Best of The Program | Guest: Hayden Dublois | 8/3/21
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Welcome to the podcast.
Today, it's a big show.
We go over what's in this infrastructure bill a lot.
We also have what's going on in Afghanistan as we're pulling out.
No surprise, the Taliban is coming in and brutalizing the population.
We will go into that today.
We also
will talk about the Andrew Cuomo allegations.
The big report has come out now and is,
we have it.
We're going to go through some of the accusations in there.
Long story short, even the Democratic Attorney General is saying he harassed women around the office.
We'll get into the details there as well.
Should remind you, of course, Andrew Cuomoisawful.com.
You can go there and say the unquestionable truth about Andrew Cuomo.
That is available to you.
We'll also be covering this in detail, going through the entire report on Studios America tonight.
Look, we've been all over this story with Cuomo since the very beginning,
going back over a year now.
And we are going to make sure that each piece of this sees the light of day.
The show is available, of course, right here on podcast.
You can subscribe for free, follow the show, and rate and review the show if you don't mind.
That would be fantastic.
Also available on YouTube.
Same for, of course, this wonderful radio program.
We'll be back to talk about this even more depth tomorrow.
Thanks so much for tuning in.
Here's the podcast.
You're listening to
the best of the Blendback program.
We welcome from the incredibly popular podcast.
What's Pat's?
I was thinking about another podcast.
What's the the name of Pat's podcast?
Pat Cray Unleashed.
Oh, Pat Cray Unleashed.
You know, from that podcast.
Here is Mr.
Pat Cray.
Hello, Pat.
That was funny.
Inside, I'm laughing.
Oh, you're laughing.
Yeah, inside.
So what do you have on your plate today?
Did you, have you seen what's going on in Australia?
Yeah, you mean with the military showing up?
Yeah.
The lockdowns, the military going door to door.
Look at this.
I think we have the video of
the people in the park.
There's a guy doing yoga in the park out by himself, but he didn't have a mask on.
So police come and
cuff him
behind his back and then drag him off and arrest him.
Can we play that?
Maybe we don't have it.
No, I don't have it.
Oh, is it in your pile of stuff?
It was in my pile of crap, yeah.
But do you know, do you know how severe their situation is with the COVID-19
problem?
It's really bad.
Really bad.
It's no wonder they've gone off the deep end.
Well, they're not vaccinating.
They're not vaccinating at all, right?
Yeah, and thus 924 people have died since this began.
On the whole continent.
Whole continent.
25 million people.
924 people have died.
That is outrageous.
That's outrageous.
What are they doing?
Like, I mean, is everybody left?
Yeah, there's only 24 million,
you know, 900 and
something of a lot of people.
So, so,
you know, the good news is, is that I think the people of Australia are starting to feel the tyranny here, and they don't like it at all.
And so they'll grab their guns and they'll start going.
Oh, wait.
Oh, hold it just a second.
They turned in all their guns.
Yeah, they did.
Darn it.
Yeah, they did.
Darn it, darn it, darn it.
Well, you know, and to me, this is just a precursor of what could be in store for everybody.
I mean, this is a free country.
This is a country that appreciates
guns.
They don't have guns.
Yeah,
let's just remember that.
These are countries that don't have guns.
Both Australia and the UK.
Yeah.
Well, they did a gun buyback program.
Yeah, I bet they wish they had that money and could give it back and get their gun right now.
Yeah, I mean, look, I don't think that they're necessarily going to go into an armed revolution right now.
You know, what does it take?
No, seriously, I mean, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
But, I mean, what does it take?
Your country is being destroyed.
It's 900 people, and now
your own citizens in the military are being told to keep you inside at all costs.
This is insanity.
Well, to be fair, don't do yoga.
You get apart by yourself.
No, no, no, you can't do that.
No, that's not.
not.
That's like that kid.
Remember that guy in Colorado that was playing baseball with his kid way away from everybody else?
Yeah.
And they were like 20 feet away.
Good thing we put him in jail.
Yeah.
Right.
I hope he's not out.
Right, the bastard.
I hope he didn't get out.
I hope they beat him senseless before they put him behind bars.
Well, it's about time we start beating people senseless.
Sure is, isn't it?
Sure is.
Well, you mentioned this earlier, Glenn.
Like, in theory, right,
you have a continent of your own.
Right.
It's an island, essentially.
You're not letting anybody come.
You're not letting anyone in.
You're not letting anyone out.
You can, I guess, crack down enough to limit cases and limit the spread of the virus.
Like, there is some level of lockdown you can do this with.
However, on the other side of that, there has to be a strategy for this to end.
And what Australia has done is lock down super hard anytime they see any sign of the virus.
So they've been able to keep everything super low.
And I don't mean lockdown, U.S.
style lockdown, where we all still kind of go do our thing and it's annoying.
It's open depots.
There's no depots open in Walmart.
Like they shut down hard, like you can't walk your dog.
And so
they've done all that and then they have 12% of their population vaccinated.
So like what is the other side of this?
Like it's one thing if you want to lock down until in theory you get everybody vaccinated, which again is a problem
in another direction.
But like what's eventually you're going to have to let your people go out.
And they're not going to have any immunity.
And they're not going to have any immunity.
And they're going to get it.
You can't keep people inside all the time.
No.
This is, you know what this is?
This is the extreme example of,
well, you can stop wearing masks and we can go as soon as we get a vaccine.
Well, as soon as it calms down, we don't have the hospitals overrun.
Then it's, well, when we get the vaccine, well, the vaccine's not good enough.
They just cut right to the end.
They're just like, we're never letting people out.
Or at least we're being honest.
And it is weird coming from Australia because we think of them as having similar sensibilities as us, right?
I mean, you know?
Instead, it's a penal colony again.
Yes, I mean,
honestly,
you have spiders that size.
I'm staying in anyway.
It's true.
There's no reason to go outside in Australia.
And I want a gun because I would shoot those spiders.
Have you seen them?
They're like,
what is that?
Three feet?
They're like three feet across.
That's not even a spider.
That's
a huge one.
Well, I've never seen a a spider three feet across.
Oh, I'll show you a picture.
I live in Texas.
It was so.
Oh, no, I'll show you a picture when I got to find it when we're off air.
But I've got a picture of one.
Wow.
Because
I could not believe it.
They were telling me when I went to Australia, they were like, oh, yeah, you see the one that was just found in a barn?
I'm like, no.
They're like, yeah, there's this barn that was there.
And, you know, these old people owned it.
And when the new buyers came in, they opened up the door and they saw a spider web.
It was three feet across.
What?
No way.
The spider web is three feet across.
No.
The
spider.
Wow.
That's and they see
they put it like in a zoo or something because they're like, there's a big spider.
Yeah.
Let's kill it.
No wonder the entire country was on fire.
That was probably the smart thing to do.
You see a spider like that, you'd like the continent on fire.
You're like, no, thank you.
No, thank you.
So we have
the mayor of
Washington, D.C.
I don't know if you've seen Muriel
Bowser, what she's done,
but she had an indoor mask mandate.
She announced it citywide.
I love this.
Indoor mask mandate Thursday.
And it's effective Saturday at 5 p.m.
Which was convenient for her because she threw herself a celebrity-studded birthday party on Friday night.
So good.
Nobody wore the masks.
Then she officiated on Saturday morning a maskless outdoor wedding in Washington, and then apparently a maskless indoor reception.
Now, the birthday party was not a surprise.
So she knew that was happening, but the mask mandate wasn't in.
But neither was the wedding.
She knew about the wedding, too.
She's not just violating, she is knowingly
putting into action a a mask mandate that she intended to violate.
And again, her activity at an outdoor wedding is completely appropriate, even in the COVID era.
There's no reason to believe
there's any problem with that.
However, she's the one who implemented the rule.
And it was also the reception was inside.
The reception was inside.
Inside.
So which is it?
She either wants to spread the COVID-19 through unmasked parties and she's like, I'm going to do it myself.
Right.
Or she believes that vaccinated people are safe and can gather together.
And she's right.
She's right, obviously.
That's what it is.
This is what's so silly about it.
It's like a lot of times we complain about these celebrities
doing these things and politicians.
And usually what they're doing is something that's actually sensible.
It's fine, but it's against
what they're saying.
Rules.
And did you see?
Okay, so it was a reporter, a journalist from the Washington Examiner that took the photograph of her inside without a mask.
Yeah.
Right.
So the Washingtonian later in the day had this update.
Update.
The Washington Examiner writer who published photos of Mayor Bowser maskless at a wedding over the weekend was not invited to the wedding.
Are you kidding me?
So I guess it negates the photo.
It does.
It does.
If you crash a wedding, it negates all information.
Those journalistic standards, man, man, they don't ever do stuff like that.
Right.
It's like the police not having a warrant.
None of the evidence counts.
Right.
Because you're going to crash the wedding completely out of your mind.
Don't worry about the fact that Murael Bowser was maskless inside.
Doesn't matter because the person shouldn't have been there anyway to take the photo.
It's in the wedding crasher clause of the Constitution.
Right, it is.
It is.
Right.
Subsection.
It's plain sight.
3C.
3C.
Well, not plain sight.
You have to do the lemon rub and then
you have the Ben Franklin glasses.
But that's really good.
One other thing.
The American Federation of Teachers, the union president, Randy Weingarten,
says the kids have got to mask up this fall.
Good.
And they said, you know, look,
I'm not going to promise that schools are going to reopen.
But
this is a quote.
We're going to try.
Oh, wow.
So I don't know.
I don't know.
There is no try.
I don't know what exactly they have to rehearse or try to.
I mean, you get into your car, you turn the key, you drive to the school, you use your key to get into the school.
You open up the door, you turn on the lights, you stand there at the chalkboard, and you go, hi, kids.
I'm going to teach something.
It's not that hard.
They've been doing it for years, but maybe they have forgotten in the last year and a half.
No, I can't believe it.
They are saying they're making a big deal out of the safety for our kids.
They have to be masked up or the teachers are not coming in.
Today, I saw in MSNBC a long story about the police officers committing suicide.
Do you know there are six police officers that committed suicide after January 6th?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, they committed suicide.
And MSNBC is very upset about the conversation.
But they love the police.
They do love the police.
How supportive do you want to do poor law enforcement?
This just caused them so much stress.
Now, as I'm watching it, I'm screaming at the TV exactly exactly what's, oh, you love the police now.
You're worried about their mental health now.
Okay, and they're very worried about suicide with these police officers.
How about the epidemic of suicide for our kids?
Our kids are going through absolute hell.
Suicide rate is up 30%
because of the
schools and the masks and the
social distancing.
And they don't give a flying crap.
You never hear about their mental health.
You never really hear, unless you're reading something from conservatives, about how the test scores, what this is doing to them, not only socially, but academically.
You never hear a peep about that.
Why is it we still don't know anything?
We have nothing.
No one is talking about, if you've had it, you have God's vaccine.
This has been something we have always done.
This is why you give a vaccine, because it tricks your body into thinking you've had it.
And so you make natural antibodies for it.
But how come those of us who have natural antibodies, we are like,
we're spreading the plague.
Why?
Why?
For the first time?
Is that not how the body works?
Is that not how this vaccine works?
Yeah, I mean,
it's, you know, long-term, there's a longer conversation on that, but you're right.
We have not focused on that enough.
At all.
Enough?
Yeah.
At all.
I haven't heard anybody say.
Yeah, they don't count it as if it's anything.
Correct, right?
When you talk about people who are vaccinated, they don't add in the people who have had that.
That's what herd mentality.
Herd immunity is about.
Herd immunity.
You'll notice we're not talking about herd immunity anymore because that requires you to have enough people either vaccinated or sick to get to a certain point to where the society has enough antibodies to pretty much handle it.
In a completely unrelated story, I know this has nothing to do with what you're talking about right now.
Nothing.
But they just announced that Pfizer is going to make $33.5 billion from this.
It'll be the biggest selling drug of all time by far.
And I know that doesn't have anything to do with what we're talking about.
There's no reason that you would be pushing this drug for monetary purposes.
That would be so cynical to believe.
I mean, I would note.
I would note.
Yes.
Johnson ⁇ Johnson is selling theirs at cost.
So if you are concerned of profit motivation, you could always get it from Johnson ⁇ Johnson
and selling it at cost because the White House came out and said, I don't know, it might kill you.
No, it doesn't.
They announced they did it in 2020.
They made this decision before the vaccine was available.
It could give you leprosy.
I'm just saying, leprosy, you'll be in a wheelchair and your body will be falling out of the wheel.
Or a blood clot could shoot straight to your brain and kill you instantly.
Don't worry about it, though.
Sorry.
All wrong about that one.
Sorry.
All right.
Patriots, I know you do.
You're rolling your eyes like we're spreading misinformation or something.
It's a sound attack.
It's leprosy.
You get leprosy.
You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
Today I want to talk to you a little bit about
the good news coming out of Afghanistan.
And I know the press is all over this because they're so eager to report all of the bad things
in an ongoing war.
And so that's why the coverage is practically non-stop.
about how badly things are going in Afghanistan.
First of all, there are thousands of people that are fleeing Afghanistan and going over to Pakistan.
All the people that were living in Pakistan until we took over and there was a chance that the Taliban would be out.
They moved back into Afghanistan.
They're now moving back out of Afghanistan.
But the real people I want to talk about are the people that helped us, the translators, the people who believed that we would be there for them.
Yeah, we haven't really made a plan for them.
know, there's about, I don't know, about 10,000 of these people, and they helped us for years and years and years.
But
I mean,
should we have a plan to help them, Stu?
Why plan when you can just do it on the fly as the Taliban is just taking district after district?
It's like one of those shows where they like re
they redo the home, like a home renovation show, and every episode's like, oh my gosh, they're around the corner.
Should we put up these last curtains?
You know what I mean?
And it's like, it's really, it's always a close call.
You're like, why did you just tell them to stay out of there for another extra hour?
There's no real reason for the drama here.
That's kind of what's happening in Afghanistan right now.
Except it's not made for TV.
This is just
real.
Yeah,
the people who are saying that are the people who helped us.
They're like, oh, my gosh, the Taliban's right around the corner.
Help.
Yeah, they're saying now 330,000 Afghans have been displaced already, many of them leaving the country once again, realizing that this is just going to happen again, you know.
And that's terrible enough.
In addition, though, the people who actually helped us during the battle, translators and all sorts of different types of people who've helped the U.S.
military, you're going to be stunned to hear this.
If the Taliban gets control, they're all going to be murdered.
They're just going to be murdered because they shouldn't have been helping in the Taliban's view, the American effort.
So we have some, so there's a group of, they think, about 20,000 people who are in this category.
And we have a couple thousand that we've actually been able to help
and get out of the country.
Some of them have come to the United States.
People,
the most reliably vetted of those have come.
So some of this has happened.
They think some of the 20,000
maybe are not really shouldn't qualify for this program, a special immigrant visa type of situation where they can be moved not only either to the United States or to a third country where we have maybe you know a base or something.
But again, get them out of the way of the Taliban and the knives they're swinging.
And so they are now moving some of them to third countries and various places where they can try to do this.
But there does not seem to be a plan for, as you point out, about 10,000 of these guys that are likely to be killed the second we used them.
That does seem to be the philosophy
of the United States in way too many cases.
Let me tell you a story about a guy named Raul Wallenberg.
I've talked about him before, and he is one of my favorite 20th century heroes.
And most people don't know who Raul Wallenberg is.
A lady who wrote a
book on Raoul Wallenberg over in Sweden.
And it is the, it's the, it's like, what's his name?
Bonhoeffer book.
It is the
book
on Raoul Wallenberg.
And she came over and she had been doing interviews here in the United States.
She did a, you know, Good Morning America and everything else.
She came to do an interview with me and she almost welled up halfway through the interview.
And
she said, I cannot believe it.
You're the only American,
at least as a broadcaster that I have talked to that even knows who he is.
And I'm like, he's a hero of mine.
He's an absolute hero.
So he would go on, she'd go on and do the interviews on.
And they had no idea who was in the world.
Good warning America.
They have no idea.
This is an American hero in many ways that we abandoned just like we did
with the Taliban right now.
We're not changing our spots.
And if Americans knew about this, we would say, let's get those who helped us to safety.
But we're getting the blame for it.
Because of our weasels in the government.
So let me tell you about Raoul Wallenberg.
It's 1940s, and he's in Sweden.
He is the heir to a large fortune,
and
they are very high up on the ladder.
Remember, the Nazis are involved in Sweden, and so everybody's kind of nervous.
The United States comes to Raul Wallenberg off the, you know, through the OSS and says, hey,
We need you to go over to,
I think it was Prague,
and just watch what the Nazis are doing.
We understand that they are rounding up Jews and we need to know if that's true.
He says,
I don't know.
And they said,
just ask the king if you can be appointed to the embassy and then just spy for us.
He said, okay.
Well, he got over there and he saw that not only was it true, that it was in enormous numbers, that every Jew was being rounded up.
He couldn't abide by it.
He would write letters to us.
He'd write letters to the king.
And the king was like, I can't do anything.
The Nazis are right here.
And so Raul Wallenberg decided he was going to do something.
And he started issuing what's called a Schutz pass.
My wife gave one to me for Christmas years ago, and she said, she took it back.
She gave me the present, and then she took it back right away.
And she said, I'll give it to you tomorrow.
And I said, why?
And she said, because you're going to spend all all day crying.
And I said, I'm not.
It's Christmas.
Everything's fine.
And she said, oh, I know you, you're going to cry.
And I'm like, I'm not going to cry.
I opened it.
I cried all day.
It is such a remarkable piece of paper,
a monument to what one man can do.
He would issue these Schutz passes, which means that
whoever gets this paper and their name is filled out on it, you get that paper,
you are now under the protection of the king of Sweden.
And so Raul Wallenberg was claiming people as his.
So if you were stopped for papers, you didn't have to wear a yellow star anymore because you were now under the protection of the king of Sweden.
Well, the king of Sweden was getting all kinds of heat for this.
And I mean, he issued thousands of them.
He would type them all up, and then he would go to the trains that were going to the death camps, and he would stuff them in between the slats of the train.
And then he would stand on top of the train next to the coal car, and he'd say, Stop!
You have the wrong people!
These are my people.
And the train would unload, and they would check the papers, and anyone who had a Schutz pass was free.
He saved thousands of people
towards the end of the
end of the war.
The Russians were coming in,
and
some of his people at the embassy said, Raul, you got to go.
You got to go right now.
Now we know, now in history, Stalin hated this guy, knew what he was doing, and hated him.
And Raul said, no, there's too many more I can save.
He was last seen running to the Russian troops, the first
brigade that came in,
and that's the last we ever saw of him.
I have a cigarette case from one of the guys in that garrison that came in, that he was running to.
And
it's really quite worthless unless you know that
those are the soldiers that he ran to, saying they can't be as bad as the Germans, because in Russian, on the front of the case, it says, let's kill all the Jews and go home.
He was taken.
There's a few endings to this story.
He was taken and shot and executed there immediately.
Unlikely,
because Stalin is said to have wanted to talk to him.
So the next version of the ending of his life was that he went, he was interrogated
by Stalin and his people, and he died in a concentration camp in like 1948.
I think the worst outcome is that he went to a hard labor camp in the Soviet Union and died in 1972.
Here's the reason why I tell you this story.
Here's a guy we asked to help.
Here's a guy that every single one of us should know his name.
His name is Raul Wallenberg.
He is a he's a hero in Sweden.
There are statues to him in Sweden.
There should be statues of him here because we asked him to do it.
And then, at the end of the war, when we had Klout with Stalin, we didn't even ask where he was.
We didn't ask to exchange.
We did nothing to save his life.
No matter how many times the Swedes and everybody else asked the United States, will you please ask them?
We never asked about him until 1976.
We're doing the same thing.
And it is not the people of the United States.
It's an out-of-control large government.
that doesn't always put the same priorities on things that we might.
We're doing it again now in Afghanistan.
10,000 people that helped us, they are now living in fear and
in hiding
because the Taliban will take over.
And we knew this.
You and I, we all knew that the Taliban would come back.
That's why we should have gone in, killed Osama bin Laden, and left.
Instead, we spent 20 years
and how much treasure and how much American blood in that place.
And what we all knew would happen has happened.
The bad guys just waited us out.
We cannot build countries.
We cannot pass on freedom.
Hell, we don't even want it ourselves, it seems.
People have to want it, and they have to be willing to stand up for it themselves.
This group of people did, and we are letting them die.
You're listening to the best of the Glendeck program.
Wow.
Maya.
This is great.
This is, man, I can't tell you how excited I am that our roads and bridges and infrastructure are finally going to be fixed.
All fixed?
Are you going to be?
Finally.
I mean, geez,
we've been paying for this infrastructure.
Every president has been like, I got to fix the infrastructure.
And we give him the money and then we don't ever hear about the infrastructure, except that we have to do more.
So thank goodness this is that infrastructure bill is a godsend.
Or not.
The senior research analyst, Foundation for Government Accountability, Hayden Du Blois, is with us now.
I asked Hayden to come on because this is 2,700 pages long and it takes a team to go through it.
So
what's in it, Hayden?
Sure.
Thanks for having me on, Glenn.
Well, what's in it is important to recognize that only about 20% of the new funding in this bill goes towards what you and I and millions of Americans think about as traditionally infrastructure.
That is our roads and our bridges.
Second,
we need to fix them.
Gosh.
You know, I don't know, but what I can say is this, that this is really tied to a larger package of what the Democrats are trying to push through.
That is nearly $5 trillion in new government spending on expansions of welfare, step towards the new Green New Deal, and other pet projects.
I mean, that's really what's at issue here.
And we can't excuse some small portion of legitimate infrastructure spending when it's way overbalanced by the priorities of the far left in Congress.
Well, $20 billion goes to Amtrak.
I don't know why we keep bailing Amtrak out, but we do.
Amtrak and climate change and related green efforts.
What they're trying to do is to try to get us to go to electricity.
But I don't understand this.
Electricity,
it doesn't come from the magic box in the wall.
It's most likely made by coal.
Sure.
Sure.
No, you're absolutely right.
We've seen, I mean, they've just got tons and tons of investments in here that they're trying to create create a new clean energy office in the Department of Energy, EV charging.
They've got a $250 million grant for low-emission ferries, which everyone knows is such a big problem, those, you know, ferries we really need to do.
Oh, I know.
They're horrible.
But, I mean, you dive a little bit deeper into this.
I mean, it's 2,700 pages.
I tried to read what I could.
But case-in-point example, page 167, it says, and I quote, that they're going to enable and encourage children, including those with disabilities, to walk and bicycle to school, end quote.
I mean, that's what they're doing.
They're worried about kids' carbon emissions when they're going to school.
I mean, what's next?
Are they going to put carbon footprint, you know, ankle monitors to make sure these kids are, you know, under the quota of their carbon footprint?
I mean, it's just out of control.
Does it say how they're going to do that?
Well, they're trying to create a new program.
They're saying it's all about incentivizing, you know, healthy healthy lifestyles and making sure that
kids are getting the physical exercise.
But it's really under the guise of part of the climate agenda here that we're talking about.
But how are they going to do that?
I mean, even with disabilities, get them to walk to school.
Are they going to say we're not picking anybody up inside of this radius or what?
Well,
I think a lot of it is going to be with pressuring a lot of these areas with grants to, you know, encourage encourage what I think are bad incentives for kids to do.
I mean, we see this throughout the bill.
I mean, on the topic of energy, they've got another study in there about the effects of closing the Keystone XL pipeline, for example, without restarting any of the construction.
We don't need another study.
We know the effects of canceling the construction of this.
We don't need a government report, another one, telling us that it's a bad idea.
And this is what this bill is filled with.
It's filled with just, you know, wasteful spending on things we already know or things we don't need instead of prioritizing the roads and bridges and potholes that Americans really think of when they think about infrastructure.
I was talking to Mike Lee yesterday about this and he said that one of the problems that he has with it is
it takes over a lot of the things that belong to the states and to the local municipalities.
He's absolutely right.
Yeah, I listened to that interview and he made a great point that, you know, while people are going to say, well, it's good because they've got interstate highway funding and that should be done by the feds, there's a lot in here that is like rural surface transportation grants.
That shouldn't be coming out of a centrally planned federal office, you know, that's written up by some senators.
States could administer that much more efficiently than the federal government can.
The entire you know, precipice and foundation of this bill is that infrastructure spending is best when it's centrally planned, which we know isn't true.
And then when you realize and recognize how that's all tied in to the other trillions or yeah, trillions of dollars of other priorities that are completely unrelated to infrastructure, like expanding welfare and expanding the child care tax credit and all of that.
I mean, we're really stretching the definition of infrastructure to a point it's never been at.
There are also, there are provisions in there for
Bitcoin and
cryptocurrency to where
if you sell your cryptocurrency, you'll be called a broker,
and then all brokers have to report all activities to the IRS, right?
Yeah, which is Senator Toomey issued a statement on this, actually, and he said it's virtually impossible to implement because you don't have the required information, you know, the 1099s to do that.
And
a lot of the blockchain companies are saying that it's a ridiculous provision because they're doing that to try to raise revenue through this.
But they're saying that the revenue estimates are way off.
Toomey called this a hastily designed tax on blockchain.
He's absolutely right.
This is just stifling yet another innovation in the cryptocurrency sphere that we don't need and really isn't going to work and isn't going to pay for what this bill tries to do.
So they say that it's trying to help raise the funds to pay for this, et cetera, but I disagree with you.
I don't think it is to do that.
I think it's to cripple cryptocurrency because they know what they're doing to the US dollar and they need a DUSD, a digital US dollar.
You know, that very well could be the case because, well, let me put it to you this way.
The underlying theme in this conversation that we can't forget about is inflation, inflation, inflation, right?
We did a poll at the Center for Polling Excellence affiliated with FGA.
87% of voters, including majority of Democrats, are either very or somewhat concerned about inflation.
And Glenn, I keep thinking of three numbers, $30, $30, $30, $30 trillion national debt, 30% annualized rate of inflation for producers' goods, and 30 years high of core inflation.
This bill and the associated $5 trillion in spending is only going to fuel future inflation.
We're going to rind up with the inflationary consequences of this infrastructure bill where people won't be able to even afford the gas to drive their cars cars on the roads that this bill is allegedly going to fix.
Aaron Powell,
how fast do you think that, I mean, you know, what's really irritating to me is they're saying they're paying for this with a lot of the COVID emergency money.
Remember when they just started saying, oh, we're just, we need this.
We need all of this money.
And then they never spent it.
They knew this was coming in.
And so they're moving all of that emergency, COVID spending over to pay all of this.
When does this money actually, if approved, start to get pushed out into the system?
Well, here's part of the problem with this, and this is really an underlying problem with this bill as it relates to the funding.
We don't even know how much that is going to cover the cost.
I mean, they have yet to issue a Congressional Budget Office score for this bill, and they're trying to get it read.
Nobody's going to read it, but try to get it passed and understood and comprehended before Congress goes on summer recess.
They don't even know what it costs.
I mean, that's preposterous for anyone to expect that the Senate is going to be able to have a legitimate debate on this.
And if you look at some of the funding mechanisms you're talking about, I mean,
you've got the unused COVID provisions.
One of the most egregious ones in my mind is they're trying to book $49 billion in savings by delaying a rule from the Trump administration that would have changed how drugs are paid for.
by Medicare.
Instead of going to insurers, they would have passed prescription savings on to seniors and some of the truly needy.
But because they're delaying
that rule, we'll essentially be propping up billions of dollars on the spending priorities of the Democrats,
which range from low-emission ferries to clean energy supply chains on the backs of our Medicare recipients.
I can't speak to the Senate, but I don't think that's a good way to fund an infrastructure proposal, especially when you've got these seniors living on fixed incomes when inflation is so high.
So I want to be charitable to people like Mitt Romney, but I have a hard time doing that.
They say that
this is just going to make it cheaper on the other end.
Because if we give them this, then it won't be so bad in the end.
But Nancy Pelosi is saying she's not going to pass anything in this bill unless she gets the full boat in the second bill.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that's what I think folks have to take away from this.
This is not a...
you know, I hear the number $550 billion infrastructure package.
That's not what this is about.
This is about a $5 trillion welfare-filled expansion, one one of the largest in U.S.
history, if it gets passed, that Nancy Pelosi and AOC and Joe Biden are attaching at the hip to the infrastructure package.
That's what's at hits you here.
And that's the fundamental problem is that this is tied to unbelievable increases in spending in all the wrong areas that have nothing to do with infrastructure.
The infrastructure package is just the tip of the much bigger iceberg that forms the basis of what we're talking about here.
We're talking to Hayden Du Bois.
He is the senior research analyst for Foundation for Government Accountability.
Hayden, you know, the one thing that we saw in the Obama bill was that it would create these new things and then it would say at the discretion of the,
you know, the
head of, you know,
of the department.
And
it just left it open for all this new infrastructure to be built without Congress being involved at all.
Do you see that in this as well?
Oh, sure.
I mean, this is a case study of
centralizing power in the hands of bureaucrats and central planning.
I mean,
this is exactly and precisely what that is.
And we know those are not the right people to make decisions for
paving of state roads.
I mean, the power of the world.
There's no account.
There's no accountability.
None.
No.
There's no knowledge.
There's no accountability.
Every time this has happened, it fails.
I mean, it reminds me of the Milton Friedman quote, if you put the government in charge of the Sahara Desert in five years, there'd be a shortage of sand.
I mean, that's what we're really going for here.
That's what's going to happen.
All right.
Thank you so much.
The odds of this passing, I would imagine, are pretty good, right?
Yeah, that's the unfortunate reality here is that there seems to be enough support where this is going to go through, and then they're going to attach it to a larger reconciliation process with all those Democrat wish list items.
But it's unsustainable.
And to leave you
with a thought, 12 years ago, we had the Obama stimulus, about $800 billion.
We're essentially going to a place where that's considered a drop in the bucket with Congress.
I mean, this infrastructure package is being treated like a rounding error for them.
We need to demand that, you know, Congress really change the way they look at these federal expenditures and deficits.
Why are everyday Americans, you know, forced to live within their means when Congress is intent with living beyond it?
Well,
the debt ceiling is coming up.
It's expiring.
And they have to renew it and raise it.
Otherwise, we default.
And already the Treasury Department is saying,
you have to pass this right now.
You cannot default on this.
And it is irresponsible for the United States.
If we default, our interest rates, everything goes through the roof, and we're really screwed.
I mean, so what do people do?
Well, to Mike Lee's, you know, Mike Lee made a great point on your show yesterday, and he asked the question, why are we doing this now?
Why are we doing this at a time when inflation is hitting new records, at a time when federal deficits and federal debt are at unbelievable and really unparalleled records?
I mean, this does not make any sense.
The bottom line is Americans should tell their congressmen, listen, I can hold off on the potholes for now if you, you know, if it means avoiding bankrupting my kids and their kids and their kids after them.
That's what people should be telling their members of Congress is that I'll wait on the
small portion of this that actually goes towards infrastructure if it means avoiding the consequences of higher inflation, higher taxes, higher spending, higher debt.
Hayden, thank you so much.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Glenn.
By the way, it was this kind of spending that led Greece into the revolution.
And,
you know, when you see what's on the other side of this, you'll wish you would have made that call to your congressman and said, if you sign up for any of this crap, I will make it my mission to make sure you are never, never
re-elected.
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