CNN Declares Men Are a "Disease" — Yes, Really - In The Tank #515
Download MP3Alright. We are live. Welcome to the show, everyone. I feel like I stepped back in time to 2016. CNN is resurrecting the absolutely cringe inducing term, the male gaze, as a bad thing, of course, which I don't think has been in public media since, like, 2016 outside of articles from the Mary Sue or something.
Linnea Lueken:We will also talk about decoupling from China on rare earth and wow. I'm messing this one up today on rare earth minerals. Sorry, guys. And we are going to talk about Obamacare, the shutdown, and how to make health care work for Americans. Are going to talk about all of this and more on episode 515 of the In the Tank podcast.
Speaker 2:They can say we're fighting Trump, but where's the fight? What? Marching around? Bunch of senior citizens marching around with signs that somebody gave them. Is that the fight?
Speaker 2:Good luck.
Linnea Lueken:I'm sorry for that. Once again, we let Jim pick these, and, he likes to torture the audience very much. So so welcome to the In The Tank podcast, you guys. I am Lynea Luken, your host. We also have, as always, Jim Lakeley, vice president and director of communications at the Heartland Institute.
Linnea Lueken:We have Sam Karnik, senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, and Chris Talgo, editorial director and socialism research fellow at the Heartland Institute. And, also, we have our wonderful guest, AnneMarie Schieber, well research fellow and managing editor of health care news at the Heartland Institute. So we are having a a staff meeting here on the show today. But thank you so much for taking the time to join us, Amory.
AnneMarie Schieber:Oh, my pleasure.
Jim Lakely:Lynea, let me let me just ask you, Lynea. I know we we call we call it pulling a gym when you leave the mute button on and start moving your mouth speaking and nobody can hear you. What what do we call it now when you when you're drinking tea at the opening of the show? How long did you think the kicker on that drop was gonna be? Four minutes?
Jim Lakely:It was actually pretty long.
Linnea Lueken:I thought it would be funny, but if Oh, okay. I loved
Jim Lakely:it. Alright. It was purposeful.
Linnea Lueken:I I well, what we really need is a counter for when I totally screw up my intro. That's that's what we need. So how is it?
Jim Lakely:We do one of those signs like, you know, how many days without an accident in this factory. Yeah. It was like, how many how many shows without a screw up? It'll always say zero probably between, myself. I mean, screwing it all up too.
Linnea Lueken:Absolutely. How's everybody doing this week? Any any any drama in in the real world?
AnneMarie Schieber:Good. I haven't noticed the government's still shut down. But
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. I I told Jim in the chat that I actually forgot that the government was still shut down until I was doing research for this show this week. So it's been, you know, probably the the biggest nothing of a government shutdown that I have seen. Hello to our audience as usual. Thank you guys for joining us.
Linnea Lueken:Everything is gonna be great today. This is gonna be terrific. Alright. So before we get started, though, as always, if you want to support this show, you can go to heartland.org/inthetank and donate there. Please also click the thumbs up to like this video.
Linnea Lueken:You can do it right now. Click it. And remember that sharing it also helps to break through some of YouTube suppression on us, which they might be lightening up on, but so far, we have not seen that. So, even just leaving a comment helps a lot too with the algorithm. If you're an audio listener, you can help us out by leaving a nice review on whatever program you're using.
Linnea Lueken:Okay, guys. Let's get into it here. So we're gonna take a look at our unhinged topic today. I don't know if we have a drop for that. Lovely.
Linnea Lueken:So this this one is less well, it is unhinged, but it's mostly cringe. CNN is once again bemoaning the male gaze. Such a blast from the past. It's really pretty incredible to see this headline at CNN. They say, after years of progress on gender, the male gaze is back.
Linnea Lueken:Madeline Holcomb is the writer, and she says, in the past decade, I saw evidence of progress in my media diet. The movies, shows, books and advertisements I consumed were increasingly given women giving women a seat at the table as if that wasn't before, whatever. Heroin chic fell away and body positivity entered the fashion world. Stories about a woman stealing your man were traded for celebration of the girl's girl who resisted the competition for men's attention. It seems like women were taking a deeper breath without such heavy cultural restrictions.
Linnea Lueken:Then there was a shift. Whatever the catalyst, a change in the political environment seemed to connect with a social change that brought back narrow and at times constrictive ideas of womanhood depicted in media. The cries of weight loss medications coincided with social media influencers sharing ways to get smaller and no longer celebrating bodies of all sizes. Advertisements followed suit, making men's desire once again a dominating factor in how stories are told and how women are portrayed. How had these discarded ideas made their way back into circulation?
Linnea Lueken:Didn't we all agree we were through with them? The culprit I have learned is the male gaze. It was always there, but now it has stepped back into the spotlight. Alright. So later in the article here, she quotes activists who, are telling her that traditional beauty standards put forward by the male gaze are unrealistic and usually prioritize whiteness.
Linnea Lueken:So that's nice. I just wanted to say at the outset, this article is really long. I mean, goes on forever. And also, I found the entire thing crazy patronizing. This woman is not upset that women are being forced into a box because obviously, we're not.
Linnea Lueken:The latest Disney film that just came out has, like, a main character Asian girl boss and no romance. And so, you know, this stuff is getting tired actually. But that's another discussion maybe or maybe Jim can take that in a bit. She's, she's upset that there is a visible alternative to her idea of femininity at all. She is upset that women are choosing and are attracted to and celebrating publicly lifestyles that she doesn't like.
Linnea Lueken:Calls to mind something that a feminist activist, Simone de Beauvoir Beauvoir once said, which was no woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. And she was right. And this author is beginning to sense that and it's making her panic.
Linnea Lueken:So Anne Marie, as fellow female on the panel here, what was your take on this article?
AnneMarie Schieber:Oh, goodness. You know, the last place we should be looking for guidance on living the good life is the popular culture. You know, we live in a very secular and confused popular in a world, and this is why we have this pendulum of constantly changing trends. You know, first it was girl power, then it was the trad wife. She's upset about the male gaze, the female gaze.
AnneMarie Schieber:I mean, it's just part of our nature, first of all, to be attracted to the opposite sex. And and the problem arises when we objectify the opposite sex. Thank you, mass media, for doing that in the advertising industry. I mean, they're always tempting us with that and you know, because they know that's how it gets our attention. I mean, our our culture is always trying to convince us that we are in charge.
AnneMarie Schieber:We're in charge of our sex. We can be Wonder Woman, women warriors, maternal fathers, nurture and cut you know, can nurture and cuddle children in the same way that women can. You know, we need to start looking above, not at the culture to define us and to figure out what is a good and orderly life.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. I think one of the craziest parts of this, Jim, is that she's implying that, like, now that there is a popular surge of, you know, the trad wife thing on Instagram and stuff or, you know, popular magazines like Eevee that promote, you know, more traditional values and stuff, that the mere existence of these things is is proof that, like, we're going back to, I don't know, probably a time that frankly didn't didn't exist quite to the extent that they say that it did, but that women are being put in a box. And and now that this stuff is forward in the mainstream culture in advertising and stuff, you know, the Sydney Sweeney ad is one of the ones that she was particularly upset about. That this is this is proof that we're we're we're what's the word I'm looking for? The pendulum is swinging back too far, and now we're all forced to stay home and never go anywhere again.
Linnea Lueken:Like, it's it's crazy. She talks like there isn't still this huge push in media, especially liberal media, to, you know, promote the idea that, you know, oh, a woman does needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle kind of situation. Right?
Jim Lakely:Yeah. You know, well, you know, radical fourth wave feminism used to be confined to the craziest college campuses. I mean, I went to college between 1988 and 1992, and I went as an English writing major. And my first writing class actually was cross was cross registered with the women's studies department. So I had to read and and and write essays on radical leftist feminists like Andrea Dworkin, for instance.
Jim Lakely:That's one of the names that just pops into my head. Anne Marie might remember who that is. So people of a certain age might remember. Certainly, in our audience might. But the the point of the instructor, who is male, by the way, was to try to teach me how to write like a woman.
Jim Lakely:And I found that odd even at 18 years old. It's like, how does a woman write? I don't know. And how could I ever know? Because I am not a woman, and I will never have the female experience because I am a man.
Jim Lakely:And men and women, if and especially if you're gonna put that in college, you're saying that they're different, right, because I have to learn how to write like a woman, wasn't able to do that. But and and that kind of crazy radicalized you know, radical feminist, outlook on the world was fine when it was confined to a woman's studies department, you know, at the at the at my alma mater, University of Pittsburgh, because it wasn't really infecting the real world. What we have found in the last fifteen fifteen or ten or fifteen years is that our popular culture and our politics is now driven by radical leftist feminism, intersectional feminism, and all of that. This article is very long, and there's so many funny parts. We could probably do the whole hour just picking apart different parts of it.
Jim Lakely:But you read one part of the one that always that stuck out at me, Lanay, and was like, didn't we all agree we were through with this stuff? This stuff meaning normal normal life and normal pop culture and normal portrayals of heterosexuals of the opposite sex who might show some interest in each other. No. We did not all agree that we're through with that, but Hollywood decided that they that they were. If you think about it, a lot of this goes all the way back to the Me Too movement.
Jim Lakely:Right? Harvey Weinstein, a disgusting human being, rightly called out finally after decades of abusing women in Hollywood and his position in Hollywood for, for sexual favors. And that Me Too movement suddenly became applied to everything in society, which was an enormous overreaction to the point that, you know, Lynnea, you and I talk about this from time to time privately in chats and other things about how, you know, romance is gone. I mean, if you think about the Star Wars sequel trilogies, I guess it happened at the very end of the last sequel, but, like, there's no romantic spark between Rey and and any of her costars. We can't have that, see, because if there's romance, then that diminishes supposedly.
Jim Lakely:This is not the way I think. This is the way radical leftist feminists who run Hollywood think. If you allow her to have romantic interest in one of her male characters, that diminishes her. No. It doesn't.
Jim Lakely:It makes her human and relatable to the audience, but you can't have even a hint of romance with Ray and any of her any of her costars. In this article, just states as fact that the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ad was controversial. No. It wasn't. It wasn't controversial to normal people.
Jim Lakely:It was controversial if you are a brainwashed radical leftist feminist. Then it's controversial. Like, this entire I don't know. What is it? Probably 10,000 word article on the male gaze and how we thought we were beyond that.
Jim Lakely:Look. Without the male gaze and the female gaze for that matter, g a z e, by the way, without that, humans the human species dies out. Okay? Can we just be okay with that? It's it's actually fine to, show and even celebrate, you know, heterosexual romantic love.
Jim Lakely:Think when was the last time a good, romantic comedy was made? I mean, I I know, actually, ironically, Sidney Sweeney was in one of the last romantic comedies probably to make money in the last two years. Not a lot of people saw it. But, again, as a as somebody who grew up in the eighties and nineties, there were two dozen romantic comedies released every year. And and some romantic comedies are considered classics going all the way back to the nineteen fifties.
Jim Lakely:And it's because it was an idealized representation of how people would actually like to go through their life. They would like to meet cute, their future husband or future wife. It's a very romantic and aspirational kind of depiction on the screen. But Hollywood is not interested in that anymore. They're interested in pushing ideologies.
Jim Lakely:They're interested in portraying women as only strong and and bosses and in control of everything, never depending on anybody else, especially a man or anything in any movie. It almost never happens. And what what you've seen is that Hollywood's box office has spiraling into the into the into the sewer. I think I saw a story the other day. The biggest layoffs in Hollywood's history have happened over the last I think one was it one quarter or 20% of, you know, Hollywood writers and producers and, you know, people basically what they call below the line, not the stars.
Jim Lakely:Huge layoffs and all that stuff because they are failing because they fail and refuse for too long, have refused to give audiences a fair, accurate, and idealistic depiction of human human interactions between the sexes in a normal, heteronormative way. Using these sorts of terms, I know triggers like the woman who wrote this article, But that's just the way life is. That's what people want, and there's nothing wrong with it. Again, didn't we agree we were all through with this? We none of us agreed to that.
Jim Lakely:Only you did. And, now your delusions are, are fading away, and you find that you're all alone. Was that the author on the screen there?
Linnea Lueken:Well No. No? I don't know what this is. Yeah. Well and, Chris and Sam, if you guys wanna jump in here too, love to hear your thoughts on this one because it is kind of crazy.
Linnea Lueken:No. That's not the author. I've seen pictures of the author.
Chris Talgo:You know what that looks like to me? It looks like a fat version of Ghislaine Maxwell.
S. T. Karnick:Anyway This is an economic phenomenon. You know, the rise of d a DEI and the takeover of Hollywood by particular groups of people that were supposed to represent supposedly unrepresented voices took over. And the the movies went into the pits. Nobody could make any money doing this, and the reality has struck back. And interestingly enough, it does come after we had a bit of a slowdown in the economy.
S. T. Karnick:The author of that piece makes the point that in the nineteen twenties, oh, women were so free and so psyched up and everything. And, then in nineteen thirties, oh my gosh. It was terrible. But what was it? In the nineteen twenties, everybody was free.
S. T. Karnick:Everybody was psyched up, and everybody was, being a bit irresponsible. And, then after the stock market crash and the, onset of the Great Depression, everybody became much more conservative. That is the way it works. When there when there's a lot of easy money, people act out. And when you take that away, they have to get practical.
S. T. Karnick:Now the main thing here, though, is that the the essential thought that this woman has is to really be foundation of modernity, which is the notion that every human being is a tabula rasa, a blank slate, and whatever happens, to them in their lives will determine everything that they will do. So her thinking is that, well, there's no such thing as a male or female coming out of the womb. It's just whatever you however you treat them, whatever you do with them. So you can take a a male and and give it all the right treatment and all the right, let's say, propaganda and punishments and turn that gaze elsewhere. I don't know.
S. T. Karnick:Maybe, again, to as as Jim alluded to some other kind of gaze. I don't know. But the point is that we're not tabula rasa. We know that, and it gets proven every time you try to make human beings into something that they aren't. And this is a another hilarious lesson in that, and, I'm enjoying it.
Linnea Lueken:Well, I think one of the things that's really amusing, kind of Jim alluded to it earlier, is that, a lot of the people that she leans on for this article I mean, she pulls five or six university professors to comment on this, and they're all just quoting stuff that we've all heard before a thousand times. They're mad that there was a Carl's junior ad with a woman sharing bare arms or something in it. They're mad, at Harrison Butker, of course, which is crazy because one paragraph so she she writes Kansas City City, Kansas City chiefs player Harrison Butker spoke at a college commencement in 2024 and told the women that they have been told lies about their futures and probably were more excited about being wives and mothers and taking on careers. Okay. And so he frames this like that's not true, one.
Linnea Lueken:And then goes on to say, however, those voices are being met with other perspectives. Men advocating that sharing the mental load of running a household is part of being in a family or that protecting and providing includes supporting your wife and caring for the emotional well-being of those you love. Men can be strong, good listeners and be of service to their family. Men who can take care of themselves and aren't just good adults, they might be more attractive to women. Okay.
Linnea Lueken:Nothing that Harrison Butker said was not that. Like, Harrison Butker and his wife probably have a far more balanced and, you know, like, home life than somebody who has to make, like, an actual chore list for their husband and who is mad at him for not emptying the dishwasher, loading the dishwasher the right way, or whatever it is. Like and look.
Chris Talgo:But, you
Linnea Lueken:know, have our way to load the dishwasher, but literally me. But yeah. No. But but she's she's, like, created a straw man of him in order to to fight him when when there's nothing that Harrison Butcher said that's remotely controversial, if you're sane anyway.
Chris Talgo:I'm just gonna go in a slightly different direction here. So I can't help but myself, but always view things through a historical prism. And when I think back, you know, the human experience for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years, women were the caretakers, men were the providers. That is deeply ingrained within our DNA. You cannot just snap your fingers and say, well, in the nineteen seventies, we're just gonna say that now everything, that's, you know, been been part of our civilization for thousands of years, we're just gonna erase that.
Chris Talgo:And I'm not saying that women women and men are not equal, but they're different. They're different for very fundamental reasons. I was lucky enough. My mom, was, you know, home, you know, during my childhood. And, this whole notion of of women should join the workforce and, you know, two income households, I mean, I think that that is having a profound, negative impact on the country.
Chris Talgo:And, you know, there's so many different aspects of this that we can go into, but to me, it's just, like, you know, just just simple common sense stuff. Men, for better or worse, are supposed to provide for the family. Women, for better or worse, are supposed to make sure that the household and the kids, have everything that they need.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. Let me let me just say something real quick. We could maybe move on. But, you know, that division of labor and and you alluded to this, Lynea, that, like, kind of division of labor between a, you know, a husband and a wife that she just that she describes. And she I think the implication here was that that's not the kind of life that Harrison Butker or anybody who has a trad wife would actually live.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. And it's completely the you know, that's not the case. I mean, there's the old cliche that, you know, liberals don't understand conservatives at all, but conservatives tend to understand where liberals are coming from because we're just, you know, swimming in their cultural milieu our entire lives in every in every aspect of our life. But, you know, this this leftist feminist, you know, radical feminist viewpoint of relationships is that a relationship is a competition and that there's a winner and a loser and that the women have been coming out on the losing end for far too long, and haven't we all agreed we're through with that? That is so toxic and incorrect.
Jim Lakely:I mean, the division of labor that that was described in that thing absolutely almost perfectly describes my family and home life. My wife and I, there are blue jobs and there are pink jobs. We joke about it. You know? And, there are certain things that I do around the house that I don't want her doing or there's no reason for her to do it.
Jim Lakely:I'm I I'm better at it, you know, repairing around the house, things like that. And there are things that, she does. I can also do them and do also do them. You know? But we have a cooperative obviously, we're very happily married.
Jim Lakely:We have a cooperative home life. And this whole idea that it takes, a radical feminist viewpoint to correct something that isn't even a problem is why there's such a problem here and and why there's such a disconnect between articles like this, the viewpoints of the radical left, and the real life that everybody around them actually lives.
Chris Talgo:So, yeah, I I agree with you that there's a leftist, like, cultural, part of this. But I also go back to the Obama years when it was the life of Julia, and I vividly remember that the the the theme of that was you don't have to be dependent upon a man. You can be dependent upon the government. The government will supply you everything you need, your health care, your your your groceries. I think that that that's also a big part of this.
Chris Talgo:And, Sam, you know, you and I have been talking about 1971 and, you know, getting rid of the, the the gold standard here. And when you when you look at, the the two income, you know, trap, it really did start around that time because, you know, so many women did have to enter the workforce. And what did that do? That I'm not saying that that's a bad thing at all. But when when you're forced to do that just to make sure that you can, you know, sustain your your family, I feel like that is, you know, something that many women probably don't necessarily want to do, but feel that they're forced to do.
Chris Talgo:And when I was teaching, I remember so many of the teachers, they would take maternity leave, and they would come back and just be like, I don't wanna be back here. I wanna be back home with my kids. And that really, you know, always, like, hit me hard. Well, then why why don't you? And I I understand, though, that some of them didn't have that that that choice.
Chris Talgo:So I think there are societal pressures at play here, but I also do think that this is part of the, everything's relative, and there are no black and white distinctions between anything. You know, men and women are different. You know, that that that we could you cannot overcome that. Okay?
AnneMarie Schieber:Yeah. And, you know, who pushed this idea that women are inferior? It was the feminists back in the seventies giving the idea that if a woman cannot be a man, she's less than a man and never ever accounting for feminine strength, what that actually means, which means in many ways, women are stronger than men, not necessarily physical strength, but in so many other ways. I mean, this goes back to ancient days in the bible. I mean, it's just part of our nature.
AnneMarie Schieber:They just don't understand it. They don't get it.
S. T. Karnick:Chris made an important point, and I just wanna jump in with a little quick comment, which is that the the need for two incomes in order to buy a house pushes women into this situation. So when you say, oh, I a woman doesn't want to be lorded over by a man or bossed by a man. Oh, I can understand that. That makes sense. I don't think I've ever seen it in a real couple.
S. T. Karnick:But okay. Let's let's let's say that that's the case. But then they go into the workforce, and they're bust over and lorded over by by people that that have no relationship with them whatsoever, that don't have to, you know, live in the same house as they. It it isn't it isn't it more fulfilling? I think it's it's clear that even many men would find it more fulfilling to spend more time with their family instead of being, you know, sort of I I hate to use a a word like this, but sort of enslaved to a multinational corporation and and live in a cubicle.
S. T. Karnick:I don't see how that's much of an improvement. So we always need to look at what are what's the alternative that you're measuring against? If you're measuring against, I don't know, being being rich, super rich and, living in a boat on, off off course off Europe somewhere off in Europe somewhere, that's one thing. But if you're talking about in practical terms, working around the house and raising your children and being around them all the time and being around other neighbors and so forth and and and things like that, as opposed to living in a cubicle and and punching buttons on a computer all day. Let's let's be fair.
S. T. Karnick:Let's see what people really want and then let them have it.
Chris Talgo:Just lastly, I just wanna say one thing. The job of a mother to provide a loving, you know, and and and safe household, there's nothing more important than that. So I don't care if you go and earn $10,000,000. If if you're not doing that, then nothing else matters. And there have been so many studies, and some of these are anecdotal, but people, women who in their early forties say, oh, jeez.
Chris Talgo:I really regret not having a family and and being so career oriented because, know, unlike men, women only have a, you know, a time frame there that they can have a family.
Linnea Lueken:Yep. Well, we could honestly like like Jim said or you know, like everyone's been saying, we could probably do an entire episode just on the social breakdown, and and maybe we should. That might be interesting. Maybe if the if the audience is interested in an episode like that, we can do that. But I do wanna move along to a little bit of policy stuff starting here with a piece from the epic times about decoupling from China.
Linnea Lueken:US may decouple from China if rare earth's dispute persists. Remarking on The ongoing US China dispute over rare earth exports, treasury secretary Scott Besant Besant said during a October 15 press conference that if Beijing refuses to act in a as a reliable trading partner, The United States and its allies may have no choice but to decouple. While it's not in Washington's desired outcome, he said that it could become unavoidable giving China's posture in the current standoff over rare earth supplies. In April, Beijing expanded its export control list to include seven rare earths and magnets made from three of them, rattling global supply chains in defense, electronics, and automotive industries. And then in July, Washington and Beijing reached a framework to facilitate shipments, pausing the heavy tariffs for ninety days, yet disruptions persisted.
Linnea Lueken:And on October 9, China added five new rare earth elements and dozens of processing technologies to its restricted list. Trump accused Beijing of sinister and hostile actions and threatened a new 100% tariff on Chinese goods. Bessen said that for twenty years, anytime that a business in a market based economy launched or refined a process, China would swoop in and undercut the pricing in order to put that company out of business. So, Sam, this is bad stuff, honestly. And it and I've said it before, but it's sort of maddening that we even got to this place.
Linnea Lueken:Bessent said that everyone was asleep at the switch in the nineties on the China issue, and it's been building since then. So how on earth is this free trade, one, internationally with China? And two, what are we gonna do about it, and what can we do about it, really?
S. T. Karnick:Right. It's certainly not free trade, and it in fact destroys free trade. What you have here is a situation where The United States consciously decided to couple with China and to allow the the, well, the the deterioration and ultimately destruction of our own mining of these minerals and the like. And so what happens when you and and I think one big reason for that was environmentalism that we we thought, well, we want these beautiful valleys and hills of that don't even have any trees on them. We want it, but they they look they look orange because there are beautiful minerals there.
S. T. Karnick:So we we want these areas to be untouched. And there are ways of touching these areas and getting the the materials out and the minerals out without, damaging them permanently. So I think that what happened was there was a combination of things, but in particular, environmentalism in The United States was, I believe, a big part of what happened there. So when you when you remove all those, all those industries, then, of course, you're going to have to depend on someone that that was obviously shortsighted. And this is the problem.
S. T. Karnick:It's the shortsighted nature of of government and the shortsighted nature of big businesses. They will operate on the basis of what, what, looks good today. So we need to operate on the basis of what is good for us in the long term. It's clear that returning to wise and and, well considered mining and and other extraction activities is the right thing to do. We're not going to be able to do without that.
S. T. Karnick:Now how do you get from today where everything is is coming from China to tomorrow where it's where it's not, and you're you're you're doing it in house. Well, the way you get there is you start today, and you you have to start mining. You have to unleash these industries. Until we do that, we're simply going to be going in the wrong direction continually.
Chris Talgo:In in in response to the question that I see on the left, is The United States decoupling from China? The answer to that is no. Of course not. We're not gonna ever decouple completely, although I think a decent argument can be made in favor that. But I think what this really boils down to is our dependence on China for these, rare earth elements and rare earth minerals, especially in relation to, these, you know, electric vehicles, windmills, solar panels, and all the components that are needed to build those.
Chris Talgo:So if we were to say that we are no longer going to engage in stupid policies that, put windmills and solar, panels all over this country and, mandate people to drive EVs when they actually don't want to because they're not, you know, they're not, feasible, this would not be a problem. So I think that really what this is about is, obviously, China and The United States are in some pretty tough negotiations in terms of this, big trade deal. And I think China's probably coming from a position of weakness here and trying to say, look. We can cut you off from this. But I always go back to this.
Chris Talgo:China depends a lot more on us than we depend on them. You know, China's not doing very well. China is struggling mightily. They no longer are Chinese exports in The United States are down, 50%, since the the, quote, unquote, trade war began. And what they have been doing is they've been dumping their product to Europe, and even Europe is now starting to say, no.
Chris Talgo:We are not gonna be taking these anymore because it's starting to have deleterious effects on the European economy. So I think that China is actually coming from a position of total weakness on this, and it really seems like it's pretty desperate that they would even go down this road because, once again, we have we as Donald Trump loves to say, we have the cards in this relationship, and, I don't think this is gonna play out well for them.
Linnea Lueken:Well, I hope you're right, Chris, because it does seem like kind of insane that one country and and, you know, a country that's our enemy geopolitically, can just turn the spigot off on essential materials for
Chris Talgo:Sam said, we've done that to ourselves.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah.
Chris Talgo:We have done this to ourselves. And, you know, it's gonna take years. It's gonna take a lot of patience. You know, one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about recently is how, just how instant gratification people are even with these these problems that have been, you know, in place for decades, and they're gonna take years to actually turn the corner on. So when people say Trump's been in the, you know, Oval Office for, what, nine months now, the economy is not great.
Chris Talgo:Well, because the economy was going in a downhill slide for, I could make the argument, probably almost sixty years, and it's not gonna just turn around in sixty days. It's gonna take probably a long time, and you're it's probably gonna take a lot of, pain and suffering if we really wanna, you know, get get things back to the way that they need to be. But it's it's it's the old thing of delayed gratification. Sometimes you just have to be patient. Sometimes you just have to say, you know what?
Chris Talgo:It's gonna be a little bit tough, but this is the right thing to do. And over the long term, it's gonna be beneficial to the American people. And that's just my my go to standard of almost everything. You know, that that's the lens that I see all these things through. We're not here to make China, you know, a great country.
Chris Talgo:We're here to make America a great country.
Linnea Lueken:Anne Marie, I see, you look like you have something to say about it. Your mic is muted at the moment.
AnneMarie Schieber:It's hang on. There we go. Because I remember the nineties and when we made China the world partner in the World Trade Organization, I think it was 1998 or something. Everybody was so excited that this was going to change the world, that it was going to lead to peace. We were no longer gonna have an adversary based on this idea that trade is a way for countries to remain at peace.
AnneMarie Schieber:But my goodness, our history is replete with examples where that has broken down. Trade is leverage, and China knows that. Can The US trust a trading party partner that's a one party state, you know, because there is no competition of parties, nobody pushing back. You know, I listened to a real interesting talk a couple of years ago at Hillsdale College. It was given by a guy named Brian Kennedy of the American Strategy Group.
AnneMarie Schieber:And the talk, you could probably find it online, it was back in 02/2023. It was called Big Pharma and the Chinese Communist Party, and it was based on this idea as China is gonna control all our drugs. Are we gonna get access to those drugs and so forth? But in his talk, it it was amazing. He said China is not interested in ideology or even people for that matter, but their basic interest is control over natural resources because they think they're very limited.
AnneMarie Schieber:And they would do it at the expense of eliminating everybody in the world to get it. You know, China was the country that had a one child policy for many decades, and it was under this belief that there were limited resources and we had to control the population because there is a limit to them. So, you know, I I don't know how we're gonna resolve this. I I I am encouraged that president Trump is finally giving attention to this idea that we need to be more independent, not just on natural resources like rare earths, but drug ingredients, which he's making some headways and encouraging big pharma companies to start manufacturing projects products in The US. You know, we have to really take a look at our regulatory structure because there are a lot of reasons why big companies go abroad, to manufacture things.
AnneMarie Schieber:They save money, less regulation. So these are all things that we just have to start thinking about.
Linnea Lueken:Absolutely. And I don't wanna spend too much time on this. I mean, you know, China has control over most rare elements for now, but there are two that they haven't got, and that is gold and silver. So here's our here's our ad read transition here, Andy, if you can pull up the ad. You can have your own precious metals, you guys.
Linnea Lueken:I I think that my my transition there was pretty good, but now I'm blowing it, of course. A lot of people that you will watch in the conservative libertarian or even just plain old prepper spaces will hit you with ads for buying precious metals, you guys. They're not wrong that these are a good investment, but you want to be careful about who you buy your metals from. At In The Tank and also the Climate Realism Show, we trust Advisor Metals over all of those other guys and that's because we know that the person running the place is absolutely the best of the best. A great friend of Liberty, Ira Brzatsky, owns and is the managing member of Advisor Metals.
Linnea Lueken:He has decades of experience in precious metals and is the only person in the physical precious metals industry who has the Commodities Futures Trading Commission federal registration. What does all that mean? Well, it means that everything Ira or a member of his team says to you has to be factual. So there's no sketchy sales pitch or bait and switch. Ira is held to the highest ethical standards, and there is full transparency, which is way too lacking in too many places these days.
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Linnea Lueken:And when you talk to Ira, make sure that you let him know that we sent you. That helps us. You're helping your financial future. Everybody is happy. So please diversify your portfolio with precious metals from Advisor Metals.
Linnea Lueken:Alright. Thank you, guys.
Jim Lakely:Great job, Lynneea.
Linnea Lueken:Thank you. I fomped it again. I don't know what it is today, but I was pretty excited about that transition there. Anyways, I do I do wanna jump to our main topic today because we have an expert in the house. Anne Marie is a health care expert.
Linnea Lueken:So I wanted to talk about Obamacare. Starting with some commentary that's in The Federalist, a lot of people seem to be kind of misinformed on the issue of the Obamacare subsidies that are expiring at the end of this year. And weirdly enough, they're misinformed by both, you know, Democrat run mainstream media and also Marjorie Taylor Greene for some reason. Democrats are in part holding the government hostage trying to get some of these wish list items funded. And so here's an answer that I found was very straightforward published by Chris Jacobs over at The Federalist.
Linnea Lueken:The title is contrary to Marjorie Taylor Greene's claim, most of the Obamacare subsidies are not expiring for good or for ill. First things first, contrary to Greene's claim, most of the subsidies are not expiring. Only the enhanced subsidies passed by the Biden administration in 2021 and extended in 2022 will lapse effective December 31. The Biden administration sold those subsidies as temporary responses to the COVID pandemic, and Democrats want to make them permanent. Green and others are conflating premiums with out of pocket costs.
Linnea Lueken:The former are not doubling, and the latter are rising only because of the expiration of the enhanced subsidies. So doing the math here shows that under this scenario, premiums would rise from $74 per month to just under $1.59 per month next year. But if you think that a full premium, he writes, for health insurance comes to only $159 per month, I've got some land I want to sell you. So that's the short fact check. And, anyway, this is basically a tactic that the Democrats are using right now to try and scare Republicans into continuing to increase support and funding of Obamacare, which the last time I checked, nobody likes, even if Democrats won't admit it.
Linnea Lueken:Nobody seems particularly happy with the way that this is going. In fact, this post at Forbes explains that this problem we're in right now with expensive insurance premiums is because of Obamacare. Rising premiums were not some unexpected consequence of Obamacare. They were baked into the law's very structure. Because of Obamacare's long list of federal insurance market regulations, insurers had no choice but to raise premium or prices to cover their costs.
Linnea Lueken:And that in you know, those the the problems that were baked into it include things like community rating, which bans insurers from charging older sicker patients more than a certain amount that and then they charge younger healthier people. There's also a requirement which mandates that all plans cover the same list of service and procedures regardless of what a patient actually needs or wants. Guaranteed issue, the requirement that all insurers sell to all comers regardless of status or age, and economists have said it from the beginning that Obamacare is a disaster. So, Anne Marie, how did we get here? I mean, why do like Republicans aren't even interested in getting rid of Obamacare anymore?
AnneMarie Schieber:Well, I mean, this is something we all knew. People are fed up with covering up the bleeding. The plans have been in effect, theoretically for about eleven years. They were passed in 02/2010. They are everything the naysayers said about them and worse.
AnneMarie Schieber:I mean, look at the medical oligarchy that Obamacare has created. We've got big insurance, big medicine, big hospitals. I mean, we are constantly having to feed this beast. And you don't even have to be a policy expert to see what is going on. You know, you just drive down to any big sick city center, and you see the biggest building usually in town is the hospital.
AnneMarie Schieber:And then you see a bunch of sick lost souls, homeless, mentally ill, who are untreated, walking the streets, physical ailments being untreated. Our outcomes are not improving. They're getting worse. And, you know, the building the hospital building never stops. Where is this money coming from?
AnneMarie Schieber:It's not improving. And, you know, no one this is what's going on. So, you know, half the people in Obamacare are in fully subsidized plans, and this has led to a huge amount of fraud. The Paragon Institute has, done a lot of work on this area, and there was one thing they came up with. They looked at every state of who was getting Obamacare plans, who was enrolled in Obamacare plans.
AnneMarie Schieber:And they discovered the demographics in Florida for the ones who are most needy far were like, the people enrolled in Obamacare and subsidized plans far exceeded people in the demographic in the state of Florida, for example. So what happened was because there was no out of pocket cost, people could be enrolled in these plans and not even know it. There are reports of people being doubly enrolled, and that money is going directly into the pockets of insured insurance companies. You know, we've got a lot of fraud. I think the one idea that I've heard, and and I've never really seen Republicans as unified on this as I do today.
AnneMarie Schieber:Back in 2017 when they tried to repeal and replace Obamacare, it fell apart. But this time, I think they're standing firm. And, you know, Trump is kinda hard to read on this, and we got the midterms coming up. But I don't see people protesting, screaming about, you know, our health care going up. The premiums will definitely go up, and will finally expose Obamacare for what it is.
AnneMarie Schieber:What Congress can do is I think probably their most immediate solution is to make what we call short term plans. They are the most unregulated. They're not regulated by Obamacare, and they're as close as to traditional indemnity insurance that we had before Obamacare went into place. When Trump came in in 2017, he expanded these plans. They were always in the law, but Trump allowed them to you could get one of these plans for up to a year and renew them for three years.
AnneMarie Schieber:So what that meant is if you got sick towards the end of your term, you could get renewed without being underwritten. So you had coverage protection for three years. And then the Biden administration came in and undid all that, and the maximum you could get those plans is for four months. Nobody wants to buy a plan that's gonna cover them for four months because the possibility of getting sick would be very high, you know, without coverage. So Trump's put those regulations on hold, and congress needs to codify it.
AnneMarie Schieber:They need to because it keeps going back and forth to these administrations. And I think once people could see how well these plans would work, there would be more political, enable people feel more emboldened to go to create, you know, much more free market policies and ways that we can ensure people for health care, expanding HSAs, doing things with HRAs, which are health reimbursement accounts for employers, giving people the option of portable plans. I mean, I could go on and on about this, but it we're in week three and nobody seems to be moving on it. And I think that's an encouraging sign.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Well and I I wanted to point out too. There's another article that Jacobs wrote for the Federalist where he's looking at, you know, way like, a couple simple ways that you could fix some of this rather than just expanding Obamacare forever. And you mentioned a couple of these already. So he said Washington should look at making health insurance portable so it follows people from job to job, and that would be using those health reimbursement arrangements or HRAs.
Linnea Lueken:So the worker in that case would own that policy, and they can select that coverage that they want out of it and take it with them, to their new job or or if they, you know, move along from there. So and then second, he also recommended allowing health savings account dollars to be able to pay for health insurance premiums, which seems fairly I mean, it seems like that would be very straightforward. So why don't why don't Republicans move on this stuff? I mean, we've been talking about it as long as I can remember anyway.
Chris Talgo:It's definitely not as easy as you make it, though. See, that's the problem. The health care market is so far from a free market. It's not even funny. This goes back to World War two when, FDR implant implemented, wage controls on businesses.
Chris Talgo:So what did they do? They said, well, in order for us to attract good talent, we'll offer them, benefits such as health care. And ever since then, we've just had this, you know, this, relationship between, your job and your health care. It's totally messed up. Fast forward to nineteen sixties when we got Medicare and Medicaid.
Chris Talgo:I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I just read a biography of Lyndon Johnson, and it's just so funny when you look back and you say that they thought that the amount of money that would be necessary to fund those programs would never even come close to what it is now. And it's just it's expanded, expanded, expanded over the years. Obamacare obviously made things a bunch much worse. I totally do not agree that we we should be throwing a pity party for insurance companies because I vividly remember during the Obamacare process that the insurance companies were completely on board because it basically mandated that you had to buy a product. And if you go back to the Supreme Court decision, that, I think, is, you know, just something that I'll just I'll never get over.
Chris Talgo:How can you be forced to buy a product? How can how can that be forced upon you? Obviously, the Supreme Court twisted themselves into a pretzel in order to, you know, uphold Obamacare. But, I mean, these these things are just so, you know, fundamentally against free market principles. So HSAs that'll help, you know, indemnity plans, short term limited duration plans, all that stuff definitely helps.
Chris Talgo:But I really wish that we could get to the core of the problem, the root cause. The root cause is that the government has become so involved in health care, whether it's con laws, whether it's you have to have this, you know, these many things on, you know, on your insurance, whether if even if you're a man, have to have, you know, like like a female based, like, health care services. It's just insane. So, you know, it's it's gonna be a really tough tough tough track ahead here. Archie Taylor Greene, you know, the reason why she is saying what she's saying is because her family members are on Obamacare, and they are receiving these these, you know, premium, spikes.
Chris Talgo:So I can understand why she is a little bit annoyed that this is happening like this. I don't think that you should just cut them off, you know, immediately. I do think that you need to compromise here a little bit. I think that you can't just you you can't just, you know, just slice all the subsidies, you know, immediately because you're gonna put a lot of people in a really dangerous position that are not there because of their own volition. So I think that this needs a bipartisan approach.
Chris Talgo:I don't know if that's ever gonna happen, you know, given the current state of Washington DC and Capitol Hill, But we need Democrats and Republicans to come together and pass a bipartisan bill that actually addresses the root causes. And Anne Marie's, you know, mentioned a lot of them, and there's many more. That is what we need.
AnneMarie Schieber:See, what happens if the premiums go up, healthy people and young people are not gonna be these are not gonna buy the plans, and the market's gonna fall apart because the insurance companies are gonna be stuck with the sickest of the sick, and they can't function that way. You know, imagine if we bought health insurance like we buy maybe term life insurance where you buy it very early on in your life, you buy it for a term period, maybe twenty, thirty years, you agree that you're going to pay a premium for that extended time, and you hold on to it because if you don't pay that, you will be underwritten again. And if you get sick, you're stuck. Right? You won't be able to buy life insurance.
AnneMarie Schieber:Imagine if we did health insurance that way. That would incentivize every young healthy person to get into the market. And then we probably have to figure out because the market is so screwed up now and we have people who are dependent on government health care, you know, we would probably have to come up with a backup system for the significantly disabled population who have huge health care costs. And we were doing that in 2010 before that. You know, states were running like, in my state of Michigan, we had a program for health care insurance of last resort where people could apply for this.
AnneMarie Schieber:And, you know, it covered their you know, there's only a small percentage of the population that really needs that kind of coverage, and, you know, can be done.
Chris Talgo:Yeah. Emery, when we talk about health insurance, we're not even talking about insurance in the classic definition of the term because, you know, when I use my auto insurance, it's just something very, very bad happens. I get into an accident, they've gotta, you know, you know, redo a quarter panel or something like that. I don't I don't use my auto insurance when I go, you know, get my oil changed. I don't use it when I go to the gas station.
Chris Talgo:But that's what health care has become. Another thing and and, Marie, I know you know much, probably more about this than I do. But part of the problem is is that you're saying that everyone, no matter their physical characteristics, are gonna pay the same rate. But what if someone's unhealthy? What if they're obese?
Chris Talgo:What if they smoke? What if they've got diabetes? What if they have not taken care of themselves their entire life? And that means that they're gonna be taking a lot more out of the system than someone who is young, healthy, and and takes care of themselves. The fact that you cannot have different rates for different, you know, people based on that is another huge thing because there is no actual act actuarial, like, data being used here.
Chris Talgo:It's just it's
AnneMarie Schieber:like underwriting. Anybody can jump on the plan, and we knew that going off. Were like, what would stop somebody from not wanting to pay a premium and jumping on to Obamacare when they get sick, which is what goes on, and it cannot function that way. You know, we don't have health insurance. We have health plans.
AnneMarie Schieber:These are payment plans. They don't do what insurance is supposed to do, which is to protect you in a rare but expensive event.
Chris Talgo:I'll I'll go to my grave saying that I think Obamacare was not meant to fix the health care system. It was meant to bring in single payer because look at what it did with Medicaid expansion. You know? Look at it just it gummed up the system so much. And I remember really smart people saying that at the time that, hey.
Chris Talgo:This is a really tricky ploy by, Barack Obama and company to try to make it seem like they're putting in this this, you know, good solid system when they know it's gonna fail. And look at it where it is. Fifteen years later, it is completely failing. Barack Obama repeatedly promised on the campaign trail in twenty o eight that that if you pass Obamacare, your premiums will go down. The premiums have gone it's they have skyrocketed.
AnneMarie Schieber:John John Goodman, the copublisher of Health Care News, always famously says Obamacare is nothing more than Medicaid with higher premiums and copays. It's a man it's managed care is basically what it is.
Linnea Lueken:Yep. Yeah. I mean, I you know, Obama, I I was pulling up some commentary on this earlier, and it's Obama had promised specifically that the cost of your health health insurance for the average, like, American household would go down thousands of dollars with Obamacare. And that's obviously the exact opposite of what's happened.
Jim Lakely:Even PolitiFact called that the lie of the year. Do you know how hard it was for them to actually go forward with that and to have say Obama was the liar of the year?
Linnea Lueken:Well, and you've got people like John Fetterman too who's talking about how bad Obamacare has been and how the subsidies you know, the Democrats are kind of, like, cynically using this, at the moment to keep the government shut down. It's it's it's crazy how everybody agrees, and it's terrible, but we can't get anything done on it. Our our
Chris Talgo:health care system is gonna implode with Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare. There are not enough young people to sustain the baby boomer generation that are gonna be taking up a huge cost burden of health care services in the decades to come. So I just I I don't I don't see the end game here. You know, these subsidies, they don't they don't even come close. They don't even try to address the root causes.
Chris Talgo:It's just paying you know, it it's it's just, trying to mask the cost. It is a it is not a solution. It is just kicking the can down the road, which Washington DC just does on almost every single issue.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. In in the, in the show notes, I've actually put them if you, in this video, if you go to the description, you'll see our show notes, and there's links to all the stories that we talked about today. One of them is from the great, great Sally Pipes, who is one of the best health care analysts, in the country, has a piece in Forbes. And she her lead there says Democrats are panicking about a looming 75% average increase in out of pocket costs of insurance premiums next year for the roughly 6% of the population that shops for coverage on Obamacare exchanges. I don't shop for coverage on the Obamacare exchanges, and, apparently, only 6% of the population does.
Jim Lakely:So we completely blew up the coverage that everybody liked for 6% of the population, and and it was passed by lies. And, again, I have a long memory about this. It was basically shoved down our throats by by hook and by crook. Was it Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve? Like, in the literally, like, in the middle of the night Yeah.
Jim Lakely:To just get it through.
Chris Talgo:Reconciliation bill too.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. The that's right. Through reconciliation, so it didn't need so so it couldn't be filibustered. Yeah. Pipes also mentions that individual market premiums over the last decade have been surging between 2023 and 2014 when Obamacare's regulations took effect.
Jim Lakely:They rose 47, and average premiums for benchmark plans rose 75% between 2020 2014 and 2024. I know that my insurance is a lot more expensive. I know that the insurance the heartless do pay you know, has to renew a plan every year. Every year, it gets much more expensive. I know that my deductibles are now higher.
Jim Lakely:I know that my out of pocket costs are now higher, and I know that my services are reduced. Everybody listening to or watching this podcast, I am sure, has had the exact same experience. Everything is more expensive. The health care is is less is not as good as it was before. This entire thing was passed by lies by Obama and everybody else, and whether it's to get us a single payer or not, I don't know if we're gonna get there.
Jim Lakely:But, you know, there are no market incentives right now at all. There were there were a few before, but there are no market incentives to reduce prices. There are no price signals for providers or for or or consumers, and so this is what you get. This is actually the worst of all worlds. And I have a question for Anne Marie Sheber because I I know she's the best expert out there on health care, especially on this podcast.
Jim Lakely:I also have a very bad memory of John McCain putting his thumb down with a freaking smile on his face. And it was he know it would have helped us overturn Obamacare. So my question to Anne Marie Sheber is what would have happened if we had killed Obamacare except for John McCain, thank you, with a freaking smile on your face. What would have happened if we had repealed Obamacare then, and what would happen if we repealed Obamacare now?
AnneMarie Schieber:Well, then we had COVID, which turned everything up side down. So I don't know what might have happened. We could have had something even more disastrous because the enhanced subsidies that we're talking about right now were passed under the pandemic. So this is how people who have a household income up to $600,000 can get free premium Obamacare plans. So that's what we're talking about, by the way, extending those that extra coverage.
AnneMarie Schieber:But, you know, you think about it back going back in 2010 when when this thing was passed, every Republican vote against it and 39 Democrats in the house and all but one Republican in the senate voted against it. And look what happened the year later in 02/2010. All those people were kicked out. So, know, you everyone's talking about the midterms and how politically we can't do this. They have short memories because I'll tell you, we are not where we were back then.
AnneMarie Schieber:There was a lot of fear about health care, and there were so many other problems that probably could have fixed what we had thought were problems back then, but we decided to throw it all out and create a brand new program that just wouldn't work. It was completely managed care.
Chris Talgo:The Tea Party movement actually was born out of the Obamacare debate. And look at how far we've fallen from that. I mean, I as someone who does care about the national debt and our our deficits, it's almost like it's quaint when you look back to the deficits of, you know, the Bush years and the Obama years to where we are now with, you know, $11,000,000,000,000, $2,000,000,000,000 deficits, and that is just gonna go through the roof as Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare just eat up more and more spending.
S. T. Karnick:I can tell you what the endgame is, and the endgame is not single payer. Single payer can't happen. It's just not doable. The the numb the numbers are ridiculous. I mean, we're arguing over these re these silly extended, subsidies for, for people who are fairly wealthy.
Chris Talgo:But, Sam, what if they do single payer, then they just ration care like they do in in, you know, countries like Canada and then across I
S. T. Karnick:don't think politically you can get there. What because I
Chris Talgo:hope not.
S. T. Karnick:The conditions that we're living in today are different from the conditions that even at the time of Obamacare when they had the dream that they could turn everything into single pair. What's going to happen is one of two things. Either it's going to be fixed slowly by tinkering with it and slowly drawing down how much you spend as a percent of GDP of the total economy, slow slowly drawing down that percentage so that people feel like, well, it's it's it's helping those who really, really, really need it. Either that and that is the Trump and Republicans approach right now. And and Trump has done that in a variety of other areas as well.
S. T. Karnick:So I think it's it's clear that that's what they designed That's
Chris Talgo:what Medicaid was designed for.
S. T. Karnick:Well, you know, there you go. And they expanded Medicaid. Yeah. So they expanded Medicaid, and so they got it on one end. And then on the other end, expanding into the individual marketplace was it was Obamacare.
S. T. Karnick:So what you have there, though, is you can do that, and I think you can use a lot of reforms, the ones that we've talked about and so forth, and basically try to get yourself toward a system that is universal health service accounts or health savings accounts. So get toward a system that does that, and then those health savings accounts pay for, catastrophic insurance, and and you work your way through from there. What's what's more likely to happen if the Republicans break on this, and and Anne has alluded to the fact that they've stood strong so far, and one wonders if perhaps they actually perceive the reality. Because what will happen if they do break is there will be a collapse. The system is not fiscally supportable.
S. T. Karnick:It won't work. It will create even faster inflation than the inflation that the Biden administration unleashed through the the inflation reduction act and and its other measures that were supposedly meant to, straighten things out after, after COVID. So what's going to happen is you're either going to have a a way of saving the system by making it more responsible. That's what Republicans do, and they've been doing it for decades, saving the welfare state, saving all these these, big money, propositions that the government does. So you're either going to get that or you're going to get a collapse.
S. T. Karnick:Single payer isn't an option because the collapse will happen well before you could get to single payer.
Linnea Lueken:Couldn't it be though, Sam, that they'll they'll put in single payer after the collapse? Like, they'll use the the collapse, you know, chaos to say, like, look. Here's a way that we can do this to make sure everyone has coverage right now.
S. T. Karnick:That is a great question, and the answer is no. They won't be able to do it because after the collapse, the world will be would be entirely different. Things would look so different from the way they are today that no solutions, no answers that we're that we're looking at today would have any applicability to it at all. Things would be so weird, so strange. And and and think about them.
S. T. Karnick:One thing people don't think about is the massive deflation you would get, the massive drops in prices that you would get, and the massive drops in wages, and the massive drops in the stock market. All these things would would crash. So when that happens, you're you are kind of starting over in a lot of ways. So the one but when you're starting over, you're really starting over. You're not starting over in, like, 2011.
S. T. Karnick:You're starting over in, I don't know, maybe 1620 or something.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. John z says road warrior time.
S. T. Karnick:Not quite that bad, but close.
Chris Talgo:Sam, I I gotta say I'm not as optimistic on that one because I I think the consolidation in the health care industry is almost paving the way for a, single payer system. I remember when I was a kid and we had our little doctor practice, and you would call the office and, you know, you would just get get get the the assistant and you would make an appointment. Nowadays, everything is so centralized. You have to go through a giant hospital system. Like, here in Illinois, it's like we go through Endeavor.
Chris Talgo:I tried to make an appointment to to do some, varicose veins and work on my leg. It was eighteen months out. So there's a huge problem. The doctor shortage problem we've also got. Also, you know, as these older people who are very sick are taking extended, you know, care, I mean, that is that that that's gonna cost so much money.
Chris Talgo:So what like, mean, I just I I I don't see the solution here.
S. T. Karnick:Chris, you're making a great comparison, and that is what you're identifying and what this whole discussion has been about is the in intensive, complication and complex and greater and greater complexity of the system as government continues to intrude and make more rules. And the each thing that the government does is meant to correct something that went wrong because of something that the government did and so on and so forth. And that's how these systems work. They get more and more complex until they're not supportable anymore, and that's why the the collapse comes. So I think it is it is, very interesting that we all talk about, well, how can we save the system?
S. T. Karnick:It's true that you can save the system. As I said, the way the the Trump and the Republicans are trying to do it would save the system. I'm not sure that that's exactly best for us in the long term, but I do think that if you save the system and let it just draw down in size and shrink away over time, it'll be a lot better. It'll be a lot more normal than a collapse.
Chris Talgo:I think I think federalism I think federalism is the answer to this. If you just let each state you know, if if California wants to provide a single payer, you know, coverage for all, so be it. But then you've gotta pay for that. I would love get
S. T. Karnick:it without a collapse. You
Chris Talgo:won't get it? I know. But I would just I I would just love it if some of the red states said, you know what? We're gonna go in the total opposite direction. We're gonna have, you know, healthy, robust deep DPC agreements.
Chris Talgo:We're gonna have HSAs. We're gonna open the floodgates. You know what would happen? And it's already happening for other reasons. People from the blue states would go move there because they're saying, this is better.
Chris Talgo:It's just that It hardly means But Obamacare is a big federal law that has just, you know, globbed up the entire health care industry. So it's just it's difficult because these these federal programs, Medicare, Medicaid, those are federal. You know, in the states, some obviously are just are using the federal, you know, dollars, you know, in a very shortsighted manner, but that this is so unsustainable. I mean, Illinois here is such a bad place right now in terms of, you know, our our, you know, debt that we owe for, the the unions and their insane health care benefits, all this stuff. It's totally it it's gonna collapse.
S. T. Karnick:We have recommended to every state in the country that they consider filing for the biggest medic Medicaid waivers they can't Yep. Which is it's obviously not Obamacare, although there there are intersections there. But to to go for Medicaid waivers and and just get out of the system as as much as you can and sort of create, turn it into block grants for your state, then you can experiment. These are these things are all possible, but will they happen? I don't know.
Chris Talgo:Happy life for sure.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. But, Sam, Hakim Jeffries says that Obamacare would work great if Republicans didn't ruin everything somehow. Yes.
S. T. Karnick:He's probably right that if you were just to inflate, massively inflate the currency massively, you could print enough dollars to do anything. Yes. He is right about that. You'll get your collapse, though.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Absolutely. Jim, do you have anything anything to add here?
Jim Lakely:No. Only that I'd like to finish the podcast on a positive note, and I'm just getting angrier and angrier as we move along here. And I'm running out of the energy to scream into the microphone. But, know, The Heartless Institute were a, some people say, exertive think tank, some people say libertarian think tank. We self identify as a free market think tank, and it's depressing listening to this conversation, to be honest, and how there are as I've mentioned before, there are practically no if it I think it's safe to say.
Jim Lakely:There are no market pressures on our health care system at all, not from the free market. The decisions that we may make as as consumers of health care, of health services have no effect on the pricing and the availability and even what is presented to you in a health insurance plan. It's it's completely broken. It was bad before Obamacare. We needed and the Heartless two's been pushing and had pushed for you know, to get more market forces into the health care delivery system and the payment system because that is the only way to bring down costs and increase the quality of services.
Jim Lakely:The free market works every time for that, and it does the only thing it was never applied to, you know, since we were, you know, bartering, you know, here, I'll give you a chicken if you if you take the fever down of my child over here in a barter system. That was probably the last time any kind of real free markets marketing economics were applied to the health care system. And it is depressing to sit here and think as we were pushing for it back before Obamacare that you need market free markets to work to bring down prices and increase service you know, the quality of services. And we went in a completely opposite direction. And now it's to the point where here we are sitting around in a roundtable discussion, you know, we we did doom scrolling ourselves, you know, thinking about how bad it is now and then how is it ever gonna get better?
Jim Lakely:Sam Karnik says, the whole thing has to collapse. What the hell does that even look like? What does the health care system collapsing look like? I hope it that's what it would take to do it, to fix it. I hope it comes fast because I am sick and tired of my insurance premiums both for this organization and individually rising ten, fifteen, 20% in one year.
Jim Lakely:And I'm just supposed to eat that because six percent of Americans needed health insurance? Get the f out of here. It was never about providing health insurance for poor people. It was about as Chris Talgo said, it was really about getting either getting a single payer or destroying the system as it is so that people become more dependent, if not directly on the government for health care subsidies, dependent on the government to fix the health care system in perpetuity. And that's what it's really, that's what every government program is about.
Jim Lakely:It's about control. Alright. See, I did have the energy for it, I guess.
Linnea Lueken:Do you wanna so let me let me calm you down. And by calm me down, I mean, make things much worse. So the so the sometimes Republicans and and conservatives in general can kind of overattribute the ills of society to Obama specifically. But there are three areas where he's really, really the worst president we've had on a on a lot of these a lot of these things, and that's the health care issue. That was I mean, as we've been talking for the last half an hour, absolutely abysmal.
Linnea Lueken:Two, college tuition prices. That is all his fault with the, you know, kind of subsidizing of student loans stuff. And then race relations got worse under Obama. So everything just got worse and more less affordable and and more chaotic. And it's it's pretty incredible to look back on it now and think, man, no wonder we have Trump.
Linnea Lueken:Right? Like Yeah. I mean, look at what we put up with.
Chris Talgo:I remember when Barack Obama's investment, his trillion dollar investment plan was supposed to cure the economy. And even he just to show you how, like you know, I I think Barack Obama is a good man. I think he's a smart man, but I think that he just looks down upon hardworking Americans. And what did he say? Oh, I guess those shovel ready jobs are really all that, like, shovel ready.
Chris Talgo:He just laughs it off. Like, but wait a second, sir. You just spent $1,000,000,000,000 saying that this was gonna be the magic elixir for the great recession, and it did the total opposite. You know what mean? And and and, Lynea, I think you failed to mention that Barack Obama, in my opinion, is the grandfather of the green energy transition scam because the the, his his stupid, you know, reinvestment act, whatever you wanna call it, included billions of dollars, you know, for these battery a one two three, which, I remember, like, you know, went bankrupt, like, in a year.
Chris Talgo:And a lot of those, you know, a lot of those, so called green energy, programs we can attribute to good old Barack Obama. And what's happened to the what's happened to the price of electricity since then? Oh, it skyrocketed. Oh, yeah. Right.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Well, I would I would attribute I would certainly attribute him slamming on the accelerator and holding it there for that stuff. But I actually blame a little bit the Bush administration for a lot of that as well and Clinton. So True. He doesn't he doesn't get to to claim all of the glory on that.
Linnea Lueken:No.
Chris Talgo:But I but I I do think that he really mainstreamed it. I think that he really, like, put it into you know, he really made it up, like, a big part of the federal government. I mean, I I agree with you. I I know that, you green washing machine. It's such a joke.
S. T. Karnick:Right. It turns out to cost more.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. And not to mention that your, your HVAC company can't just repair your preexisting machine anymore. They have to replace it every so often because they keep changing up the, like, fluid or the something the coolant in it or something in order to maintain standards with EPA man, it is all over the place. It's just like everything in our government and everything in our regulatory body exists to do nothing except for make it more expensive to exist.
Chris Talgo:Well, but when but when you take the subsidies out, the the free market, you know, put puts puts reality back. And I just read to a couple days ago that General Motors has announced that they are no longer basically in the EV business, and they have lost $1,600,000,000 because of those federal, $7,500, subsidies that went to the rich of the that went to the richie riches of this country to go and buy a, you know, $80,000 Tesla. So you know what? Jim, maybe maybe there is a, you know, a shift in this, just common sense direction. Maybe?
Jim Lakely:Stop trying to cheer me up. You're not gonna cheer me up.
S. T. Karnick:The the Lynne brought you brought up something really important, which is the effect of regulation. Regulation is a huge tax on the American people. And the and and when I say huge, we're talking literally trillions of dollars per year of suppression of the the offering of goods and services to one another, and that is a terrible thing. So one of the things that we have to do and this is, as I said before, it's the complexity issue that as you as you create more regulations, then you say, well, you know, we really need to change what, what coolant we we put in air conditioners. And, that didn't come from scientists.
S. T. Karnick:It came from companies that said, you know what? We could get the everybody in the country to have to replace their air conditioners and give the money to us in order to give them air conditioners, new air conditioners. This is all a scam, but it's this this complexity benefits a few. But, ultimately, it it just trashes the entire country. And so, we're we're in the we're well into that process.
S. T. Karnick:Happens is change.
AnneMarie Schieber:Yeah. You create a regulation. People figure out a way around it. It may cause an unanticipated consequence. Then we come up with another regulation to undo that, and we create another problem.
AnneMarie Schieber:And it goes on and on and on.
S. T. Karnick:Jim's getting happier.
Linnea Lueken:I know. I've I've We're
AnneMarie Schieber:not gonna end on that.
Chris Talgo:Jim, I'm worried about you. Are you okay?
Jim Lakely:Yeah. If we don't end this podcast soon, I might have a stroke. So, you know
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Well, I just thought, you know, people on the right really enjoy bashing Obama, so I thought that might be a fun way to end the show. We It's
Chris Talgo:very cathartic. Yeah.
Linnea Lueken:It is cathartic. Alright. So, you guys, that is all the time we have today, unfortunately. So thank you everyone for your attention to these matters. We are live every single week on Thursdays at noon central on Rumble, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook.
Linnea Lueken:Anne Marie, do you have anything that you'd like to point our audience towards today?
AnneMarie Schieber:You know, no. Because I don't wanna get Jim upset. Oh, you mean in in health care news? I'm sorry.
Linnea Lueken:Good things. Good things. Yeah. No. We're working
AnneMarie Schieber:we're working frantically. I'm afraid to write the subsidy article because things are changing every minute. But, yeah, there's a lot going on. So Absolutely. You can find it on the heartland.org website.
Linnea Lueken:Alright. Chris, how about you?
Chris Talgo:I have a shout out to Sam Karnik because he wrote an amazing op ed that I just edited this morning about the housing crisis and how housing is so unaffordable for young people. And, Sam, I'm gonna get into a great outlet and has a really good article. So thank you.
Linnea Lueken:Awesome. You, Chris. Sam?
S. T. Karnick:Yeah. Thanks. Everybody go to the heartland.org website and to stcarnek.substech.com where we cover all these issues and more, and you can just sit there all day reading and and looking at videos and the like. And, you will be highly and greatly edified thereby.
Linnea Lueken:Absolutely. Jim?
Jim Lakely:Yeah. I wanna thank viewer Scott Clay for saying he's praying for me. Don't worry. I'm healthy. I get lots of exercise.
Jim Lakely:I'm in good shape. Doctor gives me the full bill of health when I can afford to go see him, that is. Check us out here tomorrow, 1PM eastern time, as we are every Friday for a great show called the climate realism shows. I host it, and Lanea is also on it. So it's gonna be a terrific show tomorrow, so we'll see you then.
Linnea Lueken:Absolutely. You guys, all to all of our viewers here, if you like your livestream pod livestream podcast, you can keep your livestream podcast, but only if you hit like right now and recommend our show to your friends. So, you know, thank you guys very much for watching. For audio listeners, please rate us well on whatever service that you're using. Leave a review.
Linnea Lueken:Thank you so much to everybody who showed up for the show today, and we will see you guys again next week. Well, I won't, but I I'm not going to be here. But the others will see you again next week. Alright. Bye, guys.
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