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CLAY: We want to start here with our good old friend, Miss “We’ll Circle Back on That” Jen Psaki defending Joe Biden on the Democrat infighting that is going on right now as the moderates and the progressives have entered into a form of civil war. Here is Jen Psaki saying, this is how democracy works, guys.
PSAKI: Well, this is how democracy works. I know it feels foreign ’cause there wasn’t much that happened over the last couple of years. We’re not trying to paint over how messy it looks from the outside. We know that. Um, but, uh what the good news is, is that there is agreement that among most Democrats if not every single one of them that we need to get something done.
BUCK: Oh, okay, that clears it up, then. “We need to get something done.” Psaki Bomb trying to do a little bit of a “Potomac two-step.” Remember A Clear and Present Danger?
CLAY: Oh, yeah.
CLAY: We don’t even know what’s in it!
BUCK: The point is we don’t know. It’s 2200-plus pages and they’re fighting over. Yeah, the price tag will obviously impact some of the programs that are in it, and they’ll have to excise some of them. It’s gonna be a whole lot of money, though, and you have to wonder: At what point do people realize: No free lunch, Clay. But it’s like we’re watching the sausage being made here, which we all know is something you’re not supposed to see.
CLAY: It’s just so wild the more and more I think about it, Buck, the lack of comprehension of basic economics. It is a childlike comprehension for the Democrat Party when you really analyze what they are saying from a talking point perspective. And I think we need to keep hammering home: We don’t even know what’s in this bill.
And that’s actually one of the criticisms that Bernie Sanders is levying against his own party right now and (chuckles) I think Bernie’s at least got this right. How do you vote on a budget bill when you’re not even aware of what the budget realities are gonna be? And, remember, they’re gonna have to bring these together, the House and Senate, and somehow come to an agreement over whatever the final budget is. But this is madness.
BUCK: The Frenchman Bastiat, in The Law, writes about the fiction that you can live at the expense of everyone else. The way that these kind of budget bills go through, the way that this political situation is unfolding, it sets it up so that everybody can get what they want by writing the checks from the public Treasury, right? That’s the whole point. I don’t think that members of Congress — I know members of Congress — have not read this entire bill.
CLAY: There’s no way they have.
BUCK: They don’t know what is in the entire bill. But what happens is because everybody… It’s a little bit like when there’s… Let’s say there’s a store that’s being looted —
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: — and everybody runs in —
CLAY: Which we have unfortunately a lot of experience.
BUCK: We’ve seen.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: Democrats are good at that, too, but let’s say there’s a store that’s being looted and people run in and they grab a whole bunch of things and then they go out. The point is it’s very hard to hold anybody accountable for what has been taken and what has been done because it all happens at once. If they broke down this bill in individual components and had votes on them —
CLAY: Which is what Joe Manchin’s requested basically.
BUCK: That’s what he wants, then you could say, “Well, this senator, this member of Congress stands for or against something that I think matters.”
CLAY: Right.
BUCK: With the current situation, everyone gets to walk away — Democrats get to walk away from it saying, “I brought home X for my constituency.” And all the things that some people who might be independents or swing voters or whatever say, “Hold on a second. Civilian Climate Corps? Tree equity?”
They go, “Well, that’s not… I mean, it’s 2,000-page bill. I — I didn’t vote for that. I just voted for the piece of it that I get,” and that’s why this is essentially a mechanism for evading the very political accountability you’re supposed to have in the legislature.
CLAY: And I’m so fascinated by this on many levels, Buck, because I think Joe Biden has painted himself into a corner where he loses in every direction. Let me explain what I mean by that. If these bills pass, then they are probably going to feature the largest tax increases in any of our lives, just about. You’re also going to have this massive government overreach, which is going to be a massive selling point for the Republican Party in 2022.
If it doesn’t pass, then the Democratic Party has become so riven by civil war that they are not able to deliver anything on the premise of which his election was based. So, it’s almost like no matter what the result is, he is between the proverbial rock and the hard place where either way he is going to end up losing.
And, unfortunately, I think either way our country is gonna end up losing, unless the Joe Manchins of the world win and there’s basically what he keeps saying — a strategic pause — and nothing happens now and people are more rational in 2022 as the election gets closer for the midterms.
BUCK: Feels like they’re gonna have to go with the 1.5 trillion.
CLAY: I think you’re right.
BUCK: I don’t see a future here in which they’re gonna say, “You know what…?” And in fact, my feeling all along is that they’ve known they were overpromising to the leftist, socialist base knowing that were they gonna have to underdeliver. They won’t say that, obviously, because that seems very political and disingenuous, but that’s what the Democrats often do.
But for Biden, remember, the same… I always feel like, Clay, at every level the Biden administration blueprint is the Obama administration in terms of the approach to a massive bill, in terms of the approach to saying you’re gonna do one thing and then obviously doing something very different.
When you look at the way that the Obama administration was pushing through massive bills like this, there was always a focus… Obamacare, the best example. What do people know about Obamacare? That it gave you your parents’ insurance. You could stay on your parents’ insurance through 26 and it covered preexisting conditions. Well, it was the houses of pages and there was a lot more than that.
What are people…? If they pass this — and even Manchin’s on board for this part — what are they gonna say? Universal pre-K. Child care. That’s the part of it that they figure is the buy-off of enough of the voters that all the other stuff? Eh. You know what I mean? It’s the Santa Claus routine. It’s give away for some people to keep everyone else from knowing what’s really going on. That’s what I worry about if they just pass even the 1.5 trillion.
CLAY: I agree with you, and the challenge becomes you never end it, right, because people say, “Oh, it’s gonna cost 1.5 trillion.” Well, no, that cost is going to go into infinity because once you start a government program — as Ronald Reagan famously said — it’s almost impossible to ever end one, because people get used to whatever benefit is out there. It’s even almost impossible, Buck, to even modify it.
Look at the difficulties we’ve had with Social Security, Medicare, just to figure out what age you should be to start to get Social Security benefits. As the country ages Social Security seating more and more of the budget. My concern is going to with much of the fallout surrounding this 1.5 trillion. Calling it a $1.5 trillion bill or a 2.5 or 3.5 or whatever it is, is a fundamental inaccuracy of math. Also, I just think it never ends. So you really need to kind of look into the future. Twenty years from now, this is still gonna be here.
BUCK: Right, and so much of this is now turning on the framing of it, the political framing of how people talk about it. You’re bringing up the costs of it. You’ve seen a lot of people on the left that have pretty good platforms, mouthpieces for the Biden agenda saying things like, “Well, compare it to the Pentagon budget.”
And “If you break it out over the next 10 years, it’s only a few hundred billion here, a few hundred billion there.” The real way to look at this is, it is — in addition to the 3-point-whatever it is trillion dollars of federal government spending that’s already just assumed to be happening — 1 trillion of infrastructure or whatever the final number is, 1.5 of social spending if it stops at that number. And I think Manchin maybe might be able to be persuaded to get it to 2 or 2.5.
BUCK: And that’s in addition to the, what is it, 5 or 6 trillion of emergency covid spending last 18 months. I mean, the U.S. national debt right now, you’re talking about 28,825,000,000,000. We’re gonna be at $30 trillion really soon. This budget would put us through so that we are getting there in a matter of months.
CLAY: And purely from a… Let’s pretend you are a family looking at this, right, $30 trillion. Pretend this is your family budget instead this is the point where as a family you just throw up your hands and say, “We’re gonna die with tons of debt. We’ll never pay this off.” The idea that the United States is ever going to have a lower deficit is basically out the window, right?
BUCK: Or dramatically pay it down.
CLAY: And then the interest payments become, for our kids and grandkids, a massive portion of the federal government going forward.
BUCK: And this is also a huge opportunity, too, because we are used to a world — when you talk to the economists who take a long view of these things, we have — you and I and everyone listening to this — lived in a world where the dollar has just been the reserve currency for our entire lifetimes. There’s no one listening to this really who has not had the U.S. dollar as the ultimate global currency.
CLAY: The gold standard.
BUCK: The standard. It’s what everyone buys their oil in. It’s what denominations are in. China’s seeing all this and they’re thinking to themselves… The biggest shift that could happen — other than, obviously, a war that we lose — would be if China all the sudden becomes a true competitor for the global reserve currency. And when you’re looking at $30 trillion in debt and conditions are thinking… Now, China’s got its own economic problems right now. But this is a long-term strategic threat as well as an economic pain point that we’re gonna be seeing.
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