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TERMS OF USE | PRIVACY POLICY

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Glenn's Show Prep

Glenn talks to John Lott

February 20, 2013
Wilson

Writer

This morning on radio, Glenn spoke to author, economist and political commentator John Lott. His latest book, At the Brink, examines what the current administration is doing and what this government is doing to push us over the cliff. Lott will also be on The Glenn Beck Program tonight at 5pm ET on TheBlaze TV. Start a 14 day free trial to watch.

GLENN: John Lott is one of my favorite thinkers, especially when it comes to ‑‑ well, when it comes to facts and figures, you know, he's probably best known for his work on guns, guns by the numbers. I think his name is ‑‑ the name of his book is More Guns, Less Crime, and it is the ‑‑ it is the standard bearer, I think, for that kind of stat, and you won't read that anyplace else. Well, he has turned his attention now to what this administration is doing and what this government is doing to push us over the brink. That's the name of his new book called At The Brink. Will the man who won't be named on this program without a $20 fine, will "that guy" push us over the edge is the subtitle and John is with us now. Hi, John, how are you?

LOTT: Great to talk to you. Thank you very much for having me on.

GLENN: You bet. You're taking this on, and I wonder if we can ever come back from this because I look at the facts that you have in this. I just look at the things when you talk about the stimulus and how the stimulus is going to go down in history as the most expensive economic failure in all of history. You want to make that point first before I ask you the question on it?

LOTT: Well, I think there are some things that we can come back from and other things I don't think we're going to be able to completely. The economy's one thing. I think we're always going to be poorer than we otherwise would have been as a result of this policy. I mean, we've had the biggest increase in government spending and inflation‑adjusted terms that we've ever had in our nation's history, even bigger than the increase, even accounting for inflation, than we had during World War II.

GLENN: That's amazing.

LOTT: But the only thing that we've gotten out of that is a massive increase in debt, a debt that for a family of four now, publicly held debt is worth $200,000 per family. And we have incredibly slow growth. And those things aren't unrelated. I mean, the president keeps on saying that we can't cut spending at all, not even the growth rate, or we're going to somehow hurt the economy. And the exact opposite's true. You look around the world; those countries that have followed his policy, his Keynesian policy of increased spending and increased deficits ‑‑

GLENN: Lose.

LOTT: ‑‑ those are the countries that are hurting now those are the countries that have slow growth and bad employment growth.

GLENN: So where I want to go here are things like his stimulus and basically his policies is we're not going to be able to turn it around because in World War II we at the end had factories. We had hard goods that turned ‑‑ we could turn those things that we were building for planes and ships and everything else, we could turn those around and we had an engine to now start to build the best cars in the world and the best refrigerators in the world where at the end of this one we got nothing.

LOTT: Well, we got government and we have a lot of production that wouldn't exist without subsidies. You have all these green jobs that are out there and there's a reason why they don't exist without these subsidies. If you took away the subsidies, they would disappear because their costs are much greater than the benefits. They make us poorer. When you have a gallon of ethanol that cost more than twice a gallon of gasoline and produces less energy, it's almost as if you're just throwing away, you know, $100 a barrel that you, you know, that's just gone. You might as well just burn it up.

GLENN: So you ‑‑

LOTT: We're poorer by that amount.

GLENN: You talk about healthcare as another big problem, and I am stunned at the number of people who are just beginning to figure ‑‑ people I think are really smart are just beginning to figure out, "Wow, there's a real problem here." How long before the effects of universal healthcare really kick in and so everybody knows it?

LOTT: Well, some effects have kicked in. Over the last year, over the last 12 months the cost of health insurance premiums have gone up by 14.3%. Hardly the type of price control that the president was promising with his packages. But the real damaging stuff's going to go into effect this coming January. I mean, there's a reason why the president had the presidential election before the main bulk of these healthcare regulations went in effect. People I think are going to be shocked not just by, there's going to be additional big increases in the prices of health insurance but I think within a relatively short few years, the health insurance markets just for private insurance is going to disintegrate.

GLENN: Okay.

LOTT: And the reason why that's the case is that you have two conflicting rules. We are supposed to ‑‑ he's supposed to try to make everybody get insurance with these fines or penalties but at the same time he's said that there's no regulations that insurance companies can have on preexisting conditions. The problem is that the fines and penalties are small relative to the cost of getting insurance. The cost of insurance for a family of four will be about ‑‑ is about $14,000. It's going to go up probably to about $17,000 or $18,000 over the next few years under Obama's plan. And you'll be paying a few thousand dollars in penalties.

GLENN: Right.

LOTT: It will make ‑‑ what will happen is it will be like running car insurance where you can wait until you get into a car accident and then buy insurance.

GLENN: Right.

LOTT: There's going to be good people out there who are going to feel bad gaming the system and they will wait. But at some point even they are going to feel like suckers because as more and more people wait until they get sick before they buy insurance, you know, they'll pay the few thousand‑dollar fine that they have to pay there rather than have to pay, you know, the 15, 16, $17,000 that they have to pay for their family, insurance premiums are going to soar.

GLENN: Well ‑‑

LOTT: Because you can imagine how high car insurance would be if everybody waited until they had an accident before they bought it.

GLENN: Right. It would be the price of the car or the damage.

LOTT: Exactly.

GLENN: And that defeats the whole problem ‑‑ or the solution.

The other side of that is companies. And we're seeing companies already doing this. Companies are cutting hours. They're cutting their lower, you know, paid people they have to find that money for their healthcare some place. So they have to cut that. They are cutting hours back. So part‑time people are going to be even worse off than they were before. And a lot of companies are just saying, "I'll pay the damn fine. I don't care. I'm not going to provide it." And it forces people into, into the government which is supposed to be, his words, the provider of last resort. But he's made it so it will be the provider of first resort.

LOTT: Exactly. Look, when the ‑‑ when Obama, the Obama administration and the Congressional Budget Office were figuring out the impact and the cost of ObamaCare, they essentially assumed that people wouldn't be changing their behavior. But you and I know ‑‑

GLENN: They will.

LOTT: ‑‑ that when you go and make something more costly, people do less of it.

GLENN: Here's the thing, John. I don't believe for a second they didn't know that they wouldn't change their behavior. This is a guy who won the last election and not a lot of people reported on this, but he had behavior psychologists.

LOTT: Right.

GLENN: ‑‑ on his campaign. He's a guy who has Cass Sunstein as part of his administration. They know "nudge." They know exactly how human behavior is going to work.

LOTT: Right.

GLENN: It stops me from believing that these are honest mistakes. Lot lotto, I don't ‑‑

GLENN: Do you believe ‑‑

LOTT: Yeah, I don't believe they're honest mistakes. I believe, all I'm saying, when they would tell the public what it would cost ‑‑

GLENN: Right.

LOTT: When the official estimates went out on the cost, those cost estimates assumed people's behavior wouldn't change. I know they know that, we know it changes, and what I'm saying is that these cost estimates are going to be radically off. When people ‑‑ people are going to go under the government system, which is going to be much more expensive and, you know, we taxpayers are going to be having to pick up the bill.

GLENN: Okay. So ‑‑

LOTT: But this is part of a process. So I think part of a conscious design to basically destroy private insurance in this country. They didn't want to publicly go out for single‑payer government plan, but this is something that will lead to it fairly quickly I think.

GLENN: Yeah.

LOTT: Because ‑‑

GLENN: Of course it will.

LOTT: ‑‑ as the cost of private insurance soars and as people move onto the government plan, they'll effectively get there.

GLENN: Okay. So John, the congress isn't going to do anything, the president is just executive order after executive order, and the book At The Brink is not about healthcare alone. It's about the whole thing. What does the average person do? How can we possibly stop this?

LOTT: Well, there's some things that I don't think we can stop at this point, the destruction of the pharmaceutical industry, for example, the huge elimination of research jobs and the lack of future drugs that we're not going to get that would have saved lives not only in the United States but around the world. There's not too much we can do about that right now. And I don't think we can do too much in the near term about ObamaCare. He's there as president for four years.

On the economy there are some things we can do. We can try to make sure that things like the sequester goes into effect. I mean, it's just absolutely surreal to me ‑‑

GLENN: Wait, wait, wait, wait.

LOTT: To put off asking about the government spending and the lack of growth. Obama threatens that this $85 billion cut this year in government spending out of the $3.8 trillion budget is somehow going to send us off the rails. I mean, look around places, it's the places that have been spending the money that are off the rails. And to somehow believe that this kind of cut ‑‑ and this is after we just had $60 billion extra spent on Hurricane Sandy that somehow an $85 billion cut is going to be vast this year. And, you know, people need to keep Republicans' feet to the fire, not just on the sequester but on the debt limit bill that comes up.

The president constantly makes wrong, inaccurate claims about things like we'll go into default if the debt limit doesn't increase. It's simply false. I mean, any economist knows that as long as you can keep on paying the interest, you're not in default. And we have much more than enough money to pay the interest. Obviously almost 40 cents of every dollar that's spent by the government's being borrowed right now.

But look, if we were to just live within the revenue that we get, the government's still going to function. It's not going to do everything that everybody's going to want it to do, but it shouldn't be doing that anyway. And so, you know, the president can make the cuts as painful as he wants, but the thing the Republicans should point out then is, look, you could have spent the money on this. Instead you decide to make things bad and spend it on some pet green project that you wanted to have the money keep on going to.

GLENN: Right.

LOTT: That's your fault that you're doing it. And if I were Republicans there, I'd say, look, you've got to cut spending. We've just had this huge increase in spending.

When Obama ran in 2008, his big promise, if you go back to the presidential debates, was to cut the size of government. He kept on saying over and over again the net size of government had to get smaller. A week after the election he starts talking about this stimulus and then it was supposed to be temporary, a year or two. We're five years into the Obama administration now and not only can't we keep any of those earlier promises but we somehow can't even slightly slow the growth of government.

GLENN: Right.

LOTT: That somehow even now slightly slowing the growth of government would lead to financial disaster and, in fact, the exact opposite's true.

GLENN: All right. John, thank you so much. The name of the book is At The Brink and it's available everywhere by John Lott, a really truly brilliant guy. He's also going to be ‑‑ he's helping us on another book that we're coming out. We're crashing a book here and we've gone to the best experts, and I wanted to put together a, almost a guide for the Second Amendment and the truth about guns, and I'm calling the name of the book is Control because it is really all about control. Exposing the truth about guns. And John is helping us with some of the facts on that, and I so appreciate that. That's coming ‑‑ when is that coming out? Do you know, like ‑‑

STU: April, late April.

GLENN: Due I think this week. So late April is when it's coming out. Control. And he, John, will also be on with us tonight with the sheriffs because we have the, probably the most controversial sheriffs in all of Washington, but they are from all across the country and they are probably the most popular sheriffs because they are the ones who are saying, "I am folding. I will stand and protect and defend your right to have a gun," and they're not going to come in and search your house and they are not going to come in and take your gun. The sheriffs tonight, your last line of defense on ‑‑ at 5:00 on TheBlaze TV. Make sure you join us for that. John, thanks a lot. We'll see you later tonight.

Could China OWN our National Parks?

Jonathan Newton / Contributor | Getty Images

The left’s idea of stewardship involves bulldozing bison and barring access. Lee’s vision puts conservation back in the hands of the people.

The media wants you to believe that Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) is trying to bulldoze Yellowstone and turn national parks into strip malls — that he’s calling for a reckless fire sale of America’s natural beauty to line developers’ pockets. That narrative is dishonest. It’s fearmongering, and, by the way, it’s wrong.

Here’s what’s really happening.

Private stewardship works. It’s local. It’s accountable. It’s incentivized.

The federal government currently owns 640 million acres of land — nearly 28% of all land in the United States. To put that into perspective, that’s more territory than France, Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom combined.

Most of this land is west of the Mississippi River. That’s not a coincidence. In the American West, federal ownership isn’t just a bureaucratic technicality — it’s a stranglehold. States are suffocated. Locals are treated as tenants. Opportunities are choked off.

Meanwhile, people living east of the Mississippi — in places like Kentucky, Georgia, or Pennsylvania — might not even realize how little land their own states truly control. But the same policies that are plaguing the West could come for them next.

Lee isn’t proposing to auction off Yellowstone or pave over Yosemite. He’s talking about 3 million acres — that’s less than half of 1% of the federal estate. And this land isn’t your family’s favorite hiking trail. It’s remote, hard to access, and often mismanaged.

Failed management

Why was it mismanaged in the first place? Because the federal government is a terrible landlord.

Consider Yellowstone again. It’s home to the last remaining herd of genetically pure American bison — animals that haven’t been crossbred with cattle. Ranchers, myself included, would love the chance to help restore these majestic creatures on private land. But the federal government won’t allow it.

So what do they do when the herd gets too big?

They kill them. Bulldoze them into mass graves. That’s not conservation. That’s bureaucratic malpractice.

And don’t even get me started on bald eagles — majestic symbols of American freedom and a federally protected endangered species, now regularly slaughtered by wind turbines. I have pictures of piles of dead bald eagles. Where’s the outrage?

Biden’s federal land-grab

Some argue that states can’t afford to manage this land themselves. But if the states can’t afford it, how can Washington? We’re $35 trillion in debt. Entitlements are strained, infrastructure is crumbling, and the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, and National Park Service are billions of dollars behind in basic maintenance. Roads, firebreaks, and trails are falling apart.

The Biden administration quietly embraced something called the “30 by 30” initiative, a plan to lock up 30% of all U.S. land and water under federal “conservation” by 2030. The real goal is 50% by 2050.

That entails half of the country being taken away from you, controlled not by the people who live there but by technocrats in D.C.

You think that won’t affect your ability to hunt, fish, graze cattle, or cut timber? Think again. It won’t be conservatives who stop you from building a cabin, raising cattle, or teaching your grandkids how to shoot a rifle. It’ll be the same radical environmentalists who treat land as sacred — unless it’s your truck, your deer stand, or your back yard.

Land as collateral

Moreover, the U.S. Treasury is considering putting federally owned land on the national balance sheet, listing your parks, forests, and hunting grounds as collateral.

What happens if America defaults on its debt?

David McNew / Stringer | Getty Images

Do you think our creditors won’t come calling? Imagine explaining to your kids that the lake you used to fish in is now under foreign ownership, that the forest you hunted in belongs to China.

This is not hypothetical. This is the logical conclusion of treating land like a piggy bank.

The American way

There’s a better way — and it’s the American way.

Let the people who live near the land steward it. Let ranchers, farmers, sportsmen, and local conservationists do what they’ve done for generations.

Did you know that 75% of America’s wetlands are on private land? Or that the most successful wildlife recoveries — whitetail deer, ducks, wild turkeys — didn’t come from Washington but from partnerships between private landowners and groups like Ducks Unlimited?

Private stewardship works. It’s local. It’s accountable. It’s incentivized. When you break it, you fix it. When you profit from the land, you protect it.

This is not about selling out. It’s about buying in — to freedom, to responsibility, to the principle of constitutional self-governance.

So when you hear the pundits cry foul over 3 million acres of federal land, remember: We don’t need Washington to protect our land. We need Washington to get out of the way.

Because this isn’t just about land. It’s about liberty. And once liberty is lost, it doesn’t come back easily.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

EXPOSED: Why the left’s trans agenda just CRASHED at SCOTUS

Anna Moneymaker / Staff | Getty Images

You never know what you’re going to get with the U.S. Supreme Court these days.

For all of the Left’s insane panic over having six supposedly conservative justices on the court, the decisions have been much more of a mixed bag. But thank God – sincerely – there was a seismic win for common sense at the Supreme Court on Wednesday. It’s a win for American children, parents, and for truth itself.

In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s state ban on irreversible transgender procedures for minors.

The mostly conservative justices stood tall in this case, while Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson predictably dissented. This isn’t just Tennessee’s victory – 20 other red states that have similar bans can now breathe easier, knowing they can protect vulnerable children from these sick, experimental, life-altering procedures.

Anna Moneymaker / Staff | Getty Images

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, saying Tennessee’s law does not violate the Equal Protection Clause. It’s rooted in a very simple truth that common sense Americans get: kids cannot consent to permanent damage. The science backs this up – Norway, Finland, and the UK have all sounded alarms about the lack of evidence for so-called “gender-affirming care.” The Trump administration’s recent HHS report shredded the activist claims that these treatments help kids’ mental health. Nothing about this is “healthcare.” It is absolute harm.

The Left, the ACLU, and the Biden DOJ screamed “discrimination” and tried to twist the Constitution to force this radical ideology on our kids.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court saw through it this time. In her concurring opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett nailed it: gender identity is not some fixed, immutable trait like race or sex. Detransitioners are speaking out, regretting the surgeries and hormones they were rushed into as teens. WPATH – the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the supposed experts on this, knew that kids cannot fully grasp this decision, and their own leaked documents prove that they knew it. But they pushed operations and treatments on kids anyway.

This decision is about protecting the innocent from a dangerous ideology that denies biology and reality. Tennessee’s Attorney General calls this a “landmark victory in defense of America’s children.” He’s right. This time at least, the Supreme Court refused to let judicial activism steal our kids’ futures. Now every state needs to follow Tennessee’s lead on this, and maybe the tide will continue to turn.

Insider alert: Glenn’s audience EXPOSES the riots’ dark truth

Barbara Davidson / Contributor | Getty Images

Glenn asked for YOUR take on the Los Angeles anti-ICE riots, and YOU responded with a thunderous verdict. Your answers to our recent Glennbeck.com poll cut through the establishment’s haze, revealing a profound skepticism of their narrative.

The results are undeniable: 98% of you believe taxpayer-funded NGOs are bankrolling these riots, a bold rejection of the claim that these are grassroots protests. Meanwhile, 99% dismiss the mainstream media’s coverage as woefully inadequate—can the official story survive such resounding doubt? And 99% of you view the involvement of socialist and Islamist groups as a growing threat to national security, signaling alarm at what Glenn calls a coordinated “Color Revolution” lurking beneath the surface.

You also stand firmly with decisive action: 99% support President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to quell the chaos. These numbers defy the elite’s tired excuses and reflect a demand for truth and accountability. Are your tax dollars being weaponized to destabilize America? You’ve answered with conviction.

Your voice sends a powerful message to those who dismiss the unrest as mere “protests.” You spoke, and Glenn listened. Keep shaping the conversation at Glennbeck.com.

Want to make your voice heard? Check out more polls HERE.

EXPOSED: Your tax dollars FUND Marxist riots in LA

Anadolu / Contributor | Getty Images

Protesters wore Che shirts, waved foreign flags, and chanted Marxist slogans — but corporate media still peddles the ‘spontaneous outrage’ narrative.

I sat in front of the television this weekend, watching the glittering spectacle of corporate media do what it does best: tell me not to believe my lying eyes.

According to the polished news anchors, what I was witnessing in Los Angeles was “mostly peaceful protests.” They said it with all the earnest gravitas of someone reading a bedtime story, while behind them the streets looked like a deleted scene from “Mad Max.” Federal agents dodged concrete slabs as if it were an Olympic sport. A man in a Che Guevara crop top tried to set a police car on fire. Dumpster fires lit the night sky like some sort of postapocalyptic luau.

If you suggest that violent criminals should be deported or imprisoned, you’re painted as the extremist.

But sure, it was peaceful. Tear gas clouds and Molotov cocktails are apparently the incense and candles of this new civic religion.

The media expects us to play along — to nod solemnly while cities burn and to call it “activism.”

Let’s call this what it is: delusion.

Another ‘peaceful’ riot

If the Titanic “mostly floated” and the Hindenburg “mostly flew,” then yes, the latest L.A. riots are “mostly peaceful.” But history tends to care about those tiny details at the end — like icebergs and explosions.

The coverage was full of phrases like “spontaneous,” “grassroots,” and “organic,” as if these protests materialized from thin air. But many of the signs and banners looked like they’d been run off at ComradesKinkos.com — crisp print jobs with slogans promoting socialism, communism, and various anti-American regimes. Palestinian flags waved beside banners from Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba, and El Salvador. It was like someone looted a United Nations souvenir shop and turned it into a revolution starter pack.

And guess who funded it? You did.

According to at least one report, much of this so-called spontaneous rage fest was paid for with your tax dollars. Tens of millions of dollars from the Biden administration ensured your paycheck funded Trotsky cosplayers chucking firebombs at local coffee shops.

The same aging radicals from the 1970s — now armed with tenure, pensions, and book deals — are cheering from the sidelines, waxing poetic about how burning a squad car is “liberation.” These are the same folks who once wore tie-dye and flew to help guerrilla fighters and now applaud chaos under the banner of “progress.”

This is not progress. It is not protest. It’s certainly not justice or peace.

It’s an attempt to dismantle the American system — and if you dare say that out loud, you’re labeled a bigot, a fascist, or, worst of all, someone who notices reality.

And what sparked this taxpayer-funded riot? Enforcement against illegal immigrants — many of whom, according to official arrest records, are repeat violent offenders. These are not the “dreamers” or the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. These are criminals with long, violent rap sheets — allowed to remain free by a broken system that prioritizes ideology over public safety.

Photo by Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg | Getty Images

This is what people are rioting over — not the mistreatment of the innocent, but the arrest of the guilty. And in California, that’s apparently a cause for outrage.

The average American, according to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, is supposed to worry they’ll be next. But unless you’re in the habit of assaulting people, smuggling, or firing guns into people’s homes, you probably don’t have much to fear.

Still, if you suggest that violent criminals should be deported or imprisoned, you’re painted as the extremist.

The left has lost it

This is what happens when a culture loses its grip on reality. We begin to call arson “art,” lawlessness “liberation,” and criminals “community members.” We burn the good and excuse the evil — all while the media insists it’s just “vibes.”

But it’s not just vibes. It’s violence, paid for by you, endorsed by your elected officials, and whitewashed by newsrooms with more concern for hair and lighting than for truth.

This isn’t activism. This is anarchism. And Democratic politicians are fueling the flame.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.