Tucker: The US is looking at a grim economic picture
Fox News host gives his take on how the U.S. should respond to the Russia-Ukraine war and provides insight on the economy on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
Knowing what we know about our current leadership class, the one thing we can be absolutely certain of is they always go too far. They always get over their skis. They just can't help themselves. That's who they are.
In February, when the Russian military invaded Ukraine, there was always out there the chance that the Biden administration would find a way to turn what was a regional tragedy into something bigger, like an historical global catastrophe. That was always possible. Even before Russian forces entered into Ukraine, the White House promised us that would not happen: "There is no intention or interest or desire by the president to send troops to Ukraine." That was the word from Biden's publicist from the White House. She said the very same thing almost identically the next month.
The month after that, she said it again, "Joe Biden does not have the intention of sending U.S. troops to Ukraine," Jen Psaki solemnly pledged to the nation. Why did Jen Psaki keep saying the same thing over and over? Well, because it wasn't true. She had to repeat it because it was a lie. That's a lying works. It's not believable so you have to say it again and again and again. If you want if someone's lying, count the times they assert something. The more often they assert it, the less likely this to be true, but ultimately the truth does come out and this weekend it began to. Joe Biden's top surrogate in the Congress—that would be Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, a former Biden intern — appeared on CBS News and said the opposite of what the White House has been telling us for months. Coons demanded that the Pentagon deploy American troops to Ukraine to fight Russian soldiers.
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Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson meets with Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, March 10, 2022, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
CBS ANCHOR: In some public remarks this week, you said the country needs to talk about when it might be willing to send troops to Ukraine.
SENATOR CHRIS COONS: If Vladimir Putin, who has shown us how brutal he can be, is allowed to just continue to massacre civilians, to commit war crimes throughout Ukraine, without NATO, without the West coming more forcefully to his aid, I deeply worry that what's going to happen next is that we will see Ukraine turn into Syria. The American people cannot turn away from this tragedy in Ukraine. I think the history of the 21st century turns on how fiercely we defend freedom in Ukraine and that Putin will only stop when we stop him.
"Without the West coming more forcefully to the aid of Ukraine." So, the Ukrainian military has been trained by NATO. It uses American arms. In some cases, it's being led by Americans. The Ukrainian government is advised directly moment-to-moment by Americans. There are many Americans in Ukraine right now doing that. So, what Chris Coons is calling for is land war with Russia. Now, that's not a small thing, given that once again, Chris Coons is Joe Biden's closest ally in the Senate. Chris Coons is an unfailing and faithful spokesman for the administration's policies, whatever those policies happen to be.
When Chris Coons calls for war with Russia, he does not do it accidentally and in this case, the White House has not distanced itself from what Chris Coons said. Oh, why? Well, because war with Russia is the administration's actual policy. Leaders of the Democratic Party want to topple the Russian government by force and effect regime change in Russia. They have wanted this since the day that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential race. We know this because they've said so many, many times and the only reason the rest of us missed it is because we didn't take them seriously enough, but we should have.
A hot war with Vladimir Putin, using American troops, is the logical, maybe inevitable end stage of Russiagate. So, the whole thing began with Hillary Clinton complaining, then the pee tape and now it's moving toward nuclear war. So, what that look like, a hot war with Russia? How many Americans would die during that war? How likely is it to escalate to nuclear conflict? And if we succeed, if we remove Vladimir Putin from office, who will replace him as the head of Russia in charge of 6,000 nuclear weapons?
Those are some of the first questions that jump to mind when war with Russia is discussed. But the news reader on CBS, who was interviewing Chris Coons didn't bother to ask any of those questions, nor did she ask the one thing you would need to know if you were running a functioning democracy, which is how many Americans, how many voters, actually want war with Russia? What percentage of the American population believes that Ukraine's borders are worth dying for? That's a central question in a democracy, and as it happens, we know the answer because CBS itself ran a poll on that topic just a week ago, and they ask this question: Should the United States send troops to Ukraine?
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Vladimir President Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine only eight months after TIME magazine billed President Biden as ready to take on the Russian leader. (Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
Answer? Fully 75% of Americans said no, the United States should not send troops to Ukraine. Yet somehow the CBS newsreader forgot to mention any of this to Chris Coons. Why? Well, you know why, because in Washington, what you think is irrelevant. Our foreign policy, matters of life and death, decisions that destroy nations, are made entirely by people with no skin in the game, people who face no conceivable risk of injury, people like John Bolton,Max Boot and Toria Nuland. Your opinion doesn't factor into the equation at any point.
So, if you're bothered to ask American citizens what they think (and if you care about democracy, you would) they'd likely tell you that their borders are more important to them than Ukraine's borders are. That makes sense because they're Americans, not Ukrainians. And if you ask deeper, you would find out that at the very top of their concerns is not Ukraine. They feel sympathy for the people of Ukraine, but they're not taking up too much disk space brooding about Ukraine moment to moment because they have other things to worry about, starting with their own economy, especially the cost of food, energy and housing. They're worried about these things and they're right to be worried. At this point, the United States is looking at a grim economic picture.
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NBC REPORTER: Before you pull out that credit card today, beware. If you don't pay it off in full, your interest rate is probably about to jump. The Federal Reserve, the nation's central bank, is expected to raise rates by a quarter point today as it tries to throw cold water on runaway inflation.
WOMAN: Every time you go and shop, every, like a price of something has gone up by so much. It's insane.
NBC REPORTER: Every American shopper has seen it firsthand. Clothing up 6.5%. Food up 8.5%. Electricity up 9%. Used cars up 41% and gasoline up nearly $1.50 from a year ago.
WOMAN: Milk, flour, sugar, cartons of oil, like frying oil—that's been insane. That's like tripled in price. So, that's been crazy.
NBC REPORTER: The highest inflation in 40 years.
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Highest inflation in 40 years. Those are the official numbers, which of course, bear no resemblance to the day-to-day reality. Everything is much more expensive and that's especially true of the big things. The big things are the most expensive of all. Why is that? Simple, the declining power of U.S. currency has created an unprecedented asset bubble. That means investors around the world are rushing to convert increasingly worthless U.S. dollars into objects that might hold value over time. So, anything tangible costs a lot more, a lot more than it did a year ago. There's no mystery in this. This is exactly what happens when you pump too much money into an economy. The money becomes worth less.
So, where is this going? How's it going to unfold? Nobody believes the interest rate rises we're seeing will get inflation under control quickly. So, what happens? Well, at some point consumers will begin to run out of cash to spend. Assets will become too expensive to buy and the average person will have less money to buy them. At the same time that prices are rising, so are taxes. Property taxes are rising in many places in tandem with the real estate bubble. So even if you didn't buy a new house, you will suffer because of that. State income taxes have risen dramatically in places like New York. So, they're getting it from both ends and that means that some people, maybe a lot of people, will start to go broke and as they do go broke, they'll be forced to curtail what they buy.
In an economy driven largely by consumer spending, this is a very scary trend. When people stop buying things, the crash comes. So, you can see very clearly where this is going. Everyone in Washington understands exactly where it's going, but instead of taking real steps to fix it, like stop writing these massive spending bills, they're taking everything they can. All the money is still on the table while there still is money.
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U.S. Treasure Secretary Janet Yellen makes a speech at the COP26 U.N. Climate Summit in Glasgow, Scotland, Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2021. (AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali)
Janet Yellen, the secretary of the Treasury, declared last week, for example, that "we must redouble our efforts to decarbonize our economy." So, what does that mean exactly? How do you decarbonize an economy? Well, by spending trillions in new stimulus spending on renewable energy schemes that, by the way, are owned by the Chinese government and Democratic donors.
See how that works? You pass the cash around while it still exists. Another name for this is looting. It cannot go on forever, by definition, because if the economy tanks, everything resets, not just the economic questions. There could be genuine social and political volatility. Our current conversation can only happen in a country that still believes itself to be rich, but once the country doesn't think it’s rich, everything changes. This tells you exactly why our leaders seem so jumpy.
It's why they're more determined than ever to move the conversation away from economics ("No talking about economics!") and toward questions of race and obscure sexual politics. Every new moral panic they create—and they create them by the dozens—diverts attention away from themselves. They've been doing this for quite a while, since at least the financial crisis. Since that time (2008/2009) our leaders have been telling us over and over and over again—many books have been written about it—that the central divide in America, the seeping wound, the original sin, is race.
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Consider the timing. At exactly the moment the U.S. government bailed out Wall Street, not popular move, use of the terms race and racism in The Washington Post, The New York Times and USA Today jumped by more than 700%. So, the official message was really clear: you've got problems and White men caused those problems. The White guys are taking all the money and the perks for themselves and they're holding everyone else down.
Now to this day, you hear that constantly, including from Joe Biden. It's the most divisive possible message. It's also, factually speaking, a lie. According to federal statistics, White men aren't even close to the richest group in the United States. Indian-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Filipinos, Koreans, Indonesians, among others all have much higher median household incomes than Whites. So, the story is not only destructive of the social fabric, it's not even true. The actual fault line in American life is not color. It's money.
The real problem isn't racism, it's wealth distribution. A small number of people, smaller every year, have become richer than anyone else in history. Meanwhile, the rest of the country has stagnated and if you don't believe that, drive out 20 miles from the city center and see how people are doing.
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So, if the population understood this—that effectively it's an economics game, it's got nothing to do with racism or transgenders —the population would be pretty mad about that. Joe Biden and his donors fear that. They don't want you to think about economics. They prefer to keep you paralyzed by guilt and shame and if that doesn't work, they'd rather be worried about Ukraine. "Ukraine is the real scandal where economic problems are Putin's fault."
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I'm doing everything within my power by executive order to bring down the price and address the Putin price hike. In fact, we've already made progress since March inflation data was collected. Your family budget, your ability to fill up your tank, none of it should hinge on whether a dictator declares war and commits genocide and a half a world away.
So this is their last desperate talking point and it's highly familiar to anyone who's watched American politics for the last six years ("Putin did it!"), but it's ridiculous and we feel it's always a moral obligation to rebut it with facts. Charts clearly show it.
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Several core measures of inflation began spiking in what year? 2021—right after Joe Biden took office. It was the spending that did it. He's not the only one who spent too much, but he spent the most. Now, Biden could claim the spike started this February and the media would probably protect him, but things have gotten so obvious (economic decline being the one thing you really can't hide because people feel it every single day) that the media are beginning to stop defending.
CBS: The White House says those price jumps are happening because of the war and what they call, "Putin's price hike," But remember, prices started spiking well before the war in Ukraine began.
PBS: And every time we talk about gas prices, Democrats do, President Biden does as always "Putin's price hike." They're trying to blame, of course, the Russian president and the invasion of Ukraine for the jump in prices, but of course, as polling suggests, this president is going to take a lot of the blame here.
ABC: Biden has called it a "Putin price hike," but most Americans aren't buying it.
CNN: Despite what President Biden says, inflation was a major concern way before Putin's invasion.
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So, no one's buying it because everyone understands the most simple principle in all economics, which is supply and demand. If you create a lot more money, the money loses its value, obviously, and yet this administration proposes spending even more money at a scale that this country has never seen. The founder of FedEx, Fred Smith, summed it up this way: "Had we pass the Build Back Better bill that Biden wanted, my guess is that we would be Weimar Germany right now. We'd have 25% inflation rather than 9% or 10%."
That's all very obvious, and again, you don't need to be running the Fed to understand it. Joe Biden may be the only person who doesn't understand. In this case, he gets a pass because in Joe Biden's head, he's far away, he's somewhere else. Yesterday, for example, Biden was fumbling through questions about foreign policy when a staffer in an Easter Bunny costume appeared out of nowhere and led him away. It's that bad now? How bad is it? Here's Biden in one of the saddest moments of his or any other presidency.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: There's not a single thing America can't do when we do it together as the United States of America. God bless you all.
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President Biden speaks about status of the country's fight against COVID-19 in the South Court Auditorium on the White House campus, Wednesday, March 30, 2022, in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Shaking imaginary hands, wandering off into the great distance, So the one thing we can say with certainty about the White House in the spring of 2022 is that Joe Biden is not running it. Joe Biden has gone. In his place are unelected ideologues, people who do not care what the price of gas is. They don't care if you can afford dinner at Applebee's with your kids. They don't care even if war with Russia could cause the destruction of entire populations. Those things are not interesting to them. They care about theories, not reality. So, improving the life of Americans, elevating the American population, doesn't even rate on their scale of concern. It's a pure afterthought.
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Now we've known that for a while. They've been in charge for a while and that's been sustainable as long as everyone's getting a check, as long as everyone feels like "I've got enough money," but the second the economy turns south, the calculation changes completely. Everything is different in a country that believes it's becoming poor. The short-term effect is a peaceful revolt by voting.
So, you can be certain of this: if there are free and fair elections this November, neo liberalism will be swept away entirely, revealed as the joke it is. The thing to worry about right now is not public opinion. Public opinion is settled. Nobody likes this. The thing to worry about right now is voting, the mechanics of voting. If the public is allowed to express its preference in the midterms, we're done, but will they be allowed? That should be the thing people are paying attention to.
This article was adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the April 18, 2022 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
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