Robbie the Fire Bernstein (3:56)

Okay.

Dave Smith (3:58)

So I literally just made it back home. I apologize. We're doing this a little bit later than usual. I literally just rushed in. But so there's, you know, a few things going on that I thought would be interesting for us to get into, and maybe even this. This might be the one to start with. Oh, by the way, shout out. Shout out to the fan who brought me this pure misinformation artist shirt, which is what Sam Harris called me on his show. I thought that was pretty funny. So anyway, yeah, I enjoyed it. I'm wearing it. Okay. So one of the things that I've thought was kind of interesting over the last few weeks, I guess this has been, you know, a topic that's. That's come up, and I think we did address briefly, like, some of this on the show, but it has to do with the. The new spending bell, which I guess has made it through the house. Is that. Is that where it's at right now, Rob? Is it through the house? Do you know?

Robbie the Fire Bernstein (4:58)

I believe.

Dave Smith (4:59)

I believe that's Accurate. Yes. Now, of course, Tom, Thomas Massie voted against, made it out of the House regardless. But of course, Donald Trump took the opportunity to. To attack Thomas Massie, who is objectively more America first than Donald Trump. On Donald Trump's most America first day, he has not been as America first as Thomas Massie on his least America first day. But it is. There is something, you know, that's kind of interesting about this. Like, okay, there's a few things. Number one, I guess if you were to kind of zoom out, you would say, there's nothing interesting about this. This is just par for the course. This is how government always operates. What are you telling me? The whoever's in the White House is going to sign a gigantic spending bill. The establishment hacks and Congress will all gladly put all of their pork into it, and Thomas Massie will vote against it and it will go through. So, okay, in terms on that level, it just seems very normal. But of course, what's different about this is that, number one, Donald Trump, he claimed, and many people around, or many of his supporters claimed that he was kind of duped the first time. It would be different this time. Obviously, he had the whole Doge experiment behind him. But with all of that happening, essentially we just got another giant spending bill crammed through. And I think, you know, is it the CBO numbers on this? They're never right about anything. It's always worse than what the Congressional Budget Office says it's going to be. But even they are claiming it's going to raise the debt by $4 trillion over the next 10 years. It's just more of the same. None of the cuts that, that people were hoping might come through. And even the stuff they're talking about, about these, these tinkering around the edges, like maybe they're going to try to clean up a little bit of the, the fraud in Medicaid or something like that. Now, of course, it's just, it's, it's. I'll say it's. It's interesting because when it comes to government spending, it's. It's almost the only topic in politics today that's still so boring. Like, everything else is like new and crazy and wild. But when it comes to government spending, it's the most boring arguments for it. It's the most boring criticisms against it. Of course, MSNBC gets that.

Robbie the Fire Bernstein (7:34)

There go.

Dave Smith (7:35)

They're slashing government, they're kicking everybody off of welfare or something like this. But what we're really looking at is just, it's another meet the new boss. Same as the old boss type deal here where Donald Trump is going to demonize the only principled member of the House or one of the very few. The. The Doge effort seems to have completely failed. And here we go off the fiscal cliff. I don't know any. Any thoughts on this, Rob? Well.

Robbie the Fire Bernstein (8:07)

You basically said it. They're raising it. I've heard between three and a half and five trillion dollars without any statements whatsoever of reenacting Doge. What is the movement with Doge now that Elon Musk is no longer at the, you know, at the helms of it? What is the plan for reducing government spending? And particularly as people have gotten upset about raising prices, American manufacturing and all this is a result of government spending and interest rates are gonna start going up on our debt. I don't know that our Fed can endlessly buy our Treasuries and pretend like there's endless demand for it. So, listen, the financial stuff is boring until it isn't. And as to how much wiggle room the Fed has to engage in new quantitative easing or other mechanisms to keep propping up prices, if the thing finally goes bust, you know, then it gets real exciting and people get real angry. But there was a real opportunity with Doge and the American people to bring down the government debt. And it just seems like we're getting to the point where someone's going to have to deal with it. I don't understand how we can just push up interest rates, have these entitlement programs. You look at it on paper and you're like, this is going to pop at some point. This can't just go forever. And I don't know. Donald Trump has had as good of an opportunity as anyone to at least, at least address the fraud or at least make some sort of gestures to pretend like you want to get this under control.

Dave Smith (9:29)

Well, look, when you say it's a missed opportunity, it is. And as you. You got there at the end, and you're absolutely right, it's. This is on Donald Trump. And don't get me wrong, there's a lot of people who you can blame and a lot of people who you can point fingers at. Like, a lot, you know, there's. This is Washington, D.C. afterward, and we're talking about, when you're talking about government spending, you're talking about what is DC's budget. And so obviously, there's a lot of forces in D.C. who are like, we'd like our budget to be as high as possible. Like, you know, kind of. Kind of to be expected. But it kind of just can't be overstated how much this is on Donald Trump and that the actual issue is that Donald, first of all, Donald Trump doesn't know anything about anything. And he doesn't actually have deep convictions about any of this stuff. He never really had any deep convictions about getting to the bottom of government corruption or draining the swamp, for that matter, which, again, I've made this point a lot over the years, but it is a really important one. So I'll make it once more here. Government spending is the swamp. That's the swamp. You want to drain the swamp, then you have to cut government spending. You want to continue the swamp, you continue government spending, you want to increase the swamp, increase government spending. That's what it is. Like, these are very basic things, which, by the way, Elon Musk does understand because he has several times tweeted videos of Milton Friedman making this exact point. So, like, he does have some understanding of sound economics. But it's like this, right? Government spending is the tax. It doesn't matter what your tax rate is. The real measure of taxation is government spending. Because in order for government to spend, the government has three mechanisms by which they can spend money. Number one, they can tax you and they can spend the money that they've taxed from you. Number two, they can borrow the money. And essentially borrowing the money is just promising to tax you in the future. So they're borrowing against. They are tax slaves, which are us. And if they borrow, it's. They can pay it back with what they can tax us from. And then the third mechanism is to print money. And printing money is essentially a tax, too. It's, you know, it's just a tax paid in a different form. They're just robbing your purchasing power in order to spend money. And so, by the way, this is the reason why, you know, if anyone else did what government does, it'd be a crime. The reason why counterfeiting money is a crime is because you are robbing from everybody else. It's not just like counterfeiting shouldn't be illegal if this wasn't the case, you know, it's not like if you can counterfeit money, it's not like you just found a cheat code and now you get free stuff. You're robbing from everybody else by lowering the value of their money to get it for yourself. So that's what government's doing. They're doing the same thing. Okay? So if you understand that all government can do is tax you or Promise to tax you in the future, then that's, that's what government spending is. And when you talk about the swamp, I mean, what is the swamp? The swamp is that Washington D.C. is filled with the most corrupt monsters in the goddamn world. And that they only get money and resources from extracting it from the American workers. The American working people have to have their money stolen from them to extracted to these criminals in D.C. so that they can spend their money on all types of corrupt and destructive shit. You have, you know, you know, you look through it all the, you know, the richest districts in America, and you see how many of them are right in the suburbs, right outside of Washington D.C. well, why is that? It's not because they have great big factories in Washington and they're producing so much stuff. It's not like, hey, this is capitalism, man. They're the ones who are making all the goods and services that everyone else wants to buy. No, in fact, they make no goods and services that anybody would voluntarily want to buy. You know, they make war. They make, you know, a bunch of, you know, grants for green energy companies. But that's the whole essence. That's government spending, okay? That it is the swamp. And the reason why this is so clearly on Donald Trump, and I will say that it seems to me in Trump 2.0, in the second Donald Trump presidency, 47, not 45. Donald Trump seems to, and there might be some, you know, there might be, it might be somewhat reasonable in some areas why he went this tack. But Donald Trump has been very focused on executive orders. He's been very focused on executive fiat. He seemed to be somewhat focused on this Doge thing, which was a creation of the executive and not so much with Congress. Now, on some level you might say that, well, Congress is corrupt and Congress has failed on all of these things. So he's pursuing these other means. But the reason why I point this out is to make it very clear, cuz there's really no passing the buck here. Donald Trump, this Doge thing first of all, was very popular with the American people. And Donald Trump was in a position when Donald Trump has, when he first came in his second term. And he has record high approval ratings for Trump, his highest approval ratings ever when he's, he's north of 50% in terms of his approval rating. You have to understand what that means is that Donald Trump's approval rating amongst Republicans is in the high 90s. You know, like Donald Trump came in where the Republicans are all behind him. And what that means is that Donald Trump has enormous leverage over the Congress. You know, like if he wanted to, he could pick a few issues and go. Instead of blasting Thomas Massie for having some fucking principles, he could have said, listen, every goddamn Republican who's in the Congress, every single one of you have said you care about limited government. You've said you're against big government, you're for small government, you're for, you know, balancing the budget, you're against this fiscal insanity. He could have said, he could have been like, look, here's the Doge bill, I'm presenting it to Congress. There's nothing in this. It's a three page bill that says we're going to meet Doge's spending cuts, you know, recommendations, and if any Republican votes against it, we're primary in you. Donald Trump is going to keep a list and expose them for the frauds they are. And they'd have to fall in line. They would have had no choice. The thing is, he just doesn't care about the issue that much. He liked having Elon Musk around the campaign. He liked the energy that brought. He liked having a guy who would give him a couple hundred million dollars, he liked having a guy who would make sure his message is spread far and wide on X, make sure his people aren't censored, things like that. But at the end of it, he just didn't really care about cutting government spending. And the thing that's so frustrating, Rob, is that Donald Trump does seem to have. Look, he's in this situation here that's so unique, not only having such a high approval rating amongst Republicans, having the ability to put pressure on them, but also he doesn't have another election to win. He doesn't have to worry about getting reelected. And he's even said with the tariff stuff that he's willing to take some short term pain to have a bigger overall correction that would put America on more solid ground. But he just doesn't know enough to know that the only way to actually do that or the most important thing would be to hack up government spending and government regulations. That's the thing that while not the regulations, but while spending, there might be some short term pain, and I'm not even sure there would be too much of that to be honest, but it would put us on a long term, like on solid footing. And yet he just, he just doesn't choose to care about this issue. So I'm sorry, this is on Donald Trump now and that's that. 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All right, let's get back into the show. Any thoughts?

Robbie the Fire Bernstein (19:23)

Yeah, my plea to the Trump loyalists is, listen, Trump was better than the Alternative. The alternative was dangerous. The alternative wanted to censor the Internet, probably spend more money and have even more central planning for windmills and things that are probably worse than trying to bring back American manufacturing. And we're just going to open up the border and probably support these words. The alternative was worse. But when Donald Trump does things like this and you refuse to criticize him, you're no better than the Democrats when they tried to pretend that Biden doesn't have dementia because, hey, the other team's so bad. We all just need a rally behind this guy. And Trump is here. He is very powerful and conservatives should care about fiscal spending, particularly when you just graph out the insane place that we are in right now. You look at every president and how they added to the debt and then how Covid came around and they just added even more. And now this is Trump's first, what are we, six months in or whatever. I mean, this is the big beautiful bill. But here's your opportunity to actually have a conversation about spending and when there was so much interest in a great storyline in at least reducing the fraud, to make no effort whatsoever to make any reduction, but instead actually increase it by 3.5 trillion. This is something conservatives should be going, this is not what the conservative party should be. This is, this is actually Democratic socialism. This is the old school Donald Trump Democrat who managed to take over the Republican Party by speaking out for workers. And now you've Got a Democratic socialist who wants to increase spending even more. You guys should criticize him for it.

Dave Smith (20:55)

Yeah, 100%, dude. And, like, you know, I will say there is something that might be, I mean, somewhat of a red pilling, I hope not a black pilling, but that we got the richest, like, most successful genius of all time and put him on the task of government spending and he couldn't do anything. You know, like, we kind of got, like. And. And look, there might be something in there that's a bitter pill to swallow, but it's one that we ought to swallow.

Robbie the Fire Bernstein (21:33)

I think he probably could have done a whole lot. I just don't think you can really both have a government job and a private sector job at the same time. I do think that there are conflicts of interest in working both sectors at the same time. And in his instance, the market actually punished him for it, and that he had a product that was very, you know, firstly, I think he does a good job of. Of shilling and creating more interest in his product and his stock price than is actually warranted based on, you know, what they're doing in the marketplace. And it's similar to what Donald. The game Donald Trump's playing with tariffs is. I don't think we're actually in a fiscally good enough position to be pulling these kind of gambles and trying to exert this much pressure on other people. We're trying to keep a faulty and broken system afloat. And I think Elon Musk ran into the same little hiccup there.

Dave Smith (22:24)

Yeah, I agree. No, I think there's. I think there's a real issue with that. I sent you this tweet earlier. I thought this was interesting. This from Elon Musk tweeted this a couple of days ago, and he said, well, it was responding to somebody who said, I wonder if this is why Ellen has somewhat moved away from politics. And he responded by saying, I have come to the perhaps obvious conclusion that accelerating GDP growth is essential. Doge has and will do great work to postpone the day of bankruptcy of America, but the prolificacy of government means that only radical improvements in productivity can save our country. And so what is that? Other than kind of giving up and going like, look, this is. We need.

Robbie the Fire Bernstein (23:27)

That's not giving up. That's not giving up. That's going, I pledge allegiance to Overlord Trump. And I'm sorry that I educated the market over the fact that there's fraud and overspending in government. And so now to stay in line with the government and Donald Trump so that hopefully I can get favorable contracts. Yeah, well, yes, I'll tell you, the American people, that cutting spending is a mistake because what we need is more government spending because then there'll be future growth that gets us out of this mess. That's what that is.

Dave Smith (23:51)

Well, yes, yes. So I get your point, but I.

Robbie the Fire Bernstein (23:53)

Just mean, obviously giving up, but it's a little bit more corrupt than that. It's not just giving up and going, I couldn't do it, it's all right, I'll get in line and quit talking about the spending.

Dave Smith (24:03)

Yeah, essentially, we're going to have to grow our way out of this. And so of course, in a way, what this, you know, kind of misses the point is just that how corrupt and how damaging the, the institution of our government has been and that it's like, oh, okay, so we can't, we have to grow our way out of this. So in other words, the only, the only answer is to feed this monster, to give it more. And then hopefully we can just be so productive on top of that that we can grow our way out of it. The problem is it's kind of like trying to deal with cancer by being like, listen, we can't eliminate the cancer, so we just got to really hope that the healthy cells grow a lot quicker than the cancerous cells. And you're like, yeah, well, that's kind of not how it works. And you kind of actually do have to eliminate this cancer in order to, you know, make the patient healthy again. And look, again, it's just, this is. When I say giving up, you're right, Rob. It's, it's an important correction. But I just mean, like, he's essentially admitting that, like, yep, the thing that I was selling you on, I can't do it. I can't. The thing that I was telling you that I was like, we're going to cut $2 trillion out of the budget. Nothing's off limits, including the Pentagon. All that big talk really just resulted in nothing. And you know, this is something where I've been, I've been of two minds about this. And I will say, as I said on the show, my instincts from the very beginning were that Doge was not going to be successful, that Doge was essentially a made up government department and that. But I was like, well, look, maybe this will be great. They'll at least like, get the issue addressed and they'll get people talking about government spending again. And then there was. Now, I will say, as I said this on the show. But I had dinner with Vikram Swami. He was really high on Doge. He was like, no, dude, we're going to blow you away. There's going to be some great things we're going to do. A few weeks later, he was out of Doge. But regardless, he, I did, I am humble enough to go, like, all right, look, I have my preconceived notions. I have my views on things. But look, obviously, like, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are incredibly brilliant, incredibly successful people. It's like, hey, maybe these guys actually got something figured out that I don't know about and they're going to be able to maneuver away here. But that didn't end up happening. And now, to the point that you made before, Rob, there is, you know, it's true that when you were selling the thing as fraud and abuse, it's perhaps true that this was a more palatable way to sell cuts in government spending. You know, to point out the fact that, hey, look here, there are these areas that we all agree, like, everyone agrees there shouldn't be fraud in Medicare. So, okay, like, maybe we have a difference of opinion about, you know, whether Medicare is a good program or Medicaid is a good program or not, but we could all agree on the fraud. And look, we found all this fraud and USAID and all these other things. And so, yeah, okay, maybe there's like a wider audience that would accept that than just arguing for spending cuts because we need fiscal sanity. But the problem is that when you sell it that way and then you fail anyway, then you kind of get the worst of both worlds because, number one, you failed to get any spending cuts anyway. But number two, you didn't even really educate the public about government spending. And I mean, look, Elon did some of this. Like I said, he was sharing some great, you know, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell videos and stuff like that. But I just feel like it's not only that they failed, it's like they never even really started the conversation about government spending that needed to happen. You know, like, they never even really got into it where it was like, look like, you know, first of all, Donald Trump is sitting here advocating for a trillion dollar defense budget. So clearly he's not interested in cutting defense. He wants to increase defense spending, which is, of course, unnecessary and just a terrible policy. But then on top of that, it's like, what are we, you know, if you're never going to, you can't cut defense spending. He's unwilling to even talk about Cutting entitlement spending. Okay, well then there's no fiscal sanity here. And the idea that, you know, like, it's almost like Elon Musk maybe without ever saying it, but it certainly was pretty heavily implied that somehow, like, we could get our fiscal house in order without ever dealing with defense or entitlements. But just from finding like fraud, you know, just from finding like, you know, USAID spending money on Afghanistan, we'll balance the budget off. Cutting that. But that was always just made up. That's not true. I'm not saying there's no fraud. There's tons of it. But the real thing is that the whole thing is fraudulent. The whole government is based off fraud. All of it. Look, all of these entitlement programs are. They're wealth transfer programs from a poorer group to a richer group. It's the most goddamn corrupt thing in the world. You could have an argument, right? You could have an argument in theory about wealth redistribution. Now, obviously me and Rob would be opposed to wealth redistribution. I don't even like the term redistribution because I don't think it's an accurate term. Wealth wasn't distributed to begin with. It was. It was created, it was produced. It's not distributed. It's not. You know, like there's something about the term redistribution of wealth that almost like it's. It's almost like cheating. It's like it's like a, you know, gender affirming care. Like you're. The answer is baked into the description, right? Because like if it's gender affirming, then obviously you should be for it. It's like reproductive rights, you know, these.

Robbie the Fire Bernstein (30:23)

Terms that people or rights. I would just to speak to your point, gender affirming care has the word care in it, which makes it seem like it's actually helpful. So what you're speaking to with the wealth redistribution has a word distribution as if it was just. The wealth was just handed to some individuals. So now we're redistributing it. Not this concerned.

Dave Smith (30:45)

Yeah, well, right. It was already distributed once and obviously it wasn't distributed that great, Rob. So let's just redistribute this one more time. And that. But the thing is that it never was distributed. A sense like paychecks could be distributed like the. A manager might distribute paychecks, but the wealth itself is created. It's not distributed, you know, so anyway, so I don't even like that term. But in theory you could have these arguments where like, maybe you'd have like a free market capitalist in A, in a debate with a democratic socialist and the democratic socialists would be arguing for distributive policies like, look, these people have so much, we should tax them and give it to the people who have less. And then the free market capitalist might argue, no, no, no, you don't understand how economics works. And that in fact when these people, when the wealthy people have money, they don't just sit on it under their mattress. And even if they did, that would just make everybody else's money more valuable. But in fact this is what you need for the capital investment into new technologies and that this actually makes everybody richer. That these are all interesting theoretical discussions, but Medicare and Social Security are like these viewed as like these third rails. Almost nobody even, like almost almost nobody has the balls to even just say, I think we should cut these programs, let alone actually push for that to be enacted. But both Medicare and Social Security are distributive policies that distribute money from a poorer group to a richer group. Young people are poorer than old people. They have lower incomes, they have lower net worths, they have less life, they have less assets, obviously. And yet we're distributing money from them to the boomers. It's like the most corrupt thing ever. And again, it's just nobody, nobody in dozer, like essentially. I guess my point here is, is that if you're going to completely, spectacularly fail on policy and deliver nothing and then you're left with like, well, did you at least educate some people along the way? And it's like, no, they never even did that. They never even just told the truth. Which would have been like, at least there'd be some value in that. And you know, this is how like these, these thous bargains kind of, they, they end up working out this way quite often. It's like, hey, it's like just don't tell the truth, don't tell the whole truth. You know, just, just cover up part of it and then you'll get a little bit of what you want and then you end up doing that and you don't even get the little bit of what you wanted. And then you just blew at least your one big opportunity, which would have been to just tell the truth unallowed from, you know, on a, from a loud stage, you know, tell the truth to a lot of people. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Crowd Health, a great company. They've been a longtime sponsor of this show and they provide a much needed service which is an alternative to the health insurance scheme, if you will. We all know the health insurance system is broken. We've spent a lot of time on this show over the years explaining why that is. It's all because of government intervention. But now at least there is an alternative to health insurance, which is crowd health, which is essentially a group of people just like you who want to help pay for each other's unexpected medical expenses. But it's not insurance. It's a completely different way to pay for health care. With crowd health, there's no doctors, networks that limit who you can see. You can go to whatever doctor you'd like to, and there are no networks. It is significantly less expensive than health insurance because it rips out the bureaucracy of the middleman. Singles are $185 a month. A family of four is $605 a month. And right now, if you use the promo code POTP, you can get $99 a month per person for the first three months. So make sure to go check them out@joincrowd health.com Crowd health is not health insurance. It's a totally different way of paying for health care. Terms and conditions may apply. All right, let's get back into the show. So I don't know, you know, I'd like to be wrong about this, but it does seem to me that between that tweet, this spending bill, the way Donald Trump. It's really quite something. It's not only did Donald Trump not insist on getting some spending cuts and then use his megaphone to put pressure on the Republicans who are fucking phonies who have sat here for decades talking about how they care about fiscal responsibility. Right now, in this moment, when Donald Trump is enormously popular with Republicans, when Republicans have the presidency and the House and the Senate and the Supreme Court and the culture, the Democrats approval rating is down in the low 20s. In this moment, we're gonna pass through another giant spending bill. And then on top of that, as the cherry on top, he's gonna demonize Massey, of all people. That's who he's going to go after, Thomas Massie. So, I mean, what can you say? What can you say other than Doge failed and Donald Trump failed? I mean, you know, I tried, Listen, I tried to not be one of these Debbie Downers about it from the beginning, which I could have just done from the beginning and going, this is all destined to fail anyway. But at least I was like, hey, at least someone's trying, it seems. Let's try to get some enthusiasm going behind this. But I don't know what else to say. If someone wants to make an argument to me like, no, no, here's where they really succeeded. Okay, please show me. I'm not seeing it seems like a total failure. And then ultimately, I think you got this right. Is that. And look, I'm not even blaming Elon Musk for this, to be clear. I'm blaming Donald Trump for this, not Elon Musk. But I think you're absolutely right in your assessment, Rob, that that was Elon at the end going like, all right, well, no point in me being a martyr over this. Cause that's going to fail anyway. I might as well go back to being very successful, you know, the most successful man in the world. That seems like a better deal. Yeah, we really just got to grow.

Rand Paul (37:03)

Our way out of it.

Dave Smith (37:04)

Okay, all right, let's see if we could do that.

Robbie the Fire Bernstein (37:08)

So, two things. I think everything you said is a fair and good analysis of Donald Trump and where we're at. But I'm always a little bit reluctant to bet against the guy because he's got so much ADD you never know when he pulls a rabbit out of his ass and changes course. And then all of a sudden, you're looking like a bit of an asshole for criticizing him. He does have that Bugs Bunny way of, you know, making the criticizers look like assholes. So I still, as much as I hate on the Trump loyalists, I still got. I'm always a little bit reluctant shitting on him the same way I shat on Biden, where, like, you knew that Biden was never changing course and it was all corruption. And then just speaking to Elon Musk's tweet, if government is spending money not during a recession, what is the economic model that you're working with there for growth? And if you're taxing individuals and you're spending more money, I thought that. I mean, that does two things. One is it crowds out the money available to the private sector, and then it also draws down capital within the country. So I'm not even really sure how government's spending money now on entitlement programs or on the military or whatever else they need $3.5 trillion more for. What is even the pitch for how this leads to economic growth? I understand an argument for, hey, we're going to be spending more money because we're cutting taxes, but that's going to lead to economic growth. I at least understand how you can present that argument. I don't even understand what the plan is here of increasing spending. Firstly, if we just kept the spending levels without correcting anything, that was crazy. We're increasing spending above that. Can you explain to me where the pitch is here of how that leads to economic growth in a way that we grow out of this? I mean, just where's the pitch?

Dave Smith (38:51)

Oh, yeah, no, there essentially isn't one. It's just like essentially where DC Is addicted to spending and they don't want to stop. And so there. And then you work around that to go. So then I guess the answer is to grow our way out of the economy or something like that. But all that seems to grow with this model is the power and control of D.C. you know, Natalie, could you pull in? Rob emailed us several videos, but there was one where it said the dissenters on spending bill, on the spending bills.

Robbie the Fire Bernstein (39:32)

You'Ve got in the Senate, Ron Johnson and Rand Paul speaking.

Dave Smith (39:35)

Oh, actually, you know what, hold on. I think Natalie may not have been on that here, I'll just text it to you right now. I'm sorry. Go ahead, Rob.

Robbie the Fire Bernstein (39:43)

Yeah, you've got Ron Johnson and Rand Paul are the senators that I've heard speaking out against this. And then you had Thomas Massie, who had some, some good words about it on the, on the congressional floor. The Thomas Massie clip is a short clip. I think it's all of about a minute and a half. And then the Rand Paul. I'm. Yeah, the Rand Paul and the Ron Johnson are both longer news interviews, but the first couple of minutes are at least.

Dave Smith (40:09)

Yeah, let's, let's, let's start with the, the round Paul one, which is the first one I sent you, Natalie.

Robbie the Fire Bernstein (40:21)

But it speaks to what we're getting at here, which is essentially, hey, conservatives should not be supporting increased in government spending. This is, yeah, this is not conservative. And it's also just not good government policy.

Dave Smith (40:34)

Well, you know, it's interesting because Rand Paul, so Rand Paul came first, got elected to the Senate in 2010. Crazy. Now, that was 15 years ago. But he first came in on the Tea Party wave. I mean, he was here to be like, hey, the whole thing is we're here to cut spending and get the fiscal house back and in order. And it is amazing how, like, it's just amazing to me as someone who, you know, has been paying pretty close attention to this stuff for 20 years and is fairly well read on the history before that. It is just in my lifetime how much the Republicans have always claimed every time they're out of power, they go, oh, my God. These guys are spending so recklessly elect us to bring some type of sanity to this. And there's just been so many. Every single time they have complete control of the government. There's some reason why now is not the time. I mean, we can't even get with a, with a GOP controlled House, Senate, Supreme Court and White House. We can't even get back to pre Covid levels of spending which were higher than the Obama levels of spending. We can't even get back to that. You know, and look, I mean this is, this is the best argument to be a member of the Libertarian Party. Believe me, it's the, the arguments to join the Libertarian Party are only made by Republicans. Don't, don't listen to the Libertarians. They'll convince you not to join. But the only thing is just that it's like, look, the, the Republicans claim to stand for this shit and it's how many chances do they get? There is never, ever in my lifetime been a year where spending went down from the previous year. Republicans have never managed to do it. I mean, what can you say? All right here, let's go to this video here.

Fox News Host (42:35)

Joining us now, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. Welcome back to FOX News Sunday.

Rand Paul (42:40)

Good morning. Thanks for having me.

Fox News Host (42:42)

Okay, I want to get to some foreign policy, but first, what's going down here in Washington as the big beautiful bill, as it's been called, is now heading to you in the Senate. Hill says this House GOP leaders spent weeks in delicate talks with Republican holdouts before cobbling together a fragile agreement. The critical voices of the House debate are cautioning their upper chamber counterparts not to alter their design too severely or it will never get through the House on its return. We'll talk about some of your specific objections, but how much does that worry factor into your calculus, whether or not what you do in the Senate can get back through the House?

Rand Paul (43:19)

You know, the bigger a bill, the more it includes, the more difficult it is to get everybody to agree to things. I supported the tax cuts in 2017. I support making them permanent. So I support that part of the bill. I support spending cuts. I think the cuts currently in the bill are wimpy and anemic, but I still would support the bill even with wimpy and anemic cuts if they weren't going to explode the debt. The problem is the math doesn't add up. They're going to explode the debt by The House says 4 trillion. The Senate's actually been talking about exploding the debt.5 trillion this year in September when Our fiscal year ends, the deficit will be about 2.2 trillion. Now, people used to always say, the Republicans say, what's Biden nomics? That's Biden's spending levels. When March, every Republican, virtually every Republican other than me, voted to continue the Biden spending levels, which are going to give us a $2.2 trillion deficit. Now, if you increase the debt ceiling 4 to 5 trillion dollars, that means they're planning on 2 trillion this year and more than 2 trillion next year. That's just not conservative. So I've told them if they strip out the debt ceiling, I'll consider, even with the imperfections, voting for the rest of the bill. But I can't vote to raise the debt ceiling 5 trillion. There's got to be someone left in Washington who thinks debt is wrong and deficits are wrong and wants to go in the other direction. The idea that we're going to explode deficits and the projections are now looking at over $3 trillion in deficits over the next 10 years, I think is just, you know, not a serious proposal.

Fox News Host (44:44)

So, you know, the debt ceiling is going to come sooner or later. And Republicans, many of them, and those who advocate for including the debt ceiling being raised within this measure say work today is broken.

Dave Smith (44:56)

All right, well, you could pause it there. Well, yeah. How can you even argue with us? You know, it's funny because I've literally just been through this so many times. Like just since we've had the show going, I just been through this so many times at this point. But here is an argument that nobody can ever make. Nobody even ever pretends to. But we're simple. A question nobody can even answer. What is the point of having a debt ceiling? Like, why do we have one? Isn't one of them like one. One of these corrupt congressmen have the integrity to just flat out say, I think we should get rid of the debt ceiling. They just have a debt ceiling. We have a rule under the law that says you can't go more than this much into debt. And then every time we hit that much, we just raise the number. It's just too ridiculous. So what's the point of having it? The whole point of having the debt ceiling seems to be to raise it.

Robbie the Fire Bernstein (46:00)

Yeah, and that's the point. They can pretend like they're doing something. They can pretend. What are you talking about? We're not financially responsible. We have a debt ceiling and then we get together and renegotiate how we can safely raise it. And so what, three times a year they get Together they threaten shutting down government and then they have all their meetings, then at the last moment they want to go on vacation and so they pass it. And I guess they can create the illusion like they're actually doing something.

Dave Smith (46:23)

Yep, that seems like it's pretty much it. And you know, again, like I said before, but particularly like in this moment where you just can't get any type of movement on this stuff, you're like, well then I don't know what it's going to take. Before that we would get to a point where you actually could. But again, this is just, it's this continuous cycle of bullshit. And yeah, as you said, this is the game that they play that we're going to constantly now, multiple times a year have this, oh my God, the debt ceiling. And then of course, it's kind of the typical, like I said at the beginning, it's this boring game where then they can phrase it or they can frame it. I should say, as anybody who ever talks about any type of cuts, no matter how modest they are, is, oh my God, you're kicking people off of welfare. Oh my God, you're kicking the most helpless people off of these programs. People are going to starve. It's going to be a nightmare. And then this is the whole game of how D.C. ends up keeping it's corrupt system going. And like, nobody will actually look you in the eyes and say, oh no, no, no. If all of the suburbs outside of Washington D.C. aren't permeated by multimillionaires who produce nothing of value in the market, then things would be terrible. They won't just say that to you because they know like that's, that'd just be too crazy. But so what they will do is say anytime anyone doesn't want to drastically government spending from its already insane high levels, you basically just want some poor single mom to not have health care. That's, that's the game. And you would think like one of the things that's kind of tragic about this is that you would think Donald Trump would have been the guy who was uniquely positioned to smack down all that and to just like he could have simply just rolled his eyes and been like, shut up, no one believes you guys anymore. You know, then it would have just been like, aha. Yeah, he's right. You know, that's, he's right. They're all full of shit. No one's going to be starving. This is fine. And he doesn't want to do it, you know, and I don't know, it's like he wants, he wants 0% interest rates again. He wants record high government spending because I think he thinks that'll make the GDP in the stock market look really good at this time next year. And then Donald Trump can say, look, I delivered the greatest economy ever. I think that's, I really think that's as simple that that's the explanation. But I don't know. Hey, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, a brand new sponsor who I'm thrilled to have on board. And that is blackout coffee. Now, people, if you know me, you know I am a coffee enthusiast. I would not bring you a crappy brand of coffee. Luckily, I have an excellent brand in blackout. Not only is blackout coffee great, but it's also roasted right here in the United States of America. And it's a company that is dedicated to liberty and freedom and capitalism and the Constitution and all of the things that we hold dear. They've got over 25,000 five star reviews for a reason. This stuff is excellent. I've been sipping on the cold brew all day. Love this stuff. Go pick up some for yourself. Head over to blackout coffee.com problem right now and use the promo code problem to get 20 off your first order. It's great coffee made by a great company and you're going to get 20% off, but only when you go to blackout coffee.com problem and use the promo code problem for 20% off your first order. Support your values, support freedom and drink some great coffee while you're doing it. Blackout coffee.com problem. All right, let's get back into the show.

Robbie the Fire Bernstein (50:30)

So the other thing that Rand says here, which I think is important for the Trump loyalists, is he likes to say, I support Trump. I just don't support raising the debt like this. And then I think it's worth playing the Ron Johnson clip because he talks about also coming in under the Tea Party and he speaks a little bit more about not robbing from our future generations, which not enough people are talking about the fact that, you know, know. Yeah, we're stealing from the grandkids here.

Dave Smith (50:59)

Yeah. All right, let's, let's play that. Let's play that clip. But, yeah, well, look, it's a, it's a pretty, a pretty important point and, you know, you would. Isn't it interesting too, how it's only through government that you even can do something like that? Like, I can't. It's, it's illegal for me to do that as a parent. I can't like, max out credit cards in my daughter's name. You know what I'm saying? Like, I can't just spend on present consumption and then saddle her with the debt. It's only through the mechanism of government that we can do this. But, my God, if you ever. Let's just say theoretically you could do that, just how monstrous it's for.

Robbie the Fire Bernstein (51:43)

It's for family, household growth. It's. If we lived in a nicer house now, she'll have a brighter future and earn more.

Dave Smith (51:49)

But then you cut, and it's just like, I'm just driving like a Bugatti. And you're like, whoa, Dave, you bought this? Or, well, I put it on my daughter's credit card. Like, wouldn't you. Immediately you'd be like, what a monster. Like, if somebody did this in their personal life, you'd think of it as like the most evil thing. And yet this is how our economic system maintains itself. It's truly crazy. All right, let's play this clip.

Rand Paul (52:13)

We need to establish. Girls, listen. This is the weekend we honor the service and sacrifice of the finest among us. More than a million that died defend this nation. I don't think they served in sacrifice to leave our children completely mortgaged. Their future and their prospects diminished because of it. So we need to be responsible. The first goal of our budget reconciliation process should be to reduce the deficit. This actually increases it. But let me describe the mess. President Obama averaged about $910 billion of deficits per year. President Trump in his first three years averaged about 810. Then Covid hit over $3 trillion in deficit. It should have ended there. We should have immediately returned to a pre pandemic level spending. But President Biden averaged $1.9 trillion of deficits over his four years. And according to CBO, those deficits now average $2.2 trillion. Over the next 10 years, we'll add $22 trillion. And I'm sorry, the House bill would probably add. I've calculated 4 trillion. You're saying they have these independent analysts saying it's 3.3 to 4 trillion. I agree with that. We have to reduce the deficit, and so we need to focus on spending, spending, spending.

Fox News Host (53:24)

So what changes?

Rand Paul (53:24)

You don't defeat the deep state by funding it.

Dave Smith (53:27)

Right.

Fox News Host (53:28)

So what changes are you going to push for in this bill when the Senate takes it up? You want to make $6 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade. You say, just for comparison, that's the equivalent of almost the entire federal budget from last year. Here's where all that money went last year. We're just holding up a chart. You already know the percentages here of how much it's going to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Pentagon and on and on. Where would you make cuts?

Rand Paul (53:55)

First of all, you take a different approach. You don't start at $7 trillion of completely unjustified level spending and then subject yourself to death by a thousand cuts. You start with a reasonable pre pandemic level spending. You've heard people talk about zero based budgeting. I'm talking about a budget of 5.5 to 6.5 trillion. Those are options from Clinton, Obama and Trump where you just take their actual outlays plus them up by population growth and inflation, leaving Social Security, Medicare and interest untouched. That would leave you somewhere between 5.5 and $6.5 trillion. So you start there, but you have to do the work and you need the time to do the work. I have to believe when you go through $7,000 billion dollars of spending, if you go buy it line by line like Doge has done, you will find hundreds of billions of dollars. And I've proven this in terms of where this spending occurs. Hundreds of billions of dollars of.

Robbie the Fire Bernstein (54:46)

It's amazing just how much the Overton window has shifted that here you've got the guy who's the extremist on spending just going, let's go to the pre pandemic levels. Like, listen, I know that we couldn't afford that and I know back then I would have said, hey, we gotta bring it down, but you guys have gotten so crazy. Listen, I won't touch your Medicaid, I won't touch your Social Security, I won't touch anything. In fact, I'll actually increase it relative to the inflation and population growth. But can we at least just halt it? There's, I mean, that's how much of a shift we've had from a conversation about, you know, rolling back government spending. Is that the most extreme position on the news of rolling back government spending is. Let's just go to the pre. Remember when it was the biggest emergency that ever happened in America so we had to spend more money and we said we were only gonna do it once, cuz we're in this huge emergency. Can we at least honor what we said there and go to the before that loony levels? And that's the radical position. It's really, it's really, I don't know, it's just kind of crazy to watch that. This is the extreme position.

Dave Smith (55:46)

It's, it's wild, too, because you see this all. Look, this is the entire story of the 20th century, and it's been the story of the 21st century as well, that it's always. This is why Michael Malice said, which I always loved this quote, thought it was one of the best quotes he's ever had. And there's a reason why it caught on so much. But he said conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit. So it's just like you're still going in the same path. It's just. They're kind of like, hey, let's, let's just keep it at 65. You know what I mean? Like, it's, it's. There's, look, the, the old right, as Murray Rothbard called them, which was, you know, like Robert Taft and Garrett Garrett and people like this, they essentially rose up in opposition to the New Deal, which was, of course, FDR's economic plan to get us out of the Great Depression, which, if you go check the numbers, didn't. It did not get us out of the Great Depression. In fact, it's the reason why the Great Depression is remembered as the Great Depression. It's not. The Great Depression isn't remembered because the stock market crashed in 1929. In fact, there was a crash in 21 that was more severe than the one in 29, the crash. There's a great book on this. Have you ever read this, Rob? It's such a good book. It's called the Forgotten Crash. It's by Jim Grant, but it's all about the crash of 21. And essentially what happened was in 1921, a huge stock market crash. It was a bigger correction than the Great Depression and then the crash in 29. And essentially the government just didn't do anything, did nothing. The Federal Reserve had only been open for a few years. They weren't really even up and running to the level that they were later. There was no government spending programs, no increase in regulations. And it was over. A year later, the economy had completely recovered and it was over. Then cut to 29, the stock market crashed. You have these huge government spending projects, and then in 32, FDR comes in and institutes the New Deal and the unemployment was in double digits. I think it went up. It was at 25% at one point, well into the 30s, years and years and years later, problem was still happening anyway. So there were these, these. They wouldn't call themselves conservatives, but what you might think of as conservatives at the time who were opposed to the New Deal. However, you know, Reagan, right now, this is decades later, obviously, but Ronald Reagan was an fd, an FDR Democrat who switched over and became a Republican because he was like, my God, the size and scope of government is getting too big. And yet, yet none of them whatever. You know, in the 60s, Lyndon Johnson had the Great Society, another huge expansion of government. At the time, the conservatives in the Republican Party would have said, we're against this, we're against these programs, we wanna repeal these programs. But by the time they get back into power, all of a sudden, these are things you can never touch. No one could dream of touching Social Security. No one could dream of touching Medicare. Look, the Republicans ran on repealing and replacing Obamacare. Has anyone even mentioned that since the Republicans have all been in power, the idea of repealing Obamacare, none of them are even talking about doing that. And so you always have this thing where kind of like a new, a new giant entitlement gets proposed. People, you know, rail against it. They say, oh, this is going to be a disaster. The people who are for it are like, look, it's only going to cost this much. It'll be blah, blah, blah. It, it's going to be great. It ends up costing seven times as much as they say. And it underd. Delivers on their promises. And then you get to a point where it's just codified. Well, that's part of, I mean, they call them entitlements, for God's sakes, like that. It's just something you're entitled to and so nobody can take it away from you now. And so this is where we keep going. But it is funny, as you point out, Rob, that the, the hawk, the fiscal hawk here is saying, could we go to five years ago? Would that be possible? Could we get back to the levels that we were five years ago, which were substantially higher than Obama? Error levels of spending, man, it is just pathetic.

Robbie the Fire Bernstein (60:19)

I think Ron Johnson's one of the good guys. What other senator do you hear actually mentioning the deep state on the news or the fact that we're stealing from future generations, but it's just unbelievable that the guy who comes off as a fiscal conservative extremist is going, let's just go to even more spending than Obama, please.

Dave Smith (60:38)

Well, it's a sad, it's a sad state of affairs. It's like if you're, you're like an abolitionist at the height of slavery and there's one person up there who's like, maybe don't whip them so hard. And you're like, all Right. How about that guy? Can we take up his proposal? That seems like a reasonable proposal, right? And they're like, this guy would free all the slaves. You know? He didn't even say that. He didn't even say. Yeah, you just said, don't hit him so hard. Is that possible? All right, listen, I. Do we gotta wrap there. Apologize for the show being late today, but we will be back to our normal time at 1pm tomorrow. Porch tour.com go check out Rob. Uh, go, go follow him on the road. And of course, check out the run your mouth, run your mouth podcast. Rob's other fantastic show, comicdavesmith.com for all of me and Rob's ticket links together. And of course, if you want to come out to the mothership in August, come on out. Get the tickets now because those will all sell out. All right, catch you guys tomorrow. Peace.

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