CLAY: I want to talk about some positive news, Buck. Joe Manchin — the most sane Democrat in the country, Joe Manchin — has been right about inflation. He shot down Build Back Better last year right before Christmas. He also has now decided, according to multiple reports, that he will not support any tax increases and also will not endorse any of the climate change provisions that Democrats were trying to get him to endorse. As a result, Joe Biden’s agenda as president of the United States is effectively over.

The Senate is going to go into recess on July 31st, I believe. That means the midterms then come up. Republicans are going to take the House and that will mean that really nothing gets passed. If you’re out there and you’re a small business owner, there will be no tax increases. The Trump tax cuts will remain in effect from 2017 all the way to 2025, maybe more tax cuts if Republicans can win the House, the Senate, and the White House in 2024.

But, Buck Sexton, if there was any sanity at all in the Democrat Party, they would be talking about nominating Joe Manchin to be their presidential candidate in 2024. Instead, Joe Manchin, if he runs for reelection in West Virginia, which Donald Trump won by almost 40 points, is either going to have to run as a Republican or an independent. Democrats are going to kick him to the curb. It doesn’t matter that he was right about everything economically; he went against the party, and that is unacceptable. But this is a big win for America. Thankfully, he will not allow Joe Biden’s agenda to get passed.

BUCK: You know, to your initial statement, though, Joe Manchin is nowhere near crazy enough for the Democrat Party.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: They’re not gonna… He wouldn’t get the nomination in a million years. I mean, honestly, you and I are about as likely to get the nomination as Joe Manchin from West Virginia. And that’s for a lot of reasons. The money in the Democrat Party comes from New York, the D.C. area, and California.

CLAY: Everybody’s paying for Stacey Abrams’ campaign right now.

BUCK: That’s exactly right. Stacey Abrams, for everyone who’s watching that Georgia gubernatorial race, she is an outside-funded governor.

CLAY: Yep.

BUCK: A majority, a huge majority of her money is coming from people who live in those three places — New York, the D.C. area — so that’s Washington, D.C., and then those northern suburbs much Virginia that are among the wealthiest per capita counties like Loudoun and Fairfax in the country, and then obviously California. So, you have to be a pro-abortion nine months of a pregnancy, climate change lunatic, January 6 was an insurrection, BLM-supporting, double-mask leftist to get money from those places which you would need to be competitive, right?

West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, who continues to save Democrats from their idiocy, reportedly won’t support any new tax increases or climate spending. With Republicans poised to take over the House Joe Biden’s agenda is essentially now over. https://t.co/s9Z6WPuO3C

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) July 15, 2022

So, that’s why… To the point about how the Democrat Party’s gone effectively crazy, they’ve always had the crazies. There were crazies in the Democrat Party stretching back for the last 20 years. But now what we’ve seen is that they’re actually calling the shots. And people say, well, what about Joe Biden? Exactly. Joe Biden is the candidate that we said he would be from the very beginning of his campaign, which is the Trojan horse, which is the guy who presents one idea of what the Biden White House will be.

But you look at the advisors and the agenda and the policies and the things that he’s done, and you have effectively the same president you would have if you had a president AOC in terms of who’s around. I mean, maybe that would be a little crazier, but it’s certainly trending in that direction. Joe Manchin has this very straightforward approach, one, I think he wants to keep his job. Why go along if the Democrats are the ones who are about to get crushed, he’s the guy who looks smart. He’s gonna see ripping around in his Maserati. You know he drives a Maserati?

CLAY: I do. And he lives on a boat in the Potomac River.

BUCK: He’s living it up, buddy.

CLAY: I respect Manchin’s unabashed redneckdom, as somebody who grew up in a red state surrounded by a lot of rednecks owning a sports car and living on a house boat is like West Virginia royalty country roads, baby. I love it.

BUCK: The first time I ever saw that was actually Don Johnson as Crockett in Miami Vice. Remember? He was a cop who lived on a house boat who drove a Ferrari. Yeah.

CLAY: I didn’t even think about that, basically that Manchin is Don Johnson, except living in West Virginia as opposed to Miami.

BUCK: They both got good hair too. But the point here —

CLAY: I was noticing that the other day. He does have great hair for a man of his age.

BUCK: If he’s listening right now, he’s getting a lot of love on the Clay and Buck show.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: We gotta keep his feet to the fire, make sure he doesn’t cave, Clay. I’m worried here that… I shouldn’t say “worried.” It’s not over ’til it’s over, right? I mean, it looks like right now it’s a done deal. And I know the schedule means that it’s gonna be coming upon us very quickly, but I do think there’s some desperation in the Democrat camp over this one. Manchin on Wednesday said that it’s pretty straightforward. We should be cautious in this moment heading into a recession where everyone’s paying sky-high prices for gas, where inflation’s over 9%. Maybe now is not the time to be throwing it against the wall to see what happens.

MANCHIN: Basically, everyone should be very conscious of what we’re doing and how we’re approaching things now and looking at anything that could inflame the inflationary high numbers that we have.

BUCK: How much more straightforward can it be than that? Don’t spend a whole bunch of more money when you’re in a period of high inflation looking at a big recession.

CLAY: He’s written several different op-eds over the years and he’s been consistent basically since Joe Biden came into office that he was incredibly worried about the inflationary pressures that additional government spending we’re going to bring to bear in this country. And he’s been proven time after time to be right. And we should mention — and this is something else that Republicans should be hammering on the campaign trail this fall — Joe Biden’s agenda is a disaster, what he’s actually accomplished.

We would be in the midst of a near inflation apocalypse if Joe Biden had been able to pass his Build Back Better agenda. So, as bad as things are by Joe Biden, don’t allow him to argue that the reason things are bad is because his agenda didn’t get passed. The reason why things aren’t worse is because Manchin and Sinema stood up and refused along with all of the Republicans in the Senate to allow this agenda to be passed.

BUCK: Inflation can destroy an economy, it can destroy a country, actually. If you look through the history, fiat currencies, as a general rule, have a very troubling pattern of eventually crashing into oblivion. And inflation in any number of periods in history has brought down governments, has brought down societies, has led to major conflicts. Inflation is no joke friends, right? We’re dealing with inflation that hurts. But if you just keep pushing, they thought… Oh, Clay, it was Modern Monetary Theory. They were effectively doing. They just weren’t calling it that. And some people are saying, well, hold on. That’s a great idea except it’s a crazy idea because you’ll actually debase your currency.

CLAY: And people who don’t know what that is, modern monetary theory, effectively they were arguing, we can spend as much money as we want and there are no consequences. That basically in essence is the idea behind modern monetary theory.

BUCK: The Bernie advisers and the people that will talk about MMT would claim that you spend the money that is socially necessary and then you manage inflation on the backside. The problem with that is, what is necessary, right? If you think that there’s no real risk because you can always print more — if you believe you can control the inflation on the backside of this — well, then, why not just spend what you want to spend because you can control it.

The problem is, Clay, they can’t control it. The problem is there are actual market forces that are at work that go beyond the dictates of the government. And this is why, you know, when you see countries that have super high inflation, what are some of the things they start to do? I mean, you had this in Venezuela. They start saying, well, no, the price of that dishwasher is half what the actual price is in our currency.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: And then that makes everything worse and then people go to the black market and then the government actually creates the problem and then in telling people they’ll fix the problem, they take away more individual rights, including property rights, of course, and they make the whole situation a worse situation by spending. This is where the government is effectively operating a printing press in response to the overuse of the printing press.

CLAY: And it’s, sadly, what Joe Biden tried to do when he said, “I’m calling on all you gas stations to lower the price of gas at your pumps! We’re in a battle with Ukraine.” It’s a fund… This is what we talked about yesterday. The average Biden economic adviser as 2.4 years of actual experience in business. That is a scintilla. They don’t understand basic market forces. Any anyone out there, you want to know why Venezuelans are overwhelmingly voting Republican?

You want to know why so many people from Latin-American countries in South Florida are such massive supporters of Republicans? It’s ’cause they know what bare shelves look like. They know what it’s like to go into Cuba where the government is artificially saying, “Hey, you have to charge this.” You can’t run a business that requires you to sell products for less than you have to pay to acquire them. And that is the fundamental failure of understanding basic economics and basic markets. And Joe Manchin, to his credit, unlike almost every other Democrat, seems to understand that.

BUCK: And let’s just take a look at this. Venezuela in 2021 had an inflation rate, according to Bloomberg, of 686%, folks, okay?

CLAY: That’s not ideal.

BUCK: That’s not what you want. That’s not a good situation. Now, you might be saying, “Oh, that’s Venezuela. We’ll never get there.” Yeah, but what happened was they started to use social justice principles and socialism in place of looking at the markets and what actually is the functioning of business and how businesses operate, and they completely… A country that was the wealthiest… It was, I believe, in the 1990s the third wealthiest country per capita in the Western Hemisphere. It was U.S., Canada, Venezuela. The large part ’cause of all the oil but it was —

CLAY: They still have the largest collection of oil in the world.

BUCK: They have oil reserves in the world, bigger than Saudi Arabia. So, a country, just… You know, the left hates talking about this. You’ll notice very little coverage of Venezuela in the New York Times, you know, Democrat media. They took a country that is sitting on a sea of liquid wealth, literally has black gold reserves coming out of the ground like you can’t believe, worse than any other place on the planet, their inflation rate last year was 686% because of why? The morons in charge who are like, money for everybody, we’ll just give everybody all the stuff and we’ll set all the prices and we’ll also do a lot of narco trafficking on the side so the people in charge can stay rich.

CLAY: It’s crazy. But good news as we roll into the weekend. No tax increases until probably at the earliest 2025. So, if you have a small business, if you have a business that you’re struggling to keep afloat and dealing with all the increases in prices and everything else that’s going on out there, finding workers, then this is at least Washington getting out of the way and not making things worse for you, when Joe Biden definitely would have if he had gotten his way.