← The 47 Morning Update with Ben Ferguson
The 47 Morning Update with Ben Ferguson
Comrade Kamala Proposes She Be in Charge of Price Fixing for Food plus Open Borders Attract Terrorists & Endanger Children
00:53:15
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- [00:01]
Ben Ferguson
Welcome. It is verdict with senator Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you. Senator, it's like one in the morning, and I can't believe I'm actually saying this to you, but is it fair to say that Kamala Harris is stealing campaign ideas from socialists and communists, you know, people like Stalin and, I don't know, Maduro with her new plan on food prices?
- [00:26]
Ted Cruz
Well, we're 25 days in to Kamala Harris being the presumptive Democrat nominee. For 23 of the days, she had a total of zero policy proposals. Her website still has no policy positions listed on it. Then 24 days into it, she discovered her first policy proposal, and it was a good one. It was no taxes on tips, something Donald Trump proposed, something that I introduced and authored the legislation. And so that was a good sign. She had found one position that she liked, and it was actually a tax cutting position. Well, that moment, that moment of clarity lasted about 24 hours. She's now come out with her second policy position. And mind you, this is the second out of two, because in 25 days, she has not had any other policy positions whatsoever. Unfortunately, position number two was not nearly as good as position number one. Position number two, is she Queen Kamala, the federal government czar is going to set prices. Well, not on anything that matters, just food, just groceries, just what you feed your children and your family. That the federal government is now going to be in the business that the Soviet Union, their government was in for a long time, deciding the prices of goods the people need and want. The only problem is, history has shown that is absolutely disastrous. We're gonna break that down. We're gonna explain it to you. And then secondly, Kamala Harris desperately, desperately wants you to forget that she has been. The borders are for four years. There's a reason for that. The border is the single greatest disaster under Joe Biden and her administration. Just this week, we've seen a potential terrorist, a Palestinian apprehended. We've also seen a criminal, a mass murderer who had been apprehended at the border. These are inconvenient facts. As of the facts that she and Joe Biden have lost over 80,000 illegal immigrant children. They've just lost them. They handed them over to adults. They didn't vet. They don't know who they are. They don't know if the adults are abusing the kids. They don't know if the adults are putting the kids in slave labor. They don't know if the adults are engaging in sexual abuse of the kids. They've just lost them because it's all politics. And if children have to suffer, well, they're willing to accept that price. We're going to explain that as well.
- [02:53]
Ben Ferguson
I want to remind you about what's going on in Israel. The people in Israel right now still very much desperately need your help. They are absolutely under attack, this time with a massive rocket attack that just came in from Hezbollah. Since October 7, attacks on Israel have increased with Iran and its proxies launching attack after attacking hundreds and hundreds of drones and missiles. Israel and the Israeli people are living with the harsh reality of terror every day. And the need right now is bomb shelters. The international fellowship of Christians and Jews is on the ground right now addressing all the urgent needs. And that's why I want you to partner with IFCJ today. While praying for the best, IFCJ is also preparing for the worst by packing emergency bomb shelter kits that can be delivered immediately to those in desperate need. And your life saving donation today will help assemble and place these kits with enough food and life saving emergency supplies for 20 people huddled in a bomb shelter. The cost to put together and distribute these kits is just $290. And your gift will help save lives. And thanks to a matching challenge from a generous IFC supporter, your gift will be doubled in impact to help provide twice the support. Now all you have to do is call them 888, 488, 488, IFCJ. That's 888-488-IFCJ. 888-488-ICJ. You can also go online to supportifcj.org to give, that's one word, supportifcj.org to stand with the people in Israel center. When this came out, I was actually kind of laughing. And then I realized how close we are to turning into a Soviet style food market. Grocery stores. And if you go back and look what Soviet style markets look like, they didn't actually even have shelving in the majority of them. They had pallets and boxes. And then you open the box and whatever they had for you there that day is what you like went home with. You didn't go shopping. You went and found whatever they brought you. There are lots of videos of this that you can see online of just how bad it is when the government takes over. But what Kamala Harris is doing is she's trying to appease to voters saying, hey, I'm gonna put price controls on food. The issue is, and I want you to take a moment to explain this to people. If the government does that and the farmers prices go up, and the price of grain or the price of fuel or the price of transportation, they start losing money. They go under instantly, leaving no one but the government to basically feed you.
- [05:48]
Ted Cruz
Well, I want to break down a couple of pieces of this. I want to break down the politics of it, and then I want to break down the substance of it. Let's start with the politics of it. Kamala Harris and her team have been on a Sugar High for 25 days. The press has been engaged in a relentless campaign of lionization and canonization. They've been turning her into st. Kamala, but it has been utterly substance free. Her team, they're not stupid. They understand. As we get closer to election day, people are actually going to care about substance. The top two issues in the country, and this is true in pretty much every single opinion poll that is done, they are, number one, the chaos at the open border. 11.5 million people crossing into this country illegally, and number two, jobs in the economy and in particular, inflation. And inflation is hurting people all across the country. And it varies pole to poll whether illegal immigration is 1 and economy inflation is 2 or whether economy inflation is 1 and illegal immigration is 2. But those are consistently 1 and 2. They're both at about 30%, by the way, in a typical poll in terms of how many of the voters say, this is my top concern. So the two together are about 60%. And Kamala's record on them, on both of them is terrible. Now, on the border, her strategy is simple. She's just trying to gaslight the American people and claim she wasn't the border czar. It's not her fault. Pay no attention to what's going on here. It's just denial because she has no other answer on inflation. This is her effort to provide an answer. Now, I want to explain where inflation comes from first and then what's wrong with her bogus political solution. What has caused the inflation of the last four years? And it's been two things, principally. Number one, it has been the federal government spending trillions of dollars we don't have, borrowing trillions of dollars we don't have from foreign countries, including china, and printing trillions of dollars we don't have. And this is where it's important to understand. Listen, Democrats, unfortunately, in Washington are economically illiterate. And that's a real problem because one of the major jobs of serving in the federal government is to understand the economy. My number one priority in the senate is jobs. You have to know something about the economy to be able to fight for jobs for 30 million Texans. Now, what is the role of prices? And let's go back to first principles, all right? If you go to ancient agrarian societies, maybe, Ben, you might be a fisherman.
- [08:26]
Ben Ferguson
Yeah.
- [08:27]
Ted Cruz
And I might be a farmer. And let's say I grow apples. And maybe it's the case that that initially exchanges were done by barter. So let's say I wanted a fish, and you were a fisherman, and I could come and I could give you three apples, and you could give me a fish, and you and I could agree, I guess I had a lot of apples. Fish were harder to come by. They took more effort, they took more labor, they took more capital. You needed a boat to be able to get your fish. So we would agree on a price of three apples for one fish. And so that's how we set the relative value of the two things we were producing. The problem is it was really inconvenient to carry around apples in your pocket all day long or fish in your pocket all day long, Aside from the fact that it kind of stinks and they go rotten. And so what arose is the growth of money. Now, the value of money is prices serve as a signaling effect. Now they serve as a signaling effect. Number one, the relative value of goods and services vis a vis each other. They also have a different signaling effect, which I'll discuss in a minute. But let's just focus on the relative value. So if we come up with, let's say, a dollar, that's going to be our medium of currency. And if the ratio was three apples to every fish, it would be very simple. We would agree that the price of a fish is $3 and the price of an apple is $1. Now, that's that same ratio. It's the identical thing you and I have agreed. That's the relative value of the two. But the beauty of it is we could both carry dollars. And we knew if I wanted a fish, I gave you three bucks. If you wanted an apple, you gave me a dollar. By the way, you didn't have to give me a third of a fish. Like giving me the fish head is kind of lousy. You could just give me a dollar. And that was a third of the value of the fish. So it was also divisible to smaller units, and it enabled exchange and trade. Now, to understand inflation, at the very simplest level, let's the entire purpose of money, or one of the central purposes, entires a bit much. But one of the central purposes is providing a relative valuation of one good and service versus another. In a simple hypothetical, let's assume we double the number of dollars that exists in our. Our land, our country, wherever we're living. Let's say there are a million dollars in circulation on day one, and then on day two, there are $2 million. Now, if you double the number of dollars in circulation. Look, the relative value of a fish to an apple didn't change. You and I still agree a fish is worth three times as much as an apple, which means if there are twice as many dollars and the dollars are serving a signaling function to let me know how valuable a fish is compared to how valuable an apple is, it means when you double the money supply and you go from a million dollars in circulation to $2 million in circulation, you know what the price of a fish is the next day? $6. You know what the price of an apple is? $2. Why? Because the ratio of $6 to $2 is still 3 to 1. And we also want to be able to value the price of a fish and an apple vis a Visa, a banana vis a vis an F150 pickup truck. And so you need pricing gives relative values. Why do we have inflation? There were two major drivers. Number one, the Democrats spend a crap ton of money they didn't have and they grew the money supply. There are a lot more dollars. If there are a lot more dollars, the price of everything goes up. But secondly, there's a second component of inflation, which is. For four years, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have waged a war on energy, and in particular, oil and gas. And understand oil and gas. The United States is the world's biggest producer of oil and gas. We are the world's greatest superpower when it comes to oil and gas. This administration, because they've given in to the green New Deal lunatics, and in fact, not just give it in. They've embraced them. And that's who they are. They have launched regulatory effort after regulatory effort trying to hammer US Oil and gas production. The result has been the price of gasoline has risen. The price of energy has risen. The price of. Of. Of oil and gas across the board has risen. That is their intended effect. Why? Because Kamala Harris and Joe Biden want to make it really expensive. When you fill up your pickup truck, when you fill up your minivan, when you fill up your Suburban, they want it to be painful because they want you to sell your Suburban and go buy a little electric vehicle. And they figure if they make enough American families hurt, then you will change your behavior and you will comply with their Woke political demands. Now, that war on energy is a major, major driver of inflation. Let's take food. So when it comes to food, a big driver of the cost of food is the cost of fertilizer. And fertilizer, natural gas is a major ingredient. Energy costs are a major ingredient in the cost of fertilizer. And so by driving up the cost of energy, they're driving up the cost of growing food. But not just growing food. Look, if you want to plow your field right now, a farmer uses a tractor. A tractor runs on diesel. If the cost of diesel is a lot more, it's a lot more expensive to plow your field. Once you plow your field, you've got to harvest your field. That again, takes diesel. That becomes a lot more expensive. Then after you harvest it, you've got to take it to the wholesaler. The wholesaler has to take it ultimately to the grocery store. Every one of those trucks runs on diesel as well. And so by waging a war on oil and gas, Kamala Harris is directly responsible for causing a massive increase in the cost of food at the grocery store. Now, she's got a political problem. This thing, which millions of Americans hate because it's hurting their families, is her fault. It is her fault because of bad policies that she has championed day in and day out for four years. She can't admit any of that. So instead, what is their solution? They, the government will magically decree prices will be lower. You must lower prices politically. This is driven by a mandate to have some answer to inflation. And she can't give the answer. I'm going to stop my terrible policies that caused this inflation. So instead, wave a magic wand. The government will fix it. Now, in a minute, we'll get to the substance. But her solution is an absolute train wreck. It is a disaster. It would hurt the American people badly. But understand, she doesn't know this. Far too few democrats in Washington have even a basic understanding of economics. And so their answer is, we will just decree. No longer will fish. And my hypothetical be $3. Now, Mr. Ferguson, you must sell fish for a dollar because people like fish. And $3 is too much for a fish. So you must sell fish for a dollar. That is her answer. History teaches us in every society that has tried this, from the Soviet union to Venezuela, it is a disaster. It doesn't work. It results in massive shortages. It results in consumers getting royally screwed. And yet Kamala Harris and the people around her have no idea about this.
- [16:05]
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- [16:23]
Ben Ferguson
They did to talk about how tough.
- [16:25]
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- [17:41]
Ben Ferguson
Let's talk about how this, how quickly this can unravel the idea. And look, I understand this is another way of in essence, Biden and Harris or I should now just say Harris is trying to buy votes. Hey, vote for me, I'll give you cheaper food. We with guaranteed pricing. But the collapse of the private sector can literally happen overnight. I go back to Covid is a great example of this. The entire system would have fallen instantly if you had price mandates. That meant that the people that were producing, whether it's, whether it's dealing with cattle or chicken or eggs or milk, dairy, whatever, grain, everything we saw the prices go up. And if you have a set price at hay farmer, you have to sell a pound of, of ground beef at $1.99 and then it's costing you 354.
- [18:36]
Unknown
$5.
- [18:37]
Ben Ferguson
Produce, you're out of business instantly. It all shuts down instantly. You can't, you can't run in deficits like that on end because the government tells you you must sell your dozen eggs for a buck 50 when it's costing you 325 because of grain prices.
- [18:54]
Ted Cruz
That is exactly right. And what you're touching on now is a second very important function of prices. So when I was first laying this out, let me just say as an aside, this is one of the reasons I like doing this podcast, is we actually get into substance. Like, if you're watching the news on cnn, they don't cover substance. They just engage in political propaganda. And this podcast, one of the things I love about our listeners is our listeners run the gamut in terms of age, in terms of experience. So we've got some people that listen to this who are PhD economists and university professors. That's great. They understand everything I'm saying. We've got other people, we have high school kids and even junior high kids who listen to the. We have college students, we have young professionals. We have people, some who study economics, others who are lawyers, others who are doctors, others who are working, mowing lawns. I mean, we have the entire array of, of listeners. What unifies verdict listeners is they actually care about the truth and they want to know the truth. And they're interested. You and I have talked about the fact that my wife Heidi listens regularly to this podcast. Now, I've been married now 23 years. It's not easy to get your wife to listen to anything you do. But the reason she tells me she listens to it.
- [20:12]
Ben Ferguson
I know you know that you just opened me up. Trust me, I'm on the same. We're on the same boat on this one, my friend.
- [20:17]
Ted Cruz
But. But you know why Heidi says she listens to it. She says she learns things. It's actually useful and helpful to her on a topic. And so let's talk about the second function of prices. One is the relative value of one good or service vis a vis another. But another function. How is a price determined? And it's determined. So you learn this when you take Economics 101. Typically, that's like an introductory college course. A price is determined from the intersection of two lines. One line is supply and one line is demand. Now, what does that mean? Let's explain this in simple terms. Let's go back to the fish example. In the fish example, you are, Ben Ferguson is providing the supply of fish. You're out there fishing every day. Now, a price, the supply line is sloped upwards, which means the higher the price, the more fish you're going to supply. Why is that? If fish are suddenly 10 bucks a piece, Ben, you're gonna say, hot diggity damn, people like them. Some fish, maybe sushi became popular. I don't know what it is. They want fish. I sell a fish I get 10 bucks. That means I get to buy all sorts of other stuff I really care about. And so maybe, Ben, you had one fishing boat, but fish went up to $10. You're like, we're going to explain expand supply because this price is really attractive to me. I'm going to go buy me two other boats because I want to make more fish. Because at 10 bucks a fish, it's really profitable. So supply will increase if the price goes up. On the other hand, if the price goes down, if suddenly instead of three bucks for fish, fish is a dollar at a minimum, you're going to say, you know, I'm not interested in investing any more capital in this business. I'm definitely not buying another vote. And I might not even be able to survive in this business because the price has gotten so low. So the price gives a signaling effect to the producers of how much to invest in producing the product. In any business, in any product, there are two and only two inputs, labor and capital. Labor is maybe you hire three other fishermen. That's one way of increasing your production. If you had one fisherman and you hired two more, you're going to produce more fish. Another way of increasing your production is more capital. You get two more boats, that's another way of producing more capital. It is the price that gives you the instantaneous signaling effect. To know, do I need to invest more or less in my fishing business? By the way, if the price stays at 10 bucks a fish, I might decide, screw it with these apples. I'm getting me a boat. I'm getting into the fishing business. I'm tired of a dollar an apple for apples. Now the other line on the graph is the demand curve. And the demand curve slopes downward. And what that means is the higher the price, the less demand. So if fish are a hundred bucks a fish, I may love me some fish, like, oh, it's delicious stuff, I love it. But at a hundred bucks, you know what? I'm eating me apples. I don't want any fish. At a hundred bucks, I can't afford it. Nope, I am not in the fish business if it's a hundred bucks. So in my hypothetical, let's assume at 100 bucks, demand for fish is zero because no one can afford it or it's so high they don't want it. Now as the price of fish gets cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. If fish is three bucks, I may say, alright, I like fish. Maybe I go have fish once a week or twice a week. That's what I feed my family. It's a good choice. And if fish get even cheaper than that, fish drop to a dollar, I might say, you know what? Even though I like beef, if I can't afford beef anymore and fish has suddenly become really expensive, I'm gonna have fish five days a week. And so demand responds to price. The lower price gets, typically the more demand increases. And if you look at it as an economic and mathematical matter, the price is the intersection between those two lines, between supply and demand. Now, why is Kamala Harris's Soviet price fixing such a bad idea? Because history has told us that government bureaucrats, all government bureaucrats, are absolutely terrible at fixing prices. And there's a reason, frankly, nobody is smart enough to do this right. You're not. I'm not. Nobody is. If you look at free enterprise, you look at capitalism, you look at the market, Supply and demand are responding to millions of factors simultaneously to set the price, and those prices change the behavior. So if you're a fisherman and the cost of your inputs go up. Suppose you use fishing nets, and the cost of fishing nets go from $10 to $20. That's an input, you know, and you're like, okay, I got to buy fishing nets. My. My nets are more expensive, so I have to raise the price. You respond instantaneously to that. You know what? Nobody in government is smart enough to know that. And Kamala Harris most certainly is not smart enough to know that. So what happens? What the Soviet Union did all the time is they would set a price, and usually they'd set it too low. Because, by the way, government's incentive is always to give away free stuff. So if a normal free market price for a fish was three bucks, a politician that wants to be popular is going to say, a dollar fish for everyone. Look how generous I am. And what will happen is what you started by saying, Ben, in this hypothetical, if it's a dollar fish and you discover you can't afford the cost of your boat, you can't afford to pay your fishermen, you can't afford to buy nets, you know what you're going to do? You're going to go out of business, and the result is no fish. And we saw that the Soviet Union in their stores, where people would go and they'd want rice, they'd want food, they want beans, they want fish, they'd want apples. And it wasn't there because the government that set the price so low that it put people out of business.
- [26:28]
Ben Ferguson
The other part that is, and I encourage people, show this to your kids and your grandkids you can go back and just google supermarkets in Russia or in the ussr and you can see extremely long lines and zero selection. You got whatever they had and food that you and I would never purchase in the United States of America. In fact, it would never be allowed to be sold in America with our standards that we have. And that became their normal day to day life and reality. That's point number one. But there's also a very interesting part of history here, and it involves, I think in such a cool way, Houston and NASA, with a. The USSR leader, Yeltsin coming to America. And he went to NASA and then he went to a supermarket. It was an unplanned visit to go to this supermarket that was not far from NASA.
- [27:31]
Ted Cruz
And.
- [27:31]
Ben Ferguson
And he was in total amazement at what he saw.
- [27:35]
Ted Cruz
Well, that's exactly right. And so this was. Boris Yeltsin was the President of Russia. It was 1989 and he came to Texas, he came to NASA and then he stopped by a supermarket and he was utterly flabbergasted because he looked at the supermarket and he saw this incredible array of choices. Houston Chronicle reported Yeltsin, then 58 years old, quote, roamed the aisles of Randall's. Randall's was popular supermarket chain in. In Texas and Houston. Nodding his head in amazement, he told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who must often wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, quote, there would be a revolution. And he was utterly flabbergasted. He was used to. And so it describes how Yeltsin asked customers about what they were buying and how much it cost, later asking the store manager if one needed a special education to manage a store. And in the photos in the Houston Chronicle, you can see him marveling at the produce selection, the fresh, the fresh fish market. We were talking about fish. It was literally the price of fish. He's looking at it going, wow, wait, you've got salmon, you got tuna, you've got all these different kinds of fish. And the checkout counter. And he looked especially excited about frozen pudding pops. And here's what he says. He says, quote, even the Politburo doesn't have this choice, not even Mr. Gorbachev. And the fact that there were stores like this on virtually every street corner in America amazed him. They offered him, at Randall's, they offered him free cheese samples. And he was shocked. And it played a real role in America winning the Cold War in convincing him that Soviet style price controls doesn't work. And here, let me read what Yeltsin wrote in his book that he later wrote, quote, when I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort for the first time, I felt quite frankly, sick with despair for the Soviet people that such a potentially super rich country as ours had been brought to a state of such poverty. It is terrible to think about it. And yet that lesson Kamala Harris hasn't learned, none of her left wing little Marxist around her have learned. They just want to promise people $1 fish. And if it doesn't work out and suddenly there's no fish, that's not their problem. You know what they'll do? They'll blame the greedy fisherman. Ben, when you shut down your shop because you can't afford to sell $1 fish, they'll say you're a greedy, voracious capitalist and why are you trying to deny the hungry people their fish? That, sadly, is the same thing Stalin said. And you know what? If Kamala were Stalin, maybe she'd send you to the gulag.
- [30:58]
Ben Ferguson
You look at the fact that in 2024, we are here at this point where it just seems that the new strategy of the left, and I keep saying it because I believe it, I think the Democratic Party's dead. I think they're filled with communists and Marxists and socialists masquerading as Democrats. I think it's another data point to that. But, but when you look at this, it just seems like their new game plan is, okay, if we're down in the polls, we gotta buy votes from a sector. How do we do it? Last time it was all right, we'll just buy votes from people that have student loans.
- [31:31]
Ted Cruz
Right.
- [31:32]
Ben Ferguson
And that, that worked pretty well for them.
- [31:34]
Ted Cruz
Yeah, it was successful. They gave away a trillion dollars they didn't have. It was illegal for them to give. They were lying about it. But they were counting on young people being foolish and gullible and believing it. And at least some did. And by the way, they're trying to repeat that same scam again. They're counting on people being even more gullible. You know, as the old saying goes, there's no learning from the second kick of a mule. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris kicked young people once and they discovered they were lying with the trillion dollar student loan giveaway. They're trying to kick them a second time and they are hoping young voters are foolish enough to be deceived yet again.
- [32:08]
Ben Ferguson
And if they do go through with this, I go back to Obamacare and when it was pretty clear that you know, they weren't joking when they said, we won't know what's in the bill until we pass the bill. Right? And then they did. And then we saw our entire health care system upended overnight. My worry is this could happen that quickly as well, except with even, I think, more catastrophic consequences. Because you look at the big, big grocery stores. They're in business to make money for their shareholders or private equity or families, right? We've already seen the squeezing out of the mom and pop grocery stores because they couldn't compete with the prices of the big dog. So now we have, you know, very few grocers nationwide that have the mass majority of the marketplace. But if Harris gets elected and really implements this idea, you could see these grocery stores being shut down left and right.
- [33:02]
Ted Cruz
And by the way, it will not be uniformly distributed. You know who would be hurt the most by Kamala's proposal for price fixing of food?
- [33:10]
Ben Ferguson
Places where there's already, quote, food deserts and heavy, highly populated minority communities or those that are poor communities as well.
- [33:18]
Ted Cruz
My God, Ben, it's almost like you understand basic economics. Yeah, Kamala doesn't know that. Listen, I know Kamala well. I served with her for many years in the Senate. She has no idea. And you and I didn't rehearse this. I didn't know you'd know that. I just know you're a really bright guy who understands the world. And so I was fairly confident you'd know that she doesn't. If I asked her that same question, she'd like. What do you mean? And listen, understand, even with this price fixing, rich people will be, by and large, all right, Whole foods and fancy neighborhoods will still have really expensive wine and cheese. You may remember when Barack Obama was running for president, at one point he said, have you seen the price of arugula? Which. Which was a fairly amazing level of disconnectedness. All right, I wanna. I wanna test something. Ben, you and I are both guys. I'm gonna guess I don't know this, but I'm gonna guess you're not a huge grocery shopper in the family. How much is a dozen eggs?
- [34:16]
Ben Ferguson
You're gonna laugh. I'm gonna go right now. The ones that have to be, quote, cage free, they're about four bucks at the moment. $3.78.
- [34:24]
Ted Cruz
Okay. You look that up. You didn't know.
- [34:26]
Ben Ferguson
No, you're gonna laugh. This is. I love to cook. That's my. I love to cook. That's why I'd start a barbecue restaurant. So I actually enjoy going to the grocery store.
- [34:36]
Ted Cruz
All right, so that's fascinating. So as I was sitting here, we're getting ready to do this podcast, you may remember George Herbert Walker Bush was famously lambasted because he didn't know how much a gallon of milk was. And he was painted as this out of touch, wealthy guy. Right before we did started recording this pod, I googled how much for a dozen eggs and I think the average price right now is $3.08. But I wasn't googling the cage free, organic, you know, brown, funky eggs. I will say, as a guy, this may shock you, but I am not typically the grocery shopper in our family. I will go grocery shopping on occasion, but it's usually because my daughter is cooking a meal and she's like, dad, will you get me some pasta and tomatoes and garlic? And she'll give me a list and I'll go, I'll go with my list and get it. I do go occasionally get fruit. I like going to the produce thing and getting some nectarines and plums and grapes and cherries and so I'll just kind of collect that. I bought a dozen eggs a number of times before, but I have no friggin clue how much they are. I mean, I just, I, I don't buy eggs very often and so it's just not, it's not front of mind to me. But I will say the idea that you can just magically change it. By the way, Joe Biden did the same thing right before the last election. The price of gasoline. So the price of gasoline has risen massively under Joe Biden. Kamala Harris. Now this was an intended effect. They want the price of gasoline higher. But as they get closer to an election, they realize, oh crap, this is a problem. Because it turns out voters don't like paying more at the pump or paying more at the grocery store. So right before election day, they need a short term fix. So what Joe Biden did last time, number one, he released a bunch of oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that is designed to be there for emergencies. And he did that to increase supply, impacting price, because more supply lowers price. But he also, if you remember, Joe Biden attacked the greedy gas station owners, which is an economic matter, is about as ludicrous as anything you could come up with. Look, if you're owning a gas station, most gas station owners are small business owners. They're often, they own maybe one or two gas stations, many of them in Houston, I suspect across the country. Many of them are immigrants. Many of them, you know, this is their business. Their family works there often. Their kids are working at the gas station too. They are not price makers when it comes to gasoline. They are price takers. They don't have sufficient market influence to, to set the price markedly different from what the price is being set by global supply and demand. But yet Joe Biden, and by the way, the useful idiots in the media, he demagogued those mean greedy capitalists that own gas stations, they're just charging you seven bucks a gallon because they're mean, because they're greedy. And by the way, the premise of this was that during Donald Trump, apparently those capitalists were not greedy. They didn't want money. And it was only when Democrats came to office that they wanted to make a profit. Look, every business owner would love to sell their goods for a higher price, but it is driven by the cost of their inputs and it's driven by demand. Those are the factors they're facing. And what she is doing is the same thing that when the price of food has skyrocketed because of her policies, she can't take the blame for that. So instead she says, the mean mom and pop that owns the little grocery store, they're just robbing you, so I'm going to order them to stop robbing you. And as you noted, the people who are going to pay the most are people in low income neighborhoods where the stores there are often barely scraping by. And if you force them to sell things at below cost, you're gonna drive them out of business and you're gonna end up having people having much fewer choices and real shortages and scarcity. Because when you end up in the scenario where you mandate. Let's go back to my fish hypothetical $1 fish, when the cost of producing a fish is, let's say $2, you end up with no fish because you bankrupt the producers or people decide to do something else. And it's. Why in the Soviet Union or in Venezuela, look, Venezuela, Venezuela used to be the third wealthiest country in the world per capita in 1950, the United States was number one. New Zealand was number two. Venezuela was number three. You look at what Maduro has done, you look at what socialism has done, and by the way, Maduro in Venezuela promised, we're gonna put in place price controls to stop inflation. He had the same proposal Kamala Harris had. Inflation skyrocketed. I think it's something like 1,300% in Venezuela. And people are starving now in Venezuela because the food disappeared. That's how economically illiterate and disastrous her proposal is Want to tell you real.
- [40:00]
Ben Ferguson
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- [42:10]
Ted Cruz
That's exactly right. It's an individual named Omar Shaheda who is accused of explosives and arms use and was caught in Santa Teresa, New Mexico. Omar Shaheda is a Palestinian from Judea and Samaria and he is on the terror watch list for alleged prior use of explosives at arms. He was arrested, the New York Post reported. And let me read from the memo that has been leaked showing the arrest notification of the suspected Palestinian terrorist. The arrest notification says on August 12, 2024 Border Patrol agents assigned to the Santa Teresa Border Patrol station encountered a person with a terror screening. Data sent record at approximately 1:10am Agents apprehended a group of seven individuals who illegally entered the United States from Mexico near Santa Teresa, New Mexico. During processing, research revealed that Omar Nawaf Issa Shaheda was a possible match to a terror watch list record. Border patrol agents at the National Targeting center generated an NTC event. Shaheda was confirmed to be a positive match and is watch listed as a category 15 used explosives arms. Global APIs revealed that Sheda traveled from Madrid, Spain to Bogota, Colombia on a flight with a connecting flight to Panama City and that Shaheda arrived in San Salvador, El Salvador on a flight. And Shaheda is currently being held. He was encountered as a single adult. Now this is a pattern. Weeks earlier, three other suspected Palestinian terrorists were caught at the California border. Those, and we talked about that, those three on this podcast. Previously one of them had a photo on their phone including pictures of a masked man holding an AK47 rifle. Kamala Harris, the border czar is responsible for an open border that continues to be a magnet inviting terrorists to come into this country. And in fact an alert that was issued by the Border patrol said quote, individuals inspired by or reacting to the current Israel Hamas conflict may attempt to travel to or from the area of hostilities in the Middle east via circuitous transit across the southwest border. This is what Kamala Harris open border is doing to us.
- [44:57]
Ben Ferguson
You look at this and you put it together with the fact that they say she's not the border czar. And then she says, oh, I'm doing everything I can to protect you at the border. It doesn't match up. It's just lie after lie after lie after lie. And you look at these, these gang leaders that are arrested, you look at the children that are being assaulted. Unfortunately, now it's on a weekly basis. We also know, and I think we should just remind people that the system is so broken now that the administration has just been busted handing kids over to non family members. Okay, non family members lost track. Within a month, a third of the kids are handed over to their quote, sponsors who are non family members with no response and no follow up from the federal government. So in other words, they hand a child over to a non family member. They call 30 days later to check in. No one answers, no one's talking to them and they can't find the kid. And that's apparently happening with at least a third of the kids that they're bringing into this country. That is pure evil.
- [46:04]
Ted Cruz
It is pure evil. And I'll tell you, the New York Times is even reporting on this. And they're reporting Javier Becerra, who is the Secretary of Health and Human Services. He has no background in health care. He has no background. He's not a physician. He doesn't know anything about healthcare. But what he is is a radical left wing lawyer who was the Attorney General of California. And that's who Joe Biden and Kamala Harris wanted in charge of hhs. And HHS is the one that deals with unaccompanied minors. And we've seen an explosion of unaccompanied minors coming into this country because Joe Biden, Kamala Harris opened up the border and it ended up with a lot of little boys and a lot of little girls being trafficked in by human traffickers, being abused, many of them physically, many of them sexually. But then when they get here, the Biden administration had a problem. And they had a problem because they wanted to avoid kids in cages. They had made a huge deal of it under Donald Trump, never mind that the actual cages were built by Barack Obama. But they wanted to avoid the bad optics of having kids in cages under Joe Biden. So what they did is they began releasing young people and releasing them to adults who couldn't pass basic background checks. And when people in the system said, wait, we don't know who these adults are. We don't know if they're bad people. We don't know if they're looking for kids to work in child labor and slave labor. We don't know if they're violent. We don't know if they want to abuse the kids. You know what Javier Becerra said? Shut up and release them faster. And so let me read from the Wall Street Journal. This is an article on July 8th in the Wall Street Journal. In 2021, when the new Biden administration was struggling to cope with a sudden influx of unaccompanied migrant children at the US Mexico border, the government repeatedly overrode the concerns of lower level workers who warned about placing them in certain households. Documents and interviews show, quote, it does not appear safe for the minor to be released to a home environment that was not fully assessed. A caseworker wrote about a child slated to live in a hostile like home in Florida with at least three adults. A few days later, an official dismissed the recommendation to reject the proposed guardian. According to internal government memos at another facility in Pomona, California, about 30 miles east of Los Angeles. More than 100 children that summer were sent to temporary guardians who were issued denials early in the process by case coordinators, according to a review of internal government data that tracks unaccompanied children, emails and other communications and interviews with caseworkers. About two dozen more denials were overturned because of clerical errors or issues such as missing fingerprints that were resolved, record show. But many of the others were approved with scant details explaining why. And stunningly, the Wall Street Journal couldn't determine what happened to the children after they left the facility. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have lost over 80,000 children that came as unaccompanied minors to this country. They don't know where they are. They don't know who has them. They don't know what has happened to the kids. And you know what? Kamala Harris has zero interest in finding the answer to that. She will never talk about it, mind you. She was the border czar. She still is. And yet losing 80,000 children apparently doesn't concern her at all.
- [49:45]
Ben Ferguson
Yeah, and there doesn't seem to be accountability for this either. Is there anything that Congress can do now, knowing what we just learned in that report?
- [49:55]
Ted Cruz
There's a lot Congress can do, but in the Senate, the Senate will do none of it. And the reason is the Democrats who are in the majority in the Senate do not care. I've raised this issue repeatedly in the Judiciary Committee. You know what? Democrats in charge Judiciary. We have not had a single hearing in four years on the crisis at our southern border. We've had multiple hearings on the Democrats desire to grant amnesty to illegal aliens. We have not had a hearing in Judiciary on the 80,000 kids that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris has lost because the Democrats want to cover it up. And listen, we know that some significant number of those individuals are in child labor work sites, are being abused, are being physically abused, are being sexually abused. If you look, for example, I'm gonna go back to the Wall Street Journal article that says following an internal investigation, the inspector general for the US Department of Health and Human Services, which oversaw a network of shelters caring for unaccompanied minors, found gaps in the process to screen temporary guardians in it's. It said in February that 16%. 16% of records for children who were released to sponsors in March and April 2021 lacked evidence that a required safety check was conducted. Quote, although well intentioned, these sites were unregulated and unsafe, said Neha Desai, the senior director of immigration at the National center for youth law, there was enormous pressure placed on the sites to rapidly release children from custody. And the Biden Harris administration pressed them to release at these emergency shelters, caseworkers were told to discharge children within 10 to 14 days. And so they released kids without knowing if the people they were giving them to were dangerous, without knowing what was happening. And yet, tragically, the result is many kids suffered horrific mistreatment.
- [52:03]
Ben Ferguson
It is election year issue. And this is what I hope the Trump administration, the Trump team, I should say is going to do, is to lay out much of what we have laid out here for the American people to hear. Because it is such shocking news when you listen to the reports, and this is reports from our own government that are stating this people are losing their jobs because they're trying to protect the kids. And they said if you don't move them through the system fast enough for us, then you can find another job. You're done here. I'll find you.
- [52:34]
Ted Cruz
It is politics over people. And that is the consistent pattern of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It's always, always, always politics. And if people have to die, if women have to be sexually assaulted, if children have to be brutalized, they're willing to look the other way if they believe there's a political benefit for the Democrats.
- [52:53]
Ben Ferguson
Don't forget, we do the show Monday, Wednesday and Friday. We do a week in review of what you may have missed during the week on Saturdays as well. So make sure you hit that subscribe or auto download button. And those in between days, grab my podcast, the Ben Ferguson Podcast. I'll keep you up to date on the latest breaking news. The senator and I will see you back here Saturday morning for the week in review.