Jan. 21, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
05:15
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| They're lobbying for tax cuts. | |
| So again, please explain. | |
| I want people to remember this, and repetition is the mother of memory. | |
| What did FedEx do with its profits? | |
| It reinvested them, Dennis, and even more than that. | |
| It took lots of its capital and decided to buy a whole bunch of planes, 2477S. Which, by the way, Fred Smith noted, injects 540 million into the U.S. economy, supporting an ancillary 1,850 jobs. | |
| Let's put it this way. | |
| When Boeing found out it was getting that order, especially given the shape they've been in the last year, what a boom to the Boeing workers. | |
| By the way, Boeing gets its jet engines from General Electric. | |
| What a boom to the General Electric workers. | |
| This is downstream jobs. | |
| And all kinds of downstream taxes, they're paying. | |
| We aligned themselves for competition next year. | |
| So they're going in a head-to-head battle with a giant, Amazon, and they needed to reinvest their profits into their people, the pensions, the planes, and the warehouses. | |
| By the way, Dennis, they pointed out way at the bottom of the article that FedEx had paid $10 billion in taxes in the last five years. | |
| Moreover, Fred Smith promised... | |
| That after all this is done, they'd be back paying those big taxes again. | |
| They'd be competing against and beating their arch rival in the delivery business, which is a new one called Amazon. | |
| When Amazon comes to play, they're really tough competitors, Dennis. | |
| That's right. | |
| I'm rooting for FedEx, by the way. | |
| I don't want Amazon to take over the world. | |
| So, this is so, it was so misleading, the New York Times piece. | |
| Look, the truth is, I believe this. | |
| What I'm about to say, I believe this. | |
| This is not meant as an attack. | |
| I truly believe this. | |
| At the New York Times, they would rather the government give money to all those workers than have them employed by Boeing. | |
| Oh, I think you're right, Dennis. | |
| In fact, I think in some respects, they'd rather see the manufacturing of planes put into a government enterprise of some sort. | |
| And by the way, the government regulates the heck out of the airline business as it is. | |
| But I think you're right. | |
| One other point I made in this piece, Dennis, is, you know, this guy Fred Smith started, well, he graduates from Yale in the 60s, and rather than join the anti-war protesters, he goes to Vietnam, where he's in charge of logistics. | |
| Flying in planes and figuring some pretty difficult terrain where to drop soldiers and where and how to rescue them. | |
| He comes out, he starts FedEx in 1971 with another dime in his pocket, a loan from his dad, and he builds a company that has 330,000 workers in America. | |
| And these aren't any jobs. | |
| These are drivers, pilots, mechanics. | |
| These are the kind of jobs that everybody wants. | |
| 33,000 of them, Dennis, are in my own backyard. | |
| 33,000 jobs in the little city of Memphis. | |
| I am stunned at these numbers. | |
| These are big numbers, Dennis. | |
| And by the way, with those 33,000 jobs, anyone owns a mail salon, air salon, restaurant, car deal. | |
| What would happen to all of those businesses? | |
| That's right. | |
| And by the way, who would pay for the teacher's salary and the mayor's salary? | |
| Who would pay all these government bills without FedEx? | |
| Yes, exactly correct. | |
| That is exactly correct. | |
| Well, it doesn't matter because it's all ideology. | |
| Look, you wrote this. | |
| Any feedback thus far that just came out? | |
| What's the story? | |
| Oh, I got all kinds of feedback from FedEx. | |
| They loved it and they thanked me. | |
| Especially telling the story. | |
| It's for all banditists. | |
| We all say capitalism or socialism, but we don't really tell the story. | |
| That's right. | |
| One job creates three. | |
| That's right. | |
| The next three creates six more. | |
| I think it's so powerful, your piece, and the whole story. | |
| Maybe we should do a PragerU video on it. | |
| People don't know. | |
| They don't understand. | |
| This happened on a business section. | |
| This happened in the business section of a paper. | |
| The business section. | |
| That's what was most shocking. | |
| And it wasn't an op-ed. | |
| It was an op-ed. | |
| Right. | |
| Paid zero in taxes. | |
| Right. | |
| The fact that, you know, tens of thousands of Americans have well-paying jobs, that's irrelevant. | |
| That's what they're saying. | |
| That's irrelevant. | |
| How much taxes... | |
| Did you increase employment, or did you increase the government? | |
| And by the way, they're not counting all the taxes that people pay, who work at FedEx, the gasoline taxes. | |
| Yes, yes, right. | |
| Oh my goodness, it's billions of dollars. | |
| All right, where do people fall? | |
| Oh yeah, we put it up, that's right, at Newsweek. | |
| Lee Habib, you're a joy, and thank you for your help on the Newsweek issue. |
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