May 14, 2025 • 61 mins
The Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports released a new poll showing that 71% of Democrats support Elon Musk being IMPRISONED for his DOGE work. This insane position is held by 80% of self-reported "liberals" from the polling. The poll results were released the same day as this episode.
This is sadly not very shocking, as we take a look at what leftist-dominated Reddit says about Elon in our Unhinged segment. We also discuss DOGE's work so far, including issues at the U.S. Treasury Department, and whether or not the pork uncovered by DOGE is actually being cut. It seems many representatives want the spending to keep on rolling along. The Heartland Institute’s Linnea Lueken, Jim Lakely, Chris Talgo, and S.T. Karnick will discuss all of this and more on Episode 494 of the In the Tank Podcast.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Linnea Lueken (00:37):
We are now live. Welcome to the show, everyone.
The Heartland Institute releaseda new polling study
collaborating with RasmussenReports that found some pretty
astonishing things aboutliberals, namely, that they very
much wish to see Elon Muskpunished, maybe even thrown in
jail for his work with Doge.We'll be covering a couple of
things having to do with Elonand Doge today, including a
(00:57):
quick check-in on Reddit to seehow they're coping with Elon's
role. There's also some odditiesthat Doge found at the US
Treasury, and we'll look atwhether or not the things Doge
is finding as representatives.
The answer will probably notsurprise you. Alright. We are
going to talk about all of thisin episode 494 of the In the
(01:19):
Tank podcast. Welcome to the Inthe Tank podcast. I am Lanea
(02:14):
Lucan.
And today, as usual, we have JimLakely, vice president of the
Heartland Institute. Jim, howare you feeling today?
Jim Lakely (02:21):
I'm feeling pretty good. I mean, as as tradition on
this podcast is that big newsusually hits right after we go
off the air, but instead, bignews hits right as we go on the
air with us having a new pope.Plus, Donald Trump, I think,
like an hour ago, announced thathis disastrous tariff policies,
everybody says this is a bigdisaster, including the Wall
(02:42):
Street Journal about 15 times aday. Yeah. We just cut a brand
new deal trade deal with The UKthat Kyra Starmer called as
significant as the end of WorldWar Two.
So there is probably a thirdshoe to drop. We have about an
hour to go. Let's see.
Linnea Lueken (02:59):
Yeah, definitely. All right. Do we have Chris
Telgo?
Jim Lakely (03:04):
We do not.
Linnea Lueken (03:05):
He's not here today. Okay, well, I thought he
was going to come anyway. So Iskip Chris. Poor Chris. And then
so we also have Sam Karnik,senior fellow at the Heartland
Institute.
Sam.
S.T. Karnick (03:17):
Hi, Linea. Good to be here. Feeling well. Hope
everything's good with you.
Linnea Lueken (03:22):
Oh, it's terrific. All right. So before
we get started, you guys, asalways, if you want to support
the show, you can go toheartland.org/inthetank and
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nice review.
(03:43):
And so I'm going to launch rightinto it. So topic number one
today for unhinged, we have thefact that redditors are still
maintaining that Elon Musk is aNazi, not just that he's a mean
Republican. As always, theoveruse of this term continues.
And I am begging any redditorswho are potentially watching the
show to please pick another warto reference. Just just throw
(04:07):
one extra one into the bag,please.
Anyway, so I'm old enough andonline enough to remember when
Reddit was absolutely obsessedwith Elon Musk. And this is in a
positive way. So he walked onwater for Reddit for a long time
between Tesla and The BoringCompany and SpaceX. And that all
changed when he startedcriticizing the left and
(04:27):
praising Trump. So now that he'sfull on trolling the left, they
couldn't hate him more.
And we'll see later in the showjust how much. So we're gonna
check-in on our politics reallyquick, which is a veritable
loony bin these days. And wehave an article from Rolling
Stone that was posted where Elonexplained that it's outrageous
(04:48):
to say that he's a Nazi. He saidhe also believes that if people
who hate him could press abutton and kill him, they would.
And I think that's probably truebased on the posts here.
So a lot of people are on Redditare incensed about the, like,
salute arm motion that he did.There's a lot of explanations
about that. I don't know if it'strolling. I don't have an
(05:09):
opinion on it. The theresponses, though, from
Redditors are many, many, manylines of implied death threats,
implicit death threats in thisthread.
Whereas one Redditor who says,bro literally responded to
(05:32):
criticism over his SIGHIL with atweet that said, did not see
that coming, which is sorry.That's a funny joke. Alright. So
he spent too much time in smallonline spaces where he thought
it was cool and edgy. But in thereal world, we think Nazis
deserve a swift and just death.
Then someone else says, harddisagree about the swift swift
bit. Rest of it is spot on. Andso it goes on and on and on like
(05:54):
this. You know, death to Nazisis slogan I can get behind that
kind of comment. So anyway, theyalso say that support of AFD,
the alternative for Germany, isproof of Nazism.
Why? Because the Germangovernment suppressing popular
political parties says so. Soreading this thread, I get
really tired of the word Nazi.Anyway, I hope that you guys
(06:17):
didn't spend too much timereading this thing because my
brain just like leaked out of myears reading it. So I'm gonna
I'm going to pitch it to thegroup in general what your
thoughts are here and whether ornot we'll be able to say about
this kind of, like, bizarreextremism.
Although I think it's built onthe echo chamber that Reddit has
become.
Jim Lakely (06:36):
Yeah. I would agree with that. I mean, I I read
Reddit very rarely. I mean,basically, if I'm if I'm into a
TV show and it's got, like, somemystery boxes, I might use
Reddit to pop in there and hearalternative theories. It was
very fun to do that when, Gameof Thrones was going on and
before it turned into a completedisaster.
The same thing with Westworld.It was a lot of fun to read all
(06:57):
these theories and some of themcame true. Gosh, reading
political Reddit is awful. It'slike walking through a sewer. I
did scroll down that thread thatyou shared with us, Linea, and
it was, you know, I would liketo say shocking that people
would just be so, you know, soblithely wishing the death upon
(07:20):
somebody and calling him a Nazi.
Guess I usually like to sayYahtzee just so that we don't
get demonetized, especially thefirst fifteen minutes. But we're
demonetized anyway, it doesn'tmatter, but I guess. But you
know, just the idea that it'scool, I guess. Reddit does tend
to skew young, right? I get thesense from the wording of some
(07:43):
of the posts I read on Redditthat it's a younger person.
Certainly not Facebook, but itskews young, at least in the pop
culture ones, I suppose. Butjust to be Joseph casually,
wishing the death upon somebody,for what? And as I was thinking
about our topics today andtaking some notes, and I'll make
(08:03):
these points later in a littlebit more depth, I suppose. But,
you know, the indoctrination isso deep on the left and in our
media today that this is how youget these kinds of reactions.
The idea that Elon Musk did aNazi salute is absurd.
Everybody knows it was absurd.He was holding his chest and
(08:24):
waving to the you know, and andthrowing it to the oh, I just
did it. Throwing it to thecrowd. And, you know, and he had
done that a lot. You know?
So it's I guess maybe there's awillingness among people who
maybe don't think much forthemselves to just gobble up and
eat everything they're spoonfed, all the propaganda against
anything that is not, you know,leftist or with the mainstream
(08:48):
or legacy media agenda, and theyeat it up. And so what's the
irony here is that that is, youknow, having a society like that
is how you end up with theGermany of the 1930s. That's how
you whip an entire population upinto something that could turn
into actual Nazism, not this.So, you know, Elon Musk has a
(09:11):
sense of humor about it. He's apublic figure.
He's one of the most significantfigures of the twenty first
century. He go down in history.What he is doing just on
technology and space explorationis revolutionary. It has taken
our space program leaps andbounds beyond anything NASA
could have done if you gave themunlimited budget in another
(09:32):
thirty years. So, you know, hetakes it in stride.
I think it's pretty dangerous,but, that's the world we live
in.
S.T. Karnick (09:39):
I think I saw a thread a while back that showed
so many, prominent Democrats andother communists, I mean,
leftists doing that samegesture. And I think that that's
really critical because none ofthis depends at all on what you
actually did or what youactually said. It all depends on
(10:00):
who you are. And this is morelike a religious war than
anything else. What happens Ithink when people lose their
faith, and I don't want to besectarian at all here, this is
just an observation of reality.
But when people lose religiousfaith, when you have a large
(10:22):
group of people that have lostit or have adopted an
alternative, a stronglyalternative faith, the idea say
the difference between Catholicsand Protestants in sixteenth
hundreds and seventeen hundreds.When that happens, they
substitute a new faith. And whenwe, when our, the West lost the
(10:50):
plot with Christianity and wasno longer Christendom, It became
this secular thing, but thesecular thing itself became a
religion. It has its ownshibboleths and rituals and
demons and angels and so forth.And so it's what has happened
(11:14):
here is that the divide betweenthe two, it's not a divide
between two parties.
It's really a divide between twoworlds. And what we have here is
that there's no sense, at leaston the one side of any room for
compromise, any room for anyoneto say anything other than what
(11:35):
is permitted by that side. Andthat's that you remember
Puritans were like that. So Ithink that we are not in for a
quick compromise and agreementto disagree. I think we're in
for a long haul.
Linnea Lueken (11:57):
Yeah. It's definitely seems like the
rhetoric just keeps getting moreand more intense. I don't wanna
spend too much time on thisbecause we actually have a lot
to cover when it comes to Dogetoday. So one of the things that
I wanted to highlight wassomething that Doge found with
the US Treasury Department. Soanyway, moving on, who cares
what Reddit thinks?
But sometimes it is fun toglance into the abyss there. All
(12:19):
right. So this article at FoxNews explains that Doge has
found hundreds of millions inimproper payment requests
because the budget codes at thetreasury are broken, I guess, in
a new algorithm that they puttogether for it. So Fox reports,
the US Treasury Department tothe Department of Government
Efficiency discovered thathundreds of millions of dollars
in improper payment requestswere identified after going live
(12:41):
with its first automated paymentsystem last week. In fact, the
system found $334,000,000 inimproper payment requests that
were flagged because of missingbudget codes, invalid budget
codes, and budget codes withoutauthorization.
The news comes months after Dogelearned about an identification
code linking US Treasurypayments to a budget line item
(13:01):
that accounted for nearly$4,700,000,000,000 in payments
that was oftentimes left blank.So the treasury access symbol is
an identification code linking atreasury payment to a budget
line item. Doge wrote in a poston x in February in the federal
government, the TAS field wasoptional for $4,700,000,000,000
(13:23):
in payments and was often leftblank, making traceability
almost impossible. As ofSaturday, this is now a required
field, increasing insight intowhere money is actually going.
So I'm gonna go to Sam to start.
But this thing kind of seems tobe an inherent risk with
everything being automated andalgorithms getting more complex.
(13:45):
Doge is only a temporary agency.So how do we know that this kind
of issue, especially in theaccounting services in our in
our country or in ourgovernment, things that it would
be convenient if they were tostruggle to track where money
was going? How do we know thatthis kind of thing won't just
pop up as soon as Doge is goneagain and no longer watching?
S.T. Karnick (14:06):
I don't think it's Doge will be the dividing line
there. I think it will be thepartisan makeup of the next
administration. I do presumethat the Trump administration
will keep an eye on this. Theyhave good people in the cabinet
who can are certainly capable ofoverseeing this. What you have
(14:28):
here really is that their wayout, the Biden administration
did a variety of things tohamstring the next
administration.
That was of course sort of adishonorable thing, but it is
they had the legal authority todo it. Maybe, I don't know.
Maybe this was not, this was notlegal. But the the certainly
(14:51):
they're not when you're nottracking the the spending, we're
not tracking it and making surethat everything is is going into
its right bucket. You're notexecuting your job.
The president is not doing hisjob and that is something that
we had in spades for four years.And what Trump has aimed to do
(15:18):
obviously is first is first toidentify all these problems and
and to expose them. That is andand frankly, that's only
possible because of Elon Musk inthe sense that he bought Twitter
so that now these things can beexposed. You can't just cover it
up by having 50 deep statepeople say, well, it's not true
(15:43):
or it's a Russian trick here. Sowhat needs to happen is that
Congress really has to act onthese things.
They won't, they have no couragewhatsoever. And even if Congress
acts on it though, a presidentcan make mistakes. His treasury
(16:06):
department can say, oh, well, wejust accidentally didn't put
that code on things. And ofcourse that code is supposed to
go across all the departments,all the spending. So this is a
matter of belief in whether youfollow processes or you follow
goals.
(16:27):
So if your goal is to spend moremoney on various things, then
whatever gets you there is okay.And so that's why these codes
are not there. If you followprocesses, you're saying that
whatever the process says,that's what we'll follow and
whatever comes of it, that'sreality. And if we don't like
(16:49):
reality, then Congress and thepresident act. But this is I
think a huge difference betweenthe two mindsets that I
mentioned earlier.
That the difference betweenlooking at things as processes,
the difference of looking atgovernment as processes and
looking at as outcomes. Andwe'll see later in today's
(17:14):
discussion, I believe given thenature of some of the topics,
more of that. So I won't go intoany deeper examination at the
moment, but I do believe we willget there especially in the next
item.
Linnea Lueken (17:30):
Jim, what Yeah. I mean
Jim Lakely (17:33):
I'm sorry. Go ahead.
Linnea Lueken (17:34):
No. You go. You go.
Jim Lakely (17:35):
Well, mean, this is yet this is example number
4,000,228 of how if anybody inthe private sector conducted
themselves and their business inthe way the federal government
does, they'd be rotting in aprison right now and actually
deserve to be there. Is I mean,trillions of dollars of spending
(17:57):
going out the door with none ofit really traceable or
accountable. I mean, is basicbudgeting. It's as if the
federal government's never heardof QuickBooks or something. It's
like every organization like theHeartland Institute, for
instance, is a nonprofitorganization, has to code and
trace all the spending that wedo, and we're audited every
year.
And that's fine. And it's tomake sure that our donors know
(18:19):
that we are good stewards oftheir generous donations for our
shared mission of advancingfreedom in smaller governments
in The United States andincreasingly around the world.
But the federal governmentdoesn't have those kinds of
rules. Guess more to the point,there obviously are codes and
(18:40):
it's obvious that our governmentbureaucrats do not care to use
them. And it's also clear thatnobody in Congress, the fact
that Doge had to discover this,is mind boggling to me.
It's an indictment of the systemthe way it is, but especially
our congress that have oversightover such things. The fact that
this is the first time anybodylistening to this podcast or
(19:02):
alive has ever known that, yeah,spending just goes out the door.
And in fact, I read a storywhere I think the the treasury
nobody could recall a singlemoment where the treasury
department said, that spendinglooks fishy. We're not going to
send that money out. Or can wehave a little bit more
information on this, please?
Nope. All the money just goesright out the door, trillions
(19:24):
and trillions and trillions eachyear. And the idea, again, maybe
tying it back to death threatsagainst Elon Musk, which he knew
were coming, the disgustingbehavior of redditors calling
him names and saying 'yep, allNazis should die' and that
includes Elon Musk as well isabsurd. And again, Elon Musk
(19:49):
deserves our thanks for settingthis up and trying for the first
time ever in our lifetimes tohave a federal government that
actually operates sensibly, assensibly as a federal
bureaucracy can, and to haveeven a smidgen and start getting
just a smidgen of accountabilityfor our money and how it goes
(20:10):
out the door. And it's the usualsuspects who are complaining
about it, And those are thoseare people who benefit from the
idea that money just flows rightout of the government into their
pet projects or their or theirpet organizations with no
accountability.
Because if the American peoplestart to get a handle, they're
starting to get a handle, Ithink, on how much actual waste,
(20:32):
fraud and abuse there is in thefederal government, that's going
to change things in thiscountry. People are going to be
voting a lot differently in thiscountry. The scales are falling
from our eyes. We are now forthe first time ever really
starting to see and on a broadscale, like a lot of people I've
covered politics and policy whenI was a journalist and now I'm
(20:54):
in the policy realm at theHarlan Institute. So I've eaten
this stuff for breakfast for thelast forty years, thirty years.
But most normal Americans don'tdo that. They have lives to
live. They have to coach theirson's baseball league. They go
to church. They do all sorts ofthings.
They have jobs. They runbusinesses. And they really
don't have the time to dig intothis stuff the way we do. But
(21:17):
the Doge project is perfect forthis because it boils it down
much more simply to somethingjust as basic as the idea that
the Federal Treasury has asystem of spending set up so
that it is impossible to haveaccountability. And so to have
this stuff to start right now,well, better late than never.
(21:38):
And let's have more of it.
Linnea Lueken (21:40):
Yep. And I want to break in here for just a
second to say we have our thevery first in history American
Pope. So congrats us and it'sfrom our neck and he's from our
neck of the woods as well. Sothat's very exciting. So Okay.
But yeah, you're right. Andabout accountability though,
Jim, question remains and thisis something we've talked about
(22:02):
from the very beginning of thisadministration is, you know,
whether or not the stuff thatDoge finds is actually going to
be cut in any kind of permanentway. And so our next topic here
today is about exactly that isspending actually being cut.
There's a lot of proposals. Andin fact, Trump recently released
(22:23):
a budget proposal that is prettygood about, you know, listing
all the cuts that he wanted tosee present.
So from the New York Times, wehave President Trump on Friday
proposed slashing$163,000,000,000 in federal
spending next fiscal year, adrastic retrenchment in the role
and reach of government that ifenacted, would eliminate a vast
(22:44):
set of climate education, healthand housing programs, including
some that benefit the poor. Soamong I scrolled all over the
place in this New York Timesarticle. And so they had like
little mini articles attached tothis. I hate when news companies
do this. I wish they would justput it all into one article, but
whatever.
I understand they want to keepupdating the section still.
(23:05):
That's my rant for a moment. Soamong the things Trump proposed
slashing are the NationalEndowment for the Arts and the
National Endowment for theHumanities. We wanted to cut
funding to the Centers ofDisease Control and Prevention
by almost half, including theChronic Disease Center, which
was slated for eliminationentirely slash the State
(23:26):
Department's budget by$26,500,000,000. Section eight
is also on the table to be cut.
Budget cuts to Noah andeliminate the job core. So all
of this sounds like republicanwish list stuff. Right? Although
Republicans are now crying abouta lot of it as because it
becomes closer to being real.And, you know, we can go over a
(23:48):
couple of the things that Ilisted here and and how we'd
like to see them cut down.
I mean, I funny enough, I mightbe in the minority on the right
when I say this because a lot ofpeople are a little bit
utilitarian, but I actuallydon't think it's inappropriate
for government to give somemoney to the arts, particularly
if it's like a publicbeautification project related
thing. Like Trump's really biginto reinvigorating classical
(24:11):
architecture and stuff. I likethat. The main problem with
those endowments right now isthat they almost exclusively go
to projects that are ugly andsoul crushing. So, Sam, am I off
base here or am I understandingwhat this is kind of about?
S.T. Karnick (24:27):
No, I think you you got it just right. What this
is is the triumph of politics.And there is a real history of
uni party here and it's reallyrather sad the way the
Republicans have continuallygiven in. When you look at, for
example, the Corporation forPublic Broadcasting, they've
(24:49):
been talking about defundingthat for literally decades and
nothing has happened. Where werethey in 2017 and 2018?
They had the whole Congress,they had the presidency, and you
can keep blaming the filibusterall you want, but that's in the
power, it's in control of theSenate, whoever has the majority
(25:13):
in the Senate can change that.And they could have and they
didn't. There are so many thingsthat the Republicans have
already said, have long saidthat, we want to get rid of
this, we want to get rid ofthat. We want to cut back on
this, we want to cut back onthat, but they don't do it. And
that is simply, I think it'srunning to the right and
(25:36):
governing to the left.
And their belief somehow is thatthis will endear them to the
public. The problem that you runinto is if you are doing the
same thing as the opposition,which is to say, the government
is going to give you things thatwill make your life better. And
(25:58):
the opposition says we will giveyou a lot more things that will
make your life better. Who doyou think is going to win on
that? And so as you saw, ourviewers take a look at that New
York Times article, which Idon't necessarily recommend, but
if you look at it, see thepremise in there, in all the
(26:20):
critique that, and it's animplied and kind of obvious
critique throughout the article,supposed to be a news article,
but you know how that works.
But the thing is, see, the clearcritique there is that when you
cut something in the government,you are getting rid of something
that is good and positive anddoing good work. Meaning that
(26:42):
whenever the government doesany, whenever they spend any
money, that's the key, becausethey're talking about spending,
not actual behavior. So when yousay, well, when you don't spend
on this, you lose all of that.Well, the thing is that first of
all, we know that we don't evenknow what we're spending on. We
don't know what, so what are wegetting?
(27:05):
When Doge first started and theyidentified all the stuff that
was going on in AID, which issupposed to be for international
development and was in factsimply more of a slush fund than
anything else for leftistsoperating within The United
States. When you have a systemlike that, it's obviously not
(27:25):
there in any way to do good fornormal people. What it's there
to do is accumulate power in thecenters of power. And so what we
have here is a real badassumption that the things
government does is good. Youremember the economist John
Maynard Keynes had his idea ofthe multiplier, that if you
(27:49):
spend X amount of money, iffederal government or the
national government spends Xamount of money, it will result
in a X plus or one point X pluseconomy, meaning you'll get more
by spending, by governmentspending than you would just by
spending it in the privatesector.
(28:11):
That is simply untrue. But thatpremise is what has dominated
all of Western civilization forthe past one hundred and twenty
five years. So this is not new.What is new is that the
President of The United Statesdoesn't buy it. And he's got an
(28:32):
administration that is given thenumbers, is finding the evidence
and saying, look, this is how itreally works folks.
Now this is an educationalprocess in addition to a sort of
a governmental process. It's aneducational process in the sense
(28:55):
of finding these things out andtelling the public. But when it
comes down to it, it's all inthe hands of Congress. They can
make changes and they don't. Andthen the New York Times and
everybody who follows in theirwake, like the little ducklings
all says, well, but that's notlegal.
(29:15):
The president can't do that orwhatever it is. Of course,
everything's legal. Everything'sillegal. Whatever you want to
do, you can find a way, you canfind it in our statutes to do
it. Sometimes you may have to goback to the eighteenth century
to find the statute, but it'sthere and it's still in effect.
(29:37):
And a court will tell you that,well, it's not in effect. Why?
Because I say so. But theproblem we have here is that
there's an educational processthat absolutely has to occur and
Trump and Musk have initiatedthat process. Now it's going to
be up to the public to holdthose lawmakers' feet to the
(29:57):
fire.
I'll use that cliched metaphor,but it is a good one.
Linnea Lueken (30:05):
Yeah. And I wanna point out to that tweet that I
sent you guys earlier aboutRepublicans keep pushing these
cuts off. And I know ThomasMass, he is pulling his hair out
over it. Anyway, they justcancel the vote again on making
these cuts permanent. This isstuff that Republicans have
claimed to want for decades.
And now that it's right in frontof them, they just fold like a
(30:27):
cheap suit. It's it's agonizingto watch. They've got, you know,
the New York Times, as AndrewKlavan calls it the former
newspaper explains aboutNebraska representative Don
Bacon. He is called a centristby the New York Times, which is
a nice word that they give toeverybody who's a squish. He
(30:50):
says he won't vote on anythingthat threatens to cut Medicaid.
Well, the thing is, no one'ssaying that Medicaid needs to go
away. They are saying thatthere's a lot of waste and that
the waste needs to be carvedoff. So here's what The New York
Times says. While the HouseEnergy and Commerce Committee is
looking for nearly900,000,000,000 in reductions
over ten years, largely fromhealth care, Bacon says taking
(31:12):
any more than 500,000,000,000from Medicaid is too much. And a
lot of people pointed out thatit's kind of a silly thing to
say because if you discover thatthere's, you know,
$550,000,000,000 of waste, thenwhy would you just leave that
50,000,000,000 extra in therejust because you feel like it
would be a little bit tooaggressive of a pruning
(31:33):
otherwise?
It's it's it's nonsense, Jim.
Jim Lakely (31:37):
Yeah. You're really you're really triggering me now.
Like, having to sit and wait andhear all of that and then get to
speak, I don't know if I'm gonnamake it. Well, first of all,
from way back when you saidyou're cool with spending
federal money for things likenational artistic spending,
National Endowment for the Artsand all that stuff, look, before
there was a National Endowmentfor the Arts, let's call them
(31:59):
not robber barons, but verywealthy industrialists actually
did that kind of spending. I'mfrom Western Pennsylvania.
Every other great public thinglike a library, for instance, or
museums is named after AndrewCarnegie, and he used his
fortune to better society. Andyou cannot tell me that the
stuff that the industrialists ofthe turn of the twentieth
(32:22):
century spent to beautify and tolift up the spirits and the
knowledge of the people, youcannot tell me that that is
worse than what has been fundedby our tax money in all over
this country. I get it, but itcan be done and has been done
and done a lot better by theprivate sector than it has been
(32:44):
by the public. Second of all,before I joined the Heart
Institute, long before I joinedthe Heart Institute, I was a
reporter for The WashingtonTimes, as many listeners and
watchers of this podcast know.My first beat when I covered
Capitol Hill was the HouseBudget Committee, and it was so
boring.
It was awful. And I had to go tothose hearings. Sean Spicer, by
(33:07):
the way, the Sean Spicer was thespokesperson for the Republican
majority in the in the budgetcommittee as a matter of fact.
So he and I have known him for along time. But it was boring as
hell.
But it was necessary, and itthat was back in the days when
we did did things in properorder. And so, hey, New York
Times and all of you, Democratsand Liberals complaining about
(33:29):
this and even you centristRepublicans, if you don't like
the Trump budget cuts, there'ssomething you can do, and that's
called your job on thecongressional budget and the
appropriations committees. Butthat is not how we've run our
government for, nay, almost, Idon't know, at least twenty five
years now. At least since maybeI think the last time we really
(33:49):
did that was late in Gingrich'sspeakership. So we're talking
late nineties here.
But, you know, we have now youguys, and by you guys, I mean
really the left and the mediahave never caused a fuss about
this, but you gave the executivebranch broad discretion over
spending. And I'm old enough toremember when the Biden
administration threatened towithhold and did withhold
(34:09):
federal education money from anystate or school that, refused to
allow boys to, play on the girlsteam and change in their locker
rooms. So them's the rules now,and for once, they're being
applied to Democrats and theirspending priorities. So you're
just gonna have to eat this one.I'm sorry.
And but they're mad becausethanks to Trump and Doge and all
(34:31):
of this stuff kinda happening atonce flooding the zone, their
entire agenda, not entireagenda, but a lot of it is being
defunded. And Trump is the onlypresident in our lifetime who
does not care about the whiningand the of the unusual sob
stories in the media, in thepress. Oh, oh, Elmo, you're
killing Elmo and you're takingyou're taking these vital
(34:53):
services away from people thathe doesn't care about it. I
don't care about it. Most votersdon't care about it.
The world has changed. You know,we spent in 2019 before the
pandemic, the federal governmentspent $4,450,000,000,000 which
is amazing. It's an outrage.There's no need to spend
(35:15):
$4,450,000,000,000 as a federalgovernment. Yet last year, we
spent almost $7,000,000,000,000as a federal government.
So you're telling me that thereis no place that you can cut
that every single cut is that,oh my gosh, it's terrible.
People are going to starve. Youwe don't believe it anymore,
guys. We don't believe it. NPR,we don't believe it.
(35:36):
New York Times and we don'tbelieve it centrist Republicans.
And the idea, as you mentioned,Linea, that, you know, oh, you
can't touch Medicaid. Well, youknow, like it or not, Medicaid
does need to be cut and youstart with the waste. And
there's a dividing line here.There are regular people who
(35:56):
understand that it is a virtue,it's a good thing, objectively a
good thing to have finally thefederal government going through
especially expensive run onautopilot entitlements and
rooting out the fraud.
Our healthcare system in thiscountry is already way too,
thanks to Obamacare, is alreadyway too expensive. You know, if
(36:17):
you still have privateinsurance, you know this. If
you've run a small business, youknow this. The cost of health
insurance has gone through theroof. If you are, you know, as a
consumer of health care, yourbenefits have gone down while
your premiums have gone up.
It's been a complete disaster.And the expansion of Medicaid
through Obamacare is a big partof this. So, know, like it or
not, that has to be touched. Aredown, as Elon Musk has said many
(36:42):
times, we are going over thefiscal cliff. Again, dollars
4,500,000,000,000.0 we spent in2019 and then we ramped all of
it up because of the pandemicand now we're spending
$7,000,000,000,000 a year.
It is not justified remotely tohave a federal government
spending that much money, so weneed to cut it back. Figure,
(37:04):
Lynne, I think you gave was thegoal was to cut was it just in
Medicaid, but it was to cut$900,000,000,000 over ten years.
Linnea Lueken (37:13):
Yeah, over ten years. That's what the House
Energy and Commerce Committee islooking at largely from health
care. So, yeah, it's not allcoming from the same place, but
that's the goal.
Jim Lakely (37:24):
That is not nearly enough. That is that is what is
that? A 1.6% a year? I mean,come on. That is a joke.
So, yeah, this we're not buyingthis anymore. You know, this
needs to be cut. These sobstories, they can write them all
they want even if they writethem in ways that are very
annoying to you, Linea, asyou're trying to scroll. But the
(37:46):
real people, the Americanpeople, and hopefully a bare
majority of Republicans who aregetting exactly what they've
screamed for for more than twodecades are gonna have to do the
right thing. And and, this ideathat Medicaid can't be touched
and other entitlements I mean,we started this podcast talking
about how the TreasuryDepartment's on autopilot.
(38:08):
That's why nobody's evenbothered to look for the waste,
fraud and abuse. We know it'srampant. We know that it can and
should be cut. I am not gonnasit here and cry for crooks,
thieves, and scam artists whoare stealing our money. Good
luck with that.
That's great sale, democrats.Keep going.
Linnea Lueken (38:25):
Yeah. Right. And I think, Sam, I think you said
you had something to pitch inhere a bit as
S.T. Karnick (38:31):
well. Yes, I think Medicaid is a great example of
the problem because I've spentthe last two years writing about
the fact it's not a not aquestion, it's not an opinion,
it's a fact that the amount ofspending we're doing is really
hurting the economy and thatcreates more spending. Because
(38:56):
as you reduce economic output,you create more debt, which you
have to pay for. And you alsocreate more supposed need.
Because I say supposed becausethese are matters of discretion
really that if you don't have tohave Medicaid at all, of course,
(39:19):
or you could have it be20,000,000,000, 20 trillion a
year, whatever you wanna spendon it, could do that.
So the problem that we have hereis that if we continue to spend
the kind of money that we'vebeen spending every year by the
federal government, it willcollapse. And Medicaid is a good
(39:42):
example of that. There is somuch waste in there and I don't
think we even have any idea ofhow bad the waste is at this
point. Everything again, whatprior administrations did was
cover things up and make thingsopaque so that no one could know
what's real and what's not,what's actually helping people
(40:07):
in need and what isn't. SoMedicaid, the idea behind it is
to help people in need.
But then you expand it. We hadthe Medicaid expansion of
Obamacare. And so you expand itto people who are able-bodied
and above the poverty level.When that happens, states have
(40:29):
since then, states have had thathave expanded Medicaid, which is
like 38 of them. Almost all thestates have done it well and
that they did that because theywere lured by federal money to
do it.
So when you expand Medicaid inthat way, what you are doing is
expanding the amount of thenumber of people and the amount
(40:51):
of so called need that you aregoing to address. But then when
you expand it, you don't expandthe money because it's just not
possible then, or you don'texpand the money at the same
rate, then what happens is thepeople who are neediest are
going to suffer because theyused to have this size of money,
(41:18):
this this amount of money to toaddress their their problems and
their needs. And now they havethis size of money because this
part is going to other people.So Medicaid is a perfect example
of what's going on with thefederal government, because when
you run up from4,000,000,000,000 a year to
(41:39):
7,000,000,000,000 a year, $8.09,when you create that kind of
spending, what happens is youcannot get that through taxes.
It's not possible.
So what has happened is we werespending about 19%, twenty % of
(41:59):
GDP, and we're getting 17.4 to17.5 somewhere in the 17s in
federal tax money and taxrevenues. So you're two to 3% of
GDP every year you're borrowing.Well, raise that to 25% during
the Biden administration. Youare now borrowing seven to eight
(42:23):
percent a year of GDP just tofund the federal government. Now
that cannot continueindefinitely because you have to
pay that money back.
And that's what happens. Thereare things that treasury bonds
and all these issues that arise.But the bottom line is that if
your government is not reliableto pay that money back, then
(42:46):
your borrowing costs increaseextremely radically. So what
happens is at a certain point,you cannot borrow any more
money. You're locked in to spendit.
So what do you do? At somepoint, you have to cut. And what
happens is that you're eithergoing to cut voluntarily, which
(43:10):
is what Trump is trying to do.He's trying to say, we will cut
a measly, what is it,1,900,000,000.0 a year. That's
measly, quite frankly, given theamount that we spend Medicaid.
So we're going to cut that. Andthat's the amount of waste that
we believe we have. I believethat the waste is probably way,
(43:34):
way more than that, much biggerthan that. But Okay, let's.
Jim Lakely (43:39):
Mean, this is why the entire departments, you
know, that Doge is thinkingabout and Trump is thinking
about just wiping out entiredepartments and he's being
fought in the courts for thisbecause that's what needs to be
done. Like I said,$90,000,000,000 a year sounds
like a lot until you realize wespend $7,000,000,000,000 a year.
That's literally, not literally,but it's almost literally
nothing.
S.T. Karnick (43:58):
That is a tiny fraction, yes.
Jim Lakely (44:00):
Yeah, it would be advantageous. There's been a
little bit of scuttle aboutthis, Sam. I know you've heard
it too. I don't believe it'llever happen. But getting to a
zero budgeting process where youstart over the year at zero.
Zero based budget. Where youdon't just go in there and say,
well, we spent 4,000,000,000,000last year, so we're going to
spend $4,300,000,000,000 thisyear. Everything in the federal
(44:23):
government is on autopilot.There really needs to be a
serious effort to make each ofthese departments justify every
dollar they spend. They start atzero every year and they see
what their real priorities are.
Because we are spending money onthings that are not remotely a
priority to anyone, any of theAmerican people. They don't even
(44:47):
know what the money is beingspent on. That I think would do
so much more to get spendingunder control. And I think that
might be what they're doing inArgentina. Whatever they're
doing in Argentina, need to dohere.
I'll just say that as a goodbroad general statement that I
think will be generally true.
S.T. Karnick (45:03):
I fully agree. So the point here is that at a
certain point you simply can'tfund Medicaid to the level that
you have decided you're going tofund it. And so the same is
going to happen with the otherso called entitlements, in
particular food stamps, forexample, we spend a whole lot of
money on that. Now, these areall things that would be nice to
(45:27):
have, but you cannot spend thismuch on them. Now, so what's
going to happen is Trump istrying to make alterations that
will dial back spending growth,just dial back spending growth a
little bit.
(45:48):
This is just like the Reaganyears. So we're going to dial
back spending growth a littlebit and then everyone refers to
that as enormous gargantuan,terrifying evil spending cuts,
when in fact they're obviouslyjust cuts of growth. But on top
of that, when you what we calldiscretionary spending, which is
(46:08):
a very tiny, tiny slice of thefederal pie. And then you have
military spending, which isquote unquote necessary and
always necessary to have more.And then you have on top of that
though, you have obviously allthe entitlement spending, which
is considered non discretionary.
Why do I use the termconsidered? Because, well, the
(46:29):
law says that we're going togive this much to social
security beneficiaries, we'regoing to give this much to
Medicaid beneficiaries, we'regoing to give this much to food
stamps. And as Jim said, this isall on autopilot, just like
everything else, but it is achoice. One of the things I
(46:50):
wrote a few months ago was thatall spending is discretionary.
When they tell you that this isnon discretionary spending and
this is discretionary, no, it'sall discretionary.
You can change the laws and youcan make things as they should
be. We don't choose to do that.But what Trump is trying to do
is slow down the growth so thateconomic growth can catch up.
(47:14):
What you do is if you're notspending as much as you were
planning to spend, let's put itthat way, or if you're slowing
the growth, which is a way ofsaying the same thing, then
you're going to get your 17% ofGDP and you're not going to have
to borrow as much. That's whathe's trying to do.
(47:36):
You hit the wall later than youwould otherwise. You're going to
hit the wall because ofdemographics, as population
ages, becomes more expensive. Sowith all that said, what Trump
is doing is averting a collapsebecause if you don't do this,
you will get spending cuts likeyou never imagined and they will
(47:58):
be involuntary. You will getwhere the federal government
just says, oh, here's what wehave this year. We've got
6,000,000,000,000 and that's it.
What do we do? Sure.
Jim Lakely (48:13):
It's pretty incredible to
Linnea Lueken (48:14):
see the kind of modest moderate response or the
kind of modest moderate cutsthat have been proposed so far
compared to the screeching aboutthose modest cuts has been
really incredible. And so theHeartland Institute and
Rasmussen got together andconducted a poll of potential
(48:34):
voters. I'm gonna read from thepress release at heartland.org.
A new poll by the Glenn C.Haskins Emerging Issues Center
at the Heartland Institute andRasmussen reports found that a
strong majority of Democraticand liberal voters held radical
views about Elon Musk, a senioradviser to president Trump and
founder of the administration'snew department of government
(48:56):
efficiency.
The survey of a 67 likely voterscompleted 05/04/2025 found that
71%, seriously, guys, 71% ofDemocrat voters would strongly
or somewhat support ahypothetical law that would
imprison Elon Musk for his rolein Doge. We're just gonna let
(49:19):
that sink in. Right? Furthersupport for the author
authoritarian measure toimprison Musk was highest among
self identified liberal voters.80% of liberal respondents said
that they would strongly orsomewhat support the proposal.
Equally disconcerting 68% oflikely democrat voters support a
(49:42):
hypothetical law that would banElon from serving in government
compared to 29% of selfidentified Republicans, which is
also pretty high. Boy, I mean,responses to this. The
imprisonment thing is soextreme. I'm actually, you know,
I knew that the Democrats werecrazy, but like that seems very
extreme. And it wasn't a hugesample size, but it's still
(50:04):
pretty reflective of what wehave going on here.
And after looking at the Redditportion at the beginning, the
way that The New York Times iscovering these cuts in this
very, like, extremist language,it actually maybe isn't all that
surprising.
Jim Lakely (50:20):
Yeah. I mean, this the sample size, I mean, this is
a scientific poll, so it's arepresentative sample size and
it's accurate as all the otherpolls that that Rasmussen does
and everybody else does. Theydon't poll 40,000 people. They
poll, you know, a a much smallersubset to the so they they can
get results. But I look at thisas, Schrodinger's poll about
Democrats and so called Liberalsbecause it's both shocking and
(50:43):
not shocking at the same time.
And it's not shocking to mebecause of the polling that
Heartland has done withharassment over the last several
years. Back in late twentytwenty, we conducted a poll that
found that one quarter ofAmericans believe that people
who violate theoreticaloffensive speech could be put in
jail. We did another poll atRasmus, and they love doing
(51:05):
polls with us because we come upwith some fantastic questions
and some topics to explore. InJanuary 2022, we released a poll
that found a lot of shockingthings. Found that 78% of
Democrats support Biden'svaccine mandate for businesses
with more than 100 employees.
78% of Democrats supported that.55% of Democrats supported
(51:26):
finding Americans who don't getthe jab. Forty eight percent of
Democrats back in 2022, '40 '8percent said government should
fine or imprison Americans whopublicly just question the
efficacy of COVID vaccines. Bythe way, for which they would
have been 100% correct, as wewere on this poll as, on this
show as well. Back then, just acouple years ago, 47% of
(51:48):
Democrats supported thegovernment tracking the
unvaccinated to ensure that theyare quarantined or socially
distanced.
So taking their freedoms awaythere, not a problem for about
half Democrats. And then more amore than a quarter of Democrats
in that poll in 2022 that we ranwith Rasmussen said that parents
should lose custody of theirkids if they didn't give them
the jab. Now that poll there andthis new poll that we did today
(52:12):
or releasing this week aboutElon Musk reveals a deep fascist
and totalitarian streak on theleft and even obviously here
among the mainstream DemocraticParty. And so, you know, the
results this has gone on for awhile. This is why it's both
shocking to one's conscious, butnot surprising considering the
(52:33):
way politics, frankly, have beenhave been done in this country
on the left and with theDemocratic Party over the last
several years, frankly, sincearound that day that Donald
Trump came down the goldenescalator.
Suddenly, free speech was outthe window. That's one of the
reasons they hate Elon Musk.He's actually upholding the
principles that he held when hewas a member of in good standing
(52:56):
of the Democratic Party and of,you know, liberals or people on
the left. He certainly wouldnever have considered describing
himself as a conservative, maybea libertarian, but certainly not
a conservative and not a MAGAguy just a few years ago. So,
you know, the results of thispoll, reveals that it seems that
(53:19):
membership in a certain partyand if you are philosophically
on the left side of thespectrum, that you are
susceptible to propaganda andlies about COVID, about Trump,
about Elon Musk.
So look, if they want to putthese people want to put it's
(53:42):
either they're they're justbrainwashed with propaganda or
lies or they know very well whatElon Musk's Doge project is
doing. And it is exposing thescam that is the broad scam, the
spending scam, which we coveredearlier in this podcast, that
many institutions on the leftare basically stealing your
(54:03):
money to enrich themselves andto push an agenda which is not
shared by the majority of theAmerican people. Doge is
exposing this. So they want ElonMusk in jail so they don't go to
jail. We talk about it on theClimate Realism Show, how all of
these instant pop up NGOs,nonprofits raking in hundreds of
(54:25):
millions of dollars, sometimes$2,000,000,000 with no
qualifications, with noaccountability.
You know, that's a very, verylucrative gravy train. So
they're either I think it'sboth. Again, it's kind of
Schrodinger's poll results inthis regard. You know, it is
both. They know that they are inon the scam and it's going to
end and they could be in bigtrouble.
(54:47):
And the other people are justfed this propaganda about Elon
Musk. It is like 1984. It's twominutes of hate. Elon Musk is
the current target. It'll besomebody else next time.
It's sad that this is what ithas become, thanks to endless
propaganda, endless hate. Andthat's being, you know, that's
(55:10):
being directed against peoplethat are just doing things that
seem to make so much sense iflooked at objectively.
Linnea Lueken (55:18):
Well, absolutely. The it's the amount the amount
of vitriol in the way thatthey've been spun up over the
years towards Trump and now ElonMusk is kind of like taking part
of the flag, which isinteresting to see. He's got an
amount of hatred towards him.That's, you know, I think Chris
(55:40):
Talgo is releasing a op ed sooncalled Elon Musk derangement
syndrome with that in the titleanyway, and it's totally true.
It's the exact same level ofderanged hatred that people have
for Trump that they now have forElon Musk.
Even though what's he done? He'smade some memes. He's joked
(56:03):
around. He's made fun of theleft. Good.
He's he's involved in Doge,which is slashing up the gravy
train that a lot of, like, mainmain line, you know, like the
average Democrat floating aroundwatching MSNBC doesn't probably
fully understand just how muchof this is this is the the
(56:26):
spending in this country is justpure graft and and laundering
and it's all just so corrupt.But if there was a Republican
administration in and theydiscovered that the Republicans
were misusing funds, they wouldalmost certainly be all over
that. They they just don't careotherwise. It's I don't know. I
(56:49):
think there's a ton of peoplewho are just led by their nose
by the media.
And especially when it comes toparticularly Trump, particularly
Elon. Whatever the media says,they're just gonna go along with
it. They're not gonna do anyresearch themselves. They're not
gonna take a moment to thinkabout it. They're just gonna
say, Elon bad and move on fromthere.
(57:12):
And that's that's part of whatfeeds into people being so
willing to throw him in jail forbeing involved with Doge. What
has he done with Doge thatdeserves imprisonment? I don't
know. Like, it's bizarre. It'sit's the most strange.
I don't know. It's like yousaid, it is shocking to the
conscience, but it's notsurprising all that much.
(57:34):
Alright, Sam.
S.T. Karnick (57:36):
Yeah, thanks. I agree with everything you and
Jim said. It's that there's anattempt to isolate an individual
to make it easy for people tounderstand what the problem is.
And it's that Trump just doesn'tcare about you and that didn't
work. And they tried to imprisonhim.
(57:59):
You know the know the routine.They've turned to Elon Musk
because it didn't work on Trump.If it works on Musk, then
they'll go after the nextperson. That's how they operate,
just isolating a person to bethe symbolic representation of
evil. And of course the Naziterm is then deployed to signal
(58:25):
to us that this is the personwhom we're going after.
Jim Lakely (58:32):
Well well And remember one and remember one
more thing that that Elon Muskdid that really, I think, got
all this going is he boughtTwitter because he believed in
free speech, and he thought theonly way to stop the Biden
regime from coordinating withsocial media giants to censor
the speech of people who opposedthe regime was to spend
(58:53):
$44,000,000,000 and privatizeTwitter and fire all the people
who were exchanging emails andSlack messages and what and what
have you with the federalgovernment to conspire on how to
keep people from saying whatthey thought, especially when
often what they thought was thetruth, whether it came to the
Hunter Biden laptop, whether itcame to the efficacy of
(59:14):
vaccines, whether it came to thewisdom of broad lockdowns,
whether it came to the hypocrisyof the, you know, federal and
government officials allowingmass protests in the summer of
love for George Floyd, butkeeping churches closed. You
weren't allowed to say anythingin criticism of that without
having your, you know, your yoursocial media accounts shut down,
(59:37):
your mouth shut, your voicesilenced, and sometimes even
having your livelihood,threatened by this.
That is the unforgivable sin tothe Democratic Party of the left
that that Elon Musk hadcommitted because just two years
ago, he was their hero. He he hehe started Tesla. Everybody
(59:57):
needs to get an electric car.He's saving the planet. And now
it's all gone because he stoodup for the principle of free
speech.
And on the left, free speech isnot only not a virtue, it's a
crime. And that's what they wantto put him in jail for.
Linnea Lueken (01:00:14):
Absolutely. Well, I think we summed it up about as
best as we can. Everybody who'swatching, please go to
heartland.org to look at thestudy or the poll yourselves.
Boy, I think this is the firsttime ever. We're just about
finishing on time for in thetank.
So. All right, everybody. Ithink that's all the time we
have. And that is also all ofthe content that we have today.
(01:00:37):
Thank you guys so much fortuning in.
We are live every single week onThursdays at noon central on
Rumble, Twitter, YouTube,Facebook, wherever you can find
streaming like that. For audiolisteners, please rate us well
on whatever service you areusing and leave a review. Thank
you so much to all of our usualpanelists. Jim, what do you have
to to plug for us today?
Jim Lakely (01:00:59):
You can follow me on the free speech x at Jay
Lakeley. You can follow theHeartland Institute at Heartland
Inst on X and yes, visitheartland.org to check out the
results of this poll and we havepreview. We have more poll
results coming out next week.
Linnea Lueken (01:01:15):
Awesome. Sam?
S.T. Karnick (01:01:17):
Yeah. Thank you. Follow me at, Twitter at or X at
SDcarnac and SubstackSDcarnac.substack.com.
Linnea Lueken (01:01:27):
Thank you very much. Well, that's all we have
everyone. So thank you all somuch for watching. We will see
you again next week.
We are now live. Welcome to the show, everyone.
The Heartland Institute releaseda new polling study
collaborating with RasmussenReports that found some pretty
astonishing things aboutliberals, namely, that they very
much wish to see Elon Muskpunished, maybe even thrown in
jail for his work with Doge.We'll be covering a couple of
things having to do with Elonand Doge today, including a
(00:57):
quick check-in on Reddit to seehow they're coping with Elon's
role. There's also some odditiesthat Doge found at the US
Treasury, and we'll look atwhether or not the things Doge
is finding as representatives.
The answer will probably notsurprise you. Alright. We are
going to talk about all of thisin episode 494 of the In the
(01:19):
Tank podcast. Welcome to the Inthe Tank podcast. I am Lanea
(02:14):
Lucan.
And today, as usual, we have JimLakely, vice president of the
Heartland Institute. Jim, howare you feeling today?
Jim Lakely (02:21):
I'm feeling pretty good. I mean, as as tradition on
this podcast is that big newsusually hits right after we go
off the air, but instead, bignews hits right as we go on the
air with us having a new pope.Plus, Donald Trump, I think,
like an hour ago, announced thathis disastrous tariff policies,
everybody says this is a bigdisaster, including the Wall
(02:42):
Street Journal about 15 times aday. Yeah. We just cut a brand
new deal trade deal with The UKthat Kyra Starmer called as
significant as the end of WorldWar Two.
So there is probably a thirdshoe to drop. We have about an
hour to go. Let's see.
Linnea Lueken (02:59):
Yeah, definitely. All right. Do we have Chris
Telgo?
Jim Lakely (03:04):
We do not.
Linnea Lueken (03:05):
He's not here today. Okay, well, I thought he
was going to come anyway. So Iskip Chris. Poor Chris. And then
so we also have Sam Karnik,senior fellow at the Heartland
Institute.
Sam.
S.T. Karnick (03:17):
Hi, Linea. Good to be here. Feeling well. Hope
everything's good with you.
Linnea Lueken (03:22):
Oh, it's terrific. All right. So before
we get started, you guys, asalways, if you want to support
the show, you can go toheartland.org/inthetank and
donate there. Please also clickthe thumbs up to like the video
and remember that sharing italso helps break through some of
YouTube suppression or even justleaving a comment helps too. If
you're an audio listener, youcan help us out by leaving a
nice review.
(03:43):
And so I'm going to launch rightinto it. So topic number one
today for unhinged, we have thefact that redditors are still
maintaining that Elon Musk is aNazi, not just that he's a mean
Republican. As always, theoveruse of this term continues.
And I am begging any redditorswho are potentially watching the
show to please pick another warto reference. Just just throw
(04:07):
one extra one into the bag,please.
Anyway, so I'm old enough andonline enough to remember when
Reddit was absolutely obsessedwith Elon Musk. And this is in a
positive way. So he walked onwater for Reddit for a long time
between Tesla and The BoringCompany and SpaceX. And that all
changed when he startedcriticizing the left and
(04:27):
praising Trump. So now that he'sfull on trolling the left, they
couldn't hate him more.
And we'll see later in the showjust how much. So we're gonna
check-in on our politics reallyquick, which is a veritable
loony bin these days. And wehave an article from Rolling
Stone that was posted where Elonexplained that it's outrageous
(04:48):
to say that he's a Nazi. He saidhe also believes that if people
who hate him could press abutton and kill him, they would.
And I think that's probably truebased on the posts here.
So a lot of people are on Redditare incensed about the, like,
salute arm motion that he did.There's a lot of explanations
about that. I don't know if it'strolling. I don't have an
(05:09):
opinion on it. The theresponses, though, from
Redditors are many, many, manylines of implied death threats,
implicit death threats in thisthread.
Whereas one Redditor who says,bro literally responded to
(05:32):
criticism over his SIGHIL with atweet that said, did not see
that coming, which is sorry.That's a funny joke. Alright. So
he spent too much time in smallonline spaces where he thought
it was cool and edgy. But in thereal world, we think Nazis
deserve a swift and just death.
Then someone else says, harddisagree about the swift swift
bit. Rest of it is spot on. Andso it goes on and on and on like
(05:54):
this. You know, death to Nazisis slogan I can get behind that
kind of comment. So anyway, theyalso say that support of AFD,
the alternative for Germany, isproof of Nazism.
Why? Because the Germangovernment suppressing popular
political parties says so. Soreading this thread, I get
really tired of the word Nazi.Anyway, I hope that you guys
(06:17):
didn't spend too much timereading this thing because my
brain just like leaked out of myears reading it. So I'm gonna
I'm going to pitch it to thegroup in general what your
thoughts are here and whether ornot we'll be able to say about
this kind of, like, bizarreextremism.
Although I think it's built onthe echo chamber that Reddit has
become.
Jim Lakely (06:36):
Yeah. I would agree with that. I mean, I I read
Reddit very rarely. I mean,basically, if I'm if I'm into a
TV show and it's got, like, somemystery boxes, I might use
Reddit to pop in there and hearalternative theories. It was
very fun to do that when, Gameof Thrones was going on and
before it turned into a completedisaster.
The same thing with Westworld.It was a lot of fun to read all
(06:57):
these theories and some of themcame true. Gosh, reading
political Reddit is awful. It'slike walking through a sewer. I
did scroll down that thread thatyou shared with us, Linea, and
it was, you know, I would liketo say shocking that people
would just be so, you know, soblithely wishing the death upon
(07:20):
somebody and calling him a Nazi.
Guess I usually like to sayYahtzee just so that we don't
get demonetized, especially thefirst fifteen minutes. But we're
demonetized anyway, it doesn'tmatter, but I guess. But you
know, just the idea that it'scool, I guess. Reddit does tend
to skew young, right? I get thesense from the wording of some
(07:43):
of the posts I read on Redditthat it's a younger person.
Certainly not Facebook, but itskews young, at least in the pop
culture ones, I suppose. Butjust to be Joseph casually,
wishing the death upon somebody,for what? And as I was thinking
about our topics today andtaking some notes, and I'll make
(08:03):
these points later in a littlebit more depth, I suppose. But,
you know, the indoctrination isso deep on the left and in our
media today that this is how youget these kinds of reactions.
The idea that Elon Musk did aNazi salute is absurd.
Everybody knows it was absurd.He was holding his chest and
(08:24):
waving to the you know, and andthrowing it to the oh, I just
did it. Throwing it to thecrowd. And, you know, and he had
done that a lot. You know?
So it's I guess maybe there's awillingness among people who
maybe don't think much forthemselves to just gobble up and
eat everything they're spoonfed, all the propaganda against
anything that is not, you know,leftist or with the mainstream
(08:48):
or legacy media agenda, and theyeat it up. And so what's the
irony here is that that is, youknow, having a society like that
is how you end up with theGermany of the 1930s. That's how
you whip an entire population upinto something that could turn
into actual Nazism, not this.So, you know, Elon Musk has a
(09:11):
sense of humor about it. He's apublic figure.
He's one of the most significantfigures of the twenty first
century. He go down in history.What he is doing just on
technology and space explorationis revolutionary. It has taken
our space program leaps andbounds beyond anything NASA
could have done if you gave themunlimited budget in another
(09:32):
thirty years. So, you know, hetakes it in stride.
I think it's pretty dangerous,but, that's the world we live
in.
S.T. Karnick (09:39):
I think I saw a thread a while back that showed
so many, prominent Democrats andother communists, I mean,
leftists doing that samegesture. And I think that that's
really critical because none ofthis depends at all on what you
actually did or what youactually said. It all depends on
(10:00):
who you are. And this is morelike a religious war than
anything else. What happens Ithink when people lose their
faith, and I don't want to besectarian at all here, this is
just an observation of reality.
But when people lose religiousfaith, when you have a large
(10:22):
group of people that have lostit or have adopted an
alternative, a stronglyalternative faith, the idea say
the difference between Catholicsand Protestants in sixteenth
hundreds and seventeen hundreds.When that happens, they
substitute a new faith. And whenwe, when our, the West lost the
(10:50):
plot with Christianity and wasno longer Christendom, It became
this secular thing, but thesecular thing itself became a
religion. It has its ownshibboleths and rituals and
demons and angels and so forth.And so it's what has happened
(11:14):
here is that the divide betweenthe two, it's not a divide
between two parties.
It's really a divide between twoworlds. And what we have here is
that there's no sense, at leaston the one side of any room for
compromise, any room for anyoneto say anything other than what
(11:35):
is permitted by that side. Andthat's that you remember
Puritans were like that. So Ithink that we are not in for a
quick compromise and agreementto disagree. I think we're in
for a long haul.
Linnea Lueken (11:57):
Yeah. It's definitely seems like the
rhetoric just keeps getting moreand more intense. I don't wanna
spend too much time on thisbecause we actually have a lot
to cover when it comes to Dogetoday. So one of the things that
I wanted to highlight wassomething that Doge found with
the US Treasury Department. Soanyway, moving on, who cares
what Reddit thinks?
But sometimes it is fun toglance into the abyss there. All
(12:19):
right. So this article at FoxNews explains that Doge has
found hundreds of millions inimproper payment requests
because the budget codes at thetreasury are broken, I guess, in
a new algorithm that they puttogether for it. So Fox reports,
the US Treasury Department tothe Department of Government
Efficiency discovered thathundreds of millions of dollars
in improper payment requestswere identified after going live
(12:41):
with its first automated paymentsystem last week. In fact, the
system found $334,000,000 inimproper payment requests that
were flagged because of missingbudget codes, invalid budget
codes, and budget codes withoutauthorization.
The news comes months after Dogelearned about an identification
code linking US Treasurypayments to a budget line item
(13:01):
that accounted for nearly$4,700,000,000,000 in payments
that was oftentimes left blank.So the treasury access symbol is
an identification code linking atreasury payment to a budget
line item. Doge wrote in a poston x in February in the federal
government, the TAS field wasoptional for $4,700,000,000,000
(13:23):
in payments and was often leftblank, making traceability
almost impossible. As ofSaturday, this is now a required
field, increasing insight intowhere money is actually going.
So I'm gonna go to Sam to start.
But this thing kind of seems tobe an inherent risk with
everything being automated andalgorithms getting more complex.
(13:45):
Doge is only a temporary agency.So how do we know that this kind
of issue, especially in theaccounting services in our in
our country or in ourgovernment, things that it would
be convenient if they were tostruggle to track where money
was going? How do we know thatthis kind of thing won't just
pop up as soon as Doge is goneagain and no longer watching?
S.T. Karnick (14:06):
I don't think it's Doge will be the dividing line
there. I think it will be thepartisan makeup of the next
administration. I do presumethat the Trump administration
will keep an eye on this. Theyhave good people in the cabinet
who can are certainly capable ofoverseeing this. What you have
(14:28):
here really is that their wayout, the Biden administration
did a variety of things tohamstring the next
administration.
That was of course sort of adishonorable thing, but it is
they had the legal authority todo it. Maybe, I don't know.
Maybe this was not, this was notlegal. But the the certainly
(14:51):
they're not when you're nottracking the the spending, we're
not tracking it and making surethat everything is is going into
its right bucket. You're notexecuting your job.
The president is not doing hisjob and that is something that
we had in spades for four years.And what Trump has aimed to do
(15:18):
obviously is first is first toidentify all these problems and
and to expose them. That is andand frankly, that's only
possible because of Elon Musk inthe sense that he bought Twitter
so that now these things can beexposed. You can't just cover it
up by having 50 deep statepeople say, well, it's not true
(15:43):
or it's a Russian trick here. Sowhat needs to happen is that
Congress really has to act onthese things.
They won't, they have no couragewhatsoever. And even if Congress
acts on it though, a presidentcan make mistakes. His treasury
(16:06):
department can say, oh, well, wejust accidentally didn't put
that code on things. And ofcourse that code is supposed to
go across all the departments,all the spending. So this is a
matter of belief in whether youfollow processes or you follow
goals.
(16:27):
So if your goal is to spend moremoney on various things, then
whatever gets you there is okay.And so that's why these codes
are not there. If you followprocesses, you're saying that
whatever the process says,that's what we'll follow and
whatever comes of it, that'sreality. And if we don't like
(16:49):
reality, then Congress and thepresident act. But this is I
think a huge difference betweenthe two mindsets that I
mentioned earlier.
That the difference betweenlooking at things as processes,
the difference of looking atgovernment as processes and
looking at as outcomes. Andwe'll see later in today's
(17:14):
discussion, I believe given thenature of some of the topics,
more of that. So I won't go intoany deeper examination at the
moment, but I do believe we willget there especially in the next
item.
Linnea Lueken (17:30):
Jim, what Yeah. I mean
Jim Lakely (17:33):
I'm sorry. Go ahead.
Linnea Lueken (17:34):
No. You go. You go.
Jim Lakely (17:35):
Well, mean, this is yet this is example number
4,000,228 of how if anybody inthe private sector conducted
themselves and their business inthe way the federal government
does, they'd be rotting in aprison right now and actually
deserve to be there. Is I mean,trillions of dollars of spending
(17:57):
going out the door with none ofit really traceable or
accountable. I mean, is basicbudgeting. It's as if the
federal government's never heardof QuickBooks or something. It's
like every organization like theHeartland Institute, for
instance, is a nonprofitorganization, has to code and
trace all the spending that wedo, and we're audited every
year.
And that's fine. And it's tomake sure that our donors know
(18:19):
that we are good stewards oftheir generous donations for our
shared mission of advancingfreedom in smaller governments
in The United States andincreasingly around the world.
But the federal governmentdoesn't have those kinds of
rules. Guess more to the point,there obviously are codes and
(18:40):
it's obvious that our governmentbureaucrats do not care to use
them. And it's also clear thatnobody in Congress, the fact
that Doge had to discover this,is mind boggling to me.
It's an indictment of the systemthe way it is, but especially
our congress that have oversightover such things. The fact that
this is the first time anybodylistening to this podcast or
(19:02):
alive has ever known that, yeah,spending just goes out the door.
And in fact, I read a storywhere I think the the treasury
nobody could recall a singlemoment where the treasury
department said, that spendinglooks fishy. We're not going to
send that money out. Or can wehave a little bit more
information on this, please?
Nope. All the money just goesright out the door, trillions
(19:24):
and trillions and trillions eachyear. And the idea, again, maybe
tying it back to death threatsagainst Elon Musk, which he knew
were coming, the disgustingbehavior of redditors calling
him names and saying 'yep, allNazis should die' and that
includes Elon Musk as well isabsurd. And again, Elon Musk
(19:49):
deserves our thanks for settingthis up and trying for the first
time ever in our lifetimes tohave a federal government that
actually operates sensibly, assensibly as a federal
bureaucracy can, and to haveeven a smidgen and start getting
just a smidgen of accountabilityfor our money and how it goes
(20:10):
out the door. And it's the usualsuspects who are complaining
about it, And those are thoseare people who benefit from the
idea that money just flows rightout of the government into their
pet projects or their or theirpet organizations with no
accountability.
Because if the American peoplestart to get a handle, they're
starting to get a handle, Ithink, on how much actual waste,
(20:32):
fraud and abuse there is in thefederal government, that's going
to change things in thiscountry. People are going to be
voting a lot differently in thiscountry. The scales are falling
from our eyes. We are now forthe first time ever really
starting to see and on a broadscale, like a lot of people I've
covered politics and policy whenI was a journalist and now I'm
(20:54):
in the policy realm at theHarlan Institute. So I've eaten
this stuff for breakfast for thelast forty years, thirty years.
But most normal Americans don'tdo that. They have lives to
live. They have to coach theirson's baseball league. They go
to church. They do all sorts ofthings.
They have jobs. They runbusinesses. And they really
don't have the time to dig intothis stuff the way we do. But
(21:17):
the Doge project is perfect forthis because it boils it down
much more simply to somethingjust as basic as the idea that
the Federal Treasury has asystem of spending set up so
that it is impossible to haveaccountability. And so to have
this stuff to start right now,well, better late than never.
(21:38):
And let's have more of it.
Linnea Lueken (21:40):
Yep. And I want to break in here for just a
second to say we have our thevery first in history American
Pope. So congrats us and it'sfrom our neck and he's from our
neck of the woods as well. Sothat's very exciting. So Okay.
But yeah, you're right. Andabout accountability though,
Jim, question remains and thisis something we've talked about
(22:02):
from the very beginning of thisadministration is, you know,
whether or not the stuff thatDoge finds is actually going to
be cut in any kind of permanentway. And so our next topic here
today is about exactly that isspending actually being cut.
There's a lot of proposals. Andin fact, Trump recently released
(22:23):
a budget proposal that is prettygood about, you know, listing
all the cuts that he wanted tosee present.
So from the New York Times, wehave President Trump on Friday
proposed slashing$163,000,000,000 in federal
spending next fiscal year, adrastic retrenchment in the role
and reach of government that ifenacted, would eliminate a vast
(22:44):
set of climate education, healthand housing programs, including
some that benefit the poor. Soamong I scrolled all over the
place in this New York Timesarticle. And so they had like
little mini articles attached tothis. I hate when news companies
do this. I wish they would justput it all into one article, but
whatever.
I understand they want to keepupdating the section still.
(23:05):
That's my rant for a moment. Soamong the things Trump proposed
slashing are the NationalEndowment for the Arts and the
National Endowment for theHumanities. We wanted to cut
funding to the Centers ofDisease Control and Prevention
by almost half, including theChronic Disease Center, which
was slated for eliminationentirely slash the State
(23:26):
Department's budget by$26,500,000,000. Section eight
is also on the table to be cut.
Budget cuts to Noah andeliminate the job core. So all
of this sounds like republicanwish list stuff. Right? Although
Republicans are now crying abouta lot of it as because it
becomes closer to being real.And, you know, we can go over a
(23:48):
couple of the things that Ilisted here and and how we'd
like to see them cut down.
I mean, I funny enough, I mightbe in the minority on the right
when I say this because a lot ofpeople are a little bit
utilitarian, but I actuallydon't think it's inappropriate
for government to give somemoney to the arts, particularly
if it's like a publicbeautification project related
thing. Like Trump's really biginto reinvigorating classical
(24:11):
architecture and stuff. I likethat. The main problem with
those endowments right now isthat they almost exclusively go
to projects that are ugly andsoul crushing. So, Sam, am I off
base here or am I understandingwhat this is kind of about?
S.T. Karnick (24:27):
No, I think you you got it just right. What this
is is the triumph of politics.And there is a real history of
uni party here and it's reallyrather sad the way the
Republicans have continuallygiven in. When you look at, for
example, the Corporation forPublic Broadcasting, they've
(24:49):
been talking about defundingthat for literally decades and
nothing has happened. Where werethey in 2017 and 2018?
They had the whole Congress,they had the presidency, and you
can keep blaming the filibusterall you want, but that's in the
power, it's in control of theSenate, whoever has the majority
(25:13):
in the Senate can change that.And they could have and they
didn't. There are so many thingsthat the Republicans have
already said, have long saidthat, we want to get rid of
this, we want to get rid ofthat. We want to cut back on
this, we want to cut back onthat, but they don't do it. And
that is simply, I think it'srunning to the right and
(25:36):
governing to the left.
And their belief somehow is thatthis will endear them to the
public. The problem that you runinto is if you are doing the
same thing as the opposition,which is to say, the government
is going to give you things thatwill make your life better. And
(25:58):
the opposition says we will giveyou a lot more things that will
make your life better. Who doyou think is going to win on
that? And so as you saw, ourviewers take a look at that New
York Times article, which Idon't necessarily recommend, but
if you look at it, see thepremise in there, in all the
(26:20):
critique that, and it's animplied and kind of obvious
critique throughout the article,supposed to be a news article,
but you know how that works.
But the thing is, see, the clearcritique there is that when you
cut something in the government,you are getting rid of something
that is good and positive anddoing good work. Meaning that
(26:42):
whenever the government doesany, whenever they spend any
money, that's the key, becausethey're talking about spending,
not actual behavior. So when yousay, well, when you don't spend
on this, you lose all of that.Well, the thing is that first of
all, we know that we don't evenknow what we're spending on. We
don't know what, so what are wegetting?
(27:05):
When Doge first started and theyidentified all the stuff that
was going on in AID, which issupposed to be for international
development and was in factsimply more of a slush fund than
anything else for leftistsoperating within The United
States. When you have a systemlike that, it's obviously not
(27:25):
there in any way to do good fornormal people. What it's there
to do is accumulate power in thecenters of power. And so what we
have here is a real badassumption that the things
government does is good. Youremember the economist John
Maynard Keynes had his idea ofthe multiplier, that if you
(27:49):
spend X amount of money, iffederal government or the
national government spends Xamount of money, it will result
in a X plus or one point X pluseconomy, meaning you'll get more
by spending, by governmentspending than you would just by
spending it in the privatesector.
(28:11):
That is simply untrue. But thatpremise is what has dominated
all of Western civilization forthe past one hundred and twenty
five years. So this is not new.What is new is that the
President of The United Statesdoesn't buy it. And he's got an
(28:32):
administration that is given thenumbers, is finding the evidence
and saying, look, this is how itreally works folks.
Now this is an educationalprocess in addition to a sort of
a governmental process. It's aneducational process in the sense
(28:55):
of finding these things out andtelling the public. But when it
comes down to it, it's all inthe hands of Congress. They can
make changes and they don't. Andthen the New York Times and
everybody who follows in theirwake, like the little ducklings
all says, well, but that's notlegal.
(29:15):
The president can't do that orwhatever it is. Of course,
everything's legal. Everything'sillegal. Whatever you want to
do, you can find a way, you canfind it in our statutes to do
it. Sometimes you may have to goback to the eighteenth century
to find the statute, but it'sthere and it's still in effect.
(29:37):
And a court will tell you that,well, it's not in effect. Why?
Because I say so. But theproblem we have here is that
there's an educational processthat absolutely has to occur and
Trump and Musk have initiatedthat process. Now it's going to
be up to the public to holdthose lawmakers' feet to the
(29:57):
fire.
I'll use that cliched metaphor,but it is a good one.
Linnea Lueken (30:05):
Yeah. And I wanna point out to that tweet that I
sent you guys earlier aboutRepublicans keep pushing these
cuts off. And I know ThomasMass, he is pulling his hair out
over it. Anyway, they justcancel the vote again on making
these cuts permanent. This isstuff that Republicans have
claimed to want for decades.
And now that it's right in frontof them, they just fold like a
(30:27):
cheap suit. It's it's agonizingto watch. They've got, you know,
the New York Times, as AndrewKlavan calls it the former
newspaper explains aboutNebraska representative Don
Bacon. He is called a centristby the New York Times, which is
a nice word that they give toeverybody who's a squish. He
(30:50):
says he won't vote on anythingthat threatens to cut Medicaid.
Well, the thing is, no one'ssaying that Medicaid needs to go
away. They are saying thatthere's a lot of waste and that
the waste needs to be carvedoff. So here's what The New York
Times says. While the HouseEnergy and Commerce Committee is
looking for nearly900,000,000,000 in reductions
over ten years, largely fromhealth care, Bacon says taking
(31:12):
any more than 500,000,000,000from Medicaid is too much. And a
lot of people pointed out thatit's kind of a silly thing to
say because if you discover thatthere's, you know,
$550,000,000,000 of waste, thenwhy would you just leave that
50,000,000,000 extra in therejust because you feel like it
would be a little bit tooaggressive of a pruning
(31:33):
otherwise?
It's it's it's nonsense, Jim.
Jim Lakely (31:37):
Yeah. You're really you're really triggering me now.
Like, having to sit and wait andhear all of that and then get to
speak, I don't know if I'm gonnamake it. Well, first of all,
from way back when you saidyou're cool with spending
federal money for things likenational artistic spending,
National Endowment for the Artsand all that stuff, look, before
there was a National Endowmentfor the Arts, let's call them
(31:59):
not robber barons, but verywealthy industrialists actually
did that kind of spending. I'mfrom Western Pennsylvania.
Every other great public thinglike a library, for instance, or
museums is named after AndrewCarnegie, and he used his
fortune to better society. Andyou cannot tell me that the
stuff that the industrialists ofthe turn of the twentieth
(32:22):
century spent to beautify and tolift up the spirits and the
knowledge of the people, youcannot tell me that that is
worse than what has been fundedby our tax money in all over
this country. I get it, but itcan be done and has been done
and done a lot better by theprivate sector than it has been
(32:44):
by the public. Second of all,before I joined the Heart
Institute, long before I joinedthe Heart Institute, I was a
reporter for The WashingtonTimes, as many listeners and
watchers of this podcast know.My first beat when I covered
Capitol Hill was the HouseBudget Committee, and it was so
boring.
It was awful. And I had to go tothose hearings. Sean Spicer, by
(33:07):
the way, the Sean Spicer was thespokesperson for the Republican
majority in the in the budgetcommittee as a matter of fact.
So he and I have known him for along time. But it was boring as
hell.
But it was necessary, and itthat was back in the days when
we did did things in properorder. And so, hey, New York
Times and all of you, Democratsand Liberals complaining about
(33:29):
this and even you centristRepublicans, if you don't like
the Trump budget cuts, there'ssomething you can do, and that's
called your job on thecongressional budget and the
appropriations committees. Butthat is not how we've run our
government for, nay, almost, Idon't know, at least twenty five
years now. At least since maybeI think the last time we really
(33:49):
did that was late in Gingrich'sspeakership. So we're talking
late nineties here.
But, you know, we have now youguys, and by you guys, I mean
really the left and the mediahave never caused a fuss about
this, but you gave the executivebranch broad discretion over
spending. And I'm old enough toremember when the Biden
administration threatened towithhold and did withhold
(34:09):
federal education money from anystate or school that, refused to
allow boys to, play on the girlsteam and change in their locker
rooms. So them's the rules now,and for once, they're being
applied to Democrats and theirspending priorities. So you're
just gonna have to eat this one.I'm sorry.
And but they're mad becausethanks to Trump and Doge and all
(34:31):
of this stuff kinda happening atonce flooding the zone, their
entire agenda, not entireagenda, but a lot of it is being
defunded. And Trump is the onlypresident in our lifetime who
does not care about the whiningand the of the unusual sob
stories in the media, in thepress. Oh, oh, Elmo, you're
killing Elmo and you're takingyou're taking these vital
(34:53):
services away from people thathe doesn't care about it. I
don't care about it. Most votersdon't care about it.
The world has changed. You know,we spent in 2019 before the
pandemic, the federal governmentspent $4,450,000,000,000 which
is amazing. It's an outrage.There's no need to spend
(35:15):
$4,450,000,000,000 as a federalgovernment. Yet last year, we
spent almost $7,000,000,000,000as a federal government.
So you're telling me that thereis no place that you can cut
that every single cut is that,oh my gosh, it's terrible.
People are going to starve. Youwe don't believe it anymore,
guys. We don't believe it. NPR,we don't believe it.
(35:36):
New York Times and we don'tbelieve it centrist Republicans.
And the idea, as you mentioned,Linea, that, you know, oh, you
can't touch Medicaid. Well, youknow, like it or not, Medicaid
does need to be cut and youstart with the waste. And
there's a dividing line here.There are regular people who
(35:56):
understand that it is a virtue,it's a good thing, objectively a
good thing to have finally thefederal government going through
especially expensive run onautopilot entitlements and
rooting out the fraud.
Our healthcare system in thiscountry is already way too,
thanks to Obamacare, is alreadyway too expensive. You know, if
(36:17):
you still have privateinsurance, you know this. If
you've run a small business, youknow this. The cost of health
insurance has gone through theroof. If you are, you know, as a
consumer of health care, yourbenefits have gone down while
your premiums have gone up.
It's been a complete disaster.And the expansion of Medicaid
through Obamacare is a big partof this. So, know, like it or
not, that has to be touched. Aredown, as Elon Musk has said many
(36:42):
times, we are going over thefiscal cliff. Again, dollars
4,500,000,000,000.0 we spent in2019 and then we ramped all of
it up because of the pandemicand now we're spending
$7,000,000,000,000 a year.
It is not justified remotely tohave a federal government
spending that much money, so weneed to cut it back. Figure,
(37:04):
Lynne, I think you gave was thegoal was to cut was it just in
Medicaid, but it was to cut$900,000,000,000 over ten years.
Linnea Lueken (37:13):
Yeah, over ten years. That's what the House
Energy and Commerce Committee islooking at largely from health
care. So, yeah, it's not allcoming from the same place, but
that's the goal.
Jim Lakely (37:24):
That is not nearly enough. That is that is what is
that? A 1.6% a year? I mean,come on. That is a joke.
So, yeah, this we're not buyingthis anymore. You know, this
needs to be cut. These sobstories, they can write them all
they want even if they writethem in ways that are very
annoying to you, Linea, asyou're trying to scroll. But the
(37:46):
real people, the Americanpeople, and hopefully a bare
majority of Republicans who aregetting exactly what they've
screamed for for more than twodecades are gonna have to do the
right thing. And and, this ideathat Medicaid can't be touched
and other entitlements I mean,we started this podcast talking
about how the TreasuryDepartment's on autopilot.
(38:08):
That's why nobody's evenbothered to look for the waste,
fraud and abuse. We know it'srampant. We know that it can and
should be cut. I am not gonnasit here and cry for crooks,
thieves, and scam artists whoare stealing our money. Good
luck with that.
That's great sale, democrats.Keep going.
Linnea Lueken (38:25):
Yeah. Right. And I think, Sam, I think you said
you had something to pitch inhere a bit as
S.T. Karnick (38:31):
well. Yes, I think Medicaid is a great example of
the problem because I've spentthe last two years writing about
the fact it's not a not aquestion, it's not an opinion,
it's a fact that the amount ofspending we're doing is really
hurting the economy and thatcreates more spending. Because
(38:56):
as you reduce economic output,you create more debt, which you
have to pay for. And you alsocreate more supposed need.
Because I say supposed becausethese are matters of discretion
really that if you don't have tohave Medicaid at all, of course,
(39:19):
or you could have it be20,000,000,000, 20 trillion a
year, whatever you wanna spendon it, could do that.
So the problem that we have hereis that if we continue to spend
the kind of money that we'vebeen spending every year by the
federal government, it willcollapse. And Medicaid is a good
(39:42):
example of that. There is somuch waste in there and I don't
think we even have any idea ofhow bad the waste is at this
point. Everything again, whatprior administrations did was
cover things up and make thingsopaque so that no one could know
what's real and what's not,what's actually helping people
(40:07):
in need and what isn't. SoMedicaid, the idea behind it is
to help people in need.
But then you expand it. We hadthe Medicaid expansion of
Obamacare. And so you expand itto people who are able-bodied
and above the poverty level.When that happens, states have
(40:29):
since then, states have had thathave expanded Medicaid, which is
like 38 of them. Almost all thestates have done it well and
that they did that because theywere lured by federal money to
do it.
So when you expand Medicaid inthat way, what you are doing is
expanding the amount of thenumber of people and the amount
(40:51):
of so called need that you aregoing to address. But then when
you expand it, you don't expandthe money because it's just not
possible then, or you don'texpand the money at the same
rate, then what happens is thepeople who are neediest are
going to suffer because theyused to have this size of money,
(41:18):
this this amount of money to toaddress their their problems and
their needs. And now they havethis size of money because this
part is going to other people.So Medicaid is a perfect example
of what's going on with thefederal government, because when
you run up from4,000,000,000,000 a year to
(41:39):
7,000,000,000,000 a year, $8.09,when you create that kind of
spending, what happens is youcannot get that through taxes.
It's not possible.
So what has happened is we werespending about 19%, twenty % of
(41:59):
GDP, and we're getting 17.4 to17.5 somewhere in the 17s in
federal tax money and taxrevenues. So you're two to 3% of
GDP every year you're borrowing.Well, raise that to 25% during
the Biden administration. Youare now borrowing seven to eight
(42:23):
percent a year of GDP just tofund the federal government. Now
that cannot continueindefinitely because you have to
pay that money back.
And that's what happens. Thereare things that treasury bonds
and all these issues that arise.But the bottom line is that if
your government is not reliableto pay that money back, then
(42:46):
your borrowing costs increaseextremely radically. So what
happens is at a certain point,you cannot borrow any more
money. You're locked in to spendit.
So what do you do? At somepoint, you have to cut. And what
happens is that you're eithergoing to cut voluntarily, which
(43:10):
is what Trump is trying to do.He's trying to say, we will cut
a measly, what is it,1,900,000,000.0 a year. That's
measly, quite frankly, given theamount that we spend Medicaid.
So we're going to cut that. Andthat's the amount of waste that
we believe we have. I believethat the waste is probably way,
(43:34):
way more than that, much biggerthan that. But Okay, let's.
Jim Lakely (43:39):
Mean, this is why the entire departments, you
know, that Doge is thinkingabout and Trump is thinking
about just wiping out entiredepartments and he's being
fought in the courts for thisbecause that's what needs to be
done. Like I said,$90,000,000,000 a year sounds
like a lot until you realize wespend $7,000,000,000,000 a year.
That's literally, not literally,but it's almost literally
nothing.
S.T. Karnick (43:58):
That is a tiny fraction, yes.
Jim Lakely (44:00):
Yeah, it would be advantageous. There's been a
little bit of scuttle aboutthis, Sam. I know you've heard
it too. I don't believe it'llever happen. But getting to a
zero budgeting process where youstart over the year at zero.
Zero based budget. Where youdon't just go in there and say,
well, we spent 4,000,000,000,000last year, so we're going to
spend $4,300,000,000,000 thisyear. Everything in the federal
(44:23):
government is on autopilot.There really needs to be a
serious effort to make each ofthese departments justify every
dollar they spend. They start atzero every year and they see
what their real priorities are.
Because we are spending money onthings that are not remotely a
priority to anyone, any of theAmerican people. They don't even
(44:47):
know what the money is beingspent on. That I think would do
so much more to get spendingunder control. And I think that
might be what they're doing inArgentina. Whatever they're
doing in Argentina, need to dohere.
I'll just say that as a goodbroad general statement that I
think will be generally true.
S.T. Karnick (45:03):
I fully agree. So the point here is that at a
certain point you simply can'tfund Medicaid to the level that
you have decided you're going tofund it. And so the same is
going to happen with the otherso called entitlements, in
particular food stamps, forexample, we spend a whole lot of
money on that. Now, these areall things that would be nice to
(45:27):
have, but you cannot spend thismuch on them. Now, so what's
going to happen is Trump istrying to make alterations that
will dial back spending growth,just dial back spending growth a
little bit.
(45:48):
This is just like the Reaganyears. So we're going to dial
back spending growth a littlebit and then everyone refers to
that as enormous gargantuan,terrifying evil spending cuts,
when in fact they're obviouslyjust cuts of growth. But on top
of that, when you what we calldiscretionary spending, which is
(46:08):
a very tiny, tiny slice of thefederal pie. And then you have
military spending, which isquote unquote necessary and
always necessary to have more.And then you have on top of that
though, you have obviously allthe entitlement spending, which
is considered non discretionary.
Why do I use the termconsidered? Because, well, the
(46:29):
law says that we're going togive this much to social
security beneficiaries, we'regoing to give this much to
Medicaid beneficiaries, we'regoing to give this much to food
stamps. And as Jim said, this isall on autopilot, just like
everything else, but it is achoice. One of the things I
(46:50):
wrote a few months ago was thatall spending is discretionary.
When they tell you that this isnon discretionary spending and
this is discretionary, no, it'sall discretionary.
You can change the laws and youcan make things as they should
be. We don't choose to do that.But what Trump is trying to do
is slow down the growth so thateconomic growth can catch up.
(47:14):
What you do is if you're notspending as much as you were
planning to spend, let's put itthat way, or if you're slowing
the growth, which is a way ofsaying the same thing, then
you're going to get your 17% ofGDP and you're not going to have
to borrow as much. That's whathe's trying to do.
(47:36):
You hit the wall later than youwould otherwise. You're going to
hit the wall because ofdemographics, as population
ages, becomes more expensive. Sowith all that said, what Trump
is doing is averting a collapsebecause if you don't do this,
you will get spending cuts likeyou never imagined and they will
(47:58):
be involuntary. You will getwhere the federal government
just says, oh, here's what wehave this year. We've got
6,000,000,000,000 and that's it.
What do we do? Sure.
Jim Lakely (48:13):
It's pretty incredible to
Linnea Lueken (48:14):
see the kind of modest moderate response or the
kind of modest moderate cutsthat have been proposed so far
compared to the screeching aboutthose modest cuts has been
really incredible. And so theHeartland Institute and
Rasmussen got together andconducted a poll of potential
(48:34):
voters. I'm gonna read from thepress release at heartland.org.
A new poll by the Glenn C.Haskins Emerging Issues Center
at the Heartland Institute andRasmussen reports found that a
strong majority of Democraticand liberal voters held radical
views about Elon Musk, a senioradviser to president Trump and
founder of the administration'snew department of government
(48:56):
efficiency.
The survey of a 67 likely voterscompleted 05/04/2025 found that
71%, seriously, guys, 71% ofDemocrat voters would strongly
or somewhat support ahypothetical law that would
imprison Elon Musk for his rolein Doge. We're just gonna let
(49:19):
that sink in. Right? Furthersupport for the author
authoritarian measure toimprison Musk was highest among
self identified liberal voters.80% of liberal respondents said
that they would strongly orsomewhat support the proposal.
Equally disconcerting 68% oflikely democrat voters support a
(49:42):
hypothetical law that would banElon from serving in government
compared to 29% of selfidentified Republicans, which is
also pretty high. Boy, I mean,responses to this. The
imprisonment thing is soextreme. I'm actually, you know,
I knew that the Democrats werecrazy, but like that seems very
extreme. And it wasn't a hugesample size, but it's still
(50:04):
pretty reflective of what wehave going on here.
And after looking at the Redditportion at the beginning, the
way that The New York Times iscovering these cuts in this
very, like, extremist language,it actually maybe isn't all that
surprising.
Jim Lakely (50:20):
Yeah. I mean, this the sample size, I mean, this is
a scientific poll, so it's arepresentative sample size and
it's accurate as all the otherpolls that that Rasmussen does
and everybody else does. Theydon't poll 40,000 people. They
poll, you know, a a much smallersubset to the so they they can
get results. But I look at thisas, Schrodinger's poll about
Democrats and so called Liberalsbecause it's both shocking and
(50:43):
not shocking at the same time.
And it's not shocking to mebecause of the polling that
Heartland has done withharassment over the last several
years. Back in late twentytwenty, we conducted a poll that
found that one quarter ofAmericans believe that people
who violate theoreticaloffensive speech could be put in
jail. We did another poll atRasmus, and they love doing
(51:05):
polls with us because we come upwith some fantastic questions
and some topics to explore. InJanuary 2022, we released a poll
that found a lot of shockingthings. Found that 78% of
Democrats support Biden'svaccine mandate for businesses
with more than 100 employees.
78% of Democrats supported that.55% of Democrats supported
(51:26):
finding Americans who don't getthe jab. Forty eight percent of
Democrats back in 2022, '40 '8percent said government should
fine or imprison Americans whopublicly just question the
efficacy of COVID vaccines. Bythe way, for which they would
have been 100% correct, as wewere on this poll as, on this
show as well. Back then, just acouple years ago, 47% of
(51:48):
Democrats supported thegovernment tracking the
unvaccinated to ensure that theyare quarantined or socially
distanced.
So taking their freedoms awaythere, not a problem for about
half Democrats. And then more amore than a quarter of Democrats
in that poll in 2022 that we ranwith Rasmussen said that parents
should lose custody of theirkids if they didn't give them
the jab. Now that poll there andthis new poll that we did today
(52:12):
or releasing this week aboutElon Musk reveals a deep fascist
and totalitarian streak on theleft and even obviously here
among the mainstream DemocraticParty. And so, you know, the
results this has gone on for awhile. This is why it's both
shocking to one's conscious, butnot surprising considering the
(52:33):
way politics, frankly, have beenhave been done in this country
on the left and with theDemocratic Party over the last
several years, frankly, sincearound that day that Donald
Trump came down the goldenescalator.
Suddenly, free speech was outthe window. That's one of the
reasons they hate Elon Musk.He's actually upholding the
principles that he held when hewas a member of in good standing
(52:56):
of the Democratic Party and of,you know, liberals or people on
the left. He certainly wouldnever have considered describing
himself as a conservative, maybea libertarian, but certainly not
a conservative and not a MAGAguy just a few years ago. So,
you know, the results of thispoll, reveals that it seems that
(53:19):
membership in a certain partyand if you are philosophically
on the left side of thespectrum, that you are
susceptible to propaganda andlies about COVID, about Trump,
about Elon Musk.
So look, if they want to putthese people want to put it's
(53:42):
either they're they're justbrainwashed with propaganda or
lies or they know very well whatElon Musk's Doge project is
doing. And it is exposing thescam that is the broad scam, the
spending scam, which we coveredearlier in this podcast, that
many institutions on the leftare basically stealing your
(54:03):
money to enrich themselves andto push an agenda which is not
shared by the majority of theAmerican people. Doge is
exposing this. So they want ElonMusk in jail so they don't go to
jail. We talk about it on theClimate Realism Show, how all of
these instant pop up NGOs,nonprofits raking in hundreds of
(54:25):
millions of dollars, sometimes$2,000,000,000 with no
qualifications, with noaccountability.
You know, that's a very, verylucrative gravy train. So
they're either I think it'sboth. Again, it's kind of
Schrodinger's poll results inthis regard. You know, it is
both. They know that they are inon the scam and it's going to
end and they could be in bigtrouble.
(54:47):
And the other people are justfed this propaganda about Elon
Musk. It is like 1984. It's twominutes of hate. Elon Musk is
the current target. It'll besomebody else next time.
It's sad that this is what ithas become, thanks to endless
propaganda, endless hate. Andthat's being, you know, that's
(55:10):
being directed against peoplethat are just doing things that
seem to make so much sense iflooked at objectively.
Linnea Lueken (55:18):
Well, absolutely. The it's the amount the amount
of vitriol in the way thatthey've been spun up over the
years towards Trump and now ElonMusk is kind of like taking part
of the flag, which isinteresting to see. He's got an
amount of hatred towards him.That's, you know, I think Chris
(55:40):
Talgo is releasing a op ed sooncalled Elon Musk derangement
syndrome with that in the titleanyway, and it's totally true.
It's the exact same level ofderanged hatred that people have
for Trump that they now have forElon Musk.
Even though what's he done? He'smade some memes. He's joked
(56:03):
around. He's made fun of theleft. Good.
He's he's involved in Doge,which is slashing up the gravy
train that a lot of, like, mainmain line, you know, like the
average Democrat floating aroundwatching MSNBC doesn't probably
fully understand just how muchof this is this is the the
(56:26):
spending in this country is justpure graft and and laundering
and it's all just so corrupt.But if there was a Republican
administration in and theydiscovered that the Republicans
were misusing funds, they wouldalmost certainly be all over
that. They they just don't careotherwise. It's I don't know. I
(56:49):
think there's a ton of peoplewho are just led by their nose
by the media.
And especially when it comes toparticularly Trump, particularly
Elon. Whatever the media says,they're just gonna go along with
it. They're not gonna do anyresearch themselves. They're not
gonna take a moment to thinkabout it. They're just gonna
say, Elon bad and move on fromthere.
(57:12):
And that's that's part of whatfeeds into people being so
willing to throw him in jail forbeing involved with Doge. What
has he done with Doge thatdeserves imprisonment? I don't
know. Like, it's bizarre. It'sit's the most strange.
I don't know. It's like yousaid, it is shocking to the
conscience, but it's notsurprising all that much.
(57:34):
Alright, Sam.
S.T. Karnick (57:36):
Yeah, thanks. I agree with everything you and
Jim said. It's that there's anattempt to isolate an individual
to make it easy for people tounderstand what the problem is.
And it's that Trump just doesn'tcare about you and that didn't
work. And they tried to imprisonhim.
(57:59):
You know the know the routine.They've turned to Elon Musk
because it didn't work on Trump.If it works on Musk, then
they'll go after the nextperson. That's how they operate,
just isolating a person to bethe symbolic representation of
evil. And of course the Naziterm is then deployed to signal
(58:25):
to us that this is the personwhom we're going after.
Jim Lakely (58:32):
Well well And remember one and remember one
more thing that that Elon Muskdid that really, I think, got
all this going is he boughtTwitter because he believed in
free speech, and he thought theonly way to stop the Biden
regime from coordinating withsocial media giants to censor
the speech of people who opposedthe regime was to spend
(58:53):
$44,000,000,000 and privatizeTwitter and fire all the people
who were exchanging emails andSlack messages and what and what
have you with the federalgovernment to conspire on how to
keep people from saying whatthey thought, especially when
often what they thought was thetruth, whether it came to the
Hunter Biden laptop, whether itcame to the efficacy of
(59:14):
vaccines, whether it came to thewisdom of broad lockdowns,
whether it came to the hypocrisyof the, you know, federal and
government officials allowingmass protests in the summer of
love for George Floyd, butkeeping churches closed. You
weren't allowed to say anythingin criticism of that without
having your, you know, your yoursocial media accounts shut down,
(59:37):
your mouth shut, your voicesilenced, and sometimes even
having your livelihood,threatened by this.
That is the unforgivable sin tothe Democratic Party of the left
that that Elon Musk hadcommitted because just two years
ago, he was their hero. He he hehe started Tesla. Everybody
(59:57):
needs to get an electric car.He's saving the planet. And now
it's all gone because he stoodup for the principle of free
speech.
And on the left, free speech isnot only not a virtue, it's a
crime. And that's what they wantto put him in jail for.
Linnea Lueken (01:00:14):
Absolutely. Well, I think we summed it up about as
best as we can. Everybody who'swatching, please go to
heartland.org to look at thestudy or the poll yourselves.
Boy, I think this is the firsttime ever. We're just about
finishing on time for in thetank.
So. All right, everybody. Ithink that's all the time we
have. And that is also all ofthe content that we have today.
(01:00:37):
Thank you guys so much fortuning in.
We are live every single week onThursdays at noon central on
Rumble, Twitter, YouTube,Facebook, wherever you can find
streaming like that. For audiolisteners, please rate us well
on whatever service you areusing and leave a review. Thank
you so much to all of our usualpanelists. Jim, what do you have
to to plug for us today?
Jim Lakely (01:00:59):
You can follow me on the free speech x at Jay
Lakeley. You can follow theHeartland Institute at Heartland
Inst on X and yes, visitheartland.org to check out the
results of this poll and we havepreview. We have more poll
results coming out next week.
Linnea Lueken (01:01:15):
Awesome. Sam?
S.T. Karnick (01:01:17):
Yeah. Thank you. Follow me at, Twitter at or X at
SDcarnac and SubstackSDcarnac.substack.com.
Linnea Lueken (01:01:27):
Thank you very much. Well, that's all we have
everyone. So thank you all somuch for watching. We will see
you again next week.
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