Latest / Words & Numbers / Episode 413: Power and Denial: Biden, Cognitive Decline, and the 25th Amendment

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Episode 413: Power and Denial: Biden, Cognitive Decline, and the 25th Amendment · Words & Numbers

0:00
Hi, I'm James and I'm Anthony and this.
0:02
Is words and numbers brought to you by the fine people in Khaki
0:09
Center for American Culture and Ideas.
0:12
Aunt God help me, what's new and exciting in your world this
0:15
week? You probably remember one of our
0:17
listeners, Marcus from South Africa.
0:20
Indeed I do. From time to time we do Zoom
0:23
calls with we just put out a notice that we're going to be on
0:26
Zoom and people join us. And we've had anywhere from half
0:30
a dozen to 20 or 30 people show up.
0:33
And one time this young man joins us and it comes out that
0:39
he's in South Africa, and I'm doing the math.
0:42
And of course, we were holding this at like 8:00 or 9:00 at
0:45
night Eastern Time. And we said, Oh my God.
0:48
Like 3-4 o'clock in the morning for Marcus.
0:50
Yeah, yeah. Marcus stayed up to the wee
0:52
hours of the morning to talk with us.
0:54
But Marcus has sent a comment following our episode on the
0:59
rich paying their fair share. And he says, just for context,
1:04
South Africa has one of the most progressive income taxes in the
1:08
world. If you do the math, it works out
1:10
that only 2.6% of the population pays over 76% of all income
1:17
taxes. Now, I'm going to pause here for
1:20
a minute. I'll come back to Marcus in a
1:21
second. But I just went and looked up
1:24
again the numbers for the United States and I can't find the
1:28
number for 2.6. But the top 3% in the US are
1:33
paying around 50%. So 2.6% in South Africa paying
1:39
76 percent, 3% in the US paying 50%.
1:42
So it's much more progressive than we have here.
1:45
But Marcus goes on to say, and this is, I think the interesting
1:48
part, the South African Revenue Service, our equivalent of your
1:52
IRS, warns that the government is becoming overly dependent
1:56
upon an ever shrinking pool of high income earners.
2:01
I've said this about California. California, amongst all the
2:06
states, probably has the most progressive income tax system.
2:09
And this has been happening in places like Connecticut and New
2:12
York. And now what are they finding?
2:14
They're finding that people are leaving.
2:16
Well, yes, people are leaving, but particularly in California's
2:19
case, I went back and looked up their tax revenues over the past
2:23
10 years and they fluctuate wildly, like up or down ±10 to
2:29
15% one year to the next. And that's following the
2:34
fortunes or the entrance and leavings of high income
2:38
individuals. So the more progressive you get,
2:40
the more your fortunes depend on a small group of people.
2:44
And imagine the problem in California, where many, I
2:47
hesitate to say most, but much of the high end in California is
2:51
in the tech industry, right? And their fortunes rise and fall
2:55
in lockstep. Yeah.
2:57
All of the rich people have a bad year.
2:59
Guess what happens to your tax base?
3:01
Yeah, and when you talk about people leaving the state for
3:04
better tax environs, who's most able to do that are the rich?
3:09
That's exactly right. So, and Connecticut, my home
3:12
state where I was born and raised, is facing this.
3:15
They've become incredibly expensive.
3:17
The cost of living in Connecticut is extraordinarily
3:20
high. And it's not exactly the rich,
3:22
although the rich are in fact leaving, but retirees.
3:26
They pack up and leave immediately.
3:28
The day they retire, they're gone.
3:30
And you can see why that would be, but imagine the impact
3:34
that's going to have on the state's economy.
3:37
You know, the weird thing is, as children we've all heard the
3:40
story of the goose that laid the golden egg.
3:42
And of course the moral the story is don't kill the goose.
3:46
And yet, as adults, that seems to go right over our heads.
3:49
Yeah, but, you know, the southern states haven't killed
3:52
the goose. They're welcoming the goose.
3:54
There's a new place for the goose to live, new food for the
3:56
goose to eat. That's right.
3:58
Everything seems to be working out just fine for them.
4:00
You hesitate to turn it into a partisan issue, but it is in no
4:03
small part a partisan issue. The states that are most heavily
4:06
Democratic are the states that are facing this sort of problem.
4:11
Well, you know, one party rule does this sort of thing.
4:13
We've said this countless times here.
4:16
Anyway, at the risk of breaking the 4th wall here and letting
4:20
the people in on how we do our business when recording words
4:24
and numbers, do you have any idea when this recording is
4:26
going to go live? This one.
4:29
Yeah, just a ballpark. I'm guessing ballpark Gen. 15.
4:32
I kind of figured that that was the case and guess what's going
4:36
to happen round about January. 15th the. 14th to be exact are.
4:41
You talking about the debt ceiling?
4:43
Indeed I am, because having just, and I mean just raise the
4:48
debt ceiling not more than a couple of weeks prior to this
4:50
recording, we are going to run out of gas mid January.
4:55
Yep, by the time the people are hearing this, it will already be
4:58
on the Evening News. Yep, and we've said this before,
5:02
I hate to sound like a broken record, except when it comes to
5:05
the debt ceiling, it's Congress that's a broken record.
5:08
They hit the debt ceiling on average every nine months and
5:13
have been doing so since the 1970s.
5:15
In my opinion, it's all smoke and mirrors.
5:18
It's an opportunity for them to drag whatever pet projects
5:22
issues they have out in front of the media by saying the sky is
5:25
falling and the media pays attention because Oh my God,
5:28
what's going to happen if the government goes bankrupt?
5:30
The government's going to do the same thing it's done every nine
5:33
months for the past 50 years, Raise the debt ceiling.
5:37
And I'm here to make a bold prediction, Ant given the new
5:41
administration coming in in mid January, and given that this
5:46
whole Doge business is taking root and we're going to root out
5:50
all kinds of government inefficiencies, my prediction is
5:55
that absolutely nothing will change.
5:57
I'm going to want to hear from all the partisan hacks who are
6:00
telling me that Trump will solve all of our problems.
6:03
I want to hear from them a year from now when we're, what,
6:06
probably at 42 trillion in debt, maybe 45?
6:09
Look, I have no doubt that Trump is going to find things to cut.
6:14
And he may find some really useful things to cut, granted.
6:18
But he's going to also find things to spend more money on.
6:22
And when all the dust settles, we're going to be back where we
6:24
started. And he will find that when he
6:27
finds what he considers to be useful things to cut the
6:30
opposition to him is going to be enormous, because the American
6:34
people love getting more stuff in return than they pay for.
6:39
As long as that's true, and as long as there are human beings
6:42
that will be true, you will have to tell people they can't have
6:45
what they want if you want to be responsible.
6:48
And no politician is willing to tell the American people that
6:52
what they want is unreasonable. Which is really unfortunate
6:55
because of any politician in modern times, he seems perfectly
6:59
suited to that. He can't run again.
7:02
He's got nothing to lose. And yet he won't do it.
7:06
I don't think he will either. What will happen?
7:08
And if indeed this episode airs around January 15, I encourage
7:11
people to look out the window. And if the government has shut
7:15
down, what you will see are high visibility things.
7:19
White House tours will be shut down.
7:22
They'll be a cordon around the Washington Monument.
7:25
You're not allowed near it, right?
7:27
The government will actually spend more money shutting down
7:31
things that don't cost it that much just so they can say, look
7:35
at all the ways that we're cutting our budget because the
7:37
spending has all been curtailed. Oh, and all of those government
7:41
employees, every time, every time that we've had a shutdown
7:47
and they haven't been paid, when the government turns back on,
7:50
they're paid retroactively. That's right, as opposed to the
7:54
real world where if you get laid off and then you get brought
7:57
back, you get a handshake and a welcome back, you don't get
8:00
repaid for the time you lost. Right.
8:03
Why 'cause you weren't working? 'Cause you weren't working.
8:05
That's right. And if you look at government
8:09
expenditures, what you find is that every time the government
8:11
shuts down, expenditures go down, but they escalate the day
8:15
it reopens such that they might as well have not shut it down at
8:18
all. Yeah, it's a beautiful picture.
8:20
I've drawn this thing several times.
8:22
You see overtime government spending rising, rising, rising
8:26
as it does. And then it flat lines when you
8:28
hit the debt ceiling. And then you can see when they
8:31
raise the debt ceiling because it rises vertically right up to
8:35
where it would have been had the shutdown.
8:38
Never. Occurred.
8:39
It's not a beautiful story and it's a beautiful scam.
8:42
Right. But this, of course, brings us
8:44
to the foolishness of the week. And, you know, we're just out of
8:47
the Christmas season and everybody's thinking about
8:50
Christmas things. And, and this is equally true of
8:53
our good friends in Texas. And you might recall that they
8:57
had all kinds of problems when they decided to make their
8:59
public schools more religious. Do you remember that?
9:02
I recall some to do about putting the 10 commandments in
9:06
the schools. And then the Church of Satan
9:09
leapt to the challenge and said, well, if you're going to have
9:13
that in the schools, you're going to have us too, right?
9:16
Causing a First Amendment problem because churches is
9:19
churches in the view of the 1st Amendment.
9:22
Well, now there's a new religious problem in the great
9:26
state of Texas because there's a book that's being removed.
9:29
And every time we talk about books being removed from
9:32
schools, everybody loses their minds.
9:35
But maybe this time it's even better than usual, because
9:39
there's a Texas law that bans sexually explicit content in the
9:44
school books. Of course, what book has more
9:48
sexually explicit content than the Holy Bible, which has now
9:52
been removed from all of the Texas schools?
9:57
Oh my God. It's the law of unintended
10:01
consequences that you and I talk so much about.
10:03
This is going to be a perfect chapter in our upcoming book on
10:07
unintended consequences. Yeah, but there's a potential
10:10
silver lining here because you start to talk about book
10:13
banning, and I'm thinking the back of my head.
10:16
If you want to give some serious juice to a book promotion, get
10:20
it banned somewhere. I would love if our book were
10:23
banned. Yeah, me too.
10:24
But I don't think you have to promote the Bible in Texas.
10:27
Yeah, I would imagine not. Yeah.
10:29
It might be a wonder if more people read the thing.
10:32
Well, you never know. In Texas, there may be a large
10:34
number of unchurched young teenage men who suddenly say,
10:38
wait a minute, what have I been missing here?
10:41
This must be the coolest book ever.
10:43
And you know, just if you're out there listening, young men in
10:46
Texas thumb your way to the Song of Solomon or the Song of Songs,
10:49
depending on which edition you have, and start there.
10:53
God is not as stuffy as you might think.
10:55
No, and not nearly AS and early churchmen were way more
10:59
interesting than modern churchmen, for one.
11:03
Stop shopping. For all things James and Aunt,
11:06
visit our website wordsandnumbers.org.
11:10
We give a special shout out to our Patreon sponsors who help us
11:14
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11:17
to patreon.com/words and Numbers.
11:21
James, this week, this is your doing.
11:23
You want to talk about Biden? I don't have much to offer here
11:27
other than I'm appalled. As time goes by, it seems that
11:32
for a longer and longer period of time, more and more people
11:35
were aware that Biden was not able to assume the duties of
11:40
president. That is such a nice way of
11:42
putting it, I might say That his brain had taken on the texture
11:46
of pudding. This man had no business being
11:49
near the halls of power and yet there he was sitting in the
11:52
biggest, baddest chair in the world.
11:55
I saw today somebody picking on Democrats, right, saying, you
11:59
people are so keen to take guns away from regular Americans.
12:03
Why didn't you take nuclear weapons away from President
12:06
Biden? You know.
12:07
Not a bad point actually. I don't think memes really catch
12:11
much on a day-to-day basis, but that one kind of caught a lot.
12:15
And the more you think about that, the more right it gets.
12:19
So what do we make of this? It's very clear.
12:22
And look, everybody in the United States, indeed the world
12:25
saw what was going on in the Biden Trump debate where Joe
12:29
Biden took the stage and just fumble his way through
12:32
everything. And that was when the dominoes
12:36
started to fall, yielding a Kamala Harris presidential
12:40
candidacy. But if we all saw it the night
12:43
of the debate, when did everybody else on the interior
12:47
notice? And why didn't they say
12:49
anything? The 25th Amendment exists for
12:52
exactly this sort of problem. OK, so hang on, because of
12:56
course I have no idea and we probably won't know for a long
12:59
time how long he was out of the game, but I do.
13:03
Recall, no, we know already people from inside are saying
13:08
it's been well over two years. OK, 'cause I was going to say, I
13:11
recall early into his presidency, maybe 18 months at
13:15
the outside, 2 years, I was seeing news articles in which
13:20
op-ed writers were complaining that Biden's staff was not
13:25
making him available to speak to the press.
13:27
And what did we find out in the past week?
13:29
We found out that all of the press conferences that Biden had
13:34
had to work off cards that he was given ahead of time with the
13:38
question and the answer already on the card.
13:41
OK, James, two questions. First, we have a Vice President
13:46
for precisely this purpose. What was Harris doing during all
13:49
this time? And second question, who was
13:52
running the show? Well, she was playing the role
13:55
of a stalwart advocate. I mean, think back to when she
13:58
was asked if there was anything that she would have done
14:01
differently than Biden. And this is one of the pivotal
14:03
moments in the campaign. She looked at the interviewer
14:06
and said, I can't think of a single thing.
14:09
Well, then why do you want to be president?
14:12
I mean, what would you do differently?
14:14
Are you just going to be a carbon copy of what we've had?
14:17
And she at once wanted to say yes to that question in all of
14:20
the forms that it took and at the same time say, no, I'm not
14:25
Joe Biden, which she also said, but then could offer nothing of
14:29
any substantive difference that she would do upon taking the
14:32
office. She was in a bad spot.
14:34
I don't want to take this out on her too terribly much.
14:38
That said, she was probably the worst candidate I've ever seen.
14:41
She was dreadful. I don't know.
14:42
I would take it out on her. As vice president, her
14:46
constitutional duty is to the people.
14:48
It's not to Joe Biden. I understand, but she's between
14:52
a rock and a hard place on that one.
14:54
And I think you said earlier that we're going to have to wait
14:57
years and years just to find out what happened.
15:00
I think in one respect, that's absolutely true.
15:02
And I think we're going to find out 2040 years down the road
15:06
that a group headed by Kamala Harris told Joe Biden that they
15:10
were going to execute the 25th Amendment if he didn't step
15:13
down. I think we're going to find out
15:16
that that happened because it's pretty clear Joe Biden didn't
15:19
want to step down. He had to be given a situation
15:22
in which there was literally no choice.
15:23
OK. But that happened in year 4 of
15:26
his presidency. That's what's going on at 18
15:28
months to two years in. And we should say that happened
15:32
in year 4, if it in fact happened.
15:34
Right. Yeah, yeah.
15:35
Pure speculation on my part, but it's hard for me to imagine how
15:39
he backs out without the sort of Damocles over his head.
15:43
He had to have no choice whatsoever.
15:45
But what about those first three years?
15:47
Or maybe years 2-3 and four? And there were signs all over
15:51
the place. How often was Biden able to meet
15:54
with the press, even informally? And the answer was almost never.
15:59
What did we see him doing stumbling around in public?
16:02
Quite a lot, actually. Anybody who's lived with a
16:05
family member suffering from dementia.
16:08
I've said this before. We all knew exactly what we were
16:10
looking at there. We'd seen it in our own homes.
16:13
I had a parent die of with dementia, I guess would be the
16:17
best way of putting it. These signs are unmistakable.
16:20
You don't miss them. And when it's the president of
16:23
the United States, you have to keep him hidden or everybody
16:26
will see, right? Apparently they were canceling
16:29
all kinds of public events if, quote, Joe was having a bad day,
16:33
UN quote. And anybody who's lived with a
16:35
person with dementia knows this. There are very, very good days
16:38
and very, very bad days. And you don't know which one
16:41
you're going to get until you get them.
16:43
And things were just cancelled all around the president because
16:46
of his mental condition. So there's the question, right?
16:51
How many people had to be in bed with each other to keep this
16:54
happening? And I think the answer is a
16:56
metric ton. Well, I read an article recently
17:00
indicating that he wasn't even meeting regularly with his
17:03
cabinet, so it may be a small number of people who were.
17:06
Around him, I think that's got to be right, but the obvious
17:11
question is where was the press? Because I understand how people
17:15
inside the administration would have every interest in covering
17:19
for him. Right.
17:20
But where on earth was the press?
17:22
We've got some history that we can learn from here.
17:26
I think maybe starting with Woodrow Wilson, you want to keep
17:29
it in roughly the modern era. But in 1919, Wilson had a stroke
17:34
that completely incapacitated him, and he remained president
17:37
until 1921. His wife became the de facto
17:41
president of the United States. Regardless of what anybody says,
17:44
she was the first female president of the United States.
17:47
OK, The press covered for them. The press covered for FDR
17:51
endlessly. The press covered for John F
17:54
Kennedy. He had all kinds of back
17:56
problems, something I am deeply sympathetic with, and took a lot
18:01
of painkilling medication, something I am also deeply
18:04
familiar with. Do you want a person like that
18:07
in control of the nuclear football?
18:10
I don't know. Maybe most of the time.
18:12
Nixon, for his part, was a complete and total blackout
18:16
drunk. Do you want him in control of
18:18
the nuclear football? Not in the evenings, right.
18:22
And yet we never heard about these things until way later in
18:26
the game. Reagan's last two years, you
18:29
didn't see much of them in public.
18:31
Everybody, including him, he knew what was happening, right?
18:35
So we seem to have a problem. It's the press's duty to report
18:39
on these things, and yet they don't exactly do that.
18:43
And what do we see? We see a press that has much the
18:46
same interest in keeping an administration afloat as people
18:50
inside the administration. Because what do they want?
18:53
Access. What do they have access?
18:56
Will they continue to have access if a new administration
18:59
sweeps in? Maybe not.
19:01
Well, if you're a self interested human being, and all
19:05
human beings are self interested human beings, what are you going
19:09
to do? Are you going to do your duty?
19:11
Are you going to do what's best for you and figure out a way to
19:14
rationalize it as your duty? Everybody's deeply self
19:17
interested. Here.
19:18
Yeah. And I can see that with the
19:20
press. What I'm having trouble getting
19:22
my head around is Kamala Harris. She had to have known what was
19:27
going on. She could have brought the
19:30
Cabinet together and had them invoke the 25th and then she
19:34
would have been president and that would have paved the way
19:37
for her subsequent election. It seems to me her incentives
19:42
were to do the opposite of what she did do.
19:44
Well, maybe, but Are you sure that a majority of the cabinet
19:49
would have gone along with her? I don't know.
19:51
I mean, maybe 18 months in, No, But three years in, it was
19:55
obvious to anybody who saw him in that whatever that meeting
19:59
was with a Japanese Prime Minister where he couldn't
20:02
manage to find his way off the stage.
20:04
Well, sure, but you're in the Cabinet.
20:08
Kamala Harris has to somehow convene you without Joe Biden
20:11
finding out, which means everybody's got to stay quiet.
20:15
What are the odds? The odds are 0.
20:18
The odds are absolutely 0. Somebody's staff will tell a
20:22
member of his staff that this is happening, so he's going to know
20:25
right off the bat. Or if that's irrelevant given
20:28
his mental condition, his staff will know.
20:31
And then what are they going to do as they look at the Cabinet?
20:35
What are they going to say? What would you say to them?
20:37
I mean, look, this takes on elements of the prisoner's
20:40
dilemma almost immediately, right?
20:42
All you have to do is start telling people what's going to
20:44
happen to them if they try and fail.
20:47
If you try and fail, you'll all be fired.
20:51
Are you going to move forward then if you're a member of the
20:53
cabinet? Or are you going to rationalize
20:56
what you're looking at and say, well, we can run the show with
21:00
Joe incapacitated. Hell, the more incapacitated it
21:03
gets, the easier it might be, because now you don't have to
21:06
deal with a meddling president. OK, so let's pause here for a
21:10
second. I was mentioning the 25th
21:12
Amendment to somebody the other day and was surprised at the
21:15
person's reaction. They had no idea that the
21:17
cabinet could, I guess, remove the president's the wrong
21:21
language to use here. But tell us a bit about 25th
21:23
Amendment. There are many, many things in
21:26
the 25th Amendment that we don't have to care about.
21:28
The one part we have to care about is where it addresses
21:31
presidential disability, right? So imagine that the president
21:35
has a stroke, or let's make it more obviously public.
21:38
Let's imagine that the president is shot in the head and will
21:43
never get better and yet is still president.
21:47
Well, he's disabled. The Constitution is silent on
21:51
this. So they added the 25th
21:53
Amendment, which says that the vice president and a majority of
21:56
the cabinet can declare the president disabled.
22:00
And when they do, the vice president serves as acting
22:03
president until the president can resume his duties.
22:06
And if president cannot resume his duties, well, so be it.
22:10
And there's more that comes after.
22:12
The only part we have to care about is that part, right, where
22:16
the vice president and a majority of the cabinet can say,
22:19
all right, look, this isn't working and you can't be
22:21
president right now. Now, that would be, I think, a
22:24
tremendously sad day for the country, regardless of who it
22:28
happened to. And yet, with people living
22:31
longer and new and exciting diseases hitting us that never
22:36
hit us before, given that we all died of something else long
22:39
before these things happened, well, we're going to have to
22:41
have contingency plans for these things.
22:43
So what on earth do you do if a president is incapacitated but
22:47
not dead? You know, you know, it's a brave
22:49
new world for this sort of thing.
22:51
And we keep electing old, old men to this office.
22:54
This is going to keep on being a problem.
22:56
I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it happened to
22:59
become a problem in the next 4 years with Trump, who takes
23:02
office? The oldest incoming president
23:04
we've ever had. He is an 81 year old man taking
23:08
office. Boy, that's old, right?
23:10
I mean, that is well past retirement age.
23:14
So what's going to happen? Hell, I don't know, but I think
23:18
if you were laying odds you'd have to take this into account.
23:21
Yeah, So we've got the 25th Amendment where the vice
23:24
president with the majority of the cabinet can declare the
23:27
president unfit. The next fail safe, I assume,
23:30
would be impeachment. The Congress can say he's now,
23:33
of course, there's no crimes going on here.
23:36
But my understanding is that the language around impeachment is.
23:40
So I'll defined it. Doesn't matter.
23:43
No, it doesn't matter. Impeachment is literally
23:45
whatever the House of Representatives says it is.
23:48
It says high crimes and misdemeanors, but they get to
23:50
define that any way they want and then the Senate votes to
23:54
convict or not. We've had presidents impeached 1
23:58
twice and the Senate has never removed those people from
24:01
office, so it's a pretty high bar.
24:04
Incidentally, the 25th Amendment sets an even higher bar for
24:08
Congress to remove a president under the auspices of the 25th
24:12
Amendment. So impeachment is going to be
24:14
the easier of the ways to go. Would we ever use it for those
24:18
reasons? I don't know.
24:19
I think you'd have to take into account the partisan composition
24:23
of the House and of the Senate and of the presidency.
24:26
You know what's going to happen. There is one party rubbing their
24:30
hands with Glee to stick it to another party because their guy
24:33
has become demented in office. Maybe, right.
24:37
And this I think, brings us back to the role the press played in
24:40
this last one. Press is overwhelmingly, I mean
24:43
overwhelmingly Democratic. There are very few Republicans
24:48
in the press and I think almost all of them work for Fox News in
24:52
one capacity or another. The vast majority of all of the
24:57
rest of every news outlet, maybe with the one I mean, The
25:01
Washington Times and The Wall, the Wall Street Journal come to
25:04
mind as right leaning major news sources, but everything else
25:08
leans heavily to the left. So you're going to get a fair
25:12
amount of gatekeeping from the press.
25:16
Right. They are going to protect the
25:17
left and skewer the right every chance they get.
25:21
Not because they're bad people, but because they see the world
25:24
that way. They honestly think they're
25:26
doing a nice, impartial job wherein they very clearly are
25:31
not. People in the middle all know
25:33
this, right? We all know that if you want
25:35
something approaching the truth, you best stay away from Fox and
25:39
MSNBC. We've said this before a million
25:41
times. Does that leave CNN as the best
25:43
option? God, I hope not, because that
25:46
skews so hopelessly left I don't even know what to say about it.
25:49
And how do you know this? Watch the YouTube clips from
25:52
when Trump won the White House. Either time the clip shows that
25:56
people have put together on Fox News, the various Fox News hosts
26:02
laughing and dancing in joy about what has happened, and
26:06
people on the left on MSNBC and CNN literally weeping on air.
26:11
Now, is that what an impartial press would do?
26:16
Well, no, it's not. And people lose their minds
26:19
about this and say the press should be impartial, to which I
26:22
respond, well, maybe yes. But the press was never
26:26
impartial in the United States until the early 20th century,
26:30
right? The press was a highly partisan.
26:32
As a matter of fact, most newspapers were overt arms of
26:35
political parties. You know, why do you think the
26:38
press should be nonpartisan? It may be beyond the ability of
26:42
human beings to be nonpartisan. In which case, the best you can
26:45
do is try and get an equal number left and right in the
26:49
seats in the White House press corps.
26:51
Yeah, Or just encourage everybody to be as hyper
26:54
partisan as they want to be and let the American people sort it
26:57
out from there. I think people are smart enough
27:00
to do that. I think there's a big chunk of
27:02
people who don't. That doesn't mean they're not
27:04
smart enough. It means they don't care enough.
27:06
And, you know, I think most people probably shouldn't even
27:10
be voting, so woeful is their understanding of the world in
27:14
which we live. But we all have the right to
27:16
vote, and that's that, right? So you're going to vote.
27:19
Let it be a big nasty scrum. So I was going to start off by
27:23
saying, well, maybe the lesson we take from all this is that a
27:28
president isn't all that important, that we've gone
27:31
through at least two years with basically not having one, except
27:37
that there was nothing. How should I say?
27:39
I don't want to say important, but you know what I mean?
27:42
There were no wars going on that we were involved in.
27:45
We weren't attacked during this period.
27:47
What if that had happened? What happens then?
27:51
What if that had happened with any of the recent presidents
27:54
we've had in the office? Do you feel that much better?
27:58
Think where we started today. We started by talking about the
28:01
debt limit. Well, these things just seem to
28:04
happen regardless of who sits in the chair.
28:07
And I opine then that no matter who has the chair next, we're
28:10
going to be right back here next year at exactly this time, and
28:13
it's going to be far worse than it is right now.
28:15
There seems to be no difference. Well, when people talk about the
28:19
deep state, they do it with great derision, and I do as
28:23
well. But unlike them, I don't want
28:26
government to keep right on doing what it always does.
28:30
Will government continue to do exactly what it does regardless
28:33
of who sits at the top? Yes, it absolutely will.
28:36
How do I know? Well, we've had these times.
28:38
We can look at where that's exactly what's happened.
28:40
And every time a president walks into the office saying, I'm
28:43
going to change the mood in Washington DC, everything will
28:47
be different after my presidency.
28:49
Four years later, what's that person say?
28:51
I need four more years to make that happen.
28:54
And then at the end, his successor says now I need 4
28:57
years to make that happen. Why?
28:59
Because it never happens. If you're not smart enough to
29:02
realize that, I don't know what to tell you.
29:04
Every four years two groups of people come out of the woodwork
29:09
and say here's how we fix all of our problems.
29:11
And then they tell us how they're going to fix Social
29:13
Security and Medicare and the debt, etcetera, etcetera.
29:17
Four more years later after that, they all come out and they
29:20
say the exact same because they didn't fix the.
29:23
Problem. Oh yeah, well, more than that I
29:25
would say they have an incentive not to fix it because it's so
29:28
long as it isn't fixed, they can use it in the next election
29:30
cycle. And if it is fixed then they
29:33
have to be blameworth when somebody says sure you fix
29:36
Social Security but my grandma has $40 less a month to live.
29:40
Right, right. Etcetera, etcetera, which is
29:43
precisely what would have to happen for anybody to fix Social
29:46
Security. And here's the news flash.
29:49
If you don't fix Social Security and Medicare, you will not fix
29:53
the budget. Yep.
29:55
Those are just massive expenses compared to everything else, so
29:59
here we are. Let's hit that a little harder.
30:02
The Doge guys, Musk and Vivek are not going to get anywhere.
30:06
First off, they don't have the authority to be cutting things.
30:09
Now they've got the bully pulpit.
30:11
They could put a spotlight on things, but when you're done,
30:14
what is it? 2/3 of the budget is mandatory
30:16
spending. So at best, if they could do
30:19
everything they wanted to do, they still couldn't cut enough
30:22
to balance the budget. No, still couldn't balance the
30:25
budget. If they could do everything they
30:27
want to do do and cut defense spending 100%, they probably
30:32
still couldn't do what they wanted to do.
30:34
That is an insoluble problem given the inputs that we now
30:38
have. The only way to solve this
30:40
problem before it torpedoes us as a country is to change the
30:44
inputs. It's the only way.
30:46
And that will never happen, and people can draw whatever
30:49
conclusion they want from what I just said.
30:51
This is a good point to plug the plan that you and I float every
30:57
couple of years when we hit the budget deficit ceiling.
31:00
There is a way to wean us off of Social Security without current
31:05
retirees falling through the cracks, without raising the
31:08
payroll tax, without cutting benefits, and that leaves the
31:12
government actually at a surplus at the end of the whole process.
31:16
The problem is, it requires Congress sticking to a plan for
31:21
the next 100 years. Yeah, that's right.
31:23
The process is 100 years long, which is never going to happen.
31:27
Everybody wants this to be fixed right now, and the problem has
31:30
become so profound that there is no way to fix it right now.
31:33
It is literally impossible. Oh no, It took a century to get
31:37
here. It's going to take another
31:38
century to fix it. And you know, we've been talking
31:41
about this plan for 6-8 years now, which means necessarily
31:45
that the numbers we attached to it six or eight years ago are no
31:49
longer the numbers we would need.
31:51
Yeah, the longer we wait, the more difficult the problem
31:53
becomes. And the more difficult it
31:55
becomes of, the less likely we ever are to address it.
31:59
And I'm already willing to say the odds of our addressing this
32:03
problem are 0%. Yeah, Politically, yes, there's
32:07
a way to do it economically, but politically, yes, I think the
32:09
odds are virtually 0. Now, where does that leave us?
32:12
I could tell you, I'll predict it right now.
32:14
I've made this prediction several times over the past 15
32:18
years that we've been working together.
32:20
But I've now reached the point that enough has happened that I
32:24
can say with near certainty this is where we're going.
32:28
Where we're going is monetization.
32:30
We're going to just print the money that we need and it's
32:32
going to mean that we have our background.
32:35
Inflation that used to be 1 1/2 to 2% is going to be 5 to 7%
32:41
starting a decade from now. That's going to be the new
32:43
normal. I'm going to go steps further
32:45
than you just did because, yes, that's going to happen first.
32:49
And then inflation will set in, and we will have to monetize
32:53
more and more and more, because that's the pernicious effect of
32:57
inflation, right? Everything just gets out of
32:59
hand, and before you know it, we're going to have an economy
33:02
that is indistinguishable from Venezuela's.
33:05
And when the dollar collapses and has no value, the United
33:09
States will cease to exist as a country.
33:11
Yes, see, and I'm not going to go there because I think this is
33:15
where the politics comes to play.
33:17
Americans have exhibited, the voters have exhibited that they
33:21
have a tolerance for the debt. Yeah, they squeal about it, but
33:25
they don't vote people out of office because of it.
33:27
But this past business with deflation in 2022-2023, the
33:33
voters indicated that they have no tolerance for inflation like
33:36
that. And I think that's when the
33:38
political pressure comes to bear.
33:40
Look, that's right, but what does the political pressure
33:43
against inflation yield? And it yields pain in every way
33:48
imaginable. And they don't like that either.
33:51
So they're going to be given 2 choices that are equally
33:53
unpalatable. And they will just go on blaming
33:56
large groups of people, will blame the opposite party until
34:00
the whole thing comes crashing down I think.
34:02
This is a little bit different in that the inflation hits
34:04
everybody and all of a sudden everybody's feeling this pain.
34:08
Now, if you're a retiree, maybe, OK, yes, I'm feeling this pain,
34:12
but I don't want you to cut my benefits.
34:13
But everybody else is saying, look, this is a tremendous
34:15
amount of pain. Yeah, we're going to have to cut
34:17
benefits, right? And then what?
34:20
Happened. Well, we cut benefits because
34:21
the people paying in are going to be outweighing the people who
34:23
are receiving. By then, Social Security will
34:26
come crashing down. It will cease to exist as a
34:29
program, if it exists at all. It will be meaningless.
34:32
Well, that solves your problem right there.
34:34
If that shuts down, that balances the budget.
34:37
That solves a problem. It doesn't solve the problem
34:41
right? The problem is profligate
34:42
spending and that is going to come home to roost in 100
34:46
different. Ways, yeah.
34:47
And let me say something here. I ran these numbers maybe a
34:50
decade ago and I've run them a couple times and they're telling
34:53
every time when we talk about the deficit, someone always
34:56
comes back to me and says, well, look, we've just got to bite the
34:59
bullet and raise taxes. And if you look historically,
35:02
every time the government has received more tax revenue in the
35:07
following year, it spends 25% more than that.
35:11
So for every additional dollar it gets, a year later it spends
35:15
an additional buck 25. The only way to get around this
35:18
is a constitutional amendment that freezes spending to
35:21
increases to GDP. And that causes all manner of
35:25
problems, right? What if war breaks out?
35:27
What if there are tremendous natural disasters?
35:29
So, OK, now you say it has to be a constitutional amendment with
35:33
a footnote. But then trust me, everything
35:35
will be a war or a disaster. There's no way to keep
35:38
politicians from spending more than they take.
35:40
They'll be. Declaring a national emergency
35:42
to keep the Mall open in Washington.
35:44
That's right. The only way to do it is to vote
35:47
them out of office, and that's never going to happen because
35:50
that violates the self-interest of the voters.
35:52
Well, you know, but I repeated to somebody recently what you
35:56
had said, kind of tongue in cheek.
35:58
But when I repeated it, I thought, Oh my God, this is the
36:01
answer. It's to say any member of
36:04
Congress who votes for an unbalanced budget cannot run for
36:09
re election. No should go to prison.
36:13
That's even better. You want to stop them from doing
36:15
it, stop them from doing it. You can write that in right now.
36:19
How important are the wars going to be?
36:21
How important is that flood going to be?
36:24
You're going to take a sober analysis of things because if
36:27
the war is that important, go ahead and vote for it.
36:30
Be to the prison on Monday. Who's your successor?
36:33
Let's get this done. And I think that actually would
36:36
answer the problem. But nothing short of that ever
36:39
would. Because you tell them that they
36:40
can't run again. OK, I'll retire with my pension,
36:43
and I'll just be happy. What could this that do?
36:46
But, you know, as long as the American people see it in their
36:49
heart to keep bringing morons like Michelle Taylor Green and
36:54
Lorena Bobert, as long as these fools are still in Congress, you
37:00
can expect foolish legislation. And that's all the time we've
37:04
got this week on words and numbers.
37:06
Until next time, send us. E-mail
37:08
wordsandnumberspodcast@gmail.com. Try to be nice to one person who
37:12
doesn't deserve it till next week.
37:15
Can't take it easy. See you next week, James.