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Kibbe on Liberty
Ep 323 | You’re Mad at Thomas Massie Because He’s Right | Guest: Matt Kibbe
00:25:47
Matt Kibbe weighs in on Donald Trump’s threat to primary Rep. Thomas Massie over his refusal to vote for the latest continuing resolution.
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Matt Kibbe
Foreign welcome to Kibby at Liberty. Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty. My name is Matt Kibbe and I am having a serious case of PTSD because here in Washington, D.C. we're having yet again another budget knockdown, drag out fight where just a few fiscal conservatives are speaking up against Republicans that want to blow the budget again. Push the can down the road. Push the can down the road. Kick the can down the road. It's like Lucy in the football. It's like Groundhog Day. And I have been fighting this fight personally since I was a 25 year old economist at the Republican National Committee. I'll tell some of these war stories later, but this isn't about me. It's about Thomas Massie. You've probably seen that President Trump sent out an angry post on Truth Social saying that he will once again primary Thomas Massie for opposing the Republican budget deal, the continuing resolution. And I want to get into this a little bit because I side with Thomas Massie in large part because I, first of all, I know the numbers, but secondly, I empathize with the fact that he, as he said in his opposition to this current continuing resolution, unless I have a lobotomy between now and the vote, this is the same damn thing that we've been doing for the 12 years that I have been in Congress. And I actually go further back than him. I've been fighting these fights all the way back to the 1990 budget deal. And it's deja vu all over again. It never stops. And as I'm thinking today, the theme that we had during the Tea Party days is that we're going to have to beat the Republicans before we can beat the Democrats. And nowhere is that more true than when it comes to federal spending, particularly the Achilles heel of the Republican Party, which is national defense spending and the war on terror. Both of these categories, at least for Republicans, are black holes. Though you cannot fully fund these projects. And we see that flare up again in this continuing resolution that doesn't really cut anything, but it does increase national defense spending. There it is, that Republican Achilles heel. But what's going on? So President Trump has said that he will primary Massey, it's important to note. And Thomas has, has tweeted this out, by the way. I was hoping to have Thomas on the show, but as you might imagine, today he is quite busy fighting the entire Washington, D.C. establishment. So we're going to try to represent and give some historical context for the fight that we're having right now and how that fight might fundamentally undermine everything that Elon Musk and other Doge type people are exposing when it comes to usaid, every single wasteful program that are exposing all that stuff is funded in this budget. And you might not believe me, you might think that's impossible. Why would President Trump support a continuing resolution that continues to finance all of the things that his own administration is exposing? I don't know. Riddle me that. I don't know. I don't know the answer, but it's true. So where we are today is that Thomas has rightfully pointed out that this continuing resolution in March of 2025 is precisely the continuing resolution that he predicted would happen. It's in September of 2024. Now, remember, in September of 2024, nobody knows who's going to predict be the president. Nobody knows who's going to control the House. In fact, most experts predicted that the Republicans would lose the House. Nobody knew who would control the Senate. And what Speaker Johnson, Mike Johnson was proposing was a continuing resolution that basically enshrined all of these massive spending increases. It certainly didn't start in 2020, but that $2 trillion spike that happened in the fall of 2020 in response, I guess it was the spring of 2020 in response to lockdowns and Covid and the congressional panic around that stuff. You may remember that Thomas himself was the one guy that insisted that Republicans and Democrats, the Congress, come to Washington D.C. and actually vote in person. If you're going to spend $2 trillion in emergency spending on things that we can't afford with money that we don't have, could I at least get a recorded vote? Well, he was enemy number one. He was a monster in Washington, D.C. he was derided by Republicans and Democrats alike. And as I recall, that was the first time that then President Trump announced that he would primary Thomas Massie and kick him out for opposing this $2 trillion increase in federal spending. Well, one thing to appreciate, every single omnibus and continuing resolution that has happened since the spring of 2020 has only enshrined that radical increase in the spending baseline. And I'll read some numbers to you later and we can talk about what's actually happened over the last five, 10 years. That is a radical increase in the size and scope of government. Remember, the budget is what decides who and what and by how much the government is funded. You can have eliminations like Marco Rubio is claiming to have done with usaid, but ultimately, if you don't actually decrease the amount of money that Congress allocates to these programs, all you're doing is shifting deck chairs around on the Titanic. So In September of 2020, Thomas Massie announces that this is just a continuation, again and again and again, of the levels of spending that were supposedly temporary, that were supposedly emergency, that again, were financed with money we don't have. Which means the Federal Reserve's printing press goes. Goes brrr. Right? It's all fake. It's all stealing money out of your wallet and transferring that money to insiders who know how to play the game, who know how to manipulate the monetary system. All of that is still in here. So what was this election about? What exactly is going to happen differently? Well, what happened is Mike Johnson became speaker in the new Congress with President Trump's endorsement, and they are continuing all of the same things. So Congressman Chip Roy, who has also been on this show, I would view him very much as one of the best budget hawks alongside Thomas Massie in the House. He has said that he's going to hold his nose and vote for this six month continuing resolution, supposedly to give the administration and Doge time to get their ducks in a row, time to sort of line up the spending cuts that they want to see accomplished. I see a couple pretty important problems with that. One is they've passed a budget resolution which reflects the spending levels of this continuing resolution. And the budget resolution is, in fact, the sort of global roadmap for what the budget this year will look like. There's the budget resolution, there's supposedly appropriations bills, which they never get to. And then at the end of that process, in the fall, they're supposed to do something called budget reconciliation. The problem with a budget resolution that enshrines those higher levels of spending is I don't quite understand how they're going to come in in the middle of the process and deeply cut those inflated spending levels. Maybe they will. I have seen no history of the Republican Party in my lifetime where something like that might happen. But maybe something magical is going to happen. Maybe President Trump has the willpower to do that. Finally. The bigger problem perhaps is, is that every day that goes by, Trump's political mandate to do doge, to do the elimination of the Department of Education, to cut the deep state, to actually stop the war in Ukraine and pull that money back and make sure that those are the savings that are used to extend the tax cuts that President Trump cares so much about. Every day that goes by, there's one more squishy Republican that's less afraid of him. There's one more senator who is done pretending to be a fiscal conservative and thinking, you know what, I can probably ensure that the deep state and the military industrial complex and all the things that I've always cared about, that that stuff continues unabated. So I think it's a mistake for any fiscal conservative to buy this idea that we would give this new administration six more months to get their ducks in a row. They've literally been planning this for four years. They literally have had a blueprint to figure out how to defund the deep state. They've been talking about it, they've been advertising it, they've been bragging about it again and again and again. And suddenly, In March of 2025, already close to 100 days into the Trump administration, we're like, we need six more months to do it. Dangerous strategy, if not fundamentally disingenuous. And that, of course, is Thomas Massie's point, that if we do it again, like we've done again and again and again over the last 12 years, we are going to see a fundamental reckoning with our economy. Because, remember, there's only so many ways that you can spend money you don't have. Congress has been spending money it doesn't have my entire adult life with just two years. And maybe I'll get into those two years exceptions where they actually ran a small budget surplus. So we didn't have a deficit. We actually had a small surplus, didn't eliminate the national debt, didn't come close, but at least we were spending less money than we took in through receipts. But that was ancient history. That was 95, 96, 97, those years where there was some interesting dynamics where Congress was actually fighting the good fight on spending. So what's going to happen if they keep spending money they don't have? There's only so much you can raise taxes. If you look at the history of tax increases, when it translates to revenue as a percentage of the economy, there's not a lot of fluctuation. You could raise taxes, but raising taxes tanks the economy and actually lowers receipts. This is the supply side argument. The data actually supports that story again and again and again. So you can't do it through higher taxes. Smart people know how to avoid taxes. The middle class gets saddled with more and more taxes, but there's limits to what you can do. So you borrow it instead. Well, there's only so much money you can borrow, particularly when so much of the money we borrow comes from China. You can't get it from there. So what do you do? You turn on the printing presses. This is something that Ron Paul's been talking about for a generation, certainly Thomas Massie's been talking about. Rand Paul has been talking about it. The most insidious way to raise taxes on the middle class is to print the dollars that reduce the value of the money that they hold in their bank accounts. And that's what we've been doing. We've been monetizing the debt and funding all the wars, the Wall street bailouts, the trillions of dollars in funny money that we supposedly were using to bail out workers that we mandated stay at home. Well, of course, we now know that all that money was siphoned off and stolen. Everybody knew at the time that that would happen, but we had to pretend we were doing that. But let's look at the numbers. And these come from the federal government. These are federal government numbers. I like to look at spending as a percentage of the total economy, outlays as a percentage of gdp, as they say, because you can look at spending levels and you can look at deficits and debt, but if you really want to know the size of government, you need to look at total spending as a percentage of the economy. So for purposes of sort of demonstrating what has happened since 2020, let me just read some numbers. Spending is a percentage of gdp, and the context for this, and I'm actually going all the way back to 1988, when I first became a budget economist. What's interesting about this dynamic is that receipts, tax revenue, the money that you pay to the government for all the wonderful things that they do, typically gravitates around 16, 17, 18% of GDP quite often collapses in the economy, like the 2008 real estate crash and the Wall street bailout that followed. And things like that have a profound impact on revenue because the economy is shrinking. But think about it, like 16 to 18%, that's normal. Starting in 2020, you have receipts at 16%, which is on the low end, because we're in the middle of this, that the government has literally shut down the economy. So of course revenue is going to collapse. Outlays, which historically have run about 20% of GDP. Certainly there are spikes during times of war. There were spikes in other spending sprees that Congress had. It goes up to 30.8%. 30.8% of the economy is consumed by government in 2020. In 2021, it's 29.7%. In 2022, it normalizes at 24.8%. So it spikes to 30% of the economy and drops to 25%. Historically, in my lifetime 20% is the size that the federal government consumes of all that work you do. By the way, just joined by Nick Freitas. We're going to be talking to him in a minute and he's going to correct all of my budget mistakes. Hey, Nick. So I want you to comprehend this. In 2020, we locked in this thing at almost 31% of the total economy. It comes back down to 22.7% in 2023. Well, what does this Republican budget, the continuing resolution, what does that enshrine for the next four or five years? I'm seeing 24.6% in 2024. I'm seeing 24.8% in 2025. I'm seeing 24.3% in 2026 and 24.2% in 2027. So tell me about this Republican revolution that we're having where we're going to finally rein in the deep state. We're going to stop the never ending wars, we're going to stop domestic surveillance, we're going to cut all the waste, fraud and abuse, we're going to eliminate the Department of Education. But these numbers, unless something radically different changes have us not only increasing spending, but enshrining these radical increases in the size of government that happened in 2020. So this gives you some context for where Thomas Massie is coming from. He's telling us that if you actually want to put America first, if you actually want to do the things that the Trump administration says they want to do in terms of reigning in the deep state, we're going to need a fundamentally different way of looking at the budget. We can't kick the can down the road. We can't just keep doing these phony last minute omnibus bills and continuing resolutions. We actually need to return to normal order that has a budget resolution that sets the levels of spending where we want them to be, that actually sets the goal categories, that eliminates USAID and whatever it is, whatever other program they say they're going after. And then you need an appropriations process that actually does that. And then you need authorizing legislation that does that as well. You can't do this through the executive branch. You have to do it through Congress. And waiting six more months to do that means that we're in election season again. And there's nothing like an election season to make Republicans act like Democrats. It happens every two years. And it's going to happen starting this fall once again because the Democrats are going to tell us about how we're shutting everything down and destroying Everything and the children we're harming and all the things that they always say every time. So maybe President Trump, maybe you should reconsider this idea that the one guy that you want to go after, the one guy you want a primary, is the one guy that's actually trying to explain to you that Congress is going to betray the goals that you yourself have set out when it comes to Doge and all of these other important reforms that eliminate the most toxic aspects of the federal government. Maybe you should tell these squishy Republicans, you know, the Republicans we have to beat before we beat the Democrats. Maybe you should tell them that they need to fall in line, that they need to support Elon Musk and Doge and Tulsi Gabbard and eliminating the Department of Education. All these things that we've been talking about, you've been talking about, I've been celebrating you for talking about. It's time to actually do these things. But you're going to have to force the Republicans and particularly the neocons. This is the dirty secret. Marco Rubio has come out and said that after careful review, they've reviewed all the USAID programs, all that silly stuff that we've been talking about, all that toxic and dangerous stuff we've been talking about, and he has announced that he's eliminating 80% of those programs. Well, can he do that? I'm not sure that he can. I assume that the courts will have a say about whether or not the Secretary of State can unilaterally eliminate 80% of the programs in the USAID budget. But even if he can, he can only eliminate the programs. He can't eliminate the spending. And maybe that's the dirty secret of what's going on here. President Trump, while he goes after Thomas Massie, has said that, that he's endorsing Lindsey Graham, famous, infamous neocon, never saw a war, didn't like. Never saw a surveillance state he didn't like. If you're doing nothing wrong, Lindsey says you have nothing to hide. That guy has been endorsed by President Trump. Maybe it is that the neocons like continuing resolutions because you're still funding all the wars, you're still funding the deep state, you're still funding usaid. But when they get their hands on it, they're going to reapply those funds to the sort of nation building and foreign policy manipulation that they prefer, like the regime change that they just finally got done in Syria that is leading to the mass murder of Christians in that country. Who could have predicted that huh? Nobody saw that coming because that certainly didn't happen the last time that we did regime change in Libya or Iraq or Afghanistan, did it? It didn't happen then, did it? So I'll leave you this final thought, having fought these fights going all the way Back to the 1990 budget deal. I was an economist at the U.S. chamber of Commerce. I was in charge of federal budget policy for the U.S. chamber of Commerce. And I wrote in op ed opposing the 1990 budget deal where George H.W. bush said broke his read my lips pledge and decided to raise taxes and raise spending and blow up the budget. I wrote an op ed opposing that deal. Then Chief of Staff John Sununu called my boss at the Chamber, remind you, I'm a 26 year old economist at the US Chamber of Commerce, called up my boss, The President of U.S. chamber of Commerce and threatened to cut his privates off with a chainsaw. There's a Washington Post story about this. You can read it at your leisure. In hindsight it's quite funny. But just imagine how close I was to losing my job that day. I've been fighting these fights since then. And my realization going all the way through the Tea Party days, is that the Achilles heel of anyone that claims they want to balance the budget is foreign policy. It's never ending wars, it's nation building, it's the surveillance state, it's the war on terror, because those are black holes that can fundamentally undercut any effort to balance the budget. I think my theory today is that neocons like Lindsey Graham, like Mike Johnson, like probably a majority of both Republicans in the House and the Senate, they're playing the long game and they think they can outweigh Trump. They think they can outweigh America firsters, they think they can just kick the can down the road and not have to have that reckoning with how expensive the military industrial complex and nation building and never ending war is to America, how it's destroying America, that's the game that's being played. So President Trump, I'm sure you're watching this. My advice is rescind your endorsement of Lindsey Graham immediately and instead put all of your energy into re electing Thomas Massie and electing more Thomas Massie's because that's the only way you're going to get some of these things that you say you want to do. Done there. I'm done with my rant. Thank you. Thanks for watching. If you liked the conversation, make sure to like the video, subscribe and also ring the bell. For notifications. And if you want to know more about Free the people, go to freethepeople.org.