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Collapse by cost and design · Cultural Wars | America Out Loud News

• 0:00
  In a world full of lies and deception, it takes courage to speak the truth.
• 0:05
  In a nation held bent on its own destruction, it takes honor to seek a return to glory.
• 0:12
  Join us in cutting through the lies.
• 0:14
  Join us in cutting through the propaganda.
• 0:18
  Join us as we seek the truth on cutting through the fog from the America Out Loud Network.
• 0:24
  And here's your host, Wallace Garno.
• 0:27
  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Cutting Through the Chaos on the America Out Loud Network, where we cut through the lies and the propaganda to bring you the out loud truth.
• 0:38
  I'm your host Wallace Garno, and there certainly is a lot of stuff that we could talk about today.
• 0:45
  We could talk about all the lying going on regarding Iran.
• 0:50
  Iran, of course, is lying.
• 0:52
  They're pretending like they have uh they're in a position of strength, and and that somehow they are going to prevent us from not bombing them if we don't give up to a ridiculous list of demands.
• 1:02
  And and it's it's it's amazing how many people seem to think one that Trump is accepting those demands, and two that Iran has somehow won this war.
• 1:13
  Now I get some of it, some people just hate Trump so much that they refuse to accept that there is anything he could possibly do that would have any value to humanity whatsoever, including killing off the Mullah system in Iran.
• 1:28
  If somebody else did it, they might be overjoyed.
• 1:30
  But because Trump is doing it, it's a terrible thing.
• 1:33
  If he cured cancer, I've heard it said that they would be saying, you know, keep your hands off my cancer.
• 1:38
  And you're just the the level of lunacy is absurd.
• 1:43
  And I'm saying this as somebody who now for 10 years or whatever it has been, has I've never been anti Trump, but I've certainly never been like super pro Trump either.
• 1:52
  I've always been okay, he's better than the other people running.
• 1:56
  I guess maybe I guess this is the guy I'm voting for, but I've never voted for him in the Republican primary.
• 2:01
  I don't know if he could run again if I would.
• 2:03
  A little old now, but I don't know that I going back in time.
• 2:06
  I still don't know that I would vote from the Republican primary.
• 2:09
  Just like in the general election, I have to ask myself, who is he running against.
• 2:13
  I liked Ted Cruz.
• 2:15
  I used to like Rand Paul, but he's kind of gotten off the deep end, particularly on things like foreign policy.
• 2:20
  But uh, you know, I'm I'm telling you that this war is absolutely necessary, and that all the people who are up in arms about it.
• 2:27
  Uh, they're either they're they're either living in a state of denial about Trump somehow having reversed course on everything Trump has ever said, or they're they're so anti Trump on the other side of the spectrum that uh it's just lunacy.
• 2:44
  And uh, yeah, so that's what's going on there.
• 2:47
  Uh but that's not what I want to talk about.
• 2:50
  That's just obviously that's what's going on in the world right now.
• 2:52
  It's something that has to be said, but that's not what I want to talk about.
• 2:56
  I actually want to talk about a girl named Jamie.
• 3:00
  Because Jamie stands in line at the county welfare office once every month.
• 3:06
  And she knows the routine there.
• 3:07
  She takes a number, she waits, she answers the same questions with the same answers as she has always done before, and then she signs the same forms, and uh yeah, it's the same thing every time.
• 3:20
  Well, the last time she was there, the woman ahead of her was arguing about the benefits she had just lost.
• 3:27
  Meantime, she had a man behind her, he was talking about how his cousin gets more money by not working than what he gets working.
• 3:34
  Everyone in the room always knows that the system is broken.
• 3:37
  And Jamie, of course, she knows it's broken too.
• 3:40
  She's seen benefits spent on things that they shouldn't cover, and she's watched people game the rules.
• 3:46
  She's had case workers tell her one thing one week and then the opposite thing the next week, supposedly under the same rules, and she, in fact, admittedly gets lots of benefits that she probably doesn't even really qualify for.
• 4:01
  The system, of course, it's slow, it's inconsistent, it's full of waste, but nobody cares.
• 4:07
  Sometimes, if you give a good enough substory, the caseworkers will even help you get some of the benefits that you don't qualify for.
• 4:15
  And the fraud's everywhere.
• 4:17
  It's not just, it's not just Jamie or the few people that Jamie knows.
• 4:21
  You know, it's everywhere.
• 4:22
  You've got the fraud in Minneapolis in Minnesota, particularly Minneapolis, you've got the fraud in California, you've got the fraud in basically probably every state, uh, particularly the blue states, it looks like Massachusetts, you know, it's just one state after another.
• 4:36
  Now they're finding massive, massive levels of fraud that nobody had ever looked for before.
• 4:41
  And and yeah, it people are signing people up for things that they know they don't qualify for.
• 4:46
  People are helping people build fraud.
• 4:48
  It's just the whole thing is just absolutely overwhelmingly bad.
• 4:52
  But Jamie, you know, in her numbers called, she always steps forward because the check always comes, clears, and then the benefits always are just kind of there.
• 5:01
  And without that money, she's really not sure how she'd make it through the month.
• 5:07
  You know, she doesn't defend the system.
• 5:09
  She actually complains about it just as much as everybody else.
• 5:12
  But she also doesn't lose a lot of sleep over what it costs.
• 5:16
  From her perspective, capitalism hasn't really done much for her or her children anyway.
• 5:20
  So if taking welfare happens to break the economy, well, maybe the next economy will do more for people like her.
• 5:28
  See, people talk about government waste or deficit spending, she just kind of shrugs.
• 5:32
  Of course it's wasteful, but she's got to feed her kids and she doesn't have any job skills.
• 5:37
  So why should she care if she gets more than she should?
• 5:41
  The fact of the matter is, and you'll hear this on the left a lot.
• 5:44
  This is a true statistic.
• 5:46
  There are only about a million people in the United States who, like Jamie, are getting actual federal welfare money.
• 5:52
  Uh, but there are over 90 million people getting some kind of federal assistance, which is about a third of the total population.
• 6:00
  And all of these programs are, as we are now finding out, they're absolutely awash in waste, fraud, and abuse.
• 6:08
  The Congressional Budget Office claims that there is about a half a trillion dollars a year in fraudulent Medicare spending alone.
• 6:16
  I said every year, that's not a slip.
• 6:18
  A half a trillion every year.
• 6:20
  We could cut our deficit by 25%, just getting rid of Medicare fraud.
• 6:26
  That's every year.
• 6:27
  And you know what?
• 6:28
  Before Dodge, nobody was doing anything about it.
• 6:33
  Now, Milton Friedman broke down the first part of this problem, and it's a two-part problem.
• 6:39
  He broke down the first part of the problem into how government systems work in terms of who is paying for things versus who is getting them.
• 6:47
  And then the other part of the problem is that some of the people that are writing these programs are actively seeking to destroy our nation so that they can radically transform it to something else.
• 6:56
  And that's a phrase that they use radical transformation.
• 6:59
  So destroy the first system, and then you can build a new one on the carcass of the last, or something like that.
• 7:05
  What example of Lean Omar?
• 7:07
  Now, she wrote one of the bills that created one of the primary programs that the Somali residents of Minneapolis used to commit fraud.
• 7:14
  And during the time that that fraud was being committed, we saw her net worth rise to 25 million dollars while that fraud was taking place.
• 7:24
  She started out with like 125,000, then she went to a million.
• 7:27
  Now it's at 25 million dollars while that fraud was taking place.
• 7:33
  Billions and billions of dollars.
• 7:35
  You say it could be as high as 20 billion dollars of fraud in Minneapolis alone.
• 7:40
  Just exploded at 25 million dollars after her husband opened a fake winery that she had not even been able to show has ever sold any wines.
• 7:50
  So, you know, some people are getting rich and and some people in office are getting rich.
• 7:55
  And you know, when you write the bill that people then use to commit fraud, I don't think they have any cases of anybody that was actually giving food to children.
• 8:04
  I don't I I think with that particular program where she wrote the bill, I have not seen a single case where any of the money that it gave was not fraud.
• 8:13
  So in that case, she may have written a bill specifically for the Somali residents of Minneapolis to take advantage of while making herself rich.
• 8:24
  You know, it's another example.
• 8:26
  The FBI has released text messages and emails from you can't from a Ukrainian officials discussing how over a hundred million dollars of the aid sent to Ukraine during the Joe Biden years was then sent right back to the United States and smuggled into Joe Biden's reelection campaign coffers.
• 8:45
  So now we have tax dollars supposedly going out to support a war, coming back and going to Joe Biden's campaign.
• 8:53
  That's that it looks like that actually happened.
• 8:55
  I mean, the verification on that is is is fairly strong.
• 8:58
  And you know, these kinds of things, it's it's at a point now where they don't even make the news anymore, and nobody's ever held accountable.
• 9:07
  I mean, you get you get a couple of arrests here or there, but Ilian Omar, nobody's talking about her doing anything, and uh, and you know, Joe Biden, nobody's talking about that anymore.
• 9:16
  A hundred million dollars.
• 9:17
  Nobody cares.
• 9:18
  And and that really is what blows my mind.
• 9:21
  It's like the public has accepted that the primary role of the government is to fleece the people and to bankrupt the country.
• 9:28
  It's like the public wouldn't care until it affects them personally, and you know, well, then it's too late.
• 9:35
  You know, if we if we started this, we could look at you know the spending side, because Milton Friedman broke spending into four different types based on who it is that pays and who it is that benefits.
• 9:48
  The first type of spending this is when you spend your own money on yourself.
• 9:52
  You bear the cost and you receive the benefits.
• 9:54
  So what you're gonna do is you're gonna watch both the price of the money is spent on as well.
• 10:00
  Well as the quality of whatever was purchased, you're going to watch both of those very, very closely because it's your money and you're getting whatever it is that the money goes to.
• 10:08
  Now that doesn't mean that everything is expensive and high quality.
• 10:11
  No, sometimes it means the exact opposite.
• 10:14
  I collect vinyl records, so I've got a really, really high-end turntable that I spent a lot of money on and got an amazing high-end turntable.
• 10:21
  I've got a great amplifier, I've got amazing speakers.
• 10:25
  But when my CD player broke, I went out to the Salvation Army.
• 10:29
  Why?
• 10:29
  Because it was a name brand vintage unit that was fair, that was when it was built at least was a very high quality unit, and I got it for 15 bucks.
• 10:37
  Now that doesn't work as well as it used to work.
• 10:40
  Now when I go to the Salvation Army looking for uh for stereo equipment, there's there's usually nothing there.
• 10:45
  I'm actually not going anymore because I think there are other people who have figured out that you can get like a pioneer CD player or something for almost nothing.
• 10:54
  And uh, so yeah, it doesn't always mean you're spending a lot of money.
• 10:57
  Sometimes it means you're actually trying to save money by getting something that is you know pretty good, but maybe not the best thing on the market, maybe it won't last forever, but it's it's it's good for now, and you could pay almost nothing for it.
• 11:08
  So now you watch both of those things, but it doesn't mean you're spending a lot, and it doesn't mean that you're always getting the highest quality.
• 11:14
  It means that you will spend as little as you have to to get as much bang for your buck as you can.
• 11:19
  That's what we kind of do when we spend our own money on ourselves.
• 11:23
  And the second type is when you spend your own money on someone else.
• 11:27
  Now you still bear the cost there, but now you're not receiving the benefit.
• 11:31
  Somebody else is.
• 11:32
  So while the cost of whatever the money is spent on remains very, very important to you, well, the quality of what is purchased is less of a concern.
• 11:41
  How much less of a concern?
• 11:43
  I think if we're honest with ourselves, when we buy something for our mother or our children, or somebody else that we're close to, well, we're still probably somewhat concerned about the quality, but I think as we move further and further away from our circle of immediate family and and maybe our best friends, I think the quality starts to drop off, and we try to spend less money.
• 12:05
  That's just you know, it's human nature.
• 12:08
  So that's that's that's how that is.
• 12:10
  The third type of spending is when someone else's money is spent on you.
• 12:14
  Now, here you're receiving the benefit, but you don't bear the cost, so you care a great deal about how good the purchase is, but you really don't care so much about how much it costs.
• 12:24
  You know, most people in this position would choose a Ferrari would afford might be perfectly good enough.
• 12:29
  Now, again, if it's being bought by your mother or your children or your spouse or somebody very very close to you, then you still care about the cost.
• 12:38
  But as you move further and further away from your immediate circle of family and friends, once again, uh the cost becomes less and less important to you.
• 12:47
  What you care about is the benefit that you are receiving.
• 12:51
  I actually knew a guy in high school who got a new car for his 16th birthday.
• 12:55
  Now, I don't remember what it was, but I remember it was kind of a cool car, kind of a muscle car.
• 12:59
  It was kind of a cool car.
• 13:00
  It was it was not a brand new car, it was an older car, but it was very, very cool, and uh, and it was something that was it was in amazing shape.
• 13:08
  Well, kid didn't like it.
• 13:10
  Uh it was a rich family, and uh, you know, he threw an absolute fit, told his dad he wanted a Porsche.
• 13:15
  Well, his dad ran out and bought him a Porsche.
• 13:18
  Uh that's that's you know, I think that's kind of a crazy, crazy story, but that's that's that's how it is.
• 13:24
  He got something from his father that was perfectly acceptable.
• 13:28
  I'm sure it cost you know a fair amount of money, but it wasn't anywhere near as expensive as a portion as a Porsche, but he wasn't happy with it, so we made his dad go out and buy him a Porsche.
• 13:37
  He didn't care how much his dad's how much his dad spent, he wanted the Porsche.
• 13:40
  Well, you know, that's you getting the benefit and not bearing the cost yourself.
• 13:46
  That's a perfect example of that.
• 13:48
  That incidentally is exactly the kind of spending socialism promises.
• 13:53
  When people say I want socialism, what they're saying is I want benefits given to me and to other people, and I'm not going to be the one who pays for it.
• 14:00
  I'm to have somebody else pay for it.
• 14:02
  I'm to have the rich people pay for it.
• 14:04
  I'm gonna have the billionaire class pay for it.
• 14:06
  The government could just print the money because of MMT, modern monetary theory, and there's no benefit, there's there's no problem with the government printing money because it can pay its own bills by printing more.
• 14:16
  There are people actually believe that, by the way.
• 14:18
  They actually believe that the government just print money into existence, spending whatever it wants, and nothing will ever happen because they make the money that they can pay the bills.
• 14:28
  Absolutely ridiculous.
• 14:29
  Modern monetary theory is absolutely ridiculous.
• 14:31
  But that is the kind of spending that socialism promises.
• 14:35
  And then you have the fourth kind of spending, which is what socialism to the degree it does anything at all actually delivers.
• 14:42
  This is when someone else's money is spent on someone else.
• 14:47
  In that case, you bear neither the cost nor the benefit, and so you have no vested interest either in the quality of whatever is purchased nor in the cost.
• 14:58
  Now, politicians, as I said, they promise the third kind of spending that we are going to give benefits to you and somebody else is going to pay for it.
• 15:06
  But the reality is that we get the fourth.
• 15:09
  And it's amazing how voters will support all kinds of programs, whether they work or not, as long as they believe that someone else will foot the bill.
• 15:19
  Yeah, we're gonna put that notion to bed today.
• 15:22
  But we see this in the polls in terms of believing that we see this in the polls.
• 15:27
  You know, when Americans are asked if they support universal health care without discussing costs, guess what?
• 15:32
  Support is high.
• 15:33
  When Americans are asked about universal health care paid for by taxing the rich, support grows even further.
• 15:40
  Guess what happens in the same question is tied to specific taxes that the poor and middle classes have to pay, whether they're payroll taxes, income taxes, a value-added tax, or something else.
• 15:52
  As soon as you tell the poor the middle classes that Medicare for All is going to come from their pockets, support drops quickly.
• 16:00
  The Kaiser Family Foundation, in fact, is repeatedly shown that medical the Medicare for All polls very, very well until the funding mechanism is specified, at which point approval collapses.
• 16:12
  Politicians, of course, they know this, so they only promise the spending.
• 16:16
  They leave how they will pay for it up to someone else at some other time.
• 16:19
  They just say, well, you have to pay for it.
• 16:21
  Of course, you're paying for something now, so we'll just pay for it.
• 16:24
  Don't worry about it.
• 16:25
  We can figure out how to pay for it later.
• 16:26
  We just have to give everybody Medicare for all, and who could possibly be against that?
• 16:31
  Well, the truth is that while many Americans want universal health care, very few of us want to want it badly enough to pay for it ourselves.
• 16:41
  Most Americans want the benefit, excuse me, but they want someone else to take care of the costs.
• 16:47
  Nor is this kind of thinking limited by the way to health care.
• 16:50
  Virtually all socialist propaganda promises the third kind of spending to the masses.
• 16:55
  Even though if we are honest, socialist promises are not possible unless the poor and middle classes foot the bill.
• 17:02
  You see, the math behind tax the rich proves my point.
• 17:06
  The total wealth of all U.S.
• 17:08
  billionaires is mostly illiquid, which means they can't get to it quickly, and it's already tied up in productive assets like farms and factories that the public needs to survive.
• 17:18
  I guess the government could take over the farms and the factories.
• 17:21
  They've done that in other countries.
• 17:22
  It didn't work very well, but other countries have done that.
• 17:25
  But you can't just take the farms and factories and pretend that you have money to spend, you have to run the farms and the factories.
• 17:32
  So you have the food and the products that we need to survive.
• 17:36
  So, yes, the government could probably take the total wealth of billionaires and be a lot more money than uh they can take the farms, the factory, but they can't my point is you can't sell the farms and the factories.
• 17:47
  You can't just take the billionaire's wealth and say, okay, cool, now we have all of this money because to the degree that it's tied up in companies that are creating that they have creative assets from that, you can't just take that money.
• 17:59
  That money is a company that builds things.
• 18:03
  And you can't just you know, it's if I'm worth a billion dollars, how much of that is actual cash that's liquid that you can actually spend?
• 18:10
  You'd have to sell all of those things.
• 18:12
  Well, who's gonna buy them?
• 18:13
  You're taking all the money from all of the people that can afford it.
• 18:16
  So, you know, the idea that you can just take it, that doesn't work.
• 18:19
  But even if you could get it all, even if you could.
• 18:24
  If we took every penny every billionaire has, along with all of the money every billionaire makes, all of it.
• 18:31
  That would fund Medicare for all for about three months.
• 18:35
  After that, we'd be out of billionaires and we would need to tax someone else.
• 18:39
  So the whole tax the billionaire class, sorry, that's just not gonna be good enough.
• 18:44
  In fact, it's worse than that.
• 18:45
  Even if we tax all of the rich as much as we possibly can.
• 18:50
  So now we're moving from billionaires into millionaires.
• 18:52
  Even if we tax all of the rich as much as possible, the Tax Foundation and Penn Wharton budget model have both analyzed wealth tax style approaches.
• 19:03
  And guess what they found?
• 19:05
  They found that they generate revenue far below the cost of the largest entitlement programs, even before accounting for behavioral changes, capital flight and valuation issues, which of course you're going to have behavioral changes, capital flight and valuation issues.
• 19:23
  So even if you ignore that, it's nowhere near enough.
• 19:26
  The fact of the matter is that the rich is just too small a base to cover the costs of all of these programs.
• 19:33
  And in fact, the rich already pay what any rational measurement would be their fair share.
• 19:38
  Let's look at that.
• 19:39
  In the United States, the top 1% of earners pay roughly 40% of all federal income tax revenue.
• 19:45
  And if you expand it to the top 10% of earners, they pay 70% of all federal income tax revenue.
• 19:52
  The bottom half, well, guess what?
• 19:54
  The bottom half contributes two to three percent of all federal income taxes.
• 19:58
  That's it.
• 19:59
  Two to three percent.
• 20:00
  That's 50% of the public are paying two to three percent of all federal income taxes.
• 20:05
  And you know, after you throw in credits, many receive refunds that exceed their total tax payments.
• 20:12
  So they're paying two to three percent before they get a bunch of money back in their tax return.
• 20:16
  And and that reduces what they pay even more.
• 20:20
  That's the truth.
• 20:21
  And uh, you know, a negative that they basically have a negative tax burden.
• 20:26
  Not everybody, but there are people who have a negative tax burden.
• 20:28
  That's what the fifth that's what the lowest 50% pay.
• 20:31
  And then, you know, the top 1%, well, they're paying 40% of the taxes, but they're only earning about one-fifth of the total income.
• 20:39
  And the top 10%, well, they get about 45 to 50% of the income, but they're paying 70% of the taxes.
• 20:46
  So their share of the tax burden is already a lot higher than their share of the income.
• 20:51
  If we're honest with ourselves, and please, let's be honest with ourselves.
• 20:55
  If we're honest with ourselves, when people like Bernie Sanders talk about making the rich pay their fair share, he doesn't really mean that.
• 21:02
  He just means tax them more.
• 21:05
  And more, ladies and gentlemen, does that sound like a number to you or a direction?
• 21:10
  That's what he's promising.
• 21:11
  They already pay more than their fair share.
• 21:13
  He's not saying make them pay their fair share.
• 21:15
  He's simply saying make them pay more.
• 21:19
  That's what that translates to, and we need to be honest about that.
• 21:22
  We need to be fair.
• 21:23
  We can't be we're not being fair to the rich people, they're already paying more than they should.
• 21:27
  We want to be fair to everybody.
• 21:28
  You know, half the public doesn't really pay taxes.
• 21:31
  So excuse me, that's where we are.
• 21:34
  Now, people claim that tax cuts only help the rich.
• 21:38
  But the truth there is something else as well.
• 21:41
  The truth is that the federal income tax has become more progressive over time as the rates have been cut, not less.
• 21:48
  After tax Trump tax after Trump's tax cuts and jobs act, just as one example, the share of income tax is paid by the top 10% went up, as did total tax revenues.
• 21:59
  We have a spending problem, not a taxation problem.
• 22:02
  The government gets plenty of money, and it's getting plenty of money almost entirely from the rich.
• 22:06
  The problem isn't that they're not getting enough money, the problem is that they're spending more of it than they get.
• 22:11
  That's the real problem.
• 22:12
  Independent analysis, by the way, reinforces that conclusion.
• 22:15
  The Congressional Budget Office consistently finds that federal taxes have become more progressive over time when measured across income groups, even before accounting for those who get paid more in tax refunds than they pay it in.
• 22:29
  If you want to go to the Tax Foundation, another organization that measures this stuff, says the same thing.
• 22:34
  If we think only in terms of what one person is paid and what one person then pays in taxes, which is how people like Bernie Sanders want you to look at it, well, then it looks pretty obvious that a higher rate on the rich is going to lead to higher revenues.
• 22:47
  But as John F.
• 22:48
  Kennedy and later as Ronald Reagan showed, dollars are taxed each time they change hands.
• 22:55
  You know, a retail store, we know what turns are.
• 22:58
  So just as real retail store might want, might get higher revenues with lower prices and more sales.
• 23:05
  So to a nation might get more tax revenue with lower rates, but a stronger economy where the money is changing hands more frequently.
• 23:13
  See, when I get paid income, I don't just stuff it in the mattress.
• 23:16
  I go out and I I buy things, I spend it on bills.
• 23:19
  I we're redoing our kitchen.
• 23:20
  If you hear background noise, that's why.
• 23:22
  I've missed a couple of weeks because there was too much background noise, by the way.
• 23:25
  But if you hear a little background noise, we're redoing our kitchen.
• 23:28
  Original kitchen from 1978, it had to be done.
• 23:31
  So I get paid, I pay taxes on it.
• 23:34
  Then I pay a contractor to work on my kitchen.
• 23:37
  Guess what he does with that money?
• 23:39
  Yes, he pays taxes on it.
• 23:41
  And then he goes out and he buys supplies, sales taxes.
• 23:44
  Those supplies that are made by companies that employ people, payroll taxes, federal income taxes.
• 23:50
  So every time somebody buys something, they have already paid taxes on it.
• 23:54
  Now that money goes to somebody else, that person pays taxes on it, and it just goes around and around and around.
• 24:00
  It gets taxed each time the money changes hands.
• 24:05
  So, yeah, high rates, you get that first shot of it.
• 24:08
  But if the money's not changing hands, you're not taxing again and again and again.
• 24:11
  You want lower rates.
• 24:13
  Not obviously if you go too low, you're not gonna get anything, but you want to have rates that are low enough that the money turns over.
• 24:19
  We call it turns in retail, and everybody knows what that is.
• 24:22
  But in politics, for some reason, the same concept just gets ignored.
• 24:27
  And of course it does.
• 24:28
  There are two messages that sell politically.
• 24:30
  One is the rational one, which is kind of like you know, the system is broken in the following ways.
• 24:35
  And here's what I will do, or here is what we will do to fix it.
• 24:38
  That's the rational message, and that does that can sell to some people.
• 24:42
  But the other message seems to be far more popular.
• 24:45
  And that message is your lot in life, is not your fault.
• 24:49
  I know whose fault it is, and I will make them pay.
• 24:53
  Now, which of those is the easier one to sell is kind of difficult to say, but those who vote for the second message do whatever they can over and over again to block any action from taking place on the first message.
• 25:10
  You want an example of that where rationality doesn't work?
• 25:13
  Just look at voter ID.
• 25:15
  The vast majority of the public wants that made law federally, including almost 80% of Democrats.
• 25:22
  And yet Democrats in power block it at every turn.
• 25:27
  And why would they ever want to fix a system when they benefit from it being broken?
• 25:31
  You know, this kind of stuff is even worse than the EU.
• 25:34
  The EU is a lot more people who think like Jamie, you know, the girl from our deduction than we do.
• 25:39
  So it's even worse there.
• 25:40
  You know, they you don't you don't vote for the people of the EU parliament, those are selected.
• 25:45
  So the the actual power structure in Europe isn't even democratic anymore.
• 25:49
  It is it's just a bureaucracy.
• 25:50
  It is a bureaucratic nightmare.
• 25:52
  So as bad as we think things are here, they're even worse there.
• 25:55
  At least we have fraudulent voting.
• 25:58
  They don't even have that.
• 25:58
  They vote in national elections that aren't really all that all that powerful anymore.
• 26:02
  The EU is Europe is a bastard case right now.
• 26:05
  Anyway, though, getting back to this, for the rich, rates above a certain level encourage people to move into tax shelters and into offshore accounts.
• 26:14
  Money then gets parked where it cannot be taxed, waiting for lower rates.
• 26:19
  Now, when you when you lower the rates below that threshold, guess what happens?
• 26:23
  Suddenly the same people decide to declare that wealth and it gets taxed.
• 26:27
  So you can either have them get the wealth in ways that you cannot tax because they keep it offshore, whatever the case may be, they get paid in benefits rather than money, whatever the case may be, and now you can't tax that money.
• 26:38
  Um, or you can have rates that are a little bit lower below that threshold, and suddenly, well, now it gets taxed.
• 26:44
  The thing that I wish more people understood.
• 26:48
  Everybody seems to think that the rich just simply want to make more money.
• 26:50
  They just want a bigger piece of the pie.
• 26:52
  But if they have that money overseas in in offshore accounts where it's not getting taxed, uh some people say Hunter Biden, supposedly the Biden family is more money than the Trump family, according to uh the guy who wrote Clinton cash.
• 27:04
  It's another book that he wrote.
• 27:05
  I forget his name offhand, but he says the Biden family probably is billions of dollars in offshore accounts that they've gotten through illicit, you know, illegal overseas operations.
• 27:14
  Hunter Biden getting paid by barisma, for example, and you know, they they occasionally want they want access to that money, which is why Hunter Biden was doing his stupid, his stupid paintings with uh with uh with uh was using straw.
• 27:26
  So that money's overseas, he doesn't have any access to it.
• 27:30
  Rich people don't just want the money, they want to have access to the money.
• 27:35
  And if you have the tax rates too high, well, they're more interested in preserving the money for hopefully for a lower tax rate in the future.
• 27:42
  But when you bring those rates down, well, now they want access to the money, so like, cool, I'll pay taxes on that.
• 27:47
  And it's not just rich people.
• 27:49
  We see the same economic behavior too with criminals.
• 27:53
  If the cost of laundry money is below a particular threshold, they launder a lot of it.
• 27:58
  If the cost goes above that level, though, the same criminals bury the money, some of them bury it in the ground.
• 28:04
  Why do they do that?
• 28:06
  Because they're waiting for better laundering opportunities that cost less.
• 28:09
  When it costs too much to launder criminals launder less, when it costs less to launder criminals launder more.
• 28:15
  Now, these are obviously different scenarios, but in both cases, people are willing to give up a certain percentage of their money for unfettered access to the rest of it.
• 28:26
  And while the mechanisms may be different, the incentives are exactly the same.
• 28:31
  No, I tell people all the time if we were smart, we would use tax rates designed to maximize government revenues over the long term.
• 28:41
  I've never seen a study on what the top marginal rate should be to maximize revenues, but the laugher curve suggests that tax revenues are highest when the government taxes neither too much nor too little.
• 28:52
  And historically in the United States, the sweet spot for total GDP and how much of that we tax has been about 18%.
• 28:59
  When the government spends 40% as it does today, well, the the rest is eventually going to be made up for inflation.
• 29:06
  18% is not really a magic number, so don't take that as like it's magic.
• 29:09
  And if we just do 18%, that's that's where we get the most money.
• 29:12
  It doesn't really work that way.
• 29:14
  Really, what it represents is a government that's doing roughly what a government should, not doing much else.
• 29:19
  I would suggest that our government today is doing a great deal too many of the wrong things and nowhere near enough of the right things, and that the spending side of the equation in terms of how the laugher curve actually works is probably just as important as the taxing side.
• 29:33
  So the laugher curve I think is an oversimplification.
• 29:36
  It shows that if you don't tax enough, the government's not going to maximize its revenues, but if you tax too much, the government also is not going to raise as high of revenues.
• 29:46
  But I don't think the laughter curve is really taking into account the spending side of the equation.
• 29:50
  If we taxed 18% and had the government do all the wrong things, we're not going to maximize revenues.
• 29:55
  So I think really it's it's it's a mixture of the two, and we have to do is not just have taxes.
• 30:00
  At about 18%, but also have the government only doing about what it can afford to do with an 18% rate of taxes, 18% of GDP, that is.
• 30:09
  How you pull it is probably less important, more from some people, you know, whatever.
• 30:13
  Point is we're taxing too much, and we are then spending even more too much, and we are reducing revenues and going just to we're spiraling into rich into debt.
• 30:23
  And the point here is that the rich, they're not a bottomless well.
• 30:27
  Much of their wealth is tied up in businesses, equity, and long-term capital investments.
• 30:33
  Aggressive attempts to just take more, especially through wealth taxes or marginal, higher marginal rates.
• 30:39
  Well, those run into behavior changes.
• 30:41
  The rich, they move capital elsewhere, they defer or they reclassify income, and then they take other steps to avoid those higher rates.
• 30:49
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• 30:53
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• 31:02
  Also, don't forget that we are going to be going to uh to uh Nashville over July 4th.
• 31:10
  I'll be there.
• 31:10
  My wife will be there with me.
• 31:11
  There'll be a bunch of other people from America out loud there.
• 31:14
  Go check the link on that and uh go ahead and and if you can go ahead and go to uh and go to that.
• 31:20
  I think that's gonna be a great time.
• 31:21
  As I said, my wife and I, we will be there, so it's an opportunity for you to uh meet us.
• 31:26
  So don't go anywhere.
• 31:27
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• 31:33
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• 31:35
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• 34:29
  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to cutting through the chaos on the America Out Loud Network.
• 34:34
  I'm your host Wallace Garneau.
• 34:36
  And in the first half of the show, we're talking about how the rich are not a bottomless pit.
• 34:41
  We're going to pick right up from there and get right back into it.
• 34:45
  So uh Europe has found that there are actually two groups and only two groups whose behaviors do not change when tax rates go up, and those groups happen to be the poor and middle classes.
• 34:58
  As such, if you look at the effective tax rates in Europe, they tend to be regressive with the poor and middle classes bearing the primary burden.
• 35:06
  In most of Europe, in fact, effective rates actually go down as you make more money.
• 35:12
  So, you know, what's if if you look just at the income tax, that's not necessarily the case.
• 35:17
  But when you look at all forms of taxation in Europe, when you take them all into account, one, they're very, very, very high, such that not many people can afford to survive without government assistance.
• 35:27
  The people in Europe are highly dependent upon their government for their survival, which of course also makes them very, very dependent.
• 35:33
  You know, when they vote, it reflects the fact that they are dependent on government and that they live their lives in such a way that they want more largesse from government.
• 35:41
  Very dependent people.
• 35:43
  That makes them very, very non-independent people.
• 35:46
  They can't really think independently unless they're rich because they are dependent upon the government for their survival.
• 35:53
  So that's that's exactly the opposite of how it works in the United States.
• 35:57
  Uh, we actually have the most progressive tax system in the world right now, and and we have had that for a very long time.
• 36:06
  You know, people talk about back in the 60s, there were 92% tax rates.
• 36:11
  Well, yeah, but the number of people that actually paid that 92% tax rate was very, very low.
• 36:17
  When they reduced the tax rate from 72 down to 78%, I think the initial drop was under John F.
• 36:23
  Kennedy, the number of people that had incomes in the top rate exploded.
• 36:28
  Not because there were all of a sudden more people getting paid more, but because they were more people wanted to count that income so that again they could use it.
• 36:38
  Because rich people don't just want to have money, they'll put it in an offshore account to avoid high taxes, yes, but they don't just want to have money, they want to have access to it.
• 36:48
  That is the leverage you have in order to get money taxed.
• 36:50
  The fact that they want to have access to it.
• 36:54
  That's also why high taxes don't work in in individual cities and states because people can move out from underneath it.
• 37:01
  So what Zaron Mamdami wants to do is he wants to, one, he wants to have a white tax.
• 37:07
  He wants to tax white households at a higher rate than other households on the assumption that white people make more money.
• 37:12
  And the other thing that he wants to do is he wants to tax rich people at prohibitively high rates because he figures they can afford it.
• 37:19
  Corporations too.
• 37:20
  And of course, what Moron Zamdami is seeing, Moran's Amdami is that what I call him is a Ron Mamdami.
• 37:27
  That was not a Freudian slip.
• 37:28
  I was not calling him a moron intentionally.
• 37:30
  He is one, but that was uh that was funny.
• 37:32
  Anyway, Zaron Mamdami, what he is doing is he is in cur he is encouraging people in New York City to leave.
• 37:40
  And and you know, they're starting to do so.
• 37:42
  They were doing so before he was in under COVID with the restrictions, high tax rates anyway.
• 37:47
  So, you know, New York City is emptying out and going to Florida, just as LA is, I don't know, it's emptying out because they still have a lot of illegal immigration going into California.
• 37:56
  Uh, but a lot of the wealth in California is going to Texas.
• 37:59
  And and that those are trends that because of what California and New York are continuing to do, those trends will continue.
• 38:05
  Now, New York is a magnet for migrants, and it's a magnet for migrants because they do so much to take such good care of them, but at great cost.
• 38:13
  It turns out that filling the wald dwarf a story or some other luxury hotel with migrants costs a lot of money.
• 38:20
  So what we're seeing on the national level, with wealth moving from high tax areas to low tax areas and from highly bureaucratic areas to less bureaucratic areas, and from places with less individual freedom to places with more individual freedom, corporations, rich people, we're seeing that migration and people that didn't like the lockdowns.
• 38:39
  We're seeing migrations of people from less free areas to more free areas in the United States.
• 38:45
  That's called voting with your feet.
• 38:47
  And uh, you know, what a lot of people want.
• 38:50
  You know, I don't a lot, I don't know how much they'll admit this, but if you ask Gavin Newsom if you were being honest for a day, and you said, you know, why do you want to be president of the United States?
• 38:58
  Why don't you just try to put all of these policies in California and call it a day?
• 39:02
  If he's honest, what he would say is, well, I can't do everything that I want to do as the governor of California, because if I put in the Medicare for All program, for example, in California, what's going to happen is everybody in California who is young and healthy is going to leave because they don't want to pay the excess taxes.
• 39:19
  And everybody in the country that is sick is going to or hurt is going to want to move to California because their health care there is free and they don't want to pay for it.
• 39:31
  And so we're going to see an influx of poor people who have health conditions, and we're going to see an outflux of people who are healthy that can foot the bill for the poor people who have health issues.
• 39:42
  So that's why they want to do it at the national level.
• 39:45
  They don't want to do it at the state level because people can move out from underneath it.
• 39:49
  So they feel that they have to do it at the federal level.
• 39:51
  Well, if you do it at the federal level, of course, you can theoretically move to some other part of the world.
• 39:56
  So then people want to do it at the global level.
• 40:00
  The goal here is to have a bureaucracy that taxes the public very, very heavily, so the politicians decide what happens with our wealth.
• 40:09
  And we don't have much say in what happens with our wealth because they don't really listen to us.
• 40:13
  And then they want to have that in such a way that you cannot move out from underneath it.
• 40:17
  If you look at the way people move, they tend to follow voting patterns as the country becomes more conservative.
• 40:23
  You'll see people moving to more conservative areas.
• 40:25
  As the country gets more liberal, you'll see people moving to more liberal areas.
• 40:29
  And the reason for that is people want to live under the kind of governance they want.
• 40:33
  And when you have 50 states, you have a fair amount of variance in what those different states are going to do.
• 40:38
  The beauty of our federalist system is that we have 50 different experiments, and based upon people's desire to move from one place to another, we force individual states to compete with each other for those people.
• 40:51
  And the irony is you've got way more people in all of Florida than you have in New York City, and yet New York City has a bigger federal budget than all of Florida.
• 41:00
  And uh, and and Florida's doing a much better job than the New York City is.
• 41:05
  They're able to do what they're able to do more of the things government is supposed to do, and they're able to do it well.
• 41:10
  But where's New York City?
• 41:11
  You can't even they don't even pick up the garbage anymore.
• 41:13
  And uh the reason for that is not just the amount of money that is taxed or the budgets of the cities, it is what they choose to spend that money on.
• 41:23
  We talked earlier about how we have a government, even if we only taxed 18% of the federal level of GDP, we're still spending way, way, way, way, way too much money on the wrong things and way, way, way too little money on the right things.
• 41:36
  It's not just a matter of government spending versus government taxation.
• 41:40
  It is also the specifics of what it is, excuse me.
• 41:44
  What it is that government actually spends that money on.
• 41:47
  So that's what we really have to look at.
• 41:50
  Barack Obama um, incidentally, he understood when he wanted to increase tax rates.
• 41:55
  He understood that that would lead to less and not more tax revenue.
• 41:58
  He acknowledged that openly.
• 42:00
  What he said when pushed on that, you know, these tax rate increases are going to decrease revenues.
• 42:04
  Do you really want to do that?
• 42:06
  Uh, his answer was that his rate increases were about fairness rather than revenues.
• 42:12
  Now, let's assume that it is fair to charge people who are already pay uh a high proportion of their income in taxes compared to other people and to increase their taxes even more.
• 42:23
  Let's assume for a moment that that is fair.
• 42:25
  Even if it was, and I'm gonna say it's not.
• 42:28
  People care about fairness, but arithmetic doesn't care about fairness.
• 42:32
  And if the spending continues to grow, well, the burden has to expand downward into lower earning workers.
• 42:39
  You can't decrease the amount of money rich people are paying in taxes by encouraging them to either not make the income by not working as much or to put the money in tax havens so they can defer taxes until rates come down.
• 42:50
  You can't both decrease the proportion of the of taxes that are paid by the rich and decrease the amount of the proportion of taxes that are paid by the poor.
• 42:59
  If you really want to see where the tax burden is, you have to look at the percentage of all taxes paid by the 1%, the top 10%, the top 20%, the bottom 50%, etc., you have to look at it in that way because just looking at rates can be incredibly misleading.
• 43:16
  Right now, the rich pay the highest proportion of the total tax burden in our country that they ever have.
• 43:22
  So when somebody says, let's make the rich pay their fair share, we're already doing that.
• 43:27
  We're already making them pay not just their fair share, but in excess of their fair share, and we're doing that with rates that encourage them to have access to the money by paying the taxes on it.
• 43:39
  And people don't get this, and I'm like, you know, it's not rocket science, it's not rocket science.
• 43:44
  The fact of the matter is that if we don't tax the poor and middle classes directly for the kind of government largesse that people seem to want, that some people seem to want our government to have, well, they're gonna pay for it anyway, because they're gonna pay for it through inflation.
• 43:59
  That's what happens when the government doesn't pay its bills.
• 44:03
  The currency becomes worth less because there's more of it in circulation and the economy isn't growing as quickly as the amount of money in circulation is.
• 44:11
  That's the cause of inflation, by the way.
• 44:14
  And uh inflation is the most regressive tax of all.
• 44:18
  I don't know why what a cough.
• 44:20
  Uh so that's that's what we have we we want to avoid the the inflation, and we want to have a we want to continue to have uh a progressive tax system.
• 44:29
  Now, in fairness, I think maybe it should be a little bit less progressive, but I don't have any problem with having a progressive tax system, in which those who can afford to pay more are asked to do a little bit more.
• 44:39
  You know, from a from a libertarian perspective or a small government perspective, of course I want people to be able to keep more of their money, and that includes people who make a fair amount of money.
• 44:48
  It's not just you and me that should be able to keep more of their money, though we should.
• 44:52
  It's also people that have a lot of it.
• 44:54
  If you earned it fairly, I don't have a problem with you being rich.
• 44:58
  The people I have a problem with being rich are the people that are doing it through corrupt means.
• 45:02
  If you're making a if you're making millions of dollars a year on Medicare fraud, that bothers me.
• 45:08
  If you're making millions of dollars a year selling power in order to get inside information that you can then trade money on, or if you're stealing from your campaign coffers, if you're doing things like that, that I have a problem with.
• 45:20
  If you're Joe Biden's son and you're making money by selling your father access to your father if you're his father and you're taking money or you're taking 10% of what your son gets by it through corrupt means, you know, these are the things we should be upset about.
• 45:34
  And most of the money doesn't go to the actual politicians, they're smarter than that.
• 45:38
  We elect corrupt people in many cases, but they're not most cases dumb.
• 45:42
  Some of them are, they're not all dumb.
• 45:43
  What they do is they enrich their families.
• 45:47
  AOC is not going to take a bunch of her campaign money and keep it.
• 45:51
  No, she's going to contract out people she knows, family members, maybe her husband, whatever, and pay them exorbitant amounts of money so that she can essentially she's laundering the money into her own pockets or into her family's pockets, so that she can then have some access to it.
• 46:06
  So her family is enriched.
• 46:08
  Enriching the family enriches, you know, you're you're enriching, they give you some of the money back and gives it.
• 46:13
  There are all kinds of ways you can get some of that money back.
• 46:16
  That's what they do.
• 46:17
  And they tell us that they're doing this while saying that they are taxing the rich.
• 46:22
  Well, politicians pretend that they are taking from the rich to support the poor middle classes, but the truth is that the government in Europe primarily, but this is going to happen to us too, whether through inflation and direct taxes, the truth is that the government supports the poor and the middle classes with their own money.
• 46:41
  And since the government does this using Milton Freeban's fourth form of spending, this kind of support costs a great deal more than with just letting the poor and the middle classes keep their money in the first place.
• 46:54
  The best way to support people is to allow them to earn money and not to take it away from them.
• 47:00
  Everybody should understand that.
• 47:03
  Everybody should remember that.
• 47:04
  It's it's it's obvious it's also very, very true.
• 47:08
  Now, if you want an example of this, just look at the original Medicare program.
• 47:12
  It's a great example of how these systems, these programs fail, they cost way more than they're supposed to, and uh just explode.
• 47:20
  Medicare, the the costs absolutely just flew through the estimates, and it only took a few years.
• 47:27
  In 1965, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that by the year 1990, Medicare would only cost about $9 billion a year.
• 47:35
  Of course, they were thinking about how people use doctors when they had to pay to go to the doctor themselves.
• 47:40
  And people tend to have restraint when they have to pay to see the doctor themselves because they're spending their own money on themselves.
• 47:47
  So they asked questions like, do I really need to see the doctor?
• 47:50
  Not well, it's free, so why not?
• 47:52
  And uh 9 billion, that is what the CBO estimated Medicare would cost if giving people Medicare did not change behavior.
• 48:00
  Well, guess what happened with 1990 came?
• 48:03
  It wasn't 9 billion dollars, it was 67 billion dollars.
• 48:08
  Some of that probably fraud, some of that probably corruption, but a lot of that was just people saying, you know what, I don't have to pay for it, so why don't I go see the doctor?
• 48:14
  You know what?
• 48:15
  I don't have to pay for it.
• 48:16
  How about I get a single room?
• 48:17
  You know what?
• 48:18
  I don't have to pay for it.
• 48:19
  How about I go here and see just you know, I want extra testing, I want all of these different things.
• 48:23
  I'm gonna sue the doctor so I get defensive medicine.
• 48:26
  It exploded because the system was designed to explode.
• 48:30
  You know, spending, it's not driven by estimates.
• 48:33
  It's driven by usage.
• 48:35
  And once the people receiving the benefit did not pay the costs, the usage for health care just exploded.
• 48:43
  Today, Medicare is both the most expensive item on the federal ledger.
• 48:47
  It was not supposed to be, and it's also the fastest growing.
• 48:51
  The only item on the budget that is any chance to catch Medicare is the interest on the national debt.
• 48:57
  And when that exceeds Medicare, we're gonna be in real trouble because now we're having to borrow just to pay off what we've already borrowed while still having to borrow more to pay things like Medicare that continue to explode in cost.
• 49:08
  It's not affordable.
• 49:10
  Now, some of the public is going to continue to vote against Medicare for all based on the economic reality of providing it.
• 49:17
  But most people don't know the economic reality, and they're happy to remain ignorant.
• 49:24
  For them slogans suffice.
• 49:25
  You know, tax the rich, health care is a human right.
• 49:29
  Those kinds of things make for great bumper stickers, even though if you think them through, they don't always make a lot of sense.
• 49:36
  That's how people like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Casio Cortez, and the Emiron Zamdami, I said it in purpose that time, get elected.
• 49:46
  Milton Friedman, you know, his point's correct.
• 49:49
  The third type of spending is incredibly politically attractive because it disconnects choice from consequence and tells people that we are going to give them things that other people will pay for.
• 50:00
  No, we we can all live off the efforts of everybody else.
• 50:03
  And uh it just it's it's it sounds good when it disconnects the choices from the consequences.
• 50:09
  We're never gonna solve our budget problem until we connect choice and consequence together again.
• 50:16
  And the thing that if you are on the left, if you do lean toward progressivism or socialism, the thing I want you to understand, the thing that I want you to tell people that lean that way, that I want them to understand is that though we are always promised the third type of spending, what we actually get is the fourth type of spending, where people are spending other people's money on other people, and they care neither about the cost nor the quality.
• 50:41
  They care about getting re-elected.
• 50:42
  They care about saying this is what the bill is for, and I don't really care what it does or how much more it costs than what I said it would.
• 50:51
  That is how we are governed.
• 50:53
  Unfortunately, on top of this, getting into the second kind of issue, there is a sizable percentage of Americans who hate everything America has done or stood for, and who want to see the radical transformation that Barack Obama promised in his 2008 inauguration.
• 51:09
  You might remember he ran as a moderate and ruled as uh as a radical.
• 51:14
  These people believe that freedom leads to oppression.
• 51:17
  In other words, free people will oppress one another, and that equality can only exist in any form if it is enforced by the state.
• 51:26
  For such people bankrupting the United States that we can radically transform it into something else is the actual goal.
• 51:34
  Such people, you they see the world through a lens not of freedom and opportunity, but of haves and have nots.
• 51:42
  Those with wealth, a home, a nice car, or something else that others don't have are looked at with best suspicion and at worst with open hostility.
• 51:53
  Of course, they don't give up their own stuff.
• 51:55
  Bertie says he earned his millions.
• 51:57
  He says, if you want to be rich like me, write a book.
• 52:00
  It's only everyone else who is greedy.
• 52:02
  Milton Friedman once said nobody's greedy, just ask them.
• 52:05
  It's always everybody else, and that's true.
• 52:08
  Nobody says they're greedy, or at least very few people.
• 52:11
  Everybody says it's somebody else.
• 52:12
  It's everybody else who's greedy, it's never me.
• 52:15
  Such people, they don't necessarily know much about economics.
• 52:18
  And I'm talking now about Zaron Mamdami and AOC and what have you.
• 52:22
  They don't know much about economics or how complicated systems actually work.
• 52:28
  Yet they have absolute confidence in their own moral superiority and in the morality of the world they envision, which is of course one in which the supposed oppressors are brought to their knees and the supposed oppressed are elevated to whatever standard utopia demands.
• 52:45
  Let's talk a little about utopia.
• 52:47
  Now it's hard to say that the followers of these things are evil, but I suspect some of them are.
• 52:52
  I've read some of Karl Marx's poetry, and it's all about praising Satan and burning down the world.
• 52:59
  He was evil.
• 53:00
  So I don't doubt that some of those who promise utopian visions know the utopia is impossible, and that the attempts to achieve it will cause tremendous harm.
• 53:10
  They're evil.
• 53:11
  They're evil.
• 53:12
  But the masses who buy into the visions, they don't necessarily understand that.
• 53:16
  They're not necessarily evil, and we should try to bring them back in and not hate them.
• 53:21
  We should be open to them changing their minds as they get more information.
• 53:25
  Now we all think from both logic and emotion, but most of us primarily use one or the other.
• 53:30
  I'm a very much more of a logical thinker, which is probably what drew me to IT and to lean manufacturing or systems thinking as a career.
• 53:38
  Uh and emotional thinkers, they can of course think logically, just as I can think emotionally, but they are easily swayed by perceived moral failings and can be resistant to logical claims that imperfect but good may be the best we can actually achieve.
• 53:52
  They are also easily tempted by dishonored players to place as AOC once put it, being morally correct ahead of being factually correct.
• 54:00
  Now it's impossible, of course, to put being morally correct ahead of being factually correct in the real world.
• 54:06
  As without facts, there's no way to determine what is moral.
• 54:09
  But if we ground ourselves only in assumptions and slogans and not in reality, we can view systems, people, countries, etc., based only on their faults, comparing them not to other systems, people, countries, or whatever, but to some version of perfection in which any system, person, country or whatever will fall short.
• 54:30
  It's incredibly dangerous to compare things to perfection instead of to other things that actually exist.
• 54:35
  But much of the public does exactly that.
• 54:38
  And in their desire to see perfection, all they can do is destroy.
• 54:43
  It's impossible to say that anyone or anything is truly good when comparing everything to perfection, as everything will always fall short, making anyone who is not listed as oppressed inherently evil, and by extension, accusing anyone labeled as oppressed from whatever they may do, no matter how horrific it is.
• 55:03
  That's how you support Iran, because they may be horrific, but we're gonna label them as oppressed, and then we excuse them.
• 55:08
  You see, in this view, if I give a homeless man a hundred dollars, I'm evil for not giving more.
• 55:14
  If on the other hand he punches me and takes my wallet, he's simply acting out against his oppression.
• 55:20
  Why would anyone with such a worldview care about fraud, waste, and abuse?
• 55:24
  Aren't the people stealing from us just taking what they would have if the system worked according to that worldview?
• 55:29
  They don't want Jamie assisted for no one arrested for knowingly taking welfare payment she doesn't qualify for.
• 55:34
  No, to them Jamie is a victim.
• 55:36
  She's she's not she's a hero.
• 55:39
  Jamie, you know, she'll be back in the welfare line next month.
• 55:42
  She's gonna take her little number, wait her turn, and step forward when she's called.
• 55:46
  She'll complain about the system, talk about how broken it is and still rely on it, because for her it works better than any other system she's tried.
• 55:54
  And for where she stands, that behavior is it makes perfect sense.
• 55:58
  She's not paying the cost, but she's receiving the benefit.
• 56:00
  The system rewards her for continuing exactly as she is and asks nothing of her beyond showing up and signing the forms.
• 56:07
  There is no reason for her to think about sustainability and no reason for her to care who ultimately pays.
• 56:13
  That's not a failure of character, or at least not entirely.
• 56:16
  It is the predictable result of a system built on separating cost from consequence.
• 56:21
  Until those things, costs and benefits are tied back together, nothing will change.
• 56:27
  The lines will get longer and spending will continue to grow.
• 56:30
  Eventually the bill will be so large that not only won't Jamie be able to pay, but nor will anyone else.
• 56:35
  Next comes default and ruin, and sadly, a sizable proportion of our population are cheering for that day to come.
• 56:43
  Just like that, ladies and gentlemen, we're out of time, but that's okay.
• 56:45
  I got through everything I wanted to cover.
• 56:47
  As always, thank you for tuning in.
• 56:49
  Please tell others who might be interested in cutting through the chaos to listen in either on Saturday and Sunday at 9 a.m.
• 56:54
  Eastern Standard Time or 10 p.m.
• 56:56
  on Sunday, or on podcast whenever they have time.
• 57:00
  And we'll see you next week at the same time and place where it will once again be time to get involved and to get loud on America out loud.