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BUCK: Just remember, the Biden administration’s already trying to tell you it was actually amazing. It was a logistical feat. It was an accomplishment, what they did there. This is what the Biden administration folks are trying to put out there. “Remember what you saw? Remember what was going on? Oh, forget what your lying eyes tell you.” It’s what Biden’s employees want you to believe. That’s what you’re supposed to think.

And also forget what you know about math. One of the things the Democrats have to contend with is that oftentimes their collectivist, big-spending agenda runs into a problem with math and numbers. People see things; they say, “Hold on a second. That seems like a lot,” and so how do they handle that? How do they explain away that $4.5 trillion?

Remember, it was less than $1 trillion of Obama’s stimulus spending that led to the Tea Party movement and concerns over the debt starting right around 2009, 2010, right? A trillion-dollar stimulus package. We’re looking at 4.5 trillion in spending here, and so how do you explain that away? People like Sinema and Manchin in the Senate are saying, “That seems like a lot of money.” Pelosi explains it away by saying (impression), “Trillions? It’s actually, zero!”

PELOSI: It’s not about a dollar amount. The dollar amount, as the president has said, is zero. This bill will be paid for.

BUCK: The dollar amount, Clay? You believe it is 4.5 trillion, sir. “The dollar amount is zero.” Can you make a bigger lie out of that than that?

CLAY: No, and again, this just goes… We played yesterday Jen Psaki saying, whoever’s saying, “We think it would be really unfair if businesses raised their prices as a result of their costs going up,” which —

BUCK: (impression) “Like, totally unfair. Like, so mean.”

CLAY: The lack of basic economic knowledge in the Democratic Party, it blows my mind. And it used to not be this way that one party, the Republicans, totally understood business and the other party, the Democrats, are totally clueless. But that’s where we’ve gotten to. And so, this idea that you can take these trillions of dollars out of your pocket, out of my pocket, out of the pocket of many people listening to us right now and it’s not going to cost anything?

No, no, no. That money that you’re taking out of the private sector and bringing into the public sector is going to be distributed much less efficiently and therefore the overall national growth rate is likely, I believe, to be worse, not to mention… Again, I think we need to keep coming back to the inflation elements that are going on right now, because they keep saying, “We’re not going to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year.”

But, Buck, everyone out there who is making a salary when inflation is going up 5% a year, the inflation is the tax. When you have to pay more for milk and bread and gas — and when you look at your pocketbook and you go out to eat for dinner or you have to go buy school supplies for your kids and it costs you way more than it otherwise would.

I was in Arkansas recently, Buck, for that Texas-Arkansas game, and I went to a great barbecue place, Wright’s Barbecue, and they have the entire cost of all their product on the wall written out. And I asked what’s going on that they have these taped new prices on, and the owner said, “Well, our cost for product is higher. So what do we do? We have to charge more for our barbecue.”

BUCK: Oh, no! That’s mean, Clay, as Jen Psaki says.

CLAY: Yeah. How dare you!

BUCK: It’s mean when businesses have to actually deal with the costs because they’re just… There’s magic elves that are making and bringing all the food and doing all this. It’s not like they’re human beings.

CLAY: It’s really like it’s a money tree. Money grows on leaves.

BUCK: My local grocery store has even had to have the same thing about the increase in prices. They put up a little notice saying, “Look, sorry that the price of pork and red meat is so dramatically going up, but we’re running a business, and this is what the cost is, and we have to pay our staff.”

CLAY: We’re gonna pass on to the consumer.

BUCK: So those costs all do get passed on. But it’s also a reminder that the Democrat focus is not on… Wealth creation is not actually zero sum, right? If you look at the average American today versus where human beings were 150 years ago, you would rather — from a pure quality-of-life and wealth, true wealth perspective — be a person who is essentially on state benefits today in America than be somebody who was living a hundred, 200 years ago.

CLAY: As a rich person, even.

BUCK: And instead of focusing on allowing the American people to engage not only, of course, in the enjoyment of the fruits of their labors, but also wealth creation more broadly, the Democrat focus — the collectivist left-wing focus — is always on the redistribution of the existing pie.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: And that’s why Obama would say things, even… This is one of his things. Sometimes Obama said things where he really let the truth out more than he meant to. He was gonna raise taxes even if it hurt the economy in terms of growth because why, Clay? It was “the right thing to do.”

Punishing people and taking more from them because of political envy and the social pressure for the elites who don’t really care about their tax rate, right? They always want to raise the tax rate, and then they have an army of accountants saying, “Oh, well, my guy is not gonna pay that.”

It’s because of the pressures that are on them or the pressures they’re under to make it seem like they’re the elites in the Democrat Party are actually trying to fight for the “workin’ folks.” Just listen to Joe Biden. He says “workin’ folks” all the time.

CLAY: Yeah, and it’s just a fundamental misapprehension and misunderstanding of how business works. So when you people say, “Well, what are the consequences when you have Jen Psaki coming out and saying, “It would be really unfair if businesses raised costs on their consumers,” they don’t understand how profit works or what the basic purpose of any business is because most of them have been sucking on the teat of the federal government the whole time, which is the antithesis of a for-profit business.

If you could just turn on the money spigot and get as much money for as much as you want — which is really what Modern Monetary Theory is, which is what many Democrats have bought into, this idea that you can spend as much as you want and there are no consequences.

BUCK: Oh, no. It’s spend as much as you want, Clay, and then manage the inflation, as if government’s gonna just be, “Whoa. Let’s make that inflation go away.” It’s very hard. You look at the history of inflation in countries around the world. First of all, it can destroy not just a currency, but an entire country. It can bring the country to its knees.

It can bring a country to its knees, create real social unrest and social disorder, it’s not easy to just take it and control it because you’ve already done it. You’ve already made the inflation happen. It’s cause and effect. So MMT says, “Oh, yeah, we’ll just figure it out. We’ll figure it out.”

CLAY: And it’s going to end, I think, in a disastrous fashion. Now, maybe, maybe the Joe Manchins and the Kyrsten Sinema of the world are going to keep this from happening.