JASON: This infrastructure bill. At what point, fellow Republicans and fellow conservatives or Libertarians or whatever. But at what point do we quit accepting the premise on this? We are bankrupting the country. Now, this is one of the reasons that I do believe the left has been so, I don’t know, shall we say gleeful over covid? Dare we say that? Yes, gleeful over covid. Think of what they could do with this. They could run cover for China, for the private equity carried interest crowd and international trade, interventionism abroad. They could make certain you wear your mask and be a good little child. They could lock you down and fine the opponents.

You know, Keith Ellison here in Minnesota, was fining rodeos when people were looting stores in St. Paul and Minneapolis because, well, we can’t let those rodeo people, you know, congregate in groups larger than 10. You could run roughshod against religious liberty. You could do all of the things Democrats and liberals have been wanting to do for decades. Now you had an excuse to do them.

Oh. And spending. Yes. And spending. Think about this. When I, again, trust me. I’m not blowing my own horn here, but I’m actually proud of this. One of the committees that I really fought to get on when I was in Congress was the budget committee. Doesn’t have much power, but it gives you a 30,000-foot view of how we are spending ourselves into oblivion. I think every member ought to serve on the budget committee. Obama left us with a six-month budget in January of 2017. We did three budgets in the 115th Congress.

This is before Pelosi took over the Congress. We did three budgets, and we attacked mandatory spending finally, and they all balanced. Since Pelosi took over, they punted on the first budget. Chairman Yarmouth said, ah, we can’t agree, we’re not even gonna do a budget resolution. Well, why should they? Biden proposed $6 trillion in three months. We’ve spent $5.7 trillion, 5.7 trillion just on covid relief. Now he wants another 3 trillion for infrastructure.

We have a $29 trillion federal debt, a hundred percent of GDP. We’ve not reached that since World War II. And then we drew the debt down because we deployed, and we had a massive post-World War II recovery as capital found more productive uses in the private sector, as it always does. This is permanent spending. This isn’t wartime spending. This is permanent spending. Entitlement spending. This will kill, kill the experiment that was known as free markets in America. Just servicing the interest on the debt will amount to a trillion dollars if rates go back to 5% on the 10-year Treasury. We are killing the next generation. They can’t afford a home. They can’t afford health insurance. They can’t afford college because, they’re gouging. And now the Federal Reserve has a $9 trillion balance sheet.

That means they’ve created, out of thin air, $9 trillion by buying Treasury securities and other bonds. That money is finding its way to bid up prices for lumber, for gas, for homes, you name it. Asset bubbles dominate. So, my point, and I want to get to Rush here real quick, is just say “no” on spending. It’s over. You don’t have to negotiate with spenders. They propose 200 billion, you propose a hundred billion and think you won? No. You played their game. Here’s what Rush had to say about negotiating.

RUSH: To the phones we go back to Greg in Sloatsburg, New York. I’m glad you waited, Greg. Your turn on here. Make your big showbiz break worth it. How you doing?

CALLER: Thank you, Rush. It’s an honor. And I want to ask you a question. There’s something I don’t understand I hope you can explain. Why is it that the Democratic leadership is negotiating from such an idiotic position of asking for everything that they want and not conceding anything? Like Dianne Feinstein at the White House saying, why don’t you give us a clean DACA bill?

RUSH: Well, let me tell you. You know, this actually is a multifaceted answer. But the umbrella answer, the broad answer to your question which is, I think, “why do the Democrats offer these outlandish things that they know Trump is not gonna accept” is that basically what you’re asking?

CALLER: Exactly.

RUSH: Because they think Trump is stupid. No, no. I know it sounds like you can laugh at it. No, it can’t possibly be. You have to ask yourself, what media does Dianne Feinstein watch or read? Dick Durbin, ditto. What is their source for news and knowledge every day? I guarantee you it’s the New York Times, Washington Post, maybe DiFi reads San Francisco Chronicle. Six of one, half dozen of the other. They watch CNN, and what do they see? They see Donald Trump reported upon as a blithering idiot, as a thief, as somebody doesn’t know what he’s doing. That’s the umbrella answer.

Now, the more nuanced answer, in any negotiation, ask for more than you expect to get. Give yourself room to give away things. Give yourself some room to compromise. It’s called going in with throwaways. You have to go in with some things you’re willing to throw away so that you can appear to be compromising and flexible. So it could be, I mean, giving her the benefit of the doubt, it could be that’s what she was doing. But, see, I don’t think Dianne Feinstein is the wizard of smart that everybody in the media thinks. I think Trump, in a street sense, outsmarts everybody in that room. In addition to everybody in that room not having street smarts, they think they are 20 times smarter than Trump. The arrogance factor and the braggadocio quotient in that room, among the Democrats, is probably off the charts. So that would be my two-pronged answer to why they thought they could get away with it.

JASON: I want to update that to the infrastructure debate or negotiation. Why would you want to give Biden the victory on this? It’s not even infrastructure. We know that. We’re going broke. When the Fed buys Treasury securities, or mortgage-backed bonds, they’re putting money into an economy. The monetary base is absolutely surging. I think it’s up 30% since the outbreak of the pandemic. All of that money is being spent driving up prices, pricing young people out of their home, out of all these… used car prices are up! Used cars, which used to depreciate, are now going up. Inflation is here. And yet, “well, we want negotiation.” Why would you want negotiation? The White House does. Here’s what Jen Psaki said about that.

PSAKI: Well, the ball is in the Republicans’ court. We put forward a proposal on Friday, and our reasonable counter-proposal cut $550 billion from the president’s original proposal. The last counteroffer that came from the Republicans just came up $50 billion. So our concessions went ten times as far as theirs. So the ball is in their court. We are awaiting their counter-proposal. We would welcome that. We’re eager to engage, and even have them down here to the White House.

JASON: Well, sure you’re eager to engage. You want an infrastructure victory. You don’t care whether it’s spend on real roads or mass transit. You’d actually prefer the latter, which is not productive. Infrastructure spending must do two things, people. It must, A, increase productivity of the American worker, and their plan doesn’t. And, B, users ought to pay for it. When you have all these people driving electric cars, they get a subsidy when they buy it, and they pay no gas tax! How does that add user pay onto it? None of this is applicable to real infrastructure, which is why the Republican answer ought to be, “No. We’ll take this to the ’22 elections.”