Bezos Echoes C&B on Manchin and Biden

CLAY: I don’t know if you saw over the weekend, Jeff Bezos has been teeing off on Joe Biden, calling out.

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: Maybe he’s a listener, Buck.

BUCK: Can I just point out here everybody, this did not get lost on us. We have been discussing here that back… When was it that Joe Manchin, “Will he or won’t he throw down?” Was this August-September time frame —

CLAY: No, I remember specifically he shut back Build Back Better right before Christmas. He went on Fox News with Chris Wallace I believe before Chris Wallace left or maybe it was Bret Baier whoever was hosting, ’cause I was down in Key West and I was going to the Hemingway house, and I pulled out my phone and it was the Sunday he had done the Fox News show and said, “I can’t get there; I’m not doing it,” maybe like a week before Christmas or so he finally shot it all down.

BUCK: So that was when he… But he initially, I think, said, “Oh, I’m not sure about this.”

CLAY: That op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Yeah, that’s right.

BUCK: It was way back. Anyway, what we said was it looks like is he’s not only doing the right thing for the economy, he may be saving the Democrat Party —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — from committing financial annihilation in a sense of itself, destroying its prospects. You go back and look, once you get to 10 or 11, 12% inflation, people will be in so much financial pain, they’ll vote for anybody. They’ll vote for a bump on a log if it claims that it’s gonna end inflation, right? It doesn’t matter. And here we are watching, as Jeff Bezos says, that Joe Manchin may have saved the Democrat Party by not passing Build Back Better from itself, which is what we have been saying for about six months.

CLAY: Yes. It’s exactly right. But I give… Maybe Jeff Bezos is a listener. If he is, thanks for listening, Jeff. We got a great affiliate in Seattle. You’re probably appreciative of the fact that you can easily find the show now. He’s not serving full time at Amazon so maybe has a little bit more time during the day. Maybe is working out, listening to us right now. But what I say is, yes, this is common sense. And the message that I think is significant here, Buck, is, in the same way that Jeff Bezos went after Elon Musk — and he owns the Washington Post.

And I understand, by the way, the argument of, “Well, there’s a Chinese wall,” right? That’s a phrase that gets used all the time, “between editorial and ownership,” and they don’t manage the decisions that are made on a day-to-day basis about what we write about. I understand that argument. But when you go on Twitter and you call out Elon Musk, your company can see that you did that. And they know that they may curry favor with their boss by going after Elon Musk. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Washington Post had several editorials that immediately criticized Elon Musk.

Well, I think this is significant that Jeff Bezos is now going after the worst president of any of our lives, Joe Biden, for just not doing what he said he was gonna do, which is be normal! (laughing) Just be normal, dude. Don’t screw up everything that you touch. I think increasingly there are a lot of CEOs out there, Buck, who are looking at the management of the economic and business side of the Biden White House and saying what we’ve been saying on this show for a year now, which is they have no clue how to handle inflation, how to manage the tax code, how…

And, really, that’s what started the Bezos argument was he said, “Look, you can argue for or against corporate tax rate increases. But arguing that increasing the corporate tax rate is going to lower inflation? They’re not connected. If anything, you’re going to increase inflation by taking more money and spending more money on behalf of the government because the tax…” This is just Economics 101: When you increase costs for businesses, they pass it on to their consumers.

And so the idea that by increasing taxes on business, you’re going to lower inflation is just absolute economic gobbledygook. It’s total lunacy to even make that argument. And so as you look at what he’s saying, he’s got a new statement out, by the way. Man. I gotta read everybody for this. I just got… Have you seen the most recent Bezos tweet going after Biden? We gotta read this when we come back. It is fantastic. That’s what you call a tease in the business.

BUCK: Apparently, he can bring us all of our packages and deliver some tweets, Travis. Clay Travis.

CLAY: (laughing) No doubt. This is gonna be interesting to follow.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: Buck, this tweet from Jeff Bezos just came out maybe 10 minutes ago, and he has been feuding with the White House over inflation. The White House took a shot at him over the weekend and Jeff Bezos responded:

Buck, this is what all rational people are saying. The Biden administration has no plan for inflation and, in fact, if they had executed their true domestic plans, inflation would be even worse than it is today, and they are trying — I think Jeff Bezos is right here — to muddy the waters and distract from the overall number one issue that NBC News in their most recent poll found over the weekend, Buck, 16% of the American public believes that this country’s going in the right direction, 16% because Biden’s the most incompetent president of our lives.

BUCK: It would be so much better if we were having political conversations between Democrats and Republicans in this country where we were trying to gauge which side had an idea that would be an even bigger improvement over what the other side is offering, right? So we think we’ll grow the economy, we’ll grow GDP 20% or 30% above expectations, and they’re trying to get to 10% above expectations.

What I mean is we’re not in a place where we’re offering alternative visions of how to make things better. We are trying to explain how to make things better or really stop them from making things worse because that’s what they’re often doing. In the case of spending, it’s not like they have an idea for how to deal with inflation that, might work pretty well. And we have an idea that might also work pretty well and let’s debate’ let’s see whose idea is better.

Clay, our idea is, you know, let’s throw water on the fire. They’re not saying let’s throw a blanket on the fire. They’re saying I gotta a great idea, gasoline on the fire. They would make everything markedly worse. We have been making this case for six months. Jeff Bezos, he’s a lib, he owns the Washington Post, but he’s a smart guy, and he does understand — and acutely his company feels — inflation in many ways at a huge level, and he’s saying exactly what we said because it’s true. Biden not only is terrible for inflation, if Biden got his way, people would start talking about what is hyperinflation actually again? You’d start to see the Google searches going up.

CLAY: Yeah. And this, to me, is significant because what you’re seeing is Big Business executives finally turning on Joe Biden. I do believe that when the owner of the Washington Post is in a fight with the Biden White House, that there is some trepidation inside of the Washington Post over, “Oh, what exactly should we do now,” right? Because for a long time “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was what they had written at the masthead of the Washington Post with the idea being, “Oh, we’re gonna shine a light on this Trump administration, which is the biggest threat to democracy that’s ever existed!”

All that was a lie. All of it was a lie. They helped to feed the Russian collusion narrative. But it’s hard to argue when Democrats have the White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate, almost all major mayoral offices in this country, and everything is going to crap, Buck. It’s hard to argue that the Republicans are to blame. Now, they’re still gonna make that argument, but one way to counteract that argument is to say, “Okay.

“What did you want to implement that you haven’t been able to implement?” Wait a minute. You wanted last year, Joe Biden, to spend $5 trillion, I believe was the 10-year cost, on the Build Back Better initiative. The only reason that didn’t happen was because one or two Senators in your own party rebelled. You also wanted to raise taxes massively on corporate interests, you wanted individuals to be paying way more tax, and all of that would have made inflation infinitely worse. So not only have your existing policies made things bad, but if your existing policies had been able to occur to their full fruition, we’d be sitting, Buck, who knows what inflation would be? Maybe 15%, maybe 16%, maybe 20.

BUCK: And I would like to sit here and say I think the Democrats have learned their lesson. But we know that’s not true, right? We know that’s just not accurate. If anything, their belief… I mean, let’s recall, it was the talking point of all Obama supporters in the media that the reason… Remember when they spent a trillion dollars, when that sounded like a lot of money to people?

CLAY: Yeah, yeah.

BUCK: A trillion here, a trillion there starts to add up. I think it was technically 900 billion, closer to that, but on the stimulus package. And there was… We had the rise of the Tea Party and we had this huge movement, this grassroots movement because of the spending. Do you remember, Clay, what their…? When people said, “Well, hold. What did we get for this trillion dollars?” and it was essentially the extension of some government benefits and then a whole lot of “shovel-ready jobs” that weren’t shovel-ready and a lot of waste.

CLAY: We don’t even know where it went.

BUCK: And speaking of waste, $160 billion going to protection program, they have no idea what, fraud… This is what happens, folks. 160 billion. I don’t know. I think that’s a lot of money. But with Obama, remember what they said? It wasn’t enough spending. That was what they took away, and it’s the same thing with this. That’s what they really believe.

CLAY: Yeah. Well, and I do believe this is really significant. I was talking over the weekend, Buck, about every single day our goal is to just peel a few people into the Team Sanity, right? Every single day a few more people, and when I say this Jeff Bezos stuff and when I see what Elon Musk is saying, everybody is slowly moving into Team Sanity. I see it every single day. Gives me good momentum and good feeling as we get closer and closer to November.

BUCK: Yeah. I want Bezos listening to this podcast, if he realizes we’re good dudes, we see things where they are, and maybe he can give some tips to those upper pecs, man. Bezos 2.0 is like, he’s a machine.

CLAY: (laughing) He’s definitely gotten super ripped. That’s what I’m telling, I get to 50, I’m just gonna say, “Screw it! I’m gonna put anything I want in my body,” and you’re gonna be like, “How did Clay get so ripped?” I’m just gonna say, “Hey, push-ups and sit-ups.”

BUCK: That’s right.