CLAY: For those of you out there who are familiar with the history here, there was an eviction moratorium that was effectively put in place which may have made initial sense with the ridiculous lockdowns back in March of last year. But we have continued to extend that eviction moratorium. We have continued to allow covid madness to govern our decision-making.

And we finally now are coming to the end of the eviction moratorium, and, not surprisingly, there is now an uproar — and I think this goes to a larger context, why you have to be careful with the rules that you put in place because, as you well know, Buck Sexton, once people get used to something, it is very, very hard to take that away from them without being considered the Grinch.

It’s easy to give people things, but there’s a great psychological study where the risk of a dollar… If you have a dollar in your hand, you’re less likely to risk it to try to earn two dollars than if you don’t have that benefit in your hand. Now that that benefit exists, this is a question that many of us have been asking for a long time: How do you go back to normalcy?

How do you dial back the insanity and start to return to some form of normalcy and something simple like landlord-tenant relationships, which historically, the landlord gets paid by the tenant in order for the tenant to occupy that location! That hasn’t been the case, there have been all sorts of issues, and finally we’re getting back to that normal relationship, and Democrats aren’t happy.

BUCK: Only $3 billion of the $47 billion in aid authorized by Congress already to help renters pay their landlords has actually, Clay, been delivered to landlords as of June 30th. So that’s the most recent data we have: $3 billion of $47 billion! This is a remarkable case study in so many things. One is, this is just the government.

This is effectively the seizing of property without due process. I mean, they can call it whatever they want. They can say it’s a health emergency, yada yada. But at the end of the day, they’re just taking money from some people and giving it to other people under the assumption that this is more fair, this is better, because we’re in the middle of a pandemic. But there are still… There are people who own properties who are landlords who now they’re behind on the payment they have to make to the bank.

CLAY: Yes. Everybody has fallen behind.

BUCK: They’ve had to run up credit card bills that they wouldn’t have otherwise, people buy homes because it’s part of their retirement portfolio. There’s so much going on here. This was just an arbitrary, mass hysteria-based decision among so many others during the covid pandemic. And what you see right now is, if they accept that the eviction moratorium ends, that’s yet another data point for, “Well, then isn’t covid over?”

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: So then how could you be calling for mask mandates or vaccine mandates if the eviction moratorium is over? Oh, is this all kind of arbitrary and based on whatever some of the people in power feel like and also think will benefit? Oh, it’s that? Okay. So it’s not “the science” pushing all these things. (chuckles) That’s why I think the eviction moratorium is such a third rail.

Nancy Pelosi is getting a lot of pushback from the more progressive members of the House ’cause they love this. There’s a whole movement in social justice circles on the left, Clay, for “occupying private space,” meaning that you just go in to someplace where someone doesn’t live and just stay there and say, “I’m going to occupy this,” meaning, “I’m not gonna pay you.” It’s essentially like glorified squatting.

CLAY: Squatting, yeah.

BUCK: Because they view this as a form of redistributing wealth, from the land-owning class to the have-nots.

CLAY: It’s basically what’s going on all over California. There are people listening to us right now in some of the nicest areas of California where the homeless have just set up squatter rights like right on the beach. So you can live in a multimillion-dollar place in Orange County, be walking down to the beach, and not feel safe to walk to the beach because of all the squatters. I just got back from L.A.

Venice, which had become a really desirable place to live, is now filled with homeless encampments, and people don’t have any interest in leaving. Santa Monica. All these different places which are otherwise beautiful, have been taken over by the homeless. And to your point, Buck, it’s not even just tenant relationships with landlords in terms of individuals.

The entire industry of property management has been torn asunder by the covid realities in that forbearance of issues. People forget that, almost every property, the owner has a mortgage on that, too! This goes, to me, TO the Democrats not understanding the way that basic business exists, in that the landlord has typically a note on the building that they pay for based on what the tenants are paying them. There’s a large flowchart, and all of it is torn asunder when you give basically never-ending moratoriums.

BUCK: And you have to wonder what’s gonna actually happen for a lot of these landowners who are behind. Are they gonna manage to get made whole here? It’s $3 billion of the $47 billion. So that’s one thought that I have, because they’re remarkably slow with this, and just the notion that you can decide that in a health emergency like this that lasts for months and months, you can just take people’s property? What they’re doing is taking property.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: You are saying to people, “Well, we would prefer if people didn’t have to pay,” ’cause, by the way, what is exactly the epidemiological basis for you can’t not be in your home? You know what I’m saying? Rather, you have to stay where you are. People are gonna work. People are front line workers. I understand this is appealing, this notion of the eviction moratorium. “Oh, no one can be kicked out of their homes.” Okay. Well, then why should people ever be kicked out of their homes, Clay? It’s a mean thing to do.

CLAY: It’s an interesting perspective, right? Because initially the government mandated lockdowns, which meant that many people could not work. But now we’ve reached the point in 2021 when there are over nine million open jobs. For most of American history, I believe, this is the highest amount of open jobs. And there’s a ton of people out there listening to us nodding.

If you drive around in any city right now, there are big placards up begging people to go to work. So I think it’s hard to feel bad for someone. I understand it initially when we made the disastrous decision to ever put in place lockdowns. If you’re not allowing people to work for a two-week process, okay.

Remember 15 days to slow the spread? Well, it’s been 18 months. So at some point you have to end this because, to your point, Buck, if you ever owned a property and had to go through the eviction process its pretty time-consuming in many cities and it’s almost become impossible over the past year and a half.

BUCK: And there are stories of people who have run through their entire life savings because they poured it into a property that they were then renting out and trying to build financial stability. But during the pandemic, they had squatters —

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: — or, rather, people that were refusing on pay them any rent because of — particularly in California and New York — incredibly favorable laws, there was very little recourse that they to deal with.

I mean, there’s also at this level of… You see PPP and these different government programs. The government’s not even very good at shoveling money out of helicopters to people. I mean, the government can’t even get this particularly right because if they could, it would have been, “Well, if you lost your job you were supposed to have people that were able to get paid by their employer.”

So they would stay on payroll, but we still had millions of job losses, businesses shut down, closed down. I also was opposed to shutting down any businesses in the first place. So that’s a whole other thing.

CLAY: Yes. Yes.

BUCK: The whole notion of lockdowns in general. Because anyone who says, otherwise I would say, “We never actually locked down. We did partial lockdowns of some businesses at some times in some places, while a lot of people were just continuing on with their lives.” But Clay, there’s an addiction here at a broader level — an addiction to rule by emergency that the Democrats.

If you’re an authoritarian, this is amazing to you, because you don’t have to worry about, “Is it constitutional? Am I respecting private property or the rule of law?” It’s an emergency! We have to do this! Just like they kind of did in 2020 with the election laws in a whole bunch of states. It kind of reminds me of that.

CLAY: Not only that, Buck, there’s an argument out there — and some people really believe this — that the Delta variant threat is being exaggerated because it provides cover to infrastructure and the budget bill. As this process is playing out, what’s back on the front pages and all the discussion? Covid. What’s not being discussed? The biggest expansion potentially in taxes in American history. It’s all sliding right under the radar.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

WARREN: The Delta variant is more contagious, threatening to spread faster among the half of the country that remains unvaccinated. Needlessly evicting families would risk escalating our public health crisis. The CDC understood that reality when it issued an eviction moratorium in September. The agency was clear — and I want to quote the language they used — “Housing stability helps protect health.” It’s right.

BUCK: Welcome back to the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show. There you have Elizabeth Warren saying (impression), “Housing stability protects health.” If that’s true, Clay — and let’s just assume for a second that is true — wouldn’t it be nice if we could all just alive in a place where everyone gets to live in their house and not pay any rent?

That would make a lot of people happy, that would be really nice. Tthey tried something sort of like that in the Soviet Union I know that’s not we’re doing here. But the principle starts to go to pretty interesting because, yeah, of course you could make this assumption that people should be able to live rent free indefinitely, you know, why not? Well, there are reasons in fact.

CLAY: In fact, the people who live rent free or pay the least rent often live in the most crime-ridden neighbors in America, of course. But the logical extension of many of these Democrat policies is to eliminate capitalism — which is what allows America to thrive — and replace it, as you said, with communism. There’s a lot of those, you know, 1940s and 50s cinder block buildings where people were able to live in Russia.

Now, the elevators didn’t work. They didn’t have any heat or air in those buildings, and eventually everybody fled outside as capitalism came in some way to Russia. It fails, right? Government mandated programs overwhelmingly fail over time because allocating resources to government as opposed to the free market is a failure almost all the time, because government doesn’t move fast enough and because it disincentivizes — as we’re seeing right now with the tax increases that Joe Biden’s trying to rush through under cover of the way of darkness, by the way, the biggest tax increases ever — it’s all madness.

BUCK: Yeah, this is why central planning, which is the root fallacy of socialism and communism that you can have a bunch of experts that make the decisions for everyone, everywhere that will be in the best interests of those individuals. This plays out in all aspects of society in ways where we see the results are bad, but there’s emotional appeal here. There’s a sense of, “Oh, but what are we going to do?” I mean, here’s Congresswoman Cori Bush who’s out there saying, you know, you’re gonna have millions on the street unless you keep this eviction ban going.

BUSH: So if we need to streamline the procedure of how the — how this is supposed to happen and just say, ummm, just put it into the text that we need to make it the — the money should go directly to landlords, if that’s what needs to happen, let’s do something. I think that we are… We should be thoughtful enough to try to figure this thing out so that anywhere from seven million people to 11 million people don’t end up on the street. Because look, we haven’t fixed the housing crisis that we already have. How do we put more people on the street and then end the — and then in a deadly global pandemic that is surging!

BUCK: First of all, the “surging” thing? Enough, okay? The cases are going up. They’re much lower than they were, and deaths and hospitalizations are — nationwide — very low, entirely manageable as a health issue. I know we’ve said this, Clay. I just feel like we have to just keep the repeating it because the madness is all over the place. Then beyond it, what exactly is supposed to happen here? What is the…? So the Democrats want what? So then every landlord in America has to be made whole by the government before anyone can be evicted? How long do you think that’s gonna take?

CLAY: Not only that, it’s wildly inefficient, and I would just come back and respond to Representative Cori Bush there. By the way, I think the last time we talked about her on this show was maybe when she was denegrating America. Didn’t that happen on July 4th where she said America is an awful place? I feel like we were ripping her to shreds. She makes a living off of taxpayers and therefore expects the taxpayers should pay for everything.

But the answer here is — and I hate to be crass, I hate to be totally and imminently reasonable — people need to go get jobs and fill some of the 9.2 million open jobs right now in America. And if you go get a job, you can afford a place to live because American jobs right now are paying wildly exorbitant salaries, partly as a result of this Joe Biden inflation environment. But there’s a ton of demand for jobs.

BUCK: This is the closest that the progressives have ever gotten to universal basic income — the pandemic — with the unemployment benefits, the eviction moratorium. They liked it. But you mentioned Cori Bush, what she said on Fourth of July. I just want to remind everybody, this is a member of Congress. She tweeted out, “When they say that the Fourth of July is about American freedom, remember this. The freedom they’re referring to is for white people,” end quote.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: That was her, “Yeah, Fourth of July. Enjoy your time with friends and family. America’s a racist, horrible place.”

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: She’s a Democrat. Anyway, as a Democrat, that’s fine.