Friday, Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson explained how some of the elite institutions in America had been coopted to benefit the ruling class.
One of the consequences according to Carlson is along the way, capitalism is being discredited and that has given rise to proponents of socialism, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: 2020 has been a tough year for a lot of Americans, but it’s been especially difficult for the experts who claim they analyze data for a living. A lot of those people have been exposed for what they are — frauds.
Take the polling business. Polling used to seem like a legitimate job, then came November’s election, despite their supposedly sophisticated modeling, pollsters around the country got it wrong by double digits in race after race.
Pretty embarrassing, but not as embarrassing as the performance of our so-called public health experts. They’re supposed to be numbers people, too. They told you that any public protest against their lockdowns had roughly 150% chance of killing the entire population. Meanwhile, they declared looting and arson totally safe.
That’s just basic epidemiology, they said.
OK, if you’re starting to get the impression that dishonest people can easily manipulate data to tell you any story, they want to tell you, you may be on to something.
Consider the condition of our economy. The numbers out of Washington suggest it’s in great shape. Stock prices 401 (k) and upscale home sales have all risen dramatically. Try to buy an expensive exercise bike or a million-dollar center console fishing boat. Good luck. In many cases, they’re sold out.
There are a lot more billionaires than there ever have been in this country. In fact, as a group, billionaires have increased their wealth by 30% overall this year, that’s by more than a total of a trillion dollars in a single year. No precedent for that.
At the same time, the unemployment rate is falling. You hear that a lot. So it’s all good. As Joe Biden likes to say, we’re building back better.
Well, that’s one way to look at it. But look deeper. That is not the whole story.
America has a very different economy from the economy we used to have even just last year, people at the very top are thriving. Many other Americans are withering away.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (voice-over): Small businesses and restaurants, America’s backbone are on the ropes because of the coronavirus pandemic. Limited foot traffic and lockdowns translate into 164,000 businesses having to close at one point since the beginning of the pandemic, with 60% having to close permanently.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Tens of thousands of independent businesses shut down for good. Entire sectors of the economy wiped off the map. That’s a lot of people out of work. So, where are they? Why does the Federal government tell us the unemployment rate is down?
Well, here’s the simple answer. The official unemployment numbers out of Washington don’t count unemployed people who have stopped looking for jobs. And there are a lot of those.
Last month alone, another half-million working-age Americans who want a job to quit trying to find a job. And that’s not surprising. There are 10 million fewer jobs available in this country than there were in February. That’s when politicians decided to destroy countless small businesses in the name of slowing the spread.
As a result of that, according to the Labor Department, long term unemployment has hit record levels. Last month, 385,000 more Americans reported being unemployed for longer than 27 weeks.
Since September, that number has increased by more than 1.5 million. So, what is our government’s solution to the disaster they created? Well, more money from the Federal Reserve, money printed out of nowhere and backed by nothing. Trillions of new dollars spent to fix a problem they created and more on the way soon.
Now keep in mind, this is stimulus money. It’s designed to help those hurt by the lockdowns and in many cases, it did help, and it will help, but in many other cases, the money has gone to people with the right political connections.
A voter registration nonprofit run by the Reverend Raphael Warnock, that’s the left-wing preacher now running for Senate in Georgia raked in $482,000.00 in coronavirus bailout money. How did he do that? Don’t ask.
A firm that happens to be co-owned by Ilhan Omar’s husband got half a million dollars in tax money. Planned Parenthood hoovered up $80 million. More abortions for everyone.
The Kennedy Center in Washington, home to the local opera got $25 million and then laid off employees anyway.
Last week, we spoke to a man called Dave Morris. Morris owns a restaurant in the Midwest. He could have used some help, government shut down his business and now he is going under. But unfortunately, for Dave Morris, he is not married to Ilhan Omar. He doesn’t run abortion mills in black neighborhoods or invite Nancy Pelosi to the opera at the Kennedy Center.
So instead, Dave Morris has been forced to operate illegally just to survive. Here’s what he told us.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DAVE MORRIS, RESTAURANT OWNER: I had some hope when they were talking a $2 trillion stimulus package to help the American people, and when I looked at maybe 120 million families in this country, 120 million households, and I figured, you know, geez, that would give everybody, maybe $10,000.00 to every household. That’s a lot of money.
Instead, that money went all of different directions. It went to campaign donors, special interest groups, maybe a couple of museums, and it didn’t get where it was supposed to go. I never got any of it.
And the small business owners like me never got any of it. That’s our money.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: “That’s our money.” Well, it is. But here’s the good news. Pretty soon, it won’t be worth much. The truth is you can’t keep printing trillions of dollars without getting serious inflation.
Serious inflation is guaranteed. It’s natural law. There’s no getting around it. The people making these decisions know that perfectly well. But they want inflation. That’s the secret. They want inflation. In fact, they need inflation. Why?
Because they’ve gotten rich from debt. That’s the real economy. Leverage is their entire business model.
So, for the finance class, inflation is the only way out of all that debt. When money is worth less, you owe less. Meanwhile, hard assets like upscale real estate in Martha’s Vineyard will be worth more.
So, inflation may crush you, but it will make these people — the ones making the decisions — richer; everyone else will get the shaft. Who is everyone else? Well, regular wage earners, people living on fixed income, every middle-class retiree in the country. In fact, anyone who bothered to live like a responsible person and saved money, all of them will be in serious trouble when inflation arrives.
That’s not speculation. It’s coming. And anyone who is paying attention knows it’s coming over, oh, but it’s just the beginning.
If Democrats retake the Senate in January, they have committed to passing something called the HEROES Act. So, who are these heroes they plan to help? Not the thousands of small business owners whose lives they destroyed, no. Instead, the law will help rich people in the northeast who were hurt by the Trump administration’s last tax bill.
The HEROES Act would restore the full state and local tax deduction reversing the 2017 law that capped it at 10 grand.
According to Brookings Institution, 96% of the benefits from this would go to the top quintile of earners, 57% would benefit the top one percent, and 25% would benefit the top 0.1 percent.
In other words, it would benefit Democratic voters, more for the Democratic base. That’s what this is and it won’t stop there.
In October, the top Democrat in the U.S. Senate, Chuck Schumer announced his support for this idea.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY): We believe that President Biden if he becomes President, could eliminate student loan debt without Congress with the flick of the pen that he has in power.
So, we’re proposing that the first $50,000.00 of every one student debt will be automatically eliminated.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So, student debt is a huge problem. The lack of benefit from going to a four-year college is an even bigger problem. We pointed that out many times on this show.
But consider this idea. Who was helped by what Chuck Schumer just said? Well, it’s great news for people who got pointless Master’s Degrees in gender oppression, their slate will be wiped clean by Chuck Schumer and the magic of the Federal Reserve. They’ll be free to move forward on that coveted Ph.D. in transgender equity studies.
But what about everyone else? What about small business owners who spent say 50 grand trying to keep their employees on payroll over the past nine months? Will Chuck Schumer wipe their debt clean? How about people with car loans or burdensome mortgages? Or anyone who is helping to pay for their daughter’s wedding? What about their debt?
Sorry, they’re out of luck. Unlike the education establishment, people like that are not big Democratic donors.
According to one analysis, writing off student debt in the way that Schumer proposes would disproportionately help the most privileged in America, i.e. Democratic voters. But you already knew that.
Here’s another idea. Why not make the people who benefited the most from the lockdown, the people who have encouraged them from day one, pay for the effects of those lockdowns? Why wouldn’t you assess, I don’t know, Amazon and Apple and Goldman Sachs and Google and Netflix and Walmart — all the big winners in this pandemic? Why wouldn’t you assess them a one-time COVID fee? Take it out of their record profits and make them pay for the next bailout. Why are you paying for it?
Jeff Bezos, for example, is now the richest man in the history of the world. Maybe he could share the load in a meaningful way. He’s not sharing it with his employees. And while we’re at it, why not make Harvard and Yale and Stanford and Princeton use their endowments to pay off some of the student debt they caused?
There’s no reason ordinary taxpayers should be on the hook for their spending. Ordinary taxpayers have suffered enough.
Here’s the bottom line: the rich are getting richer, everyone else is getting poor. That’s not a talking point, it is true and measurable. Why is it a problem? Because if it continues, we’re going to wind up with an even more volatile society in which everybody hates each other and is consumed by envy.
And along the way, capitalism itself will be discredited, and you don’t want that, it’s already happening. There are already an awful lot of socialists around these days. Have you noticed that? Why is that? Well, it’s because the people in charge of our economy are discrediting our system.
They are giving capitalism a bad name because what they’re participating in is not a market economy, a free open market economy. It’s a closed game, run for their own benefit and their benefit alone.
Long term, this is a disaster for all of us. And not even so far in the future. In four years, for example, Sandy Cortez will be eligible to run for President. Now, you may laugh at Sandy Cortez and you should, she is a vacuous idiot, another rich girl narcissist with an overheated Twitter account. But that doesn’t mean she couldn’t win.
If we keep up with this nonsense, this economic craziness, she could win.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.