Jenny Beth sits down with policy expert Phil Kerpen to discuss some of the many policy battles they have fought together over the years. Phil is the President of American Commitment and The Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
Jenny Beth sits down with policy expert Phil Kerpen to discuss some of the many policy battles they have fought together over the years. Phil is the President of American Commitment and The Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
www.committeetounleashprosperity.com
Twitter/X: @kerpen | @jennybethm
Phil Kerpen (00:00):
They did not in any meaningful way reduce covid outcomes and they layered a second pandemic, a manmade pandemic on top of the viral pandemic, and Dr. Atlas said that Fauci would walk into the White House Task Force meetings and say, people aren't scared enough. We need to scare them more. We got to panic them. So they were intentionally doing the exact opposite of what leaders are supposed to do in a crisis.
Narrator (00:23):
Keeping our republic is on the line and it requires Patriots with great passion, dedication, and eternal vigilance to preserve our freedoms. Jenny Beth Martin is the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. She's an author of filmmaker and one of time magazine's most influential people in the world, but the title she's most proud of is Mom to Her Boy, girl Twins. She has been at the forefront fighting to protect America's core principles for more than a decade. Welcome to the Jenny Beth Show.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:55):
Bill Kerpen is the President of American Commitment and one of the smartest policy experts I know. He's an author and a veteran of conservative politics where he is focused on healthcare and economic policy. Along with Art Laffer, Steve Forbes and Steve Moore. Phil launched the committee to unleash prosperity to fight for free markets, lower taxes and limited government. Almost every single time Tea Party Patriots action fights against big government. Phil is right there fighting with us when we've rallied on the Westlawn of the United States Capitol and in front of the United States Supreme Court. Phil has always been willing to stand beside us as we make our voices heard. Phil, thank you so much for being here with me today. The Biden administration really loves government control and one of the latest things that they're doing is trying to force us all into electric vehicles. You've been working fighting against that, haven't you?
Phil Kerpen (01:48):
Yeah, I mean, I think this is probably the biggest of the regulatory issues, the one that's going to have the biggest negative impact on the economy and on people's lives, and it's pretty astonishing. You've got all these, they've issued a few different versions of their, what amounts to a ban on gas vehicles with different phase ends, and you've got California now, which officially is going to completely ban gas powered vehicles in 2035 and 10 other states are following them. Is
Jenny Beth Martin (02:17):
The grid ready for that in California?
Phil Kerpen (02:19):
Oh, no. Within a week of when they issued that, when Governor Newsom issued we're going to a hundred percent mandate, they actually had one of their famous brownouts, brownouts and power shortage, and they actually issued an advisory saying, do not charge your vehicle. We've got a grid advisor. So they didn't see any connection between the two, which I found kind of amazing, but that's a Biden policy as much as they say, oh, it's the state. No, Biden issued a waiver that allowed California to issue that because it's interstate commerce, the auto market, it's federal jurisdiction. They can only do that because Biden gave them a waiver and then of course he issued his national standards, which are basically the exact same mandate schedule as California, but just two years later. So if you follow his stand, he'd get to a full ban by 2037, and he's got it in his mandates. The national mandates through EPA that Biden issued, he's got a mandate that we go down to only 64% of vehicles being gas powered internal combustion vehicles by 2027 model year. Then he goes all the way down to 30% for 2032 model year, and that's the last year he shows. But if you look at it, it's the exact same phase in that they have in California that takes you down to zero to a total ban on internal combustion
Jenny Beth Martin (03:36):
Vehicles. What is the percentage Right now
Phil Kerpen (03:38):
It's about 85%,
Jenny Beth Martin (03:40):
So 85 to 64 in
Phil Kerpen (03:44):
Two years basically. So here's what's going to happen even in the early years of this, even in the early years of this because they're limiting by regulation. The number of internal combustion vehicles that can be sold as a percentage, they're going to become much harder to find, and if you do find 'em, they're going to be very expensive because there won't be an internal combustion vehicle available for everyone who wants one. So some people are going to have to go without, and so the people who can get it, they're going to be competing with everyone else who wants one. So prices are going to go haywire.
Jenny Beth Martin (04:14):
Well, it's either that or this could also affect it. It could be a little bit different, although it may not work. I don't think either way it works financially. They could wind up just producing even more so they produce the same number of gas powered cars and then they just have to produce on top of it to meet their percentages. Because people aren't buying these electric vehicles. They're sitting on the lot, aren't they? Well, I mean, I know people are buying them, but they're not buying them the same way they bought gas
Phil Kerpen (04:45):
Powered ones. Well, they were increasing very quickly, and this often happens with the new technology that fits some use cases, but not all is it can increase very rapidly. And then what the advocates of this sort of what they call this transition have said is, well, if it doubled in a couple of years, it'll keep doubling, but that's really not what happens. And in fact, we've now seen Tesla actually posted a negative quarter year on year. Their sales went down for the most recent quarter. That was the first time that's happened to them in I think three or four years. And so most of the people who want an electric vehicle have one at this point. And so I don't think you're going to keep seeing this rapid growth. And in fact, dealers are saying the exact same thing that you're saying. They're saying, we've got EVs piling up on our lots.
Phil Kerpen (05:30):
Those are not the vehicles that people want. We're having difficulty even with the current level of federal requirements. And so they basically begged the Biden administration to back off and the proposed mandates were a little bit worse than the final, but they really didn't change that much. And so they're still trying to really force people out of gas cars and we're going to have a Senate vote on this in the month of April. It was promised Schumer that in order to get Republicans to let the most recent government funding bill go through, Republicans had been saying, this is the amendment we have to have is an amendment to ban the EV mandates and being smart, Schumer said no, because he doesn't want to put it on a bill that the president has to sign. If it does get through the Senate, he wants it to be on something that could be vetoed.
Phil Kerpen (06:20):
So they ended up kind of taking it towards the midnight. This was on a Saturday a couple weeks ago, and then the deal that was made was we'll allow the vote when we come back in April, but it'll be a standalone vote, and so we are going to have a vote. It's going to be a 60 vote vote. I don't believe we'll get to 60 votes, but it'll be very interesting nonetheless to see every Senate Democrat put on the record on whether they want to stop these mandates or not, especially the ones who are in cycle. And so I'm going to be watching very closely a lot of these Democrats. Good.
Jenny Beth Martin (06:50):
I worked for a paper company when I first got out of college and I worked at a paper mill and the state where the paper mill was required a certain amount of air pollution coming out of the paper machine. These are massive. It's a factory paper. Machine is a factory. So coming out of this factory, you could only have a certain amount of pollution per paper machine. So the wound up in order to comply with the regulation, adding another paper machine, increasing the total output of air pollution, essentially it's air pollution, the output from the factory, so that per machine on average, it was lower. And I think that that's why I was like, you never know. They could wind up still making the same number of cars, but you wind up with a whole bunch of cars, nobody that people don't want. Sometimes regulations have unintended consequences that you can't even imagine until the market forces begin working.
Phil Kerpen (07:54):
Yeah, look, I mean I think it's very dangerous to have government decide what you can and can't buy and what can and can't be produced. One of the
Jenny Beth Martin (08:02):
Lessons we've been fighting that since we met,
Phil Kerpen (08:04):
Yeah, mean, look, one of the lessons of the 20th century that central economic planning doesn't work. I mean, you can't foresee what people's tastes and preferences are going to be as a bureaucrat sitting somewhere making these numbers up in a spreadsheet because the way markets work is they aggregate information across a million preferences of a million different people. And you can't replace that mechanism with, there's a reason there were empty shelves in the stores in the Soviet Union. I mean, you can't plan these things. It doesn't work. And it's very unfortunate that they haven't learned this lesson. And even more recently on the specific issue of electric vehicles, that there was a recent pictorial that showed these vast fields in China of subsidized electric vehicles that were produced that then had no buyers. And they're just sitting in fields now with vegetation growing up around them. And it seems like we look at that and say, oh, we want to do that too, which is a very strange thing to do when you're looking at
Jenny Beth Martin (08:59):
That. Well, and if you care about the environment that does not seem good for the environment to have a whole bunch of electric vehicles just sitting around with vegetation growing over
Phil Kerpen (09:08):
It. The green groups, the environmental movement and sort of the environmental left has actually sacrificed everything that they used to care about to their obsession with climate. And so they went from save the whales to, Hey, we don't care how many whales are killed by our offshore wind projects because all that matters is climate. And similarly, their obsession with electric vehicles I think is very bad environmentally if you care about anything other than climate. There was just an article in the Hill newspaper actually yesterday that up to one third of the great apes in Africa may be killed by EV battery input production there. So I mean they went from the people who love nature to the people who don't care if all the whales and apes die if they get the green technology they want,
Jenny Beth Martin (09:57):
Which is exactly opposite of what we heard growing up with some of the slogans that we heard. You and I have been fighting government control since I first met you. The first issues we were engaged in were fighting Obamacare and the government takeover of healthcare.
Phil Kerpen (10:14):
Yeah, it's interesting. The President Biden was actually tweeting just yesterday about his great success in signing millions and more people up for Obamacare. And if you look at what's happened in the last few years, Biden believe it or not, made Obamacare a lot worse from the taxpayer perspective, which is kind of hard to do. How did he do that? What he did is as part of his covid response, what he did is he changed the premiums that lower income people pay for Obamacare from about 2% of their income to zero. And so taxpayers now pay full freight a hundred percent of the cost for people who are under 150% of the federal poverty level for their Obamacare, and that's over $20,000 per enrollee. So taxpayers are paying over $20,000 per enrollee for people to get free Obamacare, and millions of people who signed up were not previously willing to pay 2% of their income.
Phil Kerpen (11:09):
So they value these plans so little. They think they're so not valuable to them that they weren't willing to pay 20, $25 a month for them, but they'll take it for free if they're signed up. And now the insurance company gets $20,000 plus from taxpayers. And so the insurance companies of course love this and they're doing a big lobbying push to extend it, but it's kind of a pathetic situation and the president's bragging about it. And of course, because they style the subsidies as tax credits, even though no one ever gets a tax credit, it goes straight to the insurance company. He can say, oh, I cut taxes. This is the way they twist language also. And so Obamacare has not delivered on any of the promises that were made? No, any of them. Essentially what it became at the end of the day was just a massive expansion of taxpayer funded healthcare for huge number of people were put on the Medicaid roles.
Phil Kerpen (12:08):
Medicaid, the data is not even clear that Medicaid enrollment improves health outcomes. There's some studies that show it how poor the quality of care is in Medicaid, and most high quality providers try not to take it because of the headaches of dealing with it and the low reimbursement rates. I've been very disturbed at about how our healthcare system overall performed. The last few years we had all of these articles about how overwhelmed the hospitals were during Covid, and then you look at the utilization statistics and they were actually record lows in every metric. And so you had people not getting healthcare, people dying and not getting healthcare, and the hospitals changed their business model to just farming subsidies, just getting government money. That's the business they're in now.
Jenny Beth Martin (12:57):
And a hospital would be overwhelmed if you shut down everything but one wing of the hospital and you have five employees. I know they a little bit of an exaggeration.
Phil Kerpen (13:06):
They had mass layoffs, they had mass layoffs on a sector-wide basis. If you look at what happened in healthcare, employment plunged dramatically. They were laying people off. And by the way, a lot of these hospitals
Jenny Beth Martin (13:15):
In the middle of a pandemic, they're laying off healthcare
Phil Kerpen (13:18):
Workers. What a lot of these hospitals did is they laid off a lot of their nurses and then when utilization started to come up, they had to hire travel nurses. They spent much more, I mean, just a lot of irrational decisions were made. And one of the really bad trends in American healthcare is this consolidation trend. Everything's part of a giant hospital system now. You got a lot of towns where basically if you see any kind of healthcare provider, it's going to be part of one system, maybe two systems, and these systems are very bureaucratic. And so the doctors have to go along with whatever the bosses on hire are telling 'em to do, which I think has been very bad for the practice of medicine was very bad during Covid in particular where we got almost everything wrong and sort of the official narratives.
Phil Kerpen (14:04):
And so people who are employees of these big systems weren't going to speak out about any of that, and they've got the clout to have huge political influence. And a lot of places, they're the biggest employer in the town or maybe even the biggest employer in the congressional district. And so they are able to lobby for things like those supersized Obamacare subsidies and big bailout payments. And I actually think that there is not enough ambition on the right about healthcare. I think that there is an appetite among our base for basically blowing up all of it, not just taking on the big bureaucracy and government, but the hospitals, the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies it say we're going to, I don't think any healthcare reform could be radical enough. I think we need to be thinking much bigger and saying, we're going to take on these entrenched interests that are driving this consolidation and this corruption and get back to independent physicians and paying them out of your own pocket and getting that we should be, our guys should be thinking very big. And I think there would be an appetite for it. And I fear that we could have Republicans win the House, Senate and White House again like they did in 2016 and then not have a plan, not have anything on healthcare.
Jenny Beth Martin (15:23):
I think that you have that your fears founded in reality because we've just seen exactly in 2017, there was no plan.
Phil Kerpen (15:33):
I'll never forget the quote that former senator Pat Toomey had when he was asked, why don't you guys have a healthcare plan? And he said, we thought Hillary was going to
Jenny Beth Martin (15:44):
It. It's crazy. It's just crazy. And one of the things I've been sounding from the rooftop is, you better be ready. Because if we are fortunate enough that the American people vote for Trump to be back in the White House, and for Republicans to control the House and the Senate from inaugural day until early voting starts in 2026, it's 20 months. That is it. 20 months, it's not very much time at all. And if you're not ready to start passing, you've got to have the legislation ready now so you can bring it up, bring it through committee, do whatever amendments need to be done, the debate on it and get it passed and signed into law. You can't depend on the time after midterms. You have no idea what's going to happen after midterm elections.
Phil Kerpen (16:29):
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, look, they've got a few things that they have to do. We can make the list, but you're right. I mean, they've got to have this stuff lined up and ready to go and no excuses. You see what Democrats do when they get in, they just push through one thing after another. And even if it caused them to lose politically, they say, okay, it was worth it. We got what we wanted. And what tends to happen when Republicans win is, oh, I'm not sure we should do that. People are going to be angry about it. And then they end up, and even on the administrative side, even the things that the president can do unilaterally, it's going to be a heavy lift to get things done. And there are landmines everywhere. I mean, the Biden administration just finalized a regulation out of OPM to prevent the next president from firing people who undermine his policy agenda. So now they've got an extra layer of deep state protection. So if Trump does come in, he's got to undo that rule first before he can actually fire anyone. And so they know what they're doing, they're trying to slow things down. We need to be very aggressive and move very quickly. I think to the extent we can.
Jenny Beth Martin (17:34):
Absolutely. When we're talking about healthcare, one of the things that drives me crazy when I go to a doctor is that they'll just look at a computer screen and they're asking you questions on the screen and you're basically just an algorithm. They just want to know where you fall. And then they read the screen to tell you what's wrong rather than looking at the patient, touching the patient, feeling the patient and having a real doctor patient relationship. It's some computer program that decides whatever it may or may not be, it's just, and perhaps that can help catch things. So I'm not diminishing the fact that sometimes answering all those questions may give warning systems to what else might be going on with a patient. But you can't just look at the screen and ignore a gaping gash on their arm or something and not treat it. And sometimes I think they just, it's all bureaucratic and there's no customer service, there's no doctor patient relationship. They don't care about the cost. You said people pay $20,000 for health insurance and then they still have to meet a deductible and then they still have to pay for whatever comes after that. It would be cheaper just to pay a doctor when you see a doctor.
Phil Kerpen (18:51):
Yeah. I think that this is one of the interesting trends that's going on right now is we are seeing a big growth of direct primary care where doctors say, I'm not doing insurance. I'm not doing any of the government programs. You'll pay a fee to me and I'll treat you when you need it. And a lot of people are doing that even though their insurance doesn't cover it and they have insured, they're just paying extra because they want to have that access and they want to cut that bureaucracy out. And so one of the things I would like to see is an expansion of health savings accounts and the eligibility of those kinds of arrangements so that people can use pre-tax dollars for that. And I don't think we're ever going to get away from massive amounts of tax dollars going into healthcare. I think that's out of the bag, but I think we could get so much more value for it if it were structured in a way where people control the dollars and they have choices instead of the money going directly to insurance companies, which is what we have now.
Jenny Beth Martin (19:43):
And when it goes directly to insurance companies, it cuts a customer out. The insurance companies become the customer to the government rather than the people who are paying for the services.
Phil Kerpen (19:55):
Well, and they keep raising, they can keep raising their prices and almost nobody sees it. You pay it on your taxes.
Jenny Beth Martin (20:03):
It's awful. Covid, you and I were some of the first people out going, we can't shut down the government. We can't do all of these things. We've got to reopen the government. We have to reopen schools. What do you think? Four years looking back?
Phil Kerpen (20:17):
Yeah. I actually recently did a pretty comprehensive exercise on this paper that I wrote with Dr. Scott Atlas, Casey Mulligan and Steve Hanky. So I had three big time heavy hitters from Stanford, university of Chicago and Johns Hopkins, and I was kind of like the earned boy who put all their great stuff together. So that was a pretty great honor being part of that. And if people want to see it, it's on committee unleash prosperity.com. That's the other group that I work with. And we went through all of the facts and the data, not about the models or the theories of what would happen, but what actually happened. Let's go check. Let's see who was right. Let's see what actually happened. And the evidence is pretty overwhelming that even setting aside the fact, see, I would've been against the lockdowns and the mandates even if they worked for stopping Covid because to me they violate basic principles of civil government, civil liberties and choice and constitution. So I mean, set aside for a second, the fact I would've been against them anyway, but just on their own terms in terms of accomplishing what they were supposed to do, they felt spectacularly. They did not in any meaningful way reduce covid outcomes. And they layered a second pandemic, a manmade pandemic on top of the viral pandemic. And that manmade pandemic was one of fear and panic and lockdown and societal disruption. And that pandemic has killed about 100,000 people per year now for four years. So we've killed about 400,000 people from our pandemic response.
Phil Kerpen (21:53):
It's not like we did that, but we saved a million people from Covid at the same time. We had basically no effect on Covid while we layered that manmade pandemic on top. And that's really, really tragic. I mean, I don't even know. And it was foreseeable, I think, and if you want to say that maybe the lockdowns did save some lives, the best empirical evidence is that it's maybe something around 10,000 lives. So you maybe saved 10,000 lives and you killed 400,000 people. So
Jenny Beth Martin (22:22):
That's 390,000 that you're,
Phil Kerpen (22:25):
It's not close. It's not a close call. It was overwhelmingly evidence that this response was a disaster. And we even have some confessions now. I mean Francis Collins, who was the NIH director, there's this video of him that's been circulating where he says something along the lines of, yeah, we assigned an infinite value to preventing a covid death and a zero value to any of the harm that we're, and you say, how did you, and then he said That was a mistake. You think So it's like you kind of should have been obvious that that's not the correct decision F. And in fact, if you look at the planning documents, the pandemic planning documents before this happened, all of them stressed keep society well functioning, calm people down if they're panicked, don't stoke panic. And Dr. Atlas said that Fauci would walk into the White House Task Force meetings and say, people aren't scared enough. We need to scare them more. We got to panic them more. So they were intentionally doing the exact opposite of what leaders are supposed to do in a crisis, which has calmed things down.
Jenny Beth Martin (23:26):
Even had a pandemic response prior to 2020 which they had modified. They started to put it out and they modified it and they made sure that the response was to keep schools open. You're supposed to keep schools open even in the middle of a pandemic unless children are
Phil Kerpen (23:46):
Actually dying. I suppose I remember the original CDC schools document. I shared it all the time. I thought it was good. I thought it was great. And it was kind like, if you need to close for a couple of days for deep cleaning or if there's a huge outbreak in the school, that might make sense. And then it was basically, here's why prolonged closures are bad and had all these reasons. It's like the educational harms, but also they're going to be cared for maybe by a grandparent or you're, you're going to have other less structured settings. We have more transmission. It kind of like all the arguments that we made, they originally, they originally said it wasn't like some secret unknown thing. They originally said it. And I'll never forget the sequence of events in that summer of 2020 because I actually thought we were going to be in a good place for schools in the fall because I remember the American Academy of Pediatrics came out with the original version of their guidance, which was basically like school's the most important thing for kids.
Phil Kerpen (24:45):
They need to be in school. It's not a high risk setting. Don't worry about masks in elementary where they probably can't wear them anyway. Don't worry about six feet distancing. It's better to be less than that than to have kids sitting at home. It was a really good document. It was. And so I'm sharing that every, Hey, 60,000 pediatricians, the official that's, and then Trump came out and said the same thing. And within a week, the American Academy of Pediatrics did 180 degree reversal in a literal joint statement with the teacher's unions. They were like, the pediatricians and the educators think schools should be closed if there's covid around. And I was like, and that's when I realized this is going to be exploited politically. And then Biden started running TV ads. Your kids are not safe in schools because of Donald Trump. And then even when Biden came into office, remember, and there was this expectation that, okay, Biden's in now they're going to call off the dogs and the schools are all going to open again. They didn't do that. Instead they ran a play where basically they said, we're going to shake down taxpayers for another 150 billion of K 12 and we're not going to open the schools unless taxpayers pay up. And they basically held kids that were in the blue areas that actually were listening to this guidance. They held them hostage for another couple of months into 2021 until they could shake down taxpayers.
Jenny Beth Martin (26:05):
Some kids lost that entire school year and the beginning of 2020, the 20 21, 20 22 school year was not completely normal
Phil Kerpen (26:14):
Even for, there were a few places that even had closures. Even that next year.
Jenny Beth Martin (26:19):
You and I were at the White House together in July in 2020 with the American Academy of Pediatrics and Teachers and others.
Phil Kerpen (26:29):
The crazy thing about that, the White House Schools forum is I brought my daughter to that
Jenny Beth Martin (26:35):
And I brought my
Phil Kerpen (26:35):
Kids. And so she's at this White House thing and all day long she listens to a hundred experts school, the kids should be in school, the most important. And then two days after that, we got a thing from our principal that was like, we're changing from five days to two days, you two days week. And so she basically, that whole, they never went full-time that year. They were two days and then they were eventually four days, but they never got to five. And so she's like, I just heard all this. Even I just went the thing with every single expert. So I mean, I don't even know how she dealt with that, but I thought it was absurd political exploitation of basically 75 million school children basically by the teacher's unions and by the Democrats who saw this as a campaign issue. And it also was a really interesting example of the deep state problem because you could watch Trump speak and you could watch Robert Redfield speak and they say All the schools should be open. It's very important. The harms are going to be massive if they're not. And then you go on the CDC DC website and it was like, here are all the reasons schools should be closed. And you're like, this guy doesn't control his own agency. I mean, it was clear that Redfield did not have control of his own agency.
Jenny Beth Martin (27:57):
No, he didn't. Well, and that's part of why they're passing the new regulations right now to prevent firing government employees because they don't want someone like Redford to come in and actually have control of them. And we all learn so much about what happened with the bureaucracy during covid
Phil Kerpen (28:19):
That the CDC is an especially problematic one because see, normally agency rules and major guidances go through a review process at the White House through OMB, but CDC doesn't submit any of their stuff to the White House because it's all supposedly non-binding guidance. They say, we didn't do any rulemaking, we're just suggesting. But as we all saw all of your local authorities and all of your states, they said, Hey, we've got to do what the CDC says. And so they effectively were dictating to the whole country, and it was bureaucrats that the political appointees couldn't control and they weren't submitting their stuff to the White House. They just post it.
Jenny Beth Martin (29:00):
There were above checks and balances everywhere.
Phil Kerpen (29:04):
It was a massive problem. And at the same time, on the NIH side, you've got the guys Collins and Fauci who control 45 billion of taxpayer funding of all the grant money that funds almost all the signs that goes on in this country. They're calling the shots on the lockdown narrative and assigning an infinite value to a covid life and a zero value to any other harm. And who's going to disagree with that when they control all the grant money? And so that's another huge problem that we have where we have sort of publicly facing policy making people who control the flow of the grant money that the people who give out the, first of all, I think there's way too much Grant, let's
Jenny Beth Martin (29:43):
Talk about the grant money for a second. Let's talk about spending, keep going, and then we're going to go back to that.
Phil Kerpen (29:47):
Yeah, first of all, there should be a lot less of that and it should be decentralized. Instead of having 10 universities that get 800 million each, it should be much less centralized than that and there should be much less of it, period. But the people who are in charge of giving out grants should not be famous people who are on TV taking policy positions. It should be people nobody ever heard of who are deciding on the merits.
Jenny Beth Martin (30:10):
Right. And where does the FDA fall? Is it separate from the NIH
Phil Kerpen (30:16):
As well? Yeah, it's sort of its own. All of these agencies are technically under HS, but it's its own entity
Jenny Beth Martin (30:26):
FDA and the F FDA A gives out grants as well, right? Or
Phil Kerpen (30:31):
It wind up taking money, I dunno, don't know if they do grant money. But the FDA, we've got a big problem in two ways. To me, the biggest evidence of how corrupted FDA is was when they paused the Johnson and Johnson vaccine for a week and they said, oh no, this causes blood clots. We need to pause it for a week. And then you pulled up the data on blood clots and it was basically the same rate for all the vaccines. They're like, why are they choosing this? And it was basically because they perceived it as a republican company and Woody Johnson was a Trump ambassador, and it was like, we can stick it to these guys because we can. I think maybe there was some merit to it perhaps, but I think that's basically what they were doing. And you've got a situation at the FDA where bringing a new drug to market can cost like a billion dollars to do all of the studies and to go through their whole regulatory process.
Phil Kerpen (31:33):
And there are only a handful of companies that can do it, that can navigate the bureaucratic maze over there. And so it's got to be Pfizer, right? You've got to be one of the companies that actually knows how to navigate that process. And the FDA became completely politicized under Biden. They approved boosters that own the head of their vaccine division said, this shouldn't be approved. We don't have the data for it. She ended up resigning in, she ended up resigning actually their top two vaccine officials resigned based on White House interference, pushing boosters through. And it was like not even a two day, no one cared. I'm like, if something like this happened in Republican administration, it would've been like the scandal of all time. And they just did it. And basically no one cared. I mean, I would like to see, I think that if you can warp speed this, you can warp speed everything. I'd like to see that bureaucracy cut dramatically. I think that we've got to have, instead of having a billion dollars worth of crazy testing and all this kind of stuff, just do one study, do it well, be totally honest about what it shows, and then let people decide if they want things or not.
Phil Kerpen (32:54):
You don't have to have these massive bureaucracies that only a few companies can navigate. And then at the end of the day, the decisions are made politically anyway by someone dictating from the White House. So what was the point?
Jenny Beth Martin (33:05):
And we know they were political because we have evidence of it, but even the six foot rule or even masking
Phil Kerpen (33:13):
Things, well, Fauci admitted that the six foot rule was based on nothing mean. And the whole rest of the world was going with one meter, which is half of it's like three feet. So you're like, did somebody just double it? But for fun, I mean, why was the US twice what the other countries were?
Jenny Beth Martin (33:32):
And in my kid's school they did open, but they did one of the, there's so many dumb things. I started to see one of the dumbest, and I had to just correct it. So many dumb things that people did. They would say, oh, someone tested positive. You tested positive. Then they'd get a ruler out and measure whether the child had sat near the person or not. And my daughter wound up missing her birthday at school, her senior year of high school because she was within, she was five feet instead of six. And it was all for nothing. It a lie. It was a
Phil Kerpen (34:06):
Lie. Do you know what percentage of kids got covid? A hundred percent. Yeah, they all did. It was the idea that you were ever going to prevent that from happening or should have even tried to,
Jenny Beth Martin (34:15):
And kids were the barrier. They helped.
Phil Kerpen (34:18):
Well, that's where transmission chains tended to terminate because adults infected kids very easily. It was difficult for kids to infect adults, although kids could infect other kids and
Jenny Beth Martin (34:28):
They weren't dying from harm from it. They weren't
Phil Kerpen (34:29):
Dying from it. There was essentially no harm
Jenny Beth Martin (34:31):
From that. And that's part of how virus,
Phil Kerpen (34:32):
We have that evidence very early. We had that evidence from Europe in April, 2020.
Jenny Beth Martin (34:36):
Yes.
Phil Kerpen (34:37):
Yes. So I think it was crazy what they did. And by the way, almost all the transmission was aerosol, which means the distance didn't really matter at all. If you were in the same room, you might've breathed it in. So that was a whole crazy thing. It ended up being based on nothing.
Jenny Beth Martin (34:53):
I could just, my hands see him bawling them up and fist because they just get so upset. When I think about
Phil Kerpen (35:00):
You want to get even crazier, there was, there's a crazy zero covid columnist for the Guardian newspaper in the uk, Debbie Shridhar, who wrote in her column the other day that she and other like-minded experts personally briefed President Biden at the recommendation of Anthony Blinken. And they told him, we need to lock down harder and faster next time. That's the lesson.
Jenny Beth Martin (35:24):
That is a worse lesson. That's a wrong lesson. Leave everything open is
Phil Kerpen (35:28):
A lesson other than New Zealand, which is an island that was actually able to wall itself off from the rest of the world, which no other country could actually do even if we wanted to. The country in the world other than New Zealand with the lowest all cause excess death in the pandemic period was Sweden.
Jenny Beth Martin (35:43):
And they were the
Phil Kerpen (35:44):
Most open, no lockdown, no school closures. What they did is they gave people the best information they had and they let them make their own decisions. And by the way, social contact went down a lot in Sweden. They didn't do it with any mandates or lockdowns or orders. They just did it with telling people what's happening and people deciding what to do,
Jenny Beth Martin (36:00):
Acting in their own self-interest at that point, at the event, at the White House, you know how you were talking about what happened with the American Academy of Pediatrics, the head of it or the doctor who's in charge of it, I don't remember her name. I went up to her, she was there and I said, really appreciate this guidance. Thank you so much. And she said, I couldn't believe how much hate we got from it. I've had so many horrible calls and emails. And then they went and changed it and that they didn't know what to do. They did not know how to respond because they're doctors who are not normally in the political environment, like the rough and tumble of it that you and I wind up being in. And they caved. They caved to the pressure and I lost so much respect for them. And almost all pediatricians, I lost respect for,
Phil Kerpen (37:00):
Yeah, there was a study, there was a study, I dunno, maybe eight or 10 years ago now, that looked at Democrat versus Republican among doctors by specialty. And the ones that were the most Democrat all the way at the bottom of the list, they were like 90% plus Democrat. It was like infectious disease doctors and pediatricians.
Jenny Beth Martin (37:24):
It doesn't surprise
Phil Kerpen (37:24):
Me. The other end of the scale were surgeons who were actually majority Republicans. So I thought that was interesting people actually doing stuff,
Jenny Beth Martin (37:31):
And they have to be the ones who are willing to take the risk and to respect the doctor patient relationship because one size doesn't actually fit all government spending grants. The government's just spending way too much money.
Phil Kerpen (37:49):
We had what should be an object lesson, right? Because during Covid, the government spent about $6 trillion above normal just on extra emergency covid response. It's styled that way, at least stuff. And about 90% of that was financed by Federal Reserve treasury purchases. And of course we saw a huge bout of inflation as a result of that. So I think people should be able to connect the dots in a way much more than they usually can, where's spending sort of over time, maybe gradually as an inflation effect. But this was huge burst of spending, huge burst of inflation, direct line connection and what the Fed was doing. It should sort of obvious to everyone. So you would think, Hey, maybe this time we will learn our lesson and we'll bring spending back down to the pre covid line. And of course we didn't. And if we were at pre covid spending levels, we would've a surplus right now based on the revenues that we have.
Phil Kerpen (38:39):
And of course, we didn't go back to pre covid spending. In fact, we didn't even go back to the projected baseline that we went to a new baseline. It's much higher than where we were before because this is sort of one of the stories of history. Usually it's a war this time it was a pandemic and a botched response. But what happens is you have a crisis and you have a ratchet up in government spending and then it comes down some, but never. It's still much higher than it was before. Not just spending but power also intrusiveness authority. And so that's what's happened. I mean in the last fiscal year that just ended though 2023 federal spending was a trillion dollars higher than it was in the last Trump baseline. So even after Covid what we thought it was going to be, it's a trillion dollars more than that in one year.
Phil Kerpen (39:23):
You look at the 10 year and it's more than $6 trillion more. So we've got sort of from just the increase in spending under Biden is like doing the Covid thing all over again in terms of the increase in spending. And so it's over 10 years, not over two years. But why wouldn't it be expected to have the same inflation effect just not all at once? Maybe not as obviously, but I think we're likely to have chronic inflation problems. I don't think we're going back to 2% inflation like they say we are. I think we're more likely to be around three or 4% for the next few years. And if we don't do anything to get federal spending under control, we could chronically be at six, seven, 8% inflation within the next 15 to 20 years because we've got baby boomers that are aging out and we haven't reformed those programs. And now we've got much more interest expense than we did before. And so the federal budget outlook is not good. And I don't think they're going to do huge tax hikes. I wouldn't want them to because terrible for the economy also. So if you can't get spending under control and you're not going to do huge tax hikes, you end up with inflation. There's no free lunch.
Jenny Beth Martin (40:30):
Right? It's something my parents taught me from a very early age, but I think that a lot of people have forgotten that lesson. Phil, if people want to get involved and learn more about what you're doing, I think everyone should sign up for your email list and they should pay attention to you. You understand these issues. You understand the way Congress works, you know how to look for fulcrums so we can make a difference with legislation. So we have leverage to make a difference. And I met you when we were fighting Obamacare for the very first time, and every time there's an expansion of government power, I can look to my left and right and I know you're almost always going to be there fighting it.
Phil Kerpen (41:15):
Yeah, I think we end up in a lot of the same places because we both try to focus on whatever the biggest threat is at a given time to our freedom and our prosperity. And there are a lot of them. So we work wide variety of issues. Unlike some groups, they get to focus on one issue area, but I think it's really important to get people focused on the big things and the big things where they might be able to make a difference. And so that is what we try to do. And if people want to follow, I'll give you a few different websites. American commitment.org is my main website, the organization that I run, I also work with a group called Committee Unleash Prosperity, and we do a daily newsletter that goes out under Steve Moore's name. So I would say go to both of those sites and sign up american commitment.org. C committed unleash prosperity.com. And I'm also an ex addict. I'm on there all the time, so if you want my up to the second thoughts about this stuff, but also baseball and whatever else you can follow me on there. It's my last name, Kerpen.
Jenny Beth Martin (42:13):
Very good. Well, thank you so much for being with me. We'll make sure that we put all of your links and your ex ID in the comments for the podcast as well, or in the description for the podcast as well.
Phil Kerpen (42:23):
Great. Thank you so much for having me.
Narrator (42:25):
The Jenny Beth Show is hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, produced by Kevin Mohan and directed by Luke Livingston. The Jenny Beth Show is a production of Tea Party Patriots action. For more information, visit tea party patriots.org.
Jenny Beth Martin (42:44):
If you like this episode, let me know by hitting the light button or leaving a comment or a five star review. And if you want to be the first to know every time we drop a new episode, be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications for whichever platform you're listening on. If you do these simple things, it will help the podcast grow, and I'd really appreciate it. Thank you so much.