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May 18, 2020 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
22:42
Avoid The Beef Shortage With This One Simple Trick - With Guest Rep. Thomas Massie

With the ominous warnings of a meat shortage as the coronavirus scare destroys supply lines, US Congressman Thomas Massie (R-KY) has a great idea of how we can insure the safety and availability of food sources. Massie also pulls back the screen to reveal how Washington's endless covid bailout bills are working well for the well-connected instead of those really suffering. Don't miss this very special episode!

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Processing Plant Shortages 00:07:36
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
How are you this morning, Dr. Paul?
I'm doing well.
We have a very special guest today.
Exciting.
He's been on our program before.
He's a good friend of Liberty and our good friend.
And we used to serve in the Congress together, but not for a long period of time.
So just six weeks, is that what we had?
But I think we knew of each other before that.
And we've been working together ever since.
So, Thomas, welcome to the program today.
Thanks for having me on, Ron.
Good to see you, Daniel.
Hi, Thomas.
How are you?
Okay, my first question is, catch us up to date on how you do your schedule.
Because, you know, you're in Kentucky right now, right?
Yeah.
Okay, basically, were you in Washington this week or when do you go or have you gone?
Just a brief update about what type of schedule you have dealing with your Kentucky schedule as well as Washington.
Basically, I'm waiting in Kentucky for Nancy Pelosi to run out of ice cream.
And then when she runs out of ice cream, she decides to call Congress back into session.
And so we haven't been in session for a couple weeks.
And so I've been in Kentucky doing everything remotely.
You know, I got hammered, smashed by Washington, D.C. on March 27th because I said we should show up to vote, that the Constitution requires a quorum to pass bills.
Well, they all hated me there for about a week, and now they've acknowledged I was right.
And so they're inviting us back tomorrow to vote on what Nancy Pelosi wants to be the fifth.
Some people call it the fourth bill, but it's really the fifth corona bill.
She wants $3 trillion now.
And Thomas, when you travel, what's the travel like now?
Are there commercial flights or private flights or automobile?
How do you, if you don't want to reveal your secrets, you don't have to.
But how do you get back and forth?
Well, when I have gone back to request recorded votes while they're trying to pass bills during vacation, I won't even put on my calendar which flight I'm taking or how I'm getting to D.C.
But I'm happy to tell you that I will be driving to D.C. tonight.
It takes about eight hours, so I'll leave my farm about four o'clock and get there at about midnight.
Then I'll be fresh and ready the next morning for whatever they're going to do.
By the way, they stagger the votes now, Ron.
I think you'd find it really weird.
We vote in groups, so they'll invite maybe 40 people to vote in a 10-minute window, and then they'll let another 40 come in, and we vote alphabetically.
But, you know, the last time they tried to get me to do that, I said, what if I want to call a procedural motion during the debate?
And nobody answered me.
So I just showed up at the beginning of the debate and stayed on the floor the whole time.
Right.
Now, I want to ask you one question about what's your opinion about this lockdown business?
Because that's the big thing.
We've spent weeks now, as everybody else has, and it's been very popular or interesting because we have a larger viewing audience right now.
But on this lockdown, and we're optimists because we report all the things where they do it, it is not the end of the world.
So what is your personal opinion on that?
Do you think that maybe the people are going to wise up when you read these great stories about people standing up to their governors?
But I understand you even have to deal with that in Kentucky.
But do you think maybe by fall they'll come to their senses?
Or are you a pessimist when you say, I don't know, it looks like Nancy Pelosi is going to rule the day.
Well, when this all got started and our own governor shut down the economy, I thought the thing that'll snap him back to reality is when he doesn't have enough tax revenue because he's killed the economy to pay the state workers.
And the state workers will come to the capital and they'll protest him.
And I thought that would happen.
But then my friends in D.C. had a different idea.
They decided to just pump money into the economy.
And now this next bill proposes to bail out the states.
So I don't think that's going to get us back to reality.
But I've seen one thing that might get us back to reality.
And I'm very familiar with this because I grow beef cattle back here on this farm.
There are shortages now in supermarkets of food.
And restaurants, even the ones that are the few that are open and serving takeout, are having a hard time getting certain kinds of meat.
And that's because you can send all the bailout money you want to people.
You can send all the bailout money you want to farmers, but it doesn't cause the crops to be harvested or the animals to be processed.
And so I'm hoping that, you know, these people, when they go to get their big filet mignon, either at a restaurant takeout or in their grocery store and they find out that all they can have is a six pack of chicken wings, if they're lucky, maybe that will snap us back into reality and get these miniature tyrants that are the governors to open our economies back up.
Well, let's hope so.
You know, the CPI report just came out recently showed that the CPI dropped dramatically, you know, because all of a sudden people had less money and it was reflecting, you know, maybe before they had their check.
But the one thing that didn't drop, it went up, it fits into what you're saying, is the food is a different story.
The prices of food is going up.
And I think that is going to happen.
I think how many checks you send out, I think it's just going to be gobbled up, you know, with price inflation.
I think we're already seeing it, and I believe that's going to get worse.
Yeah, there was a shift in demand from restaurants to consumers.
And so actually what you saw for a brief period of time is prices went down for meat because they have an overabundance of frozen supply that they couldn't ship to the restaurants.
And so they had to repackage it for a consumer.
But when the frozen supply ran out, which has happened, the factories, the processing plants, by the way, there are four processing plants that process 80% of the United States meat.
Those processing plants aren't the result.
That monopoly isn't the result of efficient capitalism.
That monopoly is the result of regulatory capture and over-regulation of small competitors by the USDA.
But so that's coming home to roost right now.
We're seeing shortages in the processing.
And here's the irony, Ron, and maybe you can appreciate this.
I'm sure you will.
Because it's Orwellian.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, their main response, their primary response to all of these shortages and the lack of processing is to help farmers efficiently destroy their animals, either using wood chippers or liquefying them, but to efficiently destroy their animals and then to compensate them for the destroyed animals.
That's not putting food on the plates.
And I'm hoping that'll snap people to reality.
And I'm also hoping that'll snap some of my colleagues into supporting a bill that I introduced five years ago called the Prime Act that deregulates the small processors.
Yeah, we do, Thomas, want to talk about the Prime Act.
If you watch the show at all, you probably notice we're plugging it a lot because we think it's great on a lot of fronts.
But I wanted to ask you something before, have you comment on something before?
Mail Active Voters Strategy 00:14:03
It's interesting you talk about the bailouts, the next round of bailouts.
Noted a couple of days ago with some amusement that now California, Oregon, and Washington are getting together and saying, hey, we need a trillion dollars.
Send us some money.
This after their governors are doing their best to destroy the economies.
We talk about, we certainly speculate on this program a bit about this, although we're not partisan political, but it's hard to escape the feeling that somehow there's a not a political component to these Democrat, left-wing Democrat-led states forcibly locking and shutting down their economy, really destroying the main platform that the president, I think, was planning on running for re-election on.
Do you get any sense of that when you look at what's happening?
Oh, I do.
And you know, there's a power struggle between the president and the governors, and they each claim the constitutional authority to open the government back up, I'm sorry, the economy back up.
The reality is they both have the power to destroy it, and it's the governors who've destroyed it.
But as long as the president signs bills to enrich the states, they're going to keep destroying their own economy.
So he can tell them to open their state up, but if he signs a bill that bails them out, they're not going to open it up.
They're just going to wait for another bailout.
I'll tell you one other fundamental shift here, Daniel, is these $600 payments per week.
If you work 40 hours a week, it pays $15 an hour to stay home instead of going to work.
So they instantly, using this crisis, got a $15 minimum wage, but it's also a $2,400 a month minimum basic income.
Because whether you work or not, unless you're an entrepreneur, by the way, which can't qualify for the unemployment or the bailouts that are going to the companies, you get $2,400 whether you work or not.
And so those are two socialist things that were achieved.
I mean, only Bernie Sanders could dream of that.
Yet almost every Republican was okay voting for that in the House of Representatives on March 27th.
Right.
You know, the unemployment is obviously in the news.
It's soaring into the many millions of people looking for unemployment benefits.
But it's interesting that the people don't have the jobs.
A lot of them are saying, I want to go back to work.
And then they have these rules and regulations and the lockdown prevents you from going to work.
You know, there's unemployment.
People want to go to work.
And so we prevent them from going to work.
And what is astounding is that people don't make a big deal of that.
I mean, some people do, but that's just the absurdity of it all.
You know, during the Depression, when food prices weren't high enough, they said, well, we'll just get rid of some food and they plow the crops under.
That'll push the prices of food up and the farmers will be happy and the depression will be over.
So sometimes this interventionism in economic policy is just absurd because most of the manipulation and the mess that we have today has come from previous regulations and previous nonsense and previous spending.
So my goal has always been, you got to change your mind about what type of policies you have and that is what I hope we can contribute to.
Yeah, you know, I polled this recently.
People were telling me that this bailout package was popular and that I better be careful criticizing it.
And I didn't believe it.
So I polled Republican primary voters in the 4th District of Kentucky.
And I found out that if you call it a stimulus package, it's 83% popular among Republicans.
And if you call it a bailout, it's still 79% popular among Republicans.
Now, I think it's gone down some a little bit since they found out that the checks are going to deceased individuals and not to everybody else.
But it still strikes me as disturbing that this $2 trillion package was that popular.
I think that's why we have a Republican, not a democracy.
The person or people who actually vote on this need to take into account the long-term effects of it.
And my colleagues aren't doing that.
They're just trying to be popular, and they're being Santa Claus and Easter Bunny at the same time.
Well, Thomas, we do want to talk about the situation with beef and meat in general.
And I mean, certainly even here in Lake Jackson, you go into the store, they limit you to two items per purchase.
The variety is way down.
You can't get what you want.
And we've talked about it before, but I think it's really worth talking about again because I see, I sense, I watch your Twitter feed, I sense you're picking up some momentum with this.
So maybe if you can kind of take us back to the idea behind the Prime Act and where it will take us, we're calling today's show, Avoid a Beef Shortage with this one simple trick.
That trick being passed the Prime Act.
So that's right.
Beef and pork and also chickens are going to be in short supply.
The Prime Act is not a silver bullet.
We didn't get into this overnight.
The virus hit us overnight.
But making our food supply so brittle by over-regulating it has taken 50 years.
But the Prime Act would have an immediate effect, benefit.
And over the long haul, it would have a tremendous effect.
What it would do is it would let farmers sell beef to consumers in a grocery store using a local processor.
Now, right now, they can't use the local processor because most of the local processors don't have a full-time USDA employee on staff and an office for them, which is one of the requirements if you want to sell in the grocery store.
Yet these small processors, on the whole, are much safer than the larger processors.
All the big meat recalls you see are on packages of meat that are stamped USDA.
And I think people would be appalled to see what little oversight the USDA actually does apply in these Chinese factories and these Brazilian-owned factories here in the United States.
So my bill is real simple.
It says, if a farmer and a consumer want to complete a transaction using a processor in a grocery store and they're all in the same state, then there's no constitutional nexus for the USDA to stop that transaction.
And that as long as all those people are complying with state and local laws, then let the transaction happen.
And what that would prevent is the millions of hogs that are being slaughtered and wasted and the millions of chickens that have been wasted.
And right now we haven't wasted any beef yet, although you see dairy cattle going into the beef supply because the milk's being wasted and the farmers can't afford to keep feeding dairy cattle.
But eventually, if we don't do something, you're going to see beef animals be wasted as well.
Terrible.
Okay.
I want to shift a little bit, Thomas, and I know that you're not on the edge of your chair in the Congress on this issue, but I want to talk a bit about the foreign policy because things are going on.
The spending is there.
Every once in a while you hear a hint, can we afford all this?
But so far, like all the budget, there's no hesitation.
There's still some spots out there.
Do you ever come across any colleague or any conversation or any piece of legislation right now that would even suggest that maybe we spend too much of our money overseas?
But you were saying the people are pretty content as long as there's another program.
You know, the populist message is, well, just go along.
But it seems like it may never quit until the dollar quits working.
But how about that, dude?
Do you come across any conversation about how we spend and waste overseas?
Well, it's interesting you bring that up.
I just had a conference call with John Sotko, who's the special inspector general for Afghan Reconstruction.
And he covers all the spending in Afghanistan.
And it was like Groundhog Day.
We've spent another $10 billion, you know, rebuilding Afghanistan.
By the way, the full bill over there is about $50 billion a year.
And with little results, and he can't even go to the places to see if the money's being spent correctly.
So there are a few loan voices, like the Inspector General in Afghanistan for us, who's tracking the money.
But I couldn't tell how many people were on that conference call.
It may have been me and two or three other people, I suspect, out of 435 who even care about that.
You know, you would think that maybe we would cut back on the foreign aid in this crisis and spend some of that at home.
But there's been no reduction of foreign aid.
In fact, there's been some foreign aid in some of these bills that we're passing.
You would think putting America first would mean focusing here at home, but it hasn't so far.
Daniel.
Well, Thomas, I don't know if you're comfortable talking about this.
That looks like you're at home now, but we're also sort of curious to hear a political update.
You know, you've got a race.
It's every two years you got to run that race and maybe your own personal race if you don't mind.
And then just kind of take a look at where you think things are heading in terms of electoral politics in general.
Well, you know, I'm in pretty good shape, but it set me back on March 27th when President Trump tweeted against me three times.
I probably shouldn't say this or call attention to it, but he wanted me thrown out of the Republican Party simply for asking Congress to show up and work.
And so that, you know, I'm in a congressional district where the president is 94% popular among Republican primary voters.
Even Rand Paul is not that popular.
He's at about 85%, I'm glad to report.
But so that has put me behind the eight ball a little bit.
I do need to raise more money if people can go to thomasmassey.com and contribute something.
I feel good about the election.
I do believe we're ahead, but they've gone to mail-in ballots here in Kentucky.
And they're going to close down most of the voting precincts.
And so I'm afraid a lot of people on election day are going to show up at the voting precincts and can't get in.
And they'll say, well, you had to request a mail-in ballot two weeks ago.
And they'll be like, what?
Oh, wow.
And so I think it's going to be very confusing here in Kentucky.
And I also think because it's mail-in ballots, you're going to have people that typically never vote who mail in that ballot and haven't really been following the race.
So we have to expand our mail program and do more TV.
You know, usually you have this universe where you mail the active voters.
Now we have to mail all the voters because they're all going to be able to vote by mail-in.
So it's thrown a little kink in the race.
So if people could help me out, I would sure appreciate it because I want to go back to Washington, D.C. and try to keep them honest.
Right.
You know, back to economics and ending this mess and spending trillions of dollars and nobody even counts it.
To me, it's been really amazing, you know, the announcement, but the markets are reflecting it to a degree.
Gold prices are up and different things like that.
And the market had to have a crash, which was a predictable event.
But it astounds me that, you know, even the people that you talk to say, oh, it's no big deal.
We need the money, spend the money, trillions of dollars.
But it amazes me because this dollar holds up, but it holds up internationally because I think the main reason is so many other currencies are so much worse.
But that's what I think is going to happen.
And we think we've had a calamity now with the stock market.
And I think someday in the not too distant future that the people are going to get sick and tired of the lockdowns with coronavirus.
And I'm hoping that will improve.
I think what they're going to have trouble escaping, which everybody's going to be involved in, is when the prices start to go up.
Right now, these prices are done.
But I think that's coming because the spending won't stop.
The only thing they can do, we don't issue bonds for people to buy them and invest in them.
Everything goes to the Fed.
They monetize everything.
So I believe that'll be the end of all this scandalous type of policies that we have.
Well, we had Chairman Powell of the Federal Reserve on a conference call with the GOP House.
And one of my colleagues asked him about inflation.
Was he worried about inflation?
He says, oh, no, we know how to handle that.
We've got tools for that if we ever see that coming.
But I think he's a little too dismissive about that question.
I tell people these policies aren't Republican or Democrat or Libertarian.
These are collapsitarian policies.
And I know some of your listeners may be collapsitarians.
And I express that ideology as somebody who doesn't think we can fix this until it all collapses.
And the things that my colleagues are doing and the things they're doing at the Federal Reserve could lead to a collapse.
And I also heard a new term here recently, accelerationist.
And these are the folks who think that the dollar, maybe not the government will collapse, but the dollar will collapse.
And we're accelerating that with these monetary policies.
And I think we are going very far out on the limb here with this spending and the borrowing and the loaning.
We're certainly doing it quicker than any point in history of the country.
Okay, we're going to have to go, but why don't you give our viewers your website once again so they can send you some support?
Please do.
It's thomasmassey.com, M-A-S-S-I-E, and go straight there to donate.
Keep Up The Good Work 00:00:47
It would be very helpful.
Like I said, we've got to mail people we've never sent mail to before because the clerks are going to, and the Secretary of State's going to be sending them ballots.
And I just want to go back and fight.
I want to try and keep these people accountable.
You can't win every day, but a lot of times one person can demand a recorded vote.
And even if I get booed on the floor of the House, which I have been several times for that, I will do it again.
Well, very good.
And Thomas, obviously, keep up the good work.
And thank you for being with us today.
Thanks, Ron.
Thanks, Daniel.
Good.
And I want to thank our viewers today for tuning in to this very special program.
And please help Thomas Massey get re-elected.
Believe me, he's lonely up there in Washington.
He needs to be re-elected.
I want to thank you once again for being with us today.
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