Crom Carmichael Explains Infrastructure Spending, Billionaire Special Interests and the Redistribution of Income

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 to explain the Biden infrastructure bill, special interests that benefit from it and the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire.

Leahy: Joined as we almost always are every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:30 by the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael. Crom, good morning.

Carmichael: Good morning, Michael.

Leahy: Well, they’re going to build an infrastructure, maybe. What are they going to build in Washington Crom?

Carmichael: Well, the infrastructure bill pattern is similar to the so-called $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill. Nine percent of it was for COVID relief and over 90 percent was for other stuff. They just called it that.

Leahy: Gee, I wonder who got the other stuff.

Carmichael: Well, special interests of a whole variety. Now the infrastructure bill, and this is a good question. If I were to say the word infrastructure, what do people think?

Leahy: Bridges, roads, airports.

Carmichael: Highways, things like that. Things that are built to last very long periods of time.

Leahy: 50 years.

Carmichael: Generally you think of something with steel or concrete.

Leahy: Generally.

Carmichael: That’s kind of what you think. Well, less than five of the two-point three trillion is for roads, bridges, and highways.

Leahy: Okay.

Carmichael: Another two percent is for airports and ports.

Leahy: It’s even worse than the COVID bill.

Carmichael: Even worse.

Leahy: It’s only seven percent.

Carmichael: But let’s remember, it’s only seven. Let’s remember that when Biden was the vice president led by Obama to pass an $8 billion shovel-ready bill. No one could ever name anything that was built with eight billion dollars. In fact, Obama even joked, it’s hard to be shovel-ready. I guess there wasn’t any. And then the Democrats laughed because they all knew that the $8 billion for so-called shovel-ready stuff were going to special interests.

And so that’s what’s happened here. Now, the remaining almost 500 billion, now of the two-point three trillion so-called infrastructure bill, less than 25 percent is actually labeled under the category of transportation. Of that 70 billion is for mass transportation relief. Now, excuse me, 80 billion is for mass transportation. Did you know that the COVID relief bill had 70 billion for mass transit?

Leahy: Interesting. I didn’t know that.

Carmichael: But now you’ve got 80 billion on top of the 70 billion. So you now have $150 billion for mass transit. Now, you may recall, in Reagan’s years the mass transit, by the way, is for very isolated areas, and most of them are blue. So this is really a throw down or a throw-up, whatever you want to call it, to big labor.

Leahy: It’s a redistribution of income.

Carmichael: It’s a redistribution of income without the accompanying tax because these are not tied together. They don’t pass together. One can pass and the other can fail and it would still pass, which would drive our federal deficit. Biden has also said that this money is being spent over eight years. So this could be similar to the Keystone pipeline and the projects could be started, and then projects could be defunded.

And so that’s possible. But here’s where the money is being spent, it’s being spent on buying millions of cars. Electronic vehicles. It’s being spent on 500,000 charging stations. It’s being spent on tens of billions of dollars of green stuff. Now, when I say green stuff, the U.S. government doesn’t build anything. It doesn’t make anything. So what you have is you have dozens of billionaire special interests who pull themselves up to the table and have gotten the Democrats. Because Republicans are not going to sign on to this. This is a billionaire’s special interest bill where over one and a half-trillion dollars is going to billionaires.

Leahy: When you say that, be more specific about which billionaires. Billionaires who are making electric vehicles?

Carmichael: Yes. That are making electric vehicles or making the charging stations or making the other things that are so-called green. And so the executive, this is a lot like what we were talking about with Senator Mark Pody who said if you are going to buy condoms under this particular bill, you have to buy a particular brand name.

Leahy: Right. Whoever makes those is the one benefiting.

Carmichael: It’s the one benefiting. That’s the one that had the lobbyist get their name in that bill to force taxpayers to spend more money to buy their products. That’s exactly what is going in here. And this is why big business now is so supportive of Democrats. They don’t want the taxes and they’re going to fight the taxes, and they’ll probably win most of that battle.

But what they are going to get is trillions of dollars of spending, because this is on top of the $1.9 trillion so-called relief bill, which, as we said, is only nine percent of that. So you have 1.7 trillion-plus 2.3 trillion. That’s $4 trillion. Trillion is a number that most of us can’t even talk about.

Leahy: You can’t comprehend how big it is.

Carmichael: And somebody was talking about 100,000 Brazilians. And I asked somebody, is a Brazilian, more than a trillion? (Laughter)

Leahy: Crom, that’s kind of funny.

Carmichael: These words. It used to be a billionaire here or a billionaire there. Now it’s literally a trillion here or a trillion there.

Leahy: And this all began with if you remember that famous statement by former minority leader in the Senate, Everett Dirksen? He said, a billion here or a billionaire there. Sooner or later, it adds up to real money.

Carmichael: And I want to try to put this into context in terms of just the multiples of it. If you have one dollar, that’s not a lot. If you have a thousand dollars, that’s not a lot.

Leahy: No.

Carmichael: But if you add three zeros, it’s a million.

Leahy: That’s a lot.

Carmichael: Okay, well, it’s a lot compared to a thousand.

Leahy: It’s a lot compared to a thousand. It’s for an individual.

Carmichael: Yes, well, the point I’m trying to make is that a person who has a million dollars is in pretty good shape. But if they retire on a million dollars, they’re going to live a modest life in retirement. If you add three zeros to a million you have a billion. Now, that’s way up there.

Leahy: Now that’s real money.

Carmichael: That’s real money. For the average American, that is an astounding amount of money. Add three, zeros to a billion, and you get a trillion.

Leahy: It’s really hard to conceptualize that.

Carmichael: Here’s the key thing. It’s a thousand times more. Just as each one that we’ve talked about is a thousand times more. When you get to where you are at a trillion if we start getting to where we’re throwing around trillions, that leads to hyperinflation. At some point, the jig is up.

Leahy: Aren’t we on a path to hyperinflation though?

Carmichael: It’s interesting. A friend of mine said, you know, the stock market tends to go up more when Democrats are in office than when Republicans are in office. And I scratched my head about that, and I went and looked and it’s true. But Democrats spend a whole lot more money than Republicans do when they’re in charge. And the greater the government spending, the more liquidity there is. And the moral liquidity goes to find places to land which is in the asset class. Now, Democrats claim that they are for the little guy, the opposite is absolutely true.

Leahy: Totally the opposite. There was a congressman from Indiana named Congressman Banks. He was on Tucker Carlson last night, and he said, look, let’s face it. Right now, it’s the Republican Party that’s the party of the middle class and working Americans, not the Democratic Party.

Carmichael: No, no. But this gets a little bit like your Victor Davis Hanson. All of these things, which is the up is down and down is up. Left is right, right is left. This is exactly the same thing. The Democrats have to trick people who are in the middle class or who are lower-income, they have to trick people to vote for them because all of their policies hurt the middle class.

Leahy: And the way they trick them is, they tell lies constantly. And they’re repeated by the mainstream media and Big Tech.

Carmichael: And then they give them a few hundred bucks.

Leahy: Exactly.

Listen to the second hour here:

– – –

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.