Federal Budget Lies: The Hidden Redistribution | Richard Stern DSH #834

My thing with taxes is I wish I could actually see where it's going to.

I really don't know if it's helping anyone.

It's not, right?

They don't want you to know.

Everybody could see where their dollars are going.

Nobody would want to pay taxes anymore.

Let me tell you something.

Almost all the federal budget goes to some form of wealth redistribution.

$4.2 trillion stolen from hardworking Americans.

Where does it go?

Nobody knows.

All right, guys, Richard Stern here today, Director for Budget Policy at Heritage.

Thanks for coming on, man.

Thank you for having me on.

Yeah, you gave a great talk to everyone.

So I appreciate that.

Definitely appreciate it as well.

Yeah,

people, we need people like you that can dive into the numbers and, you know, explain what's actually going on because you can't really find that stuff on the traditional media, right?

Well, you know, I think that's part of the problem, right?

Is the left is good at getting to empathy.

And you talk to the right and half the time it's not in English.

It's in gobbledygook that no one can understand.

So I definitely appreciate it.

I try to spend a lot of my time and focus doing exactly that, which is how do you break this down?

How do you put it into a language that most people understand in their day-to-day lives?

Absolutely.

So that being said, what are the most concerning findings you're dealing with right now?

So I think we all know inflation is just off the charts.

It's impacting everybody.

But I think the real thing that people don't really hear enough of is that inflation is not just some random thing in the background.

It's certainly not corporate greed.

As if corporations discovered greed conveniently just a couple of years ago.

Inflation is a tax.

Inflation is imposed by the government printing money, siphoning the purchasing power out of your dollars dollars and handing it to government bureaucrats.

So when you pay higher prices at the pump, pay higher prices at grocery stores, you are paying a tax that no legislator voted for and you're not filing.

Right.

And you did a great job of explaining how money today isn't the same when we were growing up.

No, thanks.

Yeah.

So let me tell you this.

Before the Federal Reserve was created, your dollar, the dollar then was worth 31 and a half times what it is now.

So if you put 31 and a half dollars on a table today, that is what a dollar was worth before the federal

1913.

Wow, it's been 100 years, basically.

100 years.

We have lost 97 and changed percent of the value of the dollar in that 100 plus years.

And again, it's a tax.

That is all just the federal government printing that money, devaluing the purchasing power out of your dollars, siphoning the purchasing power over to them.

And that's where you've gotten all of the crap and all the other things that the federal government's funded in those last hundred years.

All right, let's get into some of those fundings.

I mean, we're funding so many different wars.

It's crazy, right?

It's absolutely absurd.

But, you know, that's part of it again, right?

You work hard.

Every American goes to work.

You're hoping to produce things in service to the rest of the community, to the rest of the nation.

And you're right.

The government takes hundreds of billions of those dollars and wastes it on a manner of things.

I give you one stat on this one right here.

The government has spent about $173 billion of your dollars producing military equipment for Ukraine for a war that has no importance to the American public.

But you know what that is?

It's about $1,300

stolen from every American household.

Wow.

Money they could have used, money that would be important to them.

And you know what?

That's money that victims of Helene and Milton could use right now.

FEMA's giving out $900 checks, $750 checks to those victims.

We gave $12,000 per Ukrainian family to them.

Crazy.

And that's, yeah, I don't see the benefit of that funding that personally.

Absolutely.

But again, you know, part of this is there's this cartel in DC that gets wealthy off of stealing from everybody else.

They're the ones that really pocket that profit off of taking that money from you, taking it out of every hardworking family in the country and using it to give this foreign aid.

One of my favorite quotes is actually from Ron Paul, which is that foreign aid is taking money from poor people in wealthy countries and handing it to rich people in poor countries.

That's crazy.

So when you say getting wealthy, they're giving the money to Ukraine, but somehow figuring out ways to make some money off it, right?

Right.

Oh, it says about half the money money we've given Ukraine is in the form of cash, but the other half of it actually is, in effect, gift cards.

Gift cards you can only redeem at, you've guessed it, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon.

So they're the ones getting the profit off of it, off of your dollars.

Wow.

That's so nuts.

Yeah.

My thing with taxes is I wish I could actually see where it's going to, because I'm paying six figures a year at least, and I really don't know if it's helping anyone.

It's not, right?

And that's part of the whole deal, right?

They don't want you to know because if everybody could see where their dollars are going, nobody would want to pay taxes anymore.

You know, the left has this around the barrel.

They're always saying, well, what do you want to cut?

The roads, the post office.

Let me tell you something.

That's almost none of the budget.

Almost all the federal budget goes to some form of wealth redistribution.

Wow.

Right now, so let me tell you this, Dad.

If you wanted to end poverty in America, and this wouldn't be a long-term solution, but if you just said to me, look, Richard, I want to write a check to every household in America that's poor.

It's at least for one year, bring them out of poverty.

You could do that for about $2 trillion.

The federal government currently spends $4.2 trillion a year on wealth redistribution.

That's twice what you would need to end poverty.

And that is $4.2 trillion stolen from hardworking Americans.

Where does it go?

Nobody knows.

So crazy.

And you see Kamala raising over a billion for her campaign.

Exactly right.

And that's, of course, you know, you've got Pelosi with a $25 million mansion.

You got Biden who's worth $100 million.

We know where some of this money goes, right?

You look at the, have you seen that graphic of the before and after net worths of presidents?

Oh, of course.

And the only one that lost money is Trump.

Only one, yep.

Public servant, right?

Right.

And that's how politics used to be, right?

Exactly right.

Because, you know, it used to be, frankly, I mean, before 1913, you know, 1913 is a very interesting year.

We didn't just create the Fed.

We created the income tax and we got rid of election to the Senate from the state governments, right?

So we moved to a regime where you've got election of senators, so they're divorced from state interests and the creation of the income tax and the creation of the Fed all in the same year.

Crazy.

Is that when the IRS was made too, 1913?

Wow.

So what were you doing before that?

So before that, honestly, the federal government was very small.

We actually had tariffs, frankly, that funded most of the federal expenditures.

But you know, the federal government at the time, there wasn't really that much of a standing military, right?

We had a small standing military, good enough to defend the country.

There were some road systems and ports that were federally funded.

But truth to be told, almost nothing was done by the federal government.

Crazy.

It maintained your natural rights.

It maintained a court system.

It maintained the borders.

We had a more sealed border than we have today.

We didn't have millions of migrants and drug cartels floating across the border.

It worked, right?

Somehow, as the government's gotten larger and stolen more and more of our money, hasn't turned into prosperity for the rest of the country.

Do you think it's possible to ever go back to that one day?

I definitely do.

You don't?

So, you know, I'll tell you this, right?

I think, you know, we kind of lose sight of this a lot, right?

But the Founding Fathers left the most powerful, wealthiest country on the planet, the British Empire, precisely to get away from an autocratic government that stole the value of everybody that worked hard to make a country devoted to freedom, to respecting everybody's ability to chase their passions, to build prosperity, not just for themselves, but their free communities.

At the time, it looked like a dumb idea.

We were a small, tiny country on the other side of the world.

They didn't know that they would give rise to the most advanced, most powerful, wealthiest country on the planet.

They did because they followed their convictions and those principles.

We've done it before.

We can do it again again to get rid of that government.

That'd be amazing.

But the IRS just hired a lot of agents, so I don't know if that's happening anytime soon.

They did.

In fact, the left just gave them $80 billion under Biden to hire an army that is larger than the Union Army at Gettysburg.

Whoa.

Yes.

Just to come beat down the doors of churches and nonprofits and businesses across the country

to milk them for every dime they have got.

Are you a believer that these government agencies are being weaponized?

Absolutely.

But, you know, Truth Patrol, they're being weaponized.

They started as weapons, weapons, right?

You know, Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education.

You might think the Department of Ed is an old department.

It's not.

Created 50 years ago.

And by the way, the U.S.

had the highest education outcomes before the creation of the Department of Ed.

We're now in the middle of the pack, if not the bottom of the pack, for wealthy countries.

And so the Department of Ed was created, right, as a way of siphoning power away from families.

frankly as a way of stealing children away from their parents, of exporting the transmission of culture from parents to kids to now the government indoctrination camps.

Sorry, I mean the public school system to your kids.

So, you know, honestly, most of these agencies were created as weapons.

So what I say is they've just continued being weaponized, but they were already weapons to begin with.

That is so crazy.

So when our parents went to school, they weren't part of the Department of Education.

They were not, in fact.

And they were pretty smart generation boomers.

Well, and think about it, right?

I mean, you think of all of the inventions that made America great, the electrification, eventually the light bulb, computers, all of these things things we think of, the creation of the steel industry, auto industry, all of it was done before there was a federal department of education.

What have we had since then?

A dilapidated industrial base, slowing economic growth, wages not keeping up.

Suspiciously, more the government gets involved, the more and more poverty there is.

And that is the theme throughout all of human history.

I'm really impressed you have this take as someone that you know, strives himself on education.

Like you went to college and got a degree and everything, right?

Absolutely.

So when did you start realizing this?

So honestly, I was raised as a liberal, actually.

So I was drinking the Kool-Aid on the other side.

But, you know, part of this is I got into politics because I wanted to help people, you know, generally wanted to help people live their best life to do the things they cared about.

And, you know, the more I got into it, the more I studied economics and history, what I really came to realize is these liberal solutions with air quotes aren't solutions at all.

They just cause more suffering.

So kind of going from college into starting my life here in DC, I really got to see that and said, there's got to be a better way.

And I found conservatives.

Wow.

Wow.

Love it.

So I had this viral episode last week.

Do you know David Pac-Man?

Yeah.

So he came on the show.

He's not a fan of Trump's tariffs.

So I'd love to hear your take on it because that clip got a lot of views.

So how do you feel about it?

Yeah, absolutely.

So I'll tell you this.

I'm not generally speaking a fan of tariffs.

Normally, I think that they are taxed on consumers, but there's a nuance about this that everybody is missing.

So the way the tax code currently, the grand U.S.

tax code currently works, is we actually subsidize foreign imports right now.

So if you produce things domestically in the U.S., U.S., you face higher taxation rates.

And if you produce things here that you then want to export to other countries, you face doubly higher tax rates.

So the truth is, the conversation at the moment on tariffs is pretending like it's an even playing field and then we would put extra taxes on top.

That's not really the case at all.

So you really can use, if you're careful about it, you can actually use tariff policy to right to that imbalance and get to a tax system that is truly neutral on domestic American production.

So there's something called a border adjustment tax.

Won't bore your audience with all the wonkery of it, but it's a way of aligning the tax base so that you get to zero tax penalty on domestic production and you get rid of that double taxation of U.S.

exports going abroad.

Got it.

That's a good take.

I haven't heard that side of things.

Thank you.

Well, thanks.

Well, and honestly, it's something that doesn't get talked a lot about.

And, you know, to be fair, Trump is not very sophisticated in the way he's talking about it.

But really, at the end of the day, that's the underpinning of it.

So if we did this, you'd fix that imbalance that frankly has been part of the cause of draining manufacturing out of the U.S.

for decades.

Got it.

We'll end off with this, and we're going to send everyone's answers on this question to Trump today, actually.

If you could tell Trump anything or ask him any question, what would it be?

So if I could tell him anything or if I could ask him anything,

I'd impress upon him to really go to the American public and be frank with them that government spending is the real burden of the government.

I think he's done a great job to flush out to really showcase the DC cartel.

But I think it's important to impress upon everybody that that every time the government commits to spend a dollar, it is committing to steal a dollar.

The woke stuff that we're all looking at is just the last step of the process.

The real burden, the real crushing weight on wages and economic opportunity is the $10 trillion a year that governments in the U.S.

spend.

It is the $35 trillion,

$260,000 per household debt that the U.S.

has.

Love it.

Thanks for coming on, Richard.

Thank you as always.

Yep.

Pleasure.

Peace.