STEVE MOORE: I think what you’ve got is a problem with policy right now where, Bill, we are paying people — continue to pay people — to stay unemployed. Not just through unemployment benefits, expanded food stamps, rental assistance, $300-a-month-per-child benefits. All the free cash to people encouraging them not to work and then we’re taxing people who do work. I believe we would have 5 million more Americans working today, Austan, if we had cut the payroll tax rather than expanded unemployment benefits. You want to give people an incentive to go back to work. We’re giving people incentive to stay on the sidelines.

BUCK: Steve Moore droppin’ some truth bombs there, as he’s often fond of doing on economic issues. Welcome back to the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. This is Buck, and we’re headed for a number of big political fights. Well, that’s probably true at any point in time. But I’ve been talking about the Supreme Court battle looming over Roe and abortion. But let’s get into something that is more imminent for a moment here, and that is what happens with the entirety of the Biden agenda.

And it’s pretty much the whole thing is riding on this $3.5 trillion Democrat spending wish list of all sorts of stuff. Oh, there’s green new deal stuff, and there’s massive social spending. This is the Biden stealth-socialism plan. That’s what the $3.5 trillion is. Now, he’s not writing it. He doesn’t even really know what it’s it. He just knows (impression) “That’s where I’m supposed to sign? All right.” That’s what he’s going to do.

“Hey, man, I’m here! I’m… I’m… Amtrak Joe. I’m awake. You thought I was nappin’, didn’t ya?” But the truth is, he’s going to sign whatever they put in front of him, so it doesn’t really matter what’s in it as far as Joe Biden is concerned. As long as Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are smiling, he knows they’re gonna give him a cookie and that’s that. But Biden was going all-in this morning on the $3.5 trillion spending plan, and they have to get this thing done by September 15th.

Because that’s the deadline for committees to finish the drafting of the legislation. Then Democrats are going to have to go and push all out to get this thing through, on their side. Remember, we got a 50-50 Senate. So they have a de facto majority, thanks to Kamala. By the way, where is Kamala? Anybody? Anybody seen Kamala these days? I haven’t really heard much about our vice president.

I haven’t really heard much about her. What’s…? I thought she was in a charge of the border. Oh, the border last month was over 200,000 illegals crossing and it’s as bad as it’s ever been. So maybe we won’t hear from Kamala. It’s interesting. Kamala’s numbers when it comes to approval and likability are worse than Joe’s — and Joe’s are the worst that they’ve been in a very long time.

So I guess that’s really not all that surprising. But, anyway, because of Kamala, 50-50 means the Democrats can still get it through with a tie-breaking vote of the president. But even a Democrat majority in the House, it’s only 220 to 212. Eight seats in the House of Representatives. So if they just lose four, they don’t get this thing through. So this is going to be on a razor-thin margin.

And when you look at the $3.5 trillion that they want to spend, they’re acting as though they have a mandate. They’re acting as though we didn’t have a very close and very contested — to put it mildly — presidential election outcome. They’re acting like we don’t have 50-50 in the Senate and close to it in the House, and that the American people are crying out for some kind of a transformation-through-spending fiat, using the parliamentary trick essentially of budget reconciliation.

They didn’t just get some big mandate. They didn’t just have everyone say, “Oh, the Trump economy was horrible.” Now they’ve got 60 Senate seats, and they’ve got a 30-seat majority in the House or something. No, that’s not what happened at all. In fact, it was pretty… For a pandemic year, it was a weak showing for Democrats in the House and in the Senate — a weak showing, indeed.

We should have won one of two Senate seats in Georgia, my fellow Republicans. But that’s a conversation… We could have some whisky and cry about that another day. That was pretty depressing. But there is hope on this. I would like to send you off into your weekend with hope, and this was just published in the Wall Street Journal yesterday:

“Why I Won’t Support Spending Another $3.5 Trillion — Amid inflation, debt and the inevitability of future crises, Congress needs to take a strategic pause,” by — yes, that’s right — good old Joe Manchin. Joe Manchin is like, “You know what? I don’t know if I want to go along with this full-on socialism thing.” First of all, I’m still kind of surprised that Manchin hasn’t switched parties.

But remember, he also was a critical vote in favor of confirming Kavanaugh. But I know that internally the polls in West Virginia showed a huge support for Kavanaugh. I don’t think people realized that now-Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh was just getting ambushed with lies. They didn’t know that in some of the blue states, of course, because it wasn’t about the reality.

But anyway, Manchin has held the line against the true lunacy of his party on occasion, and here’s what he says. Now, writes — and of course, the staff… I’m not pointing this out… Everyone’s staff in the Senate is actually writing their editorial, and this is just like they write their speeches. Anyway, here’s what’s in the article under his name in the Wall Street Journal.

“I, for one, won’t support a $3.5 trillion bill, or anywhere near that level of additional spending, without greater clarity about why Congress chooses to ignore the serious effects inflation and debt have on existing government programs. This is even more important now as the Social Security and Medicare Trustees have sounded the alarm that these life-saving programs will be insolvent and benefits could start to be reduced as soon as 2026 for Medicare and 2033, a year earlier than previously projected, for Social Security.

“Establishing an artificial $3.5 trillion spending number and then reverse-engineering the partisan social priorities that should be funded isn’t how you make good policy. Undoubtedly some will argue that bold social-policy action must be taken now. While I share the belief that we should help those who need it the most, we must also be honest about the present economic reality.”

Well, Senator Manchin, I can tell you, that is where you and the Democrats have a serious disagreement. They don’t want to be honest about the present economic reality. The Democrats recognize that when it comes to spending and the size of government, math is the enemy. Math is not on their side. Remember when we were told just a few months ago that inflation would be transient, temporary?

It turns out, it will keep going up because math. We spent a whole lot of money in excess of what we’ve already spent, and some people are starting to recognize that this is a problem, especially for those who don’t have a lot of assets and rely on wages. So while Joe Biden can run around and talk about (impression), “(mutters) Middle class and jobs! Class! Jobs. Middle class. You know, here I am!

“I got the blond hairs on the legs, and they touched the hair that was bleached by the sun while I — I was at the community pool.” Some of you will remember that that’s actually pretty much a direct quote of Joe Biden’s — one of his weirdest speeches. “Legs on my hair would stand up all…” So weird. But he sniffs people’s heads, grabs them, does all kinds of weird things — and Democrats have no problem with that whatsoever.

Anyway. “For those who will dismiss my unwillingness to support a $3.5 trillion bill as political posturing, I hope they heed the powerful words of Adm. Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who called debt the biggest threat to national security.” That’s also from this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by West Virginia senator Joe Manchin.

Look, friends, they are going to try to do everything they can to try to get this through, because everything else that the Biden administration touches is in a state of free fall or has already collapsed. It’s a mess. They’re not making things better for you, they’re making things worse, and people see it. The economy is weak. Inflation is rising. Gas prices are high. The border is a disaster.

Our Afghan withdrawal was a catastrophe in the way that it was executed. Crime in major U.S. cities way up. An all-time high for overdosed debts, last year in this country and continuing to be very high this year. And the Biden administration is not doing anything about the border that is feeding this problem. In fact, they’ve kicked it wide open, and what did they say they were going to do?

He said he was going to “shut down the virus not the economy.” How is that going for us? Well, let’s take Mu variant as well as the Delta variant. You can see, nope, they have not figured that out either. So what exactly have we gotten here? A constant… Biden promised the American people normalcy when he ran in 2020. That was the big pitch. He was going to hide in the basement and promise things are going to go back to normal.

And his version of normal, as we all see it, is dysfunction that forces the American people, who are honest, to lower their expectations constantly, about their day-to-day lives and about the future of America. That’s what normalcy means for Biden: “Lower your expectations, folks. It’s going to get worse.”

I think we should fight against that. I don’t think that we should concede that that is the future under a Biden adminis… Well, it is the future under the Biden administration, but it doesn’t to have be the future, which is why we have take power away from them in the midterm election and then shut down the socialist madness here.