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What if we have 15 or 20 percent inflation by November or December? | ||
We're talking about an alarming problem where, you know, the poor and working class in our country won't be able to afford the routine staples of life. | ||
But we're then talking also about what happens when it finally bursts. | ||
And when it bursts, usually you have dramatic rises in interest rates, but you also have dramatically high unemployment. | ||
So I'm concerned about the future of our country and I think we need to get our house in order. | ||
I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is one of the senators from the great state of Kentucky, | ||
Senator Rand Paul. | ||
Welcome back to the Rubin Report. | ||
Thanks for having me. | ||
All right. | ||
So we crunched some numbers before we had you on today. | ||
I've got the papers right in front of me here. | ||
Now we just gave Ukraine 40 billion. | ||
According to my numbers, we don't have 40 billion. | ||
Am I correct? | ||
No, even before we started, you know, lavishing large sums on the COVID bailout, we were already about a trillion dollars short in our ordinary expenses. | ||
So to pay for Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Social Security, and the military, we're about a trillion dollars short every year. | ||
Now in the last two years, we had an extra four or five trillion just to really show people we could spend money like crazy, but our normal expenses were a trillion dollars short, and so that's the question I ask. | ||
Where does the 40 billion come from? | ||
Who do you get it from? | ||
Do you get it from, do we borrow it from China to send it to Ukraine? | ||
Really, we borrow it from China, we borrow it from England, we borrow it from Japan, but a lot of it we print. | ||
And all the Republicans up here seem to be concerned about inflation, but they don't seem to be concerned about where they're gonna find the 40 billion they sent to Ukraine. | ||
Are you shocked how few Republicans decided to push back against this? | ||
I think, what, it was 14 total, if I'm not mistaken? | ||
Yeah, it's a small number in the Senate. | ||
So, you know, it's about 20% of the Republicans, about 10% of the Senate. | ||
And over in the House, there are about 57 Republicans. | ||
But frankly, I look at the list and I say, you know what, I'm not really going to be supporting or working for any people who say that they are for a constitutional foreign policy and yet are for shoveling money out the door. | ||
You know, we do have problems at home. | ||
I'm worried about us becoming Venezuela, frankly. | ||
I'm worried about us destroying our currency. | ||
And I see no, everybody that looks at this, even the people who look at it from the traditional central banking point of view, say we're so far behind the curve, they're not sure how this is going to end. | ||
Because when interest rates are still so low, and they've been so slow to start increasing the interest rates, many people are predicting there isn't going to be a quick end inflation that could get much worse. | ||
What if we have 15 or 20 percent inflation by November or December? | ||
We're talking about an alarming problem where, you know, the poor and working class in our country won't be able to afford the routine staples of life. | ||
But we're then talking also about what happens when it finally bursts. | ||
And when it bursts, usually you have dramatic rises in interest rates, but you also have dramatically high unemployment. | ||
So I'm concerned about the future of our country, and I think we need to get our house in order. | ||
So, right, we're not very good at getting our house in order. | ||
We seem to want to get other people's houses in order, and we don't do that very well either. | ||
This $40 billion, though, one of the things that you brought up in the last week or so was, hey, guys, how about we get some receipts on this? | ||
How about we find out exactly where it's going, what you're going to be spending it on, who's getting the kickbacks, etc., etc.? | ||
And pretty much nobody has an answer for you. | ||
Is that fair to say, or is that an overstatement? | ||
Well, there's something called the Special Inspector General of Afghanistan Reconstruction. | ||
He's been doing this for several years now. | ||
He has a whole team involved. | ||
But Afghanistan, as you know, we decided the best way to exit was to exit in infamy and | ||
screw the whole thing up, but leave about $80 billion worth of equipment there. | ||
But this guy has an amazing team at looking at the waste, and he at least stops some of | ||
the criminality. | ||
And I do mean direct criminality. | ||
There are thieves, there are worldwide thieves who suck up US taxpayer dollars and then they | ||
run. | ||
One quick example. | ||
They had built a $90 million hotel, or they got $90 million for a hotel in Kabul. | ||
They spent probably $10 million, erected an edifice, the basic outline of it, and then the guy took off somewhere in the Middle East and took the rest of the money. | ||
It still sits there. | ||
It's just an empty edifice. | ||
It didn't quite get built. | ||
And so this kind of stuff goes on and on. | ||
I thought this guy would be perfect. | ||
His name's John Sopko. | ||
He's done a great job at looking at Afghan waste and catching the criminals. | ||
Well, everybody came up to me at first and they said, oh, it's a great idea, Republicans and Democrats, but then they got wind of who it was going to be. | ||
And so the uber hawks in the Republican Party said, oh, we hate him because he's always embarrassing us with all our follies as we go around the world. | ||
He finds where the money's being stolen. | ||
He's an embarrassment to the hawks. | ||
And actually, guess what? | ||
There are hawks in both parties. | ||
So they both ganged up and said, oh, no, we can't do this. | ||
We need to let Biden pick his own person, which would be starting from scratch and would take six months to a year, might never happen. | ||
And they would probably pick someone who's weak and will not do the job. | ||
So it was a fight, but it shows how much concern they have. | ||
They do not have concern for the money. | ||
These people are not fiscally conservative. | ||
And really, they wound up just calling me names, calling me an isolationist. | ||
And it's like, well, no, I'm a fiscal conservative, and they're not fiscally conservative. | ||
No, I mean, you were literally asking for receipts. | ||
That's pretty much it. | ||
In a more broad sense, in terms of what's going on in Ukraine, I know we are technically not at war, and we often now go to wars without declaring war and all of that, and I know your stance on that, and I'm with you, but are we at war at this point? | ||
At what point, when you endlessly fund a war, are you actually at war? | ||
I think you're at war when your enemy perceives you're at war and attacks you. | ||
So there's a possibility and we don't know this. | ||
If everything goes well and the Ukrainians keep fighting well and they push the Russians out and then the war ends, everybody will have said it was all worthwhile. | ||
But it's just like Finland and Sweden joining NATO. | ||
Might be a good thing if nobody attacks them and it's defensive. | ||
But it also might be a bad thing. | ||
What if we decide that we're going to locate nuclear weapons in Finland? | ||
For 50, 60 years, they've said they don't want nuclear weapons there. | ||
You know, what if that's part of being a NATO? | ||
Part of being a NATO is sort of accepting the weapons that US sends to you. | ||
So, I think we don't know. | ||
What if the provocation does lead to a nuclear exchange? | ||
You know, if a European capital is bombed, or a US capital, or a large city is bombed with nuclear weapons, Well, people then look back in retrospect and say, well, maybe we shouldn't have pushed them so hard. | ||
Maybe we shouldn't have insisted that Ukraine be part of NATO. | ||
And, you know, there are many smart minds who have written about this. | ||
George Kennan, probably one of the most famous diplomats of the last century, said it was a mistake to advance and to provoke Russia with creating NATO larger and larger. | ||
So did Kissinger. | ||
So have many others. | ||
So did James Matlock, who was The ambassador under the first George Bush to Russia. | ||
So a lot of smart people written on this, but now if you say anything they say, oh, you're sympathizing with Putin. | ||
Even when I try to preface every talk by saying there's no justification for Putin's attack, there's no sympathy for Putin at all, and that I hope the Ukrainians win, but it still doesn't mean we should ignore the fundamental causes of war and try to at least revisit this so we know how to prevent war in the future. | ||
I mean, even in the end, if the Ukrainians win, there will be a destroyed country, Ukraine will be destroyed, and then who's going to pay to rebuild Ukraine? | ||
They're already talking about us paying. | ||
The $40 billion that we are spending on the war effort now, they're saying that'll last until September. | ||
They're going to be back in September asking for more money. | ||
But the bill, when we go to rebuild Ukraine, Russia destroys it, and they're going to laugh all the way as we go and spend a couple hundred billion rebuilding Ukraine. | ||
So we just don't have the money. | ||
We're out of money for all the stuff we promised the American people. | ||
Are you surprised that some of your colleagues, guys that I'm sure you like and that are smart and decent human beings, that they just don't get the basic, obvious stuff that you just laid out there? | ||
That they don't get once you start throwing money at it, you're gonna throw more money at it, and it's gonna keep going, and we've done this before, and we're gonna do it again? | ||
There's a disconnect between the people and there's a disconnect in particular between the Republican primary and the Republican party voters and who they get. | ||
They get a lot of people who promise them many things and then don't follow through. | ||
Republicans at home and the Rotary Club will say, I'm fiscally conservative. | ||
And they come up here and they vote for all the spending. | ||
They go to the Rotary Club and says, I'm with you. | ||
If you elect me, we will get rid of Obamacare. | ||
Seven Republicans in the Senate came back and voted to keep Obamacare. | ||
We had the identical vote under President Obama when he vetoed it, and every Republican voted for it. | ||
President Trump came in power and said he would sign the law. | ||
I introduced the exact same legislation. | ||
It's almost word for word the same. | ||
And seven Republicans who voted to get rid of it under Obama voted to keep it under Trump, and we could have gotten rid of Obamacare. | ||
This is a problem. | ||
It's a perpetual problem. | ||
But that hawkishness, some people define conservatism as hawkishness, not fiscal conservatism, not balanced budgets. | ||
They are conservative only in the sense that they are for a bigger military and more might, and that we should spread freedom around the world. | ||
And these are the George W. Bush Republicans. | ||
And frankly, it's one of the reasons why I leaned more towards Trump on so much of this is that he did have a good head on his shoulders and he had a certain reticence to get involved around the world. | ||
He wasn't afraid. | ||
He was strong. | ||
But at the same time, he wasn't eager for the beginnings of a world war. | ||
And I think in some ways he was like Reagan. | ||
He actually, he worried about a nuclear war and did not want To be the person who presided over the destruction of the world through nuclear war. | ||
So he was not eager to sort of, you know, I think provoke war around the world. | ||
I think I mentioned this to you last time you were on, but your support for Trump was one of the things that finally got me to support him because I thought, all right, here's one of the guys on the short list of people I respect in the Senate. | ||
And he's, you know, one of Trump's main defenders right now. | ||
So let's move to some other stuff real quick. | ||
This ministry of truth that seems to have collapsed. You had a rather extraordinary exchange with | ||
HHS Secretary Mayorkas, so I want to play just a little bit. | ||
Do you think the Steele dossier included Russian disinformation? | ||
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Senator, that's not a question that I'm equipped to answer. | |
It was in the public news. | ||
You may have heard of it, the Mueller investigation. | ||
It was a $32 million investigation that went over a couple of years. | ||
Horowitz was an investigator general and he looked at the FBI's activity in the beginning of this. | ||
And what the FBI concluded was that there were FBI agents throughout this period of time who concluded That yes, the dossier was full of Russian disinformation. | ||
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So, let's say it is Russian disinformation. | |
You say your new Disinformation Governance Board is going to help the public with disinformation. | ||
You claim it's not going to be about domestic, it's going to be about foreigners and those evil Russians. | ||
So, here's my question. | ||
The FBI concludes that the Steele dossier was full of Russian disinformation. | ||
CNN propagated this disinformation gladly for years and years. | ||
The difference, I guess, between your opinion and our opinion is that, as despicable as it is that CNN propagated this disinformation, I wouldn't shut them down. | ||
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I wouldn't lecture them. | |
I wouldn't put it on a government website that CNN's wrong for propagating disinformation. | ||
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The problem you have is you're not even willing to admit. | |
I mean, we can't even have an agreement on what the FBI said was disinformation. | ||
How do you propose that you're going to have an office of disinformation governance If you see the problem in even determining what is disinformation. | ||
Oh, Senator, because our work is not focused on disinformation writ large. | ||
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Where we the Department of Homeland Security become involved is when there's a connectivity between disinformation and threats to the security of the homeland. | |
Well, the Russians might be considered that. | ||
You mentioned the Russians the other day when you tried to pivot away from this being about censorship. | ||
I think you've got no idea what disinformation is and I don't think the government's capable of it. | ||
Do you know who the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world is? | ||
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The U.S. | |
government. | ||
Are you familiar with McNamara? | ||
The Pentagon Papers? | ||
Are you familiar with George W. Bush and the weapons of mass destruction? | ||
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Are you familiar with Iran-Contra? | |
I mean, think of all the debates and disputes we've had over the last 50 years in our country. | ||
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We work them out by debating them. | |
We don't work them out by the government being the arbiter. | ||
I don't want you to guard rails. | ||
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I want you to have nothing to do with speech. | |
You think we can't determine? | ||
You know, speech by traffickers is disinformation? | ||
You think the American people are so stupid they need you to tell them what the truth is? | ||
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You can't even admit what the truth is with a Steele dossier. | |
I don't trust government to figure out what the truth is. | ||
Government is largely disseminating disinformation. | ||
So when I was playing that before the show for my guys, we were all cracking up because it's like, this guy, I mean, you cannot even agree on what disinformation is. | ||
That was your whole point there, that none of this makes any sense beyond that it's against the First Amendment, let's say. | ||
Yeah, the First Amendment and constitutionality doesn't work with these people very well, so I tried to get him at least to admit that he really didn't even agree with the FBI on what disinformation was. | ||
We had the Christopher Steele dossier. | ||
The FBI now admits that it was Russian disinformation. | ||
In fact, Christopher Steele said he got the information from a source in the Kremlin. | ||
Yeah, I think it might have been a source giving him disinformation. | ||
So anyway, I asked him about it. | ||
I love the deflection. | ||
He's like, well, uh, you know, I'm not an expert in that. | ||
And I say, well, do you read the newspaper? | ||
You know, we spent $30 million on it and we spent countless hours on television talking about it. | ||
Everybody on your side said it was Russian collusion that Trump colluded, but it turns out that was disinformation. | ||
And I said, if that's disinformation, Are you going to go to CNN and shut down CNN because for the last three years they've been promoting disinformation? | ||
And I said, for the record, I'm not for that. | ||
I say turn the channel. | ||
If you don't like CNN and they're full of disinformation, which they are, turn the channel. | ||
But I'm afraid of any kind of government organization, even one that would go after the disinformation of CNN. | ||
I don't want the government anywhere near determining what truth is. | ||
It's not as easy as a job as you think. | ||
You hear facts on both sides. | ||
It's like being a juror or a journalist or even a scientist. | ||
You hear a lot of the facts on each side, and then you try to draw a conclusion. | ||
But it's not always easy and definable and something that somebody from government could be trusted with that job. | ||
In all your years in the Senate, have you ever seen anything that was more a direct assault on the First Amendment than the idea of this proposed Ministry of Truth? | ||
I mean, the idea that the government would somehow regulate or punish or depress certain speech? | ||
I'm worried about it because there are people on the left and the right sort of promoting this, and I tell my audiences all the time now back at home because they're really proud of me on fighting the Ministry of Truth, but I said, look, there's some on the right who are setting up legislation where there would be government boards because they hate big tech so much that they want oversight of big tech. | ||
And so we have to be very worried about right or the left getting involved with speech. | ||
People need to remember there are tons and tons of choices. | ||
Your podcast didn't exist 20 years ago. | ||
When I was a kid, you had three networks. | ||
You didn't really have conservative radio. | ||
You had ABC, NBC, and CBS. | ||
The news was identical. | ||
It was a very subtle form of leftism. | ||
It wasn't in your face. | ||
It was all liberal, but there were no other choices. | ||
We've got all kinds of choices on television now, on the right. | ||
We have conservative radio. | ||
We dominate the radio sphere. | ||
We have the podcast sphere. | ||
So I don't worry about us getting enough message out. | ||
And I tell people, I'm kind of tired of everybody that complains about Twitter. | ||
Quit using it. | ||
Go somewhere else. | ||
You know, I left YouTube. | ||
I haven't yet left Twitter, but I left YouTube and came to Rumble because I don't want to support a group that believes in censorship. | ||
And if the others continue to censor me, I'll leave them too. | ||
Let me ask you one other thing, because I know you're limited on time. | ||
I've come to the conclusion at this point that this administration cannot be this inept. | ||
That all of the problems with supply chain and inflation and the bungling of Ukraine and all of the stuff, this cannot be ineptitude. | ||
This has to be intentional. | ||
Am I overstepping, do you think, on that? | ||
Only if their party has a death wish, because I think they're going to get steamrolled in November because of the inflation. | ||
No, I think they really don't really truly understand inflation. | ||
Maybe they're dumb enough to believe that greed causes inflation. | ||
But inflation comes from debt, and it comes from the Federal Reserve buying the debt, and all that new demand, all that new money that flows into the system bids prices up. | ||
With gasoline, they made it worse by also restricting the supply. | ||
So price is supply and demand. | ||
You reduce the supply, increase the demand, and boy, do you have rip-roaring inflation. | ||
We borrowed more money in the last two years ever. | ||
Even as a percentage of GDP, if you try to quantify it that way, more money than we ever had before. | ||
And you even have Democrat economists. | ||
There was the Furman came out in the last couple of days. | ||
One of Obama's economists saying it was a mistake. | ||
They juiced up the economy too much. | ||
And he said, I warned him at the time. | ||
So there are some reasonable, rational Democrat economists, maybe one or two. | ||
But anyway, there's a few of them out there, and they're even admitting what a disaster this is. | ||
So I don't think they do it on purpose. | ||
I think there is a high degree of incompetence on this. | ||
And maybe they just didn't believe. | ||
We haven't had inflation since the 70s. | ||
Maybe they thought it just disappeared. | ||
It wasn't coming back. | ||
We've had inflation, but we haven't had this kind of inflation since the late 70s. | ||
And maybe they thought it wouldn't come. | ||
Remember you had all these people talking about the new monetary theory and all this, you can spend and borrow as you much? | ||
I mean, Dick Cheney was part of that, too. | ||
Deficits don't matter. | ||
There are big government Republicans that have loved deficits forever, too. | ||
But no, I don't think it's intentional, but I do think that it's enormous and maybe bigger than anybody has predicted. | ||
I think it gets a lot bigger even before November. | ||
Well, Senator, I thank you for being one of the reasonable and rational people we got in government. | ||
It is a short list. | ||
I appreciate your time. | ||
Look forward to talking to you soon. |