CLAY: We played earlier CNN’s Brian Stelter saying (summarized) “Hey, you know, the fact that we got a baby formula shortage, and we have to land military planes filled with baby formula from Europe, not a good sign for the Biden administration’s overall management of the country, the fact that there are babies in hospitals because they were not able to get the formulas they needed.”

And inflation continues to be an unbelievable, overwhelming force as we move closer and closer to the midterms. It is dwarfing every single other issue because all of you out there… I talked about this earlier: I filled up my gas tank on the way back to the studio here in my house earlier in the day and I couldn’t even fill the tank up for a hundred dollars, and they cut me off at a hundred dollars on my purchase.

Which is probably a vestige of being concerned that maybe the pumps would keep running back in the day, before it cost over a hundred dollars to fill somebody’s gas tank up. Well, this inflation hit is so significant that even CNN’s not able to ignore it, and they’re asking a question that a lot of you have as well, and that question is: How did the Biden administration get things so wrong on inflation? Again, this is CNN. Listen.

CLAY: None of those answers make any sense, Buck.

BUCK: Clay, what’s amazing is that we sit here… To listen to Democrats, their allies in the media, fellow Democrats in the media… I mean, just really a symbiotic organism, right? On the one hand you have the Democrat Party; on the other hand, you have the Democrat-aligned corporate media. And they try to tell us, “Yeah, this inflation was unexpected.” We didn’t think it was unexpected.

CLAY: No.

BUCK: We weren’t surprised, not to pretend like we’re the only ones. Everybody, you know, there are lots of great minds on the right that are talking about this stuff day in and day out, have for a very long time. And in this you don’t have to be a great mind; it’s obvious. Biden administration comes in, they’re like, “Yeah, let’s just spend $2 trillion.” Just to remind everybody, the Tea Party got going because the Obama administration, just decided, “Yeah, let’s spend a trillion dollars!”

Now, that was back in 2009. That was the so-called stimulus package. Biden administration comes in, we had already spent trillions to stabilize the economy during covid, and they just figured, “Yeah, well, let’s throw another trillion in there,” and then they wanted to spend, as we’ve talked about, $5 trillion over 10 years additionally on top of that and get that spending started. This is the exact cause of inflation.

It is as though the Biden administration is sitting there saying, “This is so weird! We didn’t leave the couch for six months, and every night before we went to sleep, we ate a whole chocolate cake after eating a whole pizza,” maybe even some deep dish from my friends in Chicago, I don’t know, maybe, and eating the whole thing, “and sure enough, to everyone’s shock, we gained some weight!” Of course, they did! Of course, they did.

CLAY: (laughing) I think that might even be considered fat shaming now, Buck, ’cause you’re not allowed to point out when fat people are fat anymore, according to the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, anyway. But, yeah. Look. Modern Monetary Theory, which was what was driving the Joe Biden economic policies, basically held that there was no consequences for debt, that there were no consequences for…

That interest rates were never going to budge and that basic economic theory, which had held for hundreds of years and held that sooner or later if you spend too much money, you get rampant inflation and interest rates are going to rise, that all that was untrue. And I think it’s important that we continue to emphasize that the only reason we’re not dealing right now with double-digit inflation instead of 8%-plus inflation is because Joe Manchin didn’t allow Joe Biden to get his primary domestic agenda through, which was spend $5 trillion on Build Back Better.

And, by the way, in retrospect, anybody maybe think that spending over $1 trillion on infrastructure — as, at the time to his credit, Donald Trump called out — was also not a good idea, in addition to all the covid spending that was going on, maybe the worst possible time to decide to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure was as the country’s economy was collapsing due to inflation that is potentially gonna drive us back into yet another recession?

Again, all of this was eminently foreseeable. And it wasn’t just Republicans who were saying it, by and large. It was also Democrats who refused to support Joe Biden’s agenda. I think we have to thank Joe Manchin, Democrat Senator from West Virginia, because if he had gotten bullied and gone along with the Build Back Better bill, we might be sitting higher. There are guys out there, Buck, who will say inflation would have been 15% right now — 17%, 18% — and it’s almost impossible to dial this genie back in the bottle to, so to speak, but that’s where we are.

BUCK: Just as we see with the border where the blocking of the revocation of Title 42. Remember, Biden’s team wants to revoke Title 42. A federal judge, as of today, is still not letting them.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Saving Democrats from their own policies is something that we’ve seen continue to play out.