Crom’s Crommentary: Will Voters Believe Biden or Their Lying Eyes?

Crom’s Crommentary: Will Voters Believe Biden or Their Lying Eyes?

Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.

CROM CARMICHAEL:

Michael last evening, Tucker Carlson started his show talking about how the White House and maybe some other groups were awarded the International Woman of the Year Award to a man and he talked about what, what does that mean. And I thought about it, I know we’ve all heard the story about the fellow whose wife is out of town on business and he’s in bed in his own home with somebody else, and the wife comes home early and walks in the door and catches him.

And he says, honey, are you gonna believe what I’m about to tell you? Or are you gonna believe those lying eyes of yours? And that’s the world we live in today. You have the Biden administration saying that the southern border is secure. We have, what’s her name, the French woman?

Pierre says that fentanyl is now the least problem we’ve had in decades. And then you have Biden saying inflation is not a problem. Our economy is in great shape. The list of falsehoods goes on and on, and they’re just brazen. And so it is unsurprising that the White House in a very solemn ceremony would present a man with the award of International Woman of the Year.

And the thing that’s interesting to me is I wonder where in the world are women’s organizations. The ones that claim to have fought so hard for women’s rights, they’re now taking a backseat. And here’s what I predict will happen. Not that long ago, a few years, John McEnroe was on a television set and they were talking about Serena Williams and there was a female commentator on there who was a woman but not a tennis player, not a professional tennis player.

And John McEnroe said there’s no doubt in anybody who knows tennis mind that Serena Williams is the greatest female player to ever play the game. And the woman on there said why don’t you just say that she’s the greatest player to ever play the game?

And McInroy was startled by the comment and he said because she’s not. She’s the greatest female player. If she played against men, she’d be ranked about 700th in the world. He said she wouldn’t be a starter. She wouldn’t even make a men’s college tennis team.

But she is a great tennis player in her own right. And so that’s the tip of the iceberg of this stuff where somebody says something that is just brazenly false and then is incredibly offended when people don’t agree. And that’s the world we live in today. The stock market is not in good shape. The stock market is down off of where it was when Biden took office.

It’s been as high as 36,000. It’s down to 32,000; it’s really close. What I’m talking about in just the Dow, other stocks have fallen much, much more. And if you take into account the inflation, that 32,000 is really probably closer to 24,000. So stocks have lost, from a value standpoint, probably a third of their value.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the French lady came out today and claimed their stocks are currently at an all-time. And the press would say, hey, yay. Did you hear that? Stocks are at an all-time high! And so we’re living in a world where Biden now claims he’s a capitalist.

Then he comes out with a budget where he is taxing anything that moves at incredibly high rates and nobody in the media except the relatively few people who are rational and logical are calling Biden out for this. It’ll be fascinating to see what happens as Biden runs for reelection.

He will continue to make statements that are verifiably, 100% false, and he will still get away with it with the media. The question is whether or not the voters are going to believe him or believe their lying eyes.

Listen to today’s show highlights, including this Crommentary:

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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Joe Biden” by The White House. Background Photo “Election Day” by Phil Roeder. CC BY 2.0.

 

Crom’s Crommentary: The Unsustainable Budget of Joe Biden

Crom’s Crommentary: The Unsustainable Budget of Joe Biden

Live from Music Row, Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.

CROM CARMICHAEL:

Michael, the Biden administration has submitted its budget and the CBO, which I generally disregard because they are required by law to avoid dynamic scoring. And what dynamic scoring means is really simple. If the current tax rate is 50 percent and Congress were to increase the tax rate to 100 percent under the CBO requirements, they have to say that revenue will double.

Now, as Dr. Arthur Laffer has said, there are two tax rates that generate zero revenue. One is a zero tax rate, and the other is a 100 percent tax rate. And so if you don’t include dynamic scoring, you’re not going to get a good result. So it’s biased toward bigger government, but even then, the Biden budget calls for spending to increase to 25 percent of our economy.

To give you just a sense of things, from 1973 to 1922, that’s a 50-year period, the average was 21 percent. And so this is 3 percent more of the whole economy, which the whole economy at a $29 trillion economy, what you’re looking at is almost a trillion dollars a year of extra spending.

And that just won’t work. What I’m saying is, when you spend that much money at the federal level, all the wheels will come off. And we’re talking about here over the next 10 years. Now, just to try to give some perspective, in 1970, total Medicare spending, total Medicare spending was 7.5 billion, in 1970.

This figure has grown to almost 900 billion. It’s grown almost 100 times since it started 50 years ago. In 1966, Medicaid was just under $1 billion. That’s when the program started. Now it is over $650 billion. And the federal government is now trying to say that food should be part of Medicaid.

So the people who are on Medicaid can get free food under Medicaid. There’s no top on how much is spent once the benefit itself is defined. And so as we merrily go along talking about balloons and all kinds of issues that are important, but compared to Biden’s budget that he has given the Congress, anything else that we’re talking about right now for the next few years, this issue is the one that should be top of mind.

I see almost no reporting on it whatsoever by the media. They just have said he’s introduced his budget, and that’s about all they’ll tell you. And it does have in it, in his own budget, $2 trillion deficits as far as the eye can see. And that’s just unsustainable. Any reasonable person would say that’s unsustainable. But nobody in the media seems to be complaining.

Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:

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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Reporwith Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Joe Biden” by President Joe Biden. Background Photo “” by U.S. Capitol. CC BY-SA 2.0.

 

United States Senator Marsha Blackburn on China Balloon: ‘The Chinese Communist Party Sees Joe Biden as Weak’

United States Senator Marsha Blackburn on China Balloon: ‘The Chinese Communist Party Sees Joe Biden as Weak’

Live from Music Row, Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed United States Senator Marsha Blackburn to the newsmaker line to comment on the Chinese spy balloon that traversed the United States, the Biden family compromise, and economic effects of China.

Leahy: On the newsmaker line right now, Senator Marsha Blackburn, the senior senator from Tennessee. Good morning, Senator Blackburn.

Blackburn: Good morning! It’s good to be with you, and always good to have a conversation with Crom.

Carmichael: Well, you’re very kind. (Blackburn chuckles)

Leahy: Senator Blackburn, it’s another day. Has there been a separate sighting of some unknown object or balloon over Alaska or Canada or the United States recently, like today?

Blackburn: (Laughs) We have not been informed that there has been another sighting this morning, but it appears that every day they are finding more balloons. And this calls into question the coordination between the intel community, and the Department of Defense, and how closely they are watching our skies.

Here is what we do know, is that the Chinese Communist Party is intent on global domination by the time we get to the midpoint of this century. Anybody that doubts that should read Michael Pillsbury’s book The 100 Year Marathon.

The Chinese Communist Party sees this as the China century, and because of that, they’ve been very aggressive in their surveillance. You look at what they’re doing with TikTok and how that is affecting our youth and young adults. You look at the anguish that was caused to young people by the pandemic. We still do not know the origins of the pandemic. There are so many questions about the vaccine and the dangers this has caused to young people. And you look at the Chinese Confucius Institute that fortunately we’ve been able to remove from most of our universities and the Confucius classrooms that have been in many K12 schools. This is part of their propaganda, and so we know where they’re headed. What we need is for this administration, this Department of Defense, to get serious about this and to realize China is not a competitor. As the President said just a couple of weeks ago, China is an adversary. They want to dominate us. And it is not the Chinese people. It is the Chinese Communist Party.

Carmichael: What do you make of all of these balloons and these other things? I guess we’re shooting down something that I don’t know if it’s buoyed by a balloon, but I think there have been like three or four shootdowns in the last 10 days without revealing anything that’s classified.

Leahy: Four.

Blackburn: Four.

Carmichael: Do we know anything? And what do we make of something that’s kind of been going on obviously for quite some time? And now all of a sudden, the Biden administration is reacting.

Blackburn: And they are only reacting to this because a private citizen, saw something and said something and put a photograph up on a website there in Montana and said, who knows something about this? Now, bear in mind, this administration had said nothing until a citizen who was a reporter and a pilot took a picture, put it on the website, and said, what do you know about this?

This administration would not have come forward. Anthony Blinken would not have canceled his trip to China without this information. So the period of time this has been going on, we don’t know how many they have surveilled. We do not know. We have had a briefing, a classified briefing as you said.

I had a lot of questions that came out of that. Principally, why did they let this first balloon go when they spotted it and started following it off the coast of Alaska? And then they let it come back into Montana and then let it just kind of trapes across the country and then decided to shoot it down after it went to South Carolina.

But Crom, how did they know it was not going to stall out over one of our major cities and just sit there and collect intelligence? Why did they not choose to bring it down safely in Alaska when they could have done that?

Carmichael: Yes, there just seems to me to be more deal with the facts that we know, which are not very many, but they just beg many, many other questions. And it just almost appears to me that the Biden administration and as Robert Gates pointed out, Biden hasn’t made a good foreign policy decision in his entire career. He’s always been on the wrong side of every foreign policy decision and I think he sees the Communist Chinese Party almost as an organization he would like to emulate.

Blackburn: And one of the things that are of tremendous concern to me is the Biden family compromise. Why did they let this thing go and why is it that as you two know because you follow everything that is happening every day and you’re on top of it, you know that they could have made that choice to dismantle that balloon.

They could have decided that they were going to stand up to this. But the bottom line, the Chinese Communist Party sees Joe Biden as weak. They know he is not going to come after them. Whether it is that he is compromised, whether it is as Bob Gates said and as you just said, he can’t make the right decision on foreign policy because he is given more to appeasing than he is to showing strength.

I tell you this much, this would never have happened with President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo because China would have known, Xi Jinping would have known there would be hell to pay if they did this because they didn’t know what Donald Trump was going to do from one day to the next day.

And they knew that Mike Pompeo was not going to put up with this. And because of this and because of the fact that President Trump and Secretary Pompeo repeatedly held them to account and pushed the issues around the COVID vaccine and put sanctions on them and dealt with them on tariffs and trade, they knew that they could not push this.

Now, when you look at the economic side of this, you’re looking at a trade deficit that is the largest that we have had. China imported more stuff to the United States last year than ever, and we have a bigger trade deficit than ever. And that is because of the policies of this administration.

When you look at great power competition, you look at the Chinese Communist Party, you look at what they’re doing over. The United States had a balloon in Latin America. You had the balloon up in Canada. They’re surveilling people.

They’re practicing debt diplomacy. They are bullying Taiwan and all of the Pacific island nations. People are begging for our help and this administration is sitting on their hands and trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing.

Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:

Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Reporwith Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Marsha Blackburn” by Sen. Marsha Blackburn. Background Photo “U.S. Capitol” by Sandy Torchon.

 

Andy Ogles Talks Top Achievements as Mayor of Maury County and Key Concerns of Citizens

Andy Ogles Talks Top Achievements as Mayor of Maury County and Key Concerns of Citizens

Live from Music Row, Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed TN-5 GOP nominee, former Mayor of Maury County Andy Ogles to the studio to discuss past achievements as mayor and issues he is hearing on the ground through state town halls.

Leahy: In the studio – and I gotta say it again, Andy – Andy Ogles, the former mayor of Maury County, that bastion of freedom, that turbocharged engine of economic growth.

Ogles: I missed that. I really have.

Leahy: I mean, who else says that?

Ogles: That’s right.

Leahy: I think that actually, that phrasing really was yours, which I then grabbed as your intro,

Ogles: Two different statements on different days. But then you merged them.

Leahy: And merged them together to describe Maury County. And of course, you were there for four years, and Sheila Butt now is the mayor.

Ogles: Yeah, she’s doing a great job.

Leahy: And by the way, we’re going to have a mayor’s roundtable here with Sheila, Joe Carr from Rutherford County, and then our friend in Coffee County, who’s a former state rep.

So let’s talk a little bit about your tenure at Maury County. During your tenure, your four years there – you just ended your term on August 31 – you presided over an economy, a huge growth in Maury County.

Ogles: Yeah, we had record growth both residential and on the economic development side. When I was elected, that’s really what I focused on, was the economic development and going after companies, recruiting them to come to Maury County, because I want people not only to live in Maury County, but I want them to be able to work there, too.

Leahy: And Maury County, is it like the fastest growing county in the state?

Ogles: It is. Both in residential and job growth.

Leahy: So a great place. And you still live there.

Ogles: Yes. And will never leave.

Leahy: You’ll never leave Maury County.

Ogles: Sometimes people ask that question of, all right, well, when you get elected to Congress – of course we still have to win, of course. But 27 days and counting.

Ogles: That’s right, and we are counting, but are you going to move to D.C.? And the answer to that question is never.

Leahy: Never. Why would you do that with a family? Stay there?

Ogles: I’m a nerd. I love history, I love the monuments, I love the museums. But it’s a great place to visit at times. It’s a great place to work. But I would never raise my family there.

And for those that decide to do that, God bless them. But I’m a Southern boy. I’ve got a farm here down in Maury County.

Leahy: I’ve been to your farm. And of course, you got some great fruit trees out there that you planted. You kind of followed the Thomas Jefferson plan, it seems like, in terms of all the trees that you planted and what you’re doing there.

Ogles: Yes, we expanded our orchard, and then our neighbor just sold. And so I bought a little extra property and a pond next to, so I can expand our livestock because of access to water, I could get into the weeds on that. But anyway, it’s great.

Leahy: So let’s talk about the commitment to America. This was announced by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy a couple of weeks ago. And it seems to take off on all of the key issues that I hear about, you hear about, when you go out on these events, grassroots events that are kind of turned into town halls where people ask you questions: the priorities, the things that people are worried about. What are the top issues they talk to you about?

Ogles: Think back to like Newt Gingrich in the Contract with America, right, with this here are the problems that we see, and here are the things that we’re going to focus on and get done. And I think that’s what the American people are wanting.

But what’s interesting, you know, we live in a conservative state. We live in a conservative area. And the issues that resonate here are resonating across the country. So when you look at Las Vegas – so there are three congressional seats there in Las Vegas; one of them, it’s an R-2, meaning the Republican has a slight advantage. We were going to win that seat.

But the other two seats are D-2, D-4, meaning that the Democrats should win. And I think we’re going to end up winning all three of those seats.

Leahy: I think you’re going to win the Senate race there, too. I think Adam Laxalt, the son of Paul Laxalt, a friend and confidant of Ronald Reagan, I think he’s going to beat Cortez Masto. What’s her last name? Cortez Mosto, a Democrat incumbent there.

Ogles: What you’re seeing is that the top five, six, seven issues all are really commingled because it deals with the economy, with inflation, with the price of fuel, energy independence. Crime, of course, is a huge issue even here in Nashville. And immigration, of course.

And again, kind of dovetailing with that, the fentanyl crisis. And so I was on the phone with a congressman from up in the Dakotas a couple of weeks ago, and he said, Andy, historically, when you think about illegal immigration, as a country we kind of say, well, that’s Texas’ problem or that’s New Mexico’s problem, right.

But now with this flood of fentanyl that’s coming into the country, it’s now a problem at every doorstep across the country.

Leahy: Everywhere.

Ogles: Everywhere. And by the way, China is intentionally flooding the United States with fentanyl, through Mexico. It is an act of war.

Leahy: Yeah. And let’s go back to the Commitment to America. I’ll just hit the highlights of this.

Ogles: That’s a limited edition. I only have two of those, and I gave you one of them.

Leahy: I’m reading from it now. The four key areas: Number one, an economy that is strong, fight inflation and lower the cost of living, a nation that is safe; number two, secure the border and combat illegal immigration; number three, a future that’s built on freedom, make sure every student can succeed and give parents a voice; number four, a government that’s accountable to preserve our constitutional freedoms.

Let’s go back to that fight-inflation thing. It’s not doing so well because the Democrats are spending money like drunken sailors – with apologies to drunken sailors.

Ogles: One of the things we have to do, not to bore your audience with kind of an economics lesson, but we have a recession – and we’re in a recession, but we have this recession on the horizon. And when you look out at the horizon, inflation is in perpetuity right now.

And yet you still have Democrats talking about this debt forgiveness for student loans. But when you go back in time, what created this inflation, what created this recession, was the government giving money away. Giving money away it didn’t have. ECON-101. The very basics of economics is when the government oversupplies an economy with money, the backside of that is inflation. I mean, that’s just a fact.

And there’s a direct correlation with the size of the dollar spent and inflation. And so now, even when they know what they’re doing is breaking our economy, they continue to do it.

Leahy: They don’t care. The Democrats, in my view – this is my words, not yours – they don’t care.

Ogles: And I think they are deliberately trying to sabotage the economy so that when the Republicans take control and we will, that we can’t fix it. But we are going to fix it. And part of that is through energy independence. So how do you fix this?

One is we’ve got to be energy-independent. Whether it’s oil or gas, we have plenty here in North America. We don’t need our enemies overseas. We don’t need Russia. We don’t need China. We don’t need the Middle East.

And so both the United States and Europe have to become energy-independent, because our enemies are leveraging that against us. And you even see OPEC, at a time when you have skyrocketing prices, and inflationary pressures, are they are cutting the supply of oil.

Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:

– – –

Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Reporwith Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Andy Ogles” by Andy Ogles.

Wall Street Expert Liz Peek Outlines the Consequences of Raise Increases and Democrat Power Grabs at the Expense of the American Taxpayer

Wall Street Expert Liz Peek Outlines the Consequences of Raise Increases and Democrat Power Grabs at the Expense of the American Taxpayer

 

Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed by Fox Business contributor and Wall Street expert Liz Peek on the newsmakers line to discuss Joe Biden’s fiscal stimulus, wage increase disposition, and the consequences of inflation.

Leahy: We welcome to our newsmaker line our good friend Liz Peek, Fox News contributor and expert in finance. Liz, you always deliver common sense.

We’re in a land and an era where common sense seems to be very short in supply. I got one word for you. I’d like to get your reaction to this. Inflation.

Look, this is a serious problem, and I think it has been dismissed a little bit too easily by the Federal Reserve chair and by President Joe Biden.

Jerome Powell is in an awkward position. He wants to be reappointed when his term expires, I’m sure. And he also is on record having called for enormous fiscal stimulus, a lot of government spending to get us out of the slump that we were in because of COVID.

And now that that’s being delivered, probably at a level much more than he expected, it’s very hard for him to turn around and say, no, no, I was only kidding. These are not good ideas.

These $1.9 trillion dollar bills, $2 trillion dollar bills, et cetera. Please hold off on that. Even as I continue to throw billions, trillions of dollars into the economy through monetary policy.

So he’s got a problem. But I think the country is waking up to the fact that these giant spending programs that have been promoted by Democrats are simply pushing too much money into an economy that is chasing too few goods and now showing up in inflation.

Biden actually talked about it the other day (Chuckles) and his explanation was completely muddled. Which I guess we’re not surprised about.

But he’s talking about how the investments he wants to make in, I don’t even know what, green energy, et cetera, and that’s going to help inflation.

No, he’s wrong. That’s not going to help inflation, not in our lifetime, probably. In fact, it’s going to spur it because everything they want to do, for example, in energy is driving up the cost of energy.

Yes, the government is going to be subsidizing it so the consumer may not see it right away. But the truth is if you start piling into our economy, higher-cost energy, it flows everywhere.

So we have a problem. We have a spending problem. We don’t have a tax problem. If you look at long-term trends, the country is simply spending too much money.

I don’t think really many people can argue with that. We’ve never had a budget that called for spending $4 or $5 trillion dollars.

These are unimaginable numbers that we haven’t seen since World War II. And here’s the thing, we’re not at war. We have an economy that went into a ditch.

It’s very quickly revived. Democrats are lying about the fragility of the economy because they want these programs embedded now, such as the child tax credits, such as long-term dependent care, et cetera.

This really is not a good thing for our country. And thankfully, I think the polling shows consumers are very anxious about inflation, and that may help stem some of the more radical spending plans.

Leahy: But Liz, not a joke. This is is just temporary inflation. (Imitates Joe Biden) I’m paraphrasing what the President said.

Peek: And yeah, they can point to some things like lumber prices. We know went up 400, 500, 600 percent year over year, and they have come off those highs.

But one of my favorite economists on Wall Street, Ed Hyman, and has described inflation as lumpy. And he’s right. It comes kind of in batches.

You don’t really know what is going to be the big problem area, but here is one big problem area right now is rent. We’ve seen housing prices go through the roof.

Both new house prices and existing home prices are up substantially even as the Federal Reserve keeps buying up $120 billion dollars every month of bonds, including mortgage bonds.

Explain to me why we are buying mortgage bonds when the housing market is red hot? What that does is make mortgage rates lower.

Okay, that’s great. But it also spurs demand and throws out of whack a normal rebalancing of the housing market. But here’s the other thing.

What I am concerned about, and I’ve been writing about four months now, is this whole wage-price spiral. I’m old enough, I’m embarrassed to say, to remember the trauma of the 1970 inflation surge.

And what happened is you have a raft of price increases. And then the next thing that happens is you have workers going to their bosses and saying boss, the price of everything is up 10 percent. I need a raise.

And the boss says, well, you’re right. You do need to raise, put a raise through. And then he has to raise prices because he can’t afford that raise.

Joe Biden keeps saying to the restaurant workers at the CNN Town Hall: If you just raise your prices, your wages a little bit, you’ll be able to attract workers.

Well, what we’ve seen is workers are sitting on the sidelines because the $1.9 trillion dollar American Rescue Plan and other programs are offering so much in benefits and unemployment that they don’t need to take a job.

So we have a shortage of workers I think, due largely to this extremely large test of the federal government, that shortage of workers is meaning everybody has to be out there raising wages.

And there you have it. Wages are going up. Great for workers in the short run, but not if they’re paying more for everything as a result of that, which is what’s happening.

Leahy: I have a theory about why the Biden administration is so off point on this. I think it’s comprised of a bunch of economic dunderheads who are caught in a John Kenneth Galbraith time warp and have gone back to 1960. What do you think of that theory?

Peek: Well, I think you’re right. Actually, I think you’re wrong. I don’t think they have any kind of philosophical framework (Leahy laughs) or theoretical framework for what they’re doing. This is just a power grab.

Leahy: I think you actually have the right answer.

Peek: Well, forgive me.

Leahy: No, that’s fine. This is why we love having you on. Because you know what you’re talking about.

Peek: Well, it’s just so offensive to me. There’s no accountability for these bills that are being passed. Presumably, no one knows exactly.

But it’s – we’re close to $2 trillion dollars that have been allocated by Congress now and not spent. And yet here are Democrats talking about pushing through a $3.5 trillion dollar plan through reconciliation.

No GOP votes. And everyone out there should be wondering what is in that plan? Why are they so desperate? Because, by the way, the polling on this is pretty terrible.

They know this is a risky thing. They know this could cost them the control of the House and Senate in 2022. So why would they risk everything on this bill?

And the answer is because it is a massive payout to the teachers’ unions, the SEIU, and the other groups that will then come back and put them back in office think, two years later.

It’s building their base of support. And this is not right-wing craziness. This is because they are creating programs that are distinctly beneficial to expanding the membership of those unions.

What do those unions do? Well, for example, if they get their way on the voting rights bill, they’ll go out and ballot harvest. What better group than the tens of millions of members of the teachers’ unions to go out ballot harvest from nursing homes and hospitals and long-term care facilities, etc, than all those teachers?

It is just the most nefarious cycle of payouts and then support building at the expense of the American taxpayer. It’s really extraordinary.

Leahy: It’s a pure power grab.

Peek: It is.

Leahy: I think you nailed it. That’s exactly what this is. It has nothing to do with any kind of underlying economic theory. They don’t care about that. They want power, and that’s what defines them.

Peek: Yeah! The latest excuse in terms of a theory is this so-called modern monetary theory, which argues that you can just spend forever and ever unceasing amounts as a federal government.

As long as your currency remains whole and sound, it’s just basically become a talking point on the left. At some point, your currency doesn’t remain strong and sound.

Leahy: That worked so well for the Weimar Republic in Germany.

Peek: (Chuckles) Exactly. We never learn from history. How would we? We don’t teach or learn history anymore?

Leahy: Last question for you, Liz Peek. When are you moving to state income tax-free Tennessee?

Peek: I want to tell you something. I mean, I have to write about this. Maybe we just got noticed from some organization that follows this stuff that bonuses, and of course, Wall Street is a bonus community.

That’s where they make their money, not on their salaries. The rate of taxation in New York has gone from nine percent, I think, and change to 13 percent in change.

Like a 40 percent increase. I’m not sure people are even focused on this. But to your point, the exodus from New York is only going to swell. And I can guarantee you that that’s happening.

Leahy: And we’ve got some Realtors here that I can put you in touch

Peek: (Laughs) Let me tell you, it’s so tempting. It is so tempting.

Leahy: Okay, we’ll see you soon here, Liz. We’ve got a place here for you.

Listen to the full second hour here:

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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Liz Peek” by Liz Peek.