71% of Dems Want Elon Imprisoned - In The Tank #474
Download MP3We are now live. Welcome to the show, everyone. The Heartland Institute released a new polling study collaborating with Rasmussen Reports that found some pretty astonishing things about liberals, namely, that they very much wish to see Elon Musk punished, maybe even thrown in jail for his work with Doge. We'll be covering a couple of things having to do with Elon and Doge today, including a quick check-in on Reddit to see how they're coping with Elon's role. There's also some oddities that Doge found at the US Treasury, and we'll look at whether or not the things Doge is finding as representatives.
Linnea Lueken:The answer will probably not surprise you. Alright. We are going to talk about all of this in episode 494 of the In the Tank podcast. Welcome to the In the Tank podcast. I am Lanea Lucan.
Linnea Lueken:And today, as usual, we have Jim Lakeley, vice president of the Heartland Institute. Jim, how are you feeling today?
Jim Lakely:I'm feeling pretty good. I mean, as as tradition on this podcast is that big news usually hits right after we go off the air, but instead, big news hits right as we go on the air with us having a new pope. Plus, Donald Trump, I think, like an hour ago, announced that his disastrous tariff policies, everybody says this is a big disaster, including the Wall Street Journal about 15 times a day. Yeah. We just cut a brand new deal trade deal with The UK that Kyra Starmer called as significant as the end of World War Two.
Jim Lakely:So there is probably a third shoe to drop. We have about an hour to go. Let's see.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah, definitely. All right. Do we have Chris Telgo?
Jim Lakely:We do not.
Linnea Lueken:He's not here today. Okay, well, I thought he was going to come anyway. So I skip Chris. Poor Chris. And then so we also have Sam Karnik, senior fellow at the Heartland Institute.
Linnea Lueken:Sam.
S.T. Karnick:Hi, Linea. Good to be here. Feeling well. Hope everything's good with you.
Linnea Lueken:Oh, it's terrific. All right. So before we get started, you guys, as always, if you want to support the show, you can go to heartland.org/inthetank and donate there. Please also click the thumbs up to like the video and remember that sharing it also helps break through some of YouTube suppression or even just leaving a comment helps too. If you're an audio listener, you can help us out by leaving a nice review.
Linnea Lueken:And so I'm going to launch right into it. So topic number one today for unhinged, we have the fact that redditors are still maintaining that Elon Musk is a Nazi, not just that he's a mean Republican. As always, the overuse of this term continues. And I am begging any redditors who are potentially watching the show to please pick another war to reference. Just just throw one extra one into the bag, please.
Linnea Lueken:Anyway, so I'm old enough and online enough to remember when Reddit was absolutely obsessed with Elon Musk. And this is in a positive way. So he walked on water for Reddit for a long time between Tesla and The Boring Company and SpaceX. And that all changed when he started criticizing the left and praising Trump. So now that he's full on trolling the left, they couldn't hate him more.
Linnea Lueken:And we'll see later in the show just how much. So we're gonna check-in on our politics really quick, which is a veritable loony bin these days. And we have an article from Rolling Stone that was posted where Elon explained that it's outrageous to say that he's a Nazi. He said he also believes that if people who hate him could press a button and kill him, they would. And I think that's probably true based on the posts here.
Linnea Lueken:So a lot of people are on Reddit are incensed about the, like, salute arm motion that he did. There's a lot of explanations about that. I don't know if it's trolling. I don't have an opinion on it. The the responses, though, from Redditors are many, many, many lines of implied death threats, implicit death threats in this thread.
Linnea Lueken:Whereas one Redditor who says, bro literally responded to criticism over his SIGHIL with a tweet that said, did not see that coming, which is sorry. That's a funny joke. Alright. So he spent too much time in small online spaces where he thought it was cool and edgy. But in the real world, we think Nazis deserve a swift and just death.
Linnea Lueken:Then someone else says, hard disagree about the swift swift bit. Rest of it is spot on. And so it goes on and on and on like this. You know, death to Nazis is slogan I can get behind that kind of comment. So anyway, they also say that support of AFD, the alternative for Germany, is proof of Nazism.
Linnea Lueken:Why? Because the German government suppressing popular political parties says so. So reading this thread, I get really tired of the word Nazi. Anyway, I hope that you guys didn't spend too much time reading this thing because my brain just like leaked out of my ears reading it. So I'm gonna I'm going to pitch it to the group in general what your thoughts are here and whether or not we'll be able to say about this kind of, like, bizarre extremism.
Linnea Lueken:Although I think it's built on the echo chamber that Reddit has become.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. I would agree with that. I mean, I I read Reddit very rarely. I mean, basically, if I'm if I'm into a TV show and it's got, like, some mystery boxes, I might use Reddit to pop in there and hear alternative theories. It was very fun to do that when, Game of Thrones was going on and before it turned into a complete disaster.
Jim Lakely:The same thing with Westworld. It was a lot of fun to read all these theories and some of them came true. Gosh, reading political Reddit is awful. It's like walking through a sewer. I did scroll down that thread that you shared with us, Linea, and it was, you know, I would like to say shocking that people would just be so, you know, so blithely wishing the death upon somebody and calling him a Nazi.
Jim Lakely:Guess I usually like to say Yahtzee just so that we don't get demonetized, especially the first fifteen minutes. But we're demonetized anyway, it doesn't matter, but I guess. But you know, just the idea that it's cool, I guess. Reddit does tend to skew young, right? I get the sense from the wording of some of the posts I read on Reddit that it's a younger person.
Jim Lakely:Certainly not Facebook, but it skews young, at least in the pop culture ones, I suppose. But just to be Joseph casually, wishing the death upon somebody, for what? And as I was thinking about our topics today and taking some notes, and I'll make these points later in a little bit more depth, I suppose. But, you know, the indoctrination is so deep on the left and in our media today that this is how you get these kinds of reactions. The idea that Elon Musk did a Nazi salute is absurd.
Jim Lakely:Everybody knows it was absurd. He was holding his chest and waving to the you know, and and throwing it to the oh, I just did it. Throwing it to the crowd. And, you know, and he had done that a lot. You know?
Jim Lakely:So it's I guess maybe there's a willingness among people who maybe don't think much for themselves to just gobble up and eat everything they're spoon fed, all the propaganda against anything that is not, you know, leftist or with the mainstream or legacy media agenda, and they eat it up. And so what's the irony here is that that is, you know, having a society like that is how you end up with the Germany of the 1930s. That's how you whip an entire population up into something that could turn into actual Nazism, not this. So, you know, Elon Musk has a sense of humor about it. He's a public figure.
Jim Lakely:He's one of the most significant figures of the twenty first century. He go down in history. What he is doing just on technology and space exploration is revolutionary. It has taken our space program leaps and bounds beyond anything NASA could have done if you gave them unlimited budget in another thirty years. So, you know, he takes it in stride.
Jim Lakely:I think it's pretty dangerous, but, that's the world we live in.
S.T. Karnick:I think I saw a thread a while back that showed so many, prominent Democrats and other communists, I mean, leftists doing that same gesture. And I think that that's really critical because none of this depends at all on what you actually did or what you actually said. It all depends on who you are. And this is more like a religious war than anything else. What happens I think when people lose their faith, and I don't want to be sectarian at all here, this is just an observation of reality.
S.T. Karnick:But when people lose religious faith, when you have a large group of people that have lost it or have adopted an alternative, a strongly alternative faith, the idea say the difference between Catholics and Protestants in sixteenth hundreds and seventeen hundreds. When that happens, they substitute a new faith. And when we, when our, the West lost the plot with Christianity and was no longer Christendom, It became this secular thing, but the secular thing itself became a religion. It has its own shibboleths and rituals and demons and angels and so forth. And so it's what has happened here is that the divide between the two, it's not a divide between two parties.
S.T. Karnick:It's really a divide between two worlds. And what we have here is that there's no sense, at least on the one side of any room for compromise, any room for anyone to say anything other than what is permitted by that side. And that's that you remember Puritans were like that. So I think that we are not in for a quick compromise and agreement to disagree. I think we're in for a long haul.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. It's definitely seems like the rhetoric just keeps getting more and more intense. I don't wanna spend too much time on this because we actually have a lot to cover when it comes to Doge today. So one of the things that I wanted to highlight was something that Doge found with the US Treasury Department. So anyway, moving on, who cares what Reddit thinks?
Linnea Lueken:But sometimes it is fun to glance into the abyss there. All right. So this article at Fox News explains that Doge has found hundreds of millions in improper payment requests because the budget codes at the treasury are broken, I guess, in a new algorithm that they put together for it. So Fox reports, the US Treasury Department to the Department of Government Efficiency discovered that hundreds of millions of dollars in improper payment requests were identified after going live with its first automated payment system last week. In fact, the system found $334,000,000 in improper payment requests that were flagged because of missing budget codes, invalid budget codes, and budget codes without authorization.
Linnea Lueken:The news comes months after Doge learned about an identification code linking US Treasury payments to a budget line item that accounted for nearly $4,700,000,000,000 in payments that was oftentimes left blank. So the treasury access symbol is an identification code linking a treasury payment to a budget line item. Doge wrote in a post on x in February in the federal government, the TAS field was optional for $4,700,000,000,000 in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible. As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going. So I'm gonna go to Sam to start.
Linnea Lueken:But this thing kind of seems to be an inherent risk with everything being automated and algorithms getting more complex. Doge is only a temporary agency. So how do we know that this kind of issue, especially in the accounting services in our in our country or in our government, things that it would be convenient if they were to struggle to track where money was going? How do we know that this kind of thing won't just pop up as soon as Doge is gone again and no longer watching?
S.T. Karnick:I don't think it's Doge will be the dividing line there. I think it will be the partisan makeup of the next administration. I do presume that the Trump administration will keep an eye on this. They have good people in the cabinet who can are certainly capable of overseeing this. What you have here really is that their way out, the Biden administration did a variety of things to hamstring the next administration.
S.T. Karnick:That was of course sort of a dishonorable thing, but it is they had the legal authority to do it. Maybe, I don't know. Maybe this was not, this was not legal. But the the certainly they're not when you're not tracking the the spending, we're not tracking it and making sure that everything is is going into its right bucket. You're not executing your job.
S.T. Karnick:The president is not doing his job and that is something that we had in spades for four years. And what Trump has aimed to do obviously is first is first to identify all these problems and and to expose them. That is and and frankly, that's only possible because of Elon Musk in the sense that he bought Twitter so that now these things can be exposed. You can't just cover it up by having 50 deep state people say, well, it's not true or it's a Russian trick here. So what needs to happen is that Congress really has to act on these things.
S.T. Karnick:They won't, they have no courage whatsoever. And even if Congress acts on it though, a president can make mistakes. His treasury department can say, oh, well, we just accidentally didn't put that code on things. And of course that code is supposed to go across all the departments, all the spending. So this is a matter of belief in whether you follow processes or you follow goals.
S.T. Karnick:So if your goal is to spend more money on various things, then whatever gets you there is okay. And so that's why these codes are not there. If you follow processes, you're saying that whatever the process says, that's what we'll follow and whatever comes of it, that's reality. And if we don't like reality, then Congress and the president act. But this is I think a huge difference between the two mindsets that I mentioned earlier.
S.T. Karnick:That the difference between looking at things as processes, the difference of looking at government as processes and looking at as outcomes. And we'll see later in today's discussion, I believe given the nature of some of the topics, more of that. So I won't go into any deeper examination at the moment, but I do believe we will get there especially in the next item.
Linnea Lueken:Jim, what Yeah. I mean
Jim Lakely:I'm sorry. Go ahead.
Linnea Lueken:No. You go. You go.
Jim Lakely:Well, mean, this is yet this is example number 4,000,228 of how if anybody in the private sector conducted themselves and their business in the way the federal government does, they'd be rotting in a prison right now and actually deserve to be there. Is I mean, trillions of dollars of spending going out the door with none of it really traceable or accountable. I mean, is basic budgeting. It's as if the federal government's never heard of QuickBooks or something. It's like every organization like the Heartland Institute, for instance, is a nonprofit organization, has to code and trace all the spending that we do, and we're audited every year.
Jim Lakely:And that's fine. And it's to make sure that our donors know that we are good stewards of their generous donations for our shared mission of advancing freedom in smaller governments in The United States and increasingly around the world. But the federal government doesn't have those kinds of rules. Guess more to the point, there obviously are codes and it's obvious that our government bureaucrats do not care to use them. And it's also clear that nobody in Congress, the fact that Doge had to discover this, is mind boggling to me.
Jim Lakely:It's an indictment of the system the way it is, but especially our congress that have oversight over such things. The fact that this is the first time anybody listening to this podcast or alive has ever known that, yeah, spending just goes out the door. And in fact, I read a story where I think the the treasury nobody could recall a single moment where the treasury department said, that spending looks fishy. We're not going to send that money out. Or can we have a little bit more information on this, please?
Jim Lakely:Nope. All the money just goes right out the door, trillions and trillions and trillions each year. And the idea, again, maybe tying it back to death threats against Elon Musk, which he knew were coming, the disgusting behavior of redditors calling him names and saying 'yep, all Nazis should die' and that includes Elon Musk as well is absurd. And again, Elon Musk deserves our thanks for setting this up and trying for the first time ever in our lifetimes to have a federal government that actually operates sensibly, as sensibly as a federal bureaucracy can, and to have even a smidgen and start getting just a smidgen of accountability for our money and how it goes out the door. And it's the usual suspects who are complaining about it.
Jim Lakely:And those are people who benefit from the idea that money just flows right out of the government into their pet projects or their pet organizations with no accountability. Because if the American people start to get a handle, they're starting to get a handle I think, on how much actual waste, fraud and abuse there is in the federal government, that's going to change things in this country. People are going to be voting a lot differently in this country. The scales are falling from our eyes. We are now for the first time ever really starting to see and on a broad scale, like a lot of people I've covered politics and policy when I was a journalist and now I'm in the policy realm at the Harlan Institute.
Jim Lakely:So I've eaten this stuff for breakfast for the last forty years, thirty years. But most normal Americans don't do that. They have lives to live. They have to coach their son's baseball league. They go to church.
Jim Lakely:They do all sorts of things. They have jobs. They run businesses. And they really don't have the time to dig into this stuff the way we do. But the Doge project is perfect for this because it boils it down much more simply to something just as basic as the idea that the Federal Treasury has a system of spending set up so that it is impossible to have accountability.
Jim Lakely:And so to have this stuff to start right now, well, better late than never. And let's have more of it.
Linnea Lueken:Yep. And I want to break in here for just a second to say we have our the very first in history American Pope. So congrats us and it's from our neck and he's from our neck of the woods as well. So that's very exciting. So Okay.
Linnea Lueken:But yeah, you're right. And about accountability though, Jim, question remains and this is something we've talked about from the very beginning of this administration is, you know, whether or not the stuff that Doge finds is actually going to be cut in any kind of permanent way. And so our next topic here today is about exactly that is spending actually being cut. There's a lot of proposals. And in fact, Trump recently released a budget proposal that is pretty good about, you know, listing all the cuts that he wanted to see present.
Linnea Lueken:So from the New York Times, we have President Trump on Friday proposed slashing $163,000,000,000 in federal spending next fiscal year, a drastic retrenchment in the role and reach of government that if enacted, would eliminate a vast set of climate education, health and housing programs, including some that benefit the poor. So among I scrolled all over the place in this New York Times article. And so they had like little mini articles attached to this. I hate when news companies do this. I wish they would just put it all into one article, but whatever.
Linnea Lueken:I understand they want to keep updating the section still. That's my rant for a moment. So among the things Trump proposed slashing are the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. We wanted to cut funding to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention by almost half, including the Chronic Disease Center, which was slated for elimination entirely slash the State Department's budget by $26,500,000,000. Section eight is also on the table to be cut.
Linnea Lueken:Budget cuts to Noah and eliminate the job core. So all of this sounds like republican wish list stuff. Right? Although Republicans are now crying about a lot of it as because it becomes closer to being real. And, you know, we can go over a couple of the things that I listed here and and how we'd like to see them cut down.
Linnea Lueken:I mean, I funny enough, I might be in the minority on the right when I say this because a lot of people are a little bit utilitarian, but I actually don't think it's inappropriate for government to give some money to the arts, particularly if it's like a public beautification project related thing. Like Trump's really big into reinvigorating classical architecture and stuff. I like that. The main problem with those endowments right now is that they almost exclusively go to projects that are ugly and soul crushing. So, Sam, am I off base here or am I understanding what this is kind of about?
S.T. Karnick:No, I think you you got it just right. What this is is the triumph of politics. And there is a real history of uni party here and it's really rather sad the way the Republicans have continually given in. When you look at, for for example, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, they've been talking about defunding that for literally decades and nothing has happened. Where were they in 2017 and 2018?
S.T. Karnick:They had the whole Congress, they had the presidency, and you can keep blaming the filibuster all you want, but that's in the power, it's in control of the Senate, whoever has the majority in the Senate can change that. And they could have and they didn't. There are so many things that the Republicans have already said, have long said that, we want to get rid of this, we want to get rid of that. We want to cut back on this, we want to cut back on that, but they don't do it. And that is simply, I think it's running to the right and governing to the left.
S.T. Karnick:And their belief somehow is that this will endear them to the public. The problem that you run into is if you are doing the same thing as the opposition, which is to say, the government is going to give you things that will make your life better. And the opposition says we will give you a lot more things that will make your life better. Who do you think is going to win on that? And so as you saw, our viewers take a look at that New York Times article, which I don't necessarily recommend, but if you look at it, see the premise in there, in all the critique that, and it's an implied and kind of obvious critique throughout the article, supposed to be a news article, but you know how that works.
S.T. Karnick:But the thing is, see, the clear critique there is that when you cut something in the government, you are getting rid of something that is good and positive and doing good work. Meaning that whenever the government does any, whenever they spend any money, that's the key, because they're talking about spending, not actual behavior. So when you say, well, when you don't spend on this, you lose all of that. Well, the thing is that first of all, we know that we don't even know what we're spending on. We don't know what, so what are we getting?
S.T. Karnick:When Doge first started and they identified all the stuff that was going on in AID, which is supposed to be for international development and was in fact simply more of a slush fund than anything else for leftists operating within The United States. When you have a system like that, it's obviously not there in any way to do good for normal people. What it's there to do is accumulate power in the centers of power. And so what we have here is a real bad assumption that the things government does is good. You remember the economist John Maynard Keynes had his idea of the multiplier, that if you spend X amount of money, if federal government or the national government spends X amount of money, it will result in a X plus or one point X plus economy, meaning you'll get more by spending, by government spending than you would just by spending it in the private sector.
S.T. Karnick:That is simply untrue. But that premise is what has dominated all of Western civilization for the past one hundred and twenty five years. So this is not new. What is new is that the President of The United States doesn't buy it. And he's got an administration that is given the numbers, is finding the evidence and saying, look, this is how it really works folks.
S.T. Karnick:Now this is an educational process in addition to a sort of a governmental process. It's an educational process in the sense of finding these things out and telling the public. But when it comes down to it, it's all in the hands of Congress. They can make changes and they don't. And then the New York Times and everybody who follows in their wake, like the little ducklings all says, well, but that's not legal.
S.T. Karnick:The president can't do that or whatever it is. Of course, everything's legal. Everything's illegal. Whatever you want to do, you can find a way, you can find it in our statutes to do it. Sometimes you may have to go back to the eighteenth century to find the statute, but it's there and it's still in effect.
S.T. Karnick:And a court will tell you that, well, it's not in effect. Why? Because I say so. But the problem we have here is that there's an educational process that absolutely has to occur and Trump and Musk have initiated that process. Now it's going to be up to the public to hold those lawmakers' feet to the fire.
S.T. Karnick:I'll use that cliched metaphor, but it is a good one.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. And I wanna point out to that tweet that I sent you guys earlier about Republicans keep pushing these cuts off. And I know Thomas Mass, he is pulling his hair out over it. Anyway, they just cancel the vote again on making these cuts permanent. This is stuff that Republicans have claimed to want for decades.
Linnea Lueken:And now that it's right in front of them, they just fold like a cheap suit. It's it's agonizing to watch. They've got, you know, the New York Times, as Andrew Klavan calls it the former newspaper explains about Nebraska representative Don Bacon. He is called a centrist by the New York Times, which is a nice word that they give to everybody who's a squish. He says he won't vote on anything that threatens to cut Medicaid.
Linnea Lueken:Well, the thing is, no one's saying that Medicaid needs to go away. They are saying that there's a lot of waste and that the waste needs to be carved off. So here's what The New York Times says. While the House Energy and Commerce Committee is looking for nearly 900,000,000,000 in reductions over ten years, largely from health care, Bacon says taking any more than 500,000,000,000 from Medicaid is too much. And a lot of people pointed out that it's kind of a silly thing to say because if you discover that there's, you know, $550,000,000,000 of waste, then why would you just leave that 50,000,000,000 extra in there just because you feel like it would be a little bit too aggressive of a pruning otherwise?
Linnea Lueken:It's it's it's nonsense, Jim.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. You're really you're really triggering me now. Like, having to sit and wait and hear all of that and then get to speak, I don't know if I'm gonna make it. Well, first of all, from way back when you said you're cool with spending federal money for things like national artistic spending, National Endowment for the Arts and all that stuff, look, before there was a National Endowment for the Arts, let's call them not robber barons, but very wealthy industrialists actually did that kind of spending. I'm from Western Pennsylvania.
Jim Lakely:Every other great public thing like a library, for instance, or museums is named after Andrew Carnegie, and he used his fortune to better society. And you cannot tell me that the stuff that the industrialists of the turn of the twentieth century spent to beautify and to lift up the spirits and the knowledge of the people, you cannot tell me that that is worse than what has been funded by our tax money in all over this country. I get it, but it can be done and has been done and done a lot better by the private sector than it has been by the public. Second of all, before I joined the Heart Institute, long before I joined the Heart Institute, I was a reporter for The Washington Times, as many listeners and watchers of this podcast know. My first beat when I covered Capitol Hill was the House Budget Committee, and it was so boring.
Jim Lakely:It was awful. And I had to go to those hearings. Sean Spicer, by the way, the Sean Spicer was the spokesperson for the Republican majority in the in the budget committee as a matter of fact. So he and I have known him for a long time. But it was boring as hell.
Jim Lakely:But it was necessary, and it that was back in the days when we did did things in proper order. And so, hey, New York Times and all of you, Democrats and Liberals complaining about this and even you centrist Republicans, if you don't like the Trump budget cuts, there's something you can do, and that's called your job on the congressional budget and the appropriations committees. But that is not how we've run our government for, nay, almost, I don't know, at least 25 now. At least since maybe I think the last time we really did that was late in Gingrich's speakership. So we're talking late nineties here.
Jim Lakely:But, you know, we have now you guys, and by you guys, I mean really the left and the media have never caused a fuss about this, but you gave the executive branch broad discretion over spending. And I'm old enough to remember when the Biden administration threatened to withhold and did withhold federal education money from any state or school that, refused to allow boys to, play on the girls team and change in their locker rooms. So them's the rules now, and for once, they're being applied to Democrats and their spending priorities. So you're just gonna have to eat this one. I'm sorry.
Jim Lakely:And but they're mad because thanks to Trump and Doge and all of this stuff kinda happening at once, flooding the zone, their entire agenda, not entire agenda, but a lot of it is being defunded. And Trump is the only president in our lifetime who does not care about the whining and the of the unusual sob stories in the media, in the press. Oh, oh, Elmo, you're killing Elmo and you're taking you're taking these vital services away from people that he doesn't care about it. I don't care about it. Most voters don't care about it.
Jim Lakely:The world has changed. You know, we spent in 2019 before the pandemic, the federal government spent $4,450,000,000,000 which is amazing. It's an outrage. There's no need to spend $4,450,000,000,000 as a federal government. Yet last year, we spent almost $7,000,000,000,000 as a federal government.
Jim Lakely:So you're telling me that there is no place that you can cut that every single cut is like, oh my gosh, it's terrible. People are going to starve. You we don't believe it anymore, guys. We don't believe it. NPR, we don't believe it.
Jim Lakely:New York Times and we don't believe it centrist Republicans. And the idea, as you mentioned, Linea, that, you know, oh, you can't touch Medicaid. Well, you know, like it or not, Medicaid does need to be cut and you start with the waste. And there's a dividing line here. There are regular people who understand that it is a virtue, it's a good thing, objectively a good thing to have finally the federal government going through especially expensive run on autopilot entitlements and rooting out the fraud.
Jim Lakely:Our healthcare system in this country is already way too, thanks to Obamacare, is already way too expensive. You know, if you still have private insurance, you know this. If you've run a small business, you know this. The cost of health insurance has gone through the roof. If you are, you know, as a consumer of health care, your benefits have gone down while your premiums have gone up.
Jim Lakely:It's been a complete disaster. And the expansion of Medicaid through Obamacare is a big part of this. So, know, like it or not, that has to be touched. Are down, as Elon Musk has said many times, we are going over the fiscal cliff. Again, dollars 4,500,000,000,000.0 we spent in 2019, and then we ramped all of it up because of the pandemic and now we're spending $7,000,000,000,000 a year.
Jim Lakely:It is not justified remotely to have a federal government spending that much money, so we need to cut it back. Figure, Lynne, I think you gave was the goal was to cut was it just in Medicaid, but it was to cut $900,000,000,000 over ten years.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah, over ten years. That's what the House Energy and Commerce Committee is looking at largely from health care. So, yeah, it's not all coming from the same place, but that's the goal.
Jim Lakely:That is not nearly enough. That is that is what is that? A 1.6% a year? I mean, come on. That is a joke.
Jim Lakely:So, yeah, this we're not buying this anymore. You know, this needs to be cut. These sob stories, they can write them all they want even if they write them in ways that are very annoying to you, Linea, as you're trying to scroll. But the real people, the American people, and hopefully a bare majority of Republicans who are getting exactly what they've screamed for for more than two decades are gonna have to do the right thing. And and, this idea that Medicaid can't be touched and other entitlements I mean, we started this podcast talking about how the Treasury Department's on autopilot.
Jim Lakely:That's why nobody's even bothered to look for the waste, fraud and abuse. We know it's rampant. We know that it can and should be cut. I am not gonna sit here and cry for crooks, thieves, and scam artists who are stealing our money. Good luck with that.
Jim Lakely:That's great sale, democrats. Keep going.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Right. And I think, Sam, I think you said you had something to pitch in here a bit as
S.T. Karnick:well. Yes, I think Medicaid is a great example of the problem because I've spent the last two years writing about the fact it's not a not a question, it's not an opinion, it's a fact that the amount of spending we're doing is really hurting the economy and that creates more spending. Because as you reduce economic output, you create more debt, which you have to pay for. And you also create more supposed need. Because I say supposed because these are matters of discretion really that if you don't have to have Medicaid at all, of course, or you could have it be 20,000,000,000, 20 trillion a year, whatever you wanna spend on it, you could do that.
S.T. Karnick:So the problem that we have here is that if we continue to spend the kind of money that we've been spending every year by the federal government, it will collapse. And Medicaid is a good example of that. There is so much waste in there and I don't think we even have any idea of how bad the waste is at this point. Everything again, what prior administrations did was cover things up and make things opaque so that no one could know what's real and what's not, what's actually helping people in need and what isn't. So Medicaid, the idea behind it is to help people in need.
S.T. Karnick:But then you expand it. We had the Medicaid expansion of Obamacare. And so you expand it to people who are able-bodied and above the poverty level. When that happens, states have since then, states have had that have expanded Medicaid, which is like 38 of them. Almost all the states have done it well and that they did that because they were lured by federal money to do it.
S.T. Karnick:So when you expand Medicaid in that way, what you are doing is expanding the amount of the number of people and the amount of so called need that you are going to address. But then when you expand it, you don't expand the money because it's just not possible then, or you don't expand the money at the same rate, then what happens is the people who are neediest are going to suffer because they used to have this size of money, this this amount of money to to address their their problems and their needs. And now they have this size of money because this part is going to other people. So Medicaid is a perfect example of what's going on with the federal government, because when you run up from 4,000,000,000,000 a year to 7,000,000,000,000 a year, $8.09, when you create that kind of spending, what happens is you cannot get that through taxes. It's not possible.
S.T. Karnick:So what has happened is we were spending about 19%, twenty % of GDP, and we're getting 17.4 to 17.5 somewhere in the 17s in federal tax money and tax revenues. So you're two to 3% of GDP every year you're borrowing. Well, raise that to 25% during the Biden administration. You are now borrowing seven to 8% a year of GDP just to fund the federal government. Now that cannot continue indefinitely because you have to pay that money back.
S.T. Karnick:And that's what happens. There are things that treasury bonds and all these issues that arise. But the bottom line is that if your government is not reliable to pay that money back, then your borrowing costs increase extremely radically. So what happens is at a certain point, you cannot borrow any more money. You're locked in to spend it.
S.T. Karnick:So what do you do? At some point, you have to cut. And what happens is that you're either going to cut voluntarily, which is what Trump is trying to do. He's trying to say, we will cut a measly, what is it, 1,900,000,000.0 a year. That's measly, quite frankly, given the amount that we spend Medicaid.
S.T. Karnick:So we're going to cut that. And that's the amount of waste that we believe we have. I believe that the waste is probably way, way more than that, much bigger than that. But okay, let's.
Jim Lakely:Mean, this is why the entire departments, you know, that Doge is thinking about and Trump is thinking about just wiping out entire departments and he's being fought in the courts for this because that's what needs to be done. Like I said, $90,000,000,000 a year sounds like a lot until you realize we spend $7,000,000,000,000 a year. That's literally, not literally, but it's almost literally nothing.
S.T. Karnick:That is a tiny fraction, yes.
Jim Lakely:Yeah, it would be advantageous. There's been a little bit of scuttle about this, Sam. I know you've heard it too. I don't believe it'll ever happen. But getting to a zero budgeting process where you start over the year at zero.
Jim Lakely:Zero based budget. Where you don't just go in there and say, well, we spent 4,000,000,000,000 last year, so we're going to spend $4,300,000,000,000 this year. Everything in the federal government is on autopilot. There really needs to be a serious effort to make each of these departments justify every dollar they spend. They start at zero every year and they see what their real priorities are.
Jim Lakely:Because we are spending money on things that are not remotely a priority to anyone, any of the American people. They don't even know what the money is being spent on. That I think would do so much more to get spending under control. And I think that might be what they're doing in Argentina. Whatever they're doing in Argentina, need to do here.
Jim Lakely:I'll just say that as a good broad general statement that I think will be generally true.
S.T. Karnick:I fully agree. So the point here is that at a certain point you simply can't fund Medicaid to the level that you have decided you're going to fund it. And so the same is going to happen with the other so called entitlements, in particular food stamps, for example, we spend a whole lot of money on that. Now, these are all things that would be nice to have, but you cannot spend this much on them. Now, so what's going to happen is Trump is trying to make alterations that will dial back spending growth, just dial back spending growth a little bit.
S.T. Karnick:This is just like the Reagan years. So we're going to dial back spending growth a little bit and then everyone refers to that as enormous gargantuan, terrifying evil spending cuts, when in fact they're obviously just cuts of growth. But on top of that, you what we call discretionary spending, which is a very tiny, tiny slice of the federal pie. And then you have military spending, which is quote unquote necessary and always necessary to have more. And then you have on top of that though, you have obviously all the entitlement spending, which is considered non discretionary.
S.T. Karnick:Why do I use the term considered? Because, well, the law says that we're going to give this much to social security beneficiaries, we're going to give this much to Medicaid beneficiaries, we're going to give this much to food stamps. As Jim said, this is all on autopilot, just like everything else, but it is a choice. One of the things I wrote a few months ago was that all spending is discretionary. When they tell you that this is non discretionary spending and this is discretionary, no, it's all discretionary.
S.T. Karnick:You can change the laws and you can make things as they should be. We don't choose to do that. But what Trump is trying to do is slow down the growth so that economic growth can catch up. What you do is if you're not spending as much as you were planning to spend, let's put it that way, or if you're slowing the growth, which is a way of saying the same thing, then you're going to get your 17% of GDP and you're not going to have to borrow as much. That's what he's trying to do.
S.T. Karnick:You hit the wall later than you would otherwise. You're going to hit the wall because of demographics, as population ages, becomes more expensive. So with all that said, what Trump is doing is averting a collapse because if you don't do this, you will get spending cuts like you never imagined and they will be involuntary. You will get where the federal government just says, oh, here's what we have this year. We've got 6,000,000,000,000 and that's it.
S.T. Karnick:What do we do? Sure.
Jim Lakely:It's pretty incredible to
Linnea Lueken:see the kind of modest moderate response or the kind of modest moderate cuts that have been proposed so far compared to the screeching about those modest cuts has been really incredible. And so the Heartland Institute and Rasmussen got together and conducted a poll of potential voters. I'm gonna read from the press release at heartland.org. A new poll by the Glenn C. Haskins Emerging Issues Center at the Heartland Institute and Rasmussen reports found that a strong majority of Democratic and liberal voters held radical views about Elon Musk, a senior adviser to president Trump and founder of the administration's new department of government efficiency.
Linnea Lueken:The survey of a 67 likely voters completed 05/04/2025 found that 71%, seriously, guys, 71% of Democrat voters would strongly or somewhat support a hypothetical law that would imprison Elon Musk for his role in Doge. We're just gonna let that sink in. Right? Further support for the author authoritarian measure to imprison Musk was highest among self identified liberal voters. 80% of liberal respondents said that they would strongly or somewhat support the proposal.
Linnea Lueken:Equally disconcerting 68% of likely democrat voters support a hypothetical law that would ban Elon from serving in government compared to 29% of self identified Republicans, which is also pretty high. Boy, I mean, responses to this. The imprisonment thing is so extreme. I'm actually, you know, I knew that the Democrats were crazy, but like that seems very extreme. And it wasn't a huge sample size, but it's still pretty reflective of what we have going on here.
Linnea Lueken:And after looking at the Reddit portion at the beginning, the way that The New York Times is covering these cuts in this very, like, extremist language, it actually maybe isn't all that surprising.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. I mean, this the sample size, I mean, this is a scientific poll, so it's a representative sample size and it's accurate as all the other polls that that Rasmussen does and everybody else does. They don't poll 40,000 people. They poll, you know, a a much smaller subset to the so they they can get results. But I look at this as, Schrodinger's poll about Democrats and so called Liberals because it's both shocking and not shocking at the same time.
Jim Lakely:And it's not shocking to me because of the polling that Heartland has done with harassment over the last several years. Back in late twenty twenty, we conducted a poll that found that one quarter of Americans believe that people who violate theoretical offensive speech could be put in jail. We did another poll at Rasmus, and they love doing polls with us because we come up with some fantastic questions and some topics to explore. In January 2022, we released a poll that found a lot of shocking things. Found that 78% of Democrats support Biden's vaccine mandate for businesses with more than 100 employees.
Jim Lakely:78% of Democrats supported that. 55% of Democrats supported finding Americans who don't get the jab. Forty eight percent of Democrats back in 2022, '40 '8 percent said government should fine or imprison Americans who publicly just question the efficacy of COVID vaccines. By the way, for which they would have been 100% correct, as we were on this poll as, on this show as well. Back then, just a couple years ago, 47% of Democrats supported the government tracking the unvaccinated to ensure that they are quarantined or socially distanced.
Jim Lakely:So taking their freedoms away there, not a problem for about half Democrats. And then more a more than a quarter of Democrats in that poll in 2022 that we ran with Rasmussen said that parents should lose custody of their kids if they didn't give them the jab. Now that poll there and this new poll that we did today or releasing this week about Elon Musk reveals a deep fascist and totalitarian streak on the left and even obviously here among the mainstream Democratic Party. And so, you know, the results this has gone on for a while. This is why it's both shocking to one's conscious, but not surprising considering the way politics, frankly, have been have been done in this country on the left and with the Democratic Party over the last several years, frankly, since around that day that Donald Trump came down the golden escalator.
Jim Lakely:Suddenly, free speech was out the window. That's one of the reasons they hate Elon Musk. He's actually upholding the principles that he held when he was a member of in good standing of the Democratic Party and of, you know, liberals or people on the left. He certainly would never have considered describing himself as a conservative, maybe a libertarian, but certainly not a conservative and not a MAGA guy just a few years ago. So, you know, the results of this poll, reveals that it seems that membership in a certain party and if you are philosophically on the left side of the spectrum, that you are susceptible to propaganda and lies about COVID, about Trump, about Elon Musk.
Jim Lakely:So look, if they want to put these people want to put it's either they're they're just brainwashed with propaganda or lies or they know very well what Elon Musk's Doge project is doing. And it is exposing the scam that is the broad scam, the spending scam, which we covered earlier in this podcast, that many institutions on the left are basically stealing your money to enrich themselves and to push an agenda which is not shared by the majority of the American people. Doge is exposing this. So they want Elon Musk in jail so they don't go to jail. We talk about it on the Climate Realism Show, how all of these instant pop up NGOs, nonprofits raking in hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes $2,000,000,000 with no qualifications, with no accountability.
Jim Lakely:You know, that's a very, very lucrative gravy train. So they're either I think it's both. Again, it's kind of Schrodinger's poll results in this regard. You know, it is both. They know that they are in on the scam and it's going to end and they could be in big trouble.
Jim Lakely:And the other people are just fed this propaganda about Elon Musk. It is like 1984. It's two minutes of hate. Elon Musk is the current target. It'll be somebody else next time.
Jim Lakely:It's sad that this is what it has become, thanks to endless propaganda, endless hate. And that's being, you know, that's being directed against people that are just doing things that seem to make so much sense if looked at objectively.
Linnea Lueken:Well, absolutely. The it's the amount the amount of vitriol in the way that they've been spun up over the years towards Trump and now Elon Musk is kind of like taking part of the flag, which is interesting to see. He's got an amount of hatred towards him. That's, you know, I think Chris Talgo is releasing a op ed soon called Elon Musk derangement syndrome with that in the title anyway, and it's totally true. It's the exact same level of deranged hatred that people have for Trump that they now have for Elon Musk.
Linnea Lueken:Even though what's he done? He's made some memes. He's joked around. He's made fun of the left. Good.
Linnea Lueken:He's he's involved in Doge, which is slashing up the gravy train that a lot of, like, main main line, you know, like the average Democrat floating around watching MSNBC doesn't probably fully understand just how much of this is this is the the spending in this country is just pure graft and and laundering and it's all just so corrupt. But if there was a Republican administration in and they discovered that the Republicans were misusing funds, they would almost certainly be all over that. They they just don't care otherwise. It's I don't know. I think there's a ton of people who are just led by their nose by the media.
Linnea Lueken:And especially when it comes to particularly Trump, particularly Elon. Whatever the media says, they're just gonna go along with it. They're not gonna do any research themselves. They're not gonna take a moment to think about it. They're just gonna say, Elon bad and move on from there.
Linnea Lueken:And that's that's part of what feeds into people being so willing to throw him in jail for being involved with Doge. What has he done with Doge that deserves imprisonment? I don't know. Like, it's bizarre. It's it's the most strange.
Linnea Lueken:I don't know. It's like you said, it is shocking to the conscience, but it's not surprising all that much. Alright, Sam.
S.T. Karnick:Yeah, thanks. I agree with everything you and Jim said. It's that there's an attempt to isolate an individual to make it easy for people to understand what the problem is. And it's that Trump just doesn't care about you and that didn't work. And they tried to imprison him.
S.T. Karnick:And you know the know the routine. They've turned to Elon Musk because it didn't work on Trump. If it works on Musk, then they'll go after the next person. That's how they operate, just isolating a person to be the symbolic representation of evil. And of course the Nazi term is then deployed to signal to us that this is the person whom we're going after.
Jim Lakely:Well well And remember one and remember one more thing that that Elon Musk did that really, I think, got all this going is he bought Twitter because he believed in free speech, and he thought the only way to stop the Biden regime from coordinating with social media giants to censor the speech of people who opposed the regime was to spend $44,000,000,000 and privatize Twitter and fire all the people who were exchanging emails and Slack messages and what and what have you with the federal government to conspire on how to keep people from saying what they thought, especially when often what they thought was the truth, whether it came to the Hunter Biden laptop, whether it came to the efficacy of vaccines, whether it came to the wisdom of broad lockdowns, whether it came to the hypocrisy of the, you know, federal and government officials allowing mass protests in the summer of love for George Floyd, but keeping churches closed. You weren't allowed to say anything in criticism of that without having your, you know, your your social media accounts shut down, your mouth shut, your voice silenced, and sometimes even having your livelihood, threatened by this.
Jim Lakely:That is the unforgivable sin to the Democratic Party of the left that that Elon Musk had committed because just two years ago, he was their hero. He he he he started Tesla. Everybody needs to get an electric car. He's saving the planet. And now it's all gone because he stood up for the principle of free speech.
Jim Lakely:And on the left, free speech is not only not a virtue, it's a crime. And that's what they want to put him in jail for.
Linnea Lueken:Absolutely. Well, I think we summed it up about as best as we can. Everybody who's watching, please go to heartland.org to look at the study or the poll yourselves. Boy, I think this is the first time ever. We're just about finishing on time for in the tank.
Linnea Lueken:So. All right, everybody. I think that's all the time we have. And that is also all of the content that we have today. Thank you guys so much for tuning in.
Linnea Lueken:We are live every single week on Thursdays at noon central on Rumble, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, wherever you can find streaming like that. For audio listeners, please rate us well on on whatever service you are using and leave a review. Thank you so much to all of our usual panelists. Jim, what do you have to to plug for us today?
Jim Lakely:You can follow me on the free speech x at Jay Lakeley. You can follow the Heartland Institute at Heartland Inst on X and yes, visit heartland.org to check out the results of this poll and we have preview. We have more poll results coming out next week.
Linnea Lueken:Awesome. Sam?
S.T. Karnick:Yeah. Thank you. Follow me at, Twitter @orXatSDcarnac and Substack SDcarnac. Substack dot com.
Linnea Lueken:Thank you very much. Well, that's all we have everyone. So thank you all so much for watching. We will see you again next week.
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