Best of the Program | Guest: Brian Riedl | 10/18/19

Hi, it's Stu in for Glenn on the Glenn Beck program.

Today, Glenn is at a Lady Gaga concert.

I will explain that during the program.

You're going to want to know that is actually a real thing.

Today we talked about Ukraine and Mulvaney.

There's a breaking news development during the show on Ukraine.

And the Mulvaney comments, what did he mean?

Is this the end of the road?

Is it serious?

We'll get into that.

Tell you the latest, what's going on in Syria and Ukraine.

We dive into the policies of Bernie Sanders and how much he'll actually cost.

It basically sounds like a made-up number by the end, but these are actual estimates, and you're not going to believe how ridiculous they are.

And we go into the spectacular collapse of Betto O'Rourke, Robert Francis O'Rourke, Bob Frank O'Rourke.

That,

and the latest comments from AOC as well.

It's all today on the podcast.

You're listening to the best of the blend back program.

All right, so Mick Mulvaney was the big story.

Mick Mulvaney, yesterday,

the media is going crazy over this.

He did a press conference.

He came out to talk about

the Quid Pro quo,

which we have to do a montage of quid pro quo mentions because

the use of quid pro quo in the media was approximately once every six months until about two weeks ago, and now it's 75 times an hour.

You cannot watch the news for five minutes and get past it without hearing quid pro quo said.

And now they're starting to do the thing where they're like, Well, that's the quid, and that's the quo.

We got it.

We got it.

You're trying to be cute.

Quid pro quo, we got it.

You're talking about it constantly.

The idea here is Mulvaney admitted to the quid pro quo.

Let's start here.

This is him talking about politics and

is there an influence of politics in foreign policy?

This is a huge mistake from Mulvaney, and I'll explain why in a second.

Here is Mick Mulvaney yesterday.

We were holding up money at the same time for what was it, the Northern Triangle countries.

We were holding up aid at the Northern Triangle countries so that they

would change their policies on immigration.

By the way, and

this speaks to an important point, I'm sorry.

This speaks to an important point because I heard this yesterday, and I could never remember the gentleman who testified.

Was it McKinney, the guy, is that his name?

I don't know if he testified yesterday.

Yes.

And if you go, and if you believe the news reports, okay, because we've not seen any transcripts of this, the only transcript I've seen was Sonlin's testimony this morning.

If you read the news reports and you believe them, what did McKinney say yesterday?

Well, McKinney said yesterday that he was really upset with the political influence in foreign policy.

Uh-oh.

That was one of the reasons he was so upset about this.

And I have news for everybody.

Uh-oh.

Get over it.

Oh, oh, Mike.

Did you guys hear that?

Did you hear what he just said?

Get over it?

Are you kidding me?

Get over it.

Politics in foreign policy.

That is absolutely unacceptable.

He said, get over it.

He admitted it in front of the entire nation.

This is a terrible mistake, my Mick Mulvaney.

And a lot of the president's defenders are going to tell you he did a good job there.

Terrible mistake there.

He was actually honest.

And you're not supposed to be doing that in Washington.

This is completely off limits, apparently.

You're not allowed to go out there and tell people what actually occurs because who would believe that there was any political interest when it comes to foreign policy?

Sure, we're talking about politicians.

So you'd think maybe politics would be involved in it.

And sure, they all run campaigns and talk about their foreign policy and the politics surrounding it.

But when they get into the office, they become pure.

They become these clean, crystal, clear clear individuals who have no agendas and never do anything other than just serve.

That's the reality of Washington, guys.

Of course politics are involved when it comes to foreign policy with every single president since the beginning of time.

This is what politicians do.

They do politics.

Now politics is not politics have a very bad reputation, largely because of politicians.

But politics are the pursuit of what you believe the right thing to do is.

That's what politics are when it comes to our government.

This should not be a surprise.

But he went on.

He didn't just stop there.

He admitted to the crime.

Mick Mulvaney admitted to it in front of the country.

Huge mistake here by Mulvaney.

Once again, here he is talking about the quid pro quo.

I'm talking to Mr.

Carl.

That is going to happen.

Elections have consequences and foreign policy is going to change from the Obama administration to the Trump administration.

And what you're seeing now, I believe, is a group of mostly

career bureaucrats who are saying, you know what, I don't like President Trump's politics, so I'm going to participate in this witch hunt that they're undertaking on the Hill.

Hmm.

Okay, that's not the right clip.

When we play the longer clip, does he have the long clip pulled?

It's the one with the quid pro quo.

It was the 243 clip, I believe, he pulled earlier this morning.

If we talked to a little behind-the-scenes baseball here, let me know if you have that.

He talked about having the quid pro quo because that was an important part of this, right?

Like, and it was part of the defense initially, right?

One of the first thing was, oh, well, you know, this was, you know, they weren't talking about this, and then it got to, well, there was no quid pro quo.

There was no quid pro quo, meaning they didn't give, they didn't hold back the money for Ukraine in exchange for anything.

They held back the money because they thought it was the right thing to do.

It wasn't in exchange for the

investigation of Biden.

And do we have the clip or I'll just explain it?

Basically,

he said,

very.

Okay, here we go.

Let's hear it.

It is

funding will not flow unless the investigation

server

happened as well.

We do that all the time with foreign policy.

We were holding up money at the same time for what was it?

The Northern Triangle.

There it is.

Okay, stop.

So we do this all the time.

There's a quid pro quo.

We do this all the time.

This is the admission of the crime to the media today.

This is the whole case.

He came out and he said, first they said no quid pro quo.

John Carl said, hey, isn't that a quid pro quo?

And he said, yeah, we do it all the time.

Now, this is more of a problem with their initial defense, right?

Where they said there's a no quid pro quo i don't know why they said that especially considering what they knew was on you know the call and the transcript of the call where you know he doesn't it's not a specific quid pro quo but he mentions the investigation very closely and it's easy to read that if you want to okay but here mulvaney actually says it yes we do this all the time we hold back money all the time for outcomes of policy that we want from foreign countries and he goes on to explain that gives multiple examples let me give you another example of this here's Joe Biden talking and bragging in front of an audience about him engaging in quid pro quo.

Listen.

Okay, well, we don't have that either.

Wow, this is a good start to the show.

We're off to a raging set.

This is what happens when Glenn's not here.

He's at Lady Gaga right now, and people are just,

I think everyone's asleep.

Everyone's asleep.

Do we have the video of Biden from, we've played this with Ukraine a bunch of times where he says,

you've heard it before.

This audience has already heard this stuff.

It's in the special.

But basically, Biden says, Yeah, I held back the billion dollars so that they would fire this prosecutor.

He's bragging about it on stage.

It's actually the foundation,

at least from my perspective.

It was when we kind of got introduced to this Ukraine story in real terms.

Because there were always rumors about Biden talking about, you know,

his son Hunter and all of the benefits that they got there's that that's always good that's always been there

however it was really escalated when we uncovered and I believe it was John Solomon who initially uncovered it audio and video of Joe Biden saying he did it he said I will withhold a billion dollars from Ukraine unless you fire this prosecutor think about what's being said there I will withhold money unless I get this outcome involving a prosecution in Ukraine the accusation against Trump is that he was withholding money

so that he could get an outcome with a prosecution in Ukraine.

They are nearly identical stories.

The difference, of course, being that Biden admitted to it a long time ago, and now it's a massive, huge, mega-impeachment story.

Because Mick Mulvaney admitted it yesterday.

And I think this this is sort of

complicated for the average person that maybe isn't listening to talk radio every day.

You have to put yourself in the perspective of a voter that isn't you.

Because you're sitting here listening to this every day.

You've heard all these stories.

You know all these audio clips.

You've been following this stuff.

But you're not average.

I hate to tell you this.

You're way too nerdy for this society, okay?

You actually care.

Remember the person who said to Ben Franklin, you know,

what have you given us?

And he's like,

a republic, if you can keep it?

Well, you're kind of trying to do that.

That's not everybody else.

There's a lot of people watching, you know, a lot of Kardashians.

So this isn't, they don't see these stories and they don't understand every single ins, every, all the ins and outs here.

We all know,

we know Donald Trump enough.

He's been around.

He's been one of the most popular and well-known figures in American society for nearly 40 years.

This is not some, we know what Donald Trump's like.

One of the reasons why he's in office is because we like the idea that he's coming out and he's just saying the stuff, right?

He's saying all the stuff that people accuse politicians of, some of it good, some of it bad.

He's coming out and admitting it.

He's saying, you know what?

Yeah, I do this and yeah, I do that.

It's one of the things people really like about him.

And I just wish we could skip to the end of the story where we realize that, look, Donald Trump.

Every interaction he has, he's asking people about Ukraine and what Joe Biden did there.

That's probably

true.

Every time he gets into an Uber, he asks the person, hey, you know, hey, what do you know about

Biden and Ukraine?

You ever drive him around?

Was he ever talking about it?

Hey, Taco Bell delivery guy.

Did you ever talk to?

What about you?

You over there?

How about you, the guy who's fixing his electricity?

Did he know anything about Biden?

To say, no.

That's what Trump does.

Can we skip to the end of that story and admit that that's just what's happening here?

It's what he cares about.

So what he cares about is what he talks about.

And that's what people like about Trump.

And it's hard, I think, for the average person to look at this and say, say, wait a minute, it's just us the, why is this happening?

Is this true?

Is it fair the way the media is treating him?

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So George Kent, a deputy assistant secretary of state, testified this week that he was worried that Hunter Biden's position at the firm Burizma would complicate efforts by U.S.

diplomats to convey to Ukrainian officials the importance of avoiding conflicts of interest.

I wonder why that was a problem.

Sure, the vice president is head of Ukraine policy, and this is a giant Ukrainian gas company.

What could possibly be the conflict of interest hiring his son who had no experience in natural gas or Ukraine.

I can't think of anything that could possibly go wrong there.

This is something the Biden campaign is, of course, struggling with.

The vice president said he didn't have the bandwidth to deal with the issue when it was brought up to him.

Mild

problem.

And it's also in conflict with what Joe Biden is actually saying.

This is Joe Biden from the debate talking about his dealings with Hunter Biden and Burisma.

You don't regret anything.

No, no, no, no, I don't.

And because I never discussed with my son anything having to do with what was going on in Ukraine.

That's a fact.

Never discussed it with him.

Now, this is at odds, of course, with

the words of Hunter Biden, who said they did discuss it in passing once.

Did not say that they talked about it a lot.

Did not say they went into a lot of detail.

But basically, what Joe Biden said was, hey, Hunter, I hope you know what you're doing on this thing.

And Hunter was like, Oh, I do.

Now, that is a separate issue, right?

It's not just

the situation where Joe Biden does actually talk to Hunter Biden about burisma when he said multiple times, not only there, but also in the debate, that he was,

that he never said anything to Hunter about this, which

is such an impossible strain on any level of credibility.

They were on a plane together to Ukraine.

What the hell else do you talk about on that plane trip?

There's nothing else to talk about when you go to Ukraine.

Chernobyl?

Maybe.

I mean, maybe.

I can't think of no one.

Bizarrely, every single Democrat seems to find a reason to send their children to Ukraine, which is a place where every Ukrainian parent tries to get them out of.

Half the country is littered with nuclear waste.

The other half looks like a sequel to Hostel.

This is not a good place to enjoy a vacation.

Yet every single Democratic politician was like, hey, kids, there's a summer camp in Ukraine I'm thinking would be a good place for you to go live.

The best place, the best thing about it, 50 grand a month or more.

So for some reason, this is vacation paradise for every Democrat.

It doesn't make any sense.

There's no way, I mean.

There's no way it's true.

Can we get to that point?

There's no way they didn't discuss this.

He's the head of, he's the front man for policy on Ukraine.

His son has a job at a giant company in Ukraine.

Hunter says they talked about it once.

That can't possibly be true.

They talked about it a thousand times.

They talked about the political ramifications of it.

They talked about what was actually happening.

They probably talked about, you know what?

This guy who's going after Burisma, not one

investigation, but multiple investigations.

That guy, well, he happens to be a guy that we don't really trust that much anyway, so maybe I'll put lots and lots of pressure and make sure he's not going to be in power anymore.

You're telling me that didn't come up?

I just don't believe it.

So far, there's no evidence of that conversation.

But I'm just saying, as a human being, I don't believe that dad and son went on a 9,000-hour plane trip to Ukraine and what they were doing there never came up.

It's just impossible, is it not?

Are we not human beings and know how human beings interact?

We know that happened,

but we don't have concrete evidence.

We don't have the transcript of that conversation.

But it seems very, very plausible that that occurred.

And let's go on beyond that.

Not only is he saying he didn't ask Hunter about it, and Hunter is saying we talked about it once.

And Joe Biden's question was, hey, you know, I hope you got this.

I hope you know what you're doing.

He is talking to a man who has had basically

a series of personal problems that would make Sean Penn embarrassed.

This is a guy, Hunter Biden, who

I'm sure tries really hard to avoid these things, but there are real people with real problems that have real difficulty dealing with life.

And Hunter Biden is one of these people.

He's had all sorts of drug problems.

He's had drug-infused car accidents in rental cars.

He left a rental car at Hertz with white powder on the dashboard.

This is not a minor mistake.

This is happening while he's at Burisma.

And somehow, Burisma was like, you know who needs to come here?

Do you know who needs to come here

for $50,000 a month or more and be a board member of our company in a country he's never been to with a product he's never dealt with?

That guy, the white powder on the dashboard guy, that's the guy.

This is blatantly insane, and it shows Joe Biden's judgment that if this story is true, it might actually be worse.

If Joe Biden's idea of judgment is to go to his son, who has been,

I have a list of 28 individual personal failings that have gone on in Hunter Biden's life that we know of,

including when he was buying crack under a bridge,

including when he took a cigarette laced with another drug from a random, I believe he called him North African person in a parking lot.

That person is the person Joe went to and said, I hope you know what you're doing.

He doesn't know what he's doing.

Is it not clear that this person does not know what they're doing?

This person has tried to manage his life unsuccessfully at every single turn.

The idea that you just turn over this random responsibility to not only protect your dad's political future, but also

to

avoid future allegations of corruption and also just to be able to get up and tie your shoes every day.

None of these things Hunter has been able to be trusted with in his life.

And I don't say that as making fun of him.

It's just he, he,

you know what's hard for me?

Running a mile.

You know what's hard for Hunter?

Waking up and not going into rehab.

That's his life.

That's how difficult it is.

He went into rehab, I believe, eight times.

Eight times.

And dad's question is, I hope I know what you're doing.

He doesn't know what he's doing.

Maybe we get into this.

I'm going to give you a little bit of detail here on Hunter Biden.

You need to hear

the events that lead up to him getting this job.

Think about offering a job to this person.

All right, welcome back.

It's Stuart for Glenn of the Glenbeck program.

I kid you not.

He went to a Lady Gaga concert, and that's why he's not here.

I'm not making that up.

Usually I make things up when Glenn is out and I lie to you and I tell you all sorts of crazy reasons he's not here.

This time it's true, he's at a Lady Gaga concert.

Full stop.

Just wanted you to know.

Now, speaking of really irrational personal choices, let's go into Hunter Biden.

Hunter Biden, this is the guy hired for $50,000 a month.

This is the guy trusted in these high-level dealings, billions of dollars on the line in China.

This is his history.

When he was in college, he started using cocaine.

Now, look, we were all in college and used cocaine, I'm sure.

This is certainly a long time ago.

By the way, I wasn't in college or used cocaine, so I'm perfectly clear from this one.

He was in college and used cocaine.

It's one of those things I guess you can excuse, right?

Like, in all seriousness, it's not something that I know a lot of people who, but we, you know, I can think of a couple that I do know who have done that.

And it was a long time ago, and it was college, and everybody tries crazy things in college, apparently.

Now,

he got a laced cigarette, crack.

It was laced with crack in college.

Now, look, that probably happens to a lot of people, too.

You're going to have a regular cigarette.

Ah, it's laced with a little crack.

It happens.

I think he actually tried to make crack into a cigarette, was this one actually.

He got crack, didn't know what to do with it, decided to smoke it in a cigarette, and didn't really get high, I believe was his telling.

2001, he's plastered on a train.

2003, he finally realizes I've had this problem

and I'm not going to drink for 30 days.

Okay.

And he does not drink for 30 days.

Impressive.

And then he drinks on day 31.

And then he starts over again.

He goes 30 days because that's his goal.

Gets past his goal.

And then on 31, day 31, he does it again.

And he says, he repeats this over and over and over again.

He goes, 30 days, I got to get through 30 days.

He gets through 30 days.

And then on day 31, he blows it.

It's like me with a diet.

September 2003, he goes into rehab for the first time.

Later on, he goes into Alcoholics Anonymous.

Then he has a pretty good stretch, about seven years, where he is reportedly sober.

And these are all his tellings here.

I'm not unearthing any

incidents.

In 2010, he has a relapse, has three bloody Marys.

Between 2010 and 2011, he drinks heavily for several months.

2011 goes back to rehab, and that's rehab two.

Or three.

And it depends if you count AA.

I guess that's also kind of rehab.

2013, he gets the shingles.

I don't want to even think about the shingles.

It really grosses me out.

But the point is, he gets the shingles, he gets painkillers, and that sends him back into

a problem.

In May 2013, he stops at a bar, and this is where he gets the laced cigarettes from the North African, which who hasn't had that happen to him?

Now, this is all before he started at Burisma.

Okay, so, I mean, look, you can't even count that stuff.

2013, he has cocaine in his system, and it's found by the military.

Now, that's a problem.

I will say this.

He says it was because he had that laced cigarette from the North African.

So it's the North Africans' fault.

We can all blame the North Africans on that test.

Then he goes to rehab again, this time in Tijuana, because who wouldn't go to Tijuana to get your rehab?

But this is rehab where they're using some illegal substance here in the United States.

It's like some controversial, probably not scientific rehab where he takes some weird herb in Tijuana.

It's like, you know, Andy Kaufman when he was trying to get his cancer cured.

That's basically what we have here.

Then he leaves that rehab and goes, where else would you go?

To rehab in Arizona, which is, this is now what, number four or five we're on as far as rehab goes.

Around 2015, this is when he's coming home from a devastating funeral.

He's going through couples therapy.

By the way, he is now at Burisma.

earning all this money, $50,000 a month.

So they hired him with all the stuff I've given you so far.

Now he's there and this stuff is happening.

He goes to Couples Therapy.

They're talking about how terrible it is.

If you drink one more time, you got to move out.

He leaves Couples Therapy and goes and drinks a bottle of vodka.

Then he has to move out.

In 2015, one of his relapses is actually with the guy from Burisma.

He's on his boat doing shots.

His relapse is with the burisma guy.

They continue to employ him through this.

2016, he becomes a shut-in.

He's very depressed with the whole situation with his brother has gone on.

His relationships are breaking up.

And he becomes almost a shut-in.

And he says himself, I only leave for vodka at this point.

February 2016, he's back in rehab.

What are we at?

Six?

Is that six now?

Six rehab stints?

In June 2016, he goes to Monte Carlo because what a great place for you to visit if you happen to be in rehab six times.

Why not go to Monte Carlo?

I believe this visit too was another conference related to burisma.

And he does what we all do when it's time to go potty.

He had cocaine with a guy in the bathroom who was a stranger.

Because what better decision-making capability can you have than to snort something off of a bathroom,

a bathroom sink counter from a stranger?

Why not put some white powder up your nose from some guy you just met in a bathroom?

I mean, just forget the cocaine.

I don't want to sniff that close to anything in a bathroom.

It's a terrible idea in every way.

So in fall 2016, he's on his way to rehab again, which I think would be number seven, something like that.

And while he's there, he loses his wallet.

Now, this, of course, has happened to everybody.

Everyone lost their wallet.

Well, he left his on the plane.

That's tough, right?

You've lost, if you left your wallet on the plane, what are you going to do?

Luckily, he also happened to have a credit card in his pocket, which is what everyone does when they have a wallet, which is keep one credit card in your pocket, but leave your wallet somewhere else.

This is not something I've ever heard occur, but I've never smoked crack with a North African either.

Now, he lost his wallet, but then still finds a way to buy crack.

Which again, I'm not...

that familiar with the financial arrangements with your everyday crack dealer.

but I assume that's a little odd, but maybe he was taking cash advances with his credit card.

I don't know.

With over the next week, he goes back and buys crack, as he says, a few more times.

Then he gets in a fight at a bar.

This is, by the way, all still getting $50,000 a month here from Burisma throughout this entire period.

He goes and he

has a guy, some guy, I wish I had his name in front of me.

It's like, It's like Sloppy Joe is his name or something.

It's something like,

I remember thinking it reminded me of like

a rapper name, like the notorious B.I.G.

or something.

It was like some guy.

I think he actually may have been a rapper, a local rapper.

And he rescued him because he felt bad for Hunter Biden, some local rapper.

And he gets him money to get a rental car.

Hunter takes the rental car, is of course on drugs while he's driving it, and crashes it.

Hurts says, hey, I guess, you know, we have a deal where we're supposed to pick people up when they have accidents.

So they bring a new car out to him, which he promptly, I believe, crashes again, but certainly returns to Hertz with drugs left on the counter, or the console.

He's got white powder in the Hertz car, along with his government identification still left in the car after he leaves.

The reason he got in the second accident is because he believes he hallucinated an owl.

I'm not making any of this up.

Finally, he gets divorced, and he goes immediately after the divorce because there's press reports that he had problems with strip clubs.

He says, I've never been to a strip club in many, many years, but what does he do when he sees the reports?

He goes immediately to a strip club by his own admission.

This does not include any of the personal life sort of stuff that went on with this relationship where he was married, then he got divorced, then he started dating the widow of his brother.

And then he met a South African woman and a week later married her like a couple of months ago from right now.

That's this history we're talking about.

This guy was trusted with these decisions by a man who wants to be president of the United States.

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Thanks.

We've been looking at some of the democratic proposals.

We obviously had the debate this week, and there's a little bit of a competition.

going back and forth as to how uh how much government is going to grow how many of these new policies are going to go into effect?

And how much it's going to cost us?

Kind of a famous thing going back with Elizabeth Warren, who will not admit that she's raising taxes on middle-class people, which is so weird and awkward and strange.

She has this red line or something that she doesn't want to give a commercial to Republicans, and she's so bad at avoiding and being evasive that she just winds up repeating herself over and over again with that deer and headlights look that she gets.

And this is the type of thing that Donald Trump is going to expose in a dramatic way in a debate if she actually becomes the nominee.

But let's get, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Let's talk for a minute about Bernie Sanders and his proposals.

And Brian Riedel is with us.

He's a senior fellow at Manhattan Institute.

And this is a guy who, Brian, you know, you're not some crazy person here.

You're a person that, you're not some partisan conservative.

You're looking at these things and you're saying, what are the costs to the to the extent that even Vox has printed your analysis on many of these policies?

Hi, Stu.

Yeah,

when I decided to add up the cost of everything Bernie Sanders was offering, which, by the way, is difficult because every time you finish, he proposes something new.

To the extent that it was possible, I relied on Bernie's own numbers.

I relied on the Congressional Budget Office.

I relied on the existing information.

I wasn't, you know, trying to do some right-wing agenda, cook the numbers.

I said,

for all proposals, let's first look for Bernie's data.

And if Bernie's data is not available, let's look for the Congressional Budget Office.

And only then, if there's no score, I will ballpark my own score for a proposal, but then I'll walk the reader through how I calculated it so that they could put in their own score if they want.

And it's very detailed, your breakdown here.

We're going to tweet out the article, make sure that everybody can read the full detail.

But let's start from the bottom, and we'll build to the actual total cost here, because it's almost to the point where you think it's a made-up number.

We're almost there.

Here we go.

Starting with public school teacher salaries.

That's an easy, low-cost expense.

How much is that going to cost us over the next decade?

Sanders wants to spend $400 billion over 10 years ensuring that all public school teachers earn at least $60,000 a year from day one.

Okay.

All right.

That's easy.

I mean, $400 billion is almost nothing these days.

How about more education spending?

This is from K to 12.

That is $800 billion,

just general expansions across the board.

Did he make

any specificity as to what he's spending this on?

A lot of it would be Title I, low-income grants.

A lot of it would be special education.

A lot of it would be typical government special interest handouts for teachers who implement policies the Bernie Sanders way.

Okay.

Now, we know eventually we're going to get to Infrastructure week.

We know it's around the corner at any time.

Bernie's got a nice big infrastructure week going on if he becomes president.

How much does that cost us?

$1 trillion.

Now we're at, what, $2.2 trillion.

This is nothing.

Not a big deal at all.

Okay, next up.

It's nothing.

It's only the cost of the Republican tax cuts that were supposed to end the world.

Oh, yeah.

That's right.

Has the world ended yet?

I have not been keeping track.

No, no, but remember when $2.2 trillion was more money than

you could imagine two years ago?

Yeah, now it's

that's nothing.

I have a theory that the tax cuts and net neutrality that were both going to end the world canceled each other out, and that's why we're still alive.

That's just a theory, though.

Okay, paid family leave.

That's another big one.

Popular proposal.

People really seem to like it.

How much does that cost?

$1.6 trillion.

So now

we're at $3.8 trillion, if I'm keeping this scorecard correctly.

Explain the Bernie Sanders housing proposal, because it's pretty freaking expansive.

It's $2.5 trillion.

It's pretty vague.

The $2.5 trillion comes from Sanders himself, but it's a way to basically guarantee low-income housing for all.

He doesn't really specify that much how he would do it, other than there would be huge grants to states

to build more houses and guarantee housing for all paid for by you, the taxpayer.

Now,

I know Bernie's got a bunch of houses, but the $2.5 trillion isn't actually coming from Bernie himself.

He's not paying out of his own pocket for this, of course.

Oh, heavens, no, you're paying.

All right, I want to make sure, because I knew Bernie had some cash.

I did not know he had $2.5 trillion.

All right, so now we're at $4.1 trillion, $5.1,

$6.3 trillion.

What would the total budget be for

the United States over this period?

Do we know?

With a baseline, well, over the next 10 years, the federal government is going to spend $60 trillion.

Okay, so we've already spent an additional $7, so we're already up over 10%.

Next up, we have the expansion of Social Security.

Yes, Social Security is going bankrupt, and Sanders wants to put more money so that it can go bankrupt faster.

That's higher benefits, higher benefits at the bottom.

Let's redistribute even more money upward to wealthy seniors than the current system already does.

And that costs how much?

That is about $1.8 trillion.

Yeah, $1.8 trillion.

Unbelievable.

Okay, so we're at $1.8 trillion, and we haven't started getting into the big stuff yet.

This is, we are still at the bottom of this budget for Bernie Sanders.

We're at about $8 trillion, which used to be an impossible amount of money, and now it's a rounding error.

Amazing.

Okay, so now Bernie wants to make sure that people have a living wage.

This is a big problem for Bernie.

He wants to make sure people are making $15.

What's that?

Did we skip education?

Or did we skip college education?

Oh, okay.

Sorry.

College.

I did skip that one.

Free college education.

What's that cost?

$3 trillion

to pay off everybody's student loan in America and guarantee that every public college is free moving forward.

Of course, the private colleges would not be free, and they would be completely hammered by this policy because everyone would just stampede to the free public colleges.

Right.

The private schools would be decimated.

That's about $3 trillion.

So I just skipped $3 trillion.

Please forgive me, but it was just, you know, I didn't see it sitting over there.

There was a big pile.

I didn't even realize what it was.

So an extra $3 trillion over in the corner.

We're now up to $11.1 trillion.

Now, and I will say too, one minor thing about this free college thing that I don't hear tossed around that often, the value of college to an individual goes down when everyone's going.

Right?

Like there's you're not you're no longer separating yourself for high-level jobs if every single person is going for free.

Then it comes back to a merit-based system, which we were supposed to have anyway, but you've just wasted multiple trillions of dollars figuring it all out.

Right, you go from standard K-12 to standard K-16 and academic standards are going to be lower, you know, or because schools aren't going to want all these new people flunking out, especially with the that'll cost them their government money.

So, yeah, I mean, they're just going to lower standards, and we'll all have our standard K through 16, and you'll have to find different ways to signal to an employer that you know what you're doing.

All right, now we're going to get to the $15 an hour, full benefits, everybody out there.

And I've heard that this may cause up to something like 50% of all people to be employed by the government, which would be an interesting proposal.

How much does this cost, though?

It has to be massive.

This is one where I had to walk the reader through my own estimate because nobody has really costed it up.

By my estimate, guaranteeing everybody who wants one a $15 an hour job plus full benefits would cost $30 trillion over the decade.

And that's probably an underestimate.

That's a lot of money.

Why is it an underestimate?

Because the numbers that we used are based on a $56,000 per person cost that a liberal think thing came up with.

That was based on only paying $11.83 per hour.

Bernie wants to pay $15.

We also assume that only half,

you're not just going to get the unemployed joining this program.

You're going to get everybody who's currently making less than $15 an hour is going to want in.

Yet I only assume half of the people who would get a raise actually quit their job and go into this.

Wow.

Nor do I account for a recession or anything else like that where you're going to get even higher enrollment.

So, I mean, you could actually, it could be double the $30 trillion if everybody who would actually get a raise from this and would take advantage of the fact that you can't be fired.

This is a new job that you can't be fired from no matter how lazy you are and that you get 15 bucks an hour.

I mean, if everybody who would get a higher raise joined, it would actually be about $60 trillion.

So I'm going to put that on the side, an extra $30 trillion that may be in cost, because everything, and I'm glad you brought that up because it shows how detailed you are here.

This is not, you're you're trying to inflate these numbers.

You're actually undercutting them by a lot.

And I will say the quality of work you're getting out of a person that you're paying $15 an hour for that cannot be fired no matter how bad they are at the job.

It's not going to be a high quality of work.

Well and think of the effect on the economy in terms of productivity.

We're going to have people quit their private sector jobs to move into government make work jobs that were created just to keep them busy and that they can't be fired from.

And we're going to put, put, by my estimate, 45 million workers into these make-work community service jobs.

Think of what that's going to do to the productivity and the economy.

I mean,

you're going to have an immediate recession.

All right.

It's incredible.

We're up to 41.2 trillion, at least.

Now we have the biggest challenge that we fight as a planet.

Global warming, climate change.

Obviously, Bernie's got to dish a bunch of cash at that.

How much is he going for?

Bernie has promised $16.3 trillion over 10 years to save the planet.

I think he's channeling the Green New Deal in Congress.

I mean, and that's what he's admitting to.

We all know that he's going to spend more than everything he's admitting to because every government official, Republican and Democrat, does that.

So we're up to now $57.5 trillion.

How much is the entire budget projected to be for the next 10 years again, Brian?

$60 trillion.

So we're basically now doubling the entire budget.

And you may notice I have not mentioned one more thing, which is Medicare for all.

Medicare for all.

It's not Medicare for all who want it.

It's not a public option.

It's eliminating private insurance and giving free health care to every single person, quote unquote, free health care, to every single person over a 10-year period.

What's the cost of that?

If you even ask Bernie Sanders, he now concedes up to $40 trillion over 10 years.

$40 trillion

over 10 years.

Yes.

So now we are at, you want to give the big final number here?

The total cost of the Sanders agenda using mostly his own numbers is $97.5 trillion over 10 years.

We are about to

cross the $100 trillion barrier for just new proposals.

Remember, this is in excess of the $60 trillion we're already planning on spending, which is always underestimated.

We're going to take 60 trillion, add on another 97.5 trillion.

Plus, I would argue your number to the high side is going to be more accurate with the jobs, which would add another $30 trillion.

We're at $120

trillion, $127 trillion.

Brian, how long until we have to teach America what the word quadrillion means?

Yeah, we're heading that direction.

There's an old joke that

by the time we get to the Iowa caucuses, Bernie's going to be spending 100% of GDP at the rate he's going.

I mean, I'm sure he'll top $100 trillion soon.

Because every time I would finish this dumb article, Bernie would propose something new and I would have to redo my numbers.

Brian Riedel from the Manhattan Institute, we were going to tweet this whole article out.

You can see all the details.

It is absolutely fascinating to go through this because wait till you, I mean, I wish we had more time with you because he's going through the numbers, comparing it to other countries.

He says he's a European socialist.

He's far exceeding anything that's happening in Europe as far as spending goes.

Read all about this in Brian Ridel's great article.

He's at Brian underscore R-I-E-D-L on Twitter.

Brian, thanks for coming on the program.

Thanks for watching, Stu.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Like listening to this podcast?

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Sometimes

life gets in the way

of what's actually happening.

I believe it was the philosopher Ferris Buehler who said, life moves pretty fast.

If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

It's true, you know, what Ferris said.

And it is one of those things that I think affects all of us.

We get in the middle of these huge news stories, these huge news cycles, and we sometimes miss massive things.

Things that we should be all either celebrating or be horrified by.

Things that define an era, things that people look back on later on and say, hey, remember when that happened?

You know,

just the most massive events

at the time don't always seem so massive.

You know, when something that you depend on collapses in horror, you know,

it kind of, in the middle of a news cycle like this, you could lose something.

And I think when these things happen, we need to focus on them a little bit and understand the historical context.

I mean, if you can think about like, you know, we now look back at New Coke collapsing, right?

They bring in New Coke.

Oh my gosh, it's a horror show.

Then Classic Coke comes back.

They finally start calling it Coke 2 for some reason, which was a really weird moment.

And then they get rid of it.

Crystal Pepsi comes out, right?

It's this big thing, millions of dollars of advertising, and then it's just gone.

One day,

tens of thousands of employees of Bennigan's went to work to serve people Monte Cristo sandwiches, and the doors were locked.

And the company had gone bankrupt, and basically every Bennigan's closed unexpectedly from one day to the next.

Just gone.

Now, you might think Bennigan's might not be that big historically, but it is responsible for much of my weight gain from back in those days.

The Monte Cristo was a devastating sandwich.

I mean,

you've got ham, turkey, two types of cheese, the three pieces of bread, so you got to kind of have a Big Mac setup.

And then all that you're taking and you're going to dip it in batter.

Then you're going to pop that puppy into the deep fryer.

Then it's going to come out of the deep fryer.

You're going to sprinkle the top of it with powdered sugar.

And then they're going to give you on the side, because that's not enough.

They're going to give you on the side a little bit of raspberry jam to dunk that thing in.

I mean,

that was like a month of constant thanksgivings in one meal.

Somehow, that place closed in America, which they must have been really crappy businessmen.

I remember growing up,

and I lived a very difficult life,

a difficult childhood in suburban Connecticut.

And I remember, though, the one place of paradise down the highway, which I thought was paradise.

You know, now when I drive through it, it's just East Haven, Connecticut.

But in East Haven, Connecticut, they had right next to each other a Toys R Us

and a place called Child World.

Now, these were competing toy stores right next to each other.

Toys R Us and Child World.

And Child World was this really cool toy store, and it had like a panda as its mascot.

And I assume with a name like Child's World, the CEO was probably like Jeffrey Epstein.

I don't know who it was.

Looking back at it, it's a strange thing.

But it was right next to Toys R Us.

And then one day it wasn't.

One day it was just Toys R Us, and Child World had closed.

It was a devastating moment of my childhood.

And then I passed that devastation of capitalism to my son and daughter this past year when every Toys R Us closed.

It was brutal.

It's historic.

And that's the way we need to look

at the utter, spectacular collapse of Betto O'Rourke.

I want to pay.

Think of how significant this is.

This is not something you look back and who was that guy.

This is a cataclysmic destruction of one's own career in front of our very eyes.

We've all been able to witness it, to soak it in over the past year.

And I can tell you, it's particularly tasty in Texas.

Oh, it's delicious here in Texas.

It's Monte Cristo at Bennigan's delicious here in Texas.

Betto O'Rourke, this candidate that

can you even remember the time he was surrounded by constant fawning media coverage?

This was the golden child.

This is the guy who, on the cover of what was it, Vanity Fair, said, I was the chosen one.

I was born for this

about himself.

That Robert Francis O'Rourke, that Bob Frank O'Rourke

is now,

has now just dropped to the levels where it's almost impossible to be embarrassed further.

He launched into this campaign, people don't remember this, in second place behind only Biden, who wasn't in the race yet.

He was right there, 15%.

Him and Sanders were right there at the top.

And now he might not even make the next debate.

In fact, I don't think he's going to unless things change dramatically.

And he's not been able to do that so far.

He's shown no ability to be able to change his own fortunes.

Theranos was a company that said they invented this blood testing,

this blood test that could detect all these dozens of diseases at the same time in one drop of blood.

It was a massive development in medical technology.

Huge people, statesmen, even General Mattis was on the board of this company.

It was huge.

Everybody believed they had this technology.

It went to a $9 billion corporation.

And then everyone said, oh, wait a minute.

Can we see the technology in action?

Because you haven't really showed us that it works yet.

And whistleblowers inside the company said, yeah, this doesn't actually work.

We're just sending the test out to another company.

Bottom line is they're now bankrupt and there's charges all over the place.

They never even had the ability to do these tests.

A $9 billion company down the drain.

I don't even think that approaches what has happened with the Betto Overk campaign.

This guy is flailing about so pathetically right now.

And for some reason, he continues to campaign.

Why does he do this to himself?

Why does he do this to his family?

Why does he do this to America?

It's almost impossible to understand.

It's almost as possible to understand as to why his name is Betto and not just Robert.

We go into some of the specifics and the way he's handling this utter, historic, cataclysmic attack on his ability to win this campaign.

His campaign is,

I mean, it is toast.

Toast.

But he continues to try, and with every increasing percent of desperation, he becomes more and more entertaining.

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