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Sept. 13, 2023 - The Tucker Carlson Show

09:47

Tucker Carlson - Ep. 23 Hyperinflation and reckless monetary policy could soon devastate the global economy. We traveled to Argentina, where it’s already happened.

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tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		For politicians, money is power.
		They always crave more.
		But because they don't actually produce anything, they've got limited ways to get it.
		They can hike taxes on the population and collect the cash at gunpoint.
		That's the most straightforward way.
		But it's also highly unpopular.
		Voters don't like paying higher taxes.
		They resent it.
		So over time, most politicians in most places decide it's a lot easier to devalue the currency.
		You keep the tax rate pretty much the same.
		You just print more money.
		At first, most people don't even notice that it's happening.
		The money seems free.
		This is how the U.S. government just paid for the COVID checks and the war in Ukraine and pretty much everything else that Washington has done for the past couple of decades just churn out more dollars.
		You can see why it's a popular strategy.
		But what happens if you keep doing it year after year?
		We really ought to know.
		So to find out, we flew to Argentina, a country of 45 million people on the Atlantic coast of South America.
		A hundred years ago, Argentina was one of the richest places in the world.
		It had everything.
		Abundant natural resources, vast open spaces, a well-educated, capable European population.
		Its capital, Buenos Aires, once looked like Paris, but probably richer.
		You can still see remnants of that time as you walk around the city today.
		But the buildings are ratty now and marred by graffiti.
		Argentina is no longer a rich country.
		It's one of the poorest nations in the Western Hemisphere.
		Nearly half the population here lives below the poverty line.
		Chicken for dinner is a luxury.
		The people are still impressive.
		The natural resources still exist.
		But Argentina's leaders have destroyed the country by devaluing its national currency.
		Argentina now has Weimar-like hyperinflation.
		It takes a brick of bills to buy lunch.
		Roads and bridges fall apart and nobody can afford to fix them.
unidentified		We spend more money as a country than we earn money.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		This man is called Hernan.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		He's been trying to run a restaurant in one of the richest neighborhoods in Buenos Aires.
unidentified		It's really, really hard to work in Argentina, to live in Argentina.
		We are tired.
		I think that's one of the main feelings of the people.
		People are tired of all of the politicians saying the same things a couple of years and nobody does nothing good.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Over the course of the average month, the Argentine peso loses 10% of its value.
		In other words, everybody gets 10% poorer every month of the year.
		Doesn't take long for people to go hungry.
unidentified		Our institutions have something wrong.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Diana Maldino is an economist and a candidate for the Argentine Congress.
unidentified		Basically the problem we have right now, we are 47 million people.
		Out of which only 11 million people have what you would call a job.
		Slightly under 3.5 million people work for government.
		And 7 million people work in the private sector.
		So 10 million people, 11 million people out of 47. 25% of the people.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		And that's kind of the government workers.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		So if you take out the government workers, then that really is an electric window.
unidentified		Yeah, one-seventh of the country would have a private job.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		So that means...
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		7 million people are working to support the other 40 million people.
unidentified		And let me add something.
		60% of the children are poor.
		So if you ask me, if 60% of the children are poor, the whole country is poor.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Argentina's currency is so inflated and worthless, it can no longer be used to buy anything of value.
		Cars, houses, even bicycles are priced in U.S. dollars.
		The problem is the government lies about this.
		Banks are not allowed to exchange dollars at market rates, and that drives the entire population underground to the black market.
		So we're in downtown Buenos Aires.
		It's a Friday afternoon and we're on our way to a cueva, a cave, to change U.S. dollars into pesos.
		Now, the caves are the only place in the country that gives the actual exchange rate.
		The government lies about what its currency is worth.
		And gives about half its value to people in exchange for dollars.
		So this is kind of the last outpost of economic honesty in the country.
		And of course, the government is trying to shut them down.
		So we're going to see if we can exchange 100 U.S. dollars for Argentine pesos.
unidentified		Hola!
		This is my friend Tucker.
		Hola.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Is there security here?
		Yes.
		This is so cool.
		Well, we're on the top floor of a building.
		Unmarked.
		We just got buzzed in after waiting outside for a while.
		And trying to change a $100 bill.
unidentified		Okay.
unidentified		How many money do you expect are you going to receive?
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
unidentified		More or less.
unidentified		Guess.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Enough to keep my door from closing.
		A door stop.
		Well, now I feel rich.
unidentified		This is like Mad Max of Caves.
unidentified		Don't seem like that.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		That is...
		So how much is that?
		Worth.
		Thank you.
unidentified		Well, thank you.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Amazing.
		You're welcome.
		How do you carry all this?
		Hold on.
unidentified		In a bag.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		In a bag.
unidentified		You know, it's obviously amusing, but it's also sad.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Imagine if that was your country, this was your national currency, and it was like, it had the value of home insulation.
		You know?
		And this was your work product.
		This is what you spent all day working for.
		And this is what you hoped to feed your family with and send your kids to school and buy clothes.
		I mean, it had been rendered worthless by greedy, dishonest pigs running your government and lecturing you about transgenderism.
		But in the end, you were left impoverished and they were left rich.
		I mean, that's theft.
		It wasn't some sort of, you know, savage situation in there.
		It looked like a bank, almost.
		Though it's, you know, it's illegal and it was, you know, had a kind of sort of voce vibe.
		It was, uh, it was very orderly.
		But imagine if your life entailed going four times to a, quote, cave just to get the actual exchange rate on your money that you made by working.
		It's, again, they're stealing and they're lying.
		And they're enforcing that lie at gunpoint.
		They close those places down because they're this little window into reality that the government can't tolerate.
		That's what a collapsing society looks like.
		Everybody's moving backwards.
		Nobody can tell the truth about anything.
		The functions of ordinary life have to be conducted furtively, in caves.
		In Argentina, the incentives are now so perversely inverted that many people decide it's not worth working.
		They can make more money sitting home idle.
unidentified		because it's cheaper not to work than to work.
		- Why is it cheaper not to work? - Because you have to pay a lot of taxes to the people and the unions and those sort of things are very, very expensive.
		So sometimes we prefer not to work.
		Oh, that's really crazy. - Is that common here?
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		For young people in a country like this, the obvious solution is to leave, and millions have.
		The future of the country slipping away forever.
		What's remarkable is that's just fine with the current Argentine government and with the Western media and NGOs that prop it up and relentlessly defend it.
		They're happy with the corrupt status quo.
		They're thriving.
		So they attack anyone who challenges the way things are currently done.
		Not surprisingly, they especially hate Javier Mille.
unidentified		A ver, estamos los que laburamos, generamos riqueza.
		Yo a vos no te vi laburar nunca.
		Yo a vos no te vi laburar nunca.
		A vos no te vi laburar nunca.
		A vos no te vi laburar nunca A ver, yo creo que el gran problema argentino es un problema cultural.
		It's a society that is infected by socialism.
		Politicians are a kind of sociopaths who want to make us believe that we are mental invalids, invalids in every sense, because we can't live if it weren't for them.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		In reality, those who can't live if we are for them. - Milley is an economist who's running for president here in the election next month.
unidentified		In the polls show, he's winning.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Mile's main observation is that things in Argentina are not working.
		Socialist monetary policy hasn't made people happy and secure.
		It's wrecked pretty much everything.
		It's destroyed the economy and families and the national spirit.
		It's enriched just a few.
		That's hardly a radical interpretation of events.
		It's obviously true, and everybody knows that it's true.
		But for daring to notice it, the stooges at Jeff Bezos' Washington Post and many other Western media outlets have denounced Javier Mille with rising hysteria.

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