BRETT: What a speech last night, huh? That was amazing. I didn’t think they would actually surpass expectations I had in terms of spending and minimizing legitimate concerns that the American people have. Our telephone number, 800-282-2882. I am Brett Winterble, your guide host today on the EIB Network.
This was an incredible thing to watch, ladies and gentlemen: $4 trillion is essentially what we’re talking about here, a $4 trillion spending spree. And it was worth noting right out of the box (chuckles), Joe Biden stood there in the chamber with 200 members of the House, the Senate — all masked up, appropriately — Chief Justice John Roberts behind him, historically noted by the president.
Of course, the first vice president who is a woman behind him, and that was Kamala Harris, and of course the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. And he opened up (laughing) with a borrowed line from Rahm Emanuel that was a borrowed line from a Chinese proverb, which is, “This is about a crisis and an opportunity.”
He went on from there to discuss his plan to just spend us into prosperity and employment. It was incredible. Some could say that this was an attempt to replicate Santa Claus. In fact, let’s go to Rush right out of the box here, because Rush made it abundantly clear we can never compete with Santa Claus.
RUSH: And, folks, it’s really, really hard to compete against Santa Claus. And that’s how the government’s viewed by a lot of people. In fact, to a lot of people, that’s what government’s for is to take care of people. Feed people and provide for us with government. You can’t blame ’em. That’s how they’ve been taught.
BRETT: It’s how they’ve been taught. But the reality is Santa has a workplace, makes little toys for the good boys and girls around the world and delivers them out of the goodness of his own heart. The government doesn’t do that. The government is not Santa Claus. The government is … Looter Claus, maybe? Really, it’s almost as if the greatest act of looting was offered up last night there in this speech, and it’s being sold to you like it’s gonna be beneficial for all of us.
This is a man who is already $2 trillion into spending and he’s now proposing another $4 trillion. We’re talking about $6 trillion in spending! It’s an absurdly large number. It is an absurdly large number. To hearken back to the reference of looting, the people being looting are our children and grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.
President Biden stood at that dais and told you last night, he wants to put people to work. He wants to put people to work. He wants to take care of the unemployed. He wants to make sure the unemployed in this nation are gonna be taken care of. That’s what he’s talking about. Tim Scott offered the rebuttal last night, and Tim Scott — to sum up what President Biden was saying — essentially said throwing money to this situation in this country right now is not the answer. Senator Scott.
SCOTT: We should be expanding opportunities and options for all families, not throwing money at certain issues because Democrats think they know best. Infrastructure spending that shrinks our economy is not common sense! Weakening our southern borders and creating a crisis is not compassionate!
BRETT: It’s important to understand what we’re looking at here. It’s important to unpack the underlying condition the country is dealing with right now. Right now, this minute — a little bit after 12 noon on the 29th of April — there is a specific reason why the economy is here, why people who are not working are not working. There’s a specific reason why.
Before we even get into universal pre-K; before we get into free junior college; before we get into free college four years after you graduate, 40 years after you graduate, “You will get four years, you get four years, get four years.” Before we even get into the notion of just the insane amount of spending this president is looking to do, we have to understand the underlying condition in this country.
Is there unemployment? Yes, there’s unemployment. Are there people who are underemployed? Yes, there are people who are underemployed. But it is because of shutdowns brought about by government, whether that’s in business or schools. Government officials shut the economy down. Now, we can argue about whether or not it was important to shut the economy down given the pandemic. But the fact of the matter is government do this. This isn’t a failure of capitalism. This isn’t a failure of free markets.
This isn’t a failure of Wall Street, the investor class, the individual, the striver, the business owner, the billionaire. The billionaires didn’t shut the economy down. Government did that, at every level. The county, the state, the federal government was pushing for these things. This is a man standing at the dais wanting to throw money out to everybody out there. It’s going to be a… Well, at first, I thought it would be FDR, but really it was a replication of more like the Great Society.
Rush reminds us, though, the Great Society wasn’t so great.
RUSH: None of what’s happening now is normal. None of what’s happening now is anything people would design, including the lockdowns, the shutdowns, the pandemic, the ineffective way of dealing with it, the fake news, all of these public protests, all these malcontents.
Look at what we’ve done. Lyndon Johnson, Civil Rights Act 1964. What did we have? We had the Great Society. We had the War on Poverty. We’ve had over $4 trillion of wealth transferred from producers, taxpayers, to people who were discriminated against. They’re worse off today than they were before all this happened. This is one of Shelby Steele’s big points. After all of this supposed help — it’s one of my big points, too — after all of this help, after all this compassion, after all this assistance provided by the Democrat Party, we’ve got an angrier population of minorities than we have ever had.
And most people in this country do not think they’re racist. They think they’ve gone out of their way to avoid being racists. They’ve gone out of their way to be accommodating. They’ve gone out of their way to be sympathetic. It doesn’t compute. Most people are asked, “What the hell else can I do?” Now, if you get into the Millennial demographic, they’re not old enough to have had this perspective yet. And I have mentioned the past couple of days — and this is true — that the vast majority of violent protests, not all, but the vast majority of violent protests are being conducted by white Millennial kids.
And in that group, it’s a hell of a lot of women. Their minds and brains have been totally commandeered. You parents who have kids at college or recently were at college and have come home, you know exactly what I’m talking about. After two years there, they come home and they start telling you how you’re racist, you’re destroying the planet with climate change, you’re listening to complaints about your parenting and the way you’ve run the country that you don’t even recognize.
But your kids have been indoctrinated to believe that this country is white privileged, it’s white systemic — I get these two terms confused. White privilege, white supremacy. And the dangerous thing is, I’ve seen evidence. I’ve had parents call here that start agreeing with their kids. Their kids are coming home from college and persuading them that they’re right. So then when the kids go to Seattle and start burning things down, the parents are proud of ’em. Other people, what the hell is happening to our country?
BRETT: Why were they out there protesting? Last summer, last spring, why were they out there protesting? Yes, they were protesting against “injustice,” but why were they destroying property? Because none of them had anyplace to go. They weren’t in college. They weren’t analyst inspect they didn’t get to go to camp. They didn’t get go party. They were locked down, and what caused the lockdowns? The lockdowns were caused by government — federal, state, local government. Now… Now, we’re paying people not to go to work. We’re paying people not to go to work.
We’re paying people 1100 bucks a week or whatever it is and we’re saying, “Don’t take a job!” So now you’ve got unemployed people who are unemployed because Joe Biden has handed out Biden Bucks. The only organically unemployed people in the country right now — and I’m exaggerating but follow me on this — are the victims of the Keystone pipeline killing that Joe Biden did on day one as president of the United States.
He dis-employed, he unemployed Keystone jobs. The difference between the Keystone jobs that he killed and the border wall jobs that he killed is we’re still paying for the border wall even if it doesn’t get built. All of this, right — the keystone jobs, all of this — in a sacrifice to the Green New Deal. Now he wants to do more of it. He literally wants to do more of it.
Here’s a report that came out earlier today. First quarter GDP: 6.5%. So what you’re probably saying, “Yaaaay! It’s 6.5% GDP! This is great; the economy’s great.” In fact, I’m willing to believe there’s an amen corner of people who backed President Trump who are saying, “See? We knew the Trump economy would work. It’s finally coming back!”
You want to know the real reason why 6.5% GDP is the number that was reported out on that first quarter? Because the Biden Bucks, the government money is sloshing around! Go try to buy a fence. You can’t get lumber. You can’t build houses. There’s a major shortage of stuff out there, and we’re pumping all this money into the economy.
So in sum, what did you get last night? A promise to spend four trillion of your dollars to pay some of you people not to work, to pay other people not to work, and to expand the size of government to a size that could almost never be comprehended and understood. All about the fair share.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
BRETT: So looking back at this speech last night, one of the things that keeps coming up is a term that this president uses — and the progressives all use this term. Whether it’s a president, whether it’s a congressman, whether it’s Senator Ossoff from Georgia, whether it’s former President Obama or even former President Bill Clinton, and it’s an ocean of “fair,” fair share, the fair share.
“You have to pay your fair share. The rich have to pay their fair share.” Well, how much is the fair share? “Well, we’ll tell you when you’ve hit the fair share, but you have not hit the fair share yet.” This was used a lot when Barack Obama was president. You would hear things like, “I’m willing to listen to the Republicans who bring any good ideas this way.”
It’s the notion of using adjectives to validate a competing political opinion. “Fair share.” “Good ideas.” “Smart policy.” “Green policy.” And what happens is, these politicians will adjudicate whether or not you’re bringing a “good” idea, whether or not you’ve paid the “fair” share, but they’ll never give you a standard. So last night Joe Biden’s calling for the wealthy to pay their fair share.
BIDEN: It’s time foreign policy corporate America and the wealthiest 1% of Americans to just begin to pay their fair share!
CROWD: (applause)
BIDEN: Just their fair share!
BRETT: To begin to pay their fair share. You heard the breakdown from Rush yesterday on the show with Mick Mulvaney explaining how it is all this works. Okay, the wealthiest 1% pay the freight. They pay the freight at state levels in the Northeast, on the West Coast, at the federal level, across the country, the top 1% are paying their fair share. Rush talked about this.
RUSH: John in Cornwall, New York. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Maha Rushie. Giga dittos to you, longtime listener and honor to speak with you.
RUSH: Thank you very much, sir. I appreciate that.
CALLER: I’m calling because I am fed up with hearing the term “paying your fair share.”
RUSH: Amen, bro.
CALLER: I’ve had my fair share stolen from me every day in taxes and hidden fees in the last 43 years…
RUSH: Amen!
CALLER: …my wife and I have been working.
RUSH: And the top 1% are paying 70% of all the tax revenue anyway. If the game’s rigged, that’s where it’s rigged.
CALLER: And when are the recipients of my fair share going to pay their fair share?
RUSH: You know, that is an excellent…. These people talk about (Obama impression), “You didn’t build that! You didn’t make that happen.” As far as I’m concerned, the people who aren’t paying taxes don’t get to run around claiming that they built everything, that they built the roads and that they built the bridges and so forth.
If it weren’t for the taxes of the 1%, the 2%, the 5%, the 10%, then the 89 million people who aren’t working wouldn’t be eating and making phone calls on their cell phones or watching their plasmas or whatever. Some of this stuff is just backwards, but that’s what I mean (again) by this being Democrat playbook boilerplate.
“The rich aren’t paying their fair share, the poor are getting the shaft,” stuff that we’ve heard for the last 50 years. And if you’re only 30 years old listening to the program or 25, I’m telling you: Everything Obama said, like Jimmy Carter said in 1980. It’s almost verbatim. This has been standard operating procedure — word for word, practically — what the Democrats have said when they get in trouble for at least 50 years.
BRETT: … from that narrative ought to always be growth, economic growth, wealth is not a zero-sum game. It’s an zero-sum game. Jeff Bezos is worth, what, $120 billion, right? He’s worth $120 billion. Did he get his $120 billion by stealing it from poor people? Nooo, he did not. Why? Because poor people don’t have $120 billion to steal. The wealthy don’t get rich stealing from the poor.
You run out of real estate very quickly.
The poor have a finite amount of money, and it’s not nearly enough to maintain the lavish lifestyles of people with last names like Kerry and Clinton and Obama and Jack Dorsey out in Silicon Valley. Actually, that’s not even fair because Jack Dorsey in Silicon Valley actually has Twitter. He’s actually developed Twitter.
Obama and the Bidens and the Clintons and the Kerrys, well, see, that’s not even really fair for John Kerry. But, well, Teresa Heinz Kerry, I guess, ’cause the Kerry fortune — the Heinz fortune — was accumulated for selling a product. But the point is, they are relying on your ignorance of economics — and I don’t mean that to say you’re dumb.
They’re relying on the public’s ignorance of economics to understand how the country works. They think that every time a guy gets a Lamborghini, it means a child has been denied meal. That’s not true at all. The economy in 1790 was of a given size. Let’s just say it was worth a million dollars, just an arbitrary number.
The economy now is trillions and trillions of dollars, right? It’s $25 trillion in a given year. Look at those numbers and tell me where that differential came about. “Well, speculation by Wall Street, stealing from the poor.” No. Not how it works. You trade your labor, and you are paid money in exchange for that.
In your spare time, you’re at your house and you’re developing a product that then somebody wants to pay you for. You sell it to them. They think it’s great! It gets the attention of an investor group who says, “This thing, we could sell this nationwide,” and now all of a sudden, instead of selling one of those items, you’re selling 50,000 of those items every week.
You’re getting rich! Are you stealing from people? Only if you’re a bank robber or a fraudster like Bernie Madoff or the government confiscating that which is not yours. People have a failure to understand where money comes from. It doesn’t come from the government. It doesn’t.
The government can take it from you, and they will take it from you. But the dirty little secret about all of this is, they’ll never take it from you and then give it directly to a poor person. There’s a middleman called the government, and they parse it out as power and control.
“Okay. We believe this group of people deserves this money.” Why? Are they starving to death? “No, we need them to vote for us in this next election so let’s do a wealth transfer.” Governor Pat McCrory is running for the Senate seat in North Carolina, and he had a tweet last night after this address.
He said, “North Carolina families can’t afford the job losses, surging gas prices, and destruction of small businesses that would come if Biden’s radical agenda is left unchecked.” He’s right. And yet when you read Niall Strange in The Hill today, he’s praising Joe Biden for sounding so reasonable while talking about spending all of this money.
He’s gonna be awfully hard to defeat if you’re a Republican because, well, he doesn’t sound like a radical. It’s not tone of voice. It’s not pounding on the desk. It’s not yelling and screaming and waving your arms and laying in a street and blocking traffic. The radical idea is the notion of spending $4 trillion on stuff that the American people are neither clamoring for nor demanding.
Remember just two weeks ago they were telling you child care is infrastructure. Child care is infrastructure? Child care can be used for generations to come by investing in it today? No, that’s a road and a bridge. But that was a serious member of the Senate saying that very thing, and yet Niall Strange will say (summarized), “This guy was really amazing.
“What a statesman, making the case calmly and concisely.” Yeah, he’s trying to give you a Santa Claus most of the time, and he’s gonna stick it to every small business, new business, medium business, large business, you name it. That’s the group of people who have the target on their back.