Join Sean in this hour as he tackles the current political narrative around the economy, debunking claims that Democrats have fostered affordability. Sean highlights stark statistics about rising prices and inflation under Joe Biden, while suggesting that positive changes are on the horizon as tax cuts begin to take effect. He welcomes economist Steve Moore to discuss the transformative potential of these policies and the historical context of economic growth under Republican leadership. Don't miss this compelling discussion on the state of America's economy and what it means for your pocketbook!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
All right, news roundup information overload hour toll-free on numbers, 800-941-Sean, if you want to be a part of the program.
The president now has been pushing back on this ridiculous narrative that somehow Democrats had a more affordable economy.
That is a complete and utter lie.
When Joe Biden said this week that we lowered the price of everything, well, we've gone over the price of everything, and the price of everything under Joe Biden went through the roof.
He's just flat-out lying.
And, you know, the president now is on a mission to make sure that people understand that he inherited the worst economy in history, the highest prices our country has ever seen, the worst inflation in history.
And in other words, the affordability crisis was caused by the Democrats, and it was an unmitigated disaster.
Well, you said you'd fix it on day one.
Well, the president has been working nonstop to fix it from day one, and especially beginning in the new year, I suspect that you're going to see dramatic changes in terms of affordability in your life.
I think you'll notice it with lower income taxes.
The president gave us the largest tax cut in history, while the Democrats simultaneously voted for the largest tax increase in history.
Democrats voted against working men and women by voting against no tax on tips and overtime.
They voted against seniors by voting against no tax on Social Security.
And the best part is, is that we have seen dramatic decreases in inflation, dramatic decreases in affordability.
We see the lowest gas prices in five years, lowest inflation rate of five years.
We have GDP growth now at 4%.
We see the lowest deficit that we've had in five years as well.
And we're on the mend, and the best is yet to come because we still have to get online and infuse into the Trump economy the trillions of dollars that have been committed as he goes from country to country to country, you know, securing all these trillions of dollars in investments for manufacturing, automobile manufacturing coming back to the country, pharmaceutical manufacturing, rare earth manufacturing because he's, you know,
we couldn't build a mine under these climate control freak Democrats, new Green Deal Democrats, and semiconductor chip manufacturing, which is going to begin in the next year as well.
Scott Besson thinks by the end of the first quarter of next year that we are going to see a dramatic turn in the economy.
I'm arguing I'd give themselves a little more runway by the third quarter of next year.
The impact will be felt by all.
And the largest tax cuts in history always result in more revenues, more jobs created than previously.
I just spent a lot of time in the last hour.
You have 37 states, gasoline, a gallon of gas, now below $3 a gallon, medium price, $2.79 a gallon.
AAAA says this is the first time since May of 21, the national average for gas is below $3 a gallon.
You can add other factors on top of that.
You have states now that have gasoline as low as under $2 a gallon.
I couldn't believe it when I read it.
$1.69 a gallon in Colorado.
I mean, 37 states.
I mean, that's a lot of states now below $3 a gallon, 22 states below $2.75 a gallon.
That's a massive tax cut.
That's more money in your pocket.
Steve Moore joins us.
He is the author of the bestseller, Trump Anomics, inside the America First Plan to Revive Our Economy, and great economist in his own right.
You sent me a chart this week, and you pointed out the retirement account returns of Trump versus Biden.
And what you did is you went back to Trump 1.0, and retirement accounts went up a whopping $26,200 on average.
Under Biden, it went down a whopping $24,800.
So far, in 11 months of Donald Trump 2.0, it's gone up 20,700 on average per American.
That's a big change.
Yeah, it sure is.
And incidentally, 150 million Americans, Sean, not just rich people, 150 million working-class Americans own retirement accounts, either IRAs or employer plans or just simply have bought stock on their own.
And so those are impressive numbers, by the way.
And it's not taken into account when people say, oh, people are losing income.
They're not losing income.
Their wealth has increased.
Their ability to retire means that they'll have more money.
One of the things I'd add to what you just said, Sean, and you really hit all the right buttons, but I just want to mention a couple of things you might have left out.
One is we are seen around the world as the alpha male economy right now.
I mean, we are growing so much more rapidly than all of the other countries that we compete with.
I mean, China has been in a recession.
Europe, as you know, is flatlined.
Japan hasn't been growing.
And so the fact that we're able to achieve the growth rates of 3.5% to 4% for the last three quarters is amazing.
It's almost like we're carrying the rest of the world on our back to create growth in the economy.
The other thing I would say is that, you know, for these people who blame Trump for the inflation, you know, the high price of things like beef and health care, and look, I know people are still angry about how much things cost.
I said on your TV show on Fox the other night that 87.5% of the increase in the price of things like beef and health care and utility bills happened under Joe Biden.
It would be like trying to blame Ronald Reagan on Jimmy Carter's inflation.
It makes no sense.
I think Trump and the Republicans have to do a better job of selling the prosperity that he is bringing.
And one last point.
I am totally with you and Scott Besson that 2026 is set up to be a blockbuster year in part, Sean, because a lot of people come up to me on the street and say, hey, Steve Moore, where's that big beautiful tax cut I'm supposed to get?
I said, wait, it doesn't start until January, Sean.
And people are going to start to see more money in their paycheck because less money will be withheld by the IRS from your paycheck.
People will start to see the effect of no tax on tips, no tax on overtime.
All those policies kick in in January.
You see, I really want to take that word affordability and the affordability crisis mantra of the left, and I want to shove it right down every Democrat's throat as the economy now makes the transition to vibrancy and success and growth.
Look, we're both supply siders.
What does that mean?
If you go back to the Reagan years, Ronald Reagan dropped the top marginal rate from 70 to 28 percent.
Okay, it took about 18 months for his policies to get infused into the economy.
Am I wrong on that?
Yeah, 14 to 18 months, yep.
14 to 18.
Okay.
So, and when it finally kicked in, the end result was at the end of his second term, first of all, things were on fire leading into The election for his reelection campaign and 21 million new jobs.
And we had a doubling of revenues to the government.
And we had the longest period of peacetime economic growth in history up to that point.
Under President Trump, what did we see in the first three years before COVID?
We saw record low after record low after record low unemployment rates for every demographic group in the country, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, women in the workplace, Asian Americans, African American youth unemployment.
Why would we expect that he can't duplicate that?
He's already done it in his first term.
People forget how prosperous we were in the first term.
You know, record high stock market, record high job creation under Donald Trey Trump.
And by the way, these were big wage gains for people in the middle class because you and I know that Donald Trump cares most about working class Americans.
I think that's why he got elected.
This is a president who is doing trade.
By the way, as you know, I'm not a big fan of his tariffs, but the trade deals he's come up with have been amazing.
I mean, he's going to.
You're not a big fan of the tariffs, is what you're saying.
Yeah, I don't like, well, look, I'm not a big tariff guy, but what he has done so effectively, and I told him this in the Oval Office, Mr. President, I haven't liked your tariffs, but the strategy has worked.
What he's doing, Sean, is he's flexing America's economic muscle.
And he's telling these countries like China, like Japan, like Korea, like the Europeans, you're not going to cheat.
We're going to have a level playing field here.
And if you don't lower your tariffs on our farmers and our manufacturing products and our dairy producers, we're going to hit you hard with these tariffs.
And you know what?
He's brought in, he says, what, $10 to $15 trillion.
I don't know if that's the exact amount, but even if it's one-tenth that's amount, that's a huge amount of money coming, being invested in the United States of America.
We're seeing an investment.
The one cool thing about those numbers that you mentioned about the growth rate, where the growth is really happening, is in businesses investing in the United States, in building factories, machinery, equipment, research and development.
Sean, as an economist, I'm here to tell you that is the seed corn of a growing economy that will create dividends for many years to come.
We were a dead country one year ago.
We were dead as a doornail.
We were going down the tubes.
And now we're the hottest country anywhere in the world.
There's nobody close.
And we're right now drilling more oil than we've ever done ever before.
Prices are way down.
We just had four states.
It was just reported that four states had $1.99 a gallon.
And I have no higher priority than making America affordable again.
That's what we're going to do.
And again, they caused the high prices and we're bringing them down.
It's a simple message.
But that's our message.
They gave you high prices.
They gave you the highest inflation in history.
And we're giving you, we're bringing those prices down rapidly, lower prices, bigger paychecks.
All right, we continue now with Economist, author of the bestseller, Trumponomics.
Stephen Moore is with us.
I mean, this is the thing.
And I don't want to be insensitive to people that are struggling financially.
And under Biden, I mean, things got progressively worse by every metric, every category you can look at.
And I don't want to be insensitive to people that are not feeling the impacts of these policies yet, as you point out, rightly so.
The one big, beautiful bill, the largest tax cuts in history that Democrats voted against, that will take place on January 1st.
But for people that have been living paycheck to paycheck, something I can relate to because I spent like a decade of my life living that way, it's difficult.
It's hard.
And under Biden, I mean, things got about 40 plus percent more expensive.
And even though we've made progress, you know, people still find themselves underwater from where they were under Trump's first term.
So they're thinking, oh, I'm not feeling it yet.
Well put.
I mean, it's almost like when people blame Trump for the problem, that would be like saying, oh, it's not the arsonist who caused the fire.
It's the person who's trying to put out the fire.
And that's exactly what Trump has done.
But I want to reiterate this point loud and clear as an economist.
I looked at all of the forward-looking indicators.
You can call me in three months and tell me if I'm wrong, Sean, but I think we're going to look at a 2026 that will be a barn buster of a year.
I think we can call it.
Why do you think, you're like Besson, you think first quarter, I don't want to raise people's expectations that high.
That's why I'm saying by the third quarter of next year, we will all feel the impact, the effect of the Trump economic policies.
I mean, you know, we've never had this convergence, and that is the largest tax cuts in history, which we both agree in and of itself leads to massive economic growth.
Okay.
Then you can, you know, that you put jet fuel behind that with 100% depreciation in a single year to incentivize manufacturers to move fast.
In other words, they get to write off the costs of building out new facilities.
I think that's like rocket fuel for the economy, and that incentivizes them to move fast.
We've never had a president go this deep into energy dominance policies, which means that I think it's incalculable how that will impact people's lives because it's the lifeblood of the world's economy.
Then you add more rocket fuel on the other side of it.
We've never had trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars committed in manufacturing.
To me, every one of those deals represents high-paying career jobs for Americans if they want to transform their lives.
I would simply add to your list, and that's a very good listing to add two things.
Don't forget about deregulation.
You're not allowed to add to my list.
My list is comprehensive.
It's pretty comprehensive, but deregulation and getting government off the back of our businesses is huge.
When I talk to manufacturers, they say, now we know we have a president who's not going to come over with a baseball bat and hit us over the head if we dare make a profit.
And then let's not forget also what Elon Musk did with Trump in terms of Doge, hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of savings and fraud.
And incidentally, Sean, I am so upset that every single Democrat in the Senate voted to expand the Obamacare subsidies even a week after the general accounting office said there's hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud in these programs.
I don't know.
Do the Democrats, do they support fraud?
I have no idea.
Obviously, they do.
Look at Minnesota, but I digress.
Steve Moore, we appreciate you, man.
Thank you.
800-941-SHAWN is our number if you want to be a part of the program.
And he talks to the people involved in the top stories of the day.
Every day, Sean Hannity is on.
I-25 till the top of the hour.
Merry Christmas.
Happy Hanukkah.
We're not a public school.
We can say that on this program.
Prank it up.
I love this part.
Play it. Siberian Orchestra.
This is where Linda and I part waves.
He prefers Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye.
Christmas music.
True or false, you do.
I love it.
You love mine or first of all, Danny Kaye was a phenomenal performer, a beautiful dancer.
Anyone who's seen White Christmas in the roof scene, forget about it.
I don't know who you're impersonating, but it sounds like you may have had some drinks before the show.
I don't know.
I wish I did.
I could use one.
You're the one that has the moonshine in her studio, not me.
I told you I can't mess with that.
I'm strictly avoiding it.
Oh, you have messed with it.
Stop lying.
Don't lie to the audience.
Hand to God.
I cannot mess with moonshine.
I cannot.
Have you or have you not had moonshine in that control room that you work out of?
No.
Lie.
Your voice is the greatest indication of a lie.
Oh, my God.
That is a total lie.
I think the only person who had it.
Did you ever?
Okay.
Did you ever try it?
Yes.
Oh, no.
I tasted it.
Yes.
It was a gift.
And you tasted it in the control room.
Yes or no?
No, in the newsroom.
Okay.
You know what?
You sound like a little.
Listen, technicalities matter, my friend.
Okay.
So you did drink on the job, which, by the way, is illegal.
It was after six.
Okay.
It doesn't count.
Now, there are certain foods.
For example, I look at Linda's diet and she has this projectile green vomit drink that she has.
It is disgusting.
It's kale, which, by the way, makes most people bloat up like never before.
It's a horrible thing to put in your body.
Your body, most people's bodies do not digest it well.
And she's got this other putrid projectile vomit-looking drink that's orange.
I don't even know what's in that.
Maybe pumpkin, squash.
I have no idea.
Ginger.
Ginger.
Oh, ginger.
Jeez, that sounds so freaking appetizing.
Let me go tonight.
I'm going to get a kale and ginger shake.
Thank you.
I'll have an orange projectile vomit green shake and I'll have a projectile vomit orange shake and I'll drink away.
I'd rather have the moonshine at that point.
But there are certain foods that bother your stomach that you can't tolerate for whatever reason.
And this happens to everybody.
Or maybe you eat something and you feel first defined, then later you're all bloated up and you're like, your stomach's upset.
Why is this happening to me?
Well, you can now get the answer thanks to our new partner, Viome, V-I-O-M-E dot com.
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You know, as we head into the holidays, remember how we were talking about before Thanksgiving, you know, how to deal with your crazy left-wing lunatic liberal relatives?
So there's a story on Foxnews.com, Linda.
You're going to love this, that apparently partygoers at a New York City conservative Christmas event, you know, they spoke out about their dating experience or experiences.
And, you know, I would date a liberal, one person is quoted as saying, but a liberal's not going to date me.
Anyway, Raul, who leans liberal, said he prioritizes values when dating and would go out with someone on the opposite side of the political aisle as long as the conversations and discourse can be grounded in logic and rationality.
Now, most people will define logic and rationality as agreeing with them.
Do you not agree?
Yep.
Okay.
So I contend on this program that you cannot reconcile the liberal mind with conservative thinking.
There's no middle ground.
Either you support law and order and safety and security as a prerequisite towards happiness, or you buy into this defund, dismantle, no bail law, reimagine the police idiocy.
What's the middle ground there?
Can you come up with something?
You've got two master's degrees.
I have to tell you, first of all, I agree with the opening statement, which is that a Republican would date a Democrat, but a Democrat, a socialist, a liberal would never date a Republican.
They won't even have a conversation with you.
Like, literally all of you.
Oh, I'll have conversation.
I told, listen, I ran into that story.
I love it.
I mean, I've seen you.
I'll never forget that.
That was like epic.
I'm like, remind me.
I don't even remember.
What's that one?
That's when you saw Ram Emmanuel and you're like, Rombo.
And I was like, yeah, we're in public.
Yeah.
Okay.
I mean, you don't get away from it.
I did call him deadfish right to his face.
I'm not going to hop.
I'm not going to be a phone.
But I said it in a nice way.
Rom, Rombo, Deadfish.
What's going on?
I think if there's a way to say it nicely, I was at the MediaIT party one year, and I could see out of the corner of my eye, he was just dying to get in my grill and make sure that I saw him, and that was Humpty Dumpty.
And I see him.
I go, Humpty, how are you?
So great to see you.
And I said it right to his face.
No, he writes about in his book, you know, that I patted him on the shoulder in a very strong way or something to that effect.
But I don't even know what the hell he's talking about.
He doesn't know what he's talking about.
He doesn't know what he's talking about.
All I know is he really doesn't.
He's really pathetic.
And then last weekend, because I had to go to New York to interview Erica Kirk, it was only the second time I'm there this year.
I stay away from New York as much as possible.
I don't have a house there anymore.
I have no place to stay anyway.
Anyway, so I go to New York and I go to church on Sunday.
After church, we go to a hotel that has a brunch menu kind of breakfast.
And when I lived in New York, I'd go there because they leave me alone and they give me a corner table somewhere and nobody harasses me.
And I walk in and I run into Chucky Schumer.
I haven't told the whole story.
I'm kind of debating whether I should.
You know what the whole story is.
I told you the whole story.
Yes.
I think the whole story is perfectly fine.
I would tell it.
You think I should tell it?
Yeah, I think it's fun.
I also think, you know, people like to do it.
I walk up to the senator's table.
I'll tell the part that I've told before.
Walk up to the senator's table and I go, Senator, it's your favorite cable news host in the entire world.
He looks up.
He rolls his eyes.
Oh, no.
Oh, my day just went to hell.
You just can see it on his face.
Senator, how are you?
How are you doing?
How are you feeling?
By the way, he's aged a lot.
I can tell you that.
It was kind of like shocking.
You know how sometimes you see somebody in person and you're like, ooh.
But I was very nice to him.
He was nice back.
And I think I'm going to keep it private.
Oh, you sell out.
I did say at one point to him.
I said, Senator, you should be so happy.
I don't live here anymore.
This is only my second day in New York the entire year.
He goes, actually, I don't like it.
I thought that was surprising.
Good luck under Mamdani.
Oh, please, he knows.
He knows.
You know, now he never endorsed him.
And when I asked on election day who he voted for, wouldn't tell us who he voted for.
That means he voted for Cuomo.
Oh, I'm sure he wrote in Mickey Mouse.
It didn't matter.
Never mind.
The worst prediction in the history of this show came from you in the last year.
Oh, would you stop it?
I don't even want to hear your excuses.
There was no shot in hell that anybody was going to meet Mamdani.
Listen, I believe in Curtis.
I believe he's in hell.
I believe in Curtis.
Cuomo should have never even been in the race.
He should have never been in.
He lost the primary.
Goodbye.
He turns over.
Combined, Cuomo and Curtis has nothing to do with Curtis not being a good candidate.
It had nothing to do with Curtis not, I think he would have been a great mayor.
I think he would have been Rudy 2.0.
I think he would have made New York City safer.
I think he would have made New York City more business friendly.
I think he law and order would be restored.
I think he would have done a lot of good for New York.
I think he would have lowered taxes in New York.
But it's not his fault that Democrats outnumber Republicans, you know, over 10 to 1 in New York City.
You can't.
Yeah, but I don't believe that we only had Republicans voting for a non-Momdani candidate.
I think there were a lot of Democrats.
I feel this way about Billy.
Shockingly, if you look at, I think the second highest percentage of the Jewish population in the world is New York City.
And a lot of people in that community voted for Mamdani, which is shocking to me.
Yeah, but you have to because Mom Danny hates all things.
You don't have to.
I'm telling you right now that there were people in the Jewish community who voted for him because they were scared.
And they thought, oh, God, if we don't vote for him, then they're going to come after us.
They're going to know.
There was a lot of this weird behavior that was going on.
And then there was a whole other faction of people who had been Democrats all their life and they were voting for Curtis and they were voting for Cuomo because they couldn't imagine having that guy as mayor.
At the end of the day, he had more money than anybody.
He had a bunch of stupid people voting and he had a bunch of illegal immigrants voting because it's New York and you don't need ID.
Bottom line.
Okay.
Are you done now?
I'm done.
I could not be with a partner that was a liberal.
I just couldn't.
No way.
I could not imagine.
Now, I can talk to people on the other side of the aisle.
I wouldn't be dating them.
Yeah, I got to be honest with you.
I don't really believe in the yin-yang thing.
I'm all about the yin-ying.
I can't be married to somebody, different religion, different politics, different way of looking at schooling and finances.
We have to be on the same page.
Life is hard to do.
Liberals would think you're being bigoted, but you just want somebody that shares your values and vision and your values for raising children and your values on the economy, your values on what makes America great.
I mean, I think that's, you know.
Yeah, and lucky for them, I don't care what they think.
So it's awesome.
But I love the debate.
It's fun.
Just Sam in Minnesota.
Sam the man.
What's going on?
John, how are you?
I'm good.
What's happening?
So I had, I'll make this short and sweet.
I had a pretty invasive back surgery in February, and I'm a water well driller, and I have been for 20 years, and I can no longer do my job.
So I applied for disability, and they've been beating me around the bush, left and right, non-stop, and can't get anywhere with them.
And the disability case manager called me last week to ask me a few questions.
And I was pretty frustrated because, like I said, it's been over a year since I've applied.
And I said, you know what?
If I was an illegal, this would have already been figured out.
And he said, and I quote, you might want to change your name to a Somali name and you'd get this right away.
That's pretty interesting.
That's a case manager from the social security.
Well, I mean, if you look at the numbers of people and the percentage of people in the Somali community, again, this is not discriminatory.
These are the facts as they become available that we're sharing with people.
I mean, when you look at COVID and you look at Medicaid and you look at all the varying in housing and so on and so forth, the number of kids that are autistic and the dramatic percentage rise and the dramatic, you know, you're talking about what may be a billion-dollar scandal, hundreds of millions of dollars increase in just five years.
You can't come to any other conclusion that there's something radically wrong going on here, and it looks like fraud to me.
It looks like it, smells like it.
What is it, right?
Exactly, exactly.
And then going back to the back surgery thing, I actually have to have a second one, and insurance keeps denying it.
So I had to appeal it through the Minnesota Department of Health, and I still have not heard back every phone call, message, anything I get yet.
It's terrible.
I mean, welcome to the Affordability Act that's not affordable, which, you know, they want subsidies for.
I'm sorry to hear that because I'm sure you probably want to get back to work.
I would love to.
I didn't know people still drill water wells these days.
I guess they do, right?
Yeah, we're busy as heck.
Well, I hope you get back in good health.
I hope you're able to resolve this.
It's terrible what you're describing.
It really is.
There are people that need it.
That's like all, you know, all the phony cases of autism.
Well, that lessens the ability to help people that have real problems, and it takes away a lot of money from people that are in real need.
Appreciate the call.
That's going to wrap things up for today.
Hannity, tonight, 9 Eastern on the Fox News channel.
Investigator report: the biggest fraud, waste of taxpayer money, abuse of taxpayer money in history in Minnesota, now apparently spreading to Ohio.