitt Romney don't pay no tech.
Mitt Romney don't pay no tech.
Here now to explain that.
Dude, just the fact that he says here now to explain.
Wait, did he have Kanye West on the show?
No, no, no.
No, but here now to explain that.
Like, yeah, let's devote some of our time to breaking down this.
Now, Kanye West was busy, so we got Lil Wayne.
I think we can all agree on a couple things.
Number one, Kanye West has mad flow.
Number two.
Yeah, that was a pretty number two.
Bill O'Reilly, the number one show in cable news, is dedicating time to this.
But you know what?
It's like you said, Dave, you said people are either getting their beliefs reinforced over here.
Sure.
But there's another channel out there that's balancing them out.
So we're going to check it.
I still think that Rap Flow was more accurate than Paul Ryan's convention speech.
If you want to fact check, Kanye West does know Rick Ross.
It might have been a better economic plan than Paul Ryan's.
But here we are.
Okay, so let's check in though with the other side because maybe this side over at MSNBC, they'll keep them on us.
This is the more intelligent channel anyway.
Let's check in with them.
Tonight is the measure of whether the country begins in the state of Wisconsin a national drive to push back or whether we have more to go to build a movement of resistance.
But resist, we much.
We must and we will much about that be committed.
Was that Al Sharpton?
That was Al Sharpton losing control of that thing.
His brain losing control of his body.
He holds his stage presence and confidence, though.
There's never a moment where you feel like he's searching.
Like he's just like, he's like, yeah, there's a collection of words I just said.
That was, dude, yeah, he just keeps, like, instead of correcting himself, he was like, we much, must, much, must, mush.
Much, must.
I'm usually.
Are there any questions?
I'm usually good at trying to figure out what people were trying to say, but I had no clue what now to be fair.
Usually I intellectually challenge MSNBC in one thing, but then sometimes it's fun to just play an Al Sharpton, just being retarded.
I feel like it would be a much shorter show if you were just like, here are some Al Sharpton quotes that sound completely reasonable.
I like eggs.
Okay.
Eggs are good.
A shorter show and a much longer researching process.
It is not easy to check reasonable stuff.
All right.
Well, part of just making it even that much more obvious how terrible of a candidate Mitt Romney is.
Printing Money and GDP00:15:14
The new economic numbers that came out were awful, and they're doing nothing for him.
They're doing nothing for him in the polls.
But I don't know if you guys, I have been saying this for years now, two years, at least three, but we are, I'm genuinely terrified of the future of the American economy.
Terrified.
I think we're going to go through something worse than the Great Depression, and I think it's coming within the next year.
And we don't even have alcohol to bring it back, like the end of prohibition.
Oh, I got alcohol.
I don't know that.
No, but I'm saying we are like, as long as it's not over 16 ounces.
Well, we've got all solutions.
I mean, we do have drugs.
Yeah.
We do have lots of prohibitions out there.
We should legalize heroin.
Really?
Oh, my God.
And I can find that.
Especially on a rainy day like today.
Yeah.
We'll get some clean heroin.
Two birds, one stone.
Make this podcast a little bit more low energy.
But, I mean, it's as if it was bad.
It's so funny.
So it came out that the 1.7% growth rate in the economy.
And then they came out and changed it back to 1.3.
So it came out like it was like, ooh, the growth is bad.
And then they came out like, ah, we may have been a little generous.
It's even worse than you thought.
So this means that we're down to the economy grew at 1.3%, which is stagnant.
Or, you know, not literally.
But it is very, very bad.
Next episode.
And it's not.
The truth is going to be, the episodes are going to be 50% correcting.
The first 20 minutes of every episode.
Okay, last time I said you should lick a ball.
I did not.
The World War II was not won by marshmallows.
That was a mistake.
Anyway, you know, it's hard.
It's very hard to tell how bad the economy is because the government numbers are so inflated and they're so fucking, they're not real.
Like, it's like these numbers they use.
The GDP is complete bullshit.
Anytime you hear anything that's related to GDP, so those numbers I just gave, complete bullshit.
It doesn't mean it.
The GDP is like, they literally arrange it in a way to be so favorable to government activity.
If we blow up a bridge in Iraq and then we have to rebuild that bridge in Iraq, our GDP goes up.
Like that's literally, it's designed because that corporation like gets a new contract.
So our GDP goes up, but it's just, we wasted the money on that bomb, like wasted that bomb, now it's gone.
Then we spent money on a bridge that already existed in Iraq that like we never had to build.
It's like we've just lost money.
It's been out of our economy, but they present that as, ooh, the GDP got bigger.
It's the GDP, inflation makes the GDP get much bigger, and that is just a pure negative.
Like inflation is literally a pure negative in the economy, but it makes the GDP number look bigger.
If all other things are the same and you print a bunch of money, your GDP is going to sky.
You know what would actually be way more accurate is if they just found, if they just found like an average dude whose initials happen to be GDP, like George David Peters, and then like he lived in Michigan.
Some dude who like graduated from high school, took like two years of college, but then didn't finish.
And the GDP is just based on how his life is going.
Like once a month they just check in.
He's like, well, I lost my job at Walmart, but I just got this new gig at this hardware store.
Switch over the GDP.
We got some tuna.
Yeah.
I don't really like white threads.
They just go through it.
That's all we have.
They just go through his cover.
He's like, well, I just got Netflix.
And they're like, all right, that's something.
No, just the instant cue, though.
I'm not paying for TVD.
How's the dating life going, GDP?
I've seen a couple girls.
I wouldn't call it anything serious.
Our country's struggling right now.
You have to understand.
So it's like these GDP numbers are completely inflated.
And then, dude, it's growing at 1.3% while we are printing trillions of dollars.
Like, we're printing trillions of dollars.
The truth is, and everybody who knows the finance world knows this.
Ben Bernanke just came out, they announced QE3.
We'll talk about that in a second.
But if he didn't, if he came out and announced, he goes, we're not going to print any more money.
We're not going to hold interest rates to artificially low rates.
We're not going to do this.
The economy would come crashing down.
Now, we could debate whether that's a good thing or not, just to bring it down.
It's kind of like going cold turkey off heroin.
It's going to come.
You're going to come crashing down.
So everyone knows, like, that's the honest economy.
We have to keep this printing machine going in order to just keep basically next to no growth rate.
It's pretty fucking scary.
And this is going to run out at some point.
You can't keep doing this forever without getting hyperinflation, which I think is where we're going.
And it's pretty scary.
But all these numbers, the other number that I think is just hilarious, is the CPI.
It's the consumer price index, which is how they measure inflation.
So they go, inflation is only like 3.5%, 4% because the CPI only goes up 3.5%, 4%.
And then they just change the CPI year by year when it suits them.
So they just go like during the housing bubble.
They took housing out.
They just go, we're not going to count housing anymore.
Then they took food out.
They took energy out.
So food, energy, and housing is no longer part of inflation.
The government deems.
That's just not part of inflation anymore.
That's a hard thing to gauge.
So it's just like a thing you go, but you know, food and energy and housing, pretty important to most people.
Like, that's up there.
So, of course, the fact that, like, now you take a look at what would inflation really look like if you take, I mean, just look, honestly, in New York City, what we have to do, housing is like the number one cost for everybody.
You take that, I mean, take housing and food out of the equation.
Like, I'm doing fine.
I mean, anyway.
But the other thing also is that if you really understand economics at all, and this is where like the Austrian school opened my eyes up because everyone's a Keynesian in America and it's fucking, they don't get this.
But inflation isn't prices.
That's not what inflation is about.
Inflation is about how much money you have chasing how many goods.
So the other inherent flaw in measuring the CPI is, let's say we print $5 trillion.
Let's say you have, you know, $2 trillion in circulation and you print another $2 trillion.
You double the money base.
And then prices stay exactly the same.
So you go, oh, there's been no inflation.
That's like what a Keynesian would say.
There's been no inflation.
The prices are exactly the same.
So the printing money had no effect.
Any Austrian guy would go, no, the money, you've doubled the money supply.
There's no way that doesn't have an effect.
These prices were about to go down.
And then you stop them from going down.
You know what I mean?
It probably were going to go to about half of what they were, and you doubled the money supply.
So it's like when you measure prices, you don't understand where they might have gone and like what the difference is.
Anyway, we're fucked.
This economy is totally artificial.
They just announced QE3, which basically means the Fed's going to come in and start buying mortgage-backed securities at a ferocious rate for an indefinite amount of time because there's no way building up a real estate bubble could fail.
That's our plan right now.
I've never seen before.
Right, exactly.
So this is our plan.
I feel like our government is run by dudes who have like that memento disease.
Like they just wake up and there's like a Polaroid of like a stock crash market.
This is the way that the way that Keynesian logic works, which is the way like the Federal Reserve System works, is that they go, you know, so during like times of a stagnant economy, when the economy is bad, you know, you send money, cheap money into the system.
When the economy starts getting good, then inflation gets out of control because you've sent all this money in.
Then you raise interest rates and you pull it back up.
And then in the 70s, they had stagflation, which completely threw them for a loop because they went, oh, this is both things.
So what do we do?
How do you print money and raise interest rates at the same time?
You know, you can't do it.
So they have this.
They only have two levers and they're like, now here's the thing is they don't even have two levers anymore.
Now, ultimately, what did we do in the 70s?
By the way, this hyperinflation would have come to America in the 70s.
If anyone remembers this, what we did was we raised interest rates to about 25%.
We raised interest rates created.
Yeah.
Well, you know, but that's what happened.
And it turned out to be a good decision.
That's how we got inflation under control to some degree.
Inflation was going out of control.
We were having 20% inflation in the 70s.
We were getting, you know, it was really bad.
And again, I don't know if I have corrections next time.
That's not an exact number or something like that.
Just start adding the word around.
Around.
Yeah.
Yeah, I do need to.
It was around.
Something like that.
Double-digit inflation.
So we had inflation was really bad.
Of course, back then they measured housing and food and the inflation number.
So who knows where we are now.
But quickly, what you were saying about the whole pricing index, I feel like it's almost easier to measure on a smaller scale.
Like in the city, there was this thing in the New York Times a couple of years ago that they said that the closest way to gauge what the cost of one subway ride is almost exactly the cost of one plain slice of cheese pizza.
And it's been that way back to like the 60s.
Like that's it like completely equal until like two bros came in and introduced dollar pizza and fucked up the whole index.
But like for everything else, I mean like in it since I've been in the city, it was the same way.
It was like all like $2 slices.
And then right at the time I started seeing some places because they're like, what's the point you're drawing from that though?
Because there's an important point there, I think.
Yeah, I mean, the important point that I'm drawing is, I mean, like, they're drawing it from all these important sources.
And you're saying that they're now cutting out food and energy, which are an important part of what determines it.
But I feel like it's almost without even all of these billions of variables.
It seems like sometimes you can just look at like two variables.
Well, yes, but this is what you're missing, I think, is that this proves the inflation.
That's proves the inflation.
When you tie it to a real thing, when you tie it to a thing rather than money, you go, oh, the ratio actually isn't off.
You go, but so why are the prices of both these things being driven up?
You know what I mean?
If the ratio is staying the same, but these prices are being driven up, that implies there's some inflation going on.
Yeah, no, definitely.
Dude, it's so crazy.
In 1972, when we went off the gold standard or 73, 72 or 73, I think it's 73.
When we went off the gold standard, the gold was $34 an ounce.
That's when we were on the gold standard, it was a fixed rate, $34 an ounce.
Gold is now, I think, $1,500 something an ounce, right?
There's you measure this inflation.
Back in the 70s, an ounce of gold would buy you a nice suit.
Today, an ounce of gold will buy you a nice suit.
There are these really weird constants when you measure things in terms of commodities or you measure them in terms of physical things.
But then you go, so why is it gone from $34 used to get you a nice suit to now it's like, you know, $1,500 is what you need to get a nice suit.
And this is how much it's happened.
People don't pay attention to this.
This is like, there's been a tremendous amount of inflation.
And then liberals will never look at this when they're talking about, they go, why is it right away in the 70s, wages all of a sudden went flat for almost the entire history of America.
Wages are going up.
And then all of a sudden they go flat.
And all of a sudden, you know, the prices of everything start going up, but wages are staying stagnant.
And government starts growing.
And we start having perpetual war.
And it's all about going off the gold standard.
I know we all, all us libertarians get laughed at when we talk about the gold standard.
The gold standard is literally, if you look at any great nation ever, they were on the gold standard for at least a large portion of their history.
I think we should switch to pizza currency.
Pizza currency would maybe make more stable.
But you get it.
The thing is, it has to be something that ties it.
Politicians have to be restrained in the world.
It's even weirder for like illegal goods.
Like see a prostitute.
You're like, hey, what's up?
So I've got three pizzas.
What kind of tappens, honey?
They're all Hawaiian, unfortunately.
But I mean, it's a big problem.
This is why we have all the inflation.
This is why our government's out of control.
That's why we have all these wars.
We literally couldn't do all of this if we were still on the gold standard.
And the other thing that's, you know, we went from the gold standard to the oil standard, which is why we fucking fight all these wars.
That's why we have to maintain this part of the world.
You know, that's like the deal now.
It's like the dollar is the only thing you can get oil with.
Like, it used to be you could redeem your dollar for gold.
Now you can redeem it for oil.
If you couldn't redeem your dollars for oil, believe me, a lot of these countries would stop buying our dollars.
I mean, you can redeem your dollars for gold.
It's just really expensive.
No, but we won't give you.
Especially like in this neighborhood, it seems like a lot of people are redeeming their dollars for gold.
Yeah, that must be what's going on.
You guys are worried about it.
Finally, somebody gets the importance of the gold standard on Rim's rapper.
Because like 50 cents, this guy understands.
Yeah, he like pulls up in like an escalator and he's like, man, this Keynesian shit ain't doing nothing.
Because this guy understands that there's a lot of money printing going on out there, and he's protecting himself and his family.
Finally, somebody who gets it.
I would, though.
I would, if I, you know, if you have money, get gold.
I know it's all those commercials and stuff.
You get gold, silver, shit like that.
I'm telling you, we're going to print all these fucking, like, all the deals that have all these promises that have been made.
Here's what I say, like, neither candidate will talk about.
You know, the only group that I've seen talking about entitlements in this election is AARP with their commercials.
And there's a non-bias group, if ever there's been a.
I trust them.
Have you seen those ARP commercials that are running?
It's like old people who are like, who?
What's your plan on Medicare?
I earned a say.
I earned my Medicare.
I love this attitude.
You're like, all right, look, did you earn a say?
You got robbed, motherfucker.
Like, I don't know what to tell old people who think they earned money.
Well, I wouldn't tell them that.
Well, I mean, that's a true.
You got robbed, motherfucker.
I love you, grandson.
That is, but it's look.
Look, grandma, I know it's your birthday, but still.
Just because the government stole from you a long time ago and spent that money does not make you entitled to steal from the younger generation now so you can spend their money.
Like, I'm sorry, that's just not the way morality works.
I don't know.
Like, that doesn't make logical sense.
We don't have any of this fucking money.
It's not there.
You've been paying into a system your whole life.
We took your money.
That's not how morality works.
Go home, grandma.
No, I mean, look.
Yeah, but so what do you think is how morality works?
If someone got robbed, then you robbed someone else to give them their money.
Whether or not.
It was clearly immoral to steal their money in the first place.
No, no, no, don't get me wrong.
We've been taking their money their whole life.
Whether or not, whether they were paying into a health system or they got robbed is determined by whether or not we give them health care, right?
Like, so.
No, no, no, no.
I'm just like, no, no.
We're saying is trying to procure some kind of a health care system.
Hold on, you're dodging my point.
No, the way it doesn't, if you go rob someone else and give them the money, that doesn't make them have paid into a health system.
We spent their social security money.
It was put into the general revenue and we fucking spent it into debt.
It's gone, okay?
We spent their Medicare money.
Like, all that's gone.
What we're doing now is we're robbing young people who come into the workforce who have tons of student loan debt.
Now they have to also pay off these.
Look, I'm not saying you didn't, you do have some recourse here.
This government lied to you.
It's fucked up.
But to just say that you have a say in it and the young person doesn't have a say in it, who's actively being robbed now.
Oh, no.
Student Loans as a Ponzi Scheme00:16:11
At some point, we got to get out of this crazy Ponzi scheme.
I love when, what's his name, Rick Perry.
That was the only thing I ever liked that he said.
When he goes, this whole Medicare is a Ponzi scheme.
And everyone in the news just hammered him for weeks and weeks, but no one ever had the conversation, of course.
The only difference between Medicare and a Ponzi scheme is that you're forced into Medicare.
Most Ponzi schemes, you at least choose whether or not you want to invest your money there.
Medicare, you don't have a choice.
You want to work legitimately.
They will force you into this Ponzi scheme.
But it is all the other aspects are the same.
None of the money has been invested.
It was all just spent.
You get paid off by new entries.
It's a Ponzi scheme.
No, it definitely is.
I mean, I think that that's a good way to gauge whether or not someone is a political hack is that like from both parties is just ask them straight up.
Do you think Social Security is a Ponzi scheme?
If they say no, that either shows that they're a hack or have a lack of understanding of what makes a Ponzi scheme.
Yeah.
Like it literally is a Ponzi scheme.
With the one exception that I did mention, which I do think is a major exception, is that it's a forced Ponzi scheme.
Like, that is the exception.
Everything else besides that, Ponzi was cool enough to be like, I'll let you choose to do this or not.
You never jump in people's house and be like, you have to do it.
You did.
Yeah, but you were not forced to get it.
You're already part of the pyramid.
You were never forced to give Bernie Maid off your money.
You were never forced into a pony.
So it is even more morally reprehensible than a Ponzi scheme.
It does make Ponzi seem like a cooler guy.
Yes, it's much worse than a Ponzi scheme.
So that is the truth.
And, you know, whatever.
No one will talk about that except AARP, who tells you, you know, anyone.
And then anyone who just talks about it is, oh, you're pushing Granny off the cliff.
All right.
But there's no way we can keep Granny on this cliff.
And this cliff is really slippery.
So Granny's going to be okay.
She'll be fine.
We'll put some pillows down at the bottom of this cliff.
I keep getting mail from AARP.
Oh, well.
Stop watching Matlock up with them.
They're recruiting you.
You watched two episodes of The Golden Girls, and all of a sudden.
Well, that's the other.
So I'll transition to that because I did mention, you know, the kids.
This is what I feel for is like, look, I do also say I think there are people who are dependent.
You can't just like, no matter how much, like, you have to have a transition program, no matter how much I really think we'd be better off if we had more of a free market here in America.
I'm not just like, well, tomorrow you get rid of food stamps.
Obviously, there's people who need food stamps and you have to do, like, when they did the welfare cutting up in the 90s, you have to do a thing where it's like, look, two years and this program's over.
And you have to give people some notice and you have to kind of like transition out of these things.
And if we were smart, we'd start bringing all our troops home and using that money to transition out of these programs.
But you have to transition out.
You do have to do something like what Paul Ryan said, where you go, A 55, you guys, it's not there.
I know you've been paying into it for a while.
It's not going to be there.
It's going to be something different.
You have to be honest.
But I really do feel for these kids.
And then, you know, the new number came out that one in four households is carrying college debt now.
We're over a trillion dollars in college debt.
And Obama's plan is to try to lower interest rates on these college debt, which is so ridiculous.
I mean, this is like everything.
It's like the same thing the Fed is doing.
This idea that lowering interest rates is going to be the solution when that it's literally the problem.
Drawing people into these college loans is the problem.
Well, it's also not just interest rates.
I mean, the part of his plan that I liked that I thought was a good idea was that your payments on your college loans could be tied to your income.
So if you want to go to school to be a teacher.
Because right now, I mean, college costs the same if you want to be a teacher as if you want to do anything else.
And because it's so not profitable, I think that it discourages a lot of people from going into helpful but less high-paying fields.
And his idea is you tie the payments to the income.
So, I mean, it's putting more people in college, but it's also more of an incentive.
If you do want to be a teacher, you're not going to have to carry...
I mean, you get what I'm saying.
Right.
Okay.
And I like that idea.
Here's the problem, okay?
Here's the problem is once you start getting into any of this, like, this mentality, when you start doing this, where you start going, okay, so for this person in this situation, we're going to bail out their loans.
Because that's what is implicit there is that there'll be some bailing out for some situations.
Other people will be held to pay what they had to pay.
Here's the thing is, the people who you're bailing out, once you do that, once the government steps in, it's the general, everybody bails them out.
The taxpayer bails them out.
So it becomes something that now we're going to split this amongst all the American taxpayers, including the kid who didn't.
So now the kid who didn't go to college has to subsidize the guy who knowingly took out a loan and did go to college.
Now, I'm sorry, this guy is not a complete victim.
The person who went to college, they did make an agreement.
They borrowed this money.
Tuition costs were way too high.
They did make an agreement to just put that on everybody now involves the kid who didn't even get the college education, who's trying to get a job in this economy.
Like, it's a fucked up socialist principle.
You only look at one end.
You know, when you bail someone out, you only look at the people you're bailing out.
It's when Obama just goes, like, you didn't want to bail out GM.
Well, look at GM.
It's like, no, don't look at GM, motherfucker.
Look at everybody else.
Everybody else who had to pay for GM.
You don't see the money that had to go there.
Like, that money would have done something in someone else's hands.
You know what I mean?
There's another side to it.
The bigger picture is the reason.
Why is college such a mess?
You know, people have to ask this.
What has been, you know, even inflation isn't enough to describe college has been way outpacing inflation for years and years.
The prices have gotten ridiculous.
Why is it that in my grandfather's day and my father's day, you could just work a summer job and pay for your tuition?
People didn't have to go into it.
And the reason is because the government got into the business of guaranteeing student loans.
And we've bid up these prices because any 18, look, think of it.
Any 18-year-old in the world can go get a loan for tens of thousands of dollars to go to college.
They can't get that loan for anything else.
If every 18-year-old in the world could get tens of thousands of dollars loan just to start a business, believe me, a lot of them would be starting businesses.
But we only subsidize college loans so that everybody goes to college.
And these colleges have bid up their prices and bid up their prices.
And that's what they'll keep doing as long as we keep bailing out loans and lowering interest rates.
We have way too many people going to college right now.
I know people don't like to say that.
That's politically incorrect.
Way too many people go to college.
Do you know how many auto mechanics have a college degree in America?
It's fucking ridiculous.
We don't need college makes sense for people who are going into academic professions, for people for the top brightest, you know, 5% of the country probably really should go to college.
There's a lot.
Look, in today's day and age, I mean, I got a 16-year-old little brother, and it's like just the prospect of going and spending $50,000 a semester to go to one of these colleges for a bunch of shit, 90% of which you can learn on your fucking computer.
I mean, it's crazy.
You can also go to a city college, you know, and spend, you know, a few thousand dollars.
If you really want to, you can get just as good an education there.
It's fucking crazy.
These kids, and for the president to come out, he probably shouldn't take a position either way.
Like, hey, it's your life.
Some people are better off going, some people aren't.
But for him to come out and say everyone should be going to college, and by the way, to tell these kids in the inner city that their goals all should be to get themselves into debt that their families don't have to help them with, it is a fucked up position to take.
I think there's two sides of that issue.
One side is, I think it definitely is a shame that a lot of blue-collar professions are now looked down on.
Because the fact is, money-wise, if you are a plumber and you are trained and have a business, a lot of people who are plumbers get paid considerably more than people who are administrative assistant or have some kind of an office job with a degree.
And the world needs plumbers too.
And electricians and tradespeople.
I think that that is something that is overlooked: the importance of trade school in comparison to college.
On the flip side, though, going into the future, having a trade, being I mean, you could use old-timey stuff like blacksmith, but even like more modern stuff, that kind of trade thing, being a cobbler and making shoes and all this other stuff, all of those, a lot of trade jobs like that are being phased out, and it's becoming as we move more towards the internet and things like that.
It is more of an education.
Use your brain than use your hands society worldwide.
Sure.
And if our kids are going to have a chance in that world, they're going to have to know math.
They're going to have to know.
And the thing is, I mean, not everyone needs to go to college.
A high school education is more than enough for a lot of jobs.
But if you want your kid to be the boss or run a company, I mean, there's companies that you don't need a college education for.
I dropped out of college.
I mean, I dropped out after two years, and I was going to Florida Atlantic to begin with, so I'll count that as like one and a half.
But like, it's the school that Carrotop went to.
Not bragging.
You're doing good.
No, but I mean, it's I and I have friends who went to a lot of like top schools, some to Ivy League and stuff like that.
But I think look, even if you want, look, if there's a need there for people, this is why the free market works better always.
If there's a need there for people to go to college, they will go to college.
And the fact that so many more people go to college now than back then should make the price drastically cheaper.
In anything left to the free market, the more people who go into something, it makes it much cheaper per capa to give that service to them.
College price should be, if the government hadn't bid up these prices, you would have a situation where these kids could work a summer job and pay off these debts, and they wouldn't have tens of thousands of dollars hanging, in some cases, hundreds of thousands hanging over their heads.
It's a disaster that our system and our president is encouraging kids to go tens of thousands of dollars into debt before they reach the age of 20 and have developed any skills.
Look, you're right.
There are some people who college is great for.
I have a mother and a sister who both have PhDs and they're professors and college is their world.
For them, college was great.
For me, college was unnecessary.
No, I'm just saying.
It's not just the education, though.
I mean, the number one, I would say the number one thing that drives success in any industry, I mean, beyond obviously your own hard work and determination and stuff like that.
I would say the number one thing that drives success for the most part is who you know and who you can meet.
And the fact is, if you're from the inner city, I don't agree with that.
No, the thing is, I mean, if you're from the inner city, then your group of friends, for the most part, very few of them are going to become CEOs.
You go to college and you're around people.
I mean, the fact is that it's much less true now.
There used to be a lot more nobility.
But the thing is, the thing is, to be honest, I don't get any money out of it.
But the truth is, I mean, like, the kids that I'm the people that I'm friends with, the people I was talking about who did go to Ivy League schools, the reason I know them is because I was in high school with them, right?
And the people that they know, a lot of them are people that they were around in high school and then at college.
And when you're around other successful people, everyone supports everyone else's success.
And if you are out of a job, it's like, oh, well, I work at this financial company and I can help you out.
Having like that circle of friends.
Sure, it's nice.
And there's also example.
There are more benefits to college than what you actually learn in the classroom.
Sure.
Yeah, okay.
Fine.
And maybe it shouldn't be that way.
Right, you do, but there's also something that.
I mean, that's the situation.
When you force everyone into college, everyone is at college.
No, but I mean, even in comedy.
I mean, like, even like with you, for example, right?
Like, you are legitimately friends with Jay Ogerson and David Tell and dudes like that.
And you're friends with them because you have a ton in common and stuff like that.
But you couldn't say that that hasn't in some way helped your comedy career, right?
No, I'm not arguing your friend.
It doesn't help who you know.
I'm not arguing networking and things like that, which I wouldn't.
That's not how I would describe my friends.
No, but I'm just saying, like, questioning your motivations of being friends with me.
No, no, no, no.
There's a benefit.
Sure, sure, sure.
No, absolutely.
Like, there's benefits to who you know.
I'm not disagreeing with that, but there's also something to be said for, you know, joining the workforce rather than going to college, I think, in many times, can let you meet those people.
If you're in the inner city and your friends are all losers, and then you get a job at McDonald's with more losers, like who at that point is going to be the person who's like, hey, you should get into finance.
Yeah, but you know, like saying you get a job at McDonald's, there's also like, maybe, why can't it be like a job at the mail room at some fucking company?
You know, like maybe it's a kid who's a little smarter than that who's got some ambition.
Especially in New York, there's a thousand people applying for that job in the mail room.
Well, that's another, but that's because the economy is so bad.
I mean, look, we forced everybody into college and the economy is terrible.
So yes, a lot of people are in college and it's tough to get a job.
But this system would be so much better off if we had a system where, you know, look, I mean, again, there weren't any of these programs in like my father, when my father was going to college.
There weren't any of these programs to get inner city kids to college.
But all they had to do was get a fucking summer job and they could afford it.
So you didn't need it.
No, I think.
I mean, college is definitely overpriced.
I mean, there's no.
Yeah, but people have to understand that this is why.
It's because the government lets anyone borrow money who's spending it on college.
That's why these prices have been bid.
I mean, what happened if you did that for anything?
If you said we'll lend you any amount of money you want to go get apples, believe me, apples will get more and more expensive.
Everyone can get money for this reason.
Subsidized apples.
Well, it's also an issue that a lot of entry-level jobs, like even secretarial jobs, most of them require at least a two-year degree.
It's ridiculous.
I love it when entry-level jobs require three years' experience.
What do you think entry-level means?
Yeah, it's the whole.
Well, I mean, again, and that is partially because just the economy is so bad, but it's just a terrible system.
It's a terrible system.
And I happen to think all these things, like it particularly fucks over the poorest because it's, you know, the kids who have some, you know, have parents with some money.
Their parents end up saving money for their college.
And, you know, they go.
And these poor kids from the inner city are convinced to go to college, take all this debt out, and then the economy turns sour and they fucking, they're fucked.
They're just holding this debt.
And by the way, this debt, they come after your goddamn wages.
It's not even like credit card debt where they take you to court.
They just come take your shit.
Like, it's unbelievable.
And we just encourage kids blindly to get into this.
Even if they're not smart enough, it's like, go to college, you know?
To be an honest assessment.
Maybe you're not smart like that.
Maybe you shouldn't be going to college.
I don't know.
Anyway.
Everyone says children of the future.
I don't know.
Why does the future have to be driving yourself into debt?
I'm just saying the more we go into the future with the internet and all these tools at our hands, I just think there's much cheaper options.
It makes more sense to be a little innovative.
It's like you really want, you can get that education that costs $300,000 for probably $10,000.
This is kind of a separate issue, but I feel like most people are not that curious about things.
This is a little bit of a separate issue of what you're talking about.
Like now with iTunes U, there's a lot of really super interesting, high-level, even like Ivy League courses that are completely on the internet.
You don't get a certificate from watching them, but if you're interested in them, if you want to learn about American history or physics or anything else like that, it's out there.
And the thing is, I mean, I think I used to think that I had some kind of intelligence elitism, like when I was in my teens and stuff.
But I feel like as I've gotten older, what I realized, it's not that.
I think what I can't stand is people who are not intellectually curious, who aren't interested in learning new things.
And I think the sad part is for most people, college, if they didn't have to go to college, and this isn't saying even that positive thing about a college.
It's more just a sad thing about people in general.
If they didn't have to go to college and learn those things, I don't think they ever would.
Like, I don't think they would ever choose to learn about European history.
Did you go to college, Jose?
Yes.
Where'd you go?
Rutgers.
Okay, so you went to Rutgers.
Is that why you live out there?
Okay.
Now it all makes sense.
No one just chooses to live in New Brunswick.
Yeah, like the way that he said why.
Is that why you live out there?
You know, I mean, yeah, look, dude, everything that I know, which I think for people who listen to the podcast, I speak with some degree of knowledge.
And none of it comes from college.
I went to college for a little bit.
I had no interest in anything there.
And everything I've learned has been from the internet or reading or things you do outside of college.
Why College Feels Pointless00:04:38
And I've learned certainly a lot more outside than I ever did in.
And the biggest thing I think that turned me off about college is what you were saying.
I think it was 90% people who weren't interested.
Oh, no, absolutely.
I think I could have been pulled into something, but you go there.
It's college is full of dummies.
It's full of people who just shouldn't be in college.
It's ridiculous.
It's like this guy who's like, can passably read and write and is like there to like do keg stands every night.
And this is like fucking college.
So it's like this, and this, by the way, is what you're going tens of thousands of dollars into debt for to go get blackout drunk and fucking get your first date rape experience.
It's not like there's no like If you put any effort in, you can probably believe in yourself something at least fairly criminal.
No, like I graduated and I can tell you I learned maybe three or four things that I actually remember and use.
Oh, and there's a lot of people who have done this.
You can really embarrass people.
I mean, you want to go grab like college graduates on the street and give them a little like just basic, you know, U.S. civics test real quick.
No one knows anything in this dumb generation of ours.
None of these college kids know shit.
And the biggest game of the thing is, I think what college really is, and I think it's also part of, I mean, I left college to move to New York to do comedy, but I mean, I think what college really shows is not that you're intelligent.
It's not anything like that.
I think that what it really shows, the biggest thing that you need to do any job is some level of personal discipline.
And what college shows is that you have the discipline to do college.
It doesn't mean that it doesn't have that.
And the thing is, if you can't, if you're not the person who can, I mean, and I love college, so I mean, I'm not like a great example on the positive end of that.
But if you can't, if you don't have the focus or the discipline to be able to complete tasks, no matter how talented or brilliant you are, you're going to struggle with any job.
Yeah, I think there's definitely something to that.
It says that you, it also says something of, you know, your ability to listen to authority, your ability to just do what you're told and kind of get it.
Even in comedy, comedy seems like the most wacky, creative business to be in, but like comedy, we all know comics who are like really talented, but through like a lack of discipline, whether like in any like facet of their life, like it really limits like the ability to be successful.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that's even in comedy.
I'm trying to turn that around.
Absolutely, buddy.
But there's also something to we've created a culture where college is the right thing to do.
Yeah.
Period.
And there's another problem with that, too, in that a lot of colleges, no matter what you're majoring in, no matter what you actually plan on studying, they require you to take courses that are completely unrelated to it, which is just another way for them to make money.
Sure.
Yeah.
Well, how about, I mean, I think it's just criminal that they'll just let you pick your bullshit major in these colleges.
Like, there's literally people who would be like, oh, yeah, you can do the science of dance or whatever for history of pottery.
For $50,000.
Oh, we'll take your $50,000.
Absolutely.
We'll give you a degree in this bullshit that'll never mean anything.
FSU has a clown college.
No shit.
I mean, it's unreal.
You can major in clowning.
It's like, fine, man, do your thing.
And maybe we will get to a point where everyone just walks away from these debts or they all get bailed out.
And then I guess I'm the idiot.
You should have just gone and gotten your free college.
But I don't know.
I think, especially at this point, I don't think anyone from here on out should be able to claim this, like, oh, we didn't realize there weren't going to be any jobs.
I mean, you know, the economy's turned south.
There's no jobs out there.
So don't get yourself in this much debt.
And I don't think that the kid who's smart enough, like, that's the inherent problem with bailing these people out.
It's like the kid who was smart enough to see that maybe the economy was going to be goes, you know what?
I don't want to get myself in this $10,000.
Then we come in and bail out the student loans and he's on the hook for it anyway.
You know what I mean?
It's like people who stayed away from the big banks and went, I'm not going to put my money in these big banks because I think they're taking too many risky loans.
That person now has to bail them out anyway.
It's so unfair.
And no one talks about that side.
Like Obama just gets to go and all the socialists get to just go, fairness.
You know, but they only talk about the one side of fairness.
They only talk about the fairness of the kid who's stuck with this student loan debt.
They don't talk about the kid who didn't even get the college education.
Yeah.
Who's now got to pay for him?
I get annoyed when, because I have a lot of friends that also graduated, but with a lot of like complete bullshit degrees.
And they're like, oh, well, I majored in like fucking, I don't know, like pottery or whatever.
And I can't get a job.
And I'm like, that's not necessarily the economy's fault that you can't get a job in pottery.
Welcome to Obama's America.
I can't even get a job with my pottery degree.
Condemning Liberals for Racism00:07:01
Thanks, Obama.
Well, I mean, yeah, it's like if you major in theater, you're probably going to wait tables.
Like, except it and either of us are part of theater classes.
And you shouldn't have.
And everyone goes, oh man, they were the best years of my life.
He goes, well, maybe they weren't supposed to be the best years of your life.
I thought this was an investment for your future.
Why are you paying so much for that?
I mean, it makes fucking no sense.
Like, you can party for free.
And then these kids who like party for four years want someone else to pick up this tab.
No one parties for free.
But it is also.
Girls can.
Oh, goddammit.
I knew there was a loophole.
Well, I mean, you want to talk about it.
How about some fairness, Jessica?
But yeah.
Too fair.
Some equality.
Well, anyway, moving on.
So Ann Coulter wrote a new book, which I always just love talking about her.
I really just love Coulter.
I don't.
Wait, don't tell me what it's called yet.
Because she had like, what was it, Treason?
Or like, oh, what's it?
It's got to be like some really outrageous name.
Well, it's always, what's always, before I tell you what it is, it's always, you know, a big, like, a name, like, one-word exclamation point, and then a subtitle that's like, how liberals ruined everything and fucked over Jesus.
All right.
But it's always.
But Ann Coulter's thing.
I'm going to say, oh, man.
My first guess was insurgent.
But no.
That's not bad.
Man.
It's got to be country ruiner, isn't one word.
It's called mugged.
I'm not sure what the hold on, the subtitle.
Mugged.
That's racist.
It's just a coffee table book about something about liberals.
It's something about liberals.
But anyway, it's about race.
And, you know, Ann Coulter, the reason I love her so much is Ann Coulter will just, she'll say four things, and it's always like two of them.
Or I go, man, those two are a great point that no one else is willing to say.
And then the other two are so batshit crazy.
And you go, like, this lady.
How liberals are stealing our thoughts.
Like, I mean, it might just be like, you know, like, I don't even know if I can believe that you believe that.
It's so goddamn crazy.
But that's what I love.
And I love it.
You don't even want to respond to this.
I like it.
It's partially.
What I like about Ayn Rand also is just, I love her intentionally like antagonistic, like she's trying to rile you up with what she's saying.
Just by being politically incorrect she makes liberals so angry.
It's great.
But um, more or less she wrote a book just about um Democrats' history of race and the fact that, which I think there are some interesting points in there, and I'm sure again she says some crazy outrageous shit.
But there I think there's an interesting point that you know, liberals are the party who get to, who play the race card, no question about that.
Now, whether or not the Republicans are the racist party that everyone claims they are which I'm not saying, there's no truth to that but liberals play the card, they're the ones who are defending against racism.
It's a logic that not all Republicans are racist.
But if you're racist, like a lot of times, you're Republicans, but there's different forms of racism.
I mean that yeah, I mean that.
Yes, I don't know who coined that phrase.
That's my point.
What you guys just said, if you're racist, you're a Republican.
Yes, but you're speaking about one type of racism.
Yeah, the soft racism of lower expectations.
Yes, that's a real fucking racism too, man.
And there's a real, you know.
Who coined that phrase?
What, the racism of the soft racism of lower expectations?
It's a good point.
I don't know, but it's a great.
I'm sure it was a conservative.
It's a great.
It's a great tournament.
But look, it's not just that.
I've heard liberals say that.
The liberal worldview is like things are more complex.
Racism is almost like hate.
The word hate.
Like if you go, like, where is there the most hate?
Is there the most hate in the Republican Party or the Democrat?
Like, I don't know.
Like, it literally is the liberal worldview is like racism is something that you would find amongst white southerners, right?
So if you go to the deep south and like a white area and you're a black guy, it'll be rough, and that's racism, which is true.
There's probably some racism there.
But believe me, there's neighborhoods in New York City that I could walk into where I'd feel some racism too.
Racism is much more complex than the liberal worldview wants to make it.
Liberal racism is different because liberal racism is.
There's no doubt that a lot of Republicans who are putting in these voter ID stuff are doing it to try to disenfranchise people to lower minority voting.
But sometimes you'll hear liberals go so far in the other direction where they're like, how are these people ever supposed to be capable of getting identification?
Like that is racist.
Yeah, absolutely.
You've set such incredibly low expectations for these people.
Well, right.
That is in itself a form of racism.
Right.
And with that, again, how do we never...
It's fine.
If you want to have this conversation, if you want to say this is...
The person who's saying that feels like they're the least racist person in the whole world.
And if anything, that's the kind of person who calls everything racist.
But like, yeah, I mean, that is the other side of that coin.
Yeah, absolutely.
And to just never have the conversation and go, okay, so you want to say it's racist to say you need a driver's license because more black people don't have driver's licenses.
Okay, but are we ever going to have like a conversation, an honest conversation, and go, why is it that more black people don't have driver's licenses?
I mean, what does that represent?
That in 2012, why is it that this part of like the culture is just not, and I'm not saying it's black people's fault or it's white people's fault.
It doesn't always have to fit into this pretty little narrative, but it's like, let's have that conversation.
Why do black people not have their shit together in this way?
The way that white people did.
I feel like there's definitely times you'll hear liberals talking about minorities in a way that like it's really, really condescending in a way that I don't think they're even aware of.
And again, it's so weird because there's people who are racist in that outward, like using racial slurs and stuff.
But then there's people who are racist on the other side of like, these poor, helpless people who are just completely unable to help themselves.
Like, well, let's get real.
I mean, like, no, I mean, they can help themselves.
I mean, they're still like.
Well, I've been trying to, goddamn it.
We actually touched on this last week.
I forget what her name was, but she was saying how if Westerners keep making like anti-Muslim propaganda, then Muslims are going to keep blowing shit up.
So we should stop doing that.
Right.
And that's pretty racist also against Muslims because it's saying they can't control themselves.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
Yeah, that thing, I mean, I guess I'm probably, I don't know if that would put me on the conservative side of that.
But like, there were all these people who, like, when they started lighting all that stuff on fire, who came out against the idiots that made that dumb YouTube video.
Yeah.
And the thing is, like, I, I mean, that video is dumb, but at the same time, like, it would be nice if there was a whole region of the world that could fucking control themselves when they see a political cartoon they don't like, like fucking adults.
Race Issues Are Not Black and White00:15:46
Oh, yeah.
Well, I mean, I'm sorry.
You don't start condemning freedom.
You don't start condemning acts of free speech.
I'm sorry.
You start condemning the people who committed violence.
Like sent this thing around on the internet, and it's so it's super lowbrow, but it was actually like a kind of good point.
It was like this graphic drawing of like this orgy between uh like Jesus and uh and like Buddha and like all the other religious figures except for Muhammad in this really graphic orgy.
And the title of the photo was No One Got Killed for This Image.
Like, and the thing is, I mean, it's lowbrow because of just how dirty of a drawing it is, but it's true.
That kind of shit.
Like, no one's going to get murdered for this.
No one's going to torture restaurants.
I don't think that's lowbrow at all.
I mean, you can have something dirty in there, but that's pretty highbrow.
But, um, you know, you'd have to see the drawing.
Now, they were doing an anal.
Yeah, buddy shots, really.
But it's still, it might be graphic, but that's like graphic and highbrow.
I mean, highbrow, if not tasty.
The point that Ann Coulter's making her book about the Democrats is that.
And there's a fair point that never gets brought up.
God damn it.
Fuck it.
There's still moths.
I know.
What never gets brought up is that, look, the history of these two political parties, the Democrats' history is much, much worse on racism.
The small government party has always, throughout history, been the least racist party.
That's the way it always was.
It was always, the Democrats were, the Southern Democrats were the big segregationists.
Every single civil, until Barry Goldwater, it is when it flips with the civil rights.
When Lyndon Johnson supported the civil rights bill and Barry Goldwater didn't.
Before then, all the civil rights bills were Republican civil rights bills.
I mean, the obvious conflicting side to the small government being the best thing.
Why did federal troops have to be there when the black kids were integrated into schools?
Well, that is classic big government.
Okay, but it's ending one big government program.
It's a transition, period.
I mean, the big government program was.
But I mean, that's federal over state government, is what that is.
Sure.
And George Wallace wasn't crazy about it.
George Wallace.
I know his last name was Wallace.
George Wallace Black Comedian.
That is not.
George Wallace Black comedian.
It definitely was not him.
Okay, I'm not saying there's a point where literally it was a federal government checking state government power.
But I don't care where the big government comes from.
It can come from the state level or the federal level.
Slavery was a government policy enforced by government law.
You take it all the way down to the local level.
The mayor of Birmingham was the one that was ticking dogs on people.
It was the federal government that was like trying to ease up on the fire.
Sure, sure.
But I don't care if the look, when I say big government, I'm talking about government encroaching on people's liberties.
I don't care if it's a...
How small of government is small government?
You're missing the point.
I don't care how localized you're getting.
It could be a town, a city, a state, a federal government.
If any government is stepping on people's rights, then that government's gotten too big.
The federal government coming in and checking a local government because it's getting too big, that's great.
That's the idea of enumerated powers.
That's the idea of dividing up checks and balances.
But I guess with Birmingham, though, and like the with the federal troops in terms of the political use of the people that they the people that they were fighting weren't local government they were fighting local citizens that didn't want those kids their kids local government black people but like government it's not that's not a government thing i mean in the birmingham Birmingham thing, I mean, like you had that mayor who is a total nightmare, but the people in Birmingham weren't exactly upset about it.
No, yeah, of course.
The people in Birmingham were like, thank God someone's doing something to control.
Look, it all comes back down to people.
It's people, whether it's in the government or not.
Sometimes government has to control people.
Let me just say something, though.
Well, okay, but that's a big line to draw.
I mean, you start in the middle of a problem instead of starting in the beginning.
Look, all I'm saying, it's always people.
It's people in government or it's people in the private sector.
It's all people.
But slavery in general was a government policy.
It was a government policy that black people were not citizens.
This was in the Constitution.
This was a government policy.
Jim Crow was government policies.
So I see the idea is that this was because of small government.
They're like three-fifths compromised.
Yes, yes.
No, this is all about big government.
Government was.
Look, you can't have slavery.
And this is, by the way, slavery in the history of humanity, if you want to get a bigger picture.
Governments and slavery come into existence at the exact same time around.
First governments are when we have the first slaves.
And there's a reason for that.
You can't have slavery until you have government.
Someone's got to go.
You can't have slavery until you have a government.
You've got to keep it over time.
It's true, though.
That's how it works.
Someone's got to go.
You're my slave.
No.
Yeah.
He said no.
Yeah, exactly.
Someone had him.
That's my point.
It revolves around government.
You have to have a government who says, yes, I acknowledge that he's your slave.
Otherwise, you go, you're my slave.
He goes, fuck you.
I'm not your slave.
If you run away, I'll bring you back.
So to say that as we transition out of this period, we needed, there was a role for the federal government, or to say that there was a role for government to transition out of this period proves that, you know, it's okay, yes.
But we had to, ultimately, we were transitioning out of an awful government policy.
That's what we were transitioning out of.
So yes, this is example.
But her point, but Ann Coulter's point is that the Republicans were the much, look, America has a terrible history on race, but the Republicans were the better party.
No question about it up until the 60s.
Up until the 60s is when you can start debating.
But previous to that, the Republicans were always the one who...
Republicans, I mean, from Lincoln freeing slaves all the way to the first civil rights bill that were convinced.
What that lays out is that Democrats completely controlled the South.
And when LBJ took the stance that he took on civil rights, not widely popular within the Democratic Party in the South because of exactly what you said.
But he did it.
And as the result of doing it is that Republicans have controlled the South since then.
Like, look at before and after civil rights.
Okay, okay, before we put LBJ.
Okay, okay, hold on one second.
Before we put LBJ on a fucking story, he won by a fucking blowout.
That's why he did it.
He didn't say you make it seem like he sacrificed.
Are you referring to the assassination of JFK?
No, We're talking about when he was running.
We're talking about after the assassination of JFK, when he ran against Barry Goldwater.
Because he was also a survivor.
He carried 49 of 50 states, and the primary reason was because Barry Goldwater wasn't signing the civil rights bill.
This is what it was about.
So I'm saying politically.
Now, you're saying long-term, it did not work out well for the Southern Democrat strategy.
Sure.
A lot of nationworks became a bad thing.
No, you're right about what you're saying historically.
I'm just making the point that LBJ did not do this out of some foreseeing I'm sacrificing something.
It was a short-term gain for him, so that's why he did it.
But yeah, no, you're right.
This is when, you know, there was the kind of like some of the racists did come into the Republican Party.
But the point is that these big government Barry, I mean, these big government LBJ phonies immediately went from being big government pro-segregation, being government should have this role in pro-segregation, to being, no, government has to have this role in integration, and now government has to have this role.
So they just, they kept being big government, but they changed what big government was to do.
And ever since then, they've been selling big government as pro-black.
Racism for black people.
Racism issue in government is just a lot more complicated.
Just because, I mean, like, a lot of what we're sold is this idea that, like, that Lincoln did the Civil War because he loved black people so much.
Oh, no, no.
Like, Lincoln was a terrible.
Lincoln didn't give a shit about slavery.
He was consolidating power.
Lincoln had a Civil War to fight, and the Emancipation Proclamation was a way of kind of putting the moral high ground on his side.
But it was also a tactic.
It was a military tactic.
He wanted to cause mayhem in the South.
He wanted to free the slaves in the middle of the war.
Because in the middle of the war, they were part of the blacks were fighting for the South because they were doing what they were told to do.
And he wanted to let them know, hey, by the way, you can join us and start shooting against the guys who you probably should be resenting.
Similar to, like, we went into World War II because Japan bombed us.
Like, the fact that we also were able to end the Holocaust as part of it, we didn't go into the war to stop the Holocaust.
And also, the other side, like, being that, like, people were like, Americans were all as a people, these people who just love Jewish people and wanted to defend them so much.
There were people in American government and high places who were strongly anti-Semitic.
Oh, absolutely.
Forget that.
Forget that.
We partnered with a country that had a much bigger Holocaust.
We partnered with the Soviets who killed 50 million people based on their ethnicity.
By the way, there's never been a better example of how victors write history books.
I mean, because the Soviets were winners in World War II, we really forget that they had a much, much bigger thing.
Now, because the Cold War came later, we do talk about it because ultimately these guys were toppled.
So we talk about who they stepped up.
Don was a monster who was a friend of ours.
But yeah, we didn't do trials.
We didn't try the Soviets at the end of World War II.
We didn't put those guys on trials for war crimes.
No.
You know, I mean, so there's a big, there's a big, I guess we're jumping all over the place.
Yeah, what I was saying with the race thing, though, is, I mean, like, just like with Lincoln and with the Republicans and Democrats on race issues, it's not so black and white, and it's not like both teams have just stayed the exact same since the beginning.
There's definitely been some kind of switching of sides.
There's a negative Democratic side to race.
I would argue.
Legitimately, and I'm not arguing that, but it's also not quite so clear.
I would argue that freedom and small government has always been what would benefit.
Well, it benefits everybody.
I really do think that.
Well, except maybe like the people who are taking advantage of other people in the current system we have.
Like the military and industrial complex would not be benefited by a smaller government.
But in the majority, but especially for like poor and middle-class people, especially like minorities, they would be so benefited by smaller government.
Look, the big government, the whole concept of not just treating everyone as individuals, everybody has equal rights, right?
That has been the problem from the very beginning, obviously.
So it's a very, very beginning.
It's very easy to see that, right?
Like the inherent problem with slavery is that no one's respecting the fact that you're an individual with rights who owns his own body, should own the fruits of his own labor.
That's fine.
As they start to switch it more and more, now the big government people have to try to convince you.
It's like, well, no, you need like affirmative action and these other big government programs that'll help you or whatever the welfare or whatever you want to call it.
Look, the biggest thing that are hurting the black community today in America are big government programs.
Those are the big, the war on drugs, the public school education.
I mean, these are the things that are literally what's tearing apart inner-city black communities all over the country right now.
So I still think individual freedom, liberty would be the best way to go.
Now, one other point that Ann Colder brought up in the book that I just want to talk about because this is very politically incorrect, but I think such an interesting thing that no one talks about.
She basically just says, why should...
So say, let's concede that you even would believe in affirmative action in the idea of affirmative action.
She goes, there's no question we should all recognize America has a history.
We owe black people something.
I mean, America has a bad history with black people.
We violated their rights for a long time.
They absolutely should have been given reparations at some earlier date.
Like after when slavery was abolished, reparation should have been given right away.
They should have been given the rights right away.
But of course, that didn't even happen until really the 60s.
And what, why, what is the possible justification for other minorities getting affirmative action?
She brings up Hispanics.
Hispanics didn't really start coming to this country until the 50s and 60s.
They maybe got through the seven, eight years of Jim Crow laws.
And it gave you, why should Hispanics, why should immigrants, why should any other, just anyone brown, essentially, be getting affirmative action?
Like, do we, does that almost dilute the fact of what we owe to the African-American community?
You know what I'm talking about?
This is what I love that Ann Colzel will bring up a point like this that nobody else will talk about.
There's a very fair point there.
Do we just owe someone who is in some other country that maybe had a tough hand, do we owe them anything?
Because they're first generation here?
My family already put in their first generation.
I get where you are.
I mean, it's affirmative action also.
I mean, my girlfriend's Asian.
It's not 100%.
Your affirmative action.
I don't use your language.
I had a quota.
Trust me, there were more qualified people.
No, but that's the thing.
I mean, like, for Asians, though, like, a lot of times it's like kind of opposite affirmative action because, I mean, they're so overrepresented in all these fields.
Like, not only is it not helpful for them.
I mean, if anything, like, it's almost like kind of a knock against them.
Like, even getting into college and the worst thing.
They're the group who doesn't use it.
They're the least group that's on welfare also, and they're doing the best.
It's not a coincidence.
What they've always found consistently with affirmative action is the people who have benefited from the most by a million miles is white women.
Yeah, I was going to say that.
And like, followed by black women and black men who were like the number one group that they were trying to, including like Hispanics, like male and female.
Like the group that has easily benefited the least from affirmative action in all studies is black men, which has been the results.
Yes, but I think that proves the point that I'm making.
The people who I hear who get the most upset about affirmative action are always like people who are trying to get like city-level jobs.
Like if you want to be a fireman, it really gets on your fucking nerves that like a dude can have like a way lower score.
And I understand that.
But as an overall concept, like whenever people talk about how disastrous affirmative action is and how it needs to stop right away, my response is always, how many rich black people do you know?
Yeah.
Like, and the thing is, look, I mean, I have like a couple of black friends who went to Ivy League schools who are doing pretty well for themselves.
And I think that's a good question.
That's an unfair question to ask.
Your question is inherently assuming that affirmative action helps black people after you just, you're kind of contradicting what you just said, which is that the studies showed it doesn't help black people much.
Look, it's not saying that there's not a lot of rich black people out there is there's a lot of different reasons for that.
And to suggest that the reason is because the government isn't coming in and forcing people to hire more black people, dude, it doesn't help anybody.
There's also, look, dude, there's lots, and there are studies out there about this, that there are cases where affirmative action has really hurt black people.
And especially, well, here's how.
So what you do is you make these Ivy League schools hire a certain amount of minorities.
What ends up happening is if, now look, normally affirmative action, this is the thing when you tamper with the free market, to say the rules are like you have to have whatever percentage, X percentage of black people.
If you were already going to have X percentage of black people, then the law is unnecessary.
It doesn't affect you.
So if you found qualified people, then the law is unnecessary.
But the law only really comes into effect when you haven't found that many qualified people, and they force you to drag a percentage up.
You know what I mean?
So someone who maybe wasn't going to go to an Ivy League school, who is more qualified to go to a different school.
The idea is you're pulling people who aren't as qualified up into these schools.
And the rates are a lot of them end up not succeeding.
Like that's what happens when you pull people into school that maybe they weren't qualified to go to.
Look, I'm just saying there are examples where these policies hurt people.
And to say that black people aren't doing well, believe me, I think the reason why you don't know more rich black people is because more of their talented people are getting shot in gang violence in the streets because we have a war on drugs.
That has a lot more to do with them than affirmative action.
Again, to clarify what I'm saying, it's not, I mean, like I said, I know black people who've gone to Ivy League schools are making a ton of money because we work in comedy.
We both know a ton of black people.
Black people are doing way better than me.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, black people, do you know who you're rich?
Chris Rock is doing okay.
Like, no, it's not that.
I think it's more that it hasn't helped black people a ton.
Drug Laws Hurt Black Communities00:03:50
I think what I like about affirmative action as a concept is that if you were a black person who wants to work really hard, who grows up in a really tough neighborhood and wants to get out of it and step up in life, it's a series of policies that will help you do that.
I mean, like, Colin Powell is a super smart dude.
I'm sure he would have succeeded on some level, regardless.
He may have gotten as high as he got without any affirmative action whatsoever.
Yeah, dude.
To use an example like Colin Powell or someone like that and to say that that badass motherfucker, like someone who's that hot.
Saying he needed some government program.
No, no, no.
Fuck that.
No, no.
You get there on your own, dude.
Do you need the government?
This is soft expectations again.
Do you need the government to help you?
I'm not saying that.
Why the fuck are you any better?
Listen, man.
I'm not saying that.
I'm not born with a silver spoon in my mouth.
No, I got it.
I don't need the fucking government, and I don't assume that these people are any less capable than me.
Look, these, I just don't buy it.
Just to finish what I was saying on that side, I don't think he's less capable.
I think he's super smart.
I think he would have succeeded.
The reason, all these things that you're trying to overcome, by the way, like the violent neighborhood, which is, again, caused by these drug laws, the terrible schooling, which is caused by these government-run schools, there are all the government policies that you have to overcome.
And the violence is also caused by drugs themselves.
Listen, I'm against the drug policy.
It's bullshit.
It's bullshit, dude.
People don't commit crimes to get money to buy drugs.
No, that's why they commit crimes.
Yes, that's my point.
They're saying they're committing crimes because they're so goddamn expensive.
You need so much money for them.
Look, our own government, the Department of Health, tells us that cigarettes are more addictive than heroin.
But people aren't knocking over 7-Elevens to get the cigarettes behind the store because they're illegal.
They're knocking over 7-Elevens to get money to go buy heroin.
If you legalize the drugs, believe me, you would take it.
99% of the element of crime.
So you're saying like the UK model where heroin's free and the government gives you the needles and stuff to do it?
The UK model, I wouldn't even say, is the best.
But if you look at other models, if you look at the- I'm not saying it's a bad idea.
No, I think ending the war on drugs is what I'm saying more than anything else.
It's not even about what model of government regulation we go to.
It's about ending the fact that we are driving.
Look, we created crack with the war on drugs.
That's what happened.
It's not a coincidence that we started a war on drugs and a decade later, crack came out.
We drove the prices of Coke up so high that people found a new way to get a crack.
Crack's also pretty great.
Let's not get really down at all.
No, look, I'm saying once it came out, it got popular for a reason.
But I'm saying no one would have ever thought before the war on drugs, cocaine was crazy cheap.
No one would have ever thought to create crack.
This whole epidemic, not even including all the CIA shadiness.
So what you're saying is thank God for the drug war because that's why crack is around.
Listen, I'm saying some good things came out of it, but overall.
You take the good, you take the bad.
Overall, bad policy.
Fair enough.
But yeah, crack's great.
Sure.
It's wonderful.
We'll save that for the after show.
This will be just the online version.
It's all in online.
We just have the super relaxed talk, and then afterwards, we're just hitting a crackpipe.
You know, look, dude, well, at the end of the show, you like to unwind with some crackpipe.
I know, believe it.
I come to Brooklyn with expectations.
But this is what, if you look at alcohol prohibition, I mean, the violence comes from the prohibition.
This is where all the violence comes from.
Government fucks over.
Look, dude, if you don't, what does explain it?
What do you think explains all the statistics that are like why black people are so much more likely to go to jail?
All these things is what is this?
Is this the free market at work?
Is this because our government's too small, or is it because our government has these policies that we're arresting all these people, creating criminals?
Like, come on.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
We literally go in there, our government goes in and they go, uh, like all these different rules that we have that fuck over the inner cities.
We have the okay, it's the drug laws, like we were just breaking down.
Then they go, by the way, we're also going to impose the harshest gun laws in these neighborhoods, so only the criminals have guns now.
If you want to be a law, any law-abiding citizen now has to get rid of their guns, they can't defend themselves.
Welfare to Work Programs00:07:53
Then we impose these minimum wage, all these things that we claim are helping these people, these minimum wage laws.
So, anybody, like the minimum wage laws, dude, destroyed the early entry positions for kids from the inner cities, dude.
This is like the minimum wage, there's no better example of how backwards socialist thinking is.
You go, we'll just write a law that says that people have to get paid a certain amount, and that'll lift people out of poverty.
Like, okay, so why don't you just write, why isn't the minimum wage just $50 then or $100 or $200?
Why not just keep putting the minimum wage up?
Here's the thing, dude.
This is what you have to understand about the way economics works.
If you are worth, if the value that you produce is worth $4 an hour, you're not getting $20 an hour.
It doesn't matter what fucking law you pass.
No one's paying you $20 an hour if you're worth $4 an hour.
You're putting them out of business.
The only way to pay, the only thing that legislating that you have to pay someone $20 an hour does to that $4 an hour person is make them fire.
You go, oh, can't hire you anymore in this new legal environment.
The only way to do it, look, someone, instead of using a pitchfork, using a tractor, that makes their salary higher.
Innovation, creativity, making people more productive, that's what leads to pulling people out of poverty, not government rules.
I think that the bigger problem, I mean, and this is my own view on things.
Say it.
Part of the problem.
What is a part of the problem?
My view on this part of the problem is.
I think that with a lot of inner-city communities and stuff, you have it's a cultural one and it goes back to slavery.
And like, I think that that sounds like a really super hippie liberal place to come from.
But the fact is, for the most part, your work ethic and your knowledge of money or the way that you perceive money and everything like that, for the most part, comes from your parents that came from their parents, that came from their parents.
I mean, like, when you see Jewish families that are really successful, their view of money and working really hard and being really disciplined, being disciplined is part of what religion is to begin with.
Sure.
But the thing is, I feel like in a lot of black communities, it's part of why a lot of times, like when you see black doctors and attorneys and stuff, a lot of the times it's from people who are first or second generation from actual Africa.
The people who dealt with slavery, it's such a huge cultural difference than people who didn't.
And I think that we talk about education and putting more money into schools and stuff.
The fact is, I mean, even in the poorest communities, you see Asian families come to Flushing with pennies in their pocket from towns that didn't have electricity.
And in one generation, their kids are dying.
So that tells you it's the payment.
Putting more money into education isn't the answer.
Listen, it's tough because as a government, it's like we want to try to do something to fix it.
We can't just accept that it's broken and just let it remain broken.
Here's the piece that you're okay.
But here's the piece that you're missing: how much government is going to be.
So we're throwing darts on their dartboard of stuff we think that might take, Dave.
You got to let me talk to you.
This is the piece that you're missing, okay?
Because you say it dates back to slavery times, but a lot of the problems that I'm talking about don't date back to slavery times.
Look, what you're talking about with two-parent households in the 1950s and the early 60s, black households were actually more likely than white households to be two-parent households.
It was something like the black legitimacy rate was close to 80%, and the whites were like somewhere down in the 70s, not far off from each other.
But the legitimacy rate overall was much, much higher.
The crime rate in the black community was much, much lower in the 1940s and the 1950s and the 60s than it is today.
What happened is the crack epidemic.
This is not, a lot of this is not stuff that dates back to slavery.
What happened actually in the early, in the first half of the 19th century is what you had was 1900s rather, the 20th century.
First half of the 20th century, you had the black population making tremendous strides, doing way, way better every single year.
You also had the income level just rising every single year.
So people were literally just getting pulled out of poverty.
It's why everyone in the world wanted to come to America.
We became the most thriving country ever.
And literally, as the poverty went down and income went up, more and more civil rights came.
Jim Crow ended.
Black people made tremendous strides.
It stopped at a certain point.
What happened in the 60s was we introduced all these big government programs, and all of this progress came to a grinding halt.
The crack epidemic was great.
I mean, this is what happened.
So to not, you know, we ignore this, but literally for the history of America, the entire history of America, the poverty rate was falling until the rise of the welfare state, and then it leveled off.
The poverty rate is no longer falling.
You can try to ignore this stuff all you want to, but this is the fact.
Believe me, if it was reversed, if we had a regulated economy and the poverty rate was falling and then we deregulated it and let the free market take over and it stopped falling, they'd be all over this shit.
My sense on welfare is different than my stance on affirmative action.
My sense on affirmative action is that it's at worst, it does nothing.
Like, I mean, I feel like the negative side of affirmative action hasn't really, I haven't really seen like a strong negative.
The welfare state, I mean, I feel like my stance on that is probably a little bit more conservative.
It's probably more like the mid-90s, like when they, when they, like, welfare to work programs and stuff like that.
But kind of, we were talking earlier about how sometimes someone makes a claim and it goes along with what people's preconceptions of the candidate was.
Like, these Republicans came out with all these ads that Obama was doing away with the welfare to work requirements.
Which is bullshit because all of the only negotiations they were doing would have required at least more work.
But it goes along with people's preconceptions that Obama's this dude who loves welfare and like wants to build this welfare system.
Yeah, and it's also when you can't go at him on any of the real issues, you gotta make up this.
But the reason why that that sticks as a point is because it plays into what people would have already thought about him.
But I mean, yeah, with Paul Vera, I'm not a huge supporter of the welfare state.
I mean, I think I like the idea that our government, if someone does get sick or if someone, if hard times come on someone that has no control over it, I think that it's nice that there's a government that keeps people from starving in the streets.
But I think at the same time, I don't, it shouldn't be a life plan.
Because we haven't had starvation in America since Jamestown.
I mean, the problem is that that's not the problem.
Our poor people aren't starving.
They're actually obese.
And living off a government.
It's a nice idea, but what ends up happening is you give the government this power and they end up fucking everything up.
A parasite.
That's what the government is doing.
My feeling is, unless you're one of the handful of people who is legitimately enabled to work.
I mean, because if you can't work, that's different.
That's way different.
But if I definitely don't think that living off government support should be considered an occupation, and like I do have a problem with that because I think that there's people who definitely are on government support who could get jobs, but the jobs to them are less appealing than the support that they're getting from the government.
So for them, it's a choice.
And the thing is, what I'm saying now, almost 100% comes from Republicans.
You'll never hear any Democrat saying this.
But the fact is, it's not a Republican or Democrat point.
It's real.
And it doesn't mean everybody who's getting government support is that, but there are those people out there and it's a problem.
Yeah, I feel like Republicans assume that anyone who's on government support wants to be on it.
And I feel like Democrats assume that anyone who's on government support is not abusing it.
Sure.
You know, like there's a lot of things.
Right.
Yeah.
No, like I think there's a return to that.
I also think that it's a little bit of a this isn't the issue we should be going after in terms of like that types of welfare.
There's much bigger welfare like corporate welfare and foreign aid and stuff like that.
It's much more important or national defense welfare.
But just because we were specifically talking about race, I just want to talk about, I just don't think you can ignore the fact that the black community was making huge, huge strides in America up until the point that the government decided to help them make more strides, and then all the strides seem to have kind of tapered off.
Guest Mic at Eastville Club00:02:02
By the way, as a side note, I would love if, like, because we're in Brooklyn, there's a window open, and there was like just a black dude at the apartment across the I hear what you're saying.
Give me back your welfare check.
Oh, no, you're gunshots.
Well, there we go.
Someone's not following the gun laws.
All right.
Well, listen, guys, we're almost at two hours, so we should probably wrap this thing up.
Jessica, how was your show at Caroline's?
It was good.
It was good.
It was better than I expected.
Well, that's good.
Yeah, I had low expectations.
Expectations are low, though.
Well, that's good.
It's a good way to get through comedy.
It is.
And what else is new in your week, Jessica?
I don't know.
I was babysitting for my nephew, who's like a little adorable snot factory, and he got me sick.
Well, that's your mic for now on.
Yep.
No more switching them up.
Guest mic, and that's Jessica's mic.
All right.
Well, Dave, do you want to plug anything before we get out of that to our audience of hundred of people that listen to this?
Same stuff I plugged last time: savingthedolphins.com, savingthedolphins.org.
I'm on Twitter, David Kinney, K-I-N-N-E-Y, with the ad sign, which if you're on Twitter, you're already aware of.
You know all about that shit.
I'm hosting an Eastville Comedy Club all weekend.
If you listen to this podcast in time with them the next week, it'll be up tomorrow morning, right?
Yeah, Sunday.
So you'll be there Sunday.
Yeah, yeah, they're doing it through Sunday now.
Yeah, tomorrow night.
I was there last weekend, and Sunday one didn't turn out so good.
But the weekends are always great at Eastville.
Eastville Comedy Club is a great club.
So go check Dave Kinney out there.
And please follow us on Twitter at The Problem Show.
Follow me at Comic Dave Smith and Jess at OHA Jess Sega.
Yeah.
Every variation of my actual name was taken.
Hey, look, do what you can, all right?
You do what you can in this crazy world.
Well, anyway, guys, and please, you know, tweet any comments or any topics that you want us to talk about on the show, guys.