Ben Shapiro (11:49)
Okay, so again, Democrats are betting that it's all going to fall apart for President Trump and Carville suggestion is rooted in the fact that President Trump's approval ratings have slid from the mid-50s in some of the polls down to the mid-40s. And some of the polls, that was always likely to happen because again, the country is indeed quite polarized. But massive collapse doesn't appear to be on the horizon unless, unless there is some sort of serious economic problem. And that is why the central focus of the Trump administration right now must be on bringing down inflation. It must be on economic growth. That's what the central focus has to be on. Yes, we want to see President Trump keep all of his promises, and he will with regard to immigration. Sure, we would like to see President Trump bring an end to the war in Ukraine in a reasonable fashion. But the thing that Americans care most about this is true of the election, it's true of nearly every election is their economic wellbeing. And there are some blinking red lights that are on the horizon here. One of those blinking red lights comes courtesy of Warren Buffett. So Warren Buffett is now holding extraordinary amounts of cash. Warren Buffett, his Berkshire Hathaway is holding 320 billion billion in cash and treasury bills. And the reason for that is he's looking at all the various areas of possible investment and he's saying they're already overvalued. Essentially what he's saying is that we are in a bubble right now. And it is hard to look at, for example, the stock market where the price earnings ratio is way out of whack. The price earnings ratio just means the price of the stock as opposed to the earnings of companies. Right now, the average in the Dow Jones industrial average is 26 times the, the price of stocks are 26 times the annual earnings of those companies. A normal distribution would be like 16, 18, 26 is way out of whack. And at the very top end of the spectrum, those top seven companies that everybody talks about, those companies are at a PE ratio of something like 46. So those are overvalued. So Berkshire Hathaway is saying we're not gonna sink more money into that. At the same time, the real estate market is also inflated because the interest rates are, have been, have been high for a while. And there are a bunch of people who are holding on to their houses because they don't want to sell them and then get into a higher interest rate mortgage. And so that means is a sort of artificially limited supply while demand remains at sort of even keel. Now, when that happens, you end up with a real estate bubble because fewer people are selling their homes and the demand has remained the same. So you have a bit of a real estate bubble, which is likely to break at some point. You have a stock market bubble, which is likely to break at some point. These are the worries the Trump administration has on its mind. And beyond all that inflation is driving both of those things because the currency was inflated so much over the course of Joe Biden's tenure, because of the velocity of the money that was injected into the economy under Joe Biden and in the latter days of the Trump administration, because of that, there's so much money chasing goods that inflation remains at 3% right now, which is 50% higher than the Federal Reserve generally seeks. And that means that the interest rates are unlikely to come down, which means that it's tougher to get a loan. At the same time, even if you got a loan, you wouldn't actually want to spend your money on inflated assets. And so you have a bit of a sticky patch here for the American economy. And the only way to truly unstick it is with productivity gains. That is the only way to truly unstick this is more competition, less regulation, more investment in newer things. The productivity gains of AI have not actually made themselves manifest in the generalized market as of yet. There are tens of billions of dollars chasing AI. The problem, of course, is that aside from using AI for kind of everyday searches on the Internet, most people aren't using AI yet to make their businesses more efficient and more effective. There's a sort of gap between the quality of the technology and the adaptivity of that technology to. To your normal, everyday business workings. Most people aren't using it in their businesses as of yet in a major way. So productivity gains have not matched the investment. It's one of the reasons, for example, why companies like Nvidia have a massive valuation right now, because people are pouring tons of money into the semiconductors produced by Nvidia in order to build up AI. But again, the productivity gains from AI in the general workplace are not apparent as of yet. If they make themselves apparent, then we can outgrow all of this, or at least a large part of this. But in the meantime, what can the Trump administration do? They need to take a hammer to the regulations. And this is where we need to talk a little bit about Doge. So what Doge is doing right now is wonderful in a large number of ways. Y'all know I'm a big fan of the Department of Governmental Efficiency, as well as what Elon Musk is attempting to do. And one of the things Elon Musk is attempting to do is he's really targeting personnel in a very serious way inside the executive branch. So over the weekend, Elon Musk's Doge sent out an email to 2.3 million government workers asking that they justify their work. He basically said, give us five things you did over the course of the last week, and if you can't, then we may fire you. A bunch of the various agencies, again run by Trump appointees are saying, you know, you really don't have to do that. Like, some of these departments probably have to do it, but other departments not so, for example, in HHS, RFK Jr. Has instructed his people that they probably should in fact respond to Elon's email. They put out an email suggesting, quote, this is a legitimate email. Please read and respond per the instructions by Monday. And again, HHS is the largest single department inside the federal government. But there are other parts of the federal government, particularly in the intelligence community or the defense community, where it's not clear they're going to answer those emails. Why? Because it turns out that if you have a bunch of sort of long term projects in the intelligence community, you can't just write that in an email and send it to Elon's team. This is why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has instructed personnel in US Spy agencies not to respond. According to the text of an email she sent to the workforce on Sunday, citing the agency's sensitive and classified work. Defense Department employees were given similar instructions not to respond. And again, what Elon is focusing on is breaking the pipeline of money that moves between the federal government and a bunch of sort of blue areas of the economy. But it is very important at this point to recognize that when it comes to doge, DOGE alone is not going to solve the fiscal problems. DOGE is not changing the regulations. Right. That's not what DOGE is doing. DOGE is going in and finding waste, fraud and abuse. But as I've been saying for literally months, waste, fraud and abuse amount to a negligible, a very small percentage of actual federal spending. Unless you're talking about the giant wasteful programs that are, for example, means tested welfare programs, and you're talking about absolutely restructuring those programs in a more beneficial way. You are just cutting around the edges. And even the sorts of things that we like to see, even those sorts of things, are not, in fact going to materialize into gigantic cuts. The Wall Street Journal did an investigation into what DOGE has actually cut at this point. And again, there's been a lot of talk about what DOGE has cut, how much they've cut. DOGE has suggested that they've cut $55 billion in federal spending, citing canceled DEI and climate contracts. And again, all of that is good. Okay, first of all, $55 billion as a percentage of the American national budget every year is a very, very small percentage of America's budget every year, like in the last year of the Biden administration, we spent approximately $7 trillion. $55 billion would represent 1 127th of that. It's a very, very small percentage of the federal budget. But beyond that, it hasn't actually cut all of that. So the Wall Street Journal looked at what the contracts actually are cutting, and what they found is that the savings from contracts amounted to about $7 billion. And the Journal projects the actual savings could be closer to $2.6 billion over the next year if the spending levels remain consistent. Only about 2% of those funds would have gone to contracts related to dei. So you're talking again about very small amounts. In the end now, it's very good to talk about waste, fraud and abuse. It's good to change in sort of public perception the meaning of what government spending is. But the really big things that need to happen if you actually wanna unshackle the economy, if you actually wanna see productivity gains, if you wanna see business growth, if you want to see the economy boom, what you actually need to do is target precisely the kinds of programs that no one is politically willing to target. Now, listen, in this informational environment, there is a lot of information floating around. Some of it's true, some of it's not so true. How many times have you heard somebody spout off opinions as if those were cold, hard facts? The media tend to spin, politicians distort, social media amplifies, and somehow the truth just gets lost somewhere? It's pretty frustrating. We live in a world where narratives often matter more than reality. But here's the thing. The data don't lie. And if you want the data, you need a USAFact.org USA fact isn't about narratives. It's about data. Real, nonpartisan, verifiable data straight from government sources. Whether it's taxes, healthcare, or the economy, USA Facts gives you the numbers you need to cut through the nonsense and make informed decisions. And to make it easy, go to USAFacts.org, sign up for their free weekly email that you can rely on to get the data behind the news. It's like a personal briefing on the state of the nation delivered directly to your inbox. No spin, no bias, just the facts. Look, you care about how our government money is being spent, where your taxes are going? This is for you. Go to USAFacts.org right now. Get clear, contextualized facts on the issues that matter. It's time to know the facts, because data don't lie. That's USAFacts.org check it out today, USA facts.org also, let me tell you something. I didn't realize when I had that bad old mattress how bad it was until I got my Helix mattress. You know that feeling where you wake up and your back is already griping at you? Well, that was me more often than not. 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That's helixsleep.com Ben for 27% off site wide Again, just visit helixleep.com Ben for this exclusive offer. That's helixleep.com Ben the single most important op ed of the last five years was penned by House Budget Committee Chairman Jodi arrington and former U.S. senator Phil Graham back in September of last year. And it talked about what is actually driving America's systemic national debt, what is driving our national deficit. And the answer, believe it or not, is not even Social Security and Medicare alone. Because the vast majority of Social Security and Medicare are actually paid for by payroll taxes doesn't mean that they're not a huge drain on our economy, they are. Because taxes are a giant drain on our economy. And Social Security and Medicare in and of themselves are wildly inefficient. If we took the money that people are putting into payroll taxes and instead put it into the Dow Jones Back in 2006, we George W. Bush was suggesting the stock market has risen times four since then, but the actual systemic drivers of the debt, as Arrington and Phil Graham pointed out back in September, are actually in the means tested Social welfare spending programs, precisely the things that neither party actually wants to touch. Things like Medicaid, food stamps, refundable tax credits, Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, federal housing subsidies, and almost 100 other programs whose eligibility is limited to to those below an income threshold. And one of the points that Graham and Arrington make in this op ed is that since 1967, defense spending has fallen from 68% of unobligated general revenue to 37.2% in 2023. So we were spending way more on these means tested welfare programs. As defense spending plummeted, they write, swords were not beaten into playo shares which would have increased economic growth and wages, but instead were used to fund welfare payments. Today the United States redistributes a larger share of its GDP 29.4% through transfers and taxes than any other developed country on planet earth except France at 30.1%. And in fact, this is an unbelievable statistic. After counting all transfer payments as income to the recipients and taxes as income lost by taxpayers, and adjusting for household size, the average households in the bottom, second and middle quintiles all have the same income. And so we are such a redistributionist country that if you're in the bottom 60% of income earners, you're all basically making the same income because so much money has been redistributed from the top 40% to the bottom 60%. And if you're in the bottom 20%, you're actually making the same amount of money as a guy who's in like the middle quintile of income because of all the transfer payments. It's driving people out of work. It's ensuring that the massive national debt gets larger. We are now paying more interest on our national debt than we are paying for our actual defense budget every single year. Something that Neil Ferguson has pointed out is a mark of a declining empire. These things cost things, but these are the hard things. What's actually gonna bring long lasting success is not gonna be cutting around the edges, it's not gonna be posturing. What's actually gonna bring long lasting success is the politically difficult thing. And if nobody's willing to do it, then basically we're just gonna end up in this sort of progressive, this progressive populist horseshoe where despite all the talk about innovation, government just continues to grow and eat up an increasing portion of Americans earnings and savings, where a smaller and smaller percentage of the population is actually working while the government continues to spiral out of control in terms of growth and where productivity does not actually outpace all of the spending of government and the taxation of government. That is the problem that is faced by President Trump. Now, the easy thing for Democrats is that when things fall down because of all these giant programs that they themselves have enshrined, they just claim capitalism failed. This is the magic of being a Democrat. The magic of being on the side of the blue is that when government screws up the economy to the point where there's a collapse, they immediately turn around and blame capitalism. This is exactly what happened in 2007, 2008, during the real estate crisis. Bill Clinton and the Democrats rammed through particular government mortgage programs that were designed to allow people with bad credit or no credit to get into homes at subprime rates in order to make home ownership more equitable. And in the end, all of that went bust. And then capitalism got blamed. Well, the same thing could easily happen right here and it could take free markets right along with it. That is the big danger. And so at some point, Congress particularly is going to have to pick up the bag here and President Trump is going to have to start pushing for some real systemic change on the regulatory side. He's gonna have to push for some real systemic change when it comes to these means tested welfare programs. Again, the kind of stuff that populists like, but that actually is eating up a giant chunk of the American budget every single year. If the premise of the current American political moment is that we are in a moment of scarcity, which is true, that we have scarce resources, that we are in danger of being out produced by countries like China, that the American budget is too large, that our tax burden is too high, we're spending too much money. You have to look at the right places, because if you look at the wrong places, you're not going to solve the problem. And then things will go bad. And then James Carville's predictions will start to come true. Now, meanwhile, over in Germany, fascinating election, and this seems to be the pattern all across Europe is that the center right party wins and then refuses to make common cause with the actual right wing party in its respective country. You see this over and over and over. That fear of the quote, unquote far right is leading center right parties to join with center left parties and then undermine their own credibility, which leads concomitantly to the rise of that supposed far right. So right now in Germany, the results are pretty fascinating. Friedrich Mears is the clear winner of the German election. According to the Wall Street Journal, the question for the conservative leader is how fast and with whom he can cobble together a government and whether the United States will seek to influence the process. Despite a historically strong showing by anti establishment nationalists in a ballot that extended Europe's recent lurch to the right, MERS Christian Democratic Union scored a comfortable victory once all ballots had been counted. This means that MERS this week will start talks on forming a government, at the end of which he's likely to become Germany's next chancellor. But the way there could be really, really rocky because basically the breakdown was this. The CDU and its CSU sister party in Bavaria obtained 28.5% of the vote. Coming in second was the alternative for Germany. This is the party that Elon Musk has been pushing, among others. AFD came in at 20.8%. And actually, if you look at an electoral map of Germany, it's absolutely fascinating. Basically every province that was a part of East Germany voted for AfD because they hate the Communists so much. And every province that was in West Germany voted for the CDU because they're sort of moderate right. Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democratic Party absolutely collapsed. They scored 16.4%. That's the worst score since the late 19th century. The question for MERS is how he's going to put together a coalition because MERS originally said he didn't want to side with the AfD. So the AfD has been slandered, in my opinion, as a quote unquote, neo Nazi party. I see no evidence that the party itself is a neo Nazi party. Its platform looks very much like the platform of the Republican Party in the United States, although more populist on economics and probably less free market oriented, which is weird because when it was founded, it was founded as a libertarian party. The AfD, of course, has people who are hangers on and associates and people who are involved with the party who have expressed neo Nazi tendencies. But those people are both rare and not in positions of high leadership inside the AfD. The AfD's success is being driven in large part by opposition to immigration, which originally was led by the cdu. Right. Originally that was Angela Merkel's proposal to let in millions of Syrians, Syrian refugees into the country. And it completely wrecked the entire body politic in Europe. Well, the CDU has now turned on immigration not in the same way as the AfD. The AfD has turned on immigration in a much more public way. So the question is going to be whether the CDU will sit with the AFD or whether they're going to turn back to Olaf Scholes and try to get together with Olaf Scholes. So if the CDU decides to try and side with the center left, this will be very much reminiscent of what has been happening in France where Emmanuel Macron's party refused to form a coalition with the Marine Le Pen National Rally, the supposed far right party in France, which again has a program very similar to AfD. And instead they decided they were going to try and side with Jean Luc Mellishon, who's a nutcase socialist crazy person. And Macron has destroyed his own popularity in the process. And the right is rising again. Here is the reality. If in a coalitional system in Europe, your party, your center right party sides with the left, it will not be perceived by the public as a move toward right wing moderation. It will be perceived as a move toward the left and away from, from the actual principles for which people voted. The truth is that the mandate in Germany is for there to be a right wing government in which the AFD is a partner. AfD co leader Alice Fidel said, quote, our hand is extended to implement the will of the people. Again, very hard to imagine a neo Nazi party led by a lesbian who's in a relationship with a Sri Lankan woman. Okay? That's who Alice Vidal is. She said the CDU just needs to take it, otherwise a change in policy Germany won't be possible. Merce has already said he would under no circumstances form a ruling union with the AFD suda. David Wilp, the Vice President of External affairs at the German Marshall Fund in the United States, said, quote, friedrich Mers would be loath to work with the AfD. Pressure from the United States is unlikely to sway him. The problem, of course, is that the Olaf Scholz party is now saying they don't want to side with cdu. So it may be that if Olaf Scholz rejects it, then that will give me the possibility of opening up again. Back to AfD. It'll be fascinating to see because here's the thing. If there is no immigration crackdown in Germany, AFD will continue to gain ground and they should. Meanwhile, in other international news, obviously tragic things happening with regard to Pope Francis. Pope Francis has been in the hospital for several days at this point. As you know, I'm not a fan of the Pope, but everybody should pray for his health. Nonetheless, Pope Francis remained in critical condition on Sunday. Blood tests showed early kidney failure. He remains alert, responsive and attended Mass. According to The Vatican, the 88 year old pontiff is battling pneumonia and a complex lung infection. Of course, he is quite ill and he is quite old. And, you know, everybody in the Catholic Church is aware that these are probably the last days of Pope Francis. Unclear exactly who is going to take over. Obviously there will be a conclave. I assume it will not be spoiler alert an intersex person like in the idiotic movie conclave. But it'll be fascinating to see which direction the Catholic Church swerves toward. Pope Francis has led the Catholic Church in a very left wing liberation theology direction. I think it has been not beneficial for the Catholic Church. I think it has undermined its raise on debt. I think that he has sidelined many of the key causes of the Catholic Church in a modernizing left wing world in favor of conciliatory positions on some of the most controversial issues in the international community. And that has been an idiotic move. I think the Catholic Church, if it's gonna represent anything, ought to represent the eternal values upon which it was based. And those are largely social values. And they have a lot less to do with, say, redistributionism and environmentalism and putting cathias on baby Jesus. All things that apparently Pope Francis was in favor of. So obviously prayers for his health despite our disagreements. But we will see in very short order in which direction the Catholic Church wishes to move. Joining us now on the show to discuss is the host of the Michael Knowles show, and, you know, a Catholic who. I know, Michael Knowles. So let's start with, you know, what actually happens if Pope Francis should pass. And despite all of my disagreements with Pope Francis, obviously all our prayers are with him in a time of travail. If he should pass, then the conclave begins. I assume, according to the movies, we select an intersex pope is my understanding. But what is the actual sort of process? Who's making up the College of Cardinals at this point? Who are sort of the likely front runners for the possible papacy?
