Thursday, Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson criticized the taxation and so-called woke elements of the Biden administration’s proposed $2 trillion infrastructure plan, of which he said only 5% goes to roads and bridges, and the rest he said goes to “social engineering.”
The Fox News Channel host likened the proposal to the looting during last year’s Black Lives Matter civil unrest.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: If you dutifully watched Joe Biden sputter through his announcement of the administration’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan yesterday, you may have been left with some questions. First, and most obviously, is this really about infrastructure? Bridges, roads, airports, things we can actually use? Or is it yet another weird climate scheme/power grab/race-based redistribution plan? What exactly is this?
And by the way, $2 trillion sounds like a lot for anything. Wouldn’t that kind of spending cause hyperinflation? If you print money like it’s not worth anything, doesn’t the value of that money decline?
Normal people may have had questions like those, but thankfully The New York Times was on the scene to quell all doubt. The New York Times approached Joe Biden’s plan with the enthusiasm of “Izvestia” applauding yet another record Soviet potato harvest, quote: “Biden plans stresses jobs, roads and growth.” Read one of The New York Times four separate front-page headlines this morning.
“$2 trillion for a once in a generation fix of infrastructure” run another headline. That’s real.
Ron Klain, the tech lobbyists turned White House chief of staff was so grateful for the backup from The Times that he tweeted out the front page this morning, “America, let’s go win the future,” Klain wrote. Let’s go with the future, America.
What does that future look like? Well, let’s be clear from the outset that this plan, whatever its merits, will not make your commute easier. Only about 5% of that $2 trillion will actually go to roads and bridges.
So 5% on infrastructure, 95% on social engineering. That’s what Joe Biden calls a once-in-a-lifetime infrastructure bill. And he is right about part of it, it is once in a lifetime if this bill passes. The next generation will live in a very different country.
Now, before we tell you what’s in the bill, one word about who is going to pay for it, in fact, we only need one word and the word is “you.”
Taxes are going up dramatically, and they didn’t have to, actually. Tax revenues no longer fund the ambitions of our political class. Have you noticed? The Federal Reserve funds them. When politicians want something, they just print the money. It’s called Modern Monetary Theory. They’ve been doing this for years and it’s accelerating.
So there’s no actual reason to raise taxes anymore for anything. But Joe Biden wants to raise taxes to punish you, and he plans to do that.
The administration is calling for a tax increase of about $3 trillion over 10 years. That includes taxes on individual income and investments, as well as on corporations. This would make the first major tax hike in 28 years, but it’s actually a much bigger tax hike than anything we saw under the Clinton administration.
In 1993, taxes amounted to only about half a percent of GDP. This plan would come to roughly three times that, about $300 billion a year, that’s 1.3% of GDP. So you’d have to go all the way back to 1968 to find a bigger tax increase. It’s a big deal.
You have any questions? No questions allowed. Joe Biden doesn’t want to answer questions. He doesn’t have to because it’s an emergency. In emergencies, you do what you’re told.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: What I’m proposing is a one-time capital investment of roughly $2 trillion in America’s future, spread largely over eight years.
Put simply, these are investments we have to make. We can afford to make them or put another way, we can’t afford not to.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: All this can be yours, America, for just $2 trillion. We can’t afford not to spend $2 trillion, says Joe Biden like the used car salesman he is at heart. Biden knows he’s not going to be paying a dime. People like Joe Biden avoid taxes.
Joe Biden avoids taxes. In fact, in 2017 and 2018, Joe Biden and his wife dodged payroll taxes in the more than $13 million that they got through speaking fees and book royalties. How’d they do that? Did you do that? You probably didn’t. They did.
The Wall Street Journal reported the Bidens, quote, “Classified the income as S-corporation profits rather than taxable wages.” Are you surprised? Oh, come on. Corporations are going to pay for it. Yes, if only we’d support it, if that were the case.
But they’re not. Corporate interest put Joe Biden in the White House. They design his policy, they sign off on every part of it, just as the credit card companies in Delaware once did, and so they will be fine. Corporations shelter most of their money from taxes, a lot of ways, and what it costs, they pass the cost along to the workers in the form of lower wages and to customers in the form of higher prices.
That’s not a secret, economists know that and so does Joe Biden.
So none of this is going to hurt Amazon. That’s why Amazon is for it. But Joe Biden isn’t interested in getting into the details like the math. He’d like, you know, this bill is going to turn America into a scene from “The Jetsons.”
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: Imagine what we can do, what’s within our reach when we modernize those highways. You and your family to travel coast to coast without a single tank of gas onboard a high-speed train, and connect high-speed affordable, reliable internet wherever you live.
Imagine knowing that you’re handing your children and grandchildren, a country that will lead the world in producing clean energy technology and we will need to address one of the biggest threats of our time. That’s what we’ll do.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Flying cars? Teleport machines? Sadly not. But we are going to modernize those highways. And honestly, a lot of them could use it. But what is modernizing highways mean exactly? What are the details in that?
Well, The Washington Post gave us some idea. According to the paper, an activist called Amy Stelly has been demanding the removal, not the building, the removal of a highway in New Orleans that cuts through her neighborhood. She thinks that highway called the Claiborne’s Expressway is bad. It’s an eyesore and it contributes to pollution in her neighborhood.
And for years, she has demanded that local leaders get rid of it, but they’ve refused. People use it. It’s an important stretch of road in New Orleans.
But now the White House in Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan have decided that highway is an example of, quote, “historic inequity.” And that can be solved by billions in new spending. In other words, it is a racist highway, so you’ve got to pay to tear it down.
Amy Stelly was enthused by this. “I’m floored,” she said, “I’m thrilled to hear President Biden call out the Claiborne Expressway as a racist highway.” Yes, and not just racist, sexist and transphobic, too. That highway is a Jim Crow dog whistle for white supremacy, not to mention QAnon insurrectionists. We’ve got to tear it down.
Expect a lot more highways to meet that fate. People who believe highways are racists are going to get tens of billions of dollars as part of this plan as long as they are what the Biden administration calls underserved communities.
The entirety of this infrastructure plan looks more like a mash-up of intersectional theory from Wesleyan and some kind of South African style spoil system. We saw a taste of that earlier this year when Joe Biden sent billions of dollars to African-American farmers in this country purely because of how they look.
Now, that’s illegal. It’s immoral. It’s completely divisive, but it’s just the beginning.
In his infrastructure bill, Joe Biden calls pretty strongly for sending $25 billion to Historically Black Universities, and other, quote, “minority-serving institutions for research and development.”
You may think it’s a good idea, we shouldn’t have to explain why, but it’s on infrastructure. He’d also like to eliminate, quote, “exclusionary zoning” and quote, “needless barriers to producing affordable housing.” So that means that your neighborhood may have to make way for multifamily dwellings.
You don’t want multifamily dwellings in your neighborhood? It doesn’t matter, because it is equity. Shut up, racist. And there’s more where that came from.
Joe Biden would like to spend $100 billion for workplace development to quote “reduce racial inequities in job training and hiring.” Huh? That doesn’t sound like eliminating racial discrimination in hiring. It sounds like mandating it, and it is.
But wait a second, you may be wondering, what does hiring people with certain skin colors have to do with infrastructure? Sorry to keep bringing us back to the point, but the point was supposed to be infrastructure. It is not really, and Democrats aren’t really pretending it is anymore.
They’re in charge, and this is their chance to take total control of the economy, and they’re going to use it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. JAMAAL BROWN (D-NY): We understand to save our democracy and to evolve into the multiracial democracy that we are, we have to take a holistic approach.
So we spoke about infrastructure in alignment with a Green New Deal, ending our dependence on fossil fuels within the next 10 years. We spoke about education and fully funding our public schools and canceling student debt.
We spoke about repealing the Hyde Amendment, a federal jobs guarantee. We spoke about a variety of issues in alignment with the progressive priorities that the people of this country are demanding.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So this is why you don’t want the theory people in charge of anything, especially the dumb theory people like the one you just saw. Sleaze-ball politicians of old would make the case vote for me and I’ll fix the potholes. Now, they may have stolen some of the money you sent them, but in the end, they had to fix the potholes. They promised that they would and your commute got a little better.
These people are not interested in fixing the potholes. No. It’s about saving our democracy and evolving into a multiracial democracy, as if we haven’t already done that, by the way.
There is also about something called the Green New Deal. That’s what this is. And it’s not simply one deranged theory an addled Member of Congress admitting it. According to the Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, former Mayor of South Bend, former Rhodes scholar and McKinsey consultant, we need this infrastructure bill to end hurricanes.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PETE BUTTIGIEG, U.S. TRANSPORTATION SECRETARY: In the United States, transportation is the leading contributor to climate change, contributing to a pattern of extreme weather events, which takes a severe toll on our infrastructure.
Every dollar we spend rebuilding from a climate-driven disaster is a dollar we could have spent building a more competitive, modern and resilient transportation system that produces significantly lower emissions.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So according to climatologist, Pete Buttigieg, wait, we thought he was a McKinsey consultant. No, no, he’s a climate expert. Not even the climate experts understand the climate that’s so complex is what Pete Buttigieg does. And he’s telling you, it’s the roads that are causing hurricanes. We never had that before roads. He’s going to fix that.
And that explains why there’s $46 billion in this bill for the Federal government to buy electric vehicles. Now, F.B.I. agents can arrest you for sedition while driving Teslas, but wait a second, you asked, aren’t those Teslas powered by electricity made in part by coal plants? Yes, whatever.
Shhh. Insurrectionist.
Another $2 trillion goes — $2 billion rather goes to tax credits for, quote, “clean energy generation and storage.” Oh, I wonder who owns those firms? Could they be Biden donors? I think so.
There’s also a plan for building 500,000 electric vehicle chargers, an allocation of $174 billion to expand the market of electric vehicles. No one wants to buy them, the government is going to make you want to buy them, and then $10 billion for Climate Conservation Corps to quote, “boost climate resilience.”
Are they going to buy umbrellas? That would be a useful form of climate resilience, but they’re thinking bigger than that. This is about transforming our democracy. You’ll notice that none of this spending goes to our oil workers just put out of business when Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, they can learn to code.
So according to people who really run the Democratic Party, though, none of this goes far enough. It’s just not enough, $2 trillion is not enough.
We humiliated the Keystone workers, they are spending $2 trillion, but we need to go further. According to Sandy Cortez, pampered scion of Westchester, we need to spend a lot more money very quickly or you’re racist.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (D-NY): I have real concerns that $2.2 trillion isn’t actually going to get us there. So we’re going to have to make deeper investments. We are in a devastating economic moment. Millions of people in the United States are unemployed, we have a truly crippled healthcare system, and a planetary crisis on our hands, and we’re the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. So we can do $10 trillion.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Oh, another math lecture from Sandy, $10 trillion — $10 trillion. Okay, Sandy Cortez, you’ve added a lot to our country. You built this country, didn’t you? She doesn’t care.
And by the way, none of them care about the consequences of this. What are the consequences of this exactly? What happens if all this money gets into the system? Could it affect your life? Could it affect prices, commodity prices?
Take a look at a chart of commodity prices and that will give you some sense. You’re looking at one. These are the increases over the past year.
The government injected trillions of dollars into the economy, and what happened? The cost of almost every durable good, the things that you need to live went way up. The price of lumber, we might need that going forward, jumped more than 250%. Crude oil went up 188%.
Sugar 50%, copper and tin up by more than 80% each. Cattle meaning meat, wheat, meaning wheat thins, and so on. A lot more expensive to live here. That’s fine if you’re Joe Biden or Sandy Cortez, not fine if you’re you.
The cost to buy a home jumped by 11%.
According to the U.N. Food Price Index, the cost of food has reached its highest level in seven years. In other words, just by spending a lot of money they didn’t make, the people in charge are making it much harder for most Americans to live here. That’s the cost of inflation. It’s a tax and it’s insidious, and it’s impossible to control once it starts.
Meanwhile, the most powerful people in the country has never been happier. The cost of apartments in San Francisco has gone way down. The Dow Jones up by 50%. Private equity is booming. Crypto investors are seeing huge returns.
Soon, they will have so much money they are making up things to buy like what else do you do with the money? They’re investing in something called non-fungible tokens, NFTs, which are literally useless digital tokens.
The Nyan Cat meme, which you’re seeing on your screen just sold for $590,000.00 in NFT format. Now, it’s not the art that was sold, it was the useless digital token. This is the tulip craze, if there ever was one. And these are the people benefiting from yet another $2 trillion in spending and by the way, those tax increases will not offset all of this spending, Joe Biden plans to tax what economists call savers, which don’t bounce around as much the economy.
Taxing favors is not an effective way to curb inflation because the money isn’t affecting as many transactions. It’s punitive. But the party in charge doesn’t care about inflation. They don’t care if it’s harder for you to get gasoline, or buy dinner. They are just upset that you feel entitled to drive your vehicle to work on their roads.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. EMANUEL CLEAVER (D-MO): I do think that given the preference, I and probably many others would like to see the gasoline tax raised. As you know, that has been talked about for decades. And unfortunately, Americans have become so accustomed to low gas prices, and even though I would challenge anybody, if they go and leave wherever they are, right now looking at this at your show, to go out and ask 10 people how much they pay in federal gasoline taxes, they can’t tell you.
They won’t be able to tell you until a number is put out there when somebody says, we’re going to raise the taxes in order to pay our infrastructure costs or the rebuilding our infrastructure, and then all of a sudden, somebody would start waging a war.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Yes, so the real problem with America is, gas prices are too low. So people who don’t live in cities, people who drive for a living will start paying now that’s the problem and those ungrateful Americans don’t even know it.
What’s going on here? Trillions of dollars, changing hands. This is looting. Just as their supporters in Minneapolis last summer, the Biden people are looting the country. They have done nothing to build America. Not one thing.
Susan Rice, Barack Obama, Ron Klain, the rest of these people making these decisions have not created a single thing. They are not creators. They are takers, and they’ve gotten rich from doing it.
How much did Susan Rice make in the last four years? How did you get that money? They’re just stripping the corpse, and when it falls apart, they’ll be gone.
In the meantime, welcome to hyperinflation.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor